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!)

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.

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!

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.

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.

I lost all of last weekend and am now about to miss my fourth day of work, after what started as just a possible head cold and developed into quite easily the worst sinus infection I’ve had in my adult life! This thing had me by the balls!

There was a point sometime Saturday evening when suddenly I lost all capacity to do anything. I went from no real symptoms to suddenly being more-or-less incapacitated. I failed to go to an opening that night because I couldn’t even imagine walking those six blocks in my condition. Sunday was a blur, mostly watching TV thinking if I just zoned out I’d recover, but the worst was still ahead. At least at this point at least I could still swallow with ease!

Monday was when it really hit. I hadn’t had breakfast and was drinking some tea to get me settled when suddenly the contents of my stomach went flying! I never really had a fever but rather cold sweats and hot flashes on and off for the next two days. This was the starting point of over 40 hours without solid food, actually without anything but juice and water. Like fasting but without the choice. I couldn’t stay awake for more than an hour at a time and kept collapsing either on my bed or even passing out in my desk chair (it leans back quite nicely, quite comfy actually).

By the second day I was really starting to feel the pressure because I’m missing everything happening at work. I tell myself I’m going to try and make it in, but my body is weak from lack of food and by Tuesday morning my face was so swollen that a friend of mine told me I looked 45 years old; the normally-slightly angular cuts of my face were replaced by bulbous puffs of who-knows-what, my eyes had no physical articulation but were rather flat shapes set inside a bloated sack of skin, my upper-throat area was so swollen that my neck actually looked shorter. I mean this flu bug, or whatever it was, was fucking king!

Usually sleep, rest and plenty of fluids work for me in these scenarios, but like I say this time was different. I could feel it.

Yesterday I finally went looking for a doctor. Since I work full-time right now I have health coverage, but I’m terribly versed at how health coverage works in this country, even though I live here. It’s all just so confusing, and defeating. Health shouldn’t be an industry.

First I looked towards work, but around my job I had too many options, over 70! Too many to choose from, actually. I looked back towards home and eventually settled on two (of only three available!) options. I set forth at 8am to find these clinics, and just walk-in and demand an appointment. The first one developed into a fiasco, as the address was the address not of a clinic but of the MetLife building at Queens Plaza! And the phone number was some sort of ‘routing number’ for an ‘office’ of clinics, or something like that. I couldn’t make out much at 8am once I finally, after over 20 minutes, got someone on the phone. While they did have a clinic elsewhere in the city, then it turned out they didn’t actually accept my insurance! Whhaaaa!? But you’re LISTED on my insurer’s website? Again, they said they were simply a ‘routing number’ for an ‘office’. Again, confusing, defeating.

I call up my second and last option, I have no where else to go. Please, please pick up, please take me in! They say they don’t have any more appointments available but after hearing me and hearing my situation, they ask how soon could I be there? I say 15 minutes. I book it over to the clinic and low-and-behold it’s located inside the Queensbridge Housing complex! Good doctor, crazy staff, wild patients! I’m the only white guy in the joint.

As I’m a completely new patient, I have more paperwork than most. I spend over 2 hours waiting and am in-and-out with the doc in less than 20. Appointments aren’t available as he explains at Queensbridge that logic doesn’t function! He recommends to show up early to get in early. Yeah, okay. Hah!

The meds he prescribes it turns out aren’t covered under my insurance – or maybe I need to give a call to get some reimbursement the pharmacist says – and one prescription cost over $10/pill! 10 pills, 10 days, $105!

I lost my weekend time, I didn’t get to develop a costume I was working on, I’ve lost four days wages now, and spent nearly $300 on doctor’s fees and prescriptions, not to mention the parking ticket ($60) I got illegally parking to get to the doctor! All in all well around $1000 lost.

Of course the financial angle is one thing. But what of the 40+ million other United States citizens without health insurance? 40+ million! What of artists and freelancers and everybody who doesn’t want a full-time job just in order to have health insurance provided, and can’t afford to buy good packages on their own? How are people attempting to make a career out of their work, who are supposed to be in the studio as much as possible, also supposed to provide their own health care? I cringe everytime I hear or read the term health insurance industry.

So I sit at home on this sixth day sick, finally recovery may be possible. In my adult life I can’t remember a time when I was sick for six full days. Sure, a couple of days here and a couple of days there with extreme sickness, but not six, not like this. I told one person upon reflection that there was a good 3 days there where I didn’t laugh, because all I was doing was sleeping and drinking, nothing more. That made me realize how much of an impact this thing had on my daily life, because I always laugh – it’s healthy! I didn’t take any photos for over five days and hadn’t posted anything here for going on six.

Now I’ll try and slowly put back in order my studio, which looks like a couple… dozen… tornadoes hit it. When you’re as sick as I was you really could care less about where anything goes!

I’ll catch up on past events and hopefully some future events will re-inspire this blog. I know I need to make some adjustments in my own standards of living and cycles now, but in the meantime keep yourself well.

four days without blogging is like an eternity.

time lately has been without compassion. monday (the last day I blogged) and tuesday were very busy days at work, as we are currently installing our next show; wednesday we were installing and had to stop mid-way, clean-up, and prepare for the February installment of Dorkbot; wednesday night I fell ill and still went in to work because I’m the only one who does my job the latter part of the week – thursday night I had a fever and slept for over eleven hours and by friday I was so weak I could barely eat anything. while sick-with-the-plague most of my time is spent managing other artists’ time because the majority of them are such bad planners: “No, come to the gallery now. You have to see the space.”; “We need that DVD from you. Absolutely.”

Very few – as in only one – communicate their schedules, their timetable, and let us plan accordingly. Here it is the weekend before the opening and two of them don’t even have their final video edits turned in! Some of them spend so long finicking over minor details that they forget about their own work as well as the larger installation: the entire space; “No, you can’t place that smack in the middle of the room.” “Why not?” Nevermind… A handful of artists finally showed up to the gallery at 5:25pm on Friday – keep in mind we close at 6pm! Then it’s the weekend, and much to their surprise we’re not open.

So, here it is, Saturday morning, not even 7am. I’m over 100 emails behind schedule. Lots to troll through and catch up with. I’m still very much sick, but if I just spend the day lounging about drinking tea and forgetting about the burdens of the exterior world, maybe tonight I’ll venture to the Project1981 opening. More posts to follow.

(the 12,000+ 7-foot-length ball-chains overwhelmed me post-de-install. good metaphor me thinks)

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON PEOPLE!?! It’s bleeding January in New York City! I don’t want mosquitoes. And I don’t want flurries. I want five feet of dense solidified water! I want snow up to my chin so when I walk through the snow paths all you see is my head bobbing along! I want to wear big boots. And I want to climb a hill by kicking and clawing into it, by digging myself in and moving just a couple feet at a time! I want WIIIINTTTERRRRRRR!

I’ve never been one to assess things based on ‘the year’ or any chunk of time such as summing up 2006, but I will say that I think 2006 was a good run. And I think 2007 will likely only improve. Friends of mine and I talked about how 2006 seemed to imbue a sense of hope, or the possibility for potential – which we must now take advantage of.

There were the elections which led to Rumsfeld’s resignation – YAY!; “You” were announced as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year – awezommmmeeee!; lots of great art including the huge DADA exhibition at the MoMA, as well as the exhibition of works on paper @ Flux Factory which I helped curate – yes, I do see those exhibitions on the same professional bar!; the Cardinals won the World Series – SNAP! (but for some reason you can still buy tickets online? eh?); my Dad got to visit and see where I live now – he’s the DUDE man!; new housemates mean new friends – and I got to see some old ones, as well as make a few new ones along the way; of course this blog was initiated halfway down the stretch (a lot of good that has done me, they should call these things time-vacuums not blogs!); I launched Normal Space @ Flux Factory – although it’ll be over a year between the first two shows, ack!; all in all a good run. No ‘resolutions’ here, just keep on trucking and hopefully exhaust more energy, that’s my outlook!

This past weekend I helped my friends Sebastien and Marie move house; I drove and packed the rental truck. It was a cumbersome move that took longer than it should have. To boot I strained a muscle in my lower back that took two days of hot showers, stretching and attempted-relaxing to work off. Just in time for the opening reception tonight at Location One, which was pretty successful. And just in time to come home to Flux Factory to install for the next show, which is ummm… barrelling along just fine. ahem. No really I’m sure it will be lovely. Of course the reception for that show isn’t too much of a concern for me, since my work is a light projection that can’t be seen during the day, or when the gallery lights are turned on (i.e. during the reception). however it is winter and there is more dark than light, so my work, which will be projected 24-7 for the duration of the show, will get more viewing time than not. I did some tests earlier tonight and all is well. There’s a little conflict with placement in the gallery but nothing that can’t be overcome.

There are some other deadlines looming; also a friend is having a birthday bash thing Saturday; as well as this weekend is the benefit sale of postcards for Postcards From the Edge, this year being held at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (including the sneak peek preview for that, tomorrow, at the same time as the Tatlin exhibition at Flux Factory – ahh to be in two places at the same time, how I love that maneuver!). Like I said, aint nowhere near over yet!

But not all was lost this weekend. I did manage to construct my tool shelf, which I have been planning for some time now but was for a while unable to find the proper shelving brackets, which I finally found a few days ago during a tool run for another item. Sweet! So the shelf sits above the photocopier and the desktop monitor, and kind of frames off a previously-dead space part of the wall, while still allowing me to reach all the hand-tools. These are tools I use most-often, or in the case of the button maker are large and odd-shaped and otherwise difficult to store anywhere else.

The complete list of tools on the shelf are:

two tape guns (one in photo)
tape rolls
sanding block
laser level
analog level
three sizes glue
two hammers (one in photo)
button maker
two button die cutters
staple gun
jar of push pins
spray glue
three tape measures
power screwdriver
screwdriver battery charger
drill bit tray

And then I get to spend the rest of my day driving a 16-foot Budget rental around town, helping a friend move house. Guess I should just about get ready for that. And maybe eat some breakfast.

What an awesome exchange this art & internet world!

Meanwhile I’ve got a pile (literally, a stack so big it can tip over) of other mail to sort through; also hoping to make it to the post office tomorrow to send out mail including sending Karen, the producer of tangent, a button/badge she ordered from me some time ago. So Karen, if you get your RSS feeds and are reading this, expect that button soon! (as I smack myself, “It’s about time you lazy sod!”)

As I prepared dinner this evening, I had a few minutes to collect my thoughts and then it hit me: the St. Louis Cardinals are one game away from going to the World Series!! The bubble in my throat is nervousness. And wouldn’t you know they’re playing in my borough, Queens, against the Mets.

In the ‘best of 3′ series (after being tied 2-2) they won the first, in St. Louis, then lost the second last night but put up a great fight in the 9th; they’re now playing for keeps, and are tied 1-1 in the beginning of the third.

LETS GO CARDINALS LETS GO!!!

For real though last week there was an opening at my employer, Location One, followed on Friday by general work exhaustion exacerbated by the rain; Saturday was great but I … was working, invigilating the gallery; finally Sunday, today, I went up to Peekskill, NY for the Peekskill Project. Several of my artist-friends were in that, and I will report more on that tomorrow once I process some digital images.

I also have to spend some time tomorrow putting up my Sunnyside card-works for one of several pieces (hopefully) I am doing for Down the Street and Around the Corner. More on that to come.

Oh and I’ve put aside some time to work on the code running this blog. Fun fun.

i’ve spent long enough trying to solve another issue with my databases after the migration to my new webhost, that by now i could have simply re-typed everything and been working again, albeit from scratch but working. instead, i’m still where i am now, which is occasionally scratching my head and spending more time than i should to troubleshoot problems.

however, i will say it’s been a positive experience. it’s enlightened me more about how databases actually operate, and forced me to come to grips with software like phpMyAdmin. in my searches to solve some problems, i also stumbled upon some other pieces of software which i might employ across the website, so it’s not all for nothing, idinit…