Ambienttraffic

The weather has finally turned springlike in New York in past few weeks and I can't wait to spend more time outdoors. But as I've been roaming the streets, I've been forced to notice the horrible, horrible footwear choices of so many New Yorkers. What so many people don't understand is that what looks good on a model or what may be trendy looks completely horrible on you.

Everyone knows the UGGs example. Those boots make any girl look like the abominable snowman. I still don't understand how this trend hasn't died yet. Perhaps it's because of the hordes of tourists from other places other than New York that invade Soho, and the styles they wear are about three years behind in the rest of the country. Don't get me wrong, I am not dissing middle America, but everyone knew that UGGs are horrible looking, why continue the trend? I can't wait until UGG fanatics look at photos of themselves in five years, and think, "God, what was I thinking? I looked like a total tool!" Sort of like anyone who grew up in the 80s and wore a side ponytail.

So here are my top five rules on spring footwear. Well, footwear in general.

1. Do not, under any circumstances, wear those flat boots without heels and tuck your jeans in to said boots. Unless you wear a size -1. Otherwise your legs will just look like tree stumps. Just because some chick in that Urban Outfitters catalog you received last week can pull it off doesn't mean you can!
   
2. Do not wear leggings with ballet flats. Your legs will STILL look like tree stumps. And for godssakes, pick up your feet when you walk, that shuffling duck walk is so unappealing.
3. Do not wear those really really flat sandals or flip flops. YOU ARE NOT AT THE BEACH. And again, did you realize you walk like a duck?
4. Men: do not wear flip flops. Especially you jocks with those black Adidas sandals. What the hell? If you have ugly, uncared-for feet, I don't want to see them. If your girlfriend doesn't want to see your feet, neither do we. At least trim your toenails and get rid of that fungus if you're going to show us your toes. (addendum: if you have a nice pair of leather sandals, go for it. it's just the OP-surfer-dude-crappy sandals that I can't stand.)
5. extra super pointy shoes. Don't do it. Do you really want to look like a medieval court jester? Because that's exactly what you look like.
6. sorry, one more rule: don't wear Crocs. You're not Mario Batali. And what's up with the holes? Are those shoes really going to protect you when you spill a bucket of hot grease on them?
   

Banning UGG boots goes without saying. Besides, has anyone poked their head out the window lately? Guess what, it's spring and I don't see any snow, do you?

Next fashion topic: wearing leggings without a skirt. Banned? Discuss.

Theory and Practice
April 19-May 17, 2008
Curated by Evonne M. Davis
with full color catalog

Reception on April 19th, 2007
7-10pm
at Gallery Aferro
73 Market St Newark NJ 07102

"There are no countries now" -from artist Alan Bigelow's When I was President

Theory+ Practice is an acknowledgment, interrogation and fete of the void between what the world could be and what it is.
Artists: Andrew Leo Baron, Alan Bigelow, Deric Carner, Robert Ladislas Derr, Nisha Drinkard, Katarina Jerinic, Darren Jones, Tracie Lee, Paula McCartney, Tori Purcell, Stephanie Standish, Alina Tenser, Matthew Verdon, Brian Wondergem

View more about my project, Pieces of Sky

Recently I started a tumblelog on Tumblr. I wanted to see what was out there - I figured that I work with Movable Type every day and it'd probably be a good idea to get a handle on the competition. I had heard about Tumblr before but it never really made sense to me. It seemed so stripped down, what could you possibly do with it? Then I actually started using it.

It was like a whole different world. I could post short little notes, almost like a sketchbook. Suddenly I felt free to post whatever caught my fancy, whatever crossed my path at the moment and seemed interesting and noteworthy. My attitude towards posting had suddenly changed. I think over the years I've come to regard this blog (run on MT) as something that needed thought and had to be...well, interesting. I couldn't clog it up with frilly little posts, I had to really consider what I was putting out there. Which meant that I posted less and less as time went on...I sort of felt this pressure that what I was writing had to be good.

In a way, Tumblr freed me of that. The learning curve is barely a bump, it takes almost nothing to get it going and to customize it a bit. It's minimal in a really great way.  It's like it makes the task of blogging almost transparent - it's a tool that you use that you don't have to think about, it just works. Sure, Movable Type is super powerful and customizable to the nth degree, but sometimes I don't want that, I just don't have the time for it. (have you noticed how the design of this freaking blog has totally languished?)

I've been comparing the relationship that I have between MT and Tumblr with painting and mixed media. With painting, you could do anything in the world, there are so many options. You're presented with a completely blank canvas and you have to run with it. In a way it's kind of scary. Mixed media, on the other hand, is based on whatever you've gathered - newspapers, magazine clippings, junk that you found at the local thrift shop. Suddenly having some parameters is comforting, yet liberating at the same time. It just depends on how I need to work at the moment.

Now I just have to install the Actionstreams plugin on this blog so that I can get my tumblelog, flickr stream and last.fm playlist in one place. 

This was inspired by a piece in the New Yorker about light pollution via kottke.org , I wrote it a while back but I never posted it.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the thought of becoming an astronaut. Not just for the thrill of floating in zero gravity and eating freeze dried ice cream. There was something compelling about leaving the Earth and seeing the sky for it really is - the billions of stars, the moon in all its glory. But really the night sky that had fired my imagination had been an amalgam of glossy hardcovers from the Air and Space Museum, IMAX films, and PBS shows like Nova. The stars were so dim in the suburb that I grew up in that all I could really identify were Orion and the Big Dipper.

As I grew older, I forgot about my obsession with the sky. Through college and my early adult years, I was living in mostly urban environments where you'd be lucky to even spot the moon. Perhaps that sense of wonder and excitement about "what's out there" dimmed a bit as well. I remember clearly though the first time I really felt like I "saw" the sky: I was in a small village called Bulungula on the east coast of South Africa. I wanted to cry for joy; I could have stayed out all night just gazing at the millions of points of shimmering light. I felt so tiny and in awe, it felt like I was spinning and the ground had dropped away. It was so clear and bright that you could see the clouds of galactic dust that blotted out the starlight from beyond the dust. And I really understood why the Milky Way is called the Milky Way.

Maybe the reason why we have become so careless and destructive of the environment is because we can't see the night sky anymore. We can't stand in awe of where we came from and what we're made of.

I recently attended a talk by Martha Rosler, an artist that's been making work since the 70s. I first heard about her work through a class I had taken long ago - her piece The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems  had always stuck with me; these were photos of the Bowery that I knew from when I was a child, and the dissonance between those images and my own memories and my experience of the Bowery now always strikes me whenever I'm walking down it to visit my grandmother. I noticed that throughout her work she's used the theme of absence to talk about many subjects, and it gives the work a sense of power that perhaps would have been lacking if it had been dealt with straightforwardly.

Instead of using images of homeless people or people being tortured or war victims, she uses other methods - collaborating with groups of homeless people, using the sound of falling dishes and excruciatingly loud grindcore music as the viewer crosses a space, a video of a toy soldier playing "God Bless America" on a bugle with its mechanical leg exposed. By not using those images, she is able to avoid the superficial shock that the mainstream media uses to numb people into inaction.

I installed Movable Type 4.1 just the other day on my server (yea open source!), just to get the ball rolling on updating my site. I was just going to poke around a bit, export my data, run it in a test directory for a bit. But then I realized that continuing to use MT 2.x was completely silly - it's like driving a Ford Pinto held together by duct tape while you've got a brand new Mini sitting in the driveway.

So I've decided instead to relaunch my site - temporarily. Actually it's a huge relief, at least I can start posting again and not have spammers junking up my site. So for now I'm using a (boring but utilitarian) default design - soon to be remedied - and that will act as another kick in the pants to redo the site like i've been saying for the past two years. And apologies for any files that have gone missing. I'm pretty sure no one's going to miss them much anyway.

Watch this space for more good things to come...with a redesign on the way and more content!

Another embarrassing admission - I totally love Phantom of the Opera. Well, loved is more like it. Yes, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that is STILL on Broadway. For twenty years. And when I say love, I don't mean in an active way, I mean in a more, well, nostalgic way. But now love has turned to past tense. A better adjective would be annoyed.

For some reason - probably nostalgia - I put the Phantom of the Opera movie in our Netflix queue and promoted it all the way to the top. I came in the mail last week, and I immediately popped it into the DVD player. I was so excited! I hadn't heard those songs for ages. I know ALL the words. When I mean all the words, I mean that I listened to the soundtrack from the musical for days on end when I was a kid. I'm amazed that my parents hadn't thrown my stereo out the window by then. As soon as it started, Wayne said "no singing along!" That was pretty hard to do. So I just lip synched. He doesn't understand my obsession with certain musicals. Sometimes I don't either.

But I digress. In watching the movie, something changed. The words and music were so familiar - yet - there was something lacking. I knew exactly what was going to happen, but every step felt so disappointing. It was like the curtain had been pulled back. I actually thought about the lyrics and what they meant. Goddamnit the metaphors were so...obvious!!! (The Phantom = dark = evil, Raoul = light = good. meh.) The plot was non-existent! The girl who played Christine didn't have much a voice to enchant anyone! All the songs were ridiculously bombastic! And Wayne didn't help in pointing out that the Phantom would have basically been a pedophile if he had fallen in love with Christine "years ago". Ew.

The realization set in that the only reason that I thought that I liked it was that I had listened to it when I was a child. As an adult, it just made me kind of squirm. All my illusions about how great this musical was were totally shattered. Unfortunately the songs have been stuck in my head for the past week and a half and I still haven't been able to banish them to some deep dark dungeon no matter what else I listen to.

At least I still have the Sound of Music.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I'm apologizing to my blog for such serious neglect. It's been so long since I've made a post that comment spam/cruft has totally built up. And you'd think that I would have fixed my blog up by now, considering that my day job involves building blogs (with MT!) for lots of other people. Sigh. And how embarassing is it that I'm using MT 2.64!! geez!

Well, fear not. I'm going to upgrade this whole thing. For now I'm working on a (not so) super secret project to get my paintings up, and I'll be running it with MT4. Until then, this blog will continue to hobble along.

damn, the front page of my blog is blank again. Obviously too much time has gone by since the last time I posted. Ideas for posts, never got around to actually writing anything.

It's so hot today that I thought I was swimming through the air on the way to work today. I bought an iced coffee and all the ice melted before I got back to the office. This is why half of the city empties out after July 4th.

Reason #139 that Brooklyn kicks Manhattan's ass: coming out of the subway near our house, there was a cool breeze that smelled like the sea. try to top that, manhattan. By the way, don't ever go to Jones Beach if you don't own a car. It's reallly not worth the torturous bus ride. Why can't public transportation officials figure out that if you provide X number of buses TO location B, you'll have to provide the same X number of buses BACK to location A? It's not like I suddenly magically acquired a car in the couple of hours that I was sitting on the beach.

Reason #140 that Brooklyn kicks Manhattan's ass: In the space of about three minutes of gazing out the window, not only did I see a robin, but I also saw a female cardinal AND a male cardinal. It's freaking Wild America out here folks.

i suppose my lack of posting is due to the fact that it is finally NICE outside and that I preferred to be outdoors. That said, I finally posted some new photos on flickr. I spent the day with with dad on saturday, we went to Bouchon Bakery, then walked through Central Park and went to the Met. I think he had a really good time and he was super happy that he wasn't mowing the lawn.

I've gotten a renewed energy with the change of seasons. I've been working in the studio and started up my "Painting a Day" project again. (now that my studio space isn't an icebox anymore.) woohoo! I'm starting a new job soon - more about that once I start. My little sister is graduating from college (!) in a couple of weeks, I'm totally excited and proud of her. AND she got a scholarship to study for another year in Germany, which is totally awesome. And in less than a month Wayne and I will be traveling down to Texas for his dad and stepmom's 25th wedding anniversary.

So lots going on. I love this weather.