Father's Day ...

for reasons that actually do (or at least did) make sense … my work has three Laser Disk players … and we used to have one too, but when Dad got it out of the attic a few years ago it had given up … work was also getting ready to toss some interesting Laser Disks … so that was my father’s day plan sorted … i just had to get some adapters …

Blue Stitch Witch ...

the patterned swatch is one of many fabric samples that got tossed at the architecture firm i used to work for … i’m not sure where the blue satin hankie came from, but i’ve been meaning to sew them together into a sort of mystical place mat kind of thing for a while …

 

and would you look at that … i did!

Manga Decoupage

twice during my undergrad i was able to do study abroad in Japan. i have tons of amazing little trinkets and souvineers, but i also picked up a bunch of very gay manga …

i saved it for a while because i knew i wanted to do something with the more spicy pages someday …

i’ve had this box (which was originally designed to hold my dad’s record collection, we still have a bunch of them around the house) for a long time and it forms a part of my little altar setup. the last time i moved all my stuff around i realized that i could use the manga pages to decorate the inside of the box.

It turned out pretty good, and used up most of the pages! i do need to give it a gentle sand and some more coats of glue/epoxy of some sort to give it a nice finish … but it’s looking good for now.

Mix and Match

my favorite format of art to make is the mixed CD … I’ve made so many over the years i can’t remember them all, some just decorated envelops, others multi disk sets …

so, when talking to my new office mate about music a couple weeks ago, (she’d just been to a Decembrists show up in Albany) i asked if she liked one of my favorite bands … The Mountain Goats … she hade’t … so of course the best way to solve this was through the art of the mixed CD …

The Mountain Goats were the lead track on the mix i made for my old work carpool buddy … who i’m going to see them with tonight in Bearsville!

Eclipse

Back in April like a lot of places we had a ton of eclipse related stuff going on. the totality was a few hours north so we only got a couple minutes of weird grey and chilly air.

our local library and one of the art collectives in town hosted a themed art show.

it’s a sun made out of washi tape shrouded by a curtain of old VHS magnetic tape … i also did an journal illustration, and used a filter to take a picture!

NSF @ Work

there are lots of reasons i like working for academic institutions. one of them is access to academic journals and research databases. as soon as i got set up at work i started diving into google scholar to see what neat things i could find … i looked up old professors and classmates who are now professors, did a scan of journal titles, and just generally searched about all kinds of interests i have …

now this is where my employer and parents should stop reading …

because one of the things i’ve been most interested in looking at academic research about is … porn. i mean obviously it’s just an interesting thing to think about … but i have always genuinely been interested in the sociology and anthropology of gay porn. my undergrad was around the same time as the rise of the “Amateur College Boy” style porn sites. conversations about gay-for-pay porn stars and the idea of “converting“ straight boys were all over the place, mostly gossipy and catty online snark … but there were those of us who wondered what they real experiences behind these boys were.
i had a mild fantasy of applying to grad school for some kind of graduate degree that would let me study these boys and learn more about what being in porn meant for them and how they would identify now and before they did porn.

did some mind mapping exercises …

so i opened up Google Scholar at work and searched the names of some porn studios and performers i thought might have been written about. I found a few things, and once i discovered the Porn Studies journal i just started following threads of citations out to other interesting work.
(but i can only get like a quarter of the articles published by Porn Studies Journal so if you have full access let me know!)

and of course i made a nice cover for my binder of articles

i’ve also been doing searches about interesting research methods and outputs … which eventually reminded me about my love of zines … i found lots of interesting articles about the value and adaptability of zines for making research available and understandable by a wider community

meanwhile, my actual job included cleaning out a bunch of old supplies and paperwork from the administrative office. this is my favorite kind of assignment because i always find neat stuff in the pile of things slated to get tossed.
… and for some reason we have like 5 reams of legal sized paper that i’m not sure we ever needed in the first place … and i can’t imagine we’ll ever need again … so, using a folded page gets me a 7 by 8.5 zine … 7 sheets gets me 28 pages …

the first issue is set to come out in September … so … watch this space i guess?