feather2pixels

Paradoxically and as we can all see, the challenge of producing the perfect 400th post contributed to minimal activity in these pages for the past month.  In the end I shelved my more reflective ideas for this largely irrelevant milestone in favor of something perfectly trivial.  Actually, it’s almost five hundred total posts if I claim the largely irrelevant contents of  proto-feather2pixels from 2005, when everyone had a unique blog, before the great internet creativity cleanse.   Zuckerman, you could learn lots from the example of these monthly slop feeds.

I did want to mention that in my very first post (April 13, 2005) having just started my very first art studio, I was directly pondering my creative process

I have no fucking clue what I am doing, I do seem to have very specific ideas about what is okay and what is not okay at art studio. Primarily ideas about trying to set up something realistic and sustainable… I just need to go.

I can think about lot of ways I could have maybe got farther along by now, but reading this seven years later compels me to give myself credit for mostly recognizing the most important part and mostly getting it right so far.   Of the aspirations of an artist, the pinnacle is not a practice that you sustain but a practice that sustains you.

Wow even though I just made that up I absolutely believe it.

At some point in December there was an attack on  Precita Park‘s spiritual overseer/resident homeless dude, Stephen Stymiest.  Shortly thereafter, Stephen died of wounds sustained during the assault, alleged to be a random act of gang initiation.  The whole story is just sad.  Very sad.  And it is staying with me.  I feel like Stephen was one of the best things this fast-changing neighborhood had going for it and I miss his reliable and comforting presence.  Stephen was always looking over the neighborhood but who who looking over Stephen? This got me thinking about how much more I could do as a neighbor, citizen, and fellow human.

Well there’s a lot more I could do.  For now, the immediate aftermath, since I am a printmaker, I am going make a print.  This one’s going to be for Stephen.

Here’s my image:

And here’s my stack of cardboard:

More soon.

Some good local coverage from the ever-vigilant Bernalwood blog:

• RIP Stephen, Familiar Resident of Precita Park
• Memories of Stephen Stymiest Wanted by His Family
• Precita Neighbors Gather to Remember Stephen

I just completed my fifth year teaching undergraduate engineering.

If you know me, maybe you find that statement amusing.  I would guess you might think this is funny in the same way that it was funny when Bugs Bunny put on a tuxedo and conducted Wagner’s theme from Act III of the opera, Lohengrin.  Trust me, no one is as surprised as me. And I am me.

Amusing or disturbing, the completion of the academic year always means graduation.  It’s one of my favorite times of the year because I always feel very proud of my seniors.  And because it means summer is here. And because sometimes I get presents.

This year, before accepting any gifts from the class of 2011. I decided to strike first.  I thought that since the senior awards so benevolently bestowed by the university are usually a little boring, it would be fun to make my own.  One for each senior, construction paper and typewriting, a safety pin sewed on the back: that sort of flaunt-my-masculinity thing.

Anyway, I did it. I got all twenty-five made!  I was a little fretful about offending someone, but each fortune came from what I think Christians call a place of love.  Therefore I ultimately feel comfortable about all that was said.  We had a small ceremony on the last day of ET460: Automation and some people even wore their ribbons for the rest of the day.  Class of 2011, I will miss you.  (And thanks for the booze, Lamar)

click to enlarge:

It used to be that I was witness to a new kind of sport just about each time I was out at Ocean Beach.  By “new sport” I think I mean things in their garage people found to connect to kites.  You know:  long boards, short boards, card board.

Anyway I still hit up the city beaches on a regular basis, but a long time’s passed since I last discovered a new way that Californians fuck themselves up at the Ocean.  This stirred up wistfulness in my soul that wouldn’t go away.

Until last week:

Yes, that is a chariot and, yes, that horse did freak out and threaten to rear the shit out of me, Spartacus and anyone else in its way when an off-leash dog crossed its path a few seconds after these pictures were taken.

So everything is back to normal here and I love it.

Not only that, but last weekend the surf was crazy enough to kill you if the cavalry didn’t.  Enough, at least, for them to call to session the 2010 Mavericks competition .

I didn’t go to watch those surfers at Half Moon Bay, but EB and I checked out the scene at Baker Beach, where the waves were not as big as I remember, I guess.

[flv:waves_at_baker_beach.flv 480 360]

It is Tuesday morning in my bedroom.  The implications of this fact include but are not limited to:

• Loud machines pretending to clean the road will soon be terrorizing the Western end of the  mid-Bartlett corridor.
• The city-wide emergency siren system will fire up for its weekly test in a little bit.
• I am wearing jeans and drinking espresso instead of pants and coffee.

In consideration of the high probability of the following events occuring:

• The sun becoming too hot to support life on planet Earth in ~1×10⁹ years
• The Earth’s oceans evaporating in ~1.9×10⁹ years
• The sun shedding its outer layers, producing a planetary nebula with a hot core emitting 100 times more power than the sun today. in ~7.65×10⁹ years

…I thought it might be nice to recognize that right now  it’s early February in San Francisco city and therefore:

• Bernal Hill is green and the Ocean Beach tides are finally starting to recede.
• You could probably just show up and get a seat on an Alcatraz tour.
• The cherry blossoms are blooming.

In this brief moment of cosmic calm, I want to tell the world (i.e. Nowell, dad, Ben, Cat, Erin, Rachel, Erin) about a few things that are going on, divided in to separate posts to accommodate internet-scale attention spans, of course.

This is not a picture I would have predicted being in at age thirty.  But overall this picture is not a bad place to be.   Don’t my students look so cute in their dress blues?

Ravi Shankar said an amazing thing at this concert I just attended.  He said “The first time I was in San Francisco to play music was 1933.”

1933!  It seems impossible that the same guy I saw tear it up on sitar last Thursday was doing the same thing in the year that construction started on the Golden Gate Bridge and Hitler came to power in Germany.

Abusin’ the rule-of-three:

I have been thinking a lot about posters lately.  If screen printing is the high calorie carbonated beverage of the printing world, then screen printed t-shirts are probably the Coke, screen printed posters are the Pepsi and mousepads are the R.C. Cola.  I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Mollusk Surf Shop, where every supply needed to construct an aesthetically harmonious surf lifestyle, from literature (coastal travel guides) to clothing (printed hoodies as far as the eye can see) to music (mostly Brightblack Morning Light), is all available within a perfectly designed 1500 square feet.  Anyway, the art gallery featured screen printed posters and they reminded me why I think screen printing is cool. Bold blocks of solid color, clever ways of doing more with less, a vague sense of incomprehensibility: bring on the rotten teeth.

 

So a few months ago, a small girl asked me if I wanted a drawing.  I said of course and she promptly drew this and handed it to me:
(more…)

I really thought I would never get sick again.

But with the first rain in months came the strong sensation of autumn, a flooded ground floor, and a sick day in bed.  This was all after days of doing nothing but eating nachos and completing my “Working Personnel Action File” for work.  What is a Working Personnel Action File?  Well, it is a dossier in which I argue the case for my retention and in my case included sentences like the following:

“On a warm night after a basketball game, walking along Maritime Academy Drive, the sugar factory and the bridge blinking on the horizon, I realized that I felt incredibly fulfilled.  It was a remarkable moment for me.  While I had determined from the start to exceed the expectations of CMA, I had not anticipated that CMA would exceed mine.”

Wow, you don't just casually jot down gold like that. No wonder I have a 101 temperature.  Anyway, my WPAF took a week to finish and it's 109 pages long. In other news, I tricked a local coffee shop into letting me hang up my panels on their walls.  I didn't even have to show them my art, I just had to promise not to nail in to the wall.  Who knew is was that easy?  Also without nails, I finally hung the pieces up online, too.  Here's the scene in Cafe La Boheme:

Who is Jill?  Been thinking about that one for a while now.   Jill is the path of least resistance on a path that’s too long for the scenic route.  Jill is a steady exercise that builds a stout musculature in the tissues no one will care to notice.  Jill is a reliable intermediate between happy and sad where your headspace is actually completely beside the point.  Jill is an order of chicken tikka masala on a rail car to Delhi.  As you can see, all I’ve come up with are alternate lyrics to the 1995 Alanis Morisette embarrassment, “Ironic.”

I spend half my time trying to be more like Jill and the other half trying to be nothing like Jill.  Sometimes she knows before I even say the word and goddamit if she will always be a part of me.  Whether I like it or not.  She left San Francisco on Friday, possibly forever,  for the greener pastures of Chicago.  This appears to be a large city in the American Midwest.  With a minimum of adverbs (and with Nick T.), we unsentimentally sucked down one final beer at the bottom of Potrero Hill amidst subject-predicate-object conversation.  Jill is the opposite of so many people. All this is why I love Jill.

[audio:Alanis Morisette_Ironic.mp3]

Socializing has become less natural for me every year since college. Given a long enough exchange, meeting new people now requires me to confess that I work at a maritime academy in Vallejo. I have been experimenting with methods that prevent this from ending conversations.

On a cool night last week over cheap beer at some Mission District bar, I was doing my 2008 version of socializing with someone. The Academy eventually came up and this time it led to an inventory of nautical tattoos: she had two Popeye-style forearm anchors, a lobster on the bicep, something forgettable inside the lower lip, and a bunch of underwater stuff under her clothes. Then an 800 pound dog or something distracted me and that was that. Later, though, as is my custom, I let the episode get inside my head. When your life-changing decisions are another people’s personal aesthetics, is it time to find a new bar?

Instead of taking any kind of positive action, I think I’ll just keep screen printing useless postcards. Here’s the latest set, about San Francisco fast food, currently available at this place for approximately 1/500th of the cost required to make them.

On Thursday night I found myself holding hands with thirty-five tired educators in a circle, blessing each other.  This could only mean one thing: teaching in Berkeley is over.

There were two last days, actually.  That’s because there were two of everything this summer: two class sections, two talent shows, two Creative Geometry teachers, two closing ceremonies.  In our final hours, we treated our kids to a final exam, a field trip to the Berkeley Art Museum and individual awards that Adrienne and I sewed out of fancy paper and ribbon.  Awards like “Most likely to become the Warriors’ mascot and move in to Oracle Arena” were a cover for our secret that we really loved those kids.  They seemed amused.

We all reconvened for the closing ceremony, which featured us trying to sound intelligent in front of parents and accepting thank you cards we urged students to write for us.  Then there was a convocation featuring student speakers on the verge of shitting themselves with nervousness.  If that’s what one is going for, this is the pinnacle of cute high school assemblies.  You can’t manufacture that kind of earnestness, you can only force it.

Then I was suddenly at Triple Rock Brewery, drinking a microbrew that was all malt, shouting in someone’s ear about fathers.  Asian fathers like to gamble, apparently.  On some other level of consciousness, I was writing the last six weeks in the books as a success.  It was hard and frustrating and I usually wanted to be doing something else.  There were so many things I would have done differently.  In some ways we even failed.  But I got to do it with Adrienne, we noticed a glimmer of actualization in a few students’ eyes, and I’m reminded why I am a teacher: it is a thing that is impossible to do perfectly and in this way it is an honest human endeavor.

Here are the results from my Statics midterm:

The reverse bell curve. The ditch. The grave.

I spent a bunch of Sunday thinking about what this data really means. On the surface it seems like half my students get it and the other half don’t. I don’t really believe that, though. I keep pretty close tabs on my class and I think most of them are getting Statics. I think this data means that half of my students are good test-takers and the other half aren’t. And I think I’m still idealistic enough about education to believe that being a bad test-taker shouldn’t stop a student from being successful.

Of course many people might say that success should have nothing to do with exams at all. I’m not sure I totally believe that either. One of the most useful and least tangible things you get from engineering school is the confidence of finishing. Later on, you might learn how to actually engineer something. So good:I’m glad 14 people failed! If my 14 F students can find a way to improve their ability to solve highly irrelevant math problems under timed conditions, I believe they will have gained something significant. And if I can find a way to help my 14 F students get better at solving highly irrelevant math problems under timed conditions, then I will have achieved something, too.