Posts Tagged ‘updates’
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
quick notice here.
first off you’ll notice some changes ’round these parts. things look pretty stripped down, pretty bare. this is all part of a plan.
the approximate fourth incarnation of this blog in as little as 18 months, this time it’s all part of my upgrade and conquer initiative launched several weeks back.
The second incarnation went from the WordPress 1.5 to 2.0 codebase (I can’t even remember the first incarnation!); the third was actually implemented because of a forced downgrade in MySQL databases from switching hosts (a frustrating but necessary maneuver); this fourth incarnation comes with an upgrade to the WordPress 2.3.1 codebase, which has also rendered a huge chunk of some old code obsolete, thus the switch (temporary?) to K2 until I get around to polishing off some ideas and implementing some new features.
compound all of this development with having worked nearly 30 hours between two jobs in the past two days, and you can see I’ve been a little busy. Additionally, in more-depressing news, last Friday morning one of my uncles was fatally shot during a robbery in my hometown of St. Louis, MO. the type of thing one never thinks happening to one’s family, needless to say it’s shook us up. After the news broke Friday, I just sat at home all day, watching movies to get my mind off the idea. It’s not that easy.
There is, of course, a lot to report. More news about the GTA IV mural; some thoughts about Mike Nelson’s A Psychic Vacuum; Halloween; and more. It’ll all come soon, I promise promise.
(okay, not so quick. so be it!)
Friday, August 24th, 2007
first order of business: a coffee. then a nap (yes, coffee, THEN nap). then email, facebook, flickr, another nap. you know how it goes.
first thoughts: the sun here… it’s the best.
Saturday, August 18th, 2007
in London. sitting in a cafe behind the York pub right outside the Angel tube station. it’s been exactly 3 years and 1 day since I’ve been in London. a lot has changed – more on that later.
trying to pin down my friend Ed Short, I’m supposed to be crashing on his couch. He hasn’t picked up his mobile phone for over 4 hours now. Not that I mind sitting in a cafe, but carting around my luggage is a bit difficult, not so much because of the weight but more because of the sunburn I intentionally received yesterday (the 30kg backpack and straps really dig in to the skin!) on the beach in Pula, Croatia. That’s right biyotch! I was swimming in the Mediterranean less than 24 hours ago! Of course London is grey, overcast and rainy! Okay some things here haven’t changed!
But I guess I can’t – actually – complain, like I said the sunburn was intentional. Sometimes a burn is just good for you, and me, I like to sensory overload my body every now and then. It’s sort of like every surface cell of your skin eating Sriracha for a couple days!
WiFi here is hard to come by, and this particular cafe closes too early by my opinion (9pm, for a Saturday).
I have a shedload of images to upload to Flickr, things to write, and notes to transcribe to posts. Unfortunately what WiFi is available here is paid for by the hour, rounded up. The Internets were hard to come by (as in never) in Pula, so it’ll take time, but I’ll make it worth the wait!
cheerio from the Angel, N1, London!
Monday, August 13th, 2007
what can I say, Budapest is great. Actually, Buda is the shit. Pest is the town centre. if I lived here I’d live in Buda somewhere. guess that makes sense, rumor has it that’s where the fam is from.
so originally the plan was to have left earlier today for Croatia, to relax some days there before then heading to Kassel, for Documenta, and then from there to another city or two or direct to London to finish off this trip. then I got thinking, why Kassel? Documenta is pretty well documented online, indeed many of the works are pretty conceptual and only need to be read about or understood, not viewed. and another portion of the works I have no doubt I’ll see at another point in my life, and so I seem to think it’s just not necessary, and I’d much rather go easy on myself and trade an extra day in Budapest and an extra day on the beach in Croatia for a train hop to Kassel to engage with art that is, after all, just art.
Sunday, June 10th, 2007
it’s confirmed. I’m going to Europe this summer.
it’s been nearly three years since I’ve been there and this time around I’ll be visiting more countries than I toured in the three years I lived there! Oddly enough, when I lived in London while attending uni, I only visited three countries, the UK (obviously), Germany and Northern Ireland (an occupied territory of the first country anyhow)… well okay maybe four if you count Mansfield in Nottinghamshire as a world unto its own!
I didn’t get around much because 1. I was in college full-time and 2. I was relatively broke most of the time, being an already poor American in a country whose currency strengthened against any dollars I had saved up the day after I moved there (seriously day one was around 1.2$ to 1£ and within about six months it was nearly 1.9 to 1! eek!) – I even remember explaining to one of my tutors why, for the first two months I lived there I strictly made pencil art, was because I couldn’t yet afford anything else other than pencil and paper!
But this time I’m making up for it.
Still, hailing from the working class means it’s taken me nearly the entirety of those three years I’ve been away to save up, and I expect it will go faaaast. Thankfully through my participation in Flux Factory’s BudapestNewYork project at the Sziget Festival this year, about 3/4 of my plane fare is sponsored, and food and accommodation while in Budapest are covered.
I am working up until the day before I depart; I will be dismantling the current exhibition the eve before the eve of departure! I arrive in Budapest – which I might note is where my father’s family is from, on the Buda side of the Danube – the morning of 31 July. Immediately I set to work on the Flux Factory installation. Most of the other members will have already been in Budapest for nearly two weeks, but construction on the island can’t begin until 25 July, so I should arrive just on time to start my installation work (details of that in the near future). After 8 solid days of installation, the Sziget festival opens (8 August). I only plan to stick around for a couple of days, hopefully to see Napalm Death perform, but if they’re not in the first couple of days I will just have to depart. Plans are to get to Croatia for a couple of days, where my friend and fellow artist Olja Stipanovic was born, and visit her at her beach front property! Ahhh the Croatian sun! From there a 3-day stint in Kassel, Germany, for Documenta 12 is in order, and then to places such as northern Italy (least likely but potential), Zurich, Luxembourg, Brussels and Amsterdam. An ambitious list but I’m not thinking more than a day or two in any city, and after Budapest I have 15 days to get to London, where-from my departing flight leaves for NYC on 25 August. I definitely need at least 4-5 days in London, which squeezes the other countries into 10 days; Kassel will need at least 3, which leaves me with 7. Okay maybe Zurich and Italy are out of the question!
Still, an exciting trip, and one desperately needed since I didn’t get out of the USA at all in 2006 or 2005 for that matter.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
a memorial day weekend update will be here shortly, in the interim, juxtapose these two images: the last image I took in NYC, about 20 minutes before my arrival at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, at 34th Street, the MACY’S billboard was animated and really caught my eye against a backdrop of other billboards and highrises, concrete, buzzing pedestrians and blue skies; and the first morning walk at the Fokish Farm, a sea of green with dotted yellow, a row of barns, a farmhouse, and blue skies.
