images from my first print media project

Tuesday was the date to turn in our first real project in the Interactive Media Certificate Program / IMCP Print Media module! We each got to pick a sometimes cryptic phrase...from a hat? I don't know, I left class a little early for Faith, Order, Witness, so Carolyn O'Barr, our Tuesday through Friday instructor, gave me Dreams of Swans, the only one left. We could choose to design a CD, DVD or book cover; I decided on a CD. Here's the front and the back! For the CD itself, I omitted the harder-edged urban fire escape on the upper left and Rotterdam roofs lower right, faded the cannabis leaf a little more and also made the swans less opaque. In addition, I rasterized the playlist and credits so I could move them away from the CD's center hole.

from my Artists Statement:

Creative Concept

• Swans
• Images of swan pairs posed so a heart forms between their heads are common, but I chose a swan couple forming almost a heart, illustrating the often tenuous, frequently fragile, inevitably changing bonds love and relationship form.
• Dune Grass
• From summers on Cape Cod – as well as time I've spent on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia – dune grass has become one of my favorite seashore symbols. The photography I chose particularly reminds me of Nauset and Chincoteague.
• Urban Fire Escape
• The subject is dreams, and where do multitudes of dreams emerge more insistently than in the residential and commercial structures of any inner city? Escape suggests going elsewhere than the daily mundane, and I love the dual imagery of "fire" both as a danger to be quenched and a crucial aspect of creativity.
• Rotterdam Rooftops
• For me, this image is polyvalent! Rotterdam is one of my favorite cities in what's probably my favorite country. In one of my former lives, the roof of the apartment building where I lived at 39 Clark Street in Boston's North End (a block away from Old North Church, "Christ Church in the City of Boston" of Paul Revere fame) was a great place to go to dream, do homework, sunbathe, visit with friends and just plain chill. Reinforced by the song "Up on the Roof" (I consider James Taylor's the real version), rooftops evoke a cascade of nostalgic memories and the slick, contemporary ones in this photograph cleanly dovetail with my current life and style.
• Cannabis Sativa Leaf
• Pipe dreams! Not exactly renowned as a hallucinogen, nevertheless marijuana tends to induce an altered, not-quite-real state of mind and being, so I chose this image to suggest a possible new reality superimposed upon rationalized 21st-century life.

New Books, Early January 2006, and some updated personal info

Here's the list of my new books; for details, you can click on the Amazon link. Over the next couple of months I'm planning to do more reading than recently I've been doing! In addition, this coming Monday I'll begin the 12-week long (plus spring break) Print Module in the Interactive Media Certificate Program—IMCP at the San Diego Community College District's North City Campus, which is a member of the international New Media Consortium. By the way, although I tried linking to the program's course listings the link wasn't specific enough, but according to the site listing this module will include: Mac Basics, Digital Graphics, Vector Graphics, Desktop Publishing, and Portable Document Forms. According to the material we received at orientation and registration, that'll be Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro and Portfolio development--the main reason this program interests me so. Since I'll be concentrating heavily on design, with 25 class hours per week, for the next near future I may try to make most of my blogs reflections on my current reading rather than my own theologizing.

Brueggemann, Walter. Texts That Linger, Words That Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices

Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World

Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation

Robert L. Millet, Kent P. Jackson, et al. Studies In Scripture, Vol. 4: 1 Kings to Malachi

Robert L. Millet et al. Studies in Scripture, Vol. 6: Acts to Revelation