This scares and impresses me at once...

It is well done, but is it legal?
And what the hell is it for???

I saw this on the way to work this morning. Now, it may not be made by a rank amateur, it may have some polish, but I consider it well within the bounds of Impromptu for a couple of reasons:

• The proportions are such that the van looks ready to tip over.
• The addition was obviously a case of "making do" with what these people had at hand.  

Don't get me wrong: I cast no aspersions here. This is obviously a well-made structure, but it looks so tacked on to the van. I tried to peek inside to see any structural changes made to support the added weight, but there was a rather cross looking fella in the passenger's seat, watching me with wary eyes. How do they drive through Manhattan looking like this? Don't they get pulled over constantly?

It didn't have commercial tags, even. Crazy crazy. I hope it is helping someone make his way into a successful business, because this mod shows cajones.

At first it seems so jubilant...

And then you realize it is the Maelstrom of the Soul itself... Over the weekend, my last housemate moved out after a fairly long and sometimes difficult transition. We parted as friends, for which I am glad: I was not always terribly nice or patient, and expected we would not be able to manage that. All and all, I am happy to have a place of my own again after these years of budgeting and compromising in order to pay off debt. Taking over the apartment is a real benchmark of how hard I have worked to get out of the mess I made a few years back.

I have a lot of work to do on the place: I am going to be doing a very cheap sprucing up of the entire place, so I will post things as that progresses.

Yes I do, warts and trash and all.

Not much posting this week, but it has been a good one. I will be posting some of my old zines soon--going through a few things since the house is all in an uproar. The weather is just perfect right now, lovely mild temperatures, gentle rain... Nice. 

Back in 2000, I was in love with someone who lived in the Mid-West, and we had a bit of an on-again, off-again relationship. I had just moved to New York City, so when she decided to move here, I was just beside myself with joy and all that. As some of you may remember, when I pitch woo, I make little paper things for the lady-fair of mine eye. In this case, the object of my affection had both a cat and a dog, so I figured I would write something for them. The downloadable pamphlets below were both drawn in a single sitting late one night in 2000. I was living in Greenpoint in an illegal sublet above a factory, pining for some normalcy and perhaps some romance.

They are rather primitive, but capture a bit of how excited and hopeful I was. Originally, they were folded into pamphlets. I broke the scans out into paginated PDFs.

So You're Moving to the Big City (for Cats)

So You're Moving to the Big City (for Dogs)

These should go in the Valentines section under Ephemera from Crushes, but what the hell. 

Oh, and the relationship lasted for a while, more then less happily. Alas. We'll always have these bits of paper to commemorate the good times. 

A subtle sky though a window, smudgedly

I am packing both cameras still, and the photos so often diverge in purpose and execution and beauty, I can't put them in the same entry.

It looks to be a fairly chaotic week, but it is all good.