Back in the old country

This was a Martin Creed installation at CCS. the piece is called Half the Air in a Given Space, it consists of a room filled with balloons. this is a view from the middle of the room.

The great thing about CCS is that art can exist in a vacuum. Where else could you have a show that filled a room with balloons, requiring three attendants to watch the doors at all times and help out each and every visitor who came, set up a system that turns all the lights in the galleries off and on throughout the day, and set up an installation with metronomes set to each and every speed requiring an attendant with white gloves to manually check and wind the metronomes, god knows how many times a day.

This is Julia after the MFA thesis show. It was nice being up at "art camp", it made me a little sad and made me wish I lived in the "country", oh wait, I do live in the "country" and I complain about it constantly.

Due to laziness, the post thesis show party was held at the Spiegeltent. The dj was, quite possibly, the worst dj ever. Attempts at dancing were mostly thwarted.

This is a video by Libby Hux, it's a bunny that can tell your fortune. If I could think of a way to incorporate a video installation in my apartment, this would be the video I would install.

This installation by Alisha Kerlin was also pretty sweet. I would install it into my apartment as well, even though I have had problems with sculptural installations in the home in the past.

I ran into Laetitia, she was very apologetic for not returning an email 10 or so months ago. She happened to mention that last year, while I was at Bard, some faculty had expressed concern that my work was getting dangerously close to Craft. It struck me as odd that nobody had mentioned this to me.

I visited Caesars studio we chated, with his encouragement I decided to make a shotgun synthesizer, he gave me some CD's of new work, one avant and one indie-pop. You should all go out and buy The Lisps album(s). If you can't decide which song to buy, I recommend Pepper Spray, it's pretty rockin.

I attended Dorothy Albertinis reading. After her reading she introduced me to her parents. I briefly thought about pretending I was a faculty member and telling them what a great student Dorothy was and what a joy she was to have in my classes.

Boats, Music and Found Footage

We left Roseburg Thursday morning on route to the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington.

We took the scenic route. As it turns out...not all of Oregon is lush and green.

We discussed the term "angular guitars"; it refers to bands that sound like Fugazi...or possibly Stereolab.

We stopped at Stonehenge, located just across the Washington state line. The placards said it was built as a WWI (or possibly II) memorial. I can't say that I completely understand why you would build a cement recreation of a prehistoric stone monument from England to mourn dead soldiers from southern Washington State.

We stopped at a gas station and were surprised by the copious amounts of young people and cheap beer. Near the gas station was a shanty town of tents. We assumed that these were all people planning to attend the Sasquach festival as well.

It turns out this shanty town was not assembled for the music festival and was in fact set up for boat races scheduled for the following day.

We luckily decided against camping next to the camp site with a giant "BEER" banner.

We were awoken around 3 in the morning by a conversation that included the line "I like to read High Times for the articles".

The next morning we arrived at the Sasquatch campgrounds which were far larger but somehow seemed to be less...something.

The Blow (whom I have mentioned before) was pretty great, she had amusing story's to accompany her songs. I thought it was a nice spin on the singer/songwrighter + drum machine dancing-awkwardly genre.

Beer was $12 for a 16 ounce CAN of cheap domestic beer. thats 75 cents an ounce, we decided to stick with the free water.

Neko Case was good, there's not really much I can say. I think she played that one song...you know, that one that kind of sounds like that other one.

Electrelane (who were the focus of the of the earlier "angular guitar" discussion) were allot better live than they were on the album. A guy standing near me asked "what's the name of this band?" I told him "I think their called Stereolab", he thought this was much less hilarious than I did.

Ghostland Observatory was (insert expletive) awesome-tastic. We found out later that the lead singer is NOT a woman.

I think Grizzly bear was good. I'm not sure though because I was in line for the bathroom for 90% of the set.

I would be lying if I said that I didn't think the first song and the last song the Arcade Fire performed weren't the same song. I totally have a crush on one of the violin players though.

Bjork had a sweet laser show and was pretty awesome, despite her playing that awful song from her new album.

During the night I was not awoken by any drunken frat boys.

We decided against taking the scenic route home.

The un-scenic route is still pretty scenic.

During this Memorial day weekend; My Awesome Camera deleted three (3) different batches of photos, and I officially graduated from grad school.