feather2pixels

Labor Day 2012 was spent in the studio with Michelle, printing Hillside Supper Club’s 25-pound exterior sign.  I spent a bunch of time this summer fabricating the steel frame and prepping the junkyard wood, so it was fun to finally complete the project.  On Tuesday, the sign was unveiled for a crowd of Hillside supporters at a special duck dinner in the restaurant (duck appetizers, mains, and dessert).  I felt a special sense of neighborly happiness when we got a round of applause.

Here’s photos from the printing session.  It was a tricky job because it was double sided and the graphic was large.

Hello.  I recently completed a small commission to develop this photo into a series of prints, using only nine planks of laminated pine and one slice of homemade Ranier cherry pie:

The commissioner? My sister Michelle. The event?  Her birthday in July.  The final prints can be found in my objects section.  Here is a small sample:

The art of instant gratification has come a long way since 1977, but this peel-apart Polaroid of my parents and I taken this weekend is pretty much perfect.

My just-completed voyage to the US easternlands resulted in some interesting artifact finds at home, as well as the creation of some new ones. Now I am back.

Some pictures of note:

And finally, a video of me and Danny dominating The Looper at Knoebels in Elysburg:

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I just came back to town from a family road trip through the southwest.  This humongous electrical storm rolling through Beatty, Nevada was a highlight of the trip.

As seen from the Stagecoach hotel and casino parking lot:

(The bolt at the very end of the clip is the best one)

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Last weekend I drove up to Napa to meet my parents visiting from Philly. Parking was tight but I ended up finding a spot in the lot of an upscale shopping center. I was a little worried that my car might be ticketed because we took off for a bike ride with no intention of upscale shopping.

When we returned, I found this note on my windshield.

Not only had the upscale parking lot managers never suspected my desperate plot to park and dash, but based on the appearance of my car they assumed that the car couldn’t belong to anyone but an employee.

Instead of a ticket I just got a comically threatening note. The Camry saves the day again!

I guess this is kind of insulting, but my car has seen worse.

In the last fifty seconds of the final period, Delila came back from a two touch deficit to even the score. The 9-9 match went into extra time.

In Olympic fencing this is a sudden death situation. They traded clinks for a few moments. Suddenly, with a quick attack executed from below, the Olympics were over. She lost.

It was a kick-ass match. She was mesmerizing. I don’t know…I am proud of her.

My cousin Delila fences tomorrow. The long line of fencers established on my Mom’s side has been a beacon of family pride for some time now. Oh Dad, don’t be jealous. We will never forget about your nucleic acid sequence encoding a polypeptide with at least about 90% homology to a LAMP self-binding domain, and corresponding proteins.

Through special Olympic time travel technology developed by the Chinese, tomorrow’s action will be broadcast online live from the Beijing National Convention Center tonight. Ten PM Pacific time. Women’s Individual Foil. Round of 32 (she got a bye in the original round of 64). The blue piste.

I seem to be back from the coast. The south coast. Of Lake Erie. Ben and Joe (barely) flew in from New York, I came in from Pittsburgh, and we all rendezvous-ed with Shal in his newish, possibly semi-permanent home. The night before, driving a Korean rental car upstate, I watched the aggressively uniform landscape of Ohio (is any part of this state uninhabited?) kind of give way to the sprawling, post-industrial mass bisected by river that is the greater Cleveland area. We spent most of time sprawling ourselves: in next-to-back row seats of a tight Indians/Yankees game, in corners of the kind of bars that pull you in with a seven thousand beer menu and keep you there with a Labatt special, and of course on Shal’s living room floor, where approximately one thirtieth of his media collection still fills an entire bookshelf two rows deep. Cleveland is a good place to hang out.

Then I got on the same United States Route 80 of my daily commute and drove East out of the state of Ohio and towards the state of squalor. I was headed to State College, Pennsylvania, where Danny was about to complete his last week ever of studying at the state college in question in a fantastically shitty shell of a house (further ravaged from a party the weekend before). At this point, studying is the generous description of what he does there, though we did wake up at 9:30 AM, after a night of watching DVDs in his warm bedroom, and slashed though a thicket of Ugg boots into middle campus to learn about monopoly. Later on, we went out with his friends to the kind of bars that pull you in with their $5 pitchers of bottom shelf liquor and keep you there because you are not physically free to leave. It was fun and it all made miss college. But not that much.

I completed my five hundred mile circle on PA Route 22 West, where central Pennsylvania transforms to western Pennsylvania via the Altoona Valley.  Freight trains still do things like chug up proud green hills and cross sturdy steel truss bridges here. Once in Pittsburgh, I tried to make the most of my time there by visiting PA’s superior state college, eating a kielbasi fried pirogi sandwich, pinball, and meeting up with Stef and Alicia, who spend less on their new mortgages than what I’m thinking about spending on a studio space. As Alicia’s pup was licking my face over a distracted game of Guitar Hero, I thought, she’s got a pretty nice life.

The temperature keeps dropping and the family visits keep coming. On a cold Friday night, I hopped on a BART train to SFO and found Mom at the U.S. Air terminal. She was wearing wooden shoes with a trim blazer and it would be the nicest she looked all weekend. The next day she put on a borrowed baseball tee-shirt and found a way to pedal a borrowed bike all the way out to the Pacific Ocean and up to the Dumpling King. Of course I didn’t mention it, but I was proud of her. And over a BYOBed bottle of Shiraz, she also also helped me settle a longstanding internal battle: Tajine on Polk Street does in fact make the best lamb ever. Unfortunately, the photo booth at Lost Weekend Video was out of order, but they had plenty of working copies of Knocked Up (Is it just me, or was this Judd Apatow’s vaginal counterpart to his dick-centric Superbad?). Mom’s jet lag got the best of her, but at least she found my Mission apartment comfortable.

Just as I’m starting to feel totally unappreciated in my teaching career, good old Lisa R. shows up at my office with a rainbow roll in one hand and an orphaned dachshund puppy in the other.  Last year, I was compelled to graduate Lisa R., who seemed to miss a lot of April class but pass a lot of quizes.  It worked to my advantage.  According to rumor, she made a donation to the alumni fund on the condition that I was rehired this year.  At any rate it was a welcomed gesture for a down and out teacher and her pup had a really long tongue.

Raviv leaves tomorrow morning after a week or so in the Bay.  Saturday ended up being the perfect day.  We toured the Haight (“all this street is nice”), watched an unlikely throttling of the West Virginia University Mountaineers, stopped by a little art show (all my postcards sold out on opening night!), and met up with a Bud-drinking Adrienne at The Bottom of the Hill for the best show I’ve seen there in a while.  Raviv actually just got back tonight from a one day trip to LA.  As I sat at my desk, overlooking the yellow glow of 24th street, he appeared out of nowhere.  Without thinking about it, I suddenly felt happy he was back.

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.