feather2pixels

The principle printing for the 24th Street project is in the books.  Oh my god!  I didn’t think it was possible.  Yet tonight at 9:22 pm PST, the following took place:

[flv:final_print.flv 480 360]

That’s right: the final pull of the final piece.  If you thought that was boring, imagine setting up one hundred and four of those screens and watching the video seven hundred and sixteen times.   Okay so it wasn’t the biggest project in the world, but at least I can show up at my day job now.

Here are the last two prints: Potrero and Vermont.

My favorite part of today’s SF Chronicle:

I guess one of my  new year resolutions is to try some new San Francisco restaurants.  If I sound reluctant it is only because when it it comes to San Francisco restaurants, I am an arrogant motherfucker who believes his taste to be impeccable without even trying.

The truth is that I’ve been getting lazy.  For that reason it was a rare treat to discover two new instant favorites in one weekend.  The inspiration to crawl out of my comfort zone came in the form of the San Francisco Panorama‘s “Best of the Rest,”  twenty short profiles of low key restaurants relatively unknown outside of their neighborhoods.  As soon as I saw Cordon Bleu on this list—A Vietnamese restaurant in my old neighborhood specializing in dumping gallons of meat sauce over sticky rice—I knew what they had in mind.  This sort of thing was supposed to be the promise of yelp.com, totally undelivered as far as I’m concerned (If I had the time to waste sifting for useful information amidst an endless roll call of losers looking for a place to validate their petty grievances, then I would just prefer to be reading the Craigslist casual encounters where the pictures are a lot clearer).

So I guess my resolution is to try every new place on this list.  These first two selections did not disappoint.

This list is also trustworthy.

On Saturday we completed these prints of Utah and Florida. We are done printing twenty-two of twenty-four pieces for the 24th Street project.   That’s 92% done!   This has been the focus of my life for the last few months and I am now realizing that at no point did I really take the time to think about the possibility that it might end.  The project just seemed too big and precarious to finish before February.   But the end is very much in my mind now that there is just one more printing session left.

Reading an article on logistics management in the Haiti earthquake relief effort made me feel like a real asshole for that last post.  People in the capital are waiting hours in line for one bottle of water and I am complaining that it’s falling from the sky for free.

It’s been the worst commuting week of my life.  Storms every day with a near death experience on the Bay Bridge yesterday.  Basically the rain starts when I leave home and ends right before I get to work.  I know, I know:  everything’s all about me.  But I have the rainbow pix to prove it.

At home:

At work:

(Just in time for the gay marriage trial.)

I am going to do it. I am going to tell you about my current project. That is, after all, the presumed point of this online information dispensary, contrary to what four years of overwrought personal laments would have you believe.

My current project is a permanent installation in a new restaurant opening next month on 24th street.  Right here:

This is the biggest creative project I have taken on since the band’s last record release on the East Coast.  We almost sold one unit at that show and I’ve been riding the wave until now, the point where I shall unleash a thirty-foot wall of artwork upon the residents of the Inner Mission.  The wall’s going to be installed with a grid of several hundred wooden tiles, twenty-four of them screen printed works of bona fide  Art, one for each intersection of 24th street from Valencia to Vermont.  Right here:

Would you like to see some?  You will have to help me artificially inflate my click count:

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I almost never screen print t-shirts.  I’m not good at it and there are loads of other people who are.   Just about the only shirt printing I do is for other people.  That was the situation on Sunday.  A friend of a friend was interested in making some shirts for her physical therapist assistant program (as any reputable department should be), so we got together and did some textile printing.

I was reminded of the power of grey.  Simple.  Versatile.  Sexy.  Definitely my favorite color, like that dude from Counting Crows.  The shirts didn’t even turn out that awful: