Caustic Paste

About a month and a half ago I found a great deal on craig's list. $4 for 4 packs of polaroid 600. So after a small adventure, I pay $4 in mostly quarters to an old guy while his somewhat anxious wife observed. Jump ahead a month and a half and I only have one pack left, the oldest looking pack of them all! There was a two pack box from K-mart that had some ridiculously low 80's price tag on it, I think it was about $18, FOR TWO PACKS! anyway this last pack seemed to be one of those.

So I load the pack up, and setup my shot, spend a minute focusing, getting the shot just right, put the filter on and press the shiny red shutter release button. The shutter opened, but nothing else changed, no glorious pop of the mirror or squeeky grind of the gears rolling my photo out, what the hell. I knew it had to be that the batteries had gone bad, I also knew what had to be done.

I moved into the bathroom, bringing with me a old empty plastic film cartridge, my camera, the top slip, and a crappy polaroid photo. In the total darkness I take the 80's dead battery pack out and feel my way around it until I can slip out the first photo. The photo glides out easier than I'd imagined. Next I had to fanaggle the photos one by one into the new cartridge back through the same slot I was pulling them out of the other cartridge. Thankfully these cartridges are flimsy cheap plastic and you can easily bend them. After a few monotonous minutes putting each of the 10 shots into the new cartridge I put the top slip in over them. Then felt around and found the camera, put the crappy polaroid photo in the camera so that I could fit the 600 film into the sx-70. For some reason when I'd put the cartridge in, three or four shots and the top slip would be forced through the small front slot of the cartridge, not allowing it to be fully inserted. After a few tries I secured the shot's into the cartridge and pushed them down into place.

It worked, all the normal photo taking sounds occurred and the top slip came out... Followed by half of the first photo, shit. I pulled the photo the rest of the way out. The chemical pod had ruptured and spread it's demon seed all over the innards of my camera. There was blueish purple caustic chemical paste all over my fingers. I was still pumped that I had saved 9 of my 1980's cartridge shots so I went and took a few more photos. All of the photos had random portions of the chemicals scattered all over them like butter on toast. You could tell the film was expired, it lacked definition and was yellow brown, consisting of mostly mid-tones.

That's when it hit me, like someone had touched my right eye with the tentacle of a jellyfish or bee stinger. I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, there was what appeared to be a bluish purple slug on my right eye lid. I immediately wiped it off with my finger followed by alot of water.

I get polaroid goo on my hands all the time, but this is the first time it had ever brought me physical pain. I got my chat on with Erick and told him about the ordeal. He sounded worried and started copy and pasting things about the caustic lye chemicals in 600 film chemical pods and their warnings, you know deep chemical burns and blindness. Tight. That's when I got super paranoid and washed my eye and skin around it like 50 times wondering if I'd go blind. 24 hours later my eye still stings, and I have a little sore burn like thing on my eyelid. It looks sorta like someone dug their grimey pinky nail into my skin and it got infected. I mean what's the worse that could happen?

So yeah, that photo above is the photo that got the chemical all over. It sort of reminds me of Pimento loaf, out of focus and growing mold.

So kids and dudes, let this be a lesson to you and your friends. If you get polaroid chemicals on your hands, for the love of sweet baby jesus(btw happy birthday player) DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE GET THAT SHIT IN YOUR EYES! Holy god, you will regret it for days to come. my eyeball feels like a cactus in my eye socket.

the end.

Halloween 2008

This halloween Nancey and I went as Andy Warhol and a giant tomato soup can.
My initial Idea was to buy some hula hoops and some canvas and construct a tube suit. For some reason Toys R' Us discontinued hula hoops, WEAK. What's up with that? Next stop was halloween express to find nancey a wig and some makeup. As many of you may know, most halloween expresses are fucking huge, so was this one. While wandering around overwhelmed and drooling I came across a Beer Can Costume for $40. At first $40 seemed like a ridiculous amount for a foam can suit. The more I thought about it $40 didn't seem so bad considering how much construction time it would save me. My eye was on the real prize, painting the label. It also didn't help that it was payday and I had an excess of cash. So I bought it. Next stop, Wal-mart. I know, I know it's satanic and evil, however it's sort of interesting shopping at Wal-mart, atleast in the midwest. You see the most unique, weird plethora of the human race. Anyway, I picked up a few yards of canvas, a quart of red rustoleum gloss paint, and various cheap paint brushes. Using the oil based rustoleum paints was sort of fun because they took awhile to dry, so if you made a mistake you were stuck with it and would have to wait until the next session to touch it up. This really made me think things out before I jumped in. After filling in the solid red and white color fields and the metallic gold seal circle I pinned the label up on a blank portion of wall.

I printed a few reference cans at work and did a rough layout with a pencil. Was sort of tricky since I was painting flat words based on a photo of the words on a round can. Didn't worry about it too much (obviously, look how jacked up my TOMATO type looks hahahaha). I had alot of problems with drips but in the end went back and chopped them all off. The final task was to sew the label on the beer can. This ended up being a HUGE pain in the ass. I had to sew it by hand obviously and there were some parts in the foam that were really tough to get the needle through. At one point i was using an altoids tin to push the needle through, leaving deep dents on it. Sewing only took a little over an hour but it seemed like forever. Got alot of positivity wandering around on Halloween. The party we went to was sort of weak but then we hit this club by our apartment and danced a little, there was a really tall gay dude dressed as michael phelps dominating the dance floor, that was pretty awesome. Erick was Ziggy Stardust that was also pretty awesome. Oh speaking of the weak party, Dave showed up with his crew. Armahn pulled off lil wayne. Thanks for the Bob Dole Tape. That's about it for halloween.

Creating this costume really got my hand painted juices flowing. I have alot of type paintings in the works and plan on doing some posts about them, so keep your eye out. I promise it won't be another few months hahaahahaha.