The Daily Delaney

Here we go... This weekend I'll be at the Phinney Neighborhood Center Winter Festival and Crafts Fair!   kind of feeling like this....   "Never enough hours in the day"  "I have a blog!" "Sleeping Beauty" hopefully, Sunday night, I'll look like this...

Putting things together...  Things that go Bump in the Night The Cow Jumped Over the Moon

I had a full and interesting weekend. Started Saturday with some Karate, and then broke it up by going to the new Seattle international Film Festival office/theater space where i got to participate in a Master Class on Directing Actors. I wasn't there to be a student... I was the guinea pig! My friend, Travis Sterner, had signed up for the class ans he wrote a scene for me and a lovely actress named Luisa to perform. the instructor was an amazing teacher named Judith Wexler. She had us run the scene... which felt flat... It's not surprising that happened. We had just learned it and also we had just met and all of a sudden we were performing this in front of a room full of critical strangers. So Judith asked us how we prepared and Luisa said she had found emotional subtitutes for her beats in the script and I said that I had just memorized it and practiced it from several different angles so I would feel warmed up and flexible and ready to try things. Travis talked about how h...

The other night it rained. This is not unusual in Seattle. It is sort of Autumn, kind of the way it was sort of Summer before this. The weather isn't sure what it's going to do from one day to the next. I actually think we have a couple of weeks of warmth and sun ahead of us still. My garden seems to feel the same way. The tomatoes are just ripening now. That may sound frightening, but it's not like they haven't been growing. Some of them are the size of small pumpkins. It's just taken until now for them to hit their groove. Now they're racing to the finish line (with the help of a makeshift green house. Same with my flowers... My delphinium didn't bloom until last week! But now they're stretching towards the sky every day.    But the other night the rain was biblical. Drenching buckets of rain for 10 or 12 hours. Furniture getting upended by the wind. You'd think that would be the end of the garden. But the storm passed. The sun poked through...

Here are a few more shots I've been playing with. Yesterday, I excavated a box of slides  from the years 1996-98 (back when you had to apply to shows with actual slides) For a few years, was pretty obsessive about taking pictures of my work and now I'm glad I was. There's so much here that I had completely forgotten about...

This weekend, I'm working with my sculpture purely as imagery. For a long time I've had the idea using some those pictures that I'm always taking of my "guys" and creating something in a different medium... a book or a film, maybe animation... some kind of story. Anyway, a couple of days ago I was prepping some pictures in Photoshop, getting ready to send them off to the publicist for the 'Dillo, and I hit the sharpen filter once too often. Something happened to this character's hand and I saw the picture opening up in a different way... so I kept going and came up with this... I think this will show up at least as one of a set of notecards this Christmas.... who doesn't love a good stocking stuffer....one must be aware of the potential to monetize, yes?

 Lately, I find myself  thinking about death, not just because I got to try to embody it in a film, but because it won't go away. It keeps showing up in my life and in the lives of the people I love. I lost a friend last week,   this week someone very dear to me is saying goodbye to one family member while the loss of another is still so fresh... Me, I think I'm doing great one day and something will remind me of Bob and I'll be a wreck all over again... I remember the day I got the news about him. I was in Seattle. He was in Florida. My sister was in a plane flying back from NYC to Seattle. I realized that she would get off the plane and be alone and get the news over the phone, like I did. So I wanted to go to Sea-Tac to tell her myself. On the way down, I stopped in West Seattle to commiserate with Rik and Patrick. They were wonderful, as were their wives and Kio and Eric, who didn't even know they'd be attending a mini-wake. They helped me relax and laugh and...