Resurrection or Wrapping Things Up?

Hello again!

Remember the time you decided to paint a room in your home? You end up choosing two or three patriotically named colors to liven up the room (New England Clam Chowder and Georgia Sunrise for example), you scrub and sand the walls, drop the canvas and newspapers on the floor, mask off the trim, throw a coat or two on, let it dry, then move on to the walls. Everything looks good. You roll up your tarp, hammer the paint cans shut, peel the masking tape off–and then realize that the door to the guest room you painted glowing yellow-orange Georgia Sunrise to match the walls really ought to have been the creamier New England Clam Chowder you used on the trim. You still have enough paint to do it, but you already put away the sandpaper and tarp, and your brushes are still wet from a thorough rinsing. “No one’s going to care,” you think to yourself, but every time you step foot in that room and admire your craftsmanship, that door bugs you. Your artist friends stop by and say something like, “Why didn’t you do the door in Clam Chowder, like the trim? It would really make the room compositionally more sound considering the way the light comes in.” You already know this, and it’s no use telling them that you already put your supplies away. Someday, you think, you’ll get around to fixin’ that door.

This was how I felt last summer when I got to the East Coast and everyone told me that I should have stopped in Athens, Georgia to check out their homemade album covers. I couldn’t backtrack, especially after I had already rolled up my drop cloth and left Atlanta for Baltimore.

Luckily, I had an opportunity to revisit the South and spend a couple of days in Athens, a college town an hour and a half east of Atlanta. I visited a few record stores (pictures of records are on Picasa) and interviewed Mike Turner, the founder of Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records. The “Red Pony Clock” 45 in the record of the day sidebar is on his label. More about Mike Turner and Athens in a future post. One of these days I’ll get out to Portland, Oregon to see their homemade album covers.

This is a roundabout way of reintroducing the blog, talking about painting and the likes, so now on to the real business: a brief update, since nearly a year has passed since the last post.

This past April, I presented my research from summer 2008 at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. I made a display that now sits in Eclipse Records in St. Paul. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

The past month or so I’ve been working on a second UROP grant to dig deeper into the Twin Cities music scene for homemade album covers. Last summer’s project engaged in seeking out homemade album covers over contemporary space by visiting a dozen major cities–this one is about keeping the variable of space constant and exploring through time what these covers mean and have meant to the people who made and collected them. In a future post I will write more specifically about the kinds of things I have been up to my neck in.

Best,
James