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I have been enjoying a particularly rousing bout of beating myself up over not writing, lately. Which is more than stuff. It is also nonsense, because, for sure, I have not been constructing words lately, but that is largely due to the overwhelming amount of tangible visual art I've been putting together. Also, as a contributing factor, I've been catching up on correspondence. And some light cleaning. And buying clothing. And spending days with old friends. You know what the problem is? The problem is that I keep on forgetting to let myself not be machine-made, factory processed. I still hold on to the idea that I need to be actively engaged in every aspect of my life at all points in time. And that's not legit. It's not how anything natural lives. To every season, turn, turn, and all that jazz. As long as I remain conscious of my goals as a writerly type (whatever those goals may be, which is a different discussion, and one I don't plan on having for a bit), I think it is okay to let them hibernate with my scarves for a portion of time. Or at least chill with my cardigans. I probably won't wear a scarf until fall, but the cardigans are still making appearances on slightly grayer days. And that's how the large-scale writing is unraveling, currently. Here and there, in between the gusts of sun and the painting and the home ec projects. Tags: art, beauty, resolutions, summer, writing
Current Location: under clouds
how i feel: resolving
what i hear: the silence of sleeping houseguests
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It is the sort of good I hadn't remembered and hadn't had for a long time. Two stories up from the city street, south windows not yet getting any direct sun in the first hour of the afternoon. The room crowded with careful multitudes of letters and guarded by the thick-oiled beasts of printing presses. Nothing to do for the next hours but relearn the steps and processes of laying out type, and of printing. I think I've started going into rooms differently, sometimes. I let myself stand some, first, before engaging the pieces around me. I looked at things real close. I tried things gently, for once, walking around the room and remembering the separate areas, the niched boxes of auxiliary pieces to the larger technique. I found some reference materials pinned to the wall, and even though they didn't have to do with the steps of the process I was on, I thought about how they would be useful later. I measured things. I picked up a composing stick, held the flat metal of it in my hand, and slid the rail to an inchlength just a hair wider than the piece of paper I was going to print. Flicked the rail down, locked it into place, and felt like I might be able to do this, after all. I put the first few strips of leading in, as a base, and felt the tool weigh down my hand a little more, and I thought that the heft was good and familiar. Set down the stick and looked at all the thin drawerfronts, trying to remember all the typefaces and the sizes I had available, and which were what I needed. Counted capital letters to make sure I'd have enough. Finding the one I wanted, I slid the drawer all the way out and settled it up on the desktop, pinning close the map so that I could navigate to the letters making up the idea of the heavy set half-fold invitations I was aiming for. Uppercase on the right, lowercase to the right. Punctuation sprinkled at spots various and throughout. I started my fingers at the boxes, expecting to fumble through the letters of the alphabet, to drop and to ding and to get weary and get tired at the complications. But I didn't. Like someone told me, like I didn't expect, the lower light and the calm of each letter after letter, up to the lines and paragraphs of type, spaced with smooth darkened strips of leading, it was good. Each string of letters has to take up the same length of stick as the ones above and beneath it. Regimented, centered, else there'll be gaps where pronouns or personal names suddenly bite themselves into snaggletoothed nothingness, the meaning in undisciplined margins. I had to slip coppers and brass in, thin and thinner slips of metal tucked here and there in the remainder spaces hairlining the type when a row is finished. Even when all the letters and spaces were in a solid row, metal staccato city blocks of sans serifs, after that it was still not enough. The rectangular chase frame slides out of the close hug of the press. The words were laid out on cold white marble, and I lowered the frame onto the marble so it fenced them in, and all the spacer type on the outside turned into lead cattle gathering around the wobbly kneed text . Set up what's called "furniture" around the words. The furniture fills up a case with evenly numbered softworn dark blocks of wood, like a child executive's toys. I ran fingers down along the numbers that mean length, and then across, where the different widths come into play. They are meant to move into the space between the frame and the block of type, but as symmetrically as possible, just like when phrases in the composing stick have to be justified properly between the edges of the line. Two blocks taken at a time, fingers as well-meaning but cruel Noah, plucking a pair only to distance them, one on each side of the type. I added furniture until both the short and the long sides of the rectangle chase had a bridge to the words in the middle. Then there were the keys to turn, gently, but to a firm resistance. Something to hold it all in for when the sheaves of paper snubnosed individually up, glances cast sideways, looking to get inked. The furniture, the keys, it's so anyone who comes along, they can pinch the chase with thumb and forefinger at each of its top corners and then raise it all from the marble, hold the words up so that no light comes through, and strands of language that could have been just breaths in cold rooms at any sort of visible best, now they turn into fine-lined but heavy upright walls, and they slide into place onto the form of the press and are held to it, and with the ink and the paper added, and the rollers swiping in teams, alternating across the surface of the ink table and the flat honest faces of the type, the platen holding the paper and kissing up to the type in the sitcom split-second between swipes, making impressions. If I were to try and say something bigger about this, I would want to say that perhaps I had not known a very particular sort of satisfaction and grace until I picked out and contained the most basic pieces of the things that I thought had to be said: not just the letters that hit up against the paper, but the counted spaces between words, and the breaths of spacing between sentences, and the expanse of inches on each side of a centered group. Having to think them and then set them and then be careful like a superstition in all of it (because that is how, I think, things like "craft" come about.), and then from all that, knowing that I could put shoulder to the press and print out sheet after sheet in deep machinery sneezes. I had forgotten all about that satisfaction because I think I spoiled it by just taking the word "letterpress" as a big idea of a project that needed to be done, of the whole expansive swath of it, the plan and the paper and the print and the machine, the ink, the rollers and the scrapers and the dirty bouquet of pungent gray towels it all cleans up with. I lost the sweetness of the first hours of laying letters, before the flourescents cough on and the presses start their heartbeats for the evening. Picking between two 14 point ampersands held up to each other in a piece of sun, watching the way their pear curves move across the face, thinking that one looks too dry, tinny and coldsharp, putting it aside, resting the warmer one in small and pleasant place. It is so quiet, it is so good to lay down lines . I had lost the settling of the typesetting. Tags: art, beauty, ideas, ink, iprc, letterpress, letters, press, spring, type
Current Location: cairo, georgia
how i feel: chased/impressionable
what i hear: mountain goats-alpha omega
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Across the vacant lot and on the side of a small gardening shed, someone had spraypainted the loopy looking visage of a neon pink bunny. It had buck teeth, a big fluffy tail, and a sort of general appearance of hopeless bemusement. Coincidentally, you could also see it perfectly from the small window in our bathroom. I was pretty fond of it. The shed was a bit disheveled looking, anyway, and the unnamed tagger had gone through the work of putting down a brown filling even, first, so that the illustration looked as if it sprang naturally out of the dull woodgrain showing up through the patchy paint. Now they've painted over it. Rather half-assedly as well, so the view from out of the shed window is not a quirky grafitti bunny, but a big too-bright layer of paint covering half of a shed. Not interesting at all. If you're going to fix something, have the common decency to fix things right. Especially if the thing you're fixing is something I look at every freaking morning, noon, and night. Tags: art, home
Current Location: some sort of coddled high horse
how i feel: vaguely irritated
what i hear: the ark-one of us is going to die young
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I used to think that printmaking was in some way the be-all-end-all art and creation and self-realization. I thought that teaching children the basics of what it means to be able to produce multiple copies of a particular idea would then enable them to not only spot mass media, but also to create their own, and thus, learn how easy it is to alter the message being supplied. I think I had visions of zines, of posters, of grass roots in the youth that will sprout up out from under all that bullshit. I've altered that belief somewhat, added to it. My latest artistic conviction would have to do with editing, or cropping. To teach people how to frame or just create a shot, and what affects can be conveyed with simple changes. I think advertising media, as well as creative media, makes so much of itself on being able to disguise the fact that it was in fact a product of people just like you and me, and that if we knew how, we could make things look like the movies too. We could make movie stars, we could make ad campaigns, we could make your room and your house and your family look like it is in a magazine, if we wanted, (but instead we will do different things). We can erase the lines between those professionals and everyone else. (Then again, part of being able to recreate the effect entails having such an offhand, almost instinctual awareness of the visual language used. So is a knowledge of that language good or bad? Would we rather succumb? Learn how to speak like our manipulators in order to subvert their causes, in order to sway the popular opinions back to something more human?) I like PostSecret because it is so human. I enjoy imagining people who typically don't do any sort of what they would consider "art", and I like to imagine them sitting down at a table, with a desk lamp, and carefully cutting out the words to their confession then scotch taping them onto a card. Scotch tape was one of the first things I learned to disdain in composition. I hated how frosted it is, and how if layers overlap they create these crooked milky white seams. I like Flickr because it is some kind of equalizer. Just an nondescript environment for people's individual shots. Suddenly I can grasp the idea that this man, he has a camera in his hand, and when he woke up this morning he took a picture, and that picture is absolutely amazing. No one threw money at him to get a picture that good taken. Some pictures look like perfect greeting card shots, some look like your untalented aunt took them, and the ones in the middle start to explain what the differences are between the two. I was looking through Invention of Hysteria, a remarkable book. I didn't have much time with it, but the pictures were notable because they showed women in facial and physical expressions uncharacteristic of the photography of the era (the women were instructed to replicate their particular hysterical tendencies for documentation's purposes). Suddenly the distance between their time and ours is a little less, when we see them in an expression that differs from the alternatingly coy or austere format of traditional photographs (That book could fuel several more discussions, of course, but I'm sticking with the shallowest for now.). So I think it is just that sometimes the lines of life appear very broad, and our perceptions of them are of course ehanced or even formed by the simple manipulation of a careful crop, or a pose, or lighting. And so realization of those techniques, as well as the ability to recreate them at will, if needed, helps bridge the gap between that shiny life we think we can't reach and the deep rich tones that are all around us (selectively). It is all in knowing how to say it, I am thinking. Tags: art, links, questions, rambling, reflections
Current Location: down on the river by the sugar plant
how i feel: for real
what i hear: gordon lighfoot-canadian rail trilogy
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I dunno, kids, I am something of a bit bummed tonight, my head just a ball of kleenex fluffed into a rats nest in my brain, my nose the quintessential leaky faucet, my thoughts slower than honey, my limbs gone heavy in protest. I spent all day, all day, it seemed, painting these things, the fumes filling the porch air. And not a buck. Not even a healthy dose of appreciation (at least, not from anyone I didn't know.). Something went wrong in the concept and marketing of these, chappos, and I spent all night at a perfectly decent Last Thursday shilling for a product that didn't catch anybody's eye. Ever. And le sigh, of course every time I saw a little kid wander by, my eyes turned into matching dollar signs, ka-ching. And so next month I will probably retreat back to that wholesome family favorite : face painting. If you had seen these, if you had walked right by, would you have bought one?
Tags: art, photos, work
Current Location: home resigned
how i feel: home resigned
what i hear: dolorean-biggest lie
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past 
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