Topic #45--"Urban" Entry

From Karen!:

"This theme was a bit of a stretch for me ... and yet I've been a city girl for the last 25 years. I was born and raised in a small town ... and hated every minute of it! I found I had no identity in a small town ... but in the city ... well maybe I'm more interesting because I'm eccentric LOL"

Topic #45--"Urban" Entry

From Tricia!:

"As I was going through a box of photos from my collage days in Atlanta I came across a manipulated SX-70 polaroid of one of my classmates. I always thought the shadow from his hair against the blue dumpster near the school looked like wings. Sad that try as I might I can't recall his name. I do however remember well those days of heating the polaroids with a hair dryer and moving the emulsion around with a burnishing tool. Someone mentioned to me that you can't buy the SX-70 film any longer. That's a sad thing cause it was so much fun.
I scanned this image into Photoshop and added some type and gave it a different edge."

Topic #45--"Urban" Entry

From Carla!:

"Downtown NY in the mid 70's was an exciting place to be if you were into music. In fact, it was an exciting place to be if you were in your 20's and feeling ready for just about anything. It was before the gentrification of the lower east side, before the city got cleaned up and polished, and it was gritty, scary, full of characters and full of possibilities. The "Summer of Sam" might have been a horror show for many, but for me... it was a pageant of energy and people and music.

A place that figured largely in my experiences in NY at that time was CBGB. I saw lots of great - and not so great - bands play there, but it was really the atmosphere that made it all happen. I remember when I saw The Ramones play there; I had never seen them play live, and I was over the top excited about it. I waited with a couple of friends for a few hours just so we could get front row seats. We ended up second in line, behind some hippie chick whose t-shirt was festooned with all kinds of punk buttons, including the requisite "Disco Sucks." Our patience was rewarded with up-front seats next to Legs McNeill and some other person from Punk Magazine and an unobstructed view up Joey Ramone's nose. The music was beyond loud and so relentlessly fast that it impossible to resist the urge to pogo. We even left with a door prize: ringing in our ears that persisted for days. There was no doubt about it...It was an awesome show!

So I got out the step ladder and rummaged through my old journals on the top shelf in my office closet (yep...they're in the "out of circulation" section), and found an entry about that show and some people I knew who were into the scene downtown at the time. Above is a picture of me and a girl named Alison that I sketched to go with the following entry written January 24, 1978. I did alter it by adding the background after I scanned it from my journal.

Alison is a nice girl, but she looks like a scolded mole. Big nose, long bleached blonde shag, terrible posture, and a perpetual apologetic expression. I ran into her in the florist's the other day. I was buying flowers to enhance a sit-down dinner for ten, and she was buying flowers for Joey Ramone's quick recovery. A teapot blew up in his face. Very strange. I can't picture him drinking tea."

Topic #45--"Urban" Entry

From Ian!:

urban : ink, crayon & ink wash

"what do I remember about London? the buildings bearing down, the homeless big issue sellers, big mac packages strewn about, the sodium streetlight glow, and you're never more than eight feet from a rat!

I'd been doing a bit of diy today and wasn't intending on doing much else afterwards yet I had this pad of (cheapo cheapo) memo paper in front of me on the desk and I thought I'd sketch out a few ideas for the prompt this sunday, and this is what came out of the flow. The paper's thin and it cockled like crazy under the wash but I didn't mind this time. I resisted the huge temptation to crop and give it a tidy border; rough around the edges is how I see urban."

Topic #45--Urban