November 30, 1993

Cooking meatballs. Sometimes I'll brown them first in a pan (as shown here) before putting them into the sauce, sometimes I'll just put them directly into the sauce. My notes show that this was in preparation for inviting Linn over for dinner.

November 29, 1993

Working on an intaglio plate. Although I mostly employed typical etching and aquatint techniques when doing this process, on this occasion I was also doing a little engraving with a burin.

November 28, 1993

The first Sunday of Advent- one candle lit.

November 27, 1993

This was sort of a dream within a dream. In the main dream I was watching an odd performance on tv. A man and woman sat in silence on a platform, both nude, facing each other. On the sides of their bodies facing toward the camera (arm, leg, torso side) they had what looked like a mixture of unusual scars, scabbed wounds, and fresh blood. In this case the blood and such was make-up effects, not real, because within the dream I knew what I was watching was a staged version (with actors) of an image that I knew to have come from a previous dream I had at an earlier time. In reality there had been no previous dream of this scene- that's just how the performance was explained in the dream. The combination of the unusual plot structure and the image of the couple kept the dream in my head all day and pushed me to choose it as the subject of the day's print.

November 26, 1993

Took advantage of the school holiday to take care of an overdue task- getting some new glasses. The Sears out in Marion was offering a good deal, so I drove out there (only about 15 miles, but the relative isolation of towns in that part of the country always made it seem so far that I rarely left Carbondale) on this day to get the eye exam.

November 25, 1993

Thanksgiving Day. Professor Ed Shay invited any students who were not going home for the holiday to come to his place for dinner. So we had some of our Scottish contingent and a few of us who were far from home and didn't want to deal with the holiday traffic. I brought a homemade lasagne (even making the noodles from scratch- flour, eggs, olive oil), Armen brought his special recipe hummus, and others brought other appetizers. The result- the birds were barely touched we were so full.

November 24, 1993

Went to the Super Wal-Mart in town to pick up a few diverse items. On the long walk from the grocery section (canned tomatoes to make sauce for lasagne) to the hardware area (wood filler for preparing my plywood for woodcuts) I passed the gun counter. What caught my eye among the handguns and hunting weapons was what appeared to be a pistol with a very long barrel. In an odd coincidence, it was on this day that the vote for the Brady gun control bill happened in Congress.

November 23, 1993

A much overdue haircut. Since I was about 4 years old, I had been getting my hair cut at Lou's Barber Shop in my hometown. Lou was an Italian immigrant about my father's age, and the other barbers in his shop were older men, also from Italy, some speaking better English than others. When one of the older guys retired or died, Lou went back to Italy to get another. Even back in the 1980's when I was going to school in Virginia, I always waited until I was back home on break to get a haircut. But while going to school in Illinios my trips home were less frequent, only twice a year, and that was too long to wait between trimmings, so I usually got at least one somewhere between my visits home. This was one such occasion. Not exactly the same experience as an Italian barber shop, but I can't complain about the haircuts. (back in NJ after grad school I still continued to go to Lou's for haircuts, driving up from the Shore area, until he retired and sold off the shop a few years ago)

November 22, 1993

A tense night around the Glove- got into an argument with two of the other grads. The result was that we spent the rest of the evening in our respective studios in isolation, behind our walls.

November 21, 1993

Enjoying a walk outdoors on a cool but sunny Sunday.

November 20, 1993

John Siblik invited us to come out to his farm in Cobden for an evening, which included a big bonfire in an empty field.

November 19, 1993

One evening my help was requested with an unusual task. Behind a bunch of businesses on the Strip were parking lots, and behind those was a ditch about 5 feet deep, with the railroad tracks beyond that. An SUV had driven too far forward while parking and slid front end down partly into the ditch. 4 wheel drive alone was not enough to pull it out. Before calling for a tow, it was decided to try something else. I don't remember now how I happened to be on this crew, but we got down in the ditch and helped push the vehicle upward, while the driver continued to reverse. The extra muscle power seemed to be the difference, because the truck did finally pull itself out of the ditch.

November 18, 1993

Christmas street decorations start going up along the Strip in Carbondale today.

November 17, 1993

A gray late fall day, as witnessed from Allyn 206- the litho room.

November 16, 1993

I was walking up the Strip one evening and passed an arcade/game room that mostly was a hangout for locals. Outside the building I saw two guys having a fight- fists, etc. This was not unusual in Carbondale, though it was more common around bars. For example, I saw one spill out of Sidetracks, and one fighter throw another into traffic in the street (luckily slamming into the side of a moving car rather than falling in front of it) or seeing another one involving two women in the parking lot at Muggsy's, where one dragged the other out of a car and started pummelling her. By comparison, this one seemed like an ordinary disagreement.

November 15, 1993

On a regular basis, my assignment with the GEC classes required me to grade student notebooks. Nothing too exacting, just making sure they were taking notes in class. One I ran across had just about every word (including common 4 and 5 letter words) misspelled. When I brought it up to the student later, he was of the opinion that since he was planning to go into engineering, the ability to spell was not a concern.

November 14, 1993

Walked down the street to go to Mass at the Newman Center on a very rainy day. As I approached the building I saw a lot of water around it, and no clear path to it. Already pretty wet, I figured I'd just try to walk through the puddle quickly and find some high ground, but it just got deeper and deeper. Eventually I made it into the building, but had waded through almost knee deep water at some point to get there, just like everyone else in attendance.

November 13, 1993

Friend of the art department Geryll performs in a play called "Breaking the Cycle". A bunch of us go to see it.

November 12, 1993

At a house party with Heybutton, Bagel, Famous, and a random child.

November 11, 1993

Helped John Siblik use the plate cutting machine in Allyn. It's a mechanical device using a foot pedal to chop off perfect straight pieces of etching plates, usually made from zinc or copper. I don't remember the specific project, but I guess he was working on an etching.

November 10, 1993

Linn Nelson came over to my place with her VCR and the tape I helped shoot at Judith's place several days earlier. I linked her VCR with mine so she could edit the interview onto a second tape for the class presentation.

November 9, 1993

I was asked to give a tour of the print facilities at the Allyn Building to some visiting high school students. The group was kids from the Future Farmers of America, and the Future Homemakers of America. I hadn't realized that such groups were still around, but I found many unexpected things during my time in the midwest.

November 8, 1993

It's a Monday afternoon and I don't feel well. The bloodshot eyes here were one of the signs of that.

November 7, 1993

The department ran a trip to the Dana Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois, the closest major Frank Lloyd Wright home to Carbondale. I had always wanted to see one of his houses, so I took a seat in the van. The house was very interesting. I don't know that I'd ever want to live in one of those houses, but they are fun to visit. At one point we went to an office/den kind of space on the second level. That was nice enough, but I was blown away by the stairwell that led there. I walked several paces away from the group in the office to go back and enjoy the stairs, remaining there until the group came back to return to the main level. My print was based on my best memories of it, not a careful sketch on site, so some of the details might not be exact.

November 6, 1993

Carpool to the Kroger East. I had a regular rider on my weekly supermarket trips during the cooler months, my upstairs neighbor Jack, who otherwise used his motorcycle (his only functioning motor vehicle) in the better weather. However, on this day fellow art grad Shona asked if she could get a ride, and when I showed up to get her, she had a friend with her who could also use a ride. Coming back from the store, pretty much every spare space in my small car was filled with grocery bags. We didn't actually have bags hanging out the car windows, but almost.

November 5, 1993

At painting grad Judith's house, videotaping print grad Linn Nelson interviewing her, part of class project that Linn was doing.

November 4, 1993

Putting up the latest batch of prints from this series for a printmaking class critique.

November 3, 1993

The day after election day and I can't get the results of the gubernatorial election back in Jersey. Only two states (Virginia is the other) elect governors on this off year cycle, so I was thinking they would get to it. But nothing but thousands of local results, and eventually I had to leave and go to class. The internet not being available (to me anyway) back then, I probably got the results that night on the national news.

November 2, 1993

I don't remember exactly where we were, but I had occasion to give fellow grad John Siblik a ride home from there. I dropped him off at the Glove Factory, and probably went home from there.

November 1, 1993

A group of grad students put on a show in the Vergette called the "Six Foot Show", which required all artists to be 6 feet tall (one female accomplished this with her hair in a beehive) and the work to be 6 feet in some dimension. Of course I wasn't qualified, so my contribution was suggesting a 6 foot sub sandwich for the reception. Shown here is John Lustig's shaped canvas painting, The Detente Building, part of a series in a city he was creating.