| My roommate Andrew and Tara, who was visiting from Atlanta. Actually, he's moving up there this next quarter. I'm sad, he's the best roommate I've ever had. Scratch that, the kid's a fricking walking miracle in general. I'm not sure what else to say, but now I have yet another reason I have to visit atlanta more often (as if beth wasn't more than enough.) |
| Speaking of books, I just threw up some stuff here. It's a contest, but I get 3 proof copies of each item, so I can see how they print. The saturation and color balance is different on the greeting card and calender, but I think the Fashion Haus booklet looks rather good. Apparently, you can vote for them as many times as you want - which would explain the 11 thousand votes on some entries, but I'm more hoping I might win one of the software packages, I could really use it. |
| The layouts don't look quite right when looking at it online, but the color looks pretty good. I'm looking forward to seeing how they print it. I've been experimenting with different book/let companies. I printed a couple tries of my Being Inside book at Blurb, but I'm not sure about the quality or archival possibilities. I can see the patterns in the prints, it looks less like grain, more like criss crosses of lines. I sent some of the same images to iprintfromhome and they look excellent, but they don't print books, of course. I guess I might only be able to get a great quality book by having it actually published, or paying 7000 for a batch of fine art books. I don't really want to pay that much, I mainly need to make a couple small books for classes, and I want to send some to relatives. Besides that I'm satisfied with showing my work online, I don't need them for promotion, etc. Someone suggested Lulu, but I think they would be comparable to blurb. Any thoughts? |
| He'll probably be pissed at me for mentioning this, but I'm worried that next quarter Rin won't be coming back. He's been tied up in a ridiculous amount of bureaucratic nonsense to do with financial aid. He can't get a loan because his mother can't cosign. He can't get disowned because of a technicality in his state. He can't get the aid he deserves because his mother technically has an income now. He doesn't get aid from his mother because she is technically insane, and has a huge amount of debt. He can't tell the government that she's insane, because his sister would be taken from his mother (who does seem to be able to care for her.) The financial aid office - with the flair and style of financial aid offices everywhere - has constantly done their best to be enthusiastically unhelpful. He's had trouble filing special circumstances forms, because the form leaves room for only a one paragraph explanation, and check boxes, none of which who fit his circumstance. It says, do not attach forms. There's a lot more to it, but it's all basically bullshit. Rin's managed to come this far without highschool, managed to be a straight A student, do amazing work, hold down a job, etc, but it seems no matter what he does, it's almost impossible to fill that monetary gap. Hopefully we can figure things out, or he may just have to take time off to work a couple jobs at once until more scholarship can be found. This country is so fucked up. I don't understand why our priorities aren't towards the education of our highly talented and intelligent citizens, instead of funneling money into conflict and corporate interests... those few bloated companies may do well, but in the long run our education system is resulting in us falling drastically behind other countries where a good education is easier to grasp... not that I feel that we should be in direct conflict with other countries, but a more educated global community seems to be a good thing to me. I'm not the first to state this, and I can only point towards anecdotal evidence, but every time one of my friends is screwed over by this system, I get very angry about it. |
| I wanted to mention that my sister, Mariel, is awesome. I just saw this picture (I didn't take it) on her facebook, and it reminded me of how cool it is that she's been in professional dance performances, won international competitions, or can even dance well in the first place. I sure can't. She's about to finish up high school now and has told me she's interested in film.. or being a doctor. I don't know what she is going to end up doing, but she's probably going to be good at it. Just to balance out that picture, here's another one. Love ya, mari! |
| I just received four lovely letters today, three of which were the from the same person, in italy. They were postmarked on different days, which leads me to believe that all my mail is going a little slow. I'll send out a response to the american missive as soon as possible, but it seems that my italian pen pal didn't supply me with a return address... maybe I got it somewhere else and have somehow lost it? I don't know. I seem to be unable to read the name in the signature, or at least be sure of it, so I've got a little mystery here. I really appreciate the letters though, they made my day. How do we feel about this update format? I like it. I'm using tables to keep the text close to my maximum image size (600 pixels wide), which I think should keep the entire blog looking more streamlined. I can have the text centered while still being left aligned. I'm surprised it took me this long to think of doing this. I'll try to remember to keep it up. |
An interesting selection of my work has been featured at jewcy.com. And maybe this will make you giggle: Someone featured my bad news series in a blog that seems designed to give their students assignments. I think that's awesome, though there seems to be some minor confusion about the nature of the installation. The great part of all of this is that I found it and now have the ability to interact directly with the students if I so wanted. Education and information sharing has gotten so directly malleable lately. |
| I also wanted you to check out Shawn Gust's work for the Living Within Limits project over at his blog. Some of the images are really amazing. He's posted a stop motion video on the project as well. |
| Leave it to my Amazon blogger pal Ryan Brenizer to compare me to Ryan McGinley (who's recent video (and photoshoot) of breakthrough oscar stars is quite good, and you've probably seen) while I'm posting filler, but hopefully I'll be back to something I'm proud of again soon. Maybe seeing that not every one of my shots is something that I'm serious about is somehow edifying? We have fun. Who am I kidding, I'm hardly serious about most of my work. What was it that was said? The play's the thing? |
| Oh, did I mention I had a birthday? It was nice. Rin and zulmarie and melanie came over and baked me a cake. Alek and cody showed up, and of course my roommate andrew was there. Here are a few snapshots. Just hangin' around. |
| And I don't know what zulmarie was doing but I like this one with her hair messed up, mainly because of the color in the background. Why bother with studio? I've got so much stuff to deal with these next couple days, so you're going to get caught up with those digital snapshots for a few entries. |
| So beth is visiting this weekend, to help me with the fashion haus show and our own exhibition in the works. I can't wait till I can show you the recent paintings and mixed media pieces she's been coming up with, plus the play she wrote. It's got a dragon in it. What do we do while we work? Besides watching star trek and listening to meatloaf, we just like to hang around and amuse each other. |
