The first time I went to the restaurant, I noted a particular dessert on the menu. Cotton candy, spun maple sugar. But, the menu noted, it was only available when Miss Dingle was working, as she was the only person who knew how to use the machine. I opted for something else instead, though, an unglamorous chocolate cake, perfectly serviceable and unmemorable.

The second time, I ordered the spun sugar. A woman carried it out, Miss Dingle I assumed, wearing a winter hat with earflaps and a flannel shirt dusted with flour. She held it up high, at should level, and it floated towards us through the tables. The few remaining people eating made little sounds, sighed as the dessert passed them. She set it before me, a great mass of sunset colored cloud that swayed with the little movements of the air. I pulled a bit of the fluff and ate it. And I remembered the last time I had cotton candy, nearly twenty years ago. At an elementary school fair, with the little booths staffed by parents and older students, the plastic games that they had played when they were our age. Easily won, the prizes cheaper than the cost of the ticket to play them. After collecting numerous worthless little treasures, a plastic elephant with a slit in its back for coins, a tiny cup holding even tinier monkeys with interlocking arms, most of the gamestands were being taken down, the blacktop being swept.

The man, some father of a child or retired teacher, who brought the cotton candy machine every year still had a long line before his big metal cauldron. It was late, so much later than I had ever been out before. I joined the lined that extended up the grassy slope behind the playground, and the sky darkened above us as we waited. The stars burst out in tiny explosions of light, covering the sky with a brilliance. The cotton candy was spun around and around in the machine, wrapped about the coiled paper handles, tiny wisps of pink fluff caught in the air and floating away, flying up in the sky towards the stars.

More from Lou O'Bedlam These were shot just before the Los Angeles Art show at the Marriott.



I was all jittery and nervous for the demo I was going to do at LA Art, so I don't think I was really working at my best, but I really like how these came out anyway, but that's probably more due to Lou than me.

Photographing artwork in slowly failing evening light.



Students in the liminal state between attentive and distanced pass me on their tour of facilities, assuring the university of their intent to retain all fingers and various other necessary appendages for the duration of the time spent in this facility remark quietly about my prints, saying methods as questions, waiting for confirmation.



Last night, I delivered the entry form and images for an exhibit; the directions took us on a circuitous tour of Los Angeles, through the curling pearl necklace streets of Beverly Hills, with the occasional sad handpainted sign directing the interlocutor to where star maps may be purchased, guides to see people whom they will recognize and know intimately but won't recognize them, the tourist playing out the role of the reject, the unbelonging, in larger and larger spheres--up to the steep and comfortable manicured dilapidation of Laurel Canyon, the shops mimicking the drowsy friendliness of small resort towns. The prices I left for my work on the entry form are optimistic, an attempt to align with the economy of where I am as opposed to the economy of where I was and who I knew.

My birthday I spent in Los Angeles, sleeping in and then taking a nap.

I found these in a book while doing a late night rearranging (see photos of books arranged by color). I don't know why they are there, or where they are from. What occasion did I memorialize and subsequently forget by pressing asters in a book about Chagall?



My birthday is on Thursday. I'm going to spend it at the Los Angeles Art Show, doing demonstrations on printmaking techniques. For all of my complaining, I think I secretly relish the ghetto-ization of the medium I work in. The mystery of it, the secret knowledge, the potential that no one knows much about how the image came to be, not because they just don't care to find out, but because such processes are concealed.

Anyhow, happy 4th annual 25th birthday to me. I'm going to give myself a set of taxidermy eyes.

The streetlamps hold up taut gauzy tents of incandescence at night in the thick fog that comes in off of the Pacific. I'm unaccustomed to the cold still, even this milk toothed California cold.

I heard a story about a troop of Boy Scouts years ago. I always resented the Boy Scouts, because the domesticated and diluted camping that the girls got. In the story, the troop arrived at the campsite late, and it was snowing heavily. Most of the boys were handicapped by the cold, chattering and shivering, incapable of erecting the tents and lighting the fires needed.



One boy, though, worked quickly and efficiently. He was the same size as most of the other boys, and wore similar clothing. An adult asked him how he was able to work so efficiently in the cold. "I accept the cold." he said.



One of my studio mate's grandfather was in "Lawrence of Arabia." That's the sort of information, one's relative being in one of the most famous and influential films ever made, that is commonplace and told offhand here. I'm re-watching it for the umpteenth time, all four plus hours of it including the overture, in segments.



There's a scene near the beginning of the film that I would mentally refer to all through my adolescence. Lawrence lights another soldier's cigarette, and then snuffs out the match with his fingers. The soldier becomes a background character and Lawrence speaks with a higher ranking official. The soldier toys with a match, and tries to replicate the action of snuffing it out with his fingers. "Ouch, it hurts!" he says. Lawrence says "You ignore the pain."



That's how I recalled the scene. But I was incorrect; all those years a false reel was projected against the inside of my skull. What he says is "The trick, Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

Incidentally, T. E. Lawrence did not smoke.

I like this sort of slow revealing of photos from a shoot. Now that Ive all but stopped trying to work with photographers, the occasional unpaid shoot with a great photographer is more pleasant, and seeing the photos is a lovely unexpected surprise as opposed to an eventual end to waiting for my share of the TFP work, or seeing if the paying photographer will even deign to let me see them at all.

Anyhow, photo by Lou O'Bedlam:


Also:
Photo by Laura
Photo by Laura
Photo by Lou

Cover-alls over thermals I wear today, to venture to the unoccupied print shop to hoard the solitude.

Down at the new SG book signing did I go, and I brought with me some hastily manufactured stickers. Stickers for sticking in any of the books some poor misguided fool asked me to sign. What sort of person buys some pricey book and then immediately let's a bunch of tarts doodle all over it? Whatever sort of person that is, quite a few people are of the kind.

Behold, a sticker and the bizarre face I was making:


Should you feel bereft without such a sticker to marr your pricey tome, cease feeling so immediately. I have a few of such stickers remaining, and will mail one to you in exchange for 15 comments on my sets. You may distribute the comments as you see fit amongst the sets, and then message me your address.

My original intention was to charge postage, but it seems absurd to ask the same amount of money as paypal levies on each transaction.

To be honest, I've never been one who went ga ga over holidays. I don't understand the attachment for a particular food, to be partaken of only once a year but never to be missed on that one day. Secular sacrament, I suppose?

Nonetheless, I'm not above exploiting Xmas. Far from it. And so, here is my repository of goods, excellent for gifting to that person whom you can't quite tell if you hate or love, or if you just want the perfect way to say "tentacle rape me" without words.



I'll be adding new items throughout the week, so check back or I'll be irritatingly self promotional and post about it in even further blog entries.

I shot with Lou O'Bedlam a couple of weeks ago, and he posted one of the polaroids from the shoot up on his meticulously maintained blog.



Tom Jones is on "Morning Becomes Eclectic", the morning music show on 89.9 that I listen to sometimes. It's funny that I feel the need to clarify that I like Tom Jones sincerely, not ironically--that enjoyment could somehow be ironic. "Eclectic" is losing its host, Nick Harcourt with his posh and unplaceable accent, to be replaced by some mysterious DJ who probably won't get Tom Jones to play.