feather2pixels

So the ceiling did collapse, a little. Initial reports indicate that the flutist upstairs pointed the shower head at the floor for a while:

And apparently Genl is not only here (back from three weeks in Costa Rica), but she’s the one who made the helpful call to the landlord while I slept. So that stands corrected. So now we just need to get this mess cleaned up and keep living the dream.

It’s eight in the morning and, from what I understand, the apartment is imploding. All i know is what i have overheard from people passing by my closed bedroom door:

To-Shi-O: “…ceiling collapsed…”
Unidentified Man: “RMC emergency”
To-Shi-O: “downstairs too?”

If I don’t open the door, it’s not my problem, right? dare i open it? I am going open it. Oh just thank God Gen isn’t here.

This week I returned from a trip home–or whatever Blue Bell is to me. Do I have a home? What does that even mean? Is home just one of the many fictions I have invented to deal with myself? Argh! I have been desperately trying to claw out of my imaginary worlds; you would think a trip back East would provide some much needed clarity.

But at least it was an efficient trip. In four days and five nights I was able to do everything I wanted to do without down time. Time is sanity at home. More importantly, I was able to eat (almost) everything I was hoping to eat. Plus, I got to fulfill my lifelong dream of experiencing live reggae in Blue Bell. It did not disappoint.

That particular excursion happened to be the first time I have drank (Yuengling, none the less) legally with Danny, as he reached the end of his twenty-first year last January. From now on, the powers that be will have to think of a better reason to kick us out of Slim’s. The entire family, which, more and more is starting to resemble a bona fide clan, also made it down to Philly Chinatown, where I sampled the worst carrot juice and the best wonton soup of my life in the same meal.

OK, so there was a little clarity.

On Saturday, the clan traveled to a barbecue near the nuclear power plant, where tomatoes apparently grow to the size of dodge balls. Those were enjoyed with burgers and bottled water on the lovely little ranch of my dad’s longtime lab manager, Marella. Danny, Michelle & Andy (Mandy?), and I got a casual game of whiffle ball/frisbee/tennis/football (fiffle ball?) going and that was really the main event.

That nigt, Joe was cast into the final weeks of his bachelorhood with a party designed to, um, be like, the opposite of a wedding? Or something. I guess I don’t really understand bachelor parties. Maybe this mental block is linked to why I will be the last of my friends to get married. But, as with the family, everyone was together for the first time in a while, and that was good. I’ve got good friends. Plus, Shal and I got scrapple–that’s good too. Especially in a crowded diner at 2AM.

The next day I had probably the best pastrami half sandwich of my life. I use the term sandwich loosely to describe what was more of a small mountain of freshly carved, hot meat, dripping with pastrami goodness between slices of bread. The Rascal, sitting across from me in a busy corner of the Reading Terminal Market, ate the other half, which was slathered with an ill-advised layer of mustard. Not only did she decline my mustard advice, but that girl still insists I love mustard, which is like saying that Donkey Kong loves short Italian plumbers. Just because I once ate half a jar of it rather than risking certain starvation strikes me as irrelevant. Irrelevant!
Speaking of advice, some of the too hip for their own good SF coffee shops could learn something from the quiet dignity of La Colombe at Rittenhouse Square.

Finally: cheesesteaks and baby cows. It was a surprisingly good combination, the cheesesteaks in question coming from Palermo’s in Blue Bell (because at the time it was not one of Pudge’s four hours of operation) and the baby cows from Merrymead Farms, where one can watch really cute feedings in the early evening, complete with oversized baby bottles.

Look at how nice these photo booth pictures of me and To-Shi-O from The Knockout came out:

Screen printing is so good, it’s hard to contain myself. Tonight, Kristin joined me at Cellspace after a hard day working the dreaded Exploratorium summer camp. While an impossibly loud break dancing group practiced downstairs, we made a series of three postcards up in the silk screening loft. They came out really good. The gifs don’t do it justice. The images and words are (unmistakably) hers; I helped with the design.

Success!

Kind of.

I went ahead with my next CMYK experiment : a full page print with ever bigger halftones–they are really big now. And it worked. Up close it’s just clusters of large dots in four colors, but from across the room the image focuses and the colors mix:

The image is actually a small section of a panorama of Balboa and 34th Ave (a key intersection in my life, within sight of the essential Balboa Theater and the Dumpling King) I photographed this week:

So my next step is to print the whole thing in the four CMYK layers. The print will be about five feet long.

I have been experimenting with a bastardized CMYK printing process. It interests my inner scientist: how do three essentially florescent colors manage to fool the eye into experiencing the entire spectrum, and how far can one take that illusion with screen printing?

I took three full days to conduct an initial study at the Cellspace silkscreen loft (It’s great: there are no workshops going on and so, with the exception of the vaguely territorial tabby cat, I have the whole place to myself). I took six different 669 peel-apart Polaroids from the first half of 2007 and reproduced them on a series of two hundred postcards.

The original photograph was scanned:

and digitally separated into it’s four base channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I forced each channel to exaggerated halftones and exposed each one on a separate screen.

I mixed my own batch of transparent cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and printed the four screens on the same postcard in that order. This example of Bartlett Street was probably the most successful of the six, though they all looked interesting. Here is the progression from one to four colors:

I can definitely move forward from here. I like the exaggerated halftones because the image and the colors only resolve themselves from a distance. On a more cerebral level, I like how it draws attention to the optical illusion of the printing process: at one glance its a cluster of dots and at another glance it is a photographic image. I want to experiment with making the halftone dots even bigger.

Finally got series two online, fifteen months after the fact and with a fancy zoom plug-in thing. Get excited.