Monday, December 11, 2006, 10:18 PM - Travels, Sex, Politics, Dancing, Snow, George, Friends, Food, Books, Technology, Art, Los Angeles
I've been terribly neglectful of this little enterprise post-election - mostly because the last thing I wanted to do was spend a single additional second looking at a screen. (I've read three novels and am reveling in Against the Day now, which will slow down my book-devouring rate considerably). The beginning of November was a frenzied adventure- although we were better prepared than in 2004, things as always slid just under the wire (on election day people were making 40 calls a second with our tools - it was amazing to watch people swarm through our lists)...then election night was blissful, and the morning after even better. It felt wonderfully fulfilling on 11/9 to come back from a run along the Seattle waterfront (the first sunny day since I'd arrived) and see Rumsfeld getting the axe. I'm sure that our program turned out more votes than the margin of victory in key races (MT senate, several house contests, probably VA Senate as well) - of course we were only part of a larger progressive effort, but it's exciting to know we had such an impact. I've been on an extended episodic victory tour - multiple DC parties, and little celebration cocktail evenings in SF and NY, which were all great fun. I've been to one disjointed, we-were-still-too-tired-to-think official debrief, and one enervating multidisciplinary free-for-all that was loads of fun. I'm back in LA, wrapping up my work at GCI - getting ready to dig into all the data from Call for Change as part of a team of people working for MoveOn to make sure we understand what we did and learn as much as possible for next time. It's always a little hard to go from being so thoroughly consumed by a project back to a more balanced life, and I'm a little nostalgic for that laserlike focus, but this is infinitely more sustainable. Dad came out and Angela and Erik and Aurora came down for Thanksgiving and we all had our first Angeleno holiday - lots of sitting in the sun and as many revisionist recipes as George would let us get away with. I've been rediscovering the pleasures of cooking and reading the New Yorker and spending whole afternoons with friends. It's nice to remember that I like to eat in fancy restaurants (have had tasty dinners at Frankie's 457 in Brooklyn and Joe's in Venice and Lucques in LA) and go see art. I have done some dancing, but I need more of that. There are, as always, intriguing new and resurfacing romantic possibilities, which will at minimum be interesting to explore. I hope to get into some of that abundant early-season snow soon, too. What I'm not particularly motivated to do is keep writing this - it's been quite enjoyable, but I'm going to keep my personal ramblings a little more closely held. I think it'll be healthy, although probably less entertaining for many of you. I'll likley start some sort of painfully geeky political data diatribe after the holidays, that only I'll read. And I'm sure there will be the occasional tidbit I won't be able to resist posting...we'll see. Love and mounds of appreciation for everyone who helped with Call for Change and let us all find out what winning an election feels like. I'll try and make sure we get used to it.Saturday, September 16, 2006, 03:36 PM - Art, Los Angeles
I think I've found my new local bar - it's called the Hyperion Tavern and it has pretty chandeliers, rough wood partitions, part of a law library, and beer in bottles. It's not open all the time, but I'm pretty excited about it.
Before that there was the Bubbles opening at Materials and Applications which had beer in cans and undulating inflated orbs. Kind of 'Prisoner goes to Burning Man'. I liked it.
Friday, August 4, 2006, 10:41 PM - Art
;)
I had to sneak in to half an hour of the SFMOMA (only US appearance) of the current MB show. I would have rather seen it at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa...which is REALLY an art space designed to "encourage a nonlinear experience." (probably I just want to go back to that restaurant where Leslie and I had the best dinner of our whole Japan trip...) I liked the unobtrusive traces of the site-specific work he created in SF. I understood a little more of why I like his work (aside from the pure visuals of it), it was hard not to be hit over the head with how he plays with constraint and creativity. You can follow along at home with the cell phone audio tour at 408.794.2844 - enter any number 20-29 then # to get some banal/ entertaining/ enlightening snippets. The giant shrimpy ambergris manifestation was better in real life...
Wednesday, June 21, 2006, 06:09 PM - Travels, Sex, Friends, Art
I talked with my former colleague Sybil yesterday - she runs the New Orleans sister site of the HIV prevention project I used to manage in SF (community-level HIV prevention for high-risk adolescents). They've been doing street intercept interviews with teenagers at nightclubs in Central City (where those 5 kids were killed over the weekend) - Sybil's had to suspend her project (again) until everything calms down. She told me that while some things haven't changed (there are still a lot of 15 year old girls in the supposedly 21-and-over clubs), most of the 'neighborhood' adolescents are driving in from Houston for the weekend to party. As far as I can tell, this implies that New Orleans is becoming a city of richer, whiter residents, and is now a short-hop tourist destination for its former underclass...which is a truly freaky demographic shift. Perhaps the national guard will start stopping carloads of black kids at the city limits?
And for something almost completely unrelated, my old friend Justin is very talented, if you didn't know. Check out Greetings From New Orleans - pre-Katrina, even more important now that found objects from New Orleans are likely mostly lost.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 11:01 AM - Travels, Art
;)
I saw Matthew Barney and Bjork's latest project last night. The most horrifying thing about it was not the underwater romantic dismemberment, but rather the number 9 at the end of the title, suggesting that I'll be spending two hours a year for the next 8 on Mr. Barney's stylized, well-lubricated fantasies. This one fugues on Japanese culture, which apparently even the uber-weird Mr. Barney finds perplexing. At times it seemed like Leslie's and my trip, had we been shooting ourselves up with Ketamine and dropping acid daily. That said, there are stunning panoramic pageant moments at the beginning that I adored (that man is our generation's .Busby Berkeley), exquisite thoughtfulness in the oceanic tea set, and fabulous shots of congealinig icebergs of vaseline. It does crack me up that this was the first film I've seen in a theater since I arrived in LA; apparently I'm not totally assimilated into mainstream film culture quite yet.
Friday, April 7, 2006, 09:58 PM - Politics, Friends, Technology, Art
This feels like it's been my first real week in LA - I've been working like a dog on the CA_50 special election that will happen Tuesday...setting up all kinds of hyper-geeky autodialiing/ web-based phone system tests to see if we can create a super-streamlined and foolproof phone bank infrastructure for the fall. Hopefully we'll help Busby win outright on Tuesday, but the evaluator in me wants another election in June to perfect the model...
I am getting used to the braces but feel horribly sibilant. You can catch my orthodontic voiceover debut on a MoveOn volunteer training call Monday, if you're lucky.
And yesterday I also had my first taste of what it will be like to have a community here - I went to an opening at Stephen Cohen gallery of photos from Democratic Republic of Congo with Jeannette- a fundraiser for Medecins Sans Frontieres - and ran into Noah Craft. Maybe someday I'll have a new network of friends to run into?? Maybe I already do?
I promise to post some braces photos this weekend, and will dish on what Ben Ball's party is like, too.
;)
Thursday, March 23, 2006, 02:30 PM - Travels, George, Friends, Food, Art
I've had not a minute to keep up with this little enterprise. Perhaps you'll be sympathetic if you hear that in the last 16 days I've been in Boston, New Haven, Bridgeport, Brooklyn, DC, San Francisco, LA, and Denver. Yikes! No wonder I slept in today. All have been good travels; really the optimal mix of work/family/art/fun/food that one can find on the East Coast. I made an excellent blanket fort with my goddaughter in Boston, went to the (kinda stinky) biennial with Andrew, ate homemade canneloni and cannoli with Leslie for the Sopranos premiere, and drank our signature cosmopolitans with my dear New Orleans friend in DC. I had a good visit with Dad - full of nice weather and walks by the water. I'm so lucky that he's still so independent. Denver had some swing dancing and a fun planning meeting for MoveOn's fall program, and back up in NorCal I took the Republican to Joan Blades' birthday party. He gets lots of points for a) venturing into the liberal lions' den and b) dancing with me even though he'd been on a million-mile bike ride that day. Now I have to finish unpacking my life and start seeing what things will be here....pretty much all I've done is see Claudia and Angel so far, but there's a whole city out there waiting. And an update on Griffith Park running: last night at dusk I saw a coyote and heard tons of frogs and crickets. I couldn't believe that I was in the middle of the great metropolis...Monday, February 20, 2006, 08:47 PM - Art
;)
I snuck in just under the wire this weekend to see the Ecstasy installation show at LA MOCA. My favorites were a simple curtain of strobe-lit water (the only part of the show that actually looked like vision on E), the noise of the LSD crystal fountain, and the impercetably shifting enormous wall in one gallery. There were remarkable huge obsessive pencil crazy person imagined-world drawings, and a lovely green grid LED light installation. I wish I could have gone with Jeff; for all the hiply transgressive vibe of the show, there was (for me) not enough explicit dialogue about the impact of drugs in our perception or our culture- maybe best was the simple documentation of one artist's 6 (?) day regimented drug-by-drug week in Amsterdam. There was nothing that I could read as political except for the play-doh commentary on big pharma- kind of astonishing given the current drug laws' power in shaping our society and their disastrous enforcement. A grand total of one of the many X dealers I've known has ever been prosecuted. How can that show have evolved without someone commenting on who can and can't get away with altering perception? I'm not totally down with Terence McKenna (and btw where did all the mushroom art come from? what about good old fashioned CHEMICAL psychedelia?) but I do think the drive to alter one's mind is part of being human and central to the understanding of consciousness. It's sad how even that most internal experience and our artistic representations of it are circumscribed/determined by class and race and all the disconnects/discriminations of contemporary life.
Monday, January 23, 2006, 03:10 PM - Travels, Technology, Art
Despite my best efforts to begin transforming into a Silverlake post-urban LA denizen, the most interesting event I attended this weekend was a small Saturday night SF-proud SRL performance in the parking lot at the end of the row of Chinatown galleries. There's something about the immolation of a vomiting dragon/dinosaur head backed by the roar of an airhorn hovercraft that's just sublime. Makes me think that maybe I'll fit right in in LA, after all. Picture is taken from our latecomers' perch in the garage across the street- perhaps a lifetime of parking structure art spectation awaits me in the Southland?
Friday, December 30, 2005, 07:14 PM - Travels, Art
;)
I had a blast at this show in Chelsea. LA artist who searches out really strange extracurricular activity photos from yearbooks, recreates them and extrapolates short videos and installations. There are maybe 35 of them running in seemingly random sequence in the gallery, beautifully sideshow-esque and cacophonic. He and many 1970s high school students is/were apparently fascinated by vampires, but my favorite piece was the operatic performance by the chick in the bedazzled 'Fresno' overalls, on the porch of a weirdly modernist representation of a farmhouse. Great fun....
;)
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