feather2pixels

Yesterday I rented a fancy telephoto camera lens to photograph my recent series of prints on old cardboard.  The lens isn’t just fancy but incredible in its ability to make almost anything look good, shooting a razor thin depth of field that separates subject from a background that blurs into creamy oblivion.  But could it make my art look good?

After bringing the lens home in a car that is only a few times more valuable, I did some testing with CW’s new camera.  Just messing around without much idea of what I was doing opened up a new world of quality that I will probably never have access to again.   I guess I can sort of understand how photographers get obsessed with gear, although the idea is pretty unappealing.

Anyway my friend Michelle very generously donated her morning to hosting me and my cardboard at the City College SF Photo Lab, where there are two rules:

1. I don’t touch anything.
2. I don’t touch anything.

They must have been expecting me.

Michelle set up big, fake looking lights that made a pacifying sound when they flashed.  She showed me how to light my work without harsh reflections, and she did it all with a smile.  We shot all thirty-two pieces.  Overall, much ado for a bunch of trashed cardboard: here’s Three Cones in the Park on my Objects page.

Some recent signs:

This one is for Cat

From the Castro

Lost Weekend Video elevating their case against Netflix to the idealogical.

Earlier this week, the 24th Street Project was finally ready to be installed at the new Local Mission Eatery. So I bought a 6 pack, rallied some friends, and we spent six hours fastening a grid of 350 wood tiles to six enormous slabs of MDX.  Three days later the industrial grade glue still hasn’t come of our hands, but I have a warm feeling from knowing how dedicated my friends are in my time of need.

Thanks to:

• Jim
• Erin
• To-Shi-O
• Cat
• Yaron (owner of Local Mission Eatery)
• Laser

And now you shall witness the proceedings on this third rate video I made.  (Pay attention to the second part of the time lapse and you can see the inimitable Phil–proprietor of the legendary Philz coffee shop two doors down–look on with questionable approval)

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I ask you this: what is better than a good ol’ fashioned German restaurant?  Answer: A good ol’ fashioned East German Restaurant!  After my favorite schnitzel place shut its doors a few months ago with a truly sad and unexpected farewell,  a void was left in the city’s breaded-meat and 2 liter beer dining options.   Luckily, Walzwerk on South Van Ness not only stepped in quickly to fill the vacuum, but it also happened to be on my 2010 restaurant Bucket List.  So me, CW, and Nowell checked it out on the Thursday night of my very first group show at my very first gallery.

We missed the show.

Our absence was on account of a terrible accident which required the paramedics and ambulance, but the food was damn good.  In sum we sat at a long table with two San Francisco old timers who seemed tickled by us, all ingesting unhealthy quantities of food and drink.  Enough so that I found myself waiting in agony outside the lone bathroom,  crying “Mr Gorbachev tear down this stall!”

Sorry, that was stupid.  (And why would I want the stall torn down if I needed to use it so badly?)

Anyway, Walzwerk was just as great as Schnizelhaus and later that week I went to new-to-me Chinese and Japanese places that were touted as the Sunset and Inner Richmond’s Dumpling King and Sushi Zone, respectively.  They were fine.

My plan to post every day of this week was about as successful as Glenn McCoy’s plan to be an acceptable member of the media.  Keep your internet goals as vague as possible to avoid letdown, I guess.  On the other hand, there are many gratifying things in this life.  One of the most gratifying things about screen printing is its ability to translate almost any image, almost always for the better.  This encourages the hoarding element of human nature.  Forgotten texts and found trash treasures take on a new life printed through a polyester screen.

I’m way in to the idea of discovering great things in the world and then finding a way to make them work squeezed through a screen.   I’ve been working on a body-themed poster for one C.W.’s harebrained schemes.  After a lot of getting nowhere on the design, I finally turned to America’s favorite last resort.  The library.  For unknown reasons, the Maritime Academy library stocked a 1973 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and I unleashed the awesome scanning power of my Canon LIDE 80 upon it.  Now dozens of striking technical drawings from a bygone era are mine. All mine!  I cannot lose.

Since the beginning of the fall I’ve been bringing food to work.  I have never been able to do this before and I have no explanation as to why the O.C.D. is taking hold so late in life.  But five days a week this has been my lunch:

So it was that last week was a special treat.  I am not gonna gloat, but I’m coming off an unbelievable five days of eating with my friends. The undeniable highlight was Brothers restaurant, in the Korean BBQ district of San Francisco.  We got the meal for four, which yielded 38 plates, 3 pounds of meat and 1 hot-coal grill and the recommended Korean daily serving of approximately twenty thousand grams of sodium.

On Friday, C.W. and I caught a photography show at RayCo Photo Center featuring the collodion process, which is such an antiquated technique that it was already obsolete by the twentieth century. The process required slathering a salt-coated glass plate with silver nitrate and taking a picture, all while everything was still wet, all in the field, all within about ten minutes. Aside from serving as a thoughtful fuck you to digital photography, the show was teeming with some of the most striking portraits I’ve ever seen.

Even better, though, was the vintage photobooth next to the broccoli table. At $2.75 a print, it’s by far the best one I’ve found in the city so far.

Saturday was good. Me and CW started the day at The Grubsteak, the old rail-car restaurant where dining options fall into two distinct categories: diner food and fine Portuguese cuisine. We got the greasy breakfast. Recently, CW has been revaluating how much of me she wants to see around. It is a complicated question and many factors, such as her new rescue dog who wants to devour my leg, are working against me. For the moment, though, I had the undevoured leg up on the little bastard for long enough for a waterfront ride along the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building farmers’ market, where the determined cheapskate can fill up on locally grown organic miscellany, one quarter of an ounce at a time. And Pier 39. A more determined version of myself would have the energy to explain why the dude who jumps on glass reminds me of myself. Needless to say, there are some good things about Fisherman’s Wharf:

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And later, alone, I rode to the ocean, where it turned out to be one of those days you have to be kind of crazy to be there. I couldn’t keep my eyes open because the entire beach was engulfed in a small sandstorm and later in the shower I was rubbing the California Coast out of my hair for at least ten minutes. I needed it, though, and that’s what I love about cold, slightly disgusting and dangerous Ocean Beach–I haven’t done anything that deliberate in weeks. Plus, there were driftwood sculptures.

I’ll cut to the chase: the most important thing that happened on Saturday was Pitt’s dominating Big East Tournament championship. They were simply unstoppable. It was totally unexpected. Why, it was just two weeks ago that I was sitting alone in the Pinole Valley Applebee’s parking lot, sobbing to myself after a fourteen point spanking by West Virginia in what must be the most pathetic snapshot from the last couple of years of my life.

I’m happy now, though.

I am not above web-logging about the weather. It was a real nice weekend. Nice enough to wear shorts to Adrienne‘s house on Sunday morning, where she made:

(a) breakfast.
(b) a laytex cast of my right ear.

Then, by the light of the rotting Cellspace skylights, I finished the principle printing involved with the first of my first large format panoramas. For reasons too boring for even a weather post, this has taken two months! That’s a long time for something so unremarkable. As I was cleaning it all up, I ripped one of my $40 screens. That’s a lot of money for something so unremarkable.

I biked to a bonfire at ocean beach with CW, where the air was much less wet than it was at my last ocean beach bonfire experience and where we witnessed a child double his body weight by eating marshmallows. Totally outdone, I drank merely 1/70th of my body weight in discount beer.

I could also mention bluegrass, thai noodles, and unhealthy amounts of time on craigslist, but I wouldn’t be telling you anything you didn’t already know.

These writings are getting awfully negative. C.W.(formerly unhappily known as Freckles) pointed this out to me on a midnight bike ride to the sea and I think she’s right. Here are some positive thoughts to kick off the last even year of the decade.

-The grilled halibut at our 2008 faculty retreat was excellent.
-The biker I ran over last week insisted on a ride to 24th and Potrero instead of money for his broken foot.
-No class on Tuesday or Thursday this semester.
–CELLspace (where I screen print) is making me a spare key so I can come and go as I please. It could even be ready for the summer.
–The Mountain Goats on three consecutive nights at three different SF venues this winter.
-Ten predicted feet of snow at Tahoe this weekend.
-A too-good-to-be-true Kasper Hauser/Will Franken show at SF Sketchfest this January.
-Chance encounters at the no left turn sign at the intersection of 19th and Church streets.
–Double decker busses, killer tigers, and SPAM maps.
-BYOB with no corkage fee at Tajine. Lamb.
-The excitement back in my fitness goals, with inspiring expert instructors, personalized whole-body workouts, and the greatest outdoors in San Francisco.
-The U.S.P.S. Marvel superhero and America’s superlative stamps.
–Pitt 13 WVU 9
–Pitt 65 Duke 64
-End of semester emails from happy students.
-New neighbors, old penpals, family fans, calls from New York City, afternoons at Vesuvio.
-And of course: The Shanghai Dumpling King.

And now it Raviv is in San Francisco. Raviv is my Israeli cousin who’s come on his first trip to the United States with a special diplomatic visa for the purposes of teaching the U.S. military how to train bomb sniffing dogs. Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what he’s been doing with himself while I’ve been at work, but at night I’ve tried to counteract three months of Marines with immersion in the full Bay Area experience in all its precious glory. So we hit The Parkway theater for sing-a-long Popeye, ate a Sushi Zone feast (complete with an epic two hour wait), and, last night with Freckles, joined a well-timed Critical Mass. At this point, he probably misses the Marines.