From my many travels throughout the past month, as international art thief, woman of mystery, feasting foodie, advertising mogul, armchair anthropologist and general gliterati /literati /digerati /anything-ati about town* I bring you...
Not much. (I refer you back to the name of this website.)
As I have moved much of my creative process off of the internets and into "reality" in the past few months, I am still cognizant of the power of the pixel, the soapbox of the information superhighway, the bleat of the blog. So - without apologizing for sitting around attempting to be artsy, weird and HighConcept(tm) off of the internet, I do hope to share more of my projects in this uh, "forum" in the near future.
If you want to be artsy with me, please visit www.figmentnyc.org/participate. I'll explain later, k?
And the art I made for you? Unfortunately due to copyright restrictions (or perhaps because I'm not a good enough hacker), I'm going to have to redirect and instruct you how to make it yourself. Go to the Brooklyn Museum website and view the time lapse video of the installation of Murakami's "Mr. Pointy" in the Rubin Pavilion here. While watching it, listen to the Justice vs. Simian song "We Are Your Friends." (Free Youtube video version here, but minimize the window so that you just get the sound and not the visual.)
Well, *I* think it works nicely.
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*Please note: lies, exaggerations, fabrications.
April 13, 2008
I Made You Some Bad Art
February 28, 2008
A Note on Haiku
I miss my haikus.
And I'm sure you do, too.
Amanda was kind enough to cry out for them in my comments section the other day, and I realized that I do spend 3 days a week in an "office" at a "computer" - certainly enough time spent at a desk to craft clever words.
Also, I sort of wrote one by accident last night, after my "borrowed" wireless internet went on the fritz while I was talking to someone on Google Chat. Google chat, in fact, goes so far as to FOSTER haiku writing, by the very nature of its cute little boxes that force line breaks into sentences at what I would call "haiku length."
Sorry
stolen internet
is a bit flaky at times
but so exciting!
February 24, 2008
Do Not Walk This Way
Apparently, I am bad at walking.
And I'll tell you why.
Several weeks ago, I received a walking ticket from the Environmental Control Board of the City of New York.
I suppose it's less that they did not like how I walked and more that they were not a fan of where and when I was doing it. Returning home from pizza on Houston Street, I crossed through Washington Square Park with a male friend. The park is kind of a mess these days, what with them moving the fountain 6 inches to the left so that it lines up with the arch. Why the city would want to make New York look more like a fake postcard is anybody's guess - but that's a story for another time.
My friend and I walked up LaGuardia Place to the park. As per usual, there were maybe a dozen people milling around. I love Washington Square because it's always a scene - any time of night, any season, any corner of the park. Impromptu street art to organized political rallies, it's representative of New York's cultural climate. (Yeah, I said "cultural climate." I'm a grad student. I can make up phrases.) It was a little past midnight and I was walking home, my friend to the Union Square L train. There were a few police barriers off to the side, but the paths into the park were open. We crossed through the park quickly, chatting quietly, and came out the northwest corner.
We were almost to University Place when a man in a police van called us over. Being the upright citizens that we are, my friend and I headed over to find out what he had to say. As it turns out, there were two cops who wanted to ask us if we knew that we had just crossed through the park, as it was closed (!!!). They claimed that a barrier had been blocking off the pathway we entered. While "blocking off" is somewhat open to interpretation, the barrier that we walked past had been parallel to the grass and pushed to the side. I stated as such, and was accused of "lying to [the policeman's] face." Intimidated by two policemen in a van, I got quiet and my friend got a bit flustered. Unbeknownest to us, as there is no such sign posted on every entrance, Washington Square Park does close at midnight. The time was 12:26 AM and the policemen decided that we had transgressed the law and trespassed through the park.
With that, the policeman (at least, I think he was a policeman. The van said "police," but the tickets we received were from the Environmental Control Board) asked for our IDs. I'm not up on my civilian rights (shame on me), but my friend mentioned that he wasn't sure it was legal to demand identification from citizens in the United States. The policeman said he wasn't interested in having a conversation about the law, he merely wanted to see our driver's licenses. Point taken, we handed them over and both received pink tickets, emblazoned with our driver's license ID numbers. And then they left.
Thus, I am in possession of a ticket for a $50 fine. I can mail in my payment, or appear in court on February 26. I'm planning on paying the ticket, as I don't want any ado when I renew my license in a year's time. But I am considering a few Strongly Worded Letters.
It's so odd - New York City is so safe now, one can walk through the parks in the middle of the night without getting muggged... only to get robbed by the police.
February 16, 2008
196 Days to Make Good Decisions!
February 15, 2008
Things I Do Not Want to Hear at 2 am
1. A ConEd truck in front of my apartment.
2. One of my neighbors and his girlfriend (boyfriend?) being amorous in the elevator.
3. Clanging, hissing radiator next to my bed.
4. Ticking clocks.
5. My cell phone erupting with text messages.
February 12, 2008
Ad-ditional Comments
I know it's a bit late for Superbowl commercial-related commentary, given that it's been over a week and all of the ad websites that I like to read basically live-blogged the entire thing. (Twitter apparently exploded with 2,500 [useless] messages on the subject. What a waste.)
What's that? There was Football, you say? It wasn't all raging ad copy? I was watching some "sports?" Oh, but I did watch the "match," and an exciting and unpredictable game it was. But while the game is over, the ads live on, spun into internet immortality by YouTube and every other streaming site. And it's not like the rules of football are changing.
Advertising, on the other hand, has no rules.
It's been a few years since I watched the entire telecast from start to finish - last year I party hopped, 2006 I forget, 2005 I was doing homework and got to the bar late, 2004 I was cooking in Vermont with the game on, and so on and so forth. Somehow, I had forgotten how the whole thing is such a synthetic a production. Sponsorships on the field mirror the ad spots, Budweiser establishes a cohesive storyline through its ads, and generally many of the commercials echo each other.
In particular, I noticed a slew of what I'm calling cobranded ads - spots in which two or more products were advertised. It makes sense to combine ad budgets, obviously, given the extraordinary price of airtime during the Superbowl. But some of the product combinations simply didn't make sense.
There were the clever - Will Ferrell as the character from his upcoming movie Semi-Pro hawking Bud Light.
And the confusing - I didn't quite understand Dorito's endorsement of singer Kina, who I imagine won some contest. Are frat boy chips going indie? Note the iTunes logo that shows up at the tail end of the spot. It's unclear if the ad was actually cobranded or iTunes has an agreement with Interscope records, who appears to be putting out Kina's album.
The predictable - Dell and Bono's (RED) campaign teamed up for that goofy butt-slapping ad - though I wonder if that counts because the whole notion of (RED) is that it appears on products you already buy.
And finally, the last cobrand I happened to catch was Pepsi's "Justin Timberlake gets hit in the head with stuff" (not the official name) spot. Timberlake is annoying me less these days - due in large part to the fact that he gets hit in the head by a car door in this spot. Brilliant. Pepsi teams with Amazonmp3.com to advertise... buying stuff.
(Read more from the commentators who get paid to rant about these ads over at Adage.)
So forget the Giants and the Patriots. I was rooting for capitalism!
February 10, 2008
A Note to All
Do not eat an entire jar of Spanish pimento olives for dinner.
DO NOT DO IT.
That is all.
