John Wise

Starting Saturday morning I began scanning in photos from hundreds of black & white and color negatives along with a good many slides, some going back more than 40 years (as in the case of Caroline and her sister with their parents when they were just about 4 and 6). From trips with friends in the United States to some of my first photos, I shot in Europe back in the mid-1980s when I first visited Athens, Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris, and spent a lot of time in the Frankfurt, Germany area. Scanned in a bunch of images from two different shows by Los Angeles performance artist Johanna Went back in the early ’80s. Caroline and I visited Euro Disney (as it was known back then; it’s now Disneyland Paris) for her 25th birthday in 1992 and we have the photos to prove it. Old embarrassing photos from my time in the military are now in the digital domain as are a few photos from my teen years in L.A during the late 1970s.

I scanned about 1,300 images out of approximately 13,000 images, such is my guess anyway. I’ll have to clean them up a bit and then I’ll get to adding them to my blog where almost no one will ever find them when they are buried behind the roughly 2,000 blog entries that are ahead of them.

We are on a tangent to clear out the crap we’ve been dragging around for years without even ever opening the boxes the stuff is hidden in. Next up I’ll start scanning photos that I didn’t find negatives for after I finish scanning old party flyers, ads in German techno magazines, concert tickets from David Bowie to Einsturzende Neubauten, record and CD covers we made, etc., so all of that bulk can join the trash can with the negatives.

We bought a tiny Magnasonic slide and film scanner in order for us to transfer our horde of relatively useless negatives into a digital format so we can scrap the originals and post what we want here on the blog. This could be time-consuming as cleaning up the dirt on the negative, looking at thousands of images on the tiny screen where I scan them, digitally repairing, color correcting the images, and then finally blogging about stuff that there are no dates for, using foggy memories at best. This could take a bit. But at least I now have this image of Caroline on her very first time in the Grand Canyon National Park only 72 hours after she and I were married in Las Vegas back on January 12, 1994.

Caroline is now five months into crocheting on this project for Choi + Shine Architects, as I wrote about back on July 5th. This is the 18th motif and also the last one Caroline will be doing as her contribution to the art installation called “Canal Convergence 2018” coming in November. For her efforts, she has earned the title Saint Caroline of the Polycord from her friend Christine!

Oh did I say the final motif? That all changed between taking this photo and delivering the “last” ones. I met Jin Choi (one half of Choi + Shine) at the facility where they have started assembling the final piece and it turns out that some people couldn’t finish their pieces and so I’ve dragged six motif #3’s back home for Caroline to knock out this weekend. Will it ever end? Probably not as she’s informed me that she might volunteer for helping with the final assembly and then there’s going to the Scottsdale Waterfront to check out the finished piece.

Got a new Eurorack module called the T43 Adder in the mail today from Vladimir Pantelic of VPME.de in Germany and a free gift, my very own blank 8HP Patch Notes faceplate. I thought this blank was a gag when I first saw it and now that I have one I just wanted to send out a big thanks. For the astute, there’s something else worth noting (pun intended) and it has to do with beta testing 🙂

A clap of thunder got my attention to step outside as it sounded like another monsoon was about to arrive. Alas, it was only a tease putting on display the energy emanating from our planet. The winds kicked up a bit and the clouds are pretty heavy overhead, but that telltale smell of petrichor while maybe in the distance never reached my olfactory. And now it’s quiet again.