feather2pixels

The first cherry blossoms of the year,  amazingly early, sighted across Capp street from two teenagers smoking pot.

Guess who stopped by the screen printing studio the other night?  None other than nvSurly/Lonwell Alvier/Sir Lee himself.  The ever-dutiful Trent Reznor scholar since birth, Lonwell had just completed his new master Nine Inch Nails mix and the only thing standing in the way of shipping them off to the far corners of the California–Philly–New York City Corridor was packaging.

Enter the Slushmonger.

I would like to think that I helped motivate our hero towards completion of this much anticipated project, but just as the tides need not the assistance of man in washing up the ocean’s secrets so Lonwell needs no help from any one in making his voice heard.  I might say, though, that he did make this as difficult as possible, designing a multi-color square pattern that required the most precise of registrations–one false move and the spacing between red and black would read as monumentally screwed.

Alas, once again we discovered success together and everything turned out great.  Also, I must say that Mr. Reznor’s work on “The Social Network” soundtrack is exactly what I would expect from him in the year 2010, and I say that not to suggest that it sounds predictable but rather to offer it as the satisfying answer to the question of what would Nine Inch Nails sound like when Trent Reznor was fifty-one years old.  I have been enjoying it. (From what I could tell, the most important answer the film provides is that the social networking website is the most monumental thing to be invented by mankind since the the Polio vaccine).

[audio:trent_reznor-atticus_ross-intriguing_possibilities.mp3]

@jonF taking off for the #Wovenhand show at @BottomOfTheHill. Hell yes.

You should realize that I have the best of blogging intentions. Not only am I usually thinking of great ideas for posts, but I constantly find myself toying with concepts for simple flourishes that I’m confident would accumulate to the astonishingly rich digital archive of my dreams. Man I’m telling you, in a certain imagining of my life there’s something delightful posted about every cognitive-behavioral event I experience.  You would log on every day and I would knock your socks off. Woe is me that somewhere along the way, the gap between my ambition and my lack of follow-through comes to bear.

For example, take this screen drying cabinet I just built.

While depicting no overstatement in an account of my true feelings, I can honestly tell you that I would feel so much more complete and validated if I:

• told you the story of how I very grudgingly decided to build this myself once my carpenter leads dried up.
• chronicled my 10 day evolution from shamefully bad to very bad woodworker.
• described the notably not worth it sense of accomplishment I felt upon completion.

Seriously.

I am just a closeted, self-loathing product of of my time and place.

But anyway, in practice I guess I suck at this.  Basically the main idea is that now I know how to build a wooden box on wheels.

…Kind of.

…It’ll come in handy.  (Thanks to Jake R. and Jesse B. for the invaluable advice on this.)

This year I realized that something I enjoy about San Francisco winters is unpredictability.  This realization possibly has something to do with the the weather during the last few weeks, which has has consistently fluctuated between foggy thirties and sunny sixties.  Somewhere in that time, I convinced myself this is not too unusual and please feel free to tell me that my double negative dropping ass is full of it.  Also not unusually, I have tried my best to be in the SF outerlands to witness the city in all its messed up moods because I like to think that this is something we have in common.

Here are some pictures that came out alright.

Is it that time of year again?  The winning bridge held almost 25 pounds with 25 pieces of pasta.  And I haven’t even taught these students anything yet.

[flv:bridge_testing.flv 640 480]

Recently, some good people AIGA (the professional association for design) hired me to help throw a screen printing party at CELLspace.  The goal was to print 400 call for  entry posters for a design competition they are having.  So we burned a bunch of screens, set up five printing stations, and last Sunday a bunch of volunteers flooded the crafts loft with drying posters.  The whole thing worked pretty well and got me thinking of ways to transition the idea for my next birthday party.  Thanks to Kristen B. for being a great partner and and to Sarah  S. and Greer A. for the help pulling it all off.

Have you ever been to a zine festival?

Well I have.  And recently, too.  Seduced by a roomful of lovingly crafted publications of  varying aesthetic merit, I found myself inspired but only to take the laziest possible action: to spend money.   So I bought a bunch of zines and thought that maybe in the future I might like to print a zine, too.   My favorite of the lot was “Truck Face,” a memoir of a punk’s work as an elementary school teacher.

I suppose that experience planted the inspirational seed for Erin‘s Christmas present, an edition of her play “Tvá Kamila“ that I designed, screen printed, and bound.  Right now it’s my favorite of her plays, and possibly even the most zine-like.  That’s pretty much the entire story besides the part where I misspelled the name of the play on the cover, which did not even turn out being the stupidest thing I did all week (cue footage of me desperately speeding to the San Jose airport to catch a flight I forgot about).  But besides that I rule.

Here it is: