Stuff and Moonshine

I'm grateful to Susie Bubble for always digging up such interesting clothes to blog about. Here are some dresses made from photos of different textured objects, blown up and printed on fabric, which is then sewn into simple T-shirt-like shapes.

Dave Malki et al. are putting out a second Machine of Death anthology, and have posted three preview stories. It's impressive how wide a variety of things can be done with the anthology's basic premise of a machine that tells you how you will die (but not when) and is never wrong.

Sent off my entry to the Toronto Star's short-story contest, because I had a non-fantasy non-sf story that needed a venue. Analog returned 'The Emmet' because it wasn't quite SFnal enough, but they were very polite about it. Funny how this coincided with sovay's viewing of Phase IV.

I've been unsure for weeks how to introduce this, but French photographer Sacha Goldberger has been collaborating for several years with his grandmother Frederika, staging humorous photos, and eventually began focussing on a character called Super-Mamika, a grandmother superheroine. They just closed their third show of photographs featuring the character and other elderly superheroes/villains. Behind the humour, or alongside it, Goldberger is interested in the same territory explored in things like Watchmen -- what is a superhero's life like outside of the panels? -- and is also very much aware of the Jewish background to most of those characters. In other words, it's not coincidence that of his three models in the most recent show, one (Mamika) spent the war eluding the Nazis and helping other people do so; and one (Alexandre Halaunbrenner AKA Dark Papouka - he's Vader's grandpa) is a man who survived the camps as a child and spent much of his adult life tracking down Klaus Barbie.

Organized my closet, took a bag of stuff to the thrift store and while there, found a pair of pants to complete my aviatrix outfit.

Looked through the various "creative" job listings, and applied for three or four things before imposter syndrome kicked in. It's easier to be brazen in email - they can't actually laugh *in* my face, for a start, and I figure I'm only wasting a couple of seconds of their time instead of a half-hour. I even did 1950s-style hair and makeup on myself and had green_trilobite take a bunch of head shots so I could apply for a stylist job on a photoshoot. Unfortunately the ad asked that I name my salary expectations: on the one hand, any real stylists I looked up had a payscale that was way higher than I was comfortable asking for given my total lack of history doing makeup on anyone but myself (and the occasional fellow-performer in amateur theatre); on the other, asking less would probably give myself away as an amateur. Eventually honesty won out and I cited the hourly rate I usually get for office work. I guess the worst that can happen is that they won't respond. Actually it'd probably be scarier if they did respond and I have to keep faking it. Aargh.

The other one shows the make-up better, but my long face looks better in profile than front-on.

Having googled "imposter syndrome," I suspect I'm misusing the term. Apparently you have to actually be successful first, and then feel like it's all a mistake.

ETA -- Well, I actually got a fairly nice reply that wasn't a "no," so I'm at least under consideration. : )

Been experimenting with digitally manipulating photos to give them more of a vintage-y, quasi-Daguerreotype feel.