Toothbrushes off to Cal Expo, the California State Fair!

 

Selecting and documenting toothbrushes for Cal Expo to display

I spent nearly a week rummaging through half of the International Toothbrush Collection selecting a wide variety of toothbrushes ~ except the standing toothbrushes are already in one display case and the vernacular chew sticks in another ~ for the Cal Expo folks to display as they see fit. In all, about 300 toothbrushes from over 2,000 will be on display in the Wild, Weird, and Wacky Collections portion of the California State Fair. The State Fair, Cal Expo, has two websites! Big Fun and Cal Expo. Go figure!

Inaugural Week

Toothbrushes lined up to be photographed.

Besides my relief and jubilation at the inauguration of Barack Obama, work on the International Toothbrush Collection continued: editing records; photographing toothbrushes, renaming, cropping, and color adjusting image files; uploading image files to the server; linking image files to data records. My biennial blitz will have to become annual!

Great art car pulls through again!

I’ve been yearning to start painting again. When I heard that Vera Fields was selling stretchers and canvas of her late husband, the prolific  San Francisco painter Curtis Fields, I claimed the four largest ones for myself. Twice I drove to San Francisco to strap the canvases to the roof of my car. On the first day I had 3 stretchers on top, and one sticking out back. On the second day I strapped a 4′ by 8′ stretched canvas on top. Colette the cat greets me.At my framer’s.

On January 11 I had delivered two re-framed works to the SFMOMA Artists’ Gallery in Fort Mason (see below) and picked up one that also needed some attention.  If I can’t fix them myself, I bring them to my framer, Lars Lucker, owner of North Berkeley Framing. I love chatting with Lars. You can see one of his own drawings on the left side of the photo above. He’s been my framer since 1987!

Marsha discussing her new series of paintings.

I went to my art group, my second meeting with them, for just an hour. I  met with Erica Kremenak (left) and Marsha Balian (right). We got hooked up together through Jamie Brunson. I had to leave early to attend a panel discussion in San Francisco on the Holocaust Effect in Contemporary Art. Analisa Goodin moderated.

Flier announcing the afternoon seminar.

It was an interesting and difficult seminar. Lots of post-modern language, which is tough enough to read but listening in the dark is even more difficult. Lots of words like transgressive, representations, sacrilized crammed into one sentence while images of art made by secondary witnesses to the Holocaust capture one’s attention. I plan to see several of the artists who spoke again.

Unhacked!

I received an email just a few minutes ago from IX Web Hosting. It said this: “The status of your ticket (936028) has been changed from On-Hold to Resolved by Alex N.”  However, I see that none of the 100 images I uploaded yesterday appear! Back on the phone, on iChat, on webmail. Ian, Alex, Kiril, and last (definitely not least) Clyde all helped to restore the images, the front page, and I learned a bit more about web shells and directories in the process. But missed the first hour of Garrison Keillor.

Click here to search the International Toothbrush Collection.

Toothbrush Collection Hacked!

 The Toothbrush Collection web site got HACKED! I’m somewhat amused.

 

Public access is not possible until my web host restores the front page from their archive.

The Toothbrush Collection’s excellent programmer, the renowned Mike Higgins, doesn’t have to worry about this! Instead, he can recover from his New Year’s Eve on Angel Island and Annual New Year’s Day Media Blitz and prepare for his annual birthday paddle Into The Storm at Bodega Rocks!  The hacker calls himself “Technical”, gives his web site as WwW.starhackrz.CoM, which doesn’t exist. It’s a simple hack, probably run by a script.

Is this a sign of the renown of the International Toothbrush Collection? Probably not.

Toothbrushes

Is collecting toothbrushes art?

This is one of 4 boxes of toothbrushes awaiting entry into my online toothbrush database at www.toothbrushcollection.org

Corey Schultz came over for eight hours of data entry, working from my paper documentation and the toothbrushes and their packages. While he did data entry, I accessioned toothbrushes. That’s the first step toward adding anything to a new collection, and includes preliminary documentation, especially the donor’s name, the year and country of acquisition.

I’m so far behind that I’ve run out of these large boxes in which I store recently acquired toothbrushes. So now it’s time to photograph toothbrushes. Once their photos have been taken, the toothbrushes come out of their envelopes and go into plexiglass storage boxes.