May 2009 Archives

to the left is a closeup of a piece of iced white cake.

you can see at the very upper left of the cake is a light indentation with another indentation to the right, a bit cut off.  then the blasted browner one in the forefront.  these are my trials as I increased the heat.

the artwork was vector and raster based, with a black filled circle on the inside surrounded by a vector circle a bit larger.  the heat settings for this outer vector circle were too cool during the earlier trials but you can see it was getting pretty messy in the hotter forefront one.  we laughed watching the melting, bubbling and pushing!  I wonder how much heat it takes to splash icing onto the laser cover.

not sure you could handle what you might see as an epidemiologist?  laser white cake icing for a while.

I have a bit more cake to play with today and know exactly what I will be putting on it.  watch this space for further posts.


and last we tried confectioner's sugar, held in a shallow cut down paper cup.  we tried artwork of a filled circle, several little circles with filled lines connecting them, and a spiral with 27 revolutions within about an inch.  consistently, we got balls of sugar to form, then they might move and join with another ball nearby.  or maybe they'd stay where they were.  made a beautiful organic pattern of spheres.

yes, I ate these little bits.  they were crunchy and tasted just like cotton candy - no burn taste.

earlier that day, I taught a laser class and had a friend attending.  afterward, we wandered through the grocery store to get the white cake and conf sugar.  he remarked, "now I'm walking through this place wondering what everything would look like lased."  ahhh ... another kindred soul.

I keep crossing paths with this lovely piece.  even though I do post a lot of pieces about sex and genitalia, beneath it all I'm moved to address issues we have a tough time talking about - to make them less fermenty, to shed some light on them so they stop smellin' so bad.  and if I can do that with humor, hey, I am so there.

it just so happens that sex is rife with taboos.  but so is religion although it doesn't seem to provide as many opportunities to be quite so funny about it.

while this piece is not funny, it is beautiful and wholly captivating.  just how did Jocelyn Foye obtain all those eucharists?  were they blessed beforehand?  could they be a homemade substitute?  any lightning bolts if you try that at home?  are they the thinner airy ones that dissolve in short order in your mouth or are they the more substantial ones that would make do as a snack?  that was one of the big differences I noticed between my Catholic upbringing during the early years and my Baptist explorations in high school.  the Catholic eucharist tasted just like those penny candies made up of two concave wafers joined around the edges like a spaceship with little hard candies inside.  you could eat those all day and never notice.  the Baptist ones tasted like a sweet meal.  three more and I'd be full.

I saw this piece in the flesh at Works/San Jose in 2006.  I loved staring at it, imagining someone sitting at a worktable with a Dremel tool drilling hole after hole, maybe with a friend attaching c-rings with pliers in a little production line.  I also liked it because it was probably getting someone's eucharistic goat.  and it is delicately gorgeous.