My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

photo courtesy Jason at jasonlandry.com

Jason Landry writes:

I am in the home stretch of my MFA program…4 more months left. I have begun my thesis on The Photo Collector / The Photo Collection. This won’t be the title of the thesis, but mainly what it will be about. I am writing to you because I want your take on people who collect. Do you think there is a unifying thread that connects all collectors?

Please think this one through, and feel free to analyze it from all angles. I consider you a collector of things, ephemera, bees, plants, etc….and know there is some reason you do this,…it is the same reason that I collected baseball cards and now collect photo books and fine art photography.

Me:

I’d be happy to help. Off the top of my head, collectors get a rush from finding things. It feels like a successful hunt when you come home with an object you like. I think it has something to do with a program in our brain telling us to store things for time of need. I think most collectors don’t see the stuff they have, they only have eyes for what they don’t. So it is never satisfied, the desire to hunt. Which evolutionarily speaking, is good. If you get one tomato and think your work is done for the day, you won’t survive.

In the modern age of supermarkets we don’t have anything foodwise to collect. No firewood gathering, no aberrying’ we go. We go thrift shopping. Or bargain hunting. Antiquing. Because we look for things that sell below their value. A junk man/collector does not pay full price. He will go without rather than pay what the asking price is. I went to an estate sale today and like always, I walked out with something from the free pile in the garage – an old can of charcoal lighting fluid. I collect the old metal cans of the stuff. Why? Because they are old and often free and I believe someday I will have a valuable collection.

Instead of gathering nuts, we collectors gather items we believe contain value. So we convert from nuts to money. Money we can cash in when we retire, or want to go on vacation. The old coin collection, the mint condition baseball rookie cards, they are our nuts. People that don’t like to collect think we are nuts. They don’t see value, they see clutter.

This was given to me because it smelled like a lifetime of nicotine and a little bit of cat piss. So I washed it with Murhpy’s Soap, primed it with shellac based BIN, and gave it some paint. Now I hope someone buys it cuz it doesn’t match my bedroom.

this guy went in the Army and grew a bicycle out of his back

Girls were practicing routines on the track and I heard cheering and the kid who painted his car yellow all by himself in his garage – his mom was out there one day washing his wheels and rims – his car was parked and he had a Club on the steering wheel so no one would steal it. These are the type of people we tried to ban. You might find it hard to believe that your enemy’s mother would love her son that much, but you shouldn’t. When their sons are killed in action, you think that crying – the crying where they gnash their teeth and beat their chests like a bible scene – you think it is an act to prove America sucks. You’re right. They hate us more than they loved their children. They have children so we will kill them, so we will look bad. God do they hate us!
Why am I yelling? Why do I put words in your mouth? You weren’t even walking up the hill to my house today. You probably don’t have any problems with the Asian Community. You like Asians. And Afghanis. And Muslims. And Islamics. Those types.
You probably have problems with pigeons. Dairy. Sweatpants. Hot new country. What are you mad at? Why? People just wanna live!

This is the latest style in horse grooming. I saw all kinds of patterns shaved into different horse rumps today at work. We were spreading sand on a riding ring down in Woodside and there were more horses than a harness race milling around. They shave the whole body except where the saddle sits and some decorative finish in the right rear flank. I was afraid to put my rake down and ask a rich person why, so it remains a mystery to me still.

Rusty wouldn’t have the least idea why either…
This is the latest in footwear for Rusty Sunshine. I asked him why he was wearing white Reeboks, and he said, “They’re James. He won’t be usin ‘em.”

“Why’s that?” I ask. “He back in rehab?”

“Three years in jail,” Rus explained. So there’s Mr. Sunshine in someone else’s shoes. Something very few of us have done. James went in for repeat offenses of DUI, if you were wondering. Hit three cars this last time. Kep on goin. Let that be a warnin.

photo posted from my iPhone

So here is the joy of lettering, done with an ink that is very difficult to get off the side of my truck. I never hated the creativity involved in graffiti, just the damage it does to people. Like me. There’s a difference between calligraphy and graffiti, and I should ask Thomas what that is…

I did a dump run for a fellow today who turned out to be a professional calligrapher. He showed me his workshop but I didn’t have much time to ask him questions. It is dark outside and past midnight, so I can’t take a picture of the latest graffiti on my truck, so this blog that was going to be a compare and contrast of styles will have to be on the installment plan. Take a long look at Thomas Ingmire’s work up there and then tomorrow we’ll check out the asshole kid who used ink to mark up my vehicle. Oddly enough, they seem to be influencing each other.

Thomas will be at the Codex in Berkeley February 8th through the 11th. The Codex is a huge gathering of book artists and their creations. I’d definitely be into checking it out. Anyone wanna plan a field trip with me?

Some people tell you all you have to do is ask the universe for something and it will be given. I did not ask for a painting of a man in a sombrero, and yet there it is in the back of my truck. So how do you explain that? However, I was just yesterday talking about metal detectors, and what did I see in the median this sunny Monday afternoon in the Mission…

We’re heading out to some parks this Friday to hunt.

one of the many beautiful women in the hobby of metal detecting today

It’s a pretty long peninsula. An hour drive at seventy miles an hour. Not stoppin for nuthin either. And I love my truck and she’s old so I don’t push her past 60. The left speaker is still workin and that’s the side Fisher sat on so I turned it down so I could here him talkin. He talks real quiet. He’s a shy man. Look at the facts. He is an editor. That means he likes to be behind the camera. That’s the first thing. He smokes hella weed. Hella bein a lot a lot. That’s second. Folks that smoke a lot of weed and stay in their room workin on the computer are probably shy, right? And he talks real quiet. It all adds up. I think Fisher is shy.

We were on the road to Foster City. Not quite half way down the peninsula. Foster City. A planned city. Built on wetlands. What kind of plan is that? Greg runs a metal detecting shop out of his garage down there. And that’s the whole point of Fisher and me drivin south for half an hour. We got his name off the internet. He is an authorized White’s dealer. White’s and Garret are the two biggest names in the treasure huntin industry. It was awesome, standin in the driveway on a cul de sac in a planned community and watchin a garage door rumble on it’s automatic pulley, slowly revealin a wall full of danglin electronic magnetic meters.

Equipment for dreamers. Protective dreamers. Stand offish perhaps. They have secret huntin grounds, caches of coins and jewelry hidden in boxes in their homes. Strong hunches where lost treasure may lie. But they work nine to five jobs in the government – Greg was a motorcycle cop. They have a wife, a mortgage – not a pack mule and the whole summer to head into the mountains.

Stand offish till they get to know you. Dreamers need each other, they need someone else to believe with. Someone whose eyes will light up and feed the fire. Greg saw it in us. So we stood in his garage and talked about metal detectin, and got invited to The Bay Area Searchers next meeting. A secret society of metal detector enthusiasts held in the hallowed halls of a local church function hall.

Please stay tuned for the next excitin chapter, where we meet these fellow coin shooters.

There’s a big long pier that puts you about two hundred yards out over the Pacific Ocean and people crab fish from it as the waves break and boogie boarders in half inch thick wetsuits try to find a wave to catch. You’re looking at the crab “hook”. It’s a bit of chicken and squid in a homemade wire trap with a bit of blue wire turned back on itself like a slip knot. The crab gets a leg in the large circle and when it leaves, the wire tightens around the appendage. Like this…

Here it is, an unlucky lady caught in the snare. She was thrown back. Too small.

This one cuts the mustard, just made it big enough to throw in a pot.

This old zine Sean and I made in 1995 just got posted to my zines section. I tried to get it done last night but I went to bed instead.

Hard times, like jerking off the cat just to feed the dog. Things ain’t easy. Then my old pal from the junk mail factory gets laid off. It’s like Mom kickin’ you down the steps…it hits home. I guess if you’re still workin’ you could stop by his site and download a tune or buy a cd or somethin’.

photo posted from my iPhone
It’s good to be back at work…

photo posted from my iPhone
I bought an old fashioned straight razor. Don’t ever rush the job with one of those.

First I joined friendster, then everyone moved to myspace, and then along came facebook. It wasn’t until this last social network appeared that people really started finding me out of the blue. Computers aren’t geeky anymore. Working moms, stay at home moms, high school jocks, classmates just out of prison, they’re all on facebook.

I remember when I had an Angelfire email account years ago, Classmates.com would roll out the banner ads all the time. It seemed like a great idea, but it costs money to contact people who have put up profiles. I didn’t care that much. Just stopped by their site and they are charging $39 a year for complete access (to be able to contact other profiles, etc.)

Classmates has been around since 1995 so they aren’t completely stupid, but I would have to believe their days are numbered. Here’s a quote from the CEO Micheal Shutzler back in 2002:

“We’re not changing any business paradigm. The myth in the early days…was that information on the Internet wanted to be free, and the consumer won’t want to pay for anything. Somehow, you’d make money. (Classmates.com) grew painfully slowly…a couple of years ago, we had 5 or 6 million names in the database. Then came the collapse of inflated advertising rates. We had a product that was compelling and had an opportunity to acquire new customers at an economically viable price. ”

I wonder how this guy feels about facebook, which offers everything classmates does, but for free – and has about 1000 times more growth. I enjoy being part of the generation that has watched the internet develop. I can already say, “Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it. We used to have to rely on class reunions to find out who got fat and who got rich.”

As a former class president, I ought to organize an online reunion. But I was impeached for a reason – I didn’t do my job. So you won’t find me on Classmates, and there I am on facebook, adding friends but not really sure why.