How Horrible and How Beautiful

I just read this on Neil Gaiman's blog, and thought it was too elegantly stated not to pass on:

"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."

The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.

"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.

"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."

This is why I think everyone needs to see Night and Fog, even though it is truly scarring.

Bird's-Eye View

Some of you may have seen this already, if you check out my Facebook profile:


It's the big room shared by the Dawson Printshop, where I work, and the NSCAD Design Printshop. Taken with my cellphone camera. From the top of a very tall ladder. That white wall you can see just to the right is no longer white, it's grey. I painted it.

You can just see our replica common press at the top of the photo. It was used to print the replica of the first newspaper ever printed in Canada. It's not that different from what Gutenberg would have used.

What's Nikoniconiknevernikki Been Up To?

School: I've really only had three days of school so far, since I only have classes twice a week (not counting my internship), but it already seems like ages. Intaglio is already intense and exciting and I have too many projects in mind to get them all done. But that's good. I'm starting with a multiplate bookwork with sea creatures and steam. I'll also have to get started on a singleplate/multicolour print. Possibly with a Jules Verne submarine. Sometime before Friday, which means tomorrow after work, I have to photocopy the readings for art history and then read some of them. Or at least go to the library and read them. The class is Narrative and Craft and the teacher is really good (I had her for Craft and Design History).

Internship: Technically, I suppose this could fall under "School," but whatever. I'm working with Joe Landry, who teaches bookarts at NSCAD, has his own bookbinding and conservation business, and currently co-manages the Dawson Printshop. I'll be doing some gold tooling (and also blind tooling) and at some point making a Byzantine binding (complete with brass clasps), but for now I'm building boxes for Joe to have as models for clients and lectures. Lots and lots of different styles of boxes in which one can put books and other delicate things to protect them. I'll probably also be working on some product samples for the printshop at some point.

Work: psp.about.com continues as usual with me not having as much time as I'd like to play/review games. Sigh. Work at the Dawson Printshop so far has been a lot of tidying and organizing while we wait for the fittings and furnishings to be done and installed, at which point we can actually get some things printed. Tomorrow I'll be climbing a ladder to paint a giant wall grey and a tall pillar red. You should see the height of the ceilings in this place!

Social life: What? Nik has a social life? Well, sort of. See I met someone, and he's rather kept me occupied on weekends:



(Incidentally, I'm trying to teach myself to colour balance in Photoshop using curves instead of levels, as they are supposed to be much more powerful. You can judge my success, or lack thereof, from the previous photo. Yeah, I need to work on it more. Probably could also tweak the contrast a bit more.). Movies, wine, talking, etc. Lots of talking, actually, which will probably surprise some of you. Really, I do talk when I've got something to say and someone interesting to say them to. If you really want to, you can see more photos of what I've been doing on Facebook (link in left column), but I currently have my photos viewable only by friends, so you'd have to join and then add me as a friend. Alternatively, I might consider making my photos public. Maybe.

Worst Grade Ever

Last week when I started school I also picked up my grades from last semester and got, as I rather expected I might, my worst grade so far at NSCAD (though not quite my worst grade ever in university, I think). So anyway, here are my grades from Fall 07:

• AHIS 3200 History of Photography: A+
  
• PHOT2500 Lighting Workshop: B
  
• PRTM2100 Relief Printmaking: A
  
• PRTM3106 Intermediate Lithography: A
  

That gives me a GPA of 3.86 for the semester, and 3.95 so far for this degree. Not too bad, I guess.

Random Pic

Xmas trees and way too many presents (some of them contain chocolate . . .). Also, a few boxes not yet unpacked from the move.

Winter 08 Schedule

Unless, things change, which they very well might, my schedule for this semester will look something like this:

Monday

• day off for doing homework

Tuesday

• 9am - 12:30pm (ish) work at Dawson Printshop
• 1pm - 5:30pm Intermediate Intaglio

Wednesday

• internship at Leaf by Leaf

Thursday

• 9am - ? work at Dawson Printshop
• ? - 5pm (ish) internship at Dawson Printshop

Friday

• 9am - 11am Narrative and Craft (art history)
• 1pm - 5:30pm Intermediate Intaglio

Saturday

• more or less free for homework and social life (hey, I sort of have one now)
• possibly some more internship hours at Leaf by Leaf in the afternoon

Sunday

• homework, social life, sleep, etc

So, busy, but not unmanageable. There may also be more work hours at the Dawson Printshop if I seem to be keeping up with coursework and internship hours all right.

And, in other news, if you don't have a Facebook page and want to see various odds and ends of photos I've been posting (summer road trips, pets, cute boys, odds and ends), um . . . you'll just have to get Facebook. I might post a few things here, and art stuff will eventually end up on deviantART (I've started bringing prints home, and hope to get around to photographing them soon), but most of the odd stuff will end up on Facebook, visible only to my Facebook friends. If you don't know how to get on Facebook, I suggest asking the nearest 12-or-13-year-old girl.

And So it Begins

The new semester, that is. Today school started at NSCAD. I don't actually have any classes on Monday, but I went in this afternoon to see about updating my student card (we have to get a new sticker every semester) and find out if last semester's grades were available yet. I also thought I might stop and talk to a few people. Alas, it was crowded as hell in there, the line for student services was crazy long, and none of the people I was going to talk to were around. I said "hi" to a couple of former classmates and the printmaking tech, Murf, and then made my way back home (all three blocks).

I had better luck this morning picking up a parcel and changing my address on my driver's license. I also got another earring in one ear (left one, at the top, cost $3 extra for cartilage, which I determined is because they have to give you two bottles of the cleaning stuff instead of one because it takes twice as long to heal) (gone are the days of being sent home with nothing but instructions to put polysporin on it once in a while). And I bought some new jewelry for my existing piercings--I lost one of my talons not long ago and just had safety pins in, so I needed at least one set. I decided to get new rings for the other holes too. I've got them all in now and they look pretty spiffy. Except I couldn't get my current nose ring out to put the new one in. I'll have another go at it later.

Hang on, I'll get a pic.



It's hard to tell, but the one farthest back is a peacock/multicolour metal with slightly iridescent beads.

Let's see. Other news. The coffee date I mentioned a few posts back went swimmingly, as have various and sundry movies, video nights, breakfasts and used bookstore forays since then. Sometimes I accidentally catch a glimpse of my expression as I walk by a mirror. Usually it's a silly secret smile.

Xmas was nice and quiet, with way too many presents to open (I'm still working my way through all the chocolate). And there are presents still to come, apparently. Thanks to everyone. It was fabulous. Dinner was turkey and a huge assortment of veggies, many of them mashed. Deva's Mum and Randy were over all day, from breakfast of bacon, toast and hashbrowns (Ryan's favourite thing to cook) to the aforementioned dinner.

New Year's Eve involved staying up until New Year's Day drinking wine and talking. Oh, and there was some very silly dancing to the Chemical Brothers sometime around four in the morning (maybe, I really have no idea what time it was). New Year's day involved a lot of sleeping and a late breakfast, followed by, well, other things I won't talk about here.

Everything is bright and well in my world.

Don't Follow Me!

Yeah, so if I message you on Messenger with nothing but a url in the message, don't follow it. Apparently, someone's been using my account to send suspicious links. Like I said, don't follow them, it's not me. I've changed my password, which I hope will solve the problem, but if anyone notices it continuing, let me know. And 'Lena, you might want to change your passwords, too--I think it was a following a weird link from you (or that I thought was from you) that started this.

Update: Everyone's changed their passwords, and all seems to be fine once again.

Exterminate!

I got a cell phone recently. It's very shiny. Also, it has bluetooth. My Macbook also has bluetooth. Hmm . . . I thought, I bet I could make them talk to each other. Last night I managed to figure out how, though I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the ability. I've also been trying to figure out how to make my own ringtones. This phone can use mp3 ringtones, but you can't just transfer from a computer. Well, you can, and you can then listen to them, but you can't set them as ringtones. Some investigation online revealed sites that will convert mp3s to ringtone files and send them to you on your phone. But the file I wanted to use was already an mp3. Hey, I thought, what if I use bluetooth to send the file? Alas, it just saved it on the phone's memory card (sold separately ;) ). So I took the memory card out and re-sent the file. This time when I selected "store" it gave me the option to set the file as a ringtone. Yay! Now whenever someone phones me there will be Daleks exclaiming, "Exterminate! Exterminate!" Now I just need some people to phone me . . .

And here's a blurry cellphone photo of a weird thing I saw on the way home from my coffee date (drank a London Fog, had good conversation, saw cool photos):



Hmm . . . I don't know why that's sideways. It's not sideways on the phone and it's not sideways in Photoshop. Oh well, you'll just have to tilt your head. It's a snowbank on the side of the road with a big pile of shiny icecubes on top. It was very surreal in the weird night light.

Crap

Had my last day of work at the VRC (aka slide library) today. Had my last day of printing the lithographic photoplate experiment today. Got some information today that made me cancel a date. I don't know if the information was good or not, but I thought it best to err on the side of caution and only have dates in public places for a while. Feelings ended up hurt on both sides. Oh well, I thought. I will drink tea and eat xmas chocolate and watch anime and things won't seem so bad. Maybe I will stop feeling guilty (I am very good at feeling guilty). Apologies didn't help. Apologies didn't seem to do anything except make me feel like I was apologising too much. And Naruto seems to have vanished off YTV's schedule, so I have to wait for anime. So tired. Shower now, then Bleach and Deathnote, and maybe it will help, but probably I'll go on feeling guilty for a while. Probably quite a while. I love words, but sometimes they don't communicate. Crap.

Random Photo

Deva and Ryan in New Brunswick this past summer. I can't remember the name of the town, but they had sea caves and a really nice park with hiking trails.

Slippery Dog

I just got a spam mail with the subject "Dalmation lubrication." It had an attachment. I did not open it.

Random Picture

Too many words, so here's a picture from the field trip we took to Gaspereau Press with my wood type class this summer. Old machinery is fascinating.

Free Paper!

(Yes, another update. You'd almost think I had some free time. Don't get too comfortable--my free time is still pretty minuscule until after Friday.)

So what I did today. I got up groggy and even more zombie-like than yesterday. With the weather having warmed up and the heat in the apartment not seeming to have adjusted, I was too hot to sleep, and the wind was whistling in the window and earplugs just got annoying. But then I drank tea and things weren't so bad.

I went in to school and just had time to make one lithographic photo plate (no pics, sorry, the plates are light sensitive; if I remember I'll take some when I start printing tomorrow). Then I dashed to work (approximately a minute and a half dash to the library from the printmaking studios, luckily). There was a lot of going through slides to get them back in their proper order after a semester of use. I'm working my way through Asia, and so did a lot of wrestling with the dynasties of China and trying to figure out exactly what principle was behind the cataloging of the art and architecture of India. Alas, no one who actually worked on setting it up is at the library any longer. The rare times when someone came in to return or sign out a video seemed like special treats. And when Joe phoned to let me know that they did indeed want to hire me at the Dawson Printshop it was better than xmas. So then I had to tell Victoria that I'm going to take the printshop job and not return to the VRC (aka slide library) next semester. And Friday will be my last day.

After work (which ended at four) I went back to printmaking, cut (or rather ripped) some paper, set up the middle press, and pre-stretched the paper (well, half of it--part of the experiment will be to see just how much not pre-stretching cocks up the registration on different papers). While I was setting up, the technician Murf (without whom the printshop would probably not run half so well) asked me what I was getting out of being the guinea pig who gets to try the new photo-transparencies. Well, I explained, I get to keep the plates after, and I get however many copies of the prints I make on my own paper. Bob keeps the prints on the paper he bought for me to print on. Murf seemed to think I ought to get more out of it, so he went to wherever it is he stashes things and came back with some paper he put away eons ago when the Printmaking Workshop part of NSCAD printmaking shut down (they used to make prints with big-name artists). I was expecting a few sheets; printmaking paper is expensive (which is probably why I am so poor this semester). Instead, he brought me a pile of perhaps 20 sheets of gorgeous thick greenish-tinged paper. It's a teensie bit yellowed around the edges, and curled from being so aged, but it's really , really nice. I can't wait to try some intaglio prints on it. Woo hoo! Free paper. Really nice paper.

Then I made three more photoplates (for the c, m, and k--made the y this morning), cleaned up and came home. I am thinking I should probably eat something, as my lunch was really more of an afternoon snack. I don't really feel that hungry, though. If I find some energy somewhere, maybe I'll make a little pizza. I have a couple of gf crusts in the freezer, and some sauce already made. Or maybe I'll just melt some cheese over a plate of blue tortillas and eat them with salsa.

So much wrongness

Add "guys who list anal sex in their interests wrong" to the list in the previous post. Shudder.

It's alive!

Yeah, so, not dead. At least not literally. I look a bit like a zombie:


But anyway. I seem to have survived the semester. I also seem to have grown a few muscles and lost some fat. Printmaking is hard work.

Speaking of which, here are some more work-in-progress photos of printing, this time relief printmaking.

Here is a reductive linocut all ready to print the final colour. There isn't much left of it now. Behind the block is a newsprint proof of the one colour all by itself.


If I back up a bit, you can see more of the area where I'm working.


And here's the block on the press, waiting for me to add paper:


And backing up a bit from the press . . .


The print, covered with a tympan and blanket, as it comes out the other side of the press. Unlike lithography or intaglio printing, relief printing requires very little pressure so it's really easy to crank the bed through the press.


Here's the print from the back. I've used a thin Japanese paper, so all the colours show through.


The finished print alongside the block I just printed from. This was the final run, of dark blue over the other colours.


And finally, the print itself. I've titled it Kitsune Kaze, which means "fox shadow" in Japanese (which I do not speak, but I know a few words).



---

So, what else have I been doing . . .

I signed up for some stuff, like Facebook, which I tend to ignore until someone posts something on my page or sends me a message.

On a whim, when I was supposed to be writing a paper, I signed up on Plenty of Fish, which I am not going to link to here. Much to my surprise, I met a few interesting people (in real life, even!). One signed up on a dare, and another in a fit of madness. Or something. Even so, I have come to the conclusion that dating sites are strange and disturbing places. And while I am, at times, all for strange and disturbing, dating sites are really the wrong sort of strange and disturbing. Very, very wrong. Like old men with big mustaches and no beards who like country music wrong. Like men from Europe who proclaim you drive them crazy in obviously not first-language English wrong (not that not having English as a first language is itself wrong, that's silly). Even guys who, when you tell them that colour, size and shape are not important, tell you to spare them your liberal nonsense and inform you that skin colour is how we know our own kind wrong. But I'm sure these things are great for some people. For me, I'll be giving my real email to a select few people (well, one of my real emails, anyway) and getting the hell out of there.

I suppose there is more, but I should sleep before I have to get up for work and I still have a few people (non dating site people) to email before that. Probably, due to the hols, it'll be less than a month before I update again. Until then, here is an amusing picture of Poe:

Milk Chocolate is . . . Meh

Yeah, so, yesterday I bought a bar of Swiss milk chocolate with hazelnuts in. It was the third time in as many weeks that I have eaten milk chocolate and thought I shouldn't have bothered. I mean it was all right, but it just wasn't as fantastic as chocolate is supposed to be. Maybe I just bought cheap, crappy chocolate. Or maybe I need to just get dark chocolate, which has never disappointed me. Now if only I could find some dark chocolate with hazelnuts in. It's easy to find dark chocolate with almonds. Even Hershey's makes reasonable dark chocolate with almonds (and Hershey's dark chocolate used to be grainy and horrible). But no one seems to make dark chocolate with hazelnuts. Or hedgehogs. Has anyone ever seen dark chocolate hedgehogs? Mmm . . .

Airship Coat

Oh, won't someone get this for me for xmas . . . Warm wool coat (did I mention the weather has turned very chilly here), airship insignia. Airship insignia!! Anyway. I could use a coat. (I should probably measure myself and see if it would fit. I think it will. But I should measure.)

Relief!

Relief printmaking, that is. I'd set aside the entire day of today to work on nothing but relief printmaking. I wanted to get a big linocut either done or well on its way. Alas, it's not even begun.

My idea was to do a sort of scroll-shaped (that is, long and narrow) image from Aesop's The Fox and the Grapes. But I just can't get the fox right in my sketches. So I've set that aside for now, to work on drawings for a woodcut (on plywood!). Here's a sketch I did sometime last year when my design class started to get really boring:



I rather like this character. I'm not entirely sure who she is or where she fits into my various stories, but I do know she's a test pilot and a courier for Frisland Airships. Anyway, I thought it would be kind of fun to try to do a black and white woodcut of her, so I did this sketch of her face, thinking I could surround it with a black oval, a la Victorian portraits:



Then I traced the image onto another sheet of paper, so I could fix a few things, like the goggles and gloved hand. I traced over the main lines with a sharpie so I could get a clearer idea of what I was doing. For some reason I decided to try to make it into a greyscale marker drawing, with rather dubious results:



Heh. Now try to picture what this will look like in high contrast black and white, without a whole lot (or any) fine detail, as a woodcut. Anyway, we'll see how it turns out . . .

Time, I Need Time

Actually, I'm pretty sure Imperius said "Thyme. I need thyme," but anyway . . .

I think I may have taken on too much this semester. Scroll down to that post where I detailed my schedule. See anything wrong with it? Add in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday working 9-12:30 in the slide library. Now do you see? How about there's hardy any smegging time to do the bazillion assignments that come with fifteen credits of art school, twelve credits of which are studio courses? Oh yeah, and then there's my writing job, the one that actually pays the bills (which, alas, pays in US dollars which were worth less than Canadian dollars when I put my cheque in the bank earlier today!) But anyway. Somehow I thought I could do all this.

Sigh. I have asked to cut back on my slide library hours, so as of this past week, remove the Wednesday morning shift from the schedule. It's more manageable. Especially since my photo teacher said that any assignments except the final project can be resubmitted at any time up to the penultimate class. That's a huge relief, because my first two assignments were utter crap. And no, that's not just my perfectionist self speaking. Anyway. I feel I can breathe a little now, though I am still thinking of asking for another free morning. Especially since I looked at my courses to date and realized that if I do an Interdisciplinary degree (which fits better with my current plans of action A, B and C--which is to say, all of them) I can graduate a bit sooner. Even if I take on a much lighter course load next semester.

So immediate plans are to make it through this semester working as hard as I can (and nine of my fifteen credits are litho and relief printing, which are more fun), then relax a bit school-wise. But first, survive the semester. And I thought last winter was hellish!