| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 |
| 9:33 am |
Yesterday I had one of those days where you get ten things done that you've been needing to do but haven't gotten to. I was feeling superpowered. When I left Tacoma last night I was overcome with tiredness. I couldn't keep my eyes open. It was hard to drive home. Went to bed and woke up too early feeling like ass. I hope I'm not sick. Getting sick is not on the schedule until like...November. Yesterday was cloudy in Tacoma so I got a little bit of shooting done. (When it's sunny it's too bright to get a good image.) It was good but I wanted to get more footage. I was hoping to go down again today but the clouds are supposed to burn off by noon and I'm also feeling like ass so asking random strangers to pose for me is not within me today. Try approaching random people on the street and asking them if they would pose for a video art project you're doing. Then try explaining video art. Most people don't even know video art exists so they think you're gonna make fun of them on YouTube. Arg... Make yourself happy by looking at this product listing for Uranium Ore on Amazon.com. Read the comments, they're hysterical. Or warm your heart by realizing that in Osaka they have a Cat Cafe where you can pay five dollars to just play with cats for an hour. I think my life goal should be to buy twenty of those hypoallergenic cats (the ones with hair not those gross hairless ones) and making one of these in the US. Now if I was a more manipulative gay than I already am and I wanted to really put some effort into discrediting the Christian Right I would do exactly what these guys are doing. All they are doing is making people think "These guys are fucking nuts. I am not crazy like that. Maybe gay people are alright..." If it ends up that this is all an insidious homosexual plot to actually fight homophobia I would not be surprised. Jealous that they did it instead of me? Yes, but not surprised... |
| Sunday, July 12th, 2009 |
| 4:27 pm |
I've only about two weeks left in Seattle. I'm sort of missing LA but I suppose what I'm missing most is being settled. I've been nomadic since the end of April and it's affected my productivity. I'm feeling distinctly like I've gotten nothing done. I'm looking forward to finding my new apartment in Long Beach, moving in, and setting up my new space. I might also get my studio sometime in the beginning of August (before school starts). Room to work is what I need. Or maybe it's room to think. I've been in other people's spaces and it's left me without the right space to be productive. I also want to see what my land situation is like and if I'm gonna be able to plant vegetables at my new place or if I'm gonna have to sign up for the community garden in Long Beach. There is a wait list which is getting progressively longer as the economy worsens. Once in Long Beach I'll really only be able to make it up to the garden in Hollywood once a week. Not enough to really tend to it well. In California vegetables neglected for two days can burn up from lack of water. The two things keeping me here is that I've got one project that I have to do here, or rather, that I really feel as though needs to be done in the Northwest and there are people that I either haven't seen or haven't gotten to spend enough time with. I'm itching to get back to LA and start on the apartment hunt. I may end up staying in this place for three years and so I don't want to rush into anything. The prices for apartments in Long Beach have gone up $100-$200 since April when I used to cruise them and I'm worried that when we get closer to school starting that the prices will spike. |
| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 |
| 1:03 pm |
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| Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 |
| 1:26 am |
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 |
| 1:35 am |
I was grumbling about the lack of media art in Seattle when in a flash I remembered about the existence of the Henry Art Gallery. While the Seattle Art Museum may be in the business of perpetuating the idea that art is boring and only for an elite crowd, the Henry Art Gallery almost always has something fun and interesting going on. (Which is a little surprising because it's the art museum for the University of Washington which has a notoriously conservative reputation.) I saw a few children running around with their parents excited to be there. Upstairs I caught the UW's MFA show. The painters were a bore except for Hugo Shi. I won't tell you the subject matter of his work because you'll get an idea in your head of what his work is like and you'd be wrong. Sadly he doesn't seem to have a website. The rest of the painters were boring and derivative. The video artist was so fucking boring that I was sort of taken aback with how bad she was. It's like she hadn't seen any video art after the 70s and decided to do a high quality version of what she'd seen. I can't even remember her name. You shouldn't care anyway. The performance video by Bo Choi (who got her MFA in Fiber) was far more compelling. My favorite of the whole show was the sculpture by Arun Sharma. The Plexiglas coffin with the ant farm sides was my favorite. There were live ants in it. His other sculpture which was a casting of a guy with an umbilical cord at the end of his penis going down to a sculpture of a newborn child. It was seriously unsettling to look at. I forget the name of it but Kelly and I called it "Dick Baby". The big exhibit downstairs are video and sound installations by Ann Lislegaard. The exhibit is called 2062 which is 100 years past the year she was born. The audio pieces draw from science fiction movies ( 2001, Solaris) and the video installations draw from science fiction texts from writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, and Samuel Delany. The installations ranged from uninspired to hypnotic, the later benefiting from good presentation as much as good content. I didn't however feel compelled to spend a lot of time engaging with what was taking up half of the museum's exhibit space. I wouldn't have spent as much time as I did were it not for my familiarity with the stories and attempting see how they expressed the ideas behind them. Once the work by the Chinese video artists is up in July I'll return and see if my feelings about her work has changed. |
| Sunday, June 21st, 2009 |
| 1:34 am |
Now with 57% more hipsters!
Went to Moore Inside Out which was an installation art and performance event at the Moore theater. At first I was excited but being choked by throngs of hipsters definitely cut into my joy. The scale of it was the most amazing part. I can't imagine Los Angeles putting this much money and energy into producing a free event. Of course in LA people would have pretty happily paid $20 bucks to go to this and not felt ripped off. One of the largest installations was a scaffolding that rose from the floor backstage up to the balcony. The performers just danced and made music around this scaffolding bisecting the theater. When you walked out onto it you were literally in the middle of the stage while everyone was watching performances. The installation spaces were in closets, bathrooms, dressing rooms, and service tunnels. It was kind of cool to walk though all of the guts of the Moore theater (behind the stage, under the stage, up strange balconies, etc) but got clausterphobic with all of the people crushing into them. I think my favorite was a "post-apocalyptic hip-hop" bunker that was built into this weird cavernous dressing room in the basement. So often the apocalypse has a punk flavor to it (which I prefer as someone who leans punk-ward) but it was fun to see how someone who identifies with hip-hop imagines how they would live after the apocalypse. It ended with a marching band leading the crowd to the after-party at the Underground Events Center. We decided to hit a French restaurant, drink a nice Pinot, and discuss the show in relative quiet instead. |
| Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 |
| 2:52 am |
Look at Me Still Talking When There's Science To Do
Spent the last couple of days getting back into my Seattle rhythm. Almost made it to the gym but a bad headache made me rethink that. I only went to the gym once while in Tacoma because I was in a different mind space. I wasn't about reworking the body as much as I was about reformatting the brain. Plus the Tacoma YMCA gym is not as large or nice as Gold's (go figure). I had a breakthrough today in the whole interactive project scene. You see I've been able to get my Arduino to do some cool stuff (it's a simple micro-controller board for electronic input and output) and I can always do cool stuff in Flash but I've had a problem getting them to talk. This is mostly because Flash has all these barriers to keep you from accessing the hardware of the computer it's running on. (This makes sense for a SWF movie in a web page but is stupid for EXE files.) I decided to bang at it today, tried a bunch of different angles that I hadn't tried before, and finally got Flash and my Arduino talking. Major breakthrough. Once I figured that out I wrote some of my own code and got my other Arduino and my rangefinder working so now Flash can detect the distance someone is from the rangefinder. The next step is to make an image change on the screen based on the person's distance to it. (That's gonna be the easy part!) If you're making a simple robot or other simple digital device the Arduino kicks ass. It does everything that the BASIC Stamp does but at about a quarter of the price. It's also WAY simpler and has a USB connector instead of an old school serial port. It also has a development environment and language so simple that if you can program HTML, you can program a robot. |
| Sunday, June 14th, 2009 |
| 12:52 pm |
A minefield of donuts and crab-tanks...
My week in Tacoma is coming to a close. It's hard to believe that it's been a week already. Time has just flown by. Of course, that could be because of the booze... My own project didn't get very far but it is very organized and ready to go. I may still try to shoot some stuff today. The problem was that when I had the energy and was in the right mind frame the sun was so bright that any video I shot would look blown out. Today it is overcast so I am trying to get myself together enough to approach some people and film them. The Tacoma Art Center, where Ann lives, is a building with an assortment of work and live/work spaces. They form a very loose sort of collective but there are those who want to change that. Most of them are very young, half are 25 and under. As far as I know none of them really have any experience as part of an art collective or in collective living. Some just want to have cheap live/work space and couldn't care less about anyone else in the building or their well being. I suppose you always have to deal with that. Friday night Ann and I cooked a bunch of food and invited other collective members to join us. It created a lot of bonding between the members of the group that want to improve it and work together while the less involved residents avoided us. Much curry, pasta, and wine were consumed. Saturday night Jason was down to spend the day making art with Ann. Two other members came in and the leftovers were revived and people sat down to eat and make art. People were drawing, painting and sculpting. Then two other members saw us all together and just wordlessly came in with their paints and sculpting projects and sat in the gallery with us and all worked on art. It was really pretty amazing. Often making art is a solitary process so it was fun to sit around and discuss our art while drinking wine and being productive. A great Saturday night. |
| Thursday, June 4th, 2009 |
| 12:15 pm |
Northwest New Works Festival
The Northwest New Works Festival starts tomorrow (Friday) at On The Boards. It can be hit or miss but I always enjoy it. On the mainstage they have dance performances and in the studio (black box theater downstairs) they have music, dance, performance art, and theater. I'm gonna hit the shows at the studio. Probably tomorrow and Sunday of next week. Is anyone else in Seattle interested? |
| Thursday, May 28th, 2009 |
| 8:55 pm |
Landed in Seattle
Then I took a long nap. Feeling a bit human now. Lost a few pounds while doing manual labor and want to keep it up while I'm here. Back to the gym! |
| Thursday, April 30th, 2009 |
| 10:22 pm |
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| Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 |
| 8:37 pm |
It often drives me crazy but there are things I'm going to miss about this neighborhood. The neighborhood ladies who always wave from their stoop. When some delinquent kid was harassing them I walked up and said "Is there a problem?" Towering over everyone involved at my impressive 5'8" the kid left the scene. Now I'm a hero for being scary to a snotty fourteen year old. The old Korean woman who took my arm and led me around the produce section of the supermarket. She'd take my vegetables out of the cart and replace them with what she thought were superior specimens. She spoke Korean to me the whole time. I thought I did a pretty good job of picking out veggies but I was too charmed to contradict her. The sushi restaurant on Larchmont where everyone shouts "Michael!" when I come in the door. The cheap Thai restaurant where the waitress calls "The usual?" from across the room when I walk in the door and seat myself. (Cashew Chicken, medium spicy, no carrots, side of rice, and a Thai Ice Tea.) If I try to order a second Thai Ice Tea after 5pm she says "No, you can't handle that much caffeine this late. I'll get you water." She remembers my low caffeine tolerance better than I do. We regularly loan each other books and comics we think the other might like. I've lived in places where there was a stronger sense of community but still...there are things I'll miss. |
| Sunday, April 19th, 2009 |
| 4:44 pm |
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| Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 |
| 12:35 pm |
Oh yeah...video game...I forgot
Some people don't quite understand what I do. Since it changes a lot that's understandable. Here's a video game I programmed over the weekend. I got a "could you do this by Monday morning?" call. I think I'm becoming known as Mr. Tight Deadline. (At NBC everyone except my bosses told me to work slower 'cause I was making them look bad.) Follow this link to the KROQ website and click on the box that says "Mad Race to Magic Mountain". If you win the game you can enter a drawing to win passes to Magic Mountain. (Run over the DJs for extra points!) |
| 12:19 pm |
Freecycling
Today I freecycled. I had these boxes of comics that I've been slowly dragging to thrift stores every month for the last year so they don't get bogged down. (I took three boxes to a store once and they asked me not to come back for a while.) I put the posting on my local freecycle list and within half an hour of the posting going up I had six responses. By the time I came home from class I had over thirty responses. It was crazy. I gave them to this woman with a nine year old. I later got a message from a woman who wanted them for three foster kids whose dad killed themselves. I've dug up some other comics that I wasn't going to give away to give to her. The thing about freecycling is that you can also post a "WANTED" ad for stuff that you want. People have put up ads for anything from old computers to fruit. (People in LA with houses and yards often have more tree fruit than they can deal with. Once while visiting a friend a neighbor dropped off a big paper grocery bag full of avocados. I said "Oooh! I love avocados." and he came back with a full grocery bag for me.) The idea is that you create not just a free list on Craig's List but a community where you give of your extra and receive of other's bounty. Next I get rid of the exercise bike and my extra bed. http://www.freecycle.org/ |
| Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 |
| 3:59 pm |
Two Questions
Where can I get a cheap new laptop (online or in LA) and where can I get cheap moving boxes (in LA)? |
| Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 |
| 1:55 am |
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| Thursday, March 12th, 2009 |
| 9:02 am |
Home Grown
Don't you hate it when you have something you really need to do but...you just...don't...do it...? That's me and my taxes right now. Yesterday I took my first ceramics class. Definitely not for someone who doesn't like to get messy. I made a bowl and a vase like thing. I think the hardest part for me is going to be learning to be the whole slow and steady thing. Sudden movements make your project uneven. I can see how they talk about the zen nature of it. (A lot of people I talked to there say that making the pottery is meditation for them. It's a flat rate for four classes and a month's worth of 24 hour access to the studio so that you can come in at 2am and make pottery if you feel like it. (Or something other than pottery...it's a full ceramics studio.) I also picked enough salad greens out of my garden to make large salads for three. I bought a seed packet of "mixed salad greens" for $1.79 and just pulling out plants to thin the rows (so the remaining plants have room to grow). I couldn't believe how much was there. I pulled out more leaves than I would get in a $1.99 bag at Trader Joe's and it barely looked like we picked any at all. It tasted like the baby greens you get at the store but just a bit fresher. All organic too. It's the first thing I've grown in my garden that I've harvested and eaten. Some of the other crops weren't exactly success stories. The soil in that plot is just not good for certain kinds of plants. My potato plants are looking pretty good so far (except the one I accidentally sat on while planting more salad greens). Planted a few more of them and more salad greens (they take about five weeks before they are ready to eat). At home I started arugula, yellow squash, and roma tomatoes. Roma tomato plants can produce up to 200 tomatoes per plant. Let's see if I can even keep the plants alive... I think I want to make myself a big salad bowl so I can eat the salad I grow in a bowl I made. God I'm such a dork. |
| Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 |
| 10:52 am |
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| Monday, February 16th, 2009 |
| 10:35 pm |
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