Nate Beaty's Brainfag

Erroneous, but Accurate Enough APE Report

posted in Home Jabber on April 11, 2006

APE was a blast. Didn't make it to the fancy cartoonist parties (as usual), but I did get to meet a new gaggle of drawing geeks and procure a stack of new funnies to read.

Screenprinting was a last-minute stresstastic venture. I managed to get the 2-color BF6 covers done the night before (minus the inside cover print, which didn't turn out on the screen), but my 2am attempt to burn the t-shirt screen was a flop. So I retreated home and tried to sleep for a few hours. At 9am of the day of our depature I woke up, wolfed down some eggs (sidenote: I've eaten roughly 3,000 eggs in the last month), and rode over to Scott's. We found the 500 watt shop light we bought ages ago for screenprinting (the 150 watt shoplight I tried the night before did nothing even with 45 minutes of exposure), and made a ramshackle stand for the light about 20 inches above the screen. Twenty minutes later we took the screen to the tub and ran water on it, which instantly washed away the right spots .. but then also started washing away the edges of the screen. Usually you have to scrub for a good 5-10 minutes before the unexposed emulsion rubs off, so this was a bit worrisome. We decided to take it back down and dry if off under the 500w bulb. Soon it started bubbling around the edges so we put it in front of a fan and let it be.

I am realizing the chronology of the paragraph above is completely erroneous, but accurate enough in the last-minute nature.

I was still frantically screenprinting shirts and inside covers of BF6 with shirts setting in the dryer when we should have been bussing it to the airport. We ended up shoving everything in bags and boxes with an hour to go on our flight and jumped in a cab. Luckily there were no lines and the trip from airport door to airplane seat was smooth and uneventful. (Except for them scrutinizing my bag for some time, which I later realized had needle & thread, knife-looking bone folder, screwdriver, lighter and all sorts of random sharp art objects in it. Art terrorist! They took my lighter away from me.)

Tres was a fantastic host as usual. We hung out in their swinging Castro pad with his roommate Gail sipping fancy wine while I *still* continued to fold and staple. Can I just get this out now? I AM DONE SELF-PUBLISHING. SOMEONE PLEASE PLEASE APPROACH ME ABOUT PRINTING MY NEXT PROJECT? Because I'm terrible at pimping my art out. I hate that just a wee bit less than self-publishing.

Our first of many awesome dinners in sanfran was at a super-packed Korean BBQ spot on Geary called Brother's. Once we finally got a table, a man ran out with searing coals and dropped two stacks of bbq-to-be in the center of the table. Then the entire table was filled with tiny tasty bowls of kimchi and fish and radishes and bean sprouts and noodles, with delicious meats and veggies stacked at the end of the table to sear at our leisure. Stuffed to the gills, we stumbled out and met some friends at a foofoo wine bar for after-dinner boozing.

Turns out with my fantastic planning I didn't realize APE was on sat/sun, not fri/sat. So we had Friday open to roam about sanfran, which we basically pissed away. Next trip: planning. We roamed about on the busses, and did find our way to Haight street which felt like Portland's hippie Hawthorne and yuppie NW 23rd street's bastard pot-addled child: every inch of the ganja-scented street seemed covered with overpriced fashionable little Hot Topic-ish stores and laundromats. Not our scene.

We got completely drenched with a freakishly cold and gray sanfran rainstorm. Then we started fighting. However, Tres took us to the most amazing hidden sushi spot at night and soothed our razzled nerves with smooth sake and fresh fish.

I put up BFX and Mixtape in the Comics section for reading and buying if you so please. (Mixtape was a last-minute mini to utilize the trimmed paper on BFX.) I might put up the tshirts for ordering soon, but I'd like to fix my screens first and get em perfect before doing so.