I’m back from the Europe. There’s plenty-all to write about the trip, but, above all, I had a great deal of a lot of time during which to think and plot–24-or-so hours in transit yesterday alone. I came up with a tentative 12-month plan for myself, the outline of which you can see here. I’ll elaborate later.

I will say, though, that, at the Charles University bookstore in Prague, I picked up an excellent book about oil painting on stone substrates.  This has yielded plans for a series of paintings on alabaster depicting lyrics from the most recent Chris Brown single, which has more or less dominated my full musico-cultural attention, these past few weeks.

Oof. It’s only 6:30 PM, eastern time, but it very much feels like after-midnight. To bed!

Já vůle být doma Praha do člen určitý příští týden. Prozatím, zde ar nějaký majetek až k uvážit co:

Vidět rovněž, “člen určitý Hojit” a “Voják.”

Tato is člen určitý nejdříve blaho majetek příští bez Jižní Ontario do dějiny.

—
Right. Your guess is as good or better than mine as to whether “Free Online English to Czech Translators” made any sense of that. The take home message is this: I’m off to Old-Assed Europe for the next week; if you find yourself getting depressed about the Present State of Affairs, remind yourself that not only did this culture produce Erykah Badu, but it saw her, even two months ago, at the number 2 spot of Billboard Hot 200; also, that the second video (of the man dancing to the Tammys’ Egyptian Shumba) is the first indication I’ve seen that anything worthwhile and good has ever come out of Southern Ontario in the History of Ever.

Photos are all from the spring of 2002, title comes from this song, whole affair is decidedly tongue-in-cheek-or-is-it, which seems to be more and more my self-appointed milieu.

I have a couple other related things more or less finished–I’m just waiting on some backordered white photo corners and a few more frames.

I kind of liked the illustration board with just the photo corners. Might lend itself to something, at some point.

Do not, under any circumstances, have photos printed at Walgreen’s. Do not do it. The top image is a dye-sublimation print that I got from Shoppers–most of the crap on the image is on my scanner bed, but the two white dots at left are on the print (and, indeed, are on all of the dye-sub prints I got from there), so I had the photos reprinted. At Walgreen’s. Which is the image below.

I mean, I know I’m only paying 12 cents a print, but for fuck’s sake! Why in hell would you do that to an image, any image? I mean, I’m as big a fan of PhotoShop’s “Shadows/Highlight” correction tool, but you gotta go easy on that shit. I wasn’t expecting top of the line work, but seriously?

You should see what they did to my Challenger pictures. And those were 5 × 7″s. A dollar apiece down the shithole. Fuck. If you can’t tell, I’m unimpressed.

I think the weirdest thing about being back at my dad’s place in Ohio is the whole matter of being surrounded by old work of mine. Like, really. It’s everywhere. I really need to go through all of the stuff in storage, here and do my best to dispense with some of it. Most of the good stuff has been sent off to friends in different places, but there’s an awful lot still kicking around.

Not, strictly speaking, new and not, strictly speaking, about visual art, but I think these are pretty solid words to live by, whatever one’s chosen field.

“Just be butt naked somewhere. Butt naked with glitter on you, and a beeper.”

I spent the better part of my day (about six hours) selectively blurring out portions of dozens of old photographs from back home.  I’ve done pieces where I went trawling through my old photos before (like, I’ve done I think four or five distinct iterations on that theme)… but none of them worked especially well. Which does pose the question why I would bother to give it another go.

But I’m kind of liking how these images work together. The blurring is specifically the Photoshop technique for faking the appearance of photos taken with a tilt-shift lens (basically, macro depth of field on wide-angle shots–if applied to shots of building and whatnot, taken from a reasonably high vantage-point, it can have the effect of making the scene look like a diorama or miniature) that seems to be all the rage, right now.

I’m not so much interested in the “miniaturizing,” or even really making a compelling “fake” anything. I just wanted to take out some detail and screw with the depth of field. The unanticipated bonus was that, because I set the blur so heavily, I was able to up-scale a number of old pictures that I only had at 640×480 without having to worry about JPG artifact. Resizing them, blurring them, and cropping them to 4×6 dimensions (as opposed to the old 4×3) had the unnerving effect of making images that I know to be six years old (and, indeed, look like they were taken on a camera that, like mine, was not exactly top of the line, six years ago) look as though they could have been taken last summer. Which isn’t going to be interesting or even available to anyone but me, but I enjoy it.

I sent 50 over to Shoppers, and hopefully they’ll arrive before I skip town, Saturday. I’ve been playing around with a fer different groupings (groups of 12, groups of 6). I think I like the groups of 6 better; it’s enough that I don’t think individual images will become to important (because then the whole thing would turn appallingly sentimental–as opposed to merely sappy), without the group becoming too overwhelming. In any case, I’ll wait and see how things go, when I get the prints.

Whatever.