Very quickly, before I must go catch tonight’s episode of the Late Late Show (and it’s going to be exciting because Craig Ferguson is now on Twitter!) — Paul Sahre is so amazing!
Tonight at the SPD Speakeasy, described as encompassing ‘Alien abduction attempts, the hairless hand, dead pig heads, boring sex and eating the dinosaur’ on the SPD website, Paul Sahre did in fact cover all of those topics. But the best part was giveaways to everyone in the audience!
Paul’s office, located two floors above the Dunkin Donuts on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, just down the block from our beloved Pratt Manhattan campus, is obviously full of much crap. It seems like a genius idea to me to use the opportunity to clean things out of his office and have the attendees go away with a souvenir. As we entered, we were each handed a number, and each number corresponded to an object that was laid out on the stage and tables. Paul said that every object had a story behind it, as relating to its part in his ‘image making,’ which was the focus of his talk. He said that if any of us wanted to know the story, we should email him and he would be glad to tell it.
He mentioned a few specific items at the end of the talk, including a poster he had designed in grad school which he now loathes (this went to Liz, and she had him sign it! He said, ‘Oh, you’re going to make me do this?’ as he looked upon it with difficulty), a poster designed to go on garbage trucks (afterwards we saw a garbage truck, and indeed there was an empty slot for posters), and a Captain America who was missing his shield. He said that since Captain America is nothing without his shield, and he knows that it is somewhere, that whoever got it should definitely email him about it.
Lo and behold, I got Captain America! How very exciting. Now he will sit at my desk and give me insider tips on how to be great and resourceful at image making like Paul Sahre.
It was such a blast. This man has actually gone camping to try to get abducted by aliens — all in the name of research, of course, for some spreads he was doing for an alien- or space-themed zine — and he shaves his hand whenever he needs to be a hand model (which seems to be often), and he amazes hoity toity art directors in his ability to cut down the budget via in-studio means. Example is this image found on his site, which he also showed at the talk, in which he had an intern throw stars (which is one of the tamest things an intern of his can do, considering adventures to buy dead pig heads and photograph men with arm tattoos!):
I wish I’d gotten pictures of the other items, but here’s a photo SPD used for the site — there’s some pretty amazing stuff:
And here’s the man himself:
The image above on the screen is actually a video of Paul working, which his brother took a while ago. Apparently his younger brother trained camels in a circus after dropping out of high school, and would come through town once in awhile, smelling permanently like circus. But the way that Paul would sit at his desk for hours on end was hilarious to him, so he took a video unbeknownst to Paul, who really does not move that much in it. Oh, the things to aspire to!
P.S. I had a moment of alarm when I walked by earlier in the day and saw that his OOPS sign wasn’t on in the window of his studio. I asked him afterwards, and turns out they were doing a photoshoot, so they had to turn it off. Whew! Walking by and gazing up at that sign has been a strange source of comfort since I watched the AIGA video of his talk last year.
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