It's been another week of planetarium and movie outings, the first largely because we got caught up in snarled traffic the previous week and didn't really get to look around before the Pink Floyd sky show (and after which the whole thing was closing up shop.) This week, we wandered downtown for some amazing beachside tacos, free general admission, and another show dedicated entirely to the moon on one of those perfectly moderate summer evenings. Last night, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which turned out to be a suitably dark and gothic period piece, even though, in the last showing of the night, there were only like 5 people in the theater, so I doubt it's doing well amid the Barbieheimer summer.
Otherwise, I have been at my usual business. This past week, a couple of journal acceptances after a longish drought, of the home improvements poems, which will of course have to push the zine release I'd been loosely planning back into winter to accommodate those publications. I will likely still be occupied with the villains poem videos that debut next month and still promoting COLLAPSOLOGIES a bit, so I'm cool with it. Plus, there is all that I have planned for October and my #31daysofhalloween shenanigans to keep me busy. I will also be sharing some of the home improvements pieces on Instagram that have come back to me anyway over the next few weeks.
My planetarium visits with J have no doubt been influencing my visual experiments, or vice versa, but just when I thought I was done with the star collages, there were somehow more. I've been moving in some other directions, but I feel like I may still return, so am hesitant to call that particular series done. I will be focusing more on video in the coming weeks, so we'll see if I have as much time for daily artmaking as I do currently.
With J's new flexible job and more freedom, we've been doing the tourist-in-our-own-city thing and hitting up many of the activities we haven't been able to do the past 8 years due to his schedule or mine, including all the museums. Next up is the aquarium at the end of the month, which I haven't been to since the late 90s, so expect lots of sea poems and collages from this once dolphin-loving teen afterward. One of the last poems I wrote this summer was about horse girls vs. dolphin girls and how you were probably one or the other. We plan on hitting up the Field and the Art Institute in August.
This week's writing assignments have been devoted to more artsy Halloween shenanigans, whether you should buy vintage linens and various design-related trivia. I am enjoying the extra hours writing for HD since they are a little less rigorous than the research-intensive lessons, which I have been working on less with fewer must-haves in the queue the past couple of months, with only one of two things catching my eye. The cooking and restaurant articles have been filling in the gaps.
As for new projects, I have been musing over the eventual final form of granata for next year, which is too long to be a simple zine project, so I may be working it into some sort of art/text hybrid book..maybe coffee table bookish and square, possibly with a hardcover, though that can get expensive, though creating the journals have helped me to figure out how much, though will color interior, it will be quite a bit more. Currently, there are still a dozen or more pieces out in submission, so we'll see if those land anywhere. The RUINPORN manuscript is also basically finished and in need of a few tweaks, so there is that as well. The two current longer manuscripts are still missing parts, but up until my short hiatus the past few weeks, were still churning along nicely and at least one may be finished by the year's end if I actually get back to my daily writing habit.
I've been working on getting out author copies and initial orders for the slew of dgp books released in June and July, with another crest of the first new titles due soon and a couple stragglers from 2022. Submissions are coming in briskly, but I have barely been able to dip my toes in the pool, so that will come as soon as August closes out.
