Keeping the Ball Rolling

It's all but over for the republicans running against Mitt Romney. He cruised to victory in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, and if he's able to secure a win in South Carolina, it will most likely be a Romney/Obama election (plus, you know, the other guys) come November.

At left you'll find the next installment in the GOP Primary Paint Swatch© Series 2012™. The pasty skin tones in this New Hampshire set come from an ABC News photo from the debate last weekend. As with the Iowa swatch, the NH file is 300dpi and ready for printing in order to get that perfect Rick Perry shade for that bookshelf you've been promising you'd build for your children. Or whatever.

Collect them all! Coming up next is the South Carolina edition of the GOP Primary Paint Swatch© Series 2012™.

And remember to click to follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/meisenhower

Sunday Art #1

In keeping with my previous post about making art on Sundays–and in the face of much procrastination of working on syllabi and what not for the start of winter term tomorrow–I've finishing something that I thought would fit this category.

This will be an ongoing project in conjunction with the presidential election. For those not in the know, four years ago I was working on my master's thesis, a project that addressed mass media, photography, and journalism through the story of a fictional third party candidate.

Something struck me during the brief stints I spent viewing the Republican debate in New Hampshire last night, and I came up with this. Right now this new "project" is in its infancy, even though it appears that it's Mitt's nomination to lose.

The tones in this swatch were taken from official candidate photographs. Most color samples came from averaging an area of pixels in the forehead of each candidate. Numbers are the votes each candidate received, in tens of thousands.

At 300 dpi, the swatch is ready for printing on any thick card stock. With custom color matching available at places like Lowes and Home Depot, now you can paint your entire den with a good shade of Santorum.

More swatches will follow each official state primary, time permitting. Right now the best concept I have going is to use a group photo from an ABC News story from the New Hampshire debates last night. Maybe I'll have to set up the old tripod in front of the television for the next one.

Because of the project from 2008 (which was actually more like 2007-2009), I thought I had tired of elections and politics. But I think the tight race for the spot on the red side of November's card will actually make me pay some attention, even if it's only to mock the candidates, the media, or politics in general. At least it's got my creative juices flowing, as opposed to Santorum juices.

One Week In (And a Day Late)

With the new year, I've decided to add some regulation to my ever-increasing daily life.

After one week of cavalier behavior, and with the end of vacation, I've devised the following schedule that I hope to stick with as much as possible. The new schedule should increase my productivity as both an educator and artist as much of the regulation involves making stuff or getting stuff in order. Below is the schedule I've concocted, no doubt subject to change.

Saturdays - Blog posting. So consider this yesterday's blog post.*
Sundays - Art making. That basement studio gets lonely most of the time. (This also parallels with my book-a-day project from a few years ago.)
Mondays - Music. Haven't opened the guitar case in ages. (Halloween, to be exact.)
Tuesdays - School. All day. Prep work, meetings, paperwork, you name it.
Wednesdays - Catch-up day; whatever I've missed or let slip the previous days gets made up here.
Thursdays - A free day to relax
Fridays - Cleaning. Studio, house, office, classrooms, cars, laundry, self, etc.

I've also been using Twitter much more. And I'm always hoping more people I know will join the conversation. It's a great way to catch artist calls that pass by CAA, Facebook, and the other usual outlets. Twitter name is meisenhower.

* What a stupid blog post to start the year. Seriously. Please email your complaints to me instead of posting public comments here. 

New Year's Eve Memories (Then and Now)

Two years ago tonight I was in Michigan, celebrating the holidays with family and friends. I had flow back to Michigan after three months at my new job in Oregon to reunite with those I had left. I spent the three days after Christmas in Grand Rapids with good friends, an alternative to driving through the thick snow to the Upper Peninsula; family illnesses (my grandmother was in hospice and my friend's uncle was in the hospital) made us think twice about the long trip. Instead of white outs, frozen lake races, whiskey, cribbage, and chili, my friends and I settled for the three latter festivities.

My flight back to Oregon was supposed to be on December 30th. I was to be routed from Grand Rapids to Chicago to Boise. There was a problem: weather. Planes were getting in late to Chicago, which meant I would be delayed to Boise. Rather than spend the night in the airport in Grand Rapids, I elected to go back with my friends for a final, impromptu night.

This meant that I arrived in Boise not on the 30th, with time to travel home (Oregon) for New Year's festivities, but on the 31st. After a brief bomb scare  in the Boise Airport, I paid close to attention to Trip Check  and airport monitors that showed the weather. I-84, my main route to get home, was open, but was in poor conditions. Rather than risk injury, crashing my car into the side of a mountain on New Year's Eve, I formulated a plan.

The Fairfield Suites courtesy van picked me up around 10pm to take me to my car and the hotel. The shuttle driver was a younger guy, so I asked him what he recommended a stranger in Boise do to ring in the new year.

"Tell you what," the guy said to me after I explained my situation. "Book your room for tonight and tell the front desk I said I'd take you downtown. They'll page me and I'll come pick you up."

I trusted this Cory Feldman-type character was as good a person to trust as any in Boise, Idaho's largest city, so I obliged. He picked me up in the shuttle around 10:45pm and we headed towards downtown.

Cory explained to me my options: there was a strip of bars on the main drag, and for a cover fee of something like $25, you could get into all of them if you wanted. I told him I wanted free. He told me my best option was a place called Mulligans, on Main between 9th and 10th street.

Having just left Grand Rapids, Michigan, which happens to have a doppelgänger business called Mulligan's, I figured I couldn't go wrong.

I showed up to find a packed bar, your typical college town bar, with televisions showing Rihanna singing her latest single. After a few minutes, I made my way through the crowd and grabbed a drink at the bar.

Standing in line at Mulligans, a bar 170 miles from where I lived, I figured I had two options. The first was to finish my beer just after midnight, let out a small yelp as the ball dropped, and grab a cab a few minutes later to sleep before my three-hour trip home the next day, New Year's Day.

The second option, and the more unlikely and unappealing one, was to lower my inhibitions and make some new friends. Sort of like cold calling for jobs in the phone book, I figured now was as good a time as any to meet some new people in a "faraway" town.

While grabbing beer, I noticed a particularly cheerful-looking group of people at a table near the bar. Some of them reminded me of the people I had left behind in Michigan. What was the worst that could happen? Was New Year's Eve, with Carson Daly on TV, the night I was most likely to be accosted or murdered by some strangers in downtown Boise?

Of course not.

So, after grabbing my pint of Moose Drool, I moseyed over to this table of twentysomethings and sort of stood there like some lame-o until the conversation dwindled to a din.

And this is what I said (really).

"Hi. My name is Mike. I'm from Oregon and I'm stuck in Boise tonight for New Year's Eve because my planes were delayed and I-84 is in crappy condition. Can I be your friend for tonight?"

As pathetic and ridiculous as that sounds, and as it sounded then, since I fully expected them to laugh at me simply because of how stupid and out of place I looked, there was a resounding "SURE!" from the table.

It was so silly it felt like I was in the middle of some Richard Curtis movie. I had the most absurdly fun New Year's of my life, simply because I had no idea who any of the people I was with were.

There was something really special about spending such a celebratory evening with complete strangers.

I sit here now, with this party about to start, and every New Year's Eve I think about the people whose names I can't remember who might be at Mulligans tonight, or any night for that matter. I don't care what they're up to; I only hope they're doing well.

So much of my life recently has been about strangers. This past summer's photo project  was entirely dependent upon strangers. How that project mirrored my evening with strangers in Boise in 2009 isn't lost on me as I write this. If people who are strangers weren't, at their cores, nice people, then the photo project and my night in Boise would have been complete letdowns.

And every day I interact with people that I've never met. And those that I've met, whether it's through where I live, what I do, or the work I've made, I barely know. Even moving to a new neighborhood has brought new people into my life.

That's what I reflect upon as we all enter 2012. New Year's Eve can be a great time whether you're with strangers or those closest to you. And I hope to have a bit of both tonight as 2011 draws to a close.

wazzoo & Danner - 3/20/11

Oh, it was so long ago....

It's been almost nine months since I ventured into the greater Seattle area to begin the UFCK photo project. And it's been too long since posting about anything on this blog. And with applications in for both funding to continue the project and a potential exhibition of this work, it's high time I start recounting the stories that accompany these images. Both of these shots took place on the same day during spring break.

I met up with wazzoo (top photo) at his home. My notes describe the house as "a box house." I nearly died making a left turn onto a nearby street, as I had to venture into one of Seattle's hillier areas. (It was an almost completely blind left turn.)

Wazzoo was very quiet and subdued. No music. No noises. I set up my equipment and we made very basic small talk: studies in college, job-related stuff, the photo project.

It wasn't until I - for one reason or another - brought up basketball that wazzoo really piped up. Huge Seattle Sonics fan. Like many people from the area, wazzoo's sentimental streak nearly begins and ends with the loss of the Sonics and their move to Oklahoma City.

From there, the conversation moved to the city and what I had done since I arrived. Wazzoo was full of recommendations for places to visit, from good dinners to nightlife hotspots, which, admittedly, I never followed through on because my quick trip (4 photo shoots) was enough to wear me out by the end of each day.

After a quick late lunch it was out to Woodinville, a suburb in the Seattle/Redmond area. Danner (left) came out onto his balcony to welcome me. After offering me a beer - Danner is a bit of a beer nut - I set up my camera.

Danner was talkative and easily excited. He donned Liverpool gear and we chatted soccer for quite a bit. Liverpool FC is Danner's club of choice, and part of his extensive traveling résumé includes a trip to England to take in a match. UFCK's soccer thread is his sort of home away from home; we never really had crossed paths that often on the boards; his email regarding a potential photo shoot was the most surprising one I received.

Soccer and NCAA basketball were on the television as we talked quite a bit about Danner's journey to the Pacific Northwest. He interned in Dallas for the PGA Tour and has traveled to Spain, Liverpool (twice), and London. He showed a bit of interest in my 4x5 camera and recounted the story of losing his nearly-new Canon Rebel xSi on a plane to Chicago; he left it in the overhead bin and never heard about it again.

Sometimes stuff like that happens.

That long weekend in Seattle in March was the start of this whole project. It would be five months until I stepped behind the camera again for another UFCK photo shoot.

slipereypete - 3/19/11

Following the success of the photo shoot with Seattle-ite Kzoo, I ventured into unknown territory. Kzoo was the only boarder on ufck.org I had met whose photo I would take for this project. slipereypete was the second shoot on that day.

The northwest side of Seattle is highly residential, and very hilly. Lots of up and down in the car with photo equipment in the back. I found the place reasonably well - in that I only drove past it once - and made my way up.

The environment was something like an upscale bachelor pad: the olive green leather sofa, stack of art books, and intricately carved coffee table contrasted nicely with the giant flatscreen television and folding table stacked to the brim with records. We listened to Yellow Ostrich's The Mistress* as we chatted. NCAA tournament basketball and the Vancouver Whitecaps MLS debut game were switched between on the television.

slipereypete's apartment afforded great views of the city as well as great light. Our conversation was lively and insightful, and our best conversation points focused on the board and its structure and communal nature.

"Life is usually convex," slipereypete said towards the end of our meeting. "People tend to travel in different directions, doing different things, going to different places. UFCK is concave: people all collect in one place."

A large presence in ufck.org's soccer thread - and naturally a huge Sounders supporter - meeting slipereypete was a great shoot in the sense that it gave me consolation in knowing other people thought of the social experience of a website like ufck.org in the same way I was. There's something to it besides people all talking to one another.

"Everyone else on UFCK cares about all of the stuff you like that no one else gives a shit about," he said. That's the community that I had really plunged myself into.

But I never got around to asking him where his screen name came from.

* The lead singer behind Yellow Ostrich - Alex - also posts regularly on ufck.org. They're moving up in the world these days, opening shows for Ra Ra Riot and making appearances on NPR and the like. Unfortunately, Alex and his bandmates were on a very different travel schedule from mine during the project, and I wasn't able to line up a photo shoot with them. Check them out anyway and buy Yellow Mistress on super-cool yellow vinyl. 

Kzoo - 3/19/11

This is where it all started. The UFCK Photo Project got underway with one of only three boarders I had previously met. It was a cool, March Seattle day. I'm driving around residential neighborhoods with eighty pounds of photo equipment in the trunk of my car, my school has given me money to work on this project, and I have no idea how it's going to go.

I first met Kzoo back in November of 2009, when I was in Seattle for an SPE Northwest regional conference. I told him I was going to be in town, and we stopped somewhere in the Capital Hill district to grab a drink. He had a cold. He called me "Matt." It was a little weird. But our Michigan connection kept the awkward silences to a minimum.

I parked my car near Kzoo's place and he came out to the sidewalk and offered to help carry my gear.

The place was arranged in such a way as to make photographing anything with a view camera and lights a complicated mess. But I powered through. Even when I discovered that I had traveled five and a half hours from home without power cables for my lights, Kzoo found an extra computer cable that worked just fine.

The art on the walls was done by relatives of Kzoo's absent roommate. Kzoo moved the couch pillows "for a better look." He wore his narwhal shirt. He put on music: Magnolia Electric Company's self-titled final album. After the needle passed through side two, he threw on Neil Young's "Everyone Knows This is Nowhere."

Kzoo was personable and just talkative enough to not interfere with my setup. As it was my first shoot, the entire process took much longer than later shoots that happened in August.

Pictured here is an instant proof from the shoot. The exterior window behind him made the lighting awkward, though this far removed from March, the exact details of the shoot escape my memory. I know the strobe is somewhere off to the right, aimed through this translucent Japanese-style screen thing.

Kzoo is one of the guys from the board that would probably get along with anyone, whether they were invading his space to take his picture, or meeting up at Linda's* for a beer.

* This may not actually be the place we went. But it's close. 

[text] Project Website [/text]

Ok, finally.

There are some parts of this that aren't complete. I still have to write the essay I've been promising myself for the last six weeks. The webpages still show titles as "text" and nothing more. (Thanks, iWeb!) But I can't sit on the whole shebang when only small portions aren't fully realized.

So, here it is: the UFCK Photo Project website, in all its glory. Replete with photos. And links. And essays. Essays about life on the Internet. About being friends with strangers. About technological marvels. About getting drunk and passing out at a State Champion show. There's plenty missing, from the photo of the "SWEENEY" license plate I took while driving through Virginia to the slobber from the dog that tried to eat my tripod.

But when someone asks me what I was up to this summer, it was this. From a proposal for the project compiled last November to the first shots this past March, the circle has been large, interesting, and rewarding as it's come around again.

Proposals for exhibitions are now in the works. More later.

(And, if you didn't click on the link above, you can get to the site by following the link here.)