vein

My wisdom tooth post is coming soon. I'm going to make some kind of art with them, but I've been too busy drugging myself and holding ice packs on my watermelon face to do anything like that yet.

In the meantime, here's a digital light image. I have a bunch of different series of abstract light pictures that fit into various categories, such as cells, bugs, landscapes, skeletal, etc. This is from the "veins" series.

Jimbo

Squirrel Nut Zippers! Remember them? "Oh, sure, 'zoot suit rioooottt, RIOT! Throw back a bottle of beer dun da-dum da-dum...'" No, not them, that other swing band that had that other song. They played here last Friday, and Paz from Ukulala asked me to come take pictures of some of the band members while he interviewed them before the show (go here for Paz's account of the interview and the show). One thing led to another and suddenly I was on the guestlist, because I'm kind of a big deal. The show was great, and I got to touch the baritone ukulele that was played on "Hell" (THAT song).

I've been shooting a lot of shows lately for this site called mel.opho.be. I'll try to make my next few posts un-music related. Look for my Friday post, which will probably be some kind of gruesome picture of my wisdom teeth.

Boris

Boris at the Middle East last night. It was probably one of the top 5 shows I've ever been too.

fence in november

In Concord, MA. I take a lot of pictures there.

I haven't had much to say about a lot of the photos I've been posting lately. I think most of them pretty much speak for themselves. So here are some anagrams of "Photo-Go-Round", and their significance or whatever:

- Top honour dog
(Arfstanding!)

- No troop dough
(Topical and sobering.)

- Poor donut hog
(Is there any other kind?)

- Hot dog on pour
(Wouldn't it be awesome if bars had draught hot dogs? No, because that would be absolutely disgusting...)

- "Ooh, ground pot"
(...or would it? Think about it, man. Dude, look at me. Look at me................... think about it.)

- "D'oh! Gout porno!"
(Man, we've all been there.)

- Good ho: nut pro
(Makes sense I guess.)

- Too Rough Pond
(Never, ever, go skinnydipping there.)

- "Uproot hog." *Nod*
(An exchange between two hog farmers about to gather up the season's pig harvest. From the pig fields.)

- Our dong photo
(I promise you won't see it here. Maybe on Ukulala.)

- "Run to God, Pooh"
(Christopher Robin's sad, sad last words.)

chandelier pt. two

From inside an abandoned theater, which also might have been a church, because there was a gigantic Jesus hanging on a cross backstage.

Us Versus Them

Photo shoot for Us Versus Them.

celebrity

I used to take a lot of pictures of my brother when he was little, because he wasn't self-conscious and would do whatever I said. One time I had him posing in front of the sliding-glass door in the porch, which had a large, heavy curtain covering it. As I was focusing the lens I told him to back up a little. Then a little more. All of a sudden he disappeared through the curtain. Turns out the sliding-glass door was open. He went tumbling backwards down the stairs into the backyard. I felt pretty bad about that. But even though I almost killed him with photography, he still kept posing for pictures. What a trooper.

stove sitter

35mm negative printed through crumpled cellophane.

hand mirror

There's a universe within your own nostrils.

(b&w film)

win a prize

At a 4th of July fair in Lexington last year.

Carpineto cross

Another one from Carpineto della Nora, Italy.

diamond heart

No "jewel hearts" here, no sir.

The Rog + cat

Roger mans the electronic pianos in The Appreciation Post, but sometimes he lets his American flag t-shirt cat play a few bars. It's much like Toonces the Driving Cat, but with Moogs.

jewel heart

This image started as a digital picture I took by setting my camera on rapid-fire and waving it around. The actual image I captured is only half of what you see. What I'm saying is, imagine a line going down the middle of the image. One half of that is what the camera actually captured. I took that picture, made a copy, reversed it, and put the two together, and that's what you see above.

To me it looks like a chest cavity, or maybe a throat, with a heart dangling by a thread, and the heart has jewelry impaled in it and hanging from it.

This is probably one of my favorite things I've ever made. First of all, it looks really cool. Secondably, it's just crazy to me that I captured such a great image in such a haphazard way, and that I knew exactly what to do with it when I saw it. I like when things like that happen.

The Mansion Show pt. two

It's been almost a week. I think that's the longest I've gone without making a new post since I started this thing. I have a good excuse though. I was preparing my work for The Mansion Show reception, which happened this past Friday. It was good. Between the 5 other artists and me, there ended up being 50 pieces total. A lot more people came than I expected. All the work seemed to be very well-received.

All my pieces in the show were from my Deconstructure series. In the top image are six 11x14 prints. The Beebe Estate is a historic (and haunted) building, and they don't allow you to attach anything to the walls. So they have chains (probably borrowed from the ghosts) hanging down from the moulding, from which you can hang your work on hooks. This makes hanging your work properly an infuriating process, but it ends up looking pretty badass. With the chains and all.

In the second image are ten 16x20 prints. I had originally wanted these to be frameless; just the prints mounted on black board. But the day after I hung them up, the humidity in the building caused the boards to start warping. So the morning of the reception I rushed out to buy frames, put all the prints in them, and hung them back up. I'm not a fan of having glass over them, because the images are very tactile-looking, and printed on matte paper, and having shiny glass over them totally nullifies that effect. But there wasn't really anything else I could do to prevent them from warping, and I guess it does look pretty good despite the glare.

Know what else looks good? Hot pink walls. I'm mounting all my black & white prints on hot pink board from now on. I'll also give out snap bracelets at all future shows.

shed

Last week I talked about how I plan to take a walk down the train tracks and take pictures of stuff. This picture is almost like that. When I take the train, I like to set my camera to rapid-fire and hold it up to the window. Usually I get one or two pictures I like out of every one- or two-hundred I take like this. This is one photo that grabbed my attention.

I don't know what's going on here. It seems to be some kind of shed plopped down in the middle of a fence. It's not just a wall with a door in it, it's actually a three-dimensional structure that someone built at the edge of their backyard.

There are a lot of weird things about it. It's much bigger than a regular shed. You could fit a fleet of lawnmowers in there. Its placement is strange. Why was it built in the middle of a fence, rather than just in the yard? And If you assume that the fence is the boundary between these folks' land and the rail area, why does it straddle the two? (You can't tell from the picture, but the structure comes out beyond the fence). Baffling.

I like the blurry, out-of-focus quality of the picture. Yeah, any photo that's blurry and out-of-focus can seem dreeeaaammmliiiiike. But I think this photo works well because of the composition, this odd monument in the middle of the frame with the fence sections stretching to the sides, and the sharpness and richness of the trees and sky compared to the blurriness and dull brown + yellow/green of the lower half. I probably wouldn't hang it on the wall, but I like it.

nana

My great-grandmother. It's a picture of a picture, manipulated with a glass lens while I took the photo.

railroad spikes

Earlier today I found these railroad spikes arranged exactly how they appear here, while walking down the train tracks in West Concord. They were on an old cement boarding ramp, the last remaining part of an old train station (besides the old rails). Here's a picture. It's that thing on the left:


There's a project I've been meaning to do for the past two years, but have never gotten around to, and that's to take the train outbound from Boston, get off somewhere and start walking back with my camera. You see so much interesting stuff from the train. Stuff you can only see from the train. Once in a while I'll be riding the train past roads that I've driven down many times, but I'll see things that I'd never see from a car. Even things I can see from the road, I see from a new perspective on the rail. Even something as simple as the back of a building that I've walked into from the front a thousand times. It's weirdly mind-warping sometimes.

Also, there's often a lot of just really strange debris lying along the train tracks. I've seen junked-out cars half-submerged in foggy bogs. I've seen a ramshackle Cinderella pumpkin carriage made out of metal and wood. Last year I saw a bunch of dudes fighting pitbulls behind an abandoned warehouse in Baltimore. P.S. never go to Baltimore. The entire time we were going through there I thought that any second it was going to turn into that scene from Children Of Men where the people are throwing rocks at Clive Owen while he's looking out the train window.

P.S.S. I look a lot like Clive Owen.

P.S.S.S. Sorry if you're from Baltimore. Sorry that your city is horrible!

folk punk

Eric made some barechested new friends during Bread & Roses' set at BratFest '06.

restoration

My grandparents at their wedding.

deconstructures pt. three

I've been working on my photos for The Mansion Show. Here are two negatives I scratched out. They're intended to fit together. Like this!


I scanned the negatives and then combined them in Photoshop. There's no digital trickery, except for lowering the opacity so both images are visible, and fixing the brightness and contrast a little bit because the exposure of the negatives is really bad. This is the first time I've done this digitally, and I think it looks really good, even if it doesn't look quite the same as if I had printed it in the darkroom. I actually did make a print of this in the darkroom today, but I just couldn't get it right. The image above is what I was going for. But with the crappily-exposed negatives I'm working with, I don't think it's even possible to darkroom-print it as well as this.

bigfoot

Back in this entry, I posted a piece I made starring this here little girl. I had found her picture on some strips of film in my grandmother's basement. I just recently re-found those negatives, and I scanned them. Here's that little girl in color, and only slightly less scratched up. I wish I knew who she was.


I also mentioned that on the same roll of film there were some pictures from a monster truck rally. I wasn't joking...

AWESOME

AWESOME

AWESOME

AWESOME

rogues gallery pt. two

I was amiss when I didn't include Eric in the last post. Here he is taking a load off on yonder stoop, looking penny-wise and hoity-toity before an eventide's dose of carousing.



Meanwhile, our newest hero, Roger, looks more gussied up than a speakeasy harlot. But don't be hoodwinked by the looks of this insufferable dandy; he's a whiz on that keytrumpet.

rogues gallery

Way back when, this fella by the go-by Paz had it in his noodle to conjure a portrait of hisself looking dapper and rakish, and clasping a banjo at a jaunty slant. It was a capital thought, but that idear soon opened up a whole can o' worms. And that can was a biggun. And all those can-worms started a-wigglin' something fierce til they was like a twister on the plain, makin' a royal mess of things the magnitude of which weren't seen since Teapot Dome....



After catching a gander at what Paz had done, this scrappy gent by the name'a Michael, flush with the spirit of oneupmanship, presently followed suit with a photo-graph of his own. As you'd reckon, he portrays hisself with an ill countenance, as a ne'er-do-well is wont to do.



Well I tell ya, that got my dander up, sure as tarnation. I followed posthaste with three of my own pi'chers, illustrating the breadth of my imagined musical acumen.



Madder'n a boiled owl, Christian set to with this gem, a pithy rejoinder if ever there was one.



"Poppycock!", hollered Melanie, ragamuffin that she is, and sent us all runnin' for the dinner bell with this inspired tableau.



Spry ol' Michael, ever the cock-of-the-walk, would not be outdone. Sure as Samson, he heaved the old one-two with this humdinger. Our humours besmirched, I figger'd that this donnybrook had all but hit the hay like a milkmaid after a barn dance.



But forthwith a strapping young buck entered the fray. Justin, never one to wither in the face of fisticuffs, pulled himself up by the bootstraps and exclaimed, with vim and vigour, "I'll have my druthers too!"

And he did, by and by.
And sweet those druthers were.

home front

Like the last post says, I'm going to be in a show in June. If you want to come to the reception on June 6th, the Beebe Estate website has driving directions.

Directions by MBTA:
1) Take the Orange line outbound to Oak Grove.
2) Catch the #136 or #137 bus towards Reading or Wakefield (not Malden Station, which is the southbound direction). Take this into Melrose center (about an 8 minute ride), and get off at Foster St. (YMCA stop).
3) Walk two blocks west on West Foster to Beebe Estate, which is a large Greek Revival style white house on the north side. There is a sign for it. Take a look at the website, beebeestate.org for a photo of the estate.

I'll have 4 pieces in the show. They'll be mostly skyscrapers, with a few smokestacks thrown in. The image above won't be in the show, but it's along the lines of what I've been working on lately; more deconstructures.

I made this yesterday, probably the quickest one I've ever done. It's a 35mm negative, scratched up, then scanned with a negative scanner. Negative scanners are pretty much the best things ever invented.

The Mansion Show

flip car

A flipped-over car in Bridgewater, MA.
35mm

village rooftop

I guess there's kind of an architectural theme around here lately. This picture was taken in 2001 in the mountains above the village of Carpineto della Nora in Italy, where my great-grandfather was born and where I still have a good number of relatives.

deserted room

Inside of an abandoned house in Maynard, MA.
35mm black and white.

red house

I took this picture from a bit further away than it looks. The image above is cropped in a little bit. The right and left sides still look a little bendy. It looks bulgy in the middle, like it's a round house. If I knew anything about photography, I'd probably know what kind of lens prevents this from happening. Do yooooooouuuu know?

CIB

Concord Independent Battery in the Patriots Day Parade in Concord, MA, last Monday. My grandfather was a member of the CIB for a long time, and because of this he knows a whole lot about firing cannons. (He's somewhere in that picture). He even has a small cannon of his own. Here's my dad kabooming it at my aunt's wedding last year.

bronchitis

I've had bronchitis for the past week. This picture illustrates what I've felt like lately. Like I've had a human head in my chest and I've been trying to cough it up.

This is an old print I made by exposing a negative of my brother through an x-ray of my chest that I laid over the paper. The x-ray is from one of the two times I broke my collarbone when I was 13. You can see it up in the lefthand corner. It hurt. Those dark oblong shapes are clips that were on the smock they put on me. If only I had lined them up so they looked like horns on my bro's head. That would more accurately portray the evilness of the bronchitisaurus that is living inside me right now.

(While I was searching for "bronchitisaurus", I found THIS, which is probably the best video game ever made.)