Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/29/18 Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/29/18

Book of Bulmash, chapter 149

Behold the empty bed of the nine-year-old child! Look, and see the glee this absence hath bestowed in the heart of this boy's mother.
The boy had ignored the radio alarm designed to wake him. He slumbered despite the family dog's whine to be let out for bodily relief.
But the boy could not ignore the sound of his mother breathing,
For she had crawled into her son's bed and laid her head directly next to his own, so as to weaponize the breath of life.
As the air left her nostrils, it roared inside the semi-conscious boy's ear like the sound of a thousand vengeful bees pursuing their prey.
Of course, the child turned his head away from the sound. But this solution was short-lived,
For his mother simply began breathing heavily in the other, newly-exposed ear.
The child squirmed and grunted in protest, but to no avail.
At last the boy cried, "Begone, mother!
"I am awake and shall rise from my bed anon! Only thou must remove thyself and allow me to exit!"
"But my son," the mother responded, "thou hast plenty of room to exit, if thou climbest to the foot of thy bed.
"There and only there doth an escape route wait for thee."
Thereupon the mother resumed wielding her exhalation as a method of driving the child out of bed.
The boy leapt out of his cozy nest, desperate to flee his mother.
And once he retreated to the silence of the bathroom, the mother was wracked with a fit of giggles that buoyed her throughout the remaining morning routine.

Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/15/18 Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/15/18

Liberty Bank co-founders: George Tokuda

I'm starting to make faces -- collaged faces -- for the Liberty Bank Building portrait series.

This is George Tokuda, one of the original Liberty Bank's nine co-founders. He and his family owned Tokuda Drugs, a longtime fixture of Seattle's Central District. community.

His daughter Wendy Tokuda was kind enough to send me the original photo of George; she remembers "how proud he was to be on the bank board. It’s where I got my college loan!"

George was a native Washingtonian, born around 1913 in Mukilteo where Japanese immigrants worked for a lumber company. The area (now a hiking trail and nature preserve) is still known as Japanese Gulch.

George's family later moved down to Seattle, where he opened the drugstore in 1935. But as a Japanese American in the Pacific Northwest during World War II, he was one of thousands rounded up and sent to the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho.

*Photo credit: Minidoka Historical Site/ NPS*

Learning how much George gave to his communities -- and how much was taken from him -- I find the city of Mukilteo's logo and welcome sign painfully ironic.

So I altered my photo of this lighthouse sign...

... replacing the lighthouse tower with the ruins of the Minidoka guard and entrance gate.

I'm deeply grateful to Wendy Tokuda, the Mukilteo Historical Society, HistoryLink and the Liberty Bank photo archives for the opportunity to honor Mr. Tokuda.

Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/8/18 Lisa Myers Bulmash 6/8/18

Resin-ating with history

I'm gonna have some fun with newsprint and resin paper. Have you ever tried this technique?

I plan to use it in the collage portraits I'm making for the Liberty Bank Building apartments. If you've seen my work, you know I often layer translucent images over patterned paper and other materials.

For this project, I get to incorporate newspaper clippings about the bank from that time. Not the originals -- I'm copying the images onto newsprint.

I'll add fine art paper to the collages for color, mostly from my current hoard. (It's not "hoarding" per se if you use it eventually.)

Later, I'll start piecing together "suits" for each founder. My paper stash gives me a lot of options here, but I may have to pass up some of my favorite patterns. These folks were founding a bank in the late 1960s, after all. I'll try to avoid anything too wild, but again... no promises.