Thursday, May 03, 2007
Ahhhhh! I'm BACK!
I know, I know, I haven't posted in forever and a half years, but I am now DONE with school for the summer and I am HOME in Massachusetts, where there are CATS and RED SOX and.... MORE CATS. And JONATHAN PAPELBON. And DAISUKE MATSUZAKA. And HIDEKI OKAJIMA (whom I secretly love more than Matsuzaka, mainly because of that "I am willing to be a hero in the dark," quote, which is so Cyrano de Bergerac [if Cyrano was, you know, Japanese] that I can't STAND it).
In fact, here is an example of how good it is to be home.
I am watching the local news right now, and there is a WHOLE SEGMENT where they took a photo of Tom Brady wearing a Yankee hat around to various people around Fenway and filmed their reactions.... which ranged from confusion, to disbelief, to disgust, to horror. This is NEWS. PRIME TIME NIGHTLY NEWS. Massachusetts is completely insane, and I love it.
I must admit that I have been a bit baseball-distracted lately. The new baseball overlord over at MVN likes us to write every day, so I've been posting a lot at Roar of the Tigers. I also went to a bunch of Michigan baseball games, because that's probably the best time it is possible to have.
College baseball games.... ah, you can get so close to the action, get all kinds of fun photos, and when the ballpark is within easy walking distance of your apartment, it's even better. In fact, that was one of the few things that saddened me about leaving Ann Arbor for the summer: missing out on the rest of the Michigan baseball season. (I don't have the same reaction about moving away from Detroit Tigers on TV, because we have a dish at home and were thus "allowed" to purchase the Extra Innings package. So now it's just a matter of flipping back and forth on days when the Tigs and Sox play at the same time. Which I will cheerfully do.)
It was a very baseball-ish year art-wise too. My huge year-long project had to do with baseball, and you'll be hearing more about that near the end of this month. I also did some paintings; that's what the photo heading this post is of. 'Tis Fenway. It's a pretty small painting, only about 5x7", maybe a little larger, and an inch and a half or two inches thick. I just wanted to mess around with rendering a ballpark in black and white like this.
Here's a detail shot.
And here you see the 3D nature of the canvas.
Not the only baseball painting I did this year, but the only one of Fenway, so.
Anyways. Although I probably won't be able to post every day over here (it's more than enough 'work' keeping RotT going on a daily basis), I will be posting much more often. There are things to be said about the Lions' draft, posts to be made about Michigan baseball, and of course the Red Sox. There are roster photos to be made fun of. If anyone is still reading this old thing ('tho I'll be writing even if you aren't, o invisible readers), it's good to be back with you guys.Labels: art, blognews, Fenway
5:59 PM
Friday, July 07, 2006
A couple of exciting events over here at BCRS! Not nearly as exciting as David Ortiz suddenly looking up and saying to himself, "Wait, this is the effin' Trop, what the mango salsa are we doin' losin' in here?" and hitting a grand slam, but pretty exciting.
The first one is for you Massachusetts residents or, more specifically, people who are not afraid to venture into Malden. ART SHOW ALERT. Yes, vast excitement, I know. Thus far all but one of the art shows I've had stuff in have been in Michigan (the other one was up at Joppa Flats last summer... er, yeah, I didn't really tell people about that, I don't think. Sorry), so if you are in Massachusetts and you like ART and BLOGGERS THAT ARE ART STUDENTS and the fact that Malden has a BURGEONING ARTIST COMMUNITY, this is your big chance to see ALL THAT AND A BAG OF CULTURE!
The official invitation is that image you can clicky at the start of the entry. The show is called PRESENT TENSE, and it's a juried drawing show at the artSPACE@16 gallery in Malden. The opening reception (which I will not be at, sadly) is this Saturday, July 8, starting at noon. Potluck 2-5pm, gallery talk at 3. If you can't make it to the opening the gallery is also open 12 noon-5pm on Saturdays (the 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th). I'll probably be there having a look some time near the noon end of the 15th, if you want to try to catch me there.
BUT EVERYONE SHOULD GO TO THIS. I saw it when it was getting hung up, and there's some great stuff in the show. Plus some of my stuff (it's 8 drawings, it's called The Encyclopedia of Gnawing, it's got animals skulls in it. You know you wanna see), and a few drawings/paintings from my friend Corey Corcoran, who is like some sort of mad artistic genius. If you go, keep an eye out for his stuff as well.
Plus the gallery itself has to be seen to be believed. It's a... well, it's a converted garage. You're driving there and you're saying to yourself, "Nah, there's no way, this can't be right," because you're just going through this completely normal residential neighborhood, and then you're looking at two completely normal residential houses, and in between them is a little detached garage with a 16 in the windows, and this is the gallery. And inside, it's all official-like and simply amazing.
Directions, details, and so on can be found on the artSPACE@16 website. Seriously, if you're anywhere at all near Malden, or willing to haul yourself out there, give this a look. It's a good one.
The other news is exciting for everyone, regardless of location!
As some of you may know, I've been designing tshirts for my own amusement for a while now. Just random stuff I wanted on a shirt, and didn't see out there. Or excuses to fire up Adobe Illustrator and futz around with it. And I told a couple people about them, and some of those people said they wanted this or that shirt.
Well, one thing led to another and now YOU, the FASHIONABLE BLOG READER, can purchase for your very own a BCRS tshirt design. Click on the image to go to the store.
Designs up right now are
--Fangirls dig the long ball; Smart chicks dig the high on-base percentage
--Eck-tastic! Baseball knowledge made groovy
--Fangirls dig the K; Give me a good groundball pitcher with a solid infield defense
--I Score at Baseball Games
--StatGeek
--Shift This (with a 34 in the background, natch)
With more to come as I bother to make them. I currently own the long ball and groundball tshirts (with a few of the others winging their cotton way towards me as we speak), and Cafepress does a pretty darn good job printing them.
So check out the art show! Get yourself a tshirt and show the world that you are a clever person with good taste and/or an overwhelming desire to chip into my art supplies fund for next semester. And let us hope that this last game propels us to an embarassment of riches in Chicago. Oh, and that AJ Pierzynski gets scurvy.Labels: art, blognews, offtopic
12:07 AM
Monday, April 17, 2006
Of course I had class today, since Patriot's Day doesn't exist anywhere in the known universe outside of Boston, and U of M doesn't believe in Easter Monday either (which works for me, since they equally don't believe in Passover). My morning classes ended at 11:30, and, after stopping to get coffee (vital) and a billion more travel packs of tissues (sadly vital... *cough cough sneeze sniffle*), I staggered back to see if I could catch some of the Sox game.
I don't like using MLB.tv if I'm doing too many other things on the computer at the same time since it makes it buffer like a dying wombat, so I fired up the Gameday broadcast, just to see what was going on. I kept half an eye on that while doing work and gathering materials for class tonight, which I have to leave for in half an hour because my partner is a worthless untrustworthy human being. Just as an aside.
At one point I clicked over to see what was going on, and saw that Julian Tavarez was pitching. Since this was Gameday, that meant that his mug shot was duly displayed.
I nearly fell off my seat. I've always thought it, but it's even more startling when you see it sort of sprung on you: THE DUDE LOOKS LIKE AN ALIEN. A violent, insane, tempermental alien. The kind of alien who would beam cows up into his spaceship and perform all sorts of experiments on them, like to see how cowflesh reacted to his alien fist when he slammed it into their bovine heads.
Anyways, it was nice to see someone other than Papi get the clutch hit, for once, so big fat fake holiday thanks to you, Mark Loretta. This is not to say that Papi did not contribute, because he went yard. Again. Because that's what he does. I'm still pleased about that contract. Really my only concern is durability because Papi, love him as I surely do, is not the sveltest of players. Which is fine for right now, but it's hard to tell how he'll hold up as he ages over the length of this contract. It's entirely possible, of course, that he'll be like Roger Clemens and just keep on truckin' regardless. And when I say 'like Roger Clemens' I mean in physique, not personality or attitude or general level of evil.
Man, I can't wait to get back East, where I can actually watch these games. There's little comfort in being in Michigan, because it doesn't matter that I love the Tigers, the damn games aren't televised half the time anyways.
I went to the last game of the Michigan/Ohio State series on Sunday, despite the fact that I sniffled through it like a huge sickly loser. Photos are here if you'd like to see them, but I'll probably be writing about it when I've got a little more time anyhow.
Oh, and on a completely non-sport-related note, the End of the Year show awards were announced a couple days ago and I, um, won an award. Which is entirely shocking, because I never win those sorts of things. I won it for an approximately 5 foot long print of this photo (click for big):
It was the sort of thing I submitted to the show just on a whim, because I'd already had to get the damn thing printed out for my photography class, and if you spend that much money getting something printed large-scale, you may as well use it again, right? Plus it had taken a bleedin' long time to draw all that crap on myself, especially the bones on the back of my right hand, because I had to draw them with my left hand and I am not in the least tiny bit lefthanded.
This is the third year I've submitted something to the End of the Year show, and the first time I've won anything (although, in all fairness, there was no way in hell I was gonna win for what I submitted freshman year. Still, I thought last year's offering was pretty good). I'm still very surprised about it all. This image, incidentally, is one of my most popular photos on Flickr, which says something about the good taste of Flickrites, I'm sure.
Any incoherence here I fully attribute to the fact that I am ill and feel like cat pee right now.Labels: art, baseball, Julian Tavarez, MLB, offtopic, Red Sox
3:59 PM
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