Spring at MASS MoCA

May 27, 2009
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Joe and I spent the weekend in the Berkshires, and despite the fact that I tried numerous times for the umpteenth millionth year (okay, maybe only 9) to get Joe and/or his family to go with me to see a Shakespeare & Co. play, it didn't happen. I was really hopeful this time, but alas, I think that I am just plain alone in my desperation to see Shakespeare. It was Romeo & Juliet, which I've not yet seen on the stage, sigh.

At any rate, at least I can get Joe to go up to North Adams to MASS MoCA. For some bizarre reason the girls at front gave us the runaround and said there was no teacher discounts (despite the fact that every other time we've gone Joe gets in free+1 because he works at an art school). So that was rather annoying. Especially since the prices have gone up and half of the museum was video art (Guy Ben-Ner) and neither Joe or I get very excited about video art.

Fortunately there were other exhibits. One of the artists I liked is Sean Landers:

Sean Landers - "Master Jack"

Sean Landers - "Le'Go My Ego"

Joe hates art that has words in it but being a writer I'm very drawn to visual representations of words. As a critical & creative thinker, Landers is interesting to me also because he used mind-mapping in the painting above and he did it in a really interesting way where the thoughts intersect and entwine. Joe just rolled his eyes but for me I really loved the visual workings of the mind (even if they were somewhat deliberate). The thing is, as evidenced by the title, Landers is fully aware of the ego that is present in this piece, which is Joe's primary beef with art that includes words; he finds them full of ego. At any rate I really liked his part of the exhibit.

The other artist that I liked and that Joe actually did too was Robert Taplin, who I think we saw at the Decordova a few years ago. He had an interesting set of dioramas all based upon scenes from Dante's Inferno.

Robert Taplin - "Everything Imagined is Real (After Dante)"

But the highlight of Mass MoCA these days is the new wing that only houses Sol LeWitt. It's pretty amazing, three floors of drawings. You really need to see it to appreciate it. The first floor was really the most mind-boggling. The time and precision that went into the drawings is incredible. These paintings were produced from plans that he left behind after his death. Most of his later art was the execution of these sorts of art plans. It's an interesting concept.

Sol LeWitt

That photo is a very very small piece of a large wall, all done in pencil.

Sol LeWitt

Again, just a tiny piece of the wall. This one was all done in chalk.

To get a sense of the scale:

Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt "Wall Drawing 1112"

Sol LeWitt "Wall Drawing 462"

Sol LeWitt "Wall Drawing 1152"

Fortunately for you the Sol LeWitt exhibit will be up for the next 25 years, so you'll have lots of time to get thee to Mass MoCA.

I've been Obama-iconed.

Jan 11, 2009
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Paste Magazine has a great tool that allows you to "Obama-icon" any photo. So, in the spirit of the upcoming inauguration, I give you me.

Crystal

And my little roll of joy, Romeo:

Fatty

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Check out their gallery for some good chuckles. Here are some of my favorites:

my loved links lately

Nov 5, 2008
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An Open Letter to George Lucas (Stop Raping My Childhood!)

Star Wars

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Cheese unlocks your wildest dreams
Dear Rest of the World (this is hilarious!!)
I want one of these!!!

iBangle

Error messages in Haiku form
Nature's Gates of Hell (seeing as my mom thinks I'm going there I better get familiar, eh?)
Elevator Moods
Time for GINGER CAKE! The best cake recipe ever. I make it in a loaf pan and slice it up. Amazing with softened cream cheese.

lazy blogging=lots of linking=hours of your life lost

May 3, 2008
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I'm not sure why I never have anything to say anymore, on either of my blogs. I'm usually spewing some drivel or another so you might think it would end up here, but well, I have to chalk it up to laziness.

At least with a list like this it proves you can find pretty much anything you want on the Net. And that Stumbleupon rules. Here are a few of my favorites to keep you busy for hours.

And so, for your lazy link pleasure:

Candy by Joshua Hoffine

That should keep you busy for now. :)

human video games

Jan 3, 2008
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Oh yeah.

The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond

The Original Human PONG Performance by Guillaume Reymond

The Original Human SPACE INVADERS Performance

The Original Human POLE POSITION Performance

my summer vacation

Jul 8, 2007
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It's a short one when you aren't a kid and have to work for a living. Joe and I are wrapping up a nice few days in the Berkshires doing mostly nothing other than relaxing, drinking and eating, something I have desperately needed after such a stressful week at work and worrying about my father. He's doing okay...we're hoping that he'll go home from the hospital today. When I talk to him he's been in good spirits. His father and brother arrived in town yesterday and I know that really pleased him.

Over the last few days we did hit up Mass MOCA, which is one of our favorite museums. It's always been a source of some of my best photographs but I'm sad that they have signs up all over about no photographs now, mostly because of this idiot. Still, I managed to get a few subversive shots, both by artist Spencer Finch.

Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004)

and a window that he did in a courtyard facing gallery:

Luminous window facing courtyard gallery

You know it's summer when the ladybugs want to come help you with your laptop:

But don't mess with them or they'll tell you how they really feel:

Leaving a warning trail

Morrissey last night was good, although he played a lot of new songs that many of the audience wasn't familiar with. Some dorky guy did a freaky zombie sway dance in front of us all evening. In between every song he would whip out a pad of paper and a pen and write down all the songs. Probably the same type of overly-obsessed guy who joined Vox just to chastise me in my earlier rant about Moz, debating if he was actually sick or not. I'm always amazed at people who remain freak fans past their early 20s. Morrissey did redeem himself quite nicely and he was very gracious about the rescheduling, cracking a joke after he returned from going offstage after Let Me Kiss You to change his shirt (that was the song he had played when he didn't return at the previous show). A good time was had by all. Yay Morrissey. I can stop being mad at you now.

summer, art and picnics!

Jun 24, 2007
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Yesterday we hit up the Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park for a picnic and afternoon of art exploration. One of the artists, Nina Levy, had two sculptures upstairs on the roof terrace. Both are equally creepy and are pictured here.
Nina Levy: Headlong and Big Baby. The frustrating thing is that if I had looked down when taking the big head above me picture, I would have found money...instead the couple after us that wandered over found it. My missed opportunity!

Peekaboo:Staring out from inside a beautiful draping tree toward the following sculpture:

I also figured out how to finally use the Macro feature on my camera. Only had it for 6 months now.... YAY ME!

Early Spring

Apr 21, 2007
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by Ranier Maria Rilke

Promise of Spring, 1890, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Dutch

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,
hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

What an apropos poem for today! Everything is starting to soften--the earth in particular is no longer hard and is starting to sprout the first green grass. In the backyard the tiger lilies have started to shoot up through the earth on their journey toward a full bloom in June. No leaves on the trees but the oaks in the front yard have thousands of little red buds on them--tomorrow's near 80 degree heat should bring them to near full bursting. Rilke captures the sense of early spring perfectly with the vanishing harshness, softness, rivulets, tendernesses, subtle risings, expression. The sounds are there, the images are there, the little green song is peeking through the words and through the poem, just as the spring is beginning to poke through the oppressive winter that we've had here in New England.

April really is the perfect month for poetry.

joe hates this banner

Apr 18, 2007
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because it's a massively photoshopped version of my lip, stitched up after being split up to my nose after our taxi accident in 2005--we smashed into the plexiglass and messed up our faces. Joe broke his nose in six places and had to have reconstructive surgery. We were really miserable for a long time.

I photoshopped the picture around because I felt so ugly and I wanted to turn it into something beautiful. Here is the full picture:

cab-hole portrait 4

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You can see the split all the way up. The blue spot in the middle is actually my teeth. The red area on the upper left is where a screw from the plexiglass left a huge X mark under my nose.

Moral of the story:

1. BUCKLE UP WHEN YOU ARE IN A CAB. And don't feel bad telling them that they are driving like a maniac--and that you will get out if you have to. And if you do, report their medallion. Don't let them take your life into their hands.

2. If you live in Boston and end up in a bad accident and have the wherewithal to ask, have them take you to Beth Israel emergency room--they have plastic surgeons on staff there. We were both fortunate to have that--being able to have a plastic surgeon stitch you up the first time may make all the difference in your appearance.

R.I.P. Vonnegut: lament for a missed opportunity

Apr 12, 2007
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For many years, Kurt Vonnegut has been selling prints of his art at his website (now closed). Most of the prints were under $300 or so. They were quirky line drawings and I don't think my art snob husband (he's a painter and works at an art college, so he can be snobby) ever liked the prints. But I thought they were interesting and I'm always drawn to works of art done by authors (I think that it's a little piece of me that hopes for that). And well, it could have been a damn good investment.

I missed my shot, as he passed away last night from complications of brain injuries after a fall a few weeks ago. I'm both saddened and at the same time I'm kicking myself.

Just last weekend we had a friend over and he picked up my copy of A Man Without A Country that I had just finished. It's a slim volume in which he rants about things dear to my heart, technology, how much he hates Bush, etc. In the book he talked about how he used to run a Saab car dealership in Barnstable on the Cape. It went bankrupt and he joked about how maybe that's why he never got the Nobel prize. Our friend Steve had woken early and was reading the book so we discussed it for a time and talked about his other books--how much I recommend Galápagos (warning plot spoilers at that link) and how Slaughterhouse-Five is on my massive list of books to read because I somehow missed it in high school and college. It seems so strange that this discussion was so recent, and now this person is gone.

Galápagos is a book that has really sat with me over the years--it's a story about how the human race nearly eradicated themselves and how the only people left (as a result of a cruise ship crash in the Galápagos Islands) evolved over the next millennia. Vonnegut said of the book that the miseries of mankind were caused by "the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain." I think that's why it has sat with me so much--it's foreboding, it's a warning, it's a wake-up call about how we are slowly destroying our world and each other.

His prints are most likely lost to me now--as is the curious nature of an future words and art from Vonnegut. He had his critics, as we all do, but I think that overall, his memory will linger favorably long into the future. R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007.