This summer (and now autumn) has been pretty rough on me. I actually got so busy with cranking out shoots and posting them while at the same time moving out of my studio, that I sort of forgot about this blog entirely. I’m not sure whether I should just dump samples of the five shoots I did between mid August and mid September, or if I should dole out samples in 5 different blog posts.
Actually, does anyone read this blog much? I’m having a terrible time finding places to post samples of my newest work. Tumblr is no longer x-rated, and it’s a pain to get things shuttled over to instagram and all that. Sucks if you make your art on a desktop computer and now you have to like get it onto a tablet or iphone just to let people know what you’re up to.
I guess I’ll just go in order, and make this a few posts. I’ll probably do a separate post about losing my studio, which is something I haven’t quite come to terms with yet.
First things first. “Money Shot” and “Mile High Club”.
So I suppose a tiny bit of context is in order. I was renting a large warehouse building that was a separate parcel to the lot that my house is on. When I moved into the house and warehouse property, the real estate market was pretty optimistically hot. However, I was doing well enough in my income that maybe I could have bought the two pieces of land as one. Of course, I’ll never know because that’s that not the way things unfolded.
I think the two pieces of land treated as one would have been zoned as “commercial” and it was important for me to keep my house as “residential” or something like that. So when an opportunity came to split the two parcels into two (well, rather than combine them as one) I took it. In 2013 I bought the house lot with the intention that I would keep renting the warehouse lot until some later date when I’d buy it.
As the years went on, my plans kept changing and maybe the space was always too much room. I did some amazing things in that space. Everything from building 40 foot long sci-fi robot base hallways to well, all the sets that I ever built for all my shoots. It was a great, huge open space with no supporting columns in the way, and I want to do a proper retrospective on everything I accomplished there, but not quite yet. The loss of my workspace is still a little too new.
Long story short, once it came time to try to buy the studio, a few things conspired against me. A: I couldn’t quite afford it. B: Being zoned as commercial meant having to put something like 25% down. C: The fact that it was on a visible numbered route meant that it was a good place to have a business if you needed some curbside visibility, but to me this wasn’t a feature I wanted. That also probably put it out of my price range. In any event, the sellers and I tried to come up with a price that would work, but mainly the banks told me it wasn’t a good idea, and I agreed. Once you factored in the fact that the studio was impossible to heat in the winter, and difficult to cool in the hottest days of summer, I then decided I was better off just building my own building instead of having an additional mortgage to deal with.
Of course in the meantime I had fallen into the trap of “hey, got a huge space? Just full it full of projects you may or may not ever get to one day!” Project cars, unrealized photo shoot props, old lingering props from shoots that are too cool to get rid of? Well, that studio, which got nicknamed Wonderland, was a magical place that also ended up being a pretty hip play party space, so long as said party wasn’t in the middle of February.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This isn’t supposed to be my “Requiem for Wonderland”, this is supposed to be about what I did manage to get done, once I got a hard deadline for when I needed to be out of there.
So December 2018 my attempts to buy the space failed, and I decided I’d start to withdraw from the space. I had built two freestanding rooms, which were my dressing room and a partition to make it easier to heat the larger area. I decided to disassemble those rooms, and salvage that building material for ongoing house renovations.
The building went up on the market around January ’19 and I just sorta kept plugging away at taking things apart, while doing shoots and camshows and all the while, my poor house was absorbing the massive amount of stuff that I had to find new homes for. I think I actually calculated how many couches or couch-like pieces of furniture I had, and came up with a number like 11 or 12. I gave two away, brought two to the dump, and disassembled that giant red fainting couch that was really based on a 4×8 sheet of plywood. And even then, I was left with just slightly too many couches for my house, so I had to rearrange things in house to accept some of the ones I intended to keep. I did a little game of select a few crappy pieces of furniture from the house to sacrifice, so I could keep the nicer ones that lived out in the studio.
Anyway, this was essentially my entire spring and summer. I managed to bang out some good shoots like “Cumbo” and “Saccharine Stupid” and “”Cheshire Candy”, but that hard deadline to be out of the studio always seems like a can getting kicked down the road. The sellers had a few interested buyers, but the building wasn’t a fast moving property.
Of course, I will admit, I was a sneaky devil here and there. The roof leaked, and required a few pans in strategic places to catch the drips. I may have – ahem- exaggerated the extent of the leaks by replacing the little pans of water with 5 gallon buckets of waters. Heck, anything to slow the sale, why not? Ain’t I a stinker?
Anyway, so the first week of August rolls around, and apparently they have a solid buyer, and then they give me a deadline. I gotta be out by September 1st! Can you be out by September 1st? Uhhhh… I think so. Now it would simply have been enough to have gotten all my shit out of there on time, and it really came down to a matter of “well, if you can’t figure out what you’re going to do with it, all you need to do is drag whatever it is up the hill 20 feet to my lot, and throw a tarp over it. And then deal with it later”
That sort of thing. And then somehow I got inspired to actually finish up some of those unfinished projects. Did I have time to do that? 3 weeks left? Could I bang out like 4 or 5 shoots, and ambitious shoots at that- in 3 weeks? Why not try. If they end up looking half assed, it’ll be better than if they didn’t exist.
So I had this slot machine tucked away in the corner, which always had been intended for a new Vegas showgirl shoot.
The idea had always been to make some new artwork to be on some frosted plexiglass (or polycarbonite or whatever they call that stuff). The artwork itself had been 80% finished like, 5 years ago, but like everything, I had been a stupid perfectionist about it so I hadn’t made it all happen. And though I didn’t plan on throwing the slot machine away, I knew if I didn’t make this shoot happen NOW, it probably wouldn’t happen anywhere any time soon. And the outfit itself was pretty much done, having been used years ago in
“Showgirl”. 
So I quickly wrapped up the artwork in photoshop, and my intention was to print it on waterslide decal paper used for temporary tattoos. That was basically a disaster. I actually shot a series of videos of me going through that process, but I don’t think I’m going to edit them together, because I look like total shit in those videos. I basically look like a person who hasn’t slept in days and have 3 weeks to do 3 months worth of projects. I dunno, maybe I’ll take a look at the videos and I can make something out of them and toss them on youtube. They’re a little too close to a “how the sausage is made” moments for me though.
Oh, and did I mention at the same time all this happened, I was in the middle of house renovations? Yeah.. if you didn’t hear from me much on social media it was because of too much shit going on in my life.
So I did manage to make a workable, though simple set out of what I have here. And those two huge dice? Would you believe those are the boxes that my Power Mac g4 and CRT monitor came in, that I bought back in 2001? Those boxes have been turned into huge baby blocks and christmas presents for many many photoshoots over the years.
So yeah, August 20th, I got “Money Shot” done, with what, 10 days left to do whatever needed to be done. Hmmm.. fresh off my success of that shoot I looked around and wondered what other unrealized shoot might also see the light of day…
Well, enter “Mile High Club”.
I made this flight attendant outfit back in 2008, and had all that tacky blue and brown patterned material sitting in a bin, as well as matching carpet and foam, and even the LED running lights. With 10 days left to Get Shit Done, I looked around at my pile of ideas and realized that I had all the elements ready to go, and best of all, I didn’t have to waste time making a new costume or anything. Since I was like you need to spend every available minute out in that studio because it’s going away, this seemed like a good choice for a new shoot.
Could I bang out that shoot as well?
So I managed to get this shoot done on August 30th, and though I didn’t get as much detail as I wanted from like the upholstered seats, what else could I have done? Rented a 747 and then hoped the color scheme would match? Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
Now I admit here on this blog post I’m skipping over a few other shoots I hammered out, but I’ll talk about those in the next blog update. There was a fair amount of overlap in building one shoot while preparing to shoot on another, and things like oh, I have this set ready to go, but the outfit isn’t ready, so I’ll switch gears and work on this other set, and oh, I’m too exhausted today to get the shoot done, I’ll roll that over into tomorrow, and since I’m already using the drill, maybe I’ll just finish this set instead. Stuff like that.
And at the same time all this happened, I was still working on my house/ moving stuff/throwing stuff away and just freaking the fuck out. Basically 17 hour work days, but trying my best not to overwork myself to the point where no makeup in the world can hide my stress and lack of sleep. The fact that the pictures came out as good as they did (and the video not half bad either), is a miracle in itself.
To be continued in next blog post…