Tasks & Flashes

Meanwhile, though, I’m forced to content myself with a few quick notes about my life today just to prevent someone from declaring my blog dead and shipping it off to the mortuary.

But before I begin listing tasks, let me throw in a couple of Gratifying News Flashes.

Gratifying News Flash 1: Rich Thigpen has just published a very touching new review of Stuck Rubber Baby that’s now online at the PRISM web site. My sincere (if rushed) thanks for the warm words about my book, Rich, and my condolences for the loss of your dad.

Gratifying News Flash 2: The "Alabama" installment of the ambitious "Americana" series of art exhibits that I told you about two blog entries ago either opens today (according to the information I was originally given) or opened yesterday (according to the CCA Wattis Institute web site‘s current home page). Either way, this show theoretically includes pages of original art from Stuck Rubber Baby. I thought I would remind my Bay Area readers about this in case some of you would like to check the show out.)

Now on to what’s been keeping me so busy….

Task 1: Tonight’s the first meeting of the Cartooning class I’m teaching this semester at MCLA. It’s structured differently this second time around (two evening classes of moderate length every week instead of one galumphing four-hour one). Hopefully the shorter, two-hour periods will leave me and my students less glassy-eyed with exhaustion when classtime ends.

Task 2: I’ve made great progress with my design work for North Adams Open Studios (three print ads and a poster completed so far), but I still have to put together a coherent map showing where the 75-plus participating artists will be showing their work.

Task 3: There’s also the matter of selecting my own artwork that I’ll be showing during the aforementioned Open Studios weekend. This entails rummaging through flat files, making choices, and arranging to have the chosen items mounted and shrink-wrapped for display. (Someday I’ll be able to afford frames.)

Task 4: Several Stuck Rubber Baby pages and a couple of other small drawings are going to be exhibited later this month in Pittsfield as part of an exhange between the Storefront Artists Project in that city and North Adams’s own MCLA Gallery 51.

Task 5: I’m applying for funding from the Northern Berkshire Cultural Council that I hope will allow me to publish a couple more issues at least of the North County Perp.