Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Bikesnobbed!

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Lindsey and I are in the running for Bike Snob NYC's super-awesome parody photo contest! Our amazing photo collabo is putting 80's schwinns on the map! Check it out!

Here are the rest of the shots on flickr.

Now I'm back to laboriously editing my bike out of the corner of a long timelapse shot I'm including in the Winter in SLC bike video. Read More......

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Dolla Dolla Bill Yall!

Jann Haworth is in a Pop Art retrospective show called "Art Not Dollars" this spring in Paris, and she invited a bunch of Salt Lake artists to modify $1 bills for a big sewn piece she's making. Here's my contribution. Thanks Jann!

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Collage is great for someone who is inept and cannot draw straight lines, like me. Read More......

Monday, December 29, 2008

Glorious, Wicked Images

The Boston Globe has an amazing photoblog, The Big Picture. Displayed in full-screen resolution, my blog can't do them justice, but here are a couple picks and then a link to the relevant story.



The Greek Riots








The Year in Photographs Pt. 3

The Year in Photographs Pt. 2

The Year in Photographs Pt. 1


These pictures remind me how full the world is. They remind me to make every day count, and how much there is to know, to contribute to, to fight against. These pictures make me want to go out and be a fully creative person, but there's a flip side to such images:



Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, every position of privilege twinned with a disadvantage. A love-filled life requires some serious balance. Read More......

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Lindsey showed me Kaiser's Orchestra a while ago, pretty cool stuff!



They're from Norway. No idea what dude's saying, but it's a swell gypsy tune. Lindsey uploaded the lyrics into the comments section, it's actually a swell pirate tune! Read More......

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

One NY Post, on the go...


I forget how much wandering is an integral part of my being. Our flight pushed back, my mother and I return to the just-packed-up Brooklyn apartment, rebuffed at the airport. We're going to miss Christmas, but neither of us seems to mind. We've had good dinners with family before, this thanksgiving in fact, and we're pretty sure it'll happen without us.

The brownstone on President St. undergoes a role reversal due to the 3 hour journey with baggage and all, it is now home rather than a place of departure. We've arrived, in-between time, and without priorities. The structureless-ness caused by this stolen freedom (because we shouldn't be here, really) unlocks the wanderer.

I head out into the bitter cold and begin to walk, headphones on. I walk until there is no more Brooklyn, along streets where black faces look into my solitary white one, rather than the scene I've grown used to. The music is good and I look deep into everyone's eyes on this cold street, I see more than a few friends in the multitude of strangers finishing their day.

I come to a point where I have to decide: take the Manhattan Bridge into Chinatown below Canal St or the Brooklyn Bridge to Civic Center. I begin to walk across the Manhattan, scuffing and scuttling over the ice. The sun is beginning to set, I follow the bridge's subtle parabola and take in the sheer weight of its industrial repetition.


The bridge, the night, the silence, the cold, it's all so beautiful. All the more so for the wrought iron, the caging in, the infinite depth of human experience that is New York juxtaposed with the ubiquitous authority of the cage. I like the fences, the turnstiles, the barriers, the routes of New York, because they physicalize the kind of melancholy that makes this city such an astonishing place. The people I pass on the bridge are few and far between, the occasional biker or man walking alone. Their eyes are cold, blasé, and guarded. Mine are not, they are ablaze, undefended, open. A characteristic that has flaws, to be sure, but I couldn't and wouldn't trade it. I am in awe of what I see from the bridge, in awe of the bleakness of the walk and the richness of experience. I love it, love that it isn't simple. I love the weight of the bridge with its army of ghostly riveters and the way it shakes from the volume of humanity passing over. I love the graffiti-soaked walls and film-noir streetlamps and how much these settings don't belong to me as a visitor, but I am powerless to recreate them in my own home town.


I look down into the Bladerunner-esque Chinatown below and imagine hurtling through gridlock on a bike, swimming in the barracaded humanity. It makes me smile and warm, though I am cold.



I grab some dim sum to warm up, the music's still good, and I walk back over the other bridge. It's slippery and covered with tourists. Read More......

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Finals Week, and Cultural Pinnacles.

No really good thoughts for a while, being an academic then going to NY. Stay warm!

In the meantime, this not-safe-for-anything video gets taken down off youtube more often than footage of Palin naked, I consider it a beautifully mis-evolved endangered species, so enjoy while you can. This is what every other youtube video aspires to be:

Read More......

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Rockin' Tee.


This is my new favorite T-shirt.
I discovered it a while ago when I found the original image on flickr.

It's got everything. It refers to a touching photo, a moment of our history that illustrates the warmth and humanity of our new leader. It's ironic to see a man named Barack Hussein Obama cartoonishly transformed into a white icon of the american west. The message in spanish is great: "The hope has come; I represent those who have until now been left by the wayside." The whole thing is ridiculously campy as well, sort of a garbled, psudo-patriotic shirt that I would normally be appalled to wear, but representing everything I love about america: Bravado, excitment, multi-cultural struggle, honesty, and... hope.

I'd be happy to lop the sleeves off it and rock it redneck style through my European bike trip next summer. Or, even better, it comes as a tank-top!:

Read More......

Obama Killin' it again



Obama's press release this week is pretty damn cool. He starts with the regular doom and gloom economy stuff, but once you get through that it's all specific improvements he's planning that will make things more efficient and advanced and create jobs. It's like a techno-modern New Deal, revamping all the crumbling stuff and bolstering the economy in the process.

This is a much better tactic than just bolstering the 'free market,' where money is spent and made but only in the perpetuation of the existing problematic systems. Obama's plan spends money but with long term foresight and sound improvements in schools, government buildings, and hospitals.

The only part I'm not sure about is the "use it or lose it" part of allocating money to state budgets. I can see Utah quickly squandering this money on UDOT bullshit to hold up another crumbling mountain they swiped away to squeeze in a 6-lane highway. We need ideas along with dollars. Read More......

Thursday, December 4, 2008

This time last year

The spirits of the dead miss each other.

We know they do, because occasionally their whispered, lost communications go astray and drift across our mind. The human mind sympathizes with the loss, the grief and creates its own story, without really knowing why. That discontentment breeds and broods in the souls of poets and on the minds of thinkers and in the hands of artists until it metamorphoses into something beautiful. Until it does so it is excruciating.

The pain of butterflies is in their fragility, knowing that the slightest push results in a tear, the loss of a crystal so delicate and beautiful that it has no material value. This is our legacy, the production of the crystal, regardless of the pain and the cost, regardless of the value. Read More......

Monday, December 1, 2008

Senior Seminar Paper

Unlike everyone else talking in the library right now, I actually enjoy writing papers. They're usually not as good as I want them to be, and this one's no exception, but I wanted to throw it online 2 weeks before it's due and see if anyone had any feedback. You can be honest, and tell me if specific paragraphs are stupid and convoluted, I just have no distance from it anymore and would appreciate a fresh eye. It's all about this image:

Consemüller woman with Schlemm mask Breuer chai


Read the essay here.

*edit* Lindsay edited a ton of the worst dorky sentences and commas out, so now the second draft's up. Thanks! Read More......

Cratelung Taking off!

We at The Dada Factory are hosting Cratelung's going away party!



Cratelung is a local art collective that's leaving on an all-star trip through the Southwest. Their bold and adventurous team includes our dear buddy Casey and a bunch of his friends.

Find out more about Cratelung's Tour.
Join the party's Facebook Page.

Sadly, I will be in New York on the 13th, so go for me and take pictures! Read More......

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