April is the cruellest month, breeding/
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/
Memory and desire, stirring/
Dull roots with spring rain.
--T.S. Eliot, the wasteland
"what up wc, Just took a flick of the only living bomb Neckface just did in my hood, Newport Beach CA....He anialited this place.... Newport Beach has to be one of the gnarliest places to drop shit... there's millions of cops with nothing better to do that to bust kids not wearing bike helmets and survalence cameras at every stop light....im not shure how many he did but within a few hours everything was already painted over...not to mention him sitting in jail with a $20,000 set bond...he's a fukn hero!!!!!!cheers"... mr ween
The stuff about Newport Beach is pretty damn accurate. Miles of the snobby, monied and conservative makes for a no-tolerance regard for graffiti art and artists...
posted by claudine |Added at
1:47 PM| |
graffiti neckface
posted by claudine |Added at
6:11 PM| |
photographs njudah
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Sara Thustra, aka Heart101, solo show
from Saturday, 29 January, 2005, at Needles-and-Pens.
On the way to the show we saw one of the new anti-graffiti posters which was cause for much hilarity.
Needles-and-Pens is my new favourite neighborhood store -- it's an artists' collective selling hand-made clothing, accessories, artwork, and zines. And, it's often open with the Low Gallery.
It's once again the end of the week, and I haven't been able to post that much. Busy, busy, addicted with Flickr, and glad that Friday's almost here. I've been rehearsing until 11pm this past week -- my Capoeira group has a mid-day performance tomorrow and we've been turning on the steam for these last few meetings.
Some random notes: my body's having a bit of a hard time, I think, adjusting to the new schedule of Capoeira M/W/F/Sat and Loose Change Tu/Th. For the former nothing more than 1 or 1/2 a PB&J often suffices for getting me through that night's training session; for the latter I need something more substantial (carbs and protein?), and getting hungry halfway through practice causes me to lose massive amounts of concentration and focus for learning new choreography. In Capoeira I am familiar with most of the movements, and there are usually not often that many (new) patterns, or sequencias, to remember. In LC, however, we are in full rampup mode for the show, and have the goal of learning 7 minutes of new choreography, plus staging, per week. If your typical dance class is an hour and a half, and you learn perhaps an average of 1 minute of new choreography each class, it's like cramming 3.5 classes in one rehearsal, in addition to lindy choreography tacked on at the end of the night. I need to learn to eat differently, to keep both strength and stamina up.
posted by claudine |Added at
2:21 PM| |
art, art openings, graffiti, san francisco, personal
posted by claudine |Added at
2:06 PM| |
art, art openings, san francisco, photographs
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Graffwalk
O, I am finally feeling pretty exhausted. Today, petalum, quasistoic, snora & I took a long graffwalk about various urban ... uh ... locales. I brought along the new camera to give it a test run...
posted by claudine |Added at
11:47 PM| |
graffiti, graffwalk, photographs
Friday, January 28, 2005
Yes, yes, and uh... Yes.
Go Mark Morford!
Whatever the reason, news fatigue is rampant right now. Do you feel it? Have you succumbed? My media colleagues complain of it and regular readers lament it almost every day: people are, apparently and quite understandably, deathly sick of the media and sick of the news.
Sick of depressing headlines and sick of Bush and sick of war and sick, more than anything, of reading about the latest toxic government agenda, given how the overall situation, at least as far as the last four years are concerned, never seems to improve and never seems to lighten and never seems to lose its sheen of bleak and black anxiety. Can you relate?
Much to the GOP's delight, liberals and progressives across the land seem to be off their game right now, not reading as much and not following the media as closely and not really questioning the snide BushCo agenda that aggressively, barely able to tolerate even the slightest glimpse of Bush without a spiritual and physical gag, a karmic acid reflux, a sucker punch in the intellectual gut.
Especially true given how the man has almost single-handedly poisoned the spiritual pie and soiled the progressive pool and pretty much slammed a bloody cleaver down the middle of the nation, making the place livable only in the cities and educated college towns, the urban archipelago, places with funky bookstores and decent universities and food that isn't, by default, deep fried or reconstituted or slathered in liquid cheese.
[...]
Of course we're exhausted. Of course we don't want to hear it any more. It's a decidedly fatalistic feeling, after Bush snuck in to Term II, that there's little that can be done and we might as well just hunker down and wait for it all to be over because, after the valiant and heartbreaking battle of last November, much hope has been lost.
This, then, is the irony. Because now is the time when vigilance is needed more than ever, when an informed populace and an outraged resistance is mandatory lest the current regime simply steam roll over the nation for the next 1,460 days with a blindly aggressive agenda, one that aims to decimate Social Security and gut the economy and flood the courts with rabidly homophobic and anti-choice Bible-thumping judges who will almost guarantee we start treating gays as abominations and women as chattel and progressives as flammable godless heathens all over again.
And let's not forget, there's another vital election in less than two years that could very well reshape Congress and make Bush's final two years much more thorny and difficult, and that could very well help further highlight the fact that he will go down in history as one of the most destructive, least articulate, most divisive presidents in American history. Place your bets now.
So, then. It's OK to take a break. It's OK to, in the wake of the deeply nauseating Bush re-election, stay away, refocus, recharge, focus inward and focus locally and focus on living your own life with the kind of temerity and resolve that you normally prescribe to rabid evangelicals from Kentucky. Never think you have all the answers. But just know that you know how to ask the right kind of questions.
I've been trying to say that to myself since November 3rd, 2004.
posted by claudine |Added at
2:16 PM| |
politics mark morford
O we are so freaking classy...
Normally I care less about this shit, but jeezus, is it that difficult to show some modicum of respect at such an occasion?
Other leaders at the event in Poland on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of the death camp's liberation, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites), wore dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots.
"The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower," Robin Givhan, The Washington Post's fashion writer, wrote in the newspaper's Friday editions.
Between the somber, dark-coated leaders at the outdoor ceremony sat Cheney, resplendent in a green parka embroidered with his name and featuring a fur-trimmed hood, the laced brown boots and a knit ski cap reading "Staff 2001."
"And, indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults," Givhan wrote.
[...]
The Post's Givhan said Cheney might have been hoping to avoid the cold weather in Oswiecim, but noted he had worn a dark overcoat and no hat at all at another recent winter occasion -- his own swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 in snow-dusted Washington.
"The vice president might have been warm in his parka, ski cap and hiking boots," Givhan said. "But they had the unfortunate effect of suggesting he was more concerned with his own comfort than the reason for braving the cold at all."
Classy. Just as classy as the exchange with Senator Patrick Leahy last summer...
posted by claudine |Added at
1:08 PM| |
politics cheney garb
Quality Time
Monday, 17 January, 2005, 11:53am
it arrived on MLK Day, just as promised, in a large but nondescript packing box.
i was about to get some brunch at cha-cha-cha with snores, brian & looby, and only had time to take a quick peek.
it posed very nicely for me. subdued. quiet. formidable in its never-opened-before packaging.
Thursday, 27 January, 2005, 9:53pm
and i let it sit, for nearly two weeks, before i had a chance to actually open it back up again.
And there it is, sitting on top of OTM: One Track Mind, which I picked up last week at the Mighty 4 bboy competition. Afterwards Nora & I headed to Grubstake for a late dinner, and our waiter saw us paging through the 2 'zines. "Do you do graffiti?" he asked. Turns out he's an old-skool graf writer from Mexico who goes by the name of Joker.
I'm a little overwhelmed with my new 20D, but hoping to really give it a spin this weekend...
posted by claudine |Added at
12:45 PM| |
canon 20D
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Differences
Group 1 What & Where: 1/2 hour performance to kick off program at elementary school When: announced 12/21/04 for performance date of 2/4/05 Details: Volunteers recruited. Rehearsal schedule sent via email 1/2/04. Commitments secured. Rehearsals commenced 1/10/05.
Group 2 What & Where: performance for party anniversary When: "tentatively" brought up 1/6/05 for a "maybe" performance date of 1/27/05 Details: Gross miscommunication. Commitment announced 1/20/05 to one member of the group. Group informed 1/25/05. Last-minute rehearsals scheduled for 1/26 & 1/27. Individuals from outside the group solicited.
Week #3 and I'm already going crazy. I don't think this is a good sign.
NOTE: the Archives are currently somewhat broken at the moment. If you are having trouble, just access them from the main page, please. I'll get around to fixing them soon, hopefully.
