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Sunday, April 06, 2003

 
9:38 PM: [#] [0]

so i realized i just made roman caps sound icky, though when you see the exemplars with the carefully geometric lines and circles, how could you not just fall in love with them? :D i was talking with terrilynn about them and the difference we're seeing is the amount of pen manipulation involved: the roman caps we're learning are done at about 20 degrees and with standard calligraphic movements. teri martin's caps, which are stunning even without serifs, involve a fair amount of pressure/release which make the middles just the subtlest shade thinner in the middle than on the ends (i also think they're of a slightly taller/thinner proportion). we're practicing at one-inch caps and that sort of thing is muuuuuch easier to do at the smaller text sizes one works with for text (and smaller, thinner nibs). so i still have hope. :)

the edible tea was interesting but not as tea-like as i hoped. i forgot i had meant to bring the digital camera. :( terrilynn brought oriental tea cups from england and the tea was good, but the actual exhibit needed better crowd control: you were always in someone's way or standing in a line. some of the pieces could actually have been books (my favorite: mixed messages, a flag book made out of a crepe-like substance; i ate the "gracious|cruelty" page), while some only looked like books (like the don quiote lasagne-bound flan with the laser-transfer covers). war bites was a large tin of star-shaped cookies with presidential soundbytes stamped on them. and of course, someone made fortune cookies. sometimes it seemed there was no thought of a book at all: what were the asian pear slices about? tasty, but incomprehensible.

but they also had a selection of books from ucsd's special collection you could pick up and look through if you donned gloves, which i of course immediately did. book exhibits without touchable books always make me want to cry. one of the books was an artist's journal and he had used an izone to take pictures of the young book arts exhibit. they're the perfect size. why didn't i think of that? another book artist had published photos from his pinhole camera and bound them to the backs of flattened film canisters with electrical tape. one perfect tiny book was about feathers. another with a full text was about bread, a large fabric accordian book bound into a bread pan.

on the way home, we drove down del dios highway, which is another of those gorgeous random southern california roads which winds its way through vast canyons and swollen hills. halfway through we stopped and watched eight hot-air balloons rise like slow, silent rain falling into the sky like a lake.