Portland Visit

Last weekend I visited Beck's new home in Portland. Here is Ponchke inside her box.

Beck and Robert near their house. We're walking to the Max (the light rail) that runs close by.

On the way, we walk along the newly renamed Rosa Parks street. Below you can see that the old sign for Portland Ave. has been painted over. The cross street is Detroit. I was just writing about street names in my diss. In the US, since somewhere around the 70s, people have been trying to memorialize new histories by changing street names. MLK street is a primary example. This has typically been met with resistance. People who oppose the renaming just don't see the importance of names, they worry about the economic impact. Of course this has underlying race and class implications.

We ride the Max downtown. There are bike racks inside!

Beck leads us to make a quick stop to see this neat mural about Portland women's history. We see names again. Names under each woman's portrait remind me that there is so little presence of women in history. Women of color even more so. We are still at the stage of introductions. The mural hails us from our route to introduce the women. It puts the names to the faces and tells some of their stories (there is a legend on the left side not captured in the photo). For example, the text describes Amara Perez,

longtime community organizer, is the program director of In Other Words Women's Books & Resources. She is the founder of Sisters in Action for Power & a community group for gay women of color called Happy Hours.

We come across this installation art on the side of a coffee shop. Wooden letters reminding us that "this too shall pass." I think about GW in office.

Here's the artist's statement posted beneath (click image to enlarge).

More Portland art. This is the work of City Repair Project. An effort by a bunch or urban activists to take back city intersections and make them interesting and pedestrian friendly by slowing down the cars.

and this YMCA model was spotted in a store in Portland. Just think, someone is likely to get this as a X-mas present.

I have never heard of Daniel Johnston! Thanks to the random chance that I happened upon Johnston's graffiti and to the comments in the post below, I will now go check out his music. Here is where the street and the computer intersect in a collective knowledge that is not possible otherwise.

Speaking of graffiti that perseveres, media report that apparently "historic graffiti" from the 1980s was discovered in a building in Manhattan. It includes early NY graffiti writers' work such writing by Basquiat.

here are some quotes from CBS NEWS:

"It's a great discovery," says Alberto Mugrabi, a major Basquiat and Andy Warhol collector. "It's the beginning of graffiti [as art]."

"Obviously, it's a critical piece of history, SoHo history," says Lisa Dennison, the former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum read more here.

Below is an image of the graffiti being restored. Why is it being restored? Because its worth a lot of money and because time has given value to it. Now its a piece of history rather than a piece of vandalism and art collectors and museum directors are pontificating about it. I am sure that this news gets graffiti removal vigilantes' safety goggles steamed up.

Either way, the graffiti remains in the realm of extremes, validated by pretentiousness of the art world or scorned by the puritanism of street cleansing. I'm still in favor for the city to be our playground, the way that Situationists envisioned it, where scribbling, decorating, building, preforming, playing has a respected place in the city.

Where the value of urban play is not primarily translated into money, status or historic preservation, but into informal social interaction, like the one that happened around the funny bulge eyed frog drawn by a musician named Daniel Johnston, photographed and posted by me and explained by a couple of blog visitors.

This is a house that appeared to me in a dream before. I saw it on a walk in Austin. I've heard that Deja Vu is just a brain hiccup, but how can it be so real?

Saw home made T-shirt of this graff in Austin

Bob Dylan in an alley

Things I observed on my short trip to Texas:

People say "hi" to you on the street
Roads are bigger
Food portions are bigger
People are bigger
I was told that a 15-20 minute walk was "too far to walk" and that I should take a cab
Taxi drivers, servers and hotel workers have brown skin, tourists are mostly white
Men are more gentleManly
I was called "Sir" twice in two days

in contrast to the Texas bigness see this video, it will amaze you

view from my hotel room in Austin. There was a floor to ceiling glass wall in my room (the little triangle at the bottom middle is the floor in my room). and the Omni had an external glass wall and so I could see the city across the inside courtyard and the through the glass wall of the hotel.

view from the hotel elevator. it was glass on one side looking over the big open courtyard where the restaurants were.

a life size car made entirely from cloth in a gallery in Austin

section of a mural on the side of a coffee shop on the Drag (like Seattle's "Ave") in Austin near the university. the theme was something like "bliss."

dry fountain on UT Austin campus

even in Texas

Gi performs in the Faculty Dance Concert. She's a Dancing Queen.

Gi and I just published an article about Pike Place Market. You can download it here if you'd like to see. There are a couple of typos (made by the publisher, not us!), just ignore if you notice. we'll put up a new version when that's fixed.

check out this post that describes 50 online tools to tell a story. He tells the same story about his dog Dominoe with each one.

Lucas draws in between the Simpsons. One amazing thing is that this drawing is all digital...in Photoshop!

drawing by Lucas Gray

I just got a handle on Web 2.0 and now there's Web 3.0!? It makes total sense...well not quite but the concept does. I feel like I've been exploring this idea on my own and it was nice to see it articulated. Maybe if I had been going to all those tech-geek conferences, I would have heard of it sooner.

I'll be lazy here and paste what Wikipedia says Nova Spivack says about Web 3.0.

* Transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
* ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;
* network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;
* open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);
* open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;
* the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;
* distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
* intelligent applications, natural language processing.[12], machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents.[13]

I don't completely understand some of it but to most of it -- YES!

I've just been wrestling with Yahoo Pipes. I love the idea but I haven't figured out how to make them work for me yet. essentially, you can use all the cool Web 2.0 tools, like Flickr, RSS feeds, You Tube, etc. and feed it all into a single page like an ultra customized search interface. And then you can mash it all up and map flickr images into Google My Maps and feed filtered content in from websites. It basically turns all internet content into data that can interact. Until recently people were posting individual data (pictures, links, tags, text, movies, etc.) that was more or less independent from what others were posting, now we can take that stuff that people upload on the web and make it talk to each other, see how it relates. So for example, images and maps and addresses and statistics can be made to interact without fancy, expensive and specialized software. It's still a bit confusing but no doubt will get easier. This helps visualize the world in whole new ways.

And I get paid to figure out how this works and how we can use this stuff to teach students and to get them excited about learning. Just today I found some great lecture podcasts on iTunes U. check out the philosophy section. There are some great podcasts from Berkley. So cool to be able to listen to a really good lecture from a Berkeley lecture hall and for free!

Guy Maddin's Brand Upon The Brain is the one film that I managed to see at the Oly Film Fest and it was surprisingly excellent. Unlike the name suggests, it's not a modern critique of capitalism. It is about mothers, love, memories and dreams. The film is shot in Super 8 and done in an old school silent film style. However the humor, the sexy kisses and the dark plot are very 2007. If a film can be a poem, this is it. See trailer here to get a taste.

Seattle's Katherine Scharhon was pretty adorable in the gender bending role of Chance Hale.

click on the image to see more pics

Ponchke was crazy about her Thanksgiving treat.

IMG_3369.JPG, originally uploaded by wenjojukebox.

in wenjo's kitchen

More pics on Wenjo's Flickr

and on my Flickr

In Chicago, dining with Wenjo and her entourage of awesome women.

Wenjo directing us to shine in light. filming on her back on the dunes of the great lake.

strange turkey portrait near Wenjo and Anne's house in an art gallery, just days before thanksgiving. notice the fleshy scrotal bow tie.

Anne just got a call on her cell phone and said "Oh no, it's Oprah." She's on call.


Gi on her way to a job interview on the the El in Chicago.

Plaster Jesus found (and photographed) at Value Village in Olympia.

New job, old diss -- no time to blog but a little time to go to a Halloween party at the Hall of the Woods and dance on roller skates and then go geoduck digging. here are some pics. more later.

Medusa's deadly glance

Big Debbie (Little Debbie grown up) and Aurora Borealis

and the drowned skeleton at the grocery store.

click to enlarge.

Di and I got a tour of the Colman building today. Here I am with the museum's curator and local artist. For more check out the mural blog.

BBC reports that "At least 10,000 monkeys are creating havoc in the Indian capital by barging into government offices, stealing food, threatening bureaucrats and even ripping apart valuable documents. The increasingly aggressive animals swing effortlessly between the offices of the defense, finance and external affairs ministries." It seems that urban development that destroys their habitat is to blame. Looks like the Indian wild monkeys are taking some political action into their own paws.

meanwhile, i move more stuff to Washington's capital. here's gi monkeying around in the various angles of the new place. located a block away from the SF bakery and across the street from Stinky and Jen's house. Nice bike ride to SMU, where I start work on November 31.

little j, big j and their pappi

Euell Gibbons writes that the best time to hunt for geoducks is on the crazy moon, which is coming up at the end of this month. Crazy Moon, which happens once a year, is when the tide goes out the farthest. Native Americans in this area call it the Geoduck tide. If you look on the tide table, you will see that it goes out as far as -3.6, which is well beyond the recommended low tide of -2 for geoduck digging on the fish and wildlife website. I like to go to Frye Cove in Oly. This year we might check out another location though. According to Cutler, the name Geoduck comes from the Puget Salish meaning "dig deep" since that's what you have to do to get to the clam. Since the low tide happens in the middle of the night, we will be digging 3 foot deep holes by moonlight. Hopefully I won't have to do what this guy in the picture is doing. Here's Gibbons' book that has great info about shellfish harvesting.

New "free" fence before and after. The moving truck that was moving Di into our house, ran over the chain link fence. Thanks to DI, C and Gi who managed to wrangle the company to promise to pay for the damages. I got the repair guy to modify the fence by removing the chain link, cutting down the posts and attaching wood to the existing frame. The chain link fencing got picked up by Craigslist scavengers.
Reusing materials and modifying turned out to be same price as fixing the existing fence. Aside from the stress of dealing with the moving company and scheduling a ton of estimates, this turned out to be a bargain. Once the grapes grow over it and the cedar gets weathered, it will look more natural. Plus our gates are always open, it creates a nice enclave inside.

I almost fell of my chair when I saw Kaela on David Byrne's blog. Not only that, but he was raving about her act!

He clearly hasn't been to Olympia because what he calls "pretty damn eccentric and arty for a pop act, even for an alt-pop audience" is kind of normal there. Not to diminish Kaela's accomplishments. I just think that there is something about Oly that fosters that kind of creativity that is appreciated in the world at large.

Here is some art at my soon to be job at SMU

A sculpture of a Benedictine monk with a crow on his shoulder made by the son of one of the SMU's profs, Simon Kogan

Funky Jesus carving on the front door of the chapel

A sandblasted concrete bench with with drawing by Oly's Nikki McClure. The text at the top reads "Take this bread and do not be afraid."

Bronze monks reading scripts made out of etched red glass by Simon Kogan

And this is some art from the most recent Artswalk

Art in a window display

Femme de Fabrique performing trapeze in a recycled building supply warehouse

Art in an Oly book store