express yourself

Super Serious time
When I look back on old posts, I think of how orderly my life was: just because I was doing something: writing it down. My life has NEVER been orderly, but I like being reassured that I'm not a complete bored, boring idiot.
Last winter/spring went by so fast that I wish I had something to grasp onto- I wish I'd wrote more, made more, etc.
Simon and Clem are leaving on Monday: it seems that "only yesterday" we were picking them up from the airport. Yesterday I talked to Max on Skype and he has a MacBook now so I got to see him for the first time since August. I tried not to get too teary.
I'm working on getting things together: doing instead of saying and doing what I want, not what I think others want. It's really hard to break old habits but it's working.

My dreams are all more patterned than before latley: all with my sister and mother. Some with my Dad and brothers. Oh, I could make a chart/graph/map.

I decided that I'm going to close my eyes and point on a globe and that's where I'll go. No exceptions, it's where I will go. I haven't done it yet I'm kinda nervous.

I got "promoted" to 50 cents more per hour at the EIC desk, which means that now I'm a "Student Supervisor." I'm underqualified, seriously. But now I guess that's incentive to do work I should have been doing in the first place.
I also do some work in the Reference Office and I like that- I'm getting to know the other librarians.

i'm working on being nic eto everyone- strangers even. I like it.

I bought some film and tried out the Polaroid 669 film on my older 600 cmaeram but the shutter I think it is broken. So I ended up with lots of unexposed and weird stuff on the film- esp the ones I peeled before dev. time (90 secs). They look neat and I decided to turn a potential disaster (read: expensive)into something great. I started etching into the emulsion and I like what happened.
I'm still working a lot with text and even submitted work to a literary journal, don't know what will happen.
I have a hard time going to class still and missed two in a row in my sculpture class. So today I went and nobody was there. Serves me right. I'm going to try to do the casting alone tonight: one mold is finished and the other almost. I'm going to cast with paper too: see how it turns out.

I have to clean today- don't know if I will but I haven't seen too many bugs lately so if I want it to stay that way (and not have them hiding alll lllll over) then I'd best get going. The state of my house is disgusting, really and truly.

amsterdamwithtree

This is one of almost none of the photos I took in Amsterdam.
I went with Max and four of his friends, who were sometimes too rowdy. This day was one of the most peaceful. We stopped at an undercrowded coffee shop, and the Germans sitting next to us offered up their remaining hashish, as they couldn't take it home with them. We were in a quaint little neighborhood just next to a canal, and rode through someone's garden on our bikes to get here.
I was stressed out the whole trip, as riding bikes amongst hundreds of othe bikes while watching out for hundreds of cars and pedestrians while stoned... you get the idea. It was hard to get used to.
We camped just outside the city: was more like living outside- as there were hundreds of others. Though the campsite was over crowded- much like the city- word of advice, don't go in the summertime, the evenings were very peaceful and the community area had a well stocked ice cream vending machine.

I like the look of this tree and partial sign- also how I can just make out parts of the city beyond the tree. The blurriness and vignetting thanks to my vintage Zeiss 120 camera. It's a rangefinder, so many of my images were guesses and flukes. Some I feel I can't even take credit for. This one I can- it's one of the very few that I actually remember taking (really! and I was baked out of my mind).

from the train

i took this from the train window on the way from clermont-ferrand, france to marseille. there is a lot to see at the brief stops if you watch closely- even cliche, but quite real: french families and friends saying hello and goodbye, clothing drying on the line,


and just before the train picks up real speed (also when it's slow on certain tracks) it's easy to note vegetation and architecture, sometimes even people sunbathing near a river. kelly and i had our coach all to ourselves on this leg of the journey. the trains -long winded french ones especially- are remarkably hot in the summer time, making seats and coaches with other people virtual saunas. trains stop in just about every small town with a station on the way, so the trips take a long time, particularly when you have to change trains- this journey to marseille was around 10 hours.
we had a short layover in nimes, about 4 hours down the road from this image. there, we ate pizza and smoked our cigarettes while we watched passersby (a man with a caged bird at a nearby table) and suffered mild heat stroke.
there's not really much to see in this photo except the feel of fleeting glimpses which are so common from these kinds of windows.
"nothing" is often my favorite thing to see- photos like this make me feel, imagine, and remember something more than something more descriptive. this stop was only 15 minutes or so outside of clermont; the sun rose as we made our way from this small station to the next.

mess room

my wreck of a bedroom in my old apartment on elm, which oddly is greatly missed these days.
maybe it's because my new(er) place is just as messy, if not moreso.
i need to clean up. i also need to find some chronic.

roadwiper

i came across a bunch of contact sheets in my locker today, this image was among them. i haven't printed it yet, but seeing all that shit piled up really gave me some inspiration to start working again.
lately all my stuff feels stagnant, repetitive. i like finding things that i think of as new again; it's nice realizing that i haven't always been in a rut, and seeing things in my own work that i was unable to see before.

pickard ave

i almost never shoot at night but i had a few rolls of bw and couldn't sleep so this is what happened. new house in norman. it's arranged differently now in the living room: the bedroom wall is above with my mom's pear painting. i really love the grainy qualities of these images, but the scans made the whites too bright, almost blue.

flat tire bikes vienna

i'm going to start blogging one a day of recent/old photos. this was taken in vienna, austria outside of the museum of modern art. i didn't notice that the tire was flat at the time- this happens to me often in photos: the not noticing but somehow getting something relatively interesting. weird.