Studio visits

 I worked at cleaning up my basement over the past couple of days. I fortunately discovered that a heavily laden shelf of films that was tilting oddly was doing so because the particle board bottom had become wet sometime recently and needed to be discarded. I have been trying to shoot some small pick-ups for Sockvile, but also have some other plans. Feels good to be able to turn around down there, it had become filled with boxes from every unfinished project for the past decade.

 This evening we also went to Rob Bos's gallery/home and purchased a couple of his Robot Duck paintings (done under the pseudonym Stan Channing). Rob is returning to Chicago this fall to finish his MFA and currently raising funds to make sure that happens.

Sociable Friday

Angelos Hatzitolios and his wife Christine and two kids are in town. They all came over this afternoon. The kids got along very well, playing Wii and Lego. The pictures I snapped were very bad but I hope to see them at least once more time so I'll get something better. Ange's parents are having their 50th anniversary this weekend so his whole family is in town.

 This evening we started off by going to the grand opening of Rob Bos's new version of his Art Projects Gallery on 11th Avenue. It is so much bigger than before. He has multiple rooms set up and is featuring about 50 artists (including Margaret) for the opening.

 After the gallery, Paul took us to this new place on Dewdney which makes all its own baking and its own gelato. We returned to the art openings with the event at Creative Cities beside the Leader Building. It was buzzing with music and people, much of the art crowd were also there.

Back home, I finally found the last of the pieces (some substitutes) to complete this Lego Darth Vader ship from the Force Unleashed series. I've been tinkering with it for a week. It had some chucks together but at least half of it was missing. I am thinking it would be cool to restore a Lego set every week but I know I'll run out of steam very quickly on that.

Eric rocks 'em

After a somewhat fruitless day of going to work but forgetting just enough details to prevent me from finishing anything, I came home and was asked where the propane I bought this morning was and I realized I'd bought it and forgot to take it with me from the gas station. Anyway, they still had it so I did some bar-be-que and at midnight went to the Folk Festival after party where Eric played piano 10 times to the film we made, "Bonnie's Indescribable Predicament". We only had 8 chairs but played to a full house every time. Some screenings we crammed 20 people into our booth. Eric's fingers were bleeding. Tanya and Carle both made it, hope that Rob Bos comes tomorrow or Sunday.

fantastic last minute shoot

The Guy Maddin-style film Eric and I have been discussing got shot today. It required over 100 shots and I filled the cast at the last minute with some great folks, Carle Steel, Tanya Dahms, and Rob Bos. We shot it all in 3 hours and I just completed a first cut (no effects or sound) in another three hours. It's funny, but the whole cast has been mentioned, and labeled, in previous postings I've done.
Very tired now.

323

This morning we got into the Cathedral Festival lantern parade, marched down Elphanstone to the Balkwill centre, shooting super-8 along the way, and attended the picnic and comic jam there. William was really into the comic jam, which was run by Allan Dotson. William, inspired by his Stink books, created two pages of "Idiom Comics", illustrating such things as "he lost his head" and "he got up on the wrong side of the bed" and "it's not the end of the world". I contributed by drawing the head on a surrealist inspired exquisite corpse drawing (in combination with Allan, Gavid DeLint, and Margaret) - which of course turned out really well, despite my contribution. This afternoon we attended Rob Bos's art opening in his bathroom.

Nooner

Today was shrouded by another headache, not a migraine but sort of a mega tension/dehydration/neck-ache sort of thing. I was up at 6am, took a mitt full of Advil, watched some Supranos, took some more and put ice on my head, went to work for a few hours (finished the wiring for the Theremin but not the case yet) and took some more Advil so that he headache finally subsided enough that we went and did some berry picking (two gallons of huge, sweet Saskatoon berries at $12 per gallon if you pick your own which we did in about an hour since they were so abundant), and home.
We found a Rob Bos painting (that is a painting by Rob Bos, not just some Rob Bos actually dong a painting) hidden in the alley behind our house, one of his current projects, so we took it and replaced it with another of his paintings from the same text series from our own collection.