Stealing From A Child

 

I covet Miles’ magnatiles.

If you don’t know, magnatiles are little pieces of colored plastic. Each one has magnets inside their see through shell. You use these magnets to build things rather easily. They simply click together. A collection of these has a variety of shapes so what you can build out of them is quite extensive. Think of them as today’s Lincoln logs without that horrible smell.

I don’t care for most of Miles’ toys; they’re just not for me. The trucks and all that, I have no interest in playing with those. Who wants to get on the ground to push a truck around? Don’t get me started on the Hot Wheels cars, and the cliched response every parent has to them. Yes, you step on them often and yes, doing that hurts like hell. Sometimes I scream, sometimes I yell. More than once I have tossed those things the whole length of the house. I’m a little cooler with the stuffed animals, I get those, either as a thing to clutch while laying in bed, or something that just looks nice. He has more than a few Simpson’s stuffed animals. When he gets to action figures, like he really gets to them, I think our interests will dovetail. I will force him to take them out the packaging though, I’m not starting that bullshit.

The magnatiles are something else. To me they represent potential making supplies. In recent years, I’ve done a lot with magnets. I have mailed them all over the world for folks to drop in random places, as well as leaving tons of them around my area. All you have to do is stick them to a surface that…accepts magnets (I have no idea the science language here) and then walk away. It’s an easy public art show without all the needless damage to public or private property.

So, when I see Miles’ magnatiles littering the house, I want them. I’ve told him this. I’ve even told his mother this, who has warned me against them disappearing from his collections. Some might even call her warnings, “mean,” or “threatening.” No matter, as soon as he loses interest, I’m going to take every single one of them and glue stuff to them. I’ve thought about buying my own, but I don’t want to have to sneak them through the house. Could you imagine getting caught with magnatiles not intended for the boy? No way am I going to cover them up and walk them inside like someone taking illicit “reading” material out of a magazine shop in the 1990’s.

To work through some of these issues, I forced Miles to star in a forty-five second movie about this very subject. If I were making underground movies in the 1920’s, this would have been an achievement, instead it was something I could put together on my phone in less than ten minutes. I think about this sort of thing all the time. Anyway, whenever we do things like this, mostly photo shoots, he’s been a good sport. He does like to use the camera which brings mixed results. At some point I’m going to let him shoot something and then stick it together as his first movie. If Ben Affleck can do it, so can Miles.

Pictures + Collages = Picture/Collages

I’ve been taking a lot of pictures recently. Pictures that exist to stay pictures, mostly. I’ve done this for years and years, but they always end up as something else. I draft them into a collage or a re-captioned image, but nothing for someone to solely focus on. Never “here it is” and the thing be the picture. I’ve taken a lot of these, mostly for “documenting squalor” or something like that. I enjoy things that are falling in, things that have been cruelly subjected to time, or simply disregarded.  I enjoy things with dust on them. New and squeaky and fresh rarely has a story, no personality.

The process for taking these pictures happens between thrift stores runs. Mainly around small towns near Winston-Salem. Places with a lot of dust that won’t come off. Thomasville is great for finding scenes of marvelous decay. When I have the time, I dive the streets looking for anything that pops out. Old houses are great. Factories falling in on themselves are even better, and Thomasville has that, all of Davidson County has that. If the location looks “safe enough,” I’ll get out and compose something. Forcing a picture from a sitting car is difficult, getting one from a moving car is impossible. No one has ever taken a good picture from a moving car! If a junkyard dog is milling about in the background, or a gaggle of sketchy dudes are looking my way, I take the picture and get out of there. I’ve been shot at before, but not for taking pictures. I could hear the bullets going over my head. That sound has stuck with me, and I don’t wish to hear it again. 

On the left is the print. On the right is the picture. 

 

Only once has someone accosted me for taking pictures in this fashion. I was in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, walking up and down a stretch of old beachfront hotels. These were the good ones, the ones with nice signs out front. Small motels built in the 1950’s or 60’s, ones displaced by the giant high rises around them. I’m on the sidewalk. Not on private property. I’m not Robert Frank, I’m just some asshole with a camera enjoying my morning. This woman in a truck rolls up on me and asks what I was doing, then mumbles something about pictures…the message wasn’t clear, but her anger was. It was a quick minute and then she was gone. Five minutes later, as I’ve moved down to another motel, she reappears. Her tone had miraculously changed. She apologized, “Hey, we’re happy for what you guys do” and pretty much drove off. No idea if she owned a motel or was just driving around accosting tourists. I need to find those pictures. I’m sure many of those motels have disappeared by now. A Wings probably replaced them.

For this project, the one where I’m driving around looking for anything that pops up, I have a system. I take pictures and then play around with them digitally. All are taken with my I-phone which is generally more quality consistent than my nicer camera. It’s also always on me. When I edit them, I make them as brittle as a leaf, almost two dimensional. The look I go for is a little more industrial waste than sad Americana. For comparison, I’d prefer if these appear on the front of a nihilistic metal bands record cover than on a twangy Southern singer-songwriter emoting about mama. 

On the left is the print. On the the right is the photo / collage / photo-collage.

 

For a few of these, I dropped a collage on top of the image to give it a little random color, maybe a ghostly body in there. Can you see the yellow pants of a bike rider in the one image? Much of this is made somewhat haphazardly. Randomness is always something I strive for; nothing is ever meticulously placed or composed. I’m no robot. Look at the mistakes. The mistakes, or better yet, “The happy accidents” always make for a better composition. Do you think free jazz maestros go back and fix bum notes? No! They leave them in. I don’t fine-cut my collages, and I don’t perfectly match the digital monsters that come from them. Doing things this way often means you end up with shit, but so does the other process, and the payoff is never as high.

Always with any new path, you start here, and you end up over there. I took a picture, I heavily edited that picture, and then I printed it out. The last part makes it a lot more real to me.  So much of what I do is mix analog with digital. Often, the creation that comes from that marriage languishes as a digital file after you’re done. That’s all well and good, but it feels like a creation stuck in purgatory. Something that you encounter in the real world, see with your eyes, or touch with your hands, makes it real. Ones and zeroes are only waiting to exist. So, I made them real by getting cheap prints of them. I don’t know where you get nice prints, and I’m not sure if nice is for me. I like cheap tools. I like broken ones. I printed these off at Walgreens using a 40% off coupon. Three prints, at 16x20, which was essentially just a large, printed picture like any 4x6, ended up being about $38.00. Not an exorbitant amount of money, but enough to make me think about the purchase.

Wanting to continue seeing how these will turn out, by getting more of them printed, I thought about trying to sale some online. This is never good. I hate having to do this. Whenever you ask for money, people flee as quickly as they can. They’ll take free shit from you for years and years, though. When you come graveling, people won’t even click “like” on what you’ve created. It’s like seeing a homeless person sucking on their socks at the bus stop. Don’t look. Keep moving and he won’t notice us and ask us to join him in the intergalactic senate. As I imagined, no one took the bait. No matter, I’ll keep making these, but I’ll have to be pickier about which ones I print and then lay on a giant pile of shit no one is interested in.

A quick side-note, Miles took pictures of me holding up the prints. I’ve drafted him to take pictures more than once. Although he’s not great at taking just what is needed, he takes enough to get the job done, which coincidentally is my approach to photography. While he was snapping away, Misty got him in the middle of his photo shoot. He’s easy to work with, professional…not bad. I know I’ll end up using him many more times in the future. 

Miles needs something to stand on, but not much. 

 

The Cheese is Old and Moldy

I’ve been rescuing family pictures at my parents’ house.  I often find things here or there when I’m helping my mother de-clutter. The best of these I scan and then share. Some of those scanned pictures will inevitably end up in my creative projects. At some point I should ask folks if they want to be included in these projects. I have no audience, it’s fine. What I’m always looking for are little jewels, things that stand out and depict a particular time. One picture that I recently rescued depicted me at the kitchen sink when I was maybe four or five years old. This would have been 1984, or 1985. While my cute ass was front and center, I was more interested in the décor sitting on the counter behind me. Some of that décor I think I dropped off to Goodwill just last year. It’s vintage now.

A couple weeks ago I found a few boxes I hadn’t seen before, hidden boxes. While most of them were in fine shape, all of them were running the risk of being in peril. The barn they live in wasn’t exactly watertight. In fact, one of the boxes was sitting in water. When I picked that box up, all the pictures inside were completely fused together in a giant, gross brick. I pulled apart big clumps of pictures just to get some air to as many I could salvage. When doing this, I could see a face or an arm appear in the obscured in the moldy images. Although I would have preferred them to be in pristine shape, an opportunity presented itself…another project.

Rescued Pictures 

When I got the piles back to my lab (upstairs makings room) I pulled all of them apart and then set them aside to dry. Once they were somewhat dry a day later, I wiped a few of them down with a towel. Mold has a weird feel if you don’t know. It’s not a good feeling, it’s akin to having a cockroach scurry over your big toe. It’s a dirty eerie feeling. When you get mold on your fingers, you’re no thinking about the positives that mold has contributed to the world like cheese or penicillin, you’re just like… “Eww, mold.” With cheese, I never think about respiratory problems, but with mold it starts creeping into the back of your mind as soon as it appears. I turned on fans. I opened a window. If I had a hazmat suit (why don’t I have one) I would have put it on and made the whole operation look spectacular. I got to get a hazmat suit.

When everything dried for another day, I went through them all, picking out the ones that looked the most eye-catching. So many of them were filled with bright purples and blues. So many patterns swirled around the images much like a hippie’s scarf. For many, the figure had completely disappeared, leaving an impressionistic image. The more I looked, the more I thought about Katrina. I flashed back to a museum visit I made somewhere in the world years ago. In one of the exhibits, they displayed family photos that had floated away during the storm. My rescue effort wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but the image that remained was similar.

I scanned 10-15 of the best ones, focusing on the ones that had family members in them, mainly my two nephews. I figured my family might want to see these. Although I had “cleaned” them up as best I could, they were still kind of gross. The ink wasn’t dry, not exactly, leaving some terrible looking stuff on my scanner that was hard to get off. After scanning, I got prints from Walgreen’s. 4x6’s with a 50% off coupon, can’t beat that. Much cheaper and easier than trying to print them on my own. I cut them into pieces while trying to keep distant faces in the background.

The final product is fine. It worked out ok. I had made something new. I’ve realized time and time again that if I have a grandiose plan in place, one that involves many moving parts and that doesn’t randomly come together, the result is only ok, at best. And fast seems to be the best approach. A convoluted concept I think that’s novel never really works out. In the end, the new collages are like a lot like my others, but with just a little more shine from the high-glossy prints. I tried to fix this by sanding the surface of the collage even more than I normally do, but to no avail. The dreaded “line” was still there. It’s always the line. They look good enough. Saw an idea through and here it is. At least I can get rid of these by sending them to family members so they can leave them in some giant pile and forget them.

Onto the next idea. 

The final makings