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Saturday, October 13th, 2007The SF postcard video project is done! Nowell posted it last week and now I’ve followed suite (that only took six hours). Check it out.
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The Toronto Star has long been a “family newspaper.”
Sunday, September 30th, 2007Just back from Joe’s mega-wedding in lower Manhattan. Here are some pictures:
[me and nowell]
[ben]
[rascal]
[A.j.S]
[the man of the hour]
He finds young bridge players “weird”
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007I’m suddenly one those people with not enough time. That in itself wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the fact that, just a few weeks ago, I was fully embedded in the opposite circumstance. Now, I’m writing to-do lists and falling asleep at nine thirty on Friday nights.
But no matter: the postcard (film) project is done!
Well, almost done. Nowell is going to comb through edit #26 on his own to fix the few shots that still bother him, which will probably resemble something like airbrushing out someone’s pimples from a satellite photo (another reason to love collaborating with him). Wow: when we started this project, Nowell was single, I was still in grad school, and nobody knew who John Edwards was. Now Nowell is a married homeowner, I teach the classes, and John Edwards has his own bus. Look at this soundtrack:
We will have all four glorious minutes in streaming Quicktime for your video iPods in no time.
In parallel, I am screen printing a set of postcards for the Castro Street Fair, which takes place at the world’s gayest intersection this October. My art friend, Adrienne, two of her art friends, and I are setting up a booth to sell stuff. This will be my first official set so I am going to try extra hard. My goal is to make fifty sets of twelve San Francisco postcards, all stuff south of Cesar Chavez St.—a continuation of the “anti-San Francisco postcard” theme. (Oh God, if I ever put an art idea in quotes again, please punish me with, um, a week of nothing but reading A.P. Democratic primary articles.) Here are two of the photos I’m printing from:
Oh, and letterpress: I began my first printing workshop a few weeks ago. You know, like Gutenberg-style. If my screen prints bored you, well, prepare for a whole new way to be underwhelmed that you didn’t realize existed. But this stuff is cool. It makes me think intently about words and, to a greater extent, letters. And not just semantics, but the physicality of letters: typefaces and spacing and the way you can turn commas into apostrophes or quotation marks.
Maybe you kind of have to be there. The first night we were pummeled with a comical barrage of 500 years worth of esoteric vocabulary (“hold your composing stick flush with the galley in order to avoid pied type and then tighten the quoin [with the quoin key, of course]”). There are even the letterpress-originating idioms (e.g.: because a “sort” is an individual piece of type, you are “out of sorts” when you run out of e’s). Anyway, it’s still all quick foxes and lazy dogs. Every person in the workshop contributed three lines to the first exercise. I had the Garamond 18:
This January we are introducing enhancements.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007With the hope of finishing the San Francisco Postcard Project, Nowell and I decided to lock ourselves in his Cole Valley compound for the last three days. The San Francisco Postcard Project is a film we are making together about me walking around the city. If that sounds boring, consider the fact that it was shot and takes place over the course of a day, a year, and four seasons simultaneously. If that still sounds boring then consider the potential of the ultimate vanity project: nothing has ever captured in four minutes the way I feel about the last four years of my life.
Anyway, we didn’t finish.
But it’s now finally starting to come together. Five hours of footage cut down to a four minute edit. Music. Marketing plan. We figure the trailer for a four minute movie should be about eight seconds long, so that will be a challenge to look forward to. Hm, what else? I figure we can offer Roger Ebert a few German sausages for a decent tag line. If not, Joel Siegel is always waiting in the shadows. Overall it’s a good collaboration: Nowell’s geeky technology obsession and slick Matrix/NIN sensibility with my insufferable inclination to find profundity everywhere (which seems like a much better way to make a movie than to live a life).
Remind me to tell you about the three industrial dryers that have been drawing 23 amps from my apartment hallway for the last 48 hours.
A still from the film (we ended up cutting this shot out):
A throwback to a character created 15 years ago.
Thursday, July 5th, 2007Homecoming 1 Hour Photos:
corinne
jill and nowell @ the dumpling king
to-shi-o
bulldogger and me
my room
in front of the church of light
.
I know you have a new blog.
Saturday, April 28th, 2007As one of my final preparations for sea, I leave feather2pixels in the able hands of Mr. Nowell Valeri. I hope to send him dispatches from the Pacific, the Philippine Sea, and beyond. From there, it’s up to him. “I’m the man for the job,” he says confidently. And there you have it: no Earthly distance can keep feather2pixels down. Ever.
WHS reunion info.
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
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.
I doubt that we shall ever see such a comprehensive portrait.
Monday, February 19th, 2007The rumors are true: Ben Hill and Aimee made a San Francisco pit stop to begin their mid-winter drive up the coast to Portland. They were a short twenty-two hours, but long enough to eat out three times and purchase two different quasi-legal drugs. For all his last minute-ness, it was Ben Hill‘s third visit to San Francisco. His first year out, Ben Hill was just reentering society, dazed and despondent after an autumn of skeleton shifts and nights on the couch. Ben Hill was on the move by the time of his second appearance, and on Saturday Ben Hill arrived married.
Nowell got involved for the unexpectedly good sushi feast on Saturday night and was a good sport the next morning, beating us to an early morning rendezvous at Sparky’s for breakfast. Later that day and as usual, he left us in awe of the new home that he and Sadie purchased that week. It is not so much a home as it is a compound, with square faucets and soaked in thick buttery sunlight on a pretty block in Cole Valley. It’s hard to imagine being unhappy there. Not that I was happy. Anyways, the weather was spectacular and there were plenty of glow in the dark tattoos to go around.
Ben Hill: A short Appreciation:
Wolf, I simply don’t accept the premise of your question.
Thursday, January 25th, 2007Thursday. Trying to remember what I do on Thursday. Get up early, for one thing. Like, last semester early. And after an initial week of superhuman energy I have been sleepwalking through the rest of the month. It didn’t help that I started drinking on Monday this week.
Here are some uninteresting things about my life:
-Lost at trivia last night. Not just lost: last place! What the hell? Things better get back to normal quick.
-Burned up about a gallon of gasoline in 1988 Volvo, riding three miles across town to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Independent movie night with Corinne and Rinne. Awesome awesome awesome.
-Won the lottery.
-And for now I am living up to my 2007 resolution of averaging one movie a week. I caught “Romantico” with the Valeri family on Tuesday after an all out suhsi orgy in the old neighborhood. Remember that I am tired? I embarrassingly nodded off and for a moment got to be the guy who was snoring at the movies.
-Speaking of the old neighborhood: SF changes so fast. I realized that on one block of Polk Street, 75% of the stores had been replaced from the time I moved there in 2003. Businesses that stay are the exception, not the norm.
-I finally have an idea for the fourth postcard. I am realize my dream of a three-stage print.
-My healthy relationship is going great and I think I may have won the upper hand in my unhealthy relationship. But did I fuck up my last emai?