feather2pixels

I recently completed a piece for the beloved of a beloved friend.  Based on a photobooth picture, the piece was made entirely from materials I had lying around my studio. Bill (on the left) came out looking a wee bit feminine, but he is a very secure man and so I didn’t worry to much about it.

Bill and Christina | Ink,  Screenprint on Plywood | 18×20 in | 2013

There were eight people at my house not too long ago and we all fit around the kitchen table for breakfast.   That day a reoccurring thought was there have never been eight people in this apartment before.  And there have definitely never been eight people around this particular kitchen table.  I have had the apartment for three years and the table for ten.   So it was with no shred of hesitation that I blew half the strategic reserves of Polaroid peel-apart film (now made by Fuji).  These three snaps seemed compelling enough to archive via scanning machine.  EB took the best one, I thought, on top here.  It’s from the autoimmune death trail that is north Bernal Hill.

Recent photobooth activity:

Silian Rail Poster:

I thought a productive way to kick off the July printing season would be to crank out a series of starkly radiant posters for my favorite Bay Area boy-girl post post-rock experience, Silian Rail. Time was of the essence as our heroes were embarking on a west coast tour in a matter of days, and the project proved to be a much bigger pain in the ass than anticipated. This was mainly due to incompetence on my part.

The image was inspired by a recent camping trip to Angel Island with Christina, Marella, and EB (I can’t believe I have never done that before).   I had a feeling that the band would be in to a subdued natural scene that invoked their native Oakland.  That led to this Bay Bridge-Victorian-moon rise trifecta.  The images were printed on 30 x 22 Canson stock in a variety of colors:

(Click to enlarge)

Here’s some details.  The bridge:

The window:

The moon:

Of course I accidentally produced all the exposure films one inch too long for the paper. This near fatal mistake required some eleventh hour jerry-rigging in order for the band name to come through, which it barely did in the end. Luckily there was room for me to tape the text in the bottom corner of the film. Here’s what I am talking about.

And here’s some of the other (slightly too long for the paper) films:
Layer 1:

Layer 2:

And that’s probably more than anyone ever needed to know about the Silian Rail posters. Eric and Robin hit the road and the posters were on sale up and down the continent for an incredibly affordable five dollars. A limited edition of 45 or something.

Bulldogger recently bought a 1996 black Volkswagen Jetta. The good thing about it is that it has only logged 50,000 miles. The bad thing about it is that the driver side window dismantled itself almost immediately. So I agreed to join her quest to repair it in Oakland. The most remarkable thing about Bulldogger’s 1996 black Volkswagen Jetta was how thoroughly she had managed to blanket it with bird shit in only a week—-it’s hard to imagine how she would achieve a more consistent coat if she were trying. I opened the passenger door carefully, slid in the passenger seat, and we drove across the bridge to downtown Oakland.

While a commune of mechanics replaced the small motor, we took a walk around the deceptively long perimeter of Lake Merrit and talked about dressing up: another conversation prompted by my newly acquired Vietnamese suit (it is enjoying a second voyage around the far side of the earth and I will see it in September). Of course the literal begets the metaphorical. “I feel less feminine in dresses, like I’m an impostor,” she said, and even though it’s been over a decade since I was in one one myself, dressed up as Lillian Gish for Mrs. French-Folk’s social studies class, I knew exactly what she meant. One continuous observation since finding myself back on dry land has been an excess of style over substance. I’m not against that, necessarily, but does anyone really fit into the 94110? A little later on, smoothies in hand, she announced her independence from the Mission, the City, and the particular complications of her hurried and cluttered life. “I am ready to slow things down,” she said. Which begs the question: should I accept her offer to split the Berkeley Hills house that she inherited from her father?

Specifically: one room, the equivalent second room made from half an art studio and half a garage, eternal sunshine, and a thirty foot walk to the wilds of Tilden Park. “Get a dog if you want.” She’s moving this month.

Jesus, that is tempting.

But it doesn’t feel quite right; funny thing is, I can’t really convince myself why. Maybe it too much resembles the kind of settling that I promised myself wasn’t happening when I accepted a full time job last year. Maybe a part of me needs to feel dressed up with nowhere to go in order to actually get anywhere. Or maybe I am still too infatuated with the city to imagine leaving—-the Berkeley Hills are magical but they lack the majesty of the coast. This is more or less the same internal quarrel I experience every time I leave the city limits of San Francisco. Oh, why do all of the dilemmas always blow in from the East?

How do I want you to feel about my life today?

Well, I finally started cranking out some silkscreened postcards. I am still cutting most of them out, but a limited run (of postcard no. 9, out of sequence only because they were the most plentiful) was dropped in the Mission and 24th mailbox on Friday. Prepare yourself.

There are more on the way. I seriously underestimated the issues involved in screening 220 postcards (matching fronts and backs, successfully printing little letters, finding a good halftone but that’s vague but not too vague) but that’s what workshops are for. Joanna continued to crank out some pretty cool stuff too. I grabbed one of her test strips.

On Wednesday, Phanna and I won trivia night with an unprecedented two man team! It came down to a rare tiebreaker question: “what was the average weight, in lbs, of a knight’s armor in the middle ages?” We said forty-five. It’s fifty. Add one Pig Buck to the bank.

Work is so silly. I read about valves and programmable logic controllers and things like that, and the next day I show thirty-five college kids what I learned. Part of their training is licensing as a third engineer (on a ship) and this week Baby Bluehawk and her friend passed the exam requirement. She stopped by my office beaming to deliver the news and it was charming. So that’s a good part of my job, right?

The second Critical Mass of 2007 was much more successful than the first. This time I coralled the Bulldogger and Marella to join me, but we cut it too close and, again, I missed the beginning (do they really start at 6:30?). Luckily, we intercepted a fellow straggler who came prepared with a walkie-talkie and he led us to Fisherman’s Wharf, where somehow the mass had extended itself. After that (and besides a rare Pac Heights excursion) it was a pretty standard ride. The guy with the ridiculously loud speaker cart was there this time, which makes a big difference.

This week, after nine and a half years of post secondary education, Jill started her first job since the ol’ sandwich shop in high school. That’s the kind of irony grad school gets you. But suddenly she’s a development engineer at a fancy biotech company on the Peninsula and I am very proud of her. I still remember first meeting her in Dr. Stewart’s Physiscs class on virtually our first day at Pitt. We ended up choosing the same major (bioengineering) and working together on just about every group project, sometimes against our will. I caught up with her for a rushed Guinness (which she claims to only drink with me) on Wednesday night and asked her how it was going. “Lonely,” she said. She will be fine. Jill is always fine.

Oh Morgan Jameson, what the fuck are we doing? I wrote her a really heartfelt email a little while ago but it was utterly unsendable. So I didn’t send it, we didn’t speak for a while, and now, somehow, I am doing this thing where I write her about every little detail of my madness. And make no mistake, it is madness: we wrote 5,548 words to each other this weekend. It’s helped bring things to a conclusion but now she just thinks I am insane and self absorbed, which of course is kind of true, but I think I regret it. As it stands now, the plan is to not write each other for a month.
I went to an Oscar party at Louise’s tonight. I will say several things about Louise: (a) she throws a damn good Oscar party. Just like last year, it featured her baked potato bar, which is executed with such authority that it transcends the irony that would surely destroy any lesser baked potato bar. This brings up another good thing about Louise: (b) she’s groomed her irony into sincerity, which seems to me like your only viable option if you are going to stick with this type of disposition(At least without becoming an insufferable Mission jerkoff). Louise does karaoke and Stevie Nicks parties and sundae bars because she loves them. We also made buttons, which I realized is an awesome thing to do.

After another Sparky’s breakfast this week, Sadie took Nowell and I to the giant camera obscura at the Cliff House. It was closed (apparently because the day wasn’t “beautiful enough”) but at least it made for a good Polaroid.

It freaks me out how long you can go before you catch on to people. Especially when you want them to turn out to be a certain way. How exactly does one determine that somebody is a not good person? I’m not talking about a bad person–that’s easy. Just someone who doesn’t particularly care about other people. That confuses me. Everybody wants to appear like a good person and plenty of people are good at being friendly. Some people are exceptional at it. Maybe this is all just a matter expecting nothing from people.

But enough of that. Hip hip hooray for seventy-two hour weekends. When I was working at the museum, every weekend was this long. Man, that was a another life. These days, I wake up at five for a commute to an office where I am three months behind my grading, which is impressive in light of the fact I have only been working there for two.

Today, though, I got to escape reality at the end of the continent with the Bulldogger. We met up for a simple breakfast in the Mission and then we were off, traversing through the park and whatnot. That’s been my weekend life for the last few months, but I’m not used to having company. It was interesting to have a companion.
Looking ahead, I’m hoping I can hop skip and jump my way through this week and towards nine whole days of Thanksgiving break. I can’t fucking wait. Danny was supposed to make his way over here for the holiday but apparently the people who do things like buy Danny’s plane tickets couldn’t find a deal. A shame: I know he would have been up for football on the beach and midnight movies.

I think plan B is to accompany Jenny down south to where the air might not be so clean but I can think everything over in the sun. I actually haven’t been down to L.A. since I moved West and this is my forth year here. I have been so lost in this city that I’ve barely scratched California’s surface.