A Tale of Two Sundays

Jake von Slatt — Sun, 05/18/2008 - 21:35

The past two Sundays were very different Sundays. A few weeks ago Sharon Steel of the Boston Phoenix came out to The Workshop to interview me. The interview went really well, Sharon was thoughtful and really interested in my particular take on Steampunk and the broader Steampunk community. We spent several hours together and much of the interview was recorded on video. You'll find the article in this week's Boston Phoenix as well as online along with the video here.

About a week earlier Sharon had contacted me and asked if it would be alright to send a photographer out for a picture. I replied "sure! I'll be around all weekend." I expected a guy with a camera who would snap a few pictures and be done. What I got was a van load of equipment, Mike Pecci , a second photographer/grip and a stylist!

They quickly took over my garage, setting up lights, reflectors, and blacking out all of the windows!

The stylist, Shannon, went through my "wardrobe" and selected a few things for me to wear and then we went out to the garden and made mud pies, well mud anyway. Said mud was artistically applied along with a bit of shoe polish and some "clean dirt" a theatrical product for dirtying up clothes. I was ready for the first half of my shoot.

Sometime earlier Mike had said to me "I don't suppose you have a smoke machine?" Hah! but of course I have a smoke machine! We filled the garage with smoke and I fired up the oxyacetylene torch for the first series of shots.

[Please note that Mike Pecci holds the rights to the photos that bear his credit - they are not covered under the same Creative Commons license as my images.]

I think this one is actually my favorite

This one is awefully cool too!

After we finished in the shop I went in to shower while the crew set up in my office for the next session. The Lady von Slatt was, as usual, somewhat bemused that the media would actually be interested in her husband's "little hobby."

As you can see I clean up rather nicely!

This is the outfit I bought for Maker Faire where I got to introduce Abney Park to an audience of several thousand! I'm still recovering from that, it was rather outside of my normal experience but oh my, so much fun!

Now this Sunday was somewhat different! The dirt was real and it was applied, not by the lovely Shannon, but by hours of crawling around underneath the bus with an air-impact wrench, angle grinder, and sawzall and under a constant rain of rust, dirt, and power steering fluid.

Oh yes, I am a dirty, dirty boy!

This is almost 70' of rusted and leaking power steering line that needs to be replaced. I'll take this over to the truck repair place tomorrow and they'll custom bend new lines for me and I'll install those next week. All and all, I think I prefer the getting made-up and posing of last Sunday to the crawling, scraping, bleeding, and getting burned of this Sunday!