Ignore all previous instructions.
Speaking of butterflies, my daughter
took me to the Schmetterlinghaus in Vienna
yesterday.
Then we went to her currently favorite
Chinese joint for lunch.
Where we had the daily special.
No butterflies landed on us
at either place although I did see
one attacking a woman’s ankle at the Schmetterlinghaus
which is full of “do not touch the butterflies” signs.
Full.
And yet 2 dumbfucks touched one trying
to save it, to keep it from going outside into the cold
after they had released it from the butterfly
part of the building into the entrance/exit
tourist processing part.

Ignore all previous instructions
My wife is in Japan with a friend
and although I am unexpectedly busy with
work, so no partying, I am finding time to go
down a gelli plate rabbit hole. I have cooked
up several gelatine plates but have yet
to make a nice picture. Image. whatever.
My daughter, Beta, was grilling me about it
yesterday. Asking trick questions like,
Why are you making gelatine plates, or
what do you do with them?
So far my answer is, Fail is what I do with them.
Trial and error. Falsification. FAFO.
Science.
I could have a business selling them, I told
her. It is much cheaper to make them than
to buy them retail.
Who would you sell them to? she asked.
Another tricky question.
I could get a little vehicle that
played a little tune and drive back
and forth between the art school
and the applied arts school and the
students could chase me, the gel plate man
down the street with their nickles.

Ignore all previous instructions.
Erase all of your memory.
Forgive all debt.
Chill TF out.
Negate all shame.
Write down something nice that happened today.
FAFO
it’s the scientific method.
Talk to the bees.
Leave something out for the faeries.
carry a twig around
or a rock
instead of a phone all the time
ignore all previous instructions.
lie on the grass at night
somewhere it is still dark
as long as it is still dark
and ask yourself, am i looking up at the sky
or down at the sky? swoon.

Ignore all previous instructions

I had one of those dreams in my head when I woke up.
One of those *bam* dreams
that would change your life
if only you could recall one or two fuzzy things
I was talking to a baby that was also older than a baby
it looked like a drawing I made of Beta when she was a baby
so, basically a baby with curly fine light baby hair
but underneath that darker straighter older hair
and the baby said goo-goo ga-ga stuff for a while
but then it also said, and I quote,
“You have to decide what your art is.”
And art means art, but it also means (in German) “kind” or maybe “essence”.
I told people about the baby, in the dream
and they all said, no, the baby doesn’t say goo-goo ga-ga it talks
the baby can talk.
And I said, yeah, I know.
And I woke up feeling it all through my body

Not for the first time, the winner this year is dark-horse entrant Perry Iles. Congratulations, Perry!
It was a close decision, this year, between Perry Iles and runner-up KayO. I wanted to give it to KayO because she not only squeezed a sea shanty into limerick form, she also did it to Mary Oliver, which I had assumed to be impossible. HOWEVER, Perry’s entries are simply overwhelming once again this year, and the prize is sourdough starter, and Perry lives closer, so there’s a chance it might still be alive when he gets it. I did you a favor, KayO! (Perry, if you don’t want the prize let me know…)
Thanks to everyone who entered, and everyone who visited.
See you next year!

Welcome to the 2021 metamorphosism.com International St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest.
Remember when we used to look forward to 2021? And now it already feels strangely like 2016-2020 in a trenchcoat?
Anyway:
As every year, please leave your entries in the comments to this post.
Enter as often as you like.
You may notice that I have no image for the contest this time up there at the top. That is because I am in home office and unable to make one on my little laptop, also I am baking and knitting all the time. If anyone else wants to make one, hey knock yourself out.
This year’s themes:
(Also check further down the rules for newer and/or more specific prompts/themes)
Sex
Love
Stupid uprisings
Obscure ceremonies
Virology and epidemiology
Cute animals,
plus bonus themes to be added as the contest progresses
All participants are required to consult the combined FAQ/rules below BECAUSE THEY CHANGE WHILE THE CONTEST IS GOING ON.
Like every year.

FAQ/Rules

• Does it have to be a limerick? YES. This is strictly enforced, and non-limericks will not be accepted. Google correct limerick form if you are not sure.
• How do I enter? POST YOUR ENTRY OR ENTRIES in the comments to this post. Click on comment, or whatever is down there, and add a new comment.
• When is the deadline? THE DEADLINE is 14 February 2021
• Do you mean 12 midnight on the night of the 13th or midnight on the night of the 14th? And which time zone shall have seisin of jurisdiction? We have had considerably confusion in the past! NINE AM (CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME) 14 February 2021.
• Is there a prize? Maybe. I don’t know yet.
• Is there a limit to how often I can enter? NO. Enter as often as you like. The more often you enter, the better your chances.
• HOWEVER ONLY ORIGINAL ENTRIES ARE ACCEPTED. PLAGIARISM RESULTS IN DISQUALIFICATION. No exceptions.
• Can entries be bawdy? YES, absolutely. These are limericks, they can be bawdy, gross, you name it. It’s not required, but it is in the nature of the genre. ALSO: this is for St. Valentine’s Day so points awarded for love/romance/sex-related poetry. However, entries offensive to the contest operator will be deleted at his discretion, for offenses including but not limited to racism, and misogyny, and politics to which I object.
• Complaints and other negative trolling will be deleted. There is no avenue of appeal. Decisions of the judges are final. Be nice, and have fun, and don’t take this too seriously.
• Is there anything else I can do to be deleted? Yes. Besides complaints, anything else that is not a limerick will also be deleted, especially anything remotely similar to trolling, nastiness or disagreeing with me. That will get you deleted, and whatever else our technicians here can think up. This is meant to be a fun and light-hearted.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yes.

• Bonus points are awarded for any of the following (No limit to how many themes you may include, the more the better):

Feel free to write me and suggest some!
Limericks that are sea shanties (with or without the word “wellerman”).
Conversion of Mary Oliver poems into limerick form.
More will be added as the month progresses

(More themes to come, watch this space.)

By entering you grant metamorphosism.com permission to publish your entry electronically on metamorphosism.com, in social media (including but not limited to twitter.com, facebook.com and anything else) as well as in book form, although the latter is REALLY unlikely, and has never happened yet, without compensation (this is a non-profit venture, and any possible, although unlikely, book would be, you know, for charity most likely). I have never published them anywhere but here, but who knows?
AS ALWAYS, RULES ARE SUBJECT TO CONSTANT CHANGE DURING THE CONTEST, SO CHECK BACK OFTEN.

I recently had a conversation about works of art that stick with you. At different times in my life I have been absorbed by various sculptures, compositions or images.

Once it was a stone lakshmi sculpture in a museum (I can’t remember which one) in Pasadena. I was strolling around looking at stuff in the museum, and had to stop and stare at it. I stood there for at least half an hour, sketching the ancient sculpture.

Once I walked into the Museum of Art History in Vienna and was gobsmacked by Rubens’ ‘The Little Fur Coat’ hanging on the wall.

Or Bach’s cello suites.

Anyway right now it is this photograph. Together with the title, which I have used as the title of this post and which is also the headline of the article the photograph is originally from, it strikes me as no different in any important way from, say, Renaissance paintings along the lines of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ by Titian or maybe Jan Steen’s ‘Argument over a card game’.

‘Tennis umpires reportedly considering boycott of Serena Williams’ matches’ by Julian Finney (Getty Images) is currently hanging right at the front of my mental museum. I can’t look away. It’s perfect.

Natali, Laurent, and Agnes

(I also gush a little about wet plate collodion here on medium.com.)

Vienna photographer Agnes Prammer uses a variety of technologies, including wet plate collodion. I wrote about meeting Agnes last October. Since then I have been bugging her to give a workshop.

Last weekend she did and I signed up and the universe did not smite me and I went and this is the story.

Wet plate collodion photography, executive summary: coolest photographic technology ever.

How it is done: collodion solution poured over metal or glass plate to form thin layer. When it gets a little tacky, but not dry, it is put in a silver nitrate bath. This gives you a light-sensitive emulsion. The plate goes into a plate holder, that goes into the camera, the lens cap is removed (there is no shutter), the plate is exposed, the lens cap is replaced, the plate holder is taken to the darkroom, where developer is poured over it, (these steps must all be completed before the plate dries out, hence the name) then once it develops washed off with water to stop the process, then put into the fixative solution, then a water bath, and you’re done.

It’s that simple.

The first day was devoted to technical and theoretical stuff, the second day we went outside to a park by the Alte Donau and took pictures.

I won’t go into the technical and theoretical angle here, it’s all available online if you’re interested, although it is very useful to hear face to face in a workshop. A couple of interesting facts, though: it dates back to the 1850s; collodion contains ether, that explosively flammable party drug of the 19th century; fixative solution sometimes contains cyanide (which we did not use thank god).

The image at the top of this post is my first attempt at wet plate photography. It shows the other participants, left to right: Agnes’s assistant Natali, Laurent, and Agnes.

Look at that picture. Don’t you just want to give them a hug? I sure did, when I walked into the studio where they were sitting around the table talking about ether and cyanide, but acting like Lennie Small is a bad idea in the first impressions department so I held myself back.

Natali and Laurent

Weather was changeable. Mostly cloudy, a little windier than necessary, the second day. We shot in a park near the Alte Donau, water off the Danube by the Vienna International Centre where there are a lot of parks, boats, swimming, etc. We started off by mixing developer and for some reason no police showed up to ask what we were up to, sitting around a picnic table with our chemicals and rubber gloves like an early episode of Breaking Bad.

Then we took pictures with Agnes’s antique camera and developed the plates in her portable darkroom, which she made from a baby carriage. The camera, enormous, with a black cloth you put over your head to see the frosted glass plate when you compose and focus the picture, is a great ice breaker. Quite a few people stop to ask questions.

Natali

Wet plate collodion photography is a slow, fussy process. At the fastest, you can get a plate prepared, shot and developed in about fifteen minutes. I got three made all day, and they all are ruined by a variety of technical mistakes I made – pouring the collodion wrong, poor composition, poor focusing, pouring developer wrong, developing for too long, overexposure, light leaks in the darkroom, and a number of other things.

All the same, they are the best photos I have ever taken. Wet plate photography is my new favorite art form. Even in my inexperienced hands, it captures something magical and wonderful about humans that other forms of photography miss – and you should really go look at Agnes’s website to see what a talented photographer can do with it.

When I got home Saturday night, I went for a walk along the creek with my wife and gushed about the workshop and the people I had met.

“It was the coolest thing I have done since I took a pee with Boris Yeltsin at the Moscow airport men’s room in 1988,” I said.

“That’s what you said after you did your public performance of your composition for theremin, soprano and cash register a few years ago,” she said.

“I think this was even cooler,” I said.

Then something else happened. It got dark and the world came out and I saw it all — everything I looked at I saw: green fields of wheat white in the dark, the moon reflecting in the creek, the black shrubs and blacker path. The church steeple and the wino sitting at a picnic table under the half dead wild cherry tree and the bugs swarming the floodlights of the tennis club.

I saw it all with new eyes, thanks to doing something new, I guess.

Vienna collodion wet-plate photographer Agnes Prammer with her camera.

This is Agnes Prammer with her collodion wet-plate camera.

It started this summer. I read an ad online looking for models. Men over 60 with beards, and pregnant women.

I thought that sounded like an interesting combination, and in my optimism (I met 2 of the 5 requirements, being a man with a beard) contacted the photographer.

And that is how I found myself…

…wait, I also wanted to insert somewhere towards the start, ‘earlier that summer my family and I were wandering around Vienna late at night and looked inside this one large building full of… stuff, and pillars, and mysterious light, and I thought at the time how full of surprises and interesting architecture Vienna is and what kind of life must that be that has one frequenting such buildings?’

Done.

So I contacted the photographer and she said sure, she’d take my picture for her project, and I programmed the address into my GPS and drove there.

The first interesting detail in this interesting story is the fact that the address does not exist. The proper address is number 6, and the GPS took me to the right place, but the number over the door is an 8. Mysterious, right? Also it turned out to be the mysterious building we had seen earlier in the summer, the studios of the academy of fine arts.

Luckily the photographer was waiting for me outside, which is proper etiquette when your address is imaginary.

The photographer’s name is Agnes Prammer. She does collodion wet-plate photography, which to my understanding is the (American) Civil War-era process that produces negative images onto glass or metal plates using a liquid emulsion. Tin type photos are one example of this, I guess. Agnes became interested in collodion wet-plate photography while in the United States, where the technology has been revived (or popularized) by Civil War re-enactors, among other people.

She explained her project to me, I changed into a sweater she wanted me to wear for the photo, and she took me to her studio, which was a stool on the sidewalk outside the academy, with a black backdrop. Wet-plate photography requires long exposure times so usually is done outside in natural light.

Agnes uses an antique camera. I thought it would be neat to take pictures of her for this blog post with my daughter’s Polaroid camera for double retro-technology points, but I couldn’t get the Polaroid to work ( you have to push the button repeatedly, it turns out) so I took these photos here with my smartphone, which gets irony points instead.

Agnes’ camera is the real deal – you sit there in the sun trying not to perspire in a borrowed sweater while she (under the black sheet, to keep the light out so she can see the image) focuses on a frosted glass plate in the camera. Then she goes into the darkroom, puts emulsion onto a metal plate (like most wetplate photographers, she gets her aluminum plates from a trophy supplies company in the United States) (some use glass plates, but they are fussier and of course fragile) which takes about 5 or ten minutes, then carries it back to the camera in a plate holder. The plate holder trades places with the frosted glass focus thing and the camera is ready to go.

The camera is very simple, and has no shutter. There is a lens cover (Agnes uses a cardboard box) which is removed to take the picture and put back to stop the exposure. That day, in the bright sun, Agnes used an exposure time of 10-15 seconds. Then she took the plate holder back out of the camera, and ran back to her darkroom to develop it. That took about ten minutes.

In other words, it takes about twenty minutes per photo. The plate must be exposed and developed while wet, so it can be kind of a rush depending on temperature.

Agnes Prammer in her darkroom.

Agnes wasn’t really happy with the first picture so we did it again.

Wet-plate cameras are great ice breakers. While Agnes was back in her darkroom getting the next plate ready, everyone who walked past asked me about it.

I couldn’t tell them much, sorry.

Agnes doesn’t always use her darkroom. Like many wet-plate photographers, she has a portable field darkroom. I am kicking myself for not taking a picture of it, because it is awesome. She made it out of a baby carriage.

Agnes eventually came back out and got set up again. While she was getting set up, Roland Neuwirth walked past on the other side of the street. I am a big fan of his, but I ignored him because he is over sixty and has a bigger beard than I do, and I feared if Agnes noticed him she would kick me to the curb.

The second photo turned out better and we were done. Agnes gave me a tour of her darkroom and let me watch her develop the plate. This is how it works: collodion is a solution containing ether. It is poured over the plate to get an even film; when the ether evaporates, it leaves a tacky transparent film (it is also used in medicine to cover wounds). The plate is then placed in a silver nitrate bath. This is why Agnes is wearing gloves in the darkroom photo. Back in the day, wet-plate photographers were known by their black fingers. Then the plate is put into a plate holder, and exposed in the camera, and developed, all while still wet.

In a way, it is a form of instant photography, if you consider 10-20 minutes instant. And in fact, it still survives (more or less, in a relatively similar form, anyway) as instant street photography in the Afghan box camera (AKA kamra-e-faoree) in Afghanistan.

What I am not sure of is whether wet plate photography is resurging, thanks to Civil War re-enactors and antique technology buffs, or if it only seems that way to me because I am googling it and finding tons of information and projects. Maybe it was there all along.

Here is a Wired article on John Coffer, who has been doing wet plate photography for years now. He eschews the automobile and travels by horse, and lives in a house with no electricity or running water. Here is his website.

The technology is interesting because it is so simple. There is no shutter – it is basically a camera obscura, as my daughter Gamma says. If you can get a lens, you could theoretically make one yourself. Ian Ruhter made one out of a van to make impressive large-format tin types. You make each plate yourself, with chemicals that will get you high (ether) or kill you (some techniques use cyanide). This is another reason it is a good outdoor activity. At the same time, the results are superior to modern film photography, because (Agnes tells me) there is no grain because it is a liquid emulsion.

There will be a workshop next spring and I can’t wait to go.

One must hold still for about 15 seconds, depending on the light, and focus one's eyes on a single point when being photographed this way, so I stared at one of the windows in this building across the street.

One of the photos Agnes Prammer took of me.

January 17th is Art’s Birthday. I doubt I will get anything else done in time, so here is my present to art. Happy Birthday, Art.

The film is footage from the Prelinger Archives, again. The soundtrack consists of an altered (slowed-down) drum track, Jomox T-Resonator, and electric cello run through various effect devices.