no screaming this time, just a big stick
I came across a sheet of old slides, mostly of much older pastels. I taped them to a window and photographed them. The onion and tomato image was recovered from my parent’s house after my mom died; drawn in 1976. Over the winter it’s easy to plop something from the fridge onto my drawing table and use it to ‘keep my tools sharp’. I should be doing more of it.
In the early 2000s I did a yearly workshop on preparing graduate and undergraduate poster fair posters. I did them for over five years and eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t find the time. And I thought a move to digital presentations was inevitable. I kept the material in my Penn State web space and even twenty years later I received requests from all over the world to use the information. When Penn State closed the personal server and hence, all its web sites, I thought the need would finally be gone. Over the past year, though, I’ve received several requests for larger versions of the poster. Apparently, the main image has been used and credited in other websites, and the link it provided is now broken. So here it is again:
The image above—a poster about making posters—links to a much larger version. The original website is now in my space, too davidstong.com/postershow. I removed links in the guide and on the site that went to other postershow help pages- they were all dead.
I’m not sure about some of this. Seeing it here helps me step back, assess and adjust.
The library wasn’t quite open when I got there, so I ate the breakfast the café had packed. When I looked up. Warren was walking towards me. I felt a wave of relief; he was laughing and talking with his sister. She was laughing, too.
“Good morning, coach.” They both said at the same time.
“Good morning. Great to see you both. Ready to dig into some books?” Don’t even mention baseball. Or yesterday. Or crying.
On Friday, December 15, 2023, my granddaughter and I returned to my parked Saturn on Spring Street. As we checked the meter, three women came out of the Monarch beauty salon and yelled that someone had just hit my car and went down Cherry alley. “It was a dark orange-ish red pick-up.” They showed me pictures and a movie clip from their outdoor camera. My granddaughter and I walked down the alley to the VFW parking lot where we found the truck, got the license number, and noted the scratches where it struck my car. I called the non-emergency police number.
In the video, you can see the Saturn lurching. Fortunately, my car was in gear with the parking brake on- otherwise the car behind me would’ve been damaged, too. The frame rate didn’t capture the body panel caught on the truck and snapping back into position. I got that from the witnesses description.
The officer who arrived was surly from the start. “How do you know somebody hit your car?”, he shouted. It turned out he knew the owner of the truck that I reported. I explained about the witnesses and the photo evidence. The officer reluctantly went into the bar to find the driver. “I’ll go get him,” he said. After about five minutes, he came out followed by the driver, Ricky D. McClintic, who was obviously drunk but coherent. At first McClintic asked how I knew it was him, then admitted to thinking “he hit the curb.” The officer suggested the driver would make good and we agreed to work without reporting to insurance. The officer made no citation even though McClintic had left the scene. He advised me that I should come to him if McClintic didn’t pay up.
I opened the photo of the Colorado in Photoshop and lightly sharpened the license area. It’s fuzzy, but legible- the last four digits are 0620. It’s clearly McClintic’s truck.
My car suffered a cracked headlight assembly, a broken bulb that I replaced so it was safe to drive, a detached lower skirt that the Monarch staff said was actually pulled off hooked to the truck but snapped back (It’s plastic.), a deep scuff in the finish, a radiater leak, and a battery problem that may or may not be linked to the crash.
This is the truck where it side swiped my car.
The staff of the Monarch Beauty Salon on Spring Street was extremely helpful. They shared the video and photos as well as offered a place to relax and sit while we waited. They even had candy for my granddaughter. Wonderful folks!
My mechanic fixed only enough to pass inspection, keeping the total under $200. I sent McClintic a copy of the bill and sent a copy of my note to Officer Brower. Weeks went by and I sent another note. Mclintic got in touch, said he was broke and asked if he could pay in two installments. I agreed and waited a few weeks till he got in touch and said he could send a quarter, $45, of the amount. Over several weeks, McClintic mailed me three payments of $45. He never sent the final payment nor did he respond to calls and letters.
A few years back I made one of these for the library. I posted with more detail then. They don’t always have cat’s eyes; sometimes they’re funny and blue. It depends on the pumpkin- what it needs. If it wants to laugh, I let it.
Well that was lucky. I had no real desire to see what kind of creatures were making that noise in the barn. The ballplayer’s dad was at the table looking at a big basket of muffins. Mom sat a mug across the table from him.
“Good morning, sir.” Good start, anyway. “Your son is a remarkable ball player.”
“He’s pretty remarkable at everything he tries. Thankfully he’s trying to help his family just now.”
“Is that why he has a job at the Inn?” I asked. I figured I’d jump right to it.
“Pretty much. It wouldn’t be what we’d chose if things were different. But they are what they are.” I would have asked a little more but the ballplayer came in with his little sister. They were a real team, the little one idolizing the big brother.
I picked up a ball and gave it a gentle, underhand toss right into the zone. She held the bat out, letting the ball hit it and bounce back to me. “That isn’t the way you teach pitching, is it, coach?”
She took her stance again, looked me right in the eye. I didn’t want to embarrass either of us with another soft pitch, so I wound up and let one fly towards an inside corner. It wasn’t my fastest pitch, but it had some pepper on it. She dropped her left shoulder a bit, started to crouch, then swung. There was a crack, and something flew by my left ear.
“Coach, we only have two balls. You have to catch them, or we’ll spend all our time in the woods looking for them.” I picked up the second ball and she took her stance. Her eyes didn’t leave mine. I took a few steps back so I’d have more time to react. This was a tough player. My eyes locked on hers. I wound up, then curved one over the outside rear corner. Or, at least, that’s where it was heading when she smacked it. It came back right in the same place as the last one, but I managed to get a glove up. It cracked into the glove. She was aiming her hit so I could catch it. I’ll be darn!
When Laurie posted the image on Facebook, I was caught completely by surprise. My eyes filled with tears and I stopped breathing. I had no pictures. My mother had saved a few, but by the time my brother and I cleaned the house after mom passed, the pictures were gone. Mom loved Celeste, too.
A writer. A thinker. Compassionate, soulful and deep. Her eyes look at me now accusing – and I don’t have the words to respond. She teaches Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to spellbound students at Berkeley. I just survived. She deserves more now. She deserved more then.
Celeste. She was an undergrad at Penn, getting her bachelors and masters concurrently, destined for doctoral work through a fellowship at Yale. On a whim, she took a part time job at a pizza shop just off campus, within sight of the highrise dorms. I was running the ovens in the shop and closing up at night. She was different than any of the other students we’d hired; different than anyone I’d known. Tall, lean, agile, she was quick to laugh, quicker with a comeback and brilliantly engaging in even the most casual conversation. Through her influence I read Mysteries of Udolpho and Melmouth the Wanderer. I developed a fondness for Blake and Coleridge, and an immature awareness of Spencer and Milton. I was engaged by the criticism of Harold Bloom, and the place held by Marx, Nietsche, and the Transcendentalists in literary criticism. I appreciated the simple and anticipated the profound. Celeste.
“Careful, coach,” Hailey warned me, then came past me to grab a bundle of wooden slats. She unrolled it between the combs so it would provide a solid footing for me. “And this is the brace,” she said as she picked up a metal pole that I hadn’t seen. “Help me push this comb a bit,” she said as we both leaned on the same comb. It gave easily, swinging on some sort of pivot up at the top. The little tad dropped one end of the pole between a floor rod and the comb then let the comb swing back to rest against it. “That should make it easier!”
“Thanks! You really know what you’re doing in here don’t you?” She was ahead of me again. I hung back to watch. She picked up a long metal tube with a hose coming off one end. “Is that the ‘extractor’ your dad mentioned?”
“Yeah. We don’t have to pull anything into the tank. Just a little into the tube… like this.” She turned to the comb and found a spot to plunge the tube into. It seemed to sink in easily. Hailey smiled and pulled up a handle on top of a canister that I now saw the hose was attached to. Just that quick she pulled the tube back out and took a small tool of some sort and pushed the wax back in place. “Hold out a finger.”
On May 31, there was a post from the Bellefonte School District on facebook.The district wanted to be able to trademark their “B” logo and requested the submission of a more ‘trademarkable’ letterform. They used a googledoc to convey the particulars for creating and submitting, and there’s also a link on the District homepage:
Opportunity to Brand the “B” Logo
The district has a Branding Committee and it is opening up the opportunity to staff and to the community to help brand the “B” logo. The current red “B” is not unique enough to be copyrighted. Therefore, the district would like a version created that can be copyrighted in the future. This opportunity was originally available to students at the middle school and high school levels, and now the Branding Committee would like renderings submitted from the community.
Please watch the following video for more information. You can find the form to submit a rendering in the description section of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQnPf50AmaA
The committee allowed the inclussion of a one page artists statement, but I chose to let the work stand on its own. After all, it will have to. My rational, though is very simple. The District uses “Be” as a tag line on posters and web campaigns; as in “Be Responsible, Be Respectful, Be Kind…” There’s a list, but ultimately, the charge is “Be”. Just “Be”
So that’s it. I got rid of the clichéd slab serif, switched to a contemporary sans stroked for consistency, then superimposed one letter over the other to maintain the historic “B”. It includes a subtle Raider’s “R”.
I think it’s exactly what’s needed. We’ll see what the committee thinks.
Edit: October 6:
Just dawned on me that this might be better. Oh well. Too late. Download a pdf or download a pdf of reverse art
