this is the new sound. I CAME TO GET DOWN

 

my chapstick friend carling got free tickets to dinah shore (if you don't watch the L word, that's like spring break for power lesbians) recently and saw lady gaga perform live. on our ikea run this weekend, she introduced me to this amazing little number. um, speaking of ikea, WHEN THE FUCK DID BARBARA KRUEGER START DOING THEIR DISPLAYS???

i had previously written gaga off as just another factory girl (plus the non- acoustic version of poker face MAKES MY EARS BLEED) but after hearing carling's play by play account/deconstruction of her live show i did some research.....this chick is like a delicious pop culture smoothie where bowie meets xtina meets madonna with a hefty dose of feminist media studies thrown in like a protein booster. and it tastes GOOOOOD. as for kanye, well, i love that crazy dude. he's so smart, and such a dick. do i wish he hadn't just done a collaboration with my LEAST FAVORITE ARTIST EVER? yes. but nobody's perfect. at least he's ok with being railed by the south park boys. and kid cudi is so filthy and wonderful. i'm wondering if he and amanda blank have done anything together... by the way i am kind of losing my shit over here over this whole thesis show thing, but i am dealing.

ps

i'm kind of in love with these motherfuckers:

http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/

18 DAYS UNTIL MY MFA SHOW BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA

I ORDERED POSTCARDS FOR MY SHOW SO IT'S KIND OF REAL NOW

i have six different ones, cause i so fancy (gangstuh)! one is the title of the piece i'm showing and the others are excerpts of text from it. message me your address and i will send you one, i'm serious.









and the back:

i had a studio visit with marcia tanner, curator, writer, and all around badass, and she really loved what i got going, which needless to say was a HUGE vindication after my review. in a moment of subtlehustle genius i brought my portfolio on dvd with business card insert and foisted it upon her....can't hurt, i suppose.

i also recently showed my first text piece, and i think it was a pretty big success. don't have photos because i don't document anything because i am a shithead, but basically i had the phrase "my manifest destiny is a feminist mess to me" printed on vinyl in a font that has a LOT of negative space: in a color that matched the floorboards of the gallery. i then installed it (the letters were only an inch high) on the ground in front of the gallery's back doors. it's nearly invisible, and so i've decided to leave it there until i get caught and forced to remove it, even though the show closed this weekend.

i think i might also do a text intervention at the thesis show, using the same conventions (text that matches the floor). also at the show: i am auctioning off a singing telegram as part of another student's project. any song (or one i write based on the client's specifications), any costume (this could get ugly....literally) and anywhere within city limits, any time before june 1.

things are happening!

the cutest infestation ever

things are happening! it's 9 days til my final review and then i'm pretty much locked in a flight pattern til vernissage. so yeah, i can't stay long.



i am really into the ways in which we interact physically, emotionally, and intimately with hardware and software, especially social technologies, but also actual technological objects. for example, i sleep next to my laptop. every night. on the screen is live video feed of my partner, who lives 500 miles away, sleeping. this is how we deal with distance. he and i like to talk about how our children (OUR HYPOTHETICAL CHILDREN! more like the next generation in general) will interact with technology.

**NERD ALERT**

i wish there was a terminator that took place in a future where judgment day was postponed for a couple decades, so we could see how gradually we further integrated our daily lives with interpolative technology. this is how it starts:

the future is bunnehs!

if that wasn't jetsons enough for you, how about programming your coffee cup and car keys to tell you things!

i don't know whether to be totally freaked out or totally amazed and covetous. i am both, actually. this ambivalence has been a huge source of inspiration in the past...

norwegian betty friedan version of total eclipse of the heart (but you know, with dudes), vito acconci and vbs.tv

while looking for real jobs on the other side of graduation, i came across vice magazine's videos (they're looking for editors). i had heard of the vice guide to travel and watched a couple of shorts while perusing the do's and don'ts (the guiltiest of pleasures considering how MEAN those fuckers are), and am now addicted to their art talk series. some of the artists they choose are your typical nyc hipsterfuck jokes (lizzie bougatsos, anyone? no one should ever, ever let that one talk on camera again. i want that ten minutes back.), and some of them genuinely generate food for thought, love em or hate em (laurel nakadate, k8 hardy). actually, k8 hardy has one of the most relevant quotes to my life and work, nay, might i say, ANY feminist artist's life and work, that i've heard lately: "there's this assumption that we're making work to, like, prove our point. i'm not trying to prove a feminist point. this is not feminism 101, this is my world, my feminist world, and it's where i make art from."

but by far, by faaaaaaaaaaaar and away, the best episode of art talk is with vito acconci. the interview starts with his poetry career and moves forward into the present. did any of you know he's an architect/designer now? swiss cheese wtc, magnetic field tattoos, and firefly tunnels. genius is as genius does, for like 50 years. BOW YOUR MOTHAFUCKIN HEADS, ASSHOLES! you are about to witness greatness.

as far as other vbs tv offerings are concerned, i reccomend toxic napoli for children of men-esque chills, except these chills are REAL. and very intense.

the guide to travel videos are very surface, and are more entertaining than educational. i am into the spirit of them but often find the hosts really annoying and a little too present in a michael moore kind of way. still, i haven't seen anything like them and would reccomend the collected volume (available on netflix) to anyone. they are certainly fascinating in their own right.

MY WEBSITE IS UP RUNNING AND FULL OF ART. IT'S BEEN A VERY PRODUCTIVE WEEKEND....

fashion photography at the international center of photography

slideshow with captions

pyramid has now closed and been deinstalled. all in all, i think i will remember this experience fondly as a truly productive collaboration. dodes and i are very different as people and artists but it was great doing a piece together. it's funny: last fall we both had jill miller for tutorial, and she kept telling us we should be friends and collaborate. jill was one of the first professors at this school that really supported me. i palpably remember showing her the portfolio i applied with and her saying " i totally get what you were doing here", and how relieved i was, because i had had no real response to that work yet. she was actually a friend as well as a professor, and that's kind of unusual and wonderful. she has since moved on to a better job at carnegie mellon, which is also most likely the better school as well.

also, i did my first color correction, which i think went pretty well, and used some of the stuff i learned in the editing intensive to make the sound a more viable component of the piece. the opening was well-attended and i think we pulled the artist's talk off without a hitch.

two of the channels of the piece are available on my website. for the third channel, go to dodes' website. i'll have some installation shots ready eventually.

there is no rest for the wicked. next on the agenda is continued work with the navy doc under the tutelage of jay rosenblatt, and a series of videos based on the concepts explored in "if i was a man".

the nile studies

i saw this while wading through rhizome as a procrastinating technique

and i could watch it for hours. i really shouldn't, though.

humbling moments

yesterday, i actually got to show the footage from my documentary project to one of the editors of apocalypse now! 

lisa fruchtman was assistant editor on that film until she cut the scene where the bunnies land to do the USO show, and after coppola saw her work with that scene, he hired her on as a full-fledged editor, and in 1979 she and the the three or four other editors were nominated for an academy award. she was twenty-fucking-four. my age. she spoke a little, at my request, about what it must have been like to work on that project, which was male-dominated and extremely intense, and be a woman, and so young. she also said she chose to cut "children of a lesser god" on her own because she knew she needed to establish herself as a talent in her own right. she also talked about her experience winning an editing academy award for "the right stuff". she clearly has a gift, and she is clearly a badass. i felt like kind of an asshole to show her a bunch of crap and be like "yeah so, what do i do?", but she gave me some really insightful concepts to consider and expressed a lot of interest in the topic. she also relieved by anxiety about finishing the project by graduation, by basically saying "may is five minutes from now, and GOOD documentaries take time to find form and focus. DO NOT RUSH THIS." well, i'm convinced.  

oh yeah, and she has this anecdote of meeting kurosawa: she was editing the end of apocalypse now, and was cursing at the film strips strewn around her and he and coppola walked in on her while she had a bunch of film tangled around her neck and he just burst out laughing at her. then he gave her a copy of one of his paintings. eeesh.

also this past week, dan olmstead, our sound editing professor, took us on a field trip to zaentz media center, where lots and lots of entertainment industry professionals, including sam green, my former professor and director of academy award nominated the weather underground, have offices. we met with a professional sound designer, chatted briefly with a documentary picture editor, and toured fantasy studios, where green day's dookie, blues traveler four, and many many others were recorded. the center was founded by saul zaentz, who has produced the english patient, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, etc. etc. the offices are utterly gorgeous. 

did all of this give me something concrete to aspire to? yes. my work hasn't even begun yet. 

the lots o'crap home stretch enterin' update, y'all

SO. i am attempting to resuscitate this blog after a bit of a hiatus in which i made another documentary short and then traveled home for the holidays. it was a nice respite, and i actually managed to get some filming in while i was sight-seeing and relaxing with my nearest/dearest.

back in san francisco, shit is as real as it ever is. i have a group show coming up at the end of the month in the diego rivera gallery at the san francisco art institute, with stephanie dodes and brittany mccall, two totally rad bitches that i am super excited to collaborate with. the show is called "the pyramid", and has cultish undertones. you can read our statement of intent here.

while busting my ass trying to get that shebang together, i am taking a two-week intensive on film editing taught by lisa fruchtman and dan olmstead. fruchtman edited apocalypse now and children of a lesser god among many, many others, and olmstead is a bay-area sound mixer and designer. i'm pretty stoked, and have already realized the need to start really activating my netflix account to serve my film education needs: today we watched and analyzed snippets of city of god and yojimbo, neither of which i have seen, as i am a philistine.

you know what i DID see during my vacation? forgetting sarah marshall (fucking hilarious if typically-apatowian sausage festy), a scanner darkly (can i have a little less linklater in my dick please?), and borat, finally, which made me REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE. i am not sure if using a racist, exploitative interpretation of one kind of person to expose the racism, anti-semitism, and generally nausea-inducing behavior of these divided states evens out. oh wait, yes i am, and IT DOESN'T. poor kazakhstan! yes, i got that spelling right on the first try. literally everything and everyone in this movie appalled me. then again, i'm probably being over-sensitive. millions of twenty-somethings yelling "it's niiice!" can't be wrong, can they? sigh.

in higher-art news, diana al-hadid, who was a visiting professor at my undergraduate college my last year, is featured in artnews' "artists to watch" issue! her work has become a lot more sinister but maintains the beauty and whimsy i so admired back in '05. she's now in the saatchi collection and everything. hot damn, diana, good on ya. i would love to curate a show with her and swoon.

i'll be trying to stay vigilant with posting to this, because i know you guys care so, so much.

here's to 2009: year of my future!