verbminx

a lot of people added me as a friend in the last few days. yay, that's cool. however, i haven't nearly had the chance to check out all of your journals. not cool!

if i don't add you back, it probably isn't anything personal. it may have been that something you said on your journal around the time i checked it out bugged me (which is my issue, not yours), or just that i didn't really think we would click, at least on my end. this is all ok. don't be insulted! don't feel unwelcome. i just can't even always keep up with the people i've added or added back, and lately i have to be kind of brutal about who i do and don't add. but i don't want to be mean or make people feel bad, either.

and if you do hang around, fair warning: i'm boring. i have a million interests, and that saves me sometimes, and i know about ten million things, because i'm an info-sponge. but the average day is something like "got up. took out the dog. had pot roast for dinner. watched a movie. read for a while. went to sleep. not feeling great." then there are the days when i start talking about pre-17th-century English pronunciation or how much I loathe the current American presidential administration or my own brand of liberal-to-radical politics, and maybe that's interesting or maybe it isn't. i don't know.

What comes of writing great reams of crap and then not keeping track of it: I wrote an excellent paper a few years ago that I have always wanted to put online. It is not where I thought it was. Time will not stop until I find it. I'm somewhat organized, but I've forgotten my half-undone systems from a few years ago, since most of them involve stuff I've forgotten that I own. I just found, on the quest for said paper, a whole box of various unused greeting cards that I bought and saved because I liked the picture. Most of these date back 7 to 10 years! I know when I put them away - I did a huge room-cleaning/rearranging in the fall of 1995. I just forgot that I had them.

I have been looking through the new issue of Somerset Studios and as usual, there's some unpalpable thing that bothers me. This may fly in the face of the altered book peeps, etc, but I do not think that "art stamping" as presented in that magazine is art. Some of the stuff in their "Melange" center section, which is new in the last year, qualifies. But for submissions, artwork for the galleries in every issue that is supposed to correspond to the issue's theme, they require complete instructions for how you created the piece you submit. If you can include complete instructions for something that require no particular special skill or "eye" or practice to execute, IT'S A CRAFT. So 99% of the stuff they present from readers is a craft masquerading as art. Only featured artists are not required to explain every little detail of how they did something.

(click to see whole picture in new window)

From time to time they have a theme to which I'd like to submit, but you know what? the next deadline is in about a month, for their Alice in Wonderland-themed issue. Anyone who knows me knows that I pretty much bleed Alice art and that I collect books on Alice and so on and on. I have like three coloring books, a popup game book, an annotated edition, a book of Carroll's letters and some photos, the book Alternate Alices, a book of various Alice art... the list goes on. BUT I DON'T FUCKING USE RUBBER STAMPS TO DO IT. Usually I use a photocopier to resize Tenniel's art from one of the coloring books I have, and then I trace it or do a carbon transfer and then use that as a map for drawing it myself. Then I use colored pencils most of the time. Sometimes I draw Alice stuff in conté crayon, bottles that say "Drink Me", that sort of thing. I have lots of interesting Alice paper art, but I cannot submit any of it because you can't just reproduce it with rubber stamps. Furthermore, I wouldn't submit it anyway because I'm not willing to let anyone reproduce it that easily. My instructions would be, "OK, good. Draw everything by hand. You can trace, or you can use some kind of transfer. OK, now fill in blank areas with a black and white checkerboard. Thousands of dollars in art classes would not, at this point, really hurt you."

(while I'm being snotty about My Great And Precious Art, I might as well point out that I totally cheated in the example linked above, which was for a nervousness.org project, and just colored-in a page that I'd photocopied earlier for another project. Glued to cover of book, added braid and beads, etc. Total rush job on the coloring, but I like it. :)

Another complaint is that I cannot abide how, in every damned issue, someone gets the bright idea to make a fake olde-timey journal. The worst of these include badly-written short fiction.

That said, I still like the magazine. Mostly.