I’ve been pretty busy as of late, even if the blog doesn’t fully tell the tale of the tape. In fact, it’s been hard for me to keep up. Here’s a quick tally of all my blogging debts:
- I’m almost caught up on blogging each episode of the “On Writing” series (two more posts to go)
- I’m about 5 or 6 episode posts behind for the Family Pictures Podcast.
- The Cheyenne cabinet remains an elusive one to fix, so my bavacade blogging is stalled out.
- But, thankfully, all is not lost because the “Come and Play with Us” diorama featuring the Grady sisters from The Shining is coming together quite nicely.
I already blogged about the Canadian angels that visited bavastudio a couple of weeks back to give me a much needed kick in the ass to jumpstart the The Shining diorama. As of today I’m just a few short days away from completing this one, and I have to say it’s been pretty amazing.
The Shining diorama in-progress at bavastudio
Not so much the quality of the diorama, by all accounts it will end up being a fairly sub-standard addition to all the amazingly creative fan-produced art dedicated to The Shining—and I take full blame there. But that’s not so much the point, kinda like blogging. The diorama space has become a form of therapy (again like blogging) to push myself into a habit of creating and connecting. The whole idea behind bavastudio was to get out of the basement and try to separate work from home a bit more clearly. I was also increasingly in need of a space for storing, working on, and, hopefully some day, sharing my enthusiasm for 80s video game cabinets with the residents of Trento as some kind of oddball museum.
Welcome to bavastudio!
It’s that last part around sharing enthusiasm for culture that’s very much at the heart of this blog, and my idea early on for bavastudio was to imagine and build a physical extension of bavatuesdays. I’m not sure that’s been totally realized yet, but I do think the Bav-O-Rama is starting to get me there. It’s a work-in-progress that’s open for all passersby to enjoy or poh poh, it costs (them at least) nothing, and I’m not ostensibly selling anything. A pretty good approximation of bavatuesdays. The question I always get when folks stroll is “Che cos’è?” or “What is it?” I really like it when they ask me that, the whole idea that it stands apart from any normal sense of a store is fun, a kind of unclassifiable space.
One of the major differences from the blog is that building out the space, in particular the diorama, forces me to exercise both intellectual and physical skills that’ve been somewhat dormant. I recently likened it to a return of the 3rd grade art class in my life, and that’s no slight to those mighty third graders. Pulling out a T-square and the exacto knives is truly empowering. Throughout grade school and into both middle and high school I really enjoyed art class. I wasn’t necessarily talented technically, but I loved learning new techniques and being able to exercise their application in a quite personal way. The diorama space in the front window of bavastudio is just that.
As I was joking with my partner Justin Webb yesterday, what’s supposed to be a healthy outlet and relief from others stresses can quickly become an obsession all its own—it’s a thin line as I’ve learned with this blog over the years. But remaining excited and, as a result, somewhat hopeful about building something novel in order to make a connection with something or someone, no matter how irrelevant (or maybe because of exactly that), helps me deal with all the other things that can (and do) drive a thinking person crazy. Long live the bava, in both its virtual and physical forms 🙂
