My friends were just successful in adopting a beautiful little boy. He’s six weeks old. Isn’t he gorgeous? He was the greatest thing I could possibly take a picture of this day.
Cutie
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Author Archives: Tom Harold
Free Style
My friend Jem working on some of the free style drawings we started that night.
I messaged my friend Jem the other day. “You like drawing?” “Yeah, why?” was her response.
Fast forward a couple days, and we’re leaned over pieces of paper at my dining room table, pens and pencils strewn about. What I’d thought would be a fun couple of hours turned into fun that lasted until she looked at her watch and said, “I better go. You don’t wanna know what time it is.”
Time flies when you’re having a truly excellent time with art. I hope to bring you updates on these works in the future. We already have some color on them, and they rock!
Red Hot and Blues
Tools of the trade.
Had to work the second job tonight. Here’s a bit of the equipment that I work with in the evenings. This is a 1950s-era Astatic microphone, pretty common stuff for harmonica players to use. It’s sitting on top of a similar-era Gretsch amplifier. I’m really tired, so that’s all you get. I’m off to bed! Maybe later I’ll tell you about the treasure trove of free books I was bequeathed with during the set break.
Nevermore
The ghostly human embodiment of Poe's Raven shows up as a depressed writer is attempting suicide and extolls the virtues of life, art, and also calls her an idiot.
I went to a theatre production tonight. My friend wrote this play, and tonight was the second showing of it as part of Indy’s Fringe Festival, an event that offers more than 270 live theatre performances in 10 days, plus fine arts, film festival, street performers, and a ton of other awesome stuff.
The play is titled “Nevermore,” and consists of a confrontation between a hopelessly depressed and suicidal writer and the human-formed ghost of Poe’s Raven from the famous poem. It was kind of scary in a this-is-some-deep-and-real-shit kind of way, but there was some dark humor thrown in for good measure, and I do like the dark humor. I appreciated the examination of how pain can both inhibit and help the creative process, and the idea that both bad feelings and good ones come from the same place, and you can’t expect to have one without the other, that if there is despair, well, there has to be joy coming along at some point. At least that’s what I got out of it. Above you can see the Raven giving our poor writer some sage, dark views on life, death, and creativity. I’ll not spoil the end for you, as it’s still playing the rest of this week. Strong stuff, though!
It was a pretty awesome way to spend an hour. I’d emailed her several times about it in the past few weeks, and she’d been hard at work on it. It was great seeing someone’s efforts come to fruition, especially a play where it’s all live and you have to literally throw your whole self into it as people have their concentration focused on you – that’s pretty cool stuff. I was genuinely happy and envious for her to have realized her goal.
On the photo side, this was a tough shoot. I was very glad they allowed me to take pictures, as it was a cool subject, but the lighting, of course, was pretty crummy, and I had to dial the film speed way up, and still I could only shoot at about an 1/8 of a second. To stop much motion you really need to shoot at 1/60 of a second, so I was shooting very slowly. It was hard to get shots, and I missed many dramatic ones, because the actors were moving when this happened. I couldn’t even stop the motion of an eyeblink at this slow of a shutter speed. Still, I think I pulled out a few okay photos. Nice bit of practice.
I would have liked to have been involved in this somehow. These things are going on around me, and aside from watching some of my friends partake in them, these art events, I don’t have any personal involvement. It’s frustrating. I don’t know how or what to do to become a part of something like this. Maybe next year. Maybe then I’ll have something of my own to present for the visual arts portion of the show.
Artlit
Many, many art mags, some children's lit, a few colored pencils, and a Nebraska license plate. All the learnin' you need.
Darrel loaned me a bunch of his art magazines, because he’s cool like that. I’ve read through one of them already. My immediate impression was that there’s a whole lot more going on out on the West Coast than there is here, but what do I know? I also learned that there’s a pretty awesome little cottage industry booming with art toys – these goofy little whimsical, weird, fun, bizarre, cute, odd and rather detailed little figures made out of all sorts of media, though vinyl seems to be really popular. Anyway, it’s fun stuff to learn about, and I’m happy to have been given the opportunity to pick up on it for free. (Free!)
Artist vs. Artist vs. Artist
It was kind of scary, but pretty cool too.
My friend Darrel has been a bit of an encouragement with my art for some time. He’s a lot more steeped in creative efforts than I have been, at least as far as his length of involvement. He’s one of those people who identified with his creative side pretty early on, and put himself right in the middle of it and never really thought of it any other way. Me, I was more the type who thought, “It’s fun and all, but I’m not really that good, and that’s not really stuff you do when you have a ‘real’ life.” I changed my mind recently, as you may have guessed from hanging out here, and I’ve started meeting people like Darrel.
For a while he has told me that we should hang out and I can check out some of his work and this massive collection of art magazines that he owns. Today I agreed to go over there, and I brought some of my supplies as he indicated that we might goof around with drawing some stuff. Once I got over there he says, “Oh, and Steve’s coming over also.” Steve is an artist friend of his that I’ve met a couple of times before. Okay, something felt like it was going to happen, but I didn’t know what.
Once Steve gets over there I’m looking at magazines, and those guys start getting out a bunch of paper and talking about something their apparently working on, and then Darrell looks over at me and says, “Okay, so the deal is we’re going to trade off and we’re each going to draw on these and kind of collaborate.”
I laughed a little nervously. “I can’t draw,” I said.
“What do you mean you can’t draw?”
“I haven’t drawn anything since high school.”
“You can do this stuff.”
“Um, okay.”
And so we did. Some hours later I was informed that we were going to color them as well.
“With what?” I asked.
“You brought your stuff! Pencils,” Darrel said.
“Um, okay.”
I went home at about 11pm. I’d been working on art with these guys for about six or seven hours all told. It was pretty wild, spending all that time just drawing and whatnot. At one point one of Darrel’s friends called, and he said, “Oh, we’re just hanging out here, making art.”
Really? That’s what we’re doing? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that *is* what we’re doing. Making art, not just screwing around, we’re making art. Woah. That’s kind of cool.
Darrel had me take one of the drawings home to work on by myself, so we’ll see how that goes. I think those guys are okay with what I was doing, but it was kind of scary trying to fit in and not worry about doing something really stupid. I’m pretty glad they asked me to work with them. This is the first time I’ve collaborated like that. It was nice to be included. Besides, I desperately needed the creative time. I’ve missed doing stuff with my hands. I love creating stuff that way.
That reminds me, Steve, who had seen one of my rolling ball sculptures, asked what I’d been doing with them lately. “I haven’t made any. Nothing. I’ve been too busy.”
“That’s not good at all,” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it sucks,” I said.
Damn, I miss that.
I Drove It
It makes the workday just a little bit better.
Even though the filming for “8 Wheels of Death” got postponed, I was still jazzed about getting the Chevelle running again, and I wanted to take it out for a little bit of a test drive. Driving it to work (which is way too friggin’ long a drive to be making every day, honestly) was a perfect way to make sure everything was working okay. I haven’t driven this thing to work in at least a year, maybe two, and I haven’t driven it at all for any real length of time yet this year. It was pretty kickass, I must say. I’d like to do it again. I just hope it keeps running for another couple of weeks so we can get the shoot done on it!
It Lives!!! 8/20/09
Finally up under its own power again!
Last night I got the Chevelle running again, but there wasn’t much time to drive it, as the weather turned sour very soon after I got it out of the garage. The back window leaks like a sieve, and I don’t like tearing everything out to dry it off when this happens, so it wasn’t until tonight, when I was *supposed* to do the filming for “8 Wheels of Death” that I got to drive it another little bit.
What? The filming? The filming I’ve been working toward all week? Yeah, that didn’t happen. The forecast was for 50% or better chance of thunderstorms all day, so I didn’t take the car to work so that I could drive it straight to the shoot, which is some distance away. However, by about 10am all rain had stopped, all the clouds blew over, and it looked great. I wouldn’t be able to make the shoot if I had to go home and get the car first, though, so it was a loss when we canceled it early that morning. Figures, don’t it?
Anyway, I decided to go to my photo club meeting instead, which was awesome, and I decided to drive the Chevelle there, which was also awesome. What this meant, however, was that there was precious little time left in the day (uh, night) by the time I got done at the meeting, so what you have here is the Chevelle sitting in my driveway after I got home from the meeting. It’s a little cool, though, isn’t it? It ran great tonight for the little bit that I drove it, and for that I am stupendously grateful!!!
Tomorrow I hope to return to more interesting and well-conceived photos. Until then, I hope you at least find some of this stuff amusing. Maybe?
Guitar Break 8/19/08
Live music on a Wednesday.
The last in a short line of photos composed while I was a little too frazzled to really make something work, this was shot Wednesday night after I had the car all put back together and had rushed to try and meet a friend afterward. My friend had already left the bar where we were to meet by the time I arrived, but ’twas no big deal, as the guitarist recognized me moments after I entered the bar, and asked if I’d get up and do a few songs with him, which I did. I think I took four photos total this day, and this was the least terrible of them. This photo challenge is quite a challenge to complete some days, and the results aren’t always what I’d like them to be.
Crispy, Part 4 Plus Woah Power 8/18/09
Tuesday night was more work on the Chevelle. This time my brother came over to help. I did a little work on the wiring before he got there, and then we went to work on the brakes. I guess the good thing about the wiring burning up is that, while I was looking the car over under the hood, I noticed that the driver’s front brake hose was being rubbed through by the wheel when it was turned full left. This, as one may surmise, ain’t good. I got a replacement hose, and that evening we replaced it. My brother is bleeding the air out of the system here. It’s another shoddy photo attempt, but I was too busy and too wiped out and too dirty to mess with the camera any more than to do this one. Actually, aside from some completely random shots of the road on the way to work that morning, this was the only picture I took all day, the only one that was consciously composed, which says a lot about how busy I was and how crummy my composition is when I try *really* hard and I’m tired.