learning – Page 38 – Oh Fair New Mexico

The Opposite End of the Spectrum

Posted on April 3, 2012
by Karen Fayeth
3 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about my mind bending, artifying, very inspiring trip to the museum. To prove I’m no snobby snobberson, let me tell you about the other thing I did this weekend.

Roller Derby.

Yeah. I know! Roller Derby!!

To be precise, I took in an event featuring the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls, a flat track league comprised of five teams.

On this night, the match was the San Francisco ShEvil Dead versus the Berkeley Resistance.

The event went down at the Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Tamales were served.

It was AWESOME!

Of course I toted along my camera gear so I could catch all the action.

Indoors, crap florescent light, and people moving very fast.

My exposure triangle collapsed under its own weight.

I don’t know much about derby, but what I know is this: there is one lady designated as the jammer. She is the only one who can put points on the board. Her goal is to lap the opposing team. Her teammates assist by keeping the opposing team from blocking her progress and they also help try to hold back the opposing jammer.

It’s a lot of knees and elbows and flying females.

In other words: AWESOME!

You know who the jammer is by the star on her helmet.

Like this:

The jammer for San Francisco goes by the name Trixie Pixie. She must be about 90 pounds soaking wet. There would be a big clump of women duking it out, and then *boop* Trixie would pop out from the mass and go flying around the track.

By the end of the night she was my favorite player by far as the ShEvil Dead soundly beat the Resistance.

I came home with about 150 pretty useless photos. That blurry, noisy, streaky photo above is among the best of what I could get.

It may not look like much to you, but to me it’s a happy reminder of AWESOME!

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on April 2, 2012April 2, 2012
by Karen Fayeth
3 Comments

Take a look at this photo. It’s not my photo. I came across it yesterday and I kind of liked it.

It’s got that color saturation and green tinge that you see in a lot of these new square format apps for the iPhone and Android (my personal favorite is Hipstamatic).

Actually, I like this photo a lot. But I didn’t heart it on Instagram. I didn’t like it on Facebook. I didn’t re-Tweet it either.

Because this photo was found inside a frame and mounted to a wall at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

This photo is part of their Walker Evans show.

This weekend, my photography group took a field trip to check out the exhibit. Going in, I knew very little about Walker Evans other than he had captured a lot of powerful black and white images from the Depression. I purposefully didn’t study up before my trip because I wanted to learn about the photographer through his photos.

Well. Knock me over. I was really, seriously and deeply educated by the time all was said and done.

First of all, Walker was a writer, and then moved into photography. He did both for most of his life. So take that you scallywags who say an artist should pick a medium and not dabble. Feh! Also, I really came to appreciate Walker’s sense of irony. You have to get up close and look around the frame of his photos to find it, but it’s always in there.

That said, the part of the exhibit that gave me the “holy crap!” moment of connection was at the very end when I saw the photos tucked away on the back wall.

It seems that in his early seventies, Walker Evans was left tired and uninspired and found himself unwilling or perhaps unable to create.

And then he got himself a Polaroid SX-70 camera and an unlimited supply of film.

“I bought that thing as a toy, and I took it as a kind of challenge,” Evans explained. “It was this gadget and I decided that I might be able to do something serious with it. So I got to work to try to prove that. I think I’ve done something with it.”

As I stood there looking at the photos, I was at first jealous. Jealous of that “unlimited supply” of Polaroid film. I am completely devoted to the Polaroid camera and used several different versions growing up and well into adulthood. I shot Polaroid until the film was no longer available.

Thanks to the Impossible Project, it’s still possible to buy Polaroid film, but at almost $24 a pack, that easy carefree snap-whatever-you-feel-like and just buy another pack mentality has to be reined in.

So I stood there feeling jealous about having all that free film on hand.

And then…my hands came up and framed either side of my whaaaat? face as I realized…

I have access to an instant camera and unlimited film. But in a different format. Sames tools, different age.

I have Hipstamatic on my iPhone. And Instagram. And a bunch of other toy camera apps.

All of these beautiful color saturated photos. They can still be made! I can still snap with reckless abandon! Oh dear god I have this gadget and I might actually be able to do something serious with it.

Oh my goodness. Oh. My. Goodness!

This realization left me dazed and confused and happy. So happy.

And inspired.

Top photo, “Untitled, 1974 Unique Polaroid” by Walker Evans and used here under Fair Use.

Quote from The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.

On The Grid

I love this article simply because of the headline:

How Your Brain Is Like Manhattan

The Good Man and I have long debates about cities set on a grid. The very town where I grew up, Albuquerque, has a beautiful easy to navigate grid. I always figured it was due to the city’s start as a military town that roads are well organized into either north/south or east/west.

So simple. Easy. Really tough to get lost.

I gripe about the Bay Area and these roads that are all angled off to Joneses, changing directions midway and stopping suddenly. For example, there is an exit off of 101 where you have to choose the north or south bound exit. However…the road actually runs east west.

Combine this with California’s lack of mile markers and only sporadic use of street signs and I can go from zero to bonkers in about three seconds.

One of the many reasons I love Manhattan is that it’s set up on a grid. Navigating makes sense! A hayseed like me had zero trouble in the big city knowing where to go and how to get there. I never, not once, got lost while in Manhattan. And if I’m not worried about how to get there, then I relax and enjoy the journey.

The Good Man, on the other hand, has a brain that’s a lot more fluid than mine. Where I’ll draw a straight line, he’ll make expressionist art. He don’t need no stinking grid roads, he has a powerful innate sense of direction and an even stronger sense of joie de vivre when it comes to getting lost. He sees getting lost as a fun adventure. I see it as a teeth gritting bit of fear and misery.

Meanwhile both my brain and my road preferences tend to be a little more like the gorgeous city of Manhattan.

Image from Grush Hour.

And The Wheel Goes Round

To get the ol’ creative juices flowing, I’ve been working a little, here and there, on a lesson book of painting techniques. I’m pretty comfortable working with a brush and craft quality acrylics, but now I’m learning methods to create an image from scratch using real big boy paints and brushes.

It’s a big deal!

Today’s lesson was to paint my own color wheel. At first, I thought “Meh. A color wheel? Boring.”

It turned out to be a really interesting and useful exercise, and helped me learn both the paint and my new (fancy) brushes. When my work was done, I fell a little bit in love with my hand crafted color wheel.

And since I can’t seem to separate my High Arts from my Craft Arts, when I was done, I noticed the little bit of imperfection at the center of my wheel. That place where all six colors meet? There was paint overlap and some small white spaces.

So I did what any good crafter does. I hid it with rhinestone. Fabulous!

I must have colors and color theory on the brain. Here’s a photo I snapped earlier today:

6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck

It would appear there is an internet meme going on lately concerning writing tips from classic authors. So far I have come across 10 Tips on Writing from businessman David Ogilvy and Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments, both very worthy reads.

Yesterday, I came across an article in The Atlantic titled 6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck.

This is the advice that really resonated with me…which is odd because I have such a love-hate relationship with Steinbeck.

My first foray into Steinbeck was in High School where I was held down against my will and forced to read Grapes of Wrath. I *hated* Grapes of Wrath. Loathed. Jettisoned the book across the room in disgust more than once. I found it over the top, preachy and that alternating narrative about the Joad family interspersed with expository about the Depression and the Dust Bowl was dreary and overworked.

My next read was The Pearl, which I read grudgingly because it was Steinbeck, but I actually enjoyed in spite of myself. Then I read Of Mice and Men which I found to be a cruel, sad book, but the writing was solid. Then, because I liked the movie, I gave the book East of Eden a whirl and found it to be only so-so.

So I’d given Steinbeck a chance, didn’t like his stuff, and from High School on, I read zero Steinbeck. I wasn’t having it, unh-uh, no way.

I was vocal and insane about how much I WOULD NOT read Steinbeck.

Enter my multi-talented and fabulous cousin. Two years ago, he was in town and we went to Monterey to celebrate his birthday. While there, he asked if I’d ever read Cannery Row and I said no. Then I issued my overworked rant about Steinbeck.

He said, “You should give it a try, I think you’d like it.”

Well that was that. If my cousin said try Cannery Row, then by god I had to try it.

I went to the library bookshelf and plucked the slim tome from the pile and gave it a read.

I loved it. Every word, every story, every character so utterly perfect. I really actually truly loved and adored a Steinbeck book. Magic!

So when I stumbled across Steinbeck’s writing tips, I paid attention.

My two favorite books on writing are Ray Bradbuy’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which saved my life during my first real and profound battle with writer’s block, and Stephen King’s On Writing (which my rock star cousin gifted to me, because he’s so right on like that).

The little list of Steinbeck’s advice is pasted below…this now goes in the favorite pile too.

Here it is:

From The Atlantic.