Bedlam

I shot with Lou O'Bedlam a couple of weeks ago, and he posted one of the polaroids from the shoot up on his meticulously maintained blog.



Tom Jones is on "Morning Becomes Eclectic", the morning music show on 89.9 that I listen to sometimes. It's funny that I feel the need to clarify that I like Tom Jones sincerely, not ironically--that enjoyment could somehow be ironic.

It's still there, in my neck, bothersome, achey, and invisible on the surface. I was told that it doesn't need to be removed, at least for now, so instead it's there, slowly expanding and contracting like a heart which takes days to complete a beat. Sometimes I forget it for a while, and then it heaves a great lazy demanding child sigh, and I recall it again--rub up against it with my hand to remind me of the mystery there, the unknown nestled up against my spine.

Metro Rail

I don't live in Los Angeles. When I travel, I sometimes tell people I do, but then add the addendum "Well, I actually live just outside of Los Angeles in Long Beach." You can see their faces fall a little. They thought they had just met someone who had made it, who had arrived in the glittering city to the West, but then they found out they were just talking to another plebian like themselves. LA isn't far from me, 15 to 25 minutes in a car in good traffic, but I don't have a car which means it's 2 hours away on the Metro.

Ah, the Metro. Think of all the strange things you've witnessed on public transportation and then put them all together in one single trip. The homeless man who keeps dropping little plastic packages and then shooting across the train car to retrieve them and then breaking into deafening laughter; the smelly man sitting across from you who openly and ostentatiously picks his nose and then runs his fingers through his hair; the tall young man with the looks of an Adonis who regaling boards the car to hoots and whistles from the teenage girls, he nods at them only briefly before taking his seat like it's a throne.

J lives in LA, and I had yet to visit him up there. I have school every day, but Tuesday was Veteran's Day so I had no class. This seemed an ideal time to make the great trek up to the 7th and Flower stop, plus I was motivated by the opportunity to shoot with Lou O'Bedlam.



His friend Laura Taylor came too, and the above shot is by her. She, with a sleek digital camera, and he with a persnickety little double lensed antique punctuated by the rare use of a polaroid camera. It was fun, though I haven't really modeled for anyone in ages. Maybe I will be able to work with them again, given they're aowed love of hotel rooms and my easy access to one.



I returned home to Long Beach, again on the Metro, and finished printing the accursed thing you see above. I wanted to make something pretty for the print exchange Tyler and I set up to help fund a trip to Southern Graphics Council this March, because I wanted to make something that would sell. What I did not anticipate was that a great many people see someone drowning in that image. I did, however, finish another print on Tuesday that I am happy with which you can read about in the print blog. If you want one of these prints of a person swimming lazily/drowning, they are available for $20 and there are ten available for sale. Shoot me an email and we shall discuss.

Thinking about printing fills me with horror right now. I do not want to assist great hordes of undergrads on how to not destroy their awful poorly done prints today, and so I look forward with great anticipation to National Indiginous Persons Day, only because I can have the printshop all to myself.

Victory Potato!

Oh, Mr. McAbee, I've tried to live up to your high standard in the noble art of potato matrix printmaking. But over and over I have encountered defeat and failure. Today, though, today, Mr. McAbee, I have victory.



Three color potato reduction. I was shooting for five colors but the potatos just couldn't hold up past three.



I printed them in my studio with watercolors when I was sick to dying of helping undergrads not make total fools of themselves. I used watercolor left over from some mono-screenprinting when I mixed my own blacks, and linocutting gouges--printing them like stamps, with little lines down the sides of the potatos and onto the paper for registration.



I added a fourth color (or rather, fourth shade of grey) by rolling up a sheet of plexi and covering the faces with wax paper.

I made another reduction print this same week, a print of a swimmer, and done a bit more traditionally, using type-high lino, but I far prefer the potatos.

Winner

We fucking won.

I've never, in my entire life, voted for winner before. I'm told this is what cocaine feels like, only better.