Summer in the City

It’s summer around the house. We’ve had spates of hot and muggy weather, but the past few days have been delightful: in the upper 80s, a mild breeze. This does not promise to last long, though, as another blob of subtropical moisture is heading our way from Mexico (hurricane Fabio was our last moist visitor), bringing possible thunderstorms this weekend and into next week.

We go up and down the stairs a dozen times a day, and it was only this week that I stopped at the bottom and looked at the art in the stairwell. I was so pleased, I took a couple snapshots to share. Up the walls we have a collection of eight lithographic plates from “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder. My dad gave the book to me as a Christmas present when I was a kid: the clarity and simplicity of the writing captivated me, and it was the first book I’d ever had that included lithographic plates as the artwork. When the binding started to fail, I decided to rescue the art and put it in the hallway. On the facing wall above is a blowup of the famous Life magazine cover of Marilyn Monroe, made up of small Life covers from the past. It’s from the last 1990s, when such things were thought of as digital wonders; this kind of image is commonplace now.

In the corner is what I call the world’s largest paperweight: It’s a Rollin Karg sculpture that I picked up when we were visiting Eureka two years ago. It weighs about 80 pounds and is solid glass. Here’s a clip from Karg’s website showing them making one of these monstrosities. It’s a really beautiful piece, and I keep threatening to construct a lighted base to really show off the depth and refraction of the piece.



Things are going well with the business, although not as busy as I’d like to be. But I am getting calls from potential clients, and handing out my cards and the brochures is slowly paying off. I have two appointments for next week; one with the publisher from the American Society of Cinematographers (I’ve been working on their new handbooks, and I think there’s more to come on those), and a local restaurateur who is contemplating redoing her website. Beyond that, I’ve got a couple of book covers, one which I just finished and one that’s in progress, and I have a bid in with the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce to design and layout their annual business directory and community guide. We’ll see how that goes. There are other potential clients out there that I poke at every so often via e-mail, but a consistent and scheduled marketing campaign still eludes me, especially since I can’t throw hundreds of dollars a month at it just yet.

Out on the patio, I’ve developed a real consistency since the spring, and the plants are getting watered and fed on a regular timetable. It’s amazing how lush plants can get when you give them what they need. The shots above are of the ivy that replaced the dead vining ficus that was caught on the patio when the house was tented and, of course, Beuford reclining among the roots of the now-eight-foot-tall ficus benjamina.

I’ve got a webinar scheduled in about an hour and a half covering the major points of launching a consistent and successful e-mail marketing campaign for the studio; of course, it’s hosted by the website that wants to charge me for the service, but doing it on my own takes a lot of time, and I just don’t get the open and response rates that a service does.

This is one of the things I do not like about being in business for myself: Being a one-man band. Doing the marketing, tracking billable hours, networking, and lots more have all got to be attended to without anyone else setting the pace. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a dozen balls in the air at once, and I probably do. It’s still something I’m getting used to but, every now and then, a part of me longs for a nice corporate job where I don’t have to think so hard and don’t have to shine for everybody all the time.