Monday, March 27, 2006

Docu-Album 3: Cuba


Docu-Album 3: Cuba
Originally uploaded by snailsone.

I have just started working a 9 min docu-album of my trip to Cuba in January 2004. I won a scholarship for a three and a half week trip. It was probably one of the best times I've ever had in a foreign country.The above is a picture of a fridge from the 1900's that still works with ice blocks...Below is Trinidad and Fooster's Chess Pieces...
I had a bunch of video that I shot of Raul Corrales
Caballeria
speaking in his own home in Cojimar, an after-dinner chat with Natalia Bolivar, a santeria expert and cookbook writer. at home with Estereo Seguro, in Jose Toirac's studio, a night spent in candlelight because of a power outage with a Turkish grad student studying, living and finding love in Cuba...She knew a lot about Cuba's history, especially about economics...I also had footage of going to Mendive's home and a q & a about his work...I didn't use any of it....In fact, I felt it had been too intimate to put all that into a movie. The movie I ended up with is basically all photographs...



Docu-Album 3: Cuba
Originally uploaded by snail


Docu-Album 3: Cuba
Originally uploaded by snailsone.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Fun with Flash...

The Crash film experience creator is really interesting...drag and drop three words to describe the three snippets of different scenes and there comes out an art piece at the end of it with your own experience of the consequence...

Quotes to note...

There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Woody Allen

I am two with nature.
Woody Allen

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
Albert Einstein

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
Milan Kundera

The best actors do not let the wheels show.
Milan Kundera

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Milan Kundera

Found a fun site for brainy quotes...

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

New York Noise...

This is probably my favorite television show right now, New York Noise...There's a lot of experimental video along with some interesting music...

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Going Back to Cali...


Going Back to Cali...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
ERIC DROOKER

curriculae vitae

Born in 1958 in New York City, and raised on the Lower East Side. Graduate of Brooklyn Friends High School.
BFA, Cooper Union, 1983.

Eric Drooker supports himself as a freelance artist and illustrator whose work has appeared many times in national newspapers and magazines, including the op-ed

Going Back to Cali...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
page of The New York Times, and The Village Voice. He has furnished seven covers for The New Yorker since 1995, as well as numerous covers for The Nation and The Progressive. as well as books and music albums (Rage Against The Machine, But Alive...., etc.) He is the author of Flood! A Novel In Pictures, Illuminated Poems (with Allen Ginsberg), Street Posters & Ballads, and Blood Song: A Silent Ballad. He gives slide
lectures at schools and cultural centers worldwide. Eric is a third generation New Yorker, born and raised on Manhattan Island.Eric Drooker presently lives in Berkeley, California, where he moved in 1998.

Going Back to Cali...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.

Flashbacks to black and white keys...

Though Vladamir Horowitz is my favorite pianist,
Victor Borge is a good memory of childhood. He
appeared on the Muppet Show a few times. Victor Borge
had a gift for comedy and music.

"Laughter is the closest distance between two people."

I recently had the opportunity to apply for a group piano teacher position at a piano school. I'd like to do it for the teaching practice and also because I do love the piano. I started lessons at age four with Catherine Manzer. She played with the Philadelphia Philharmonic and had been a chorus girl in those old aquatic bathing beauties flicks back in the day. I trained classically and for competitions
for 8 years with her. She would have yearly formal recitals. When I moved to Ohio, I got a teacher from the Oberlin Conservatory and trained with her for a year and a half. Because I moved so much and switched teachers so much, I never competed. I also started to hate the piano because I was always getting my ass kicked for skipping practices. I have had a lot of experience playing for choirs and with other instruments. I also taught an 8 year old and a 12 year old when I was a teenager for about a year. Though I
do not feel that music is the pursuit that drives me, music is like another language that I long to speak sometimes. I would like to incoporate it into my life somehow. It has been feeling missing for several years.

Posted Later...

the Carpenters...


the Carpenters...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
I saw a few of their works around town in Havana...This one is in the Guggenheim's collection...

Los Carpinteros are among the most innovative and internationally acclaimed Cuban contemporary artists. Alexandre Arrechea (b. 1970), Dagoberto Rodriguez (b. 1969) and Marco Castillo (b. 1971) have been making art together since 1991 and coined their name in 1994, deciding to renounce the notion of individual authorship and to refer back to an older guild tradition of artisans and skilled laborers. The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The
Carpenters) has created some of the most important work to emerge from Cuba in the past decade. Interested in the intersection between art and society, the group merges architecture, design, and sculpture in unexpected and often humorous ways, creating objects and drawings for objects that negotiate the space between the functional and the nonfunctional.

Close...


Close...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
Chuck Close is always an inspiration...

He says, "I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine...Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect."

Hieronymus Bosch


Hieronymous Bosch
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
One of my favorite painters.

The one to the right is the Garden of Earthly Delights, center panel in a tryptich...
Timeline: Late Gothic Painting

The master of the monstrous... the discoverer of the unconscious. -- Carl Gustav Jung, on Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus, or Jerome, Bosch, b. c.1450, d. August 1516, spent his entire artistic career in the small Dutch town of Hertogenbosch, from which he derived his name.

At the time of his death, Bosch was internationally celebrated as an eccentric painter of religious visions who dealt in particular with the torments of hell. During his lifetime Bosch's works were in the inventories of noble families of the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and they were imitated in a number of paintings and prints throughout the 16th century, especially in the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The artist probably never went far from home, although records exist of a commission in 1504 from Philip the Handsome (later king of Castile), for a lost Last Judgment altarpiece. None of Bosch's pictures are dated, although the artist signed many of them. The one pictured below is the Tabletop of the Seven Sins...

More Bosch...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.

impressed by 3-D...


julian beever
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
I love this one...Julian Beever, an English artist, does incredible chalk drawings as also illustrated at this blog...When standing in the right spot, they are 3-D...

Installation inspirations...

Christian Boltanski

Born Sept 6 1944, France.

One of Boltanski's favorite themes is his own life
story, both actual and reinvented, which he evokes
through startling collections of photographs and
objects. In other pieces, he assembles seemingly
mundane elements to address some of the most
fundamental and disturbing contradictions of
twentieth-century life. Born in Paris in 1944,
Boltanski has spent his artistic life working with the
most ephemeral of materials -- newspaper clippings,
photographs, found snapshots, clothing, candles, light
bulbs, old biscuit tins -- to examine and to mark our
transitory passing here on earth. Using the photograph
as a central image of his work...

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Remembering Gordon Parks

"Nothing came easy," Parks wrote in his autobiography. "I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became devoted to my restlessness."

Sunday, March 05, 2006

memories of Altered States, presently known to me as Ass Suckers, in the BXFactor...

I used the internet archive engine, the Wayback machine, and dug up an old column I wrote for the BXFactor.com, Race Against Time...That was back in 1998...Pre-Bush era...And I also got some of my facts wrong...It's actually the third wave of Korean immigration into this country that my Mom took part in...though it was quite larger than previous waves...Don't mistake me for someone fixated on race...I was just writing about how my chosen family at the time was such a mix and that I was actually just a citizen of the world. Anyways, the archive is great for looking up previous site designs and articles...

I was in a different frame of mind, brainwashed...It is true...the sensory deprivation tank creates a beast who reflects in human moments...I reflect on being a member of AS...(Art Stupid by Toph, Santa Cruz)
AS (Art Stupid) in the BX Factor...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.
I think I took it all too seriously...If you watch the movie, Altered States, it makes a lot of sense why a group of geeky artists circa 1990 would come together for parties and for support while striving to make art and then grow older and then become more and more obsessed with spending time in the sensory deprivation tank just because nothing else makes us feel as alive...Nothing, nobody seems real after the swirling world of galleries and street stories...The joke amongst a few of us is that we were Anti-social, Aw Sh*t, I added the Always Skillin', Abolish Stereotypes part...I think there is a point where the advertising asphyxia starts to destroy the fabric of what comes naturally in nature...That's why after knowing so many artists, it is so hard to get past all that marketing..."I've got this show...I'm in this book...blah blah blah..." No hi, no how are you that's sincere between the promoting...One day, I woke up and realized I couldn't idealize brotherly love with people I don't know have the same ideals...What was it that brought us together in the first place? It was always the ability to sit around and sketch in each others' books and that we were all painters, a family...Anyways, I decided to get out of AS straight outta the cafes and tracks of Oakland, CA in 1999...My homegirl Monica told me when she turned 29, thinking she was already thirty said that she was happy about thirty because then she could stay away from those people she didn't really want to hang out with 'cuz she found out how valuable her time is...Yeah, She was right...

I still have some fond memories of those years in my early twenties...In the end, however, I found I just needed to be in the right crew for me...I didn't know any better and I was passionate and loyal about AS for many years, but the blinking crestfallen reality of romanticizing a collective of people that I did not feel were family was ultimately heartbreaking and also made me cynical about people...frienemies, in particular...

(Text edited May 18, 2008)


AS (Art Stupid) in the BX Factor...
Originally uploaded by snailsone.


men and women in my life series

The criteria for this set of paintings was that the subjects had to be people who changed the world in some major way by either inventing something that has since become a household item...or by bringing to mind some imagery like folkloric mythology just at the mention of their names...

The people all have nametags on...

men and women in my life series
Originally uploaded by snailsone.

The women are Eve, the two Marys, Medusa, Joan Ganz Cooney, Nettie Stevens, Harriet Tubman, Hypatia, Lucille Ball, JK Rowling, Grace Hopper, Calamity Jane, Dorothea Dix, Margaret Bourke-White...

I grew up as a latchkey kid and spent most of my time with my head in my books because I didn't hang out with too many other kids...I learned as I grew older that you choose who you want to affect you, even if it's only stories you've read about these people...

The men in my life include Ink76, Fidel, Nero, Amadeus Mozart, Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse, Honore Daumier, Dee Hock, Gandhi, Will Eisner, Jim Henson, William Shakespeare, Stevie Wonder, KRS one, Lane Meyer (John Cusack in Better Off Dead), Jimmy Carter, and Charles Eames...I chose Nero because that tall tale about him playing the fiddle as the city burns up around him is how I've always envisioned man...

flyer/logo design and docu-albums...



These flyers were done for the party, "Meet the Girl Behind the Screen"...
I have finished two graffiti docu-album movies (I've actually got 3 (Cuba), 4 (The Global Picture) and 5 (East Bay 2007) done, revised 11/2/07); Docu-Album 1: Route 66 and Docu-Album 2: Influences and Long Glances...1 includes live painting and 2 has a lot of my pieces and is dedicated to Dream AKA Michael Mendones Francisco...

My buddy Rigel has a great site called Crayone.com and he puts me to shame with his website skills...

Historical pop culture and a reef fish


Historical pop culture and a reef fish
Originally uploaded by snailsone.

greyyellowgruntfish
Originally uploaded by snailsone

I was doing a bit of research on the Korean War for some paintings that I am working on with yellow grunt fish, Haemulon sciurus...It's an experiment.

www.rsmas.miami.edu says fishes of the grunt family (Haenulidae) are noted for the rasping or grunting sounds they make in their throat when captured on a hook or otherwise disturbed. This is accomplished by means of a pair of movable muscles in the throat covered with small recurved teeth. By rubbing together these pharyngeal teeth, a clearly audible sound is produced. The reasons for noise-making in fish is not known.

I have this theory about getting hooked on stuff...A grunt is just the sound of frustration...So therefore I identify with grunts.

Historical pop culture and a reef fish

Anyways, I stumbled upon a great
site, www.authentichistory.com...It's a primary source for policial and pop culture memorabilia including audio, fashion, going by chunks of years from the 1900's to the present decade...with special sections devoted to wars...

Found some great military comics of actual soldiers' accounts, one in
particular where the protagonist was Asian, a Korean against the Reds during the Korean War...

Where my roots came from

This is the bombing of Pyongyang during "the Forgotten War"...

hands on words

I recently felt that I would attempt coming into the 2000's and give the whole blogging phenomenon a bit of hands on words. I recently received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston majoring in Studio for Inter-Related Media (www.massart.edu). Though I did graphic design and was a studio assistant in an architectural firm prior to school, I entered as a painter. In school, I found myself in wood, lighting, tech theater and video classes. After I graduated, I worked as an intern runner for a lighting design company during the elections when all the news networks set up booths at Rockerfeller Center and projected onto the buildings...Then I did pre-production (location of models/ producer/ director/ camermen/
interns, country/ shopping/ location research, equipment specing, travel) for a globe-trotting travel fashion tv show...Sounds more glamourous than it really was...When the show started shooting, my job was finished and I have had a hard time ever since finding a job using the skills I acquired in college. So now I've tried a couple things that I decided I don't necessarily really want to do for a living. The trouble is with my bi-polar nature, I am just lost without a bit of routine. That's also where this site comes in...I thought I could use this blog to note stuff that I come across in my day-to-day...