Joys of artmaking, continued.
Went to the framing woman's shop to pick up the empty frames/fields of cherry red. She began explaining how blocks of wood would have to be used to hold the pieces and longer screws and ...
anxiety rose and just then (of course) someone calls from the newspaper undoubtedly to ask me for something.
Do you have a minute? No. No? No. etc. etc.
After that went back to framing catastrophe (in the sense that it would be involving power tools, a diagram she prepared for me) and then she said You know what? I'll do the affixing, just bring me the stainless steel pieces.
Halle-fucking-lujah.
Brought them to her at 930PM or so after poly-oly-urethening my last two pieces, wrapping all the work, saying goodbyes to my new printing pals - and vowing (perhaps in a fit of post-polyurethene idiocy) to return for more silkscreening madness.
Oh and then. Before the newspaper call in the framing summit I received casual word that the gallery has cement walls. No artist on this dear planet wants to hear the words cement and wall in the same sentence, especially the week of their art opening.
This means war.
This means jackhammers and hardhats and determination and holes and runs to Home Depot and swearing and molly bolts and promises of touchups.
If art wasn't so beneficial, so balancing and a non-choice it would be called punishment.
Love.
And more love this 9/11 commemoration day.

Still, still working on the prints for the show, opening in about 20 minutes or so.
And I'm writing this from the handy open office with iMac and t-1 line that grad students have access to... as well as errant photojournalists on time-consuming art quests.
The images look great and there are only two out of thirteen that still need to be worked on, needing to be re-outputted onto acetate, re-exposed and re-printed. This can all be done, theoretically, by Tuesday night and that leaves Wednesday, Thursday and Friday AM to put these fuckers in their frames that I am NOT calling frames.

Today.
Awoke happy in Chautauqua (after late gate crashing a wedding there as guest of guest Matthew XBoss - and seeing rock star pal Reese Campbell there), community of elder crunchy goodness on a long skinny lake. I looked across the lake and for a moment believed I was looking at Canada, a byproduct of growing up, living in the Middling City where across the lush green & mighty Niagara rests our polite neighbors = Canada.

Stopped in the grand Westfield Diner, where I have consumed many cups of their awful coffee, lumpy meatloaf and other items. Today it was an omelet that came after an undinerlike interval.
A chainsmoking waitress, hard to ignore, was pondering the artist responsible for the song I Love Myself Today that she heard on a tv commercial, wrongly assuming that it was Joan Jett. I had to intervene. It's Bif Naked, she's from Canada, I tossed in her direction. Bif Who? And so that went. I said I'm 99% sure (actually more, but why say that? I photographed Bif Naked at some music event last summer and her live rendition was, how do you say, kickass?) that that's who that is. I said If you have a computer you can always do a search for the song by title. Blank stare through the cig haze.
A lunkheaded-looking young fellow to my left, eating and staring blankly into space, sometimes at another, younger and non-cahinsmoking waitress, when I asked him how far something in Dunkirk was from Westfield queried? Do you drive like it's Sunday morning or Tuesday evening?
I said, well, today I'm driving like it's Tuesday at 5:05PM.

Diner Zen and wisdom is part of what makes our country so wondrous, a small surprise in every road trip.

One more tale. En route to printing studio did some AOL writing, researching and happened upon an exurban faire (not fair) devoted to gardens, etc.
In the midst of it sat an older woman making hats and giving them away. I photographed her, asked her name, she's the mom of famed artist Charlie Clough and she gave me a golden metallic rain hat festooned with all sorts of silk flowers that she insisted on plunking down upon my sweaty mind and head.
She took my face in her hands, looked at me hard and said You do good work. You never say anything negative about anybody. Why is that?
I said There's already enough negative energy in the world.
She said Keep on doing what you do and I then floated away back to my car that matches my nouveau chapeau.
Love.