2013 Burning Elf

 It burned well. Laurie lit the elf this year. The fireworks did not set anyone's hair on fire.

The head count was about 75

It's a strange thing we do.

Long Slow Spiral Downwards Towards The Elf

More things I do.

Shoots. At the capitol. At medical equipment factories and elsewhere.

The Boot helps improve life on planet Earth

My pal John is in Africa doing audio/second camera for a Gates Foundation shoot on micro-loans. My cynicism is briefly brushed aside by this photo he sent. Goodness still happens.

As beautiful as a bird in flight….

True to form: my family finds the year's elf head "creepy." It was ordained that this was the year of the female elf. So it is written; so it shall be done. The elf will have hair, because a bald elf woman would be creepy.

Soon

Post Game at the Imperial Court of Caligula

A boondoggle of epic proportions: I did audio for a post game analysis of the Monday Night Football Seahawks beat down of the of the New Orleans Saints on Dec. 2nd 2013. We arrived at 2:30 PM and did not actually work until the end of the 4th quarter- about 9:00PM. My awesome all access pass, (which bore the pseudonym "Warren Pope" for unknown and unnecessary reasons) gave me entree to the strange, semi-forbidden world of pro football, that can only be likened to royal courts of the middle ages. Being both a fan and a fairly nihilistic armchair anarchist it was a dizzying experience of being on the field and hearing the sounds and smelling the smells of the real thing and seeing the 1%'s calloused view of the unwashed madness of professional sports. I saw almost every other sound guy in Seattle, and worked with the incredible and decent Mr. Hudson (pictured above)

Things I do.

I made audio recordings of the sad victims of the shoe cult. I made audio recordings of the makers of tablet apps for cars. I make money. I can not buy my freedom.

The Drink Coaster of Mighty Paraoh

A photo of the understated common stuff of the world's biggest philanthropist. Even he doesn't want drink rings on his end table.

Graffiti war IV

I am actually getting worse at doing this: too many words, too small to read and the graphic is getting old. No one sees this anyway and I am decaying into my base elements.

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/06/graffiti-war.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/10/graffiti-war-update.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/10/graffiti-war-3.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2013/06/graffiti-war-update.html

In Awe

Titan casts a shadow on Jupiter.

Many Obtuse, Intersecting Adventures Signifying Nothing

DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING YOU SEE ON "REALITY" TV. Three days on a popular real estate show (with nice people, crew, producer and talent and it being a relatively benign show) and the story, as usual is entirely pre cooked and digested before the viewers see it as a sort of suspense filled game show. It's all crap. I did eat well and get to spend much of a beautiful fall Veteran's day on Lake Washington on a mother F&^$@#ing boat.  Also corporate meetings are boring even for companies making life saving equipment.

Getting old sucks and I wake up ever night and question my existence.

That's a drown squirrel floating next to a houseboat.

Es ist nicht gemuchlichkeit.

Golly, I Like Her...

I can't and won't live with out her. She is awesome. Thanks Universe, she is just right.

Teaser

Coming soon….maybe. Maybe not. Nobody reads

this shit anyway.

The Continuing Hilarity of the Corporate Skit!

Still .00078% more funny than head lice!

Some days are long and the soul crushing pain intense. Forgive us Obi-Wan, the dark side was strong….

The Dream Dies Hard.

The El Camino. The shameful lust object of my early fifties is an unattainable bitch goddess.  I have seen many of the surviving specimen, and in aggregate they are decaying and literally withering unto dust. I drove a 1979 GMC Caballero (the GMC clone of the el Camino) today and while it was most immpressive mechanically, all the 1970's plastic ( of which there is much) was dissolving into a fine cornmeal and the styrofoam  in a fine powder: I was quite explicitly breathing the car as I drove it. It was also beige, a color so non committal as to surrender only thoughts of viral infection and condominium bathroom wall colors.  It was sorrowful. The glacier has moved and these vehicles have been left behind. I shall not.

My Looming Mid-Life Crisis and the Automotive Minotaur

I did not purchase this shambling wreck. This isn't even the vehicle I was tempted by. For some unnameable reason I have been haunted by the overwhelming desire to buy an El Camino ( a mythical Car-Truck that I was fascinated by in my childhood, a half man, half beast like a minotaur). My car, the "Barbie Jeep"- a loyal 1997 Honda CRV, frustrating in it's gutless dependability and suburban blandness seems to laugh at my diminishing testosterone, forcing me, like a drowning man to seek out the magwheeled  life preservers of my teenaged self. Against all good judgement and any degree of common sense I drug poor Tom out to check out a craigslist special yesterday in the rain and dull gray of October. The texts that I had exchanged with the owner lead me to believe that the car was some sort of prized legacy project shared by a father and son and that the owner himself was a freshly scrubbed high school senior. Some kind of magical bonding ritual, only understood by Americans: bondo and fender replacement with deep subtext of male initiation  rites. The car turned out to be a nasty piece of scrap, jettisoned into and retrieved from the the edge. The high school senior turned into a mid twenties unshaven white man smoking the very nub and filter of a cigarette without ever removing it from his mouth. I was shown the sad deficiencies of the whole class of car, no longer made and aging badly. The scent of mold, old upholstery, shame and starter fluid combine with the last puff's of the owner's cigarette and his flat brimmed Seahawks  camouflage hat (with sticker still on the visor) pushed me into a depression. I am sure there are vehicles that can bring joy to someone, maybe even this one did or could again. It can't make me nineteen again however.

(photo borrowed from craigslist of another car)

Grown Men Play Huge Saw- But is it art?

I worked at the Frye Art museum last week, on a video piece for Buster Simpson, a well known Northwest abstract artist. Buster was great, a fine person with a good sense of humor. He claimed to have been shocked that a conservative museum such as the Frye would do a retrospective on him, a sort of provocateur of the 1970's until now. We shot two musicians playing the giant industrial saw blade, bent into a mobius strip and painted with the phrase "Carbon andEarth builds to decay back into ..." repeating endlessly. The music, was very abstract, not jarring or noise but in the end it was like all saw music sort of just a novelty. Once again proving, like my day recently where in we recorded Bill Gates reading the Gettysburg Address, that my job is strange and surreal.

Kicking the tires

42" x 42" on plywood. Not quite finished, but it's a local call from here to there. This is rear cover art for my forthcoming novel "The Chronic Yard Sale", should it ever be finished. The book is in it's final act, which is proving to be very complicated, especially for as clunky a writer as I am.

I thought a lot about buying a Studebaker recently but instead the universe caused my freezer to die, thus changing my dreams, hopes and desires.

Mad Men

This day I mounted the art work from a recently purchased 1951 "Uttica Club Beer" billboard artwork  to a strange wall hanging made from a split hollow core door. It is the distilled best bits of a 9' x 16' out door billboard that i found on ebay. I like it and it will hang over the stairs in  my domicile

My beloved wife is patient but grows ever wearier of my need to cover all wall surfaces with weird crap.

               

Ten Years Old

My youngest has passed a milestone: ten years old. It makes me feel old but also very thankful for what I have. It was a day spent on the beach at Lincoln Park in West Seattle, with a small, eclectic group of boys, with Tom as the very rare center of attention. He had fun. It was one of those moments that you realize that the big pay off to life is happening right in front of you. For all the logistical planning that life consists of (or avoidance of planning in my case) it is really all camouflage to the real beauty and and joy that is happening all around.

I can't help remembering that ten is the age I was when my dad died, and how that shaped most of my view on everything, and how really little you still are when you are ten. Naturally my superstitious side sees portentous omens in seeing my young son at ten and me at 52, seeing parallels and ghosts in the shadows. Generally I think such thoughts are complete crap, but there is a willful desire to connect the dots into recognizable patterns. I firmly resolve to break that pattern and live to be old enough to be a total burden to my kids.

Sending the first born to the middle kingdom.

Ned goes to China for two weeks.

Update: He had a good time. He is a man of few words.

More Graffiti War Update

It's been a while. This now confounds the skate park pot smokers. What it lacks in execution it makes up for in vague and joyless messaging.

My sixteen year old son came with me on this adventure.  Is it sad or encouraging that he is willing to engage in semi-illegal shenanigans with his 52 year old dad?

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/06/graffiti-war.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/10/graffiti-war-update.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/10/graffiti-war-3.html

Sleepwalking through my middle age.

Months go by. A week seems like  an hour. I am generally rudderless and without any plan for my life. While many people might find that refreshing, I have become most dissatisfied.  I can not find the fucking bootstraps upon which I should be pulling myself up by. It has become increasingly difficult to accomplish anything more than looking out the window. These being my prime earning years that would seem to be a poor choice. Business has been slow, but occasionally interesting. Sports figures and people of merit, recorded by the Gates Foundation (Kofi Annan, and others). But the money has slowed to a trickle. Normally I would welcome such a dry spell because I could paint, but that has of course seemed like too much of a commitment. I could also spend time with the kids, but they seem less interested in actually doing anything than in their electronic heroin screens. I have painted. More strange science fiction covers, and a painting I have been working on for a couple of years of a particularly bad dream I once had.  I have also been working on a novel called "Chronic Yard Sale", and have egoistically started on a cover painting for that. So that is the last several months in a nutshell. Yea me.

Trembling before the plow.

"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." 

Non-triumphant return from non-conquest of Guatemala

I spent a week in Guatemala.  As a first worlder, secure in my knowledge that my needs are many and my appetite vast, I witnessed, however briefly, just how the other nine tenths of the planet lives and was momentarily knocked off balance. Being an audio guy means I do not speak, lest I ruin a take or change the outcome of how a scene takes shape. Unfortunately that becomes how I also view the world; as a detached observer, somewhat less passionately than those in participation. It was hard not to see what was going on and want to help. We were shooting a team from Providence hospitals putting in cook stoves in the homes of indigenous Mayan people of central Guatemala because their traditional fire benches cause respiratory infection in their children.  The houses are small- some as small as 10' x 14'- and house sometimes three generations on dirt floors, with no water or electricity (though many do have some electricity) In a way the mission is a fake: the villagers do not need North Americans to put in their stoves- they are intelligent and capable people and could easily do it them selves- the crew from Seattle found that out quickly. The reason they need North Americans there is to experience the poverty and inequity first hand and then go home and try and do something about it. I very much want my kids to do this and see that the world is not just about adequate wi-fi connection. Guatemala is the destination of numerous charitable missions from the developed world and it needs them desperately. It is however becoming increasingly dependent on them. The clinic we shot, who bring teams of surgeons down from the states to do marathon surgery in their two affiliated hospitals, has almost inadvertently become the 3rd largest healthcare provider in Guatemala, a country of 14 million people.  There are many, many problems crime there: drug and gun running, disease, corruption and most visible, it is a police state  with every corner patrolled by either a army unit of 19 year olds with AK 47s or  rent-a-security patrolman with a ubiquitous silver, pistol gripped shotgun at every bank, pharmacy or fast food restaurant. There are also many American missionary Guatemala junkies who are like a woman who marries a man and wants to change him in order to "fix" him, but is always disappointed that he never changes, but keeps trying because, he would be so perfect if it worked.

A hundred inconsequential adventures.

Many things. All of them uninteresting in the aggregate. Shoots and work and discussions and an unending stream of first world problems all of which add up to the fact I have been busy and mildly disturbed by 21st century life. I am going to Guatemala for a week at the end of February.