Late Night Early Morning

Listening to Yo La Tengo with the boy as we work on various things. I haven't posted in a while, so I haven't been able to mention how exciting it's been completing my first bunch of Etsy orders. Getting to recycle a lot of salvaged materials for packaging is an immense satisfaction.

I also wanted to share an award-worthy tip I stumbled across while scouring for DIY ways to improve my old camera's macro/zoom abilities. It's a 5.1 megapixel Sony Cyber-Shot and it functions perfectly well, but I've had terrible trouble taking close-ups of smaller, detailed things. I don't have the money to spare for a new camera -- even though they're all cheaper now than what I paid -- so I looked up some alternatives. I found this video tutorial from DPhotoJournal -- although it doesn't really need to be a video. Basically, you take the front lens off an unloved pair of binoculars and sit that in front of your camera's lens when you need to get a crisp, close shot. Fortunately enough, I even had the pair of unloved binoculars nearby. So simple, so life-changing... My excitement in real life was much noisier.

Bike Trip Sunday

James Castle,
originally uploaded by sokref1.

Yesterday rocked my jelly-buns. We -- the partner duo -- logged another bike trip along the Schuykill River Trail and also made our way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm mildly horrified by cars when on foot, deeply horrified when inside, and panick-stricken horrified when biking alongside. There goes my chance at being coolly hip, riding a bike in tight jeans. Even tight jeans couldn't keep my mess together. They say you never forget how to ride a bike, which is true I suppose, but the self-conscious nervousness was never a factor as a kid. Anyway.

The river trail is beautiful, despite all the looming concrete highways and 'scrapers and the river's own filthiness. The sun and the cold air and the Philadelphian vibe were just wonderful.

That you can take this trail and wind up at the art musuem is a whole other wonderful. I kinda hate the grandiose museum experience, especially paired with tourists, but since my daily art environment consists of my own silly ideas poorly executed, it was quite invigorating. 'Course there was a touch of nostalgia for my art school days.

I'm ashamed to say I'd never taken note of James Castle's artwork before, but the surprise enounter at the museum was too much like an epiphany to have regrets. I love that. Serendipitous, fortuitous, miraculous moments that punctuate our human blundering. I still can't get around the questions of significance in an apparently insignificant existence, but those bright happenstances keep me feeling delighted about the whole mystery of it. Life.

You can't help but be moved by Castle's soot-ink drawings and cardboard constructions. As I learn more about his life, removed from the world but so fantastically of the world, I think of my own childhood, my current self-imposed isolation, and I feel a deep fondness for lonely human beings. Looking to your own mind for interaction, letting it decide your immediate or immaterial world, existing in a sub-world, I suppose, is such a rare and unique privilege. I'm able to move back-and-forth between these places, but Castle stayed within far longer. The amount of drawings and books and constructions -- what a beautiful, frightening use of the time available to an average human being on Earth.

The return trip home was hard on my puny leg muscles, but then there was a spring roll feast afterward, so it was awesome.

I recently made my first ever Etsy sale, followed by the second, third, and fourth, so I'm delightedly grateful for that. I've been frantically making and re-making different inclusions for the packages, plus learning about what happens after someone does buy something. Whee. I wish I'd started this years ago! Particularly with these worsening economic woes, I think I missed my chance to jump on the Etsy wagon. :) Oh well.

Off to lose myself in carving stamps and making books.

Have an out-of-this-world day, anyone, everyone.

Rings an things

Last year, I started making these rings and pendants out of my drawings, but stopped because I failed at gluing. Or my glue did. Now I have some heavy-duty epoxy and I plan on finishing more, finally. This ring is an original ink and watercolor drawing protected by a clear cabochon. The settings are silver plated.

Tuesday morning with rain

Most younglings are daydreamers, it's easier to sweep your own brain off its feet when you're a kid, before "adulthood" turns life into a series of informal business transactions. No, that's harsh. But kids are more imaginative and it causes them less anxiety. I don't think this loss of wonder or the growth of shame are inevitable with age, but a lot of people would have to reexamine and overhaul the experience of living, so it's safe to assume the world of people will continue to move the way it's been moving. Progress, progress, progress, advancement, advancement, advancement. Mantras for all great societies and civilizations. I always wonder about the most advanced civilizations. Did they move underwater or to outerspace? It seems like the proudest achievements of human history mostly end up in dust: "...Nothing beside remains: round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, /The lone and level sands stretch far away." Remarkable poem, that Ozymandias.

This is messy philosophizing without a point, sorry. I was just going with it. And I was considering making a regular horror/cult movie recommendation post, so I wanted to explain my interest in such dirty business, then I wanted to examine imagination and shame and consciousness and societal schizophrenia; but, my intentions always take detours. It makes the days more eventful, but conversations suffer.

Last night, we watched a documentary about David Cronenberg that ended prematurely, but anything about his intellectual process is mesmerizing. Dead Ringers, Scanners, Videodrome, and The Brood, are great, weird brain-food. Ideas about parasitic relationships, mass media and mass schizo-psychoses, existence through willpower, the manifestations of flesh, all presented with a sincerity, or a moral subtlety you can't get on TV. It makes the films more interactive, a necessary collaboration of brains and perceptions.

Gray skies weigh heavily in my head, but there's a beautiful, muddied quality to everything.

Monday Update + Mini Tutorial

So I found some squares of Primo clay at a thrift store and I wanted to play around. As you can see, I made this gal with clay and a photocopy of vintage artwork. It's funny, I've never used clay outside of a school studio before and I realized there's too much dust and cat hair frolicking around in my room for this to turn out well. But I persisted because I wanted to try out this method for transferring images on polymer clay; I'm a sucker for cheap and easy alternatives.

Via Beads and Beading:

1. Make a shape from clay.
2. Press photocopied image onto clay surface (ink side down), burnishing gently so all your image is contact with clay.
3. Nerve-wracking fun time -- wet the image with cool water (not warm) and gently rub in circles. This should cause the paper to fuzz up into little wet balls which you can rinse off under the sink as you go. Basically, the paper peels away (circular motions work best, really) and the toner-based image is left behind.
4. After all (or most) of the paper's gone, bake the clay according to its directions, generally long enough for your apartment to stink like a plastics manufacturer.
5. Once it's baked, you can mess around with it and the image won't smudge. I painted with some gouache and then sealed the whole thing with a clear acrylic coating.

It was extremely satisfying to rub the paper and watch the image develop. I still don't know what I'll do with one of these finished pieces, but I'm happy with my little success.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Nibble they little feet

I try to walk around my neighborhood as often as possible, particularly on bright, sunfilled days like today. Living in the city is many things to many different people at many different times and places, but it's so close to me now, like a friend whose constant company is sometimes terrible, sometimes marvelous, and always familiar. I suppose I've lived so long on the edge of impermanence through military-forced nomadism and the shuffling of academic goals that thinking of a place as "home" is scarily, thoroughly delightful, however banal or complacent. This yellow-and-mauve apartment in this old apartment building on this block of South Philadelphia in the city of Whateverly Love has been an everchanging home since January of this year. Damned if it still ain't the apartment I'll die in, or even remain for the next year, but something warm tendrils around every time I set foot in the neighborhood, every time I'm sitting and working in sunbeams, or watching light color all these rowhouses like a carnival.

I guess I always want to remember the way sun filters through the streets here, setting red-brick houses in stark contrast against unnaturally blue skies. Unnatural for the city, because they oughta be smog-grey, right? Maybe they are, but they seem so clear. And the old trees along Broad St., I can see from my window -- they stand so tall and green and they whisper with the wind like they're telling me stories only trees can understand.

Anyway, I figure if I'm this glad to enjoy the sun and the sky and the trees and the air and the rain while I'm a citydweller, wandering to actual skyscraper-less, building-less environments should burst my aching heart.

I was here yesterday

And I'm here again today. Here, of course, is where I am. I've come to it late, but there's always time for a beginning. Case in point: the near-spiritual renewal of my lifelong creative dreams and the inchoate journey of this blog, a personal-yet-publicized chronicle of my fantastic, beastly life.

Oh, life, sweet and cruel thing that you are.

Odd, perhaps, but I am so fulfilled by these two words: “fantastic” and “beast”. One or the other was always at work in my childhood. The sprawling fantasies born of tightly clutched paperbacks and of too much time spent alone daydreaming; or, the fears, enormous and beastly, that left their shadows on my body, but which have made me all the stronger. Now, as an adult child and recovering consumer finding her place in this often shameful world, I am nothing but grateful that I lived in my head all those years. It's quite homey there, always a refuge, always an inspiration, always a chaos of beginnings, middles, and ends. I don't know. I want to share certain things with the world, but maybe it's like leaving a sign: "I was here." At least. Still, there are a lot of beautiful minds and beautiful intentions out there, and it sure would be grand to explore and -- do I dare -- leave tracks. Virtual ones. Which is ironic, maybe. Virtual tracks. How strange.

I hope you'll continue to read here in the days to come and that it makes your thoughts wander/wonder.

Thank you for letting me be here.