Scrap Art - All-Consuming Lump
[acrylic and spray paint of scrap wood]

The Second in a series of paintings on scraps of wood I find around my neighborhood or on my way to work. I'm hoping to put together a series of about 5 of these for our next Art Show, which as of yet is TBA.

Last Thursday The Decemberists Tour Trailer was stolen, along with ALL of their tour gear, and that of their new sound engineer who had only played 1 show with them!

If you are a fan, you can help by donating. Even as little as 1 dollar US. If you got most of their music the way I did, then you might want to pitch some money into the kitty.

When it comes to taking street art to another level a few names come to mind. But I'm not talking about Shepard Fairey this time. This time I'm talking about Banksy, if you haven't heard of him it's because he is based out of Eng-A-Land.

Banksy recently gained recognition when he painted graffiti on live animals, his show was shut down when the animals became "distressed."

Banksy's newest show takes place in a real, authentic, really real Gallery... with a capital G homes. Except the gallery didn't know he was having a show. That's because he snuck into the gallery and placed his art along side some of the world's most famous. (via metafilter)

Of his first show in a real famous gallery Banksy said:
"This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue."

certainly... isn't wearing a fake beard what gallery shows are always about?

No matter what you do to stop it. I tried to stop it, but I just got hurt.

Scrap Art Bindle

This is the first in a series of paintings done on scraps of wood I find near my house, or on my way to work. The series is called, for lack of a better term, Scrap Art. Not just because it's art painted on scraps, but also because I feel the name doesn't try to make the art seem high falutin'. It's just art after all.

This particular piece of wood came from a house that was being refurbished just up the street. It is painted with acrylic and spray paint.

Also, get your brushes and your pencils ready. We are gearing up for a Mini One-Off Art show soon. The last one was such a success we had to have another. this one might be a little different. We may have an actual space. Not that Matt's basement wasn't awesome. We'll see... more on that later.

One of the 8 guys who founded Dad's Garage, and my good friend Matt-o has finally gotten himself a proper weblog. No more of this myspace nonsense. As per usual, he has interesting things to say. I hope he says more of it.

Last Wednesday I met David. He plays the banjo, and you can download some free tracks of his music. He also builds and operates his own puppets.

He told me he was the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, this reminded me of a documentary I saw in Art School titled Marjoe. It's the story of Marjoe Gortner a one-time child evangelist turned religious con-man. Marjoe became famous when his evangelist father got the kitschy idea to have little Marjoe marry people despite the fact that he was 10 years old. During the time of the documentary, Marjoe had turned his back on evangelism, only to return to the fold, this time with the sole intention of making as much money from tent rivial appearences as possible. A blatant fact that the organizers of the revivials seemed to mind very little, as the more money Marjoe made, the more money they tmeselves made as well.

We played Dodgeball again last night. This time against Uncle Rico. The games were very evenly matched, with some games going on longer than any dodgeball game should ever go. Even so, they scratch out a win against us. Mack has some nice pictures up of the game.

also:
The guy who designed the most popular PC game of all time... The Sims, has revealed his latest game at the Game Developers Conference. It's called Spore, and it looks like it has the potential to be one of the greatest games of all time... We'll have to wait and see.

Hey, everybody loves fractals, you know those geometric objects that when divided into parts, no matter how small, all look the same as the original object.

And everybody loves The Buddha, you know that happy fat dude who sat under a tree for a millions years.

Then you'll go ape over the Buddhabrot.

"The Buddhabrot is a special rendering of the Mandelbrot set, which resembles to some extent certain depictions of the Buddha." - wiki (via linkfilter)

Our friend Andy came out to The Saturday Morning Pajama Jam. He sat on some pillows, watched our show, and then was kind enough to mention it in his Scene and Herd column for Creative Loafing.

Also, on a related note, Andy had a funny post in his weblog last sunday.

Tonight we take up our dodgeballs once again. With just about 1/3rd of our team still slightly injured after our beating last week, we'll just have to see how we do tonight.

The latest in this ongoing drama, last night was round 3 of the Atlanta Adult Dodge Ball League. Oh man...

We played the Tomahawk Ballers. From what I could tell, they all worked for The Atlanta Braves. And while we certainly had the edge when it came to trash talking, they tipped the scales when it came to pure athleticism. Or they were cyborgs.

They were also very competitive. And seeing as how we were all going to wear mexican wrestler masks for the second half of the game, I think it's easy to say they took the game way more seriously than we did. Which is probably why they kept us to only 1 win out of 9 games.

One of our local news stations came out to do some coverage of the games. So if you were watching 11 Alive last night around... well 11 o'clock, you might have seen us. And if you were paying close enough attention, you might have even caught clunkygirl dropping a few sound bites for the television viewers.

Again, we couldn't have gotten through our beating without Coach C-Dub, this week clothed in sport coat and tie, with clipboard. He's a tough coach, but fair. His best asset: assigning nicknames to the players on the other team, like "Haircut."

Milton Glaser is a famous designer. He designing the "I *heart* NY" logo... He's been designing for a long time, and he has a few thoughts not only about the job of designing, but also about the job of living life. He wrote them out here:

10 Things I have Learned (via boingboing)

You come see him, and you pay a fee.

From the mailbox of the man himself, to the hands of my Boss. Then quickly into my scanner. Now to you.

I present the Man the Myth the Legend:
Christopher "Kid" Reid.

he looks good...
He also sent a CD of his new music. Which I would love to upload, but I don't think he'd appreciate that. If you know me, ask me, and I'll play some selected tracks for you. My favorite is Track 05, and while it doesn't have a name, I've given it the name "What Up Kid." (according to the chorus this is the most obvious choice) Also, if I were Kid's Agent, I would push this track as the first single, AND I would make it the "Title Track" of the album. Therefore the name of the full length album would be:
"What Up Kid: The Music of Christopher Reid"
featuring the hit single "What Up Kid?"

Yeah, we might be a little behind the times, but this weekend the Space Station was finally outfitted for DVR. That's simplified tech talk for Digital Video Recorder. Some people call it Tivo, but we didn't get Tivo, we subscribe from Comcast, so we got they're version of DVR.

What was supposed to be a 10 minute upgrade turned into a 2 hour retrofitting.

Apparently the "drop box" was only sending us a +6 signal. When that signal is split between our digital cable modem, and the DVR the signal degrades too much for any of our devices to operate properly.

Here is a question, how long has Comcast known about our crappy +6 signal? I'll tell you: The entire time we've subscribed to their service.

The first guy who came to our house to hook up our cable and cable modem should have told us, he should have restrung our wires, he should have scheduled maintenance for our "drop box." He didn't, neither did the second guy, and funnily enough neither did the third guy.

This last guy did.

He restrung our wires, and called for our drop box to be serviced. Now our Cable Modem will run clean and fast. And now I can fill my DVR hardrive with episodes of Sealab and Stargate SG-1.
Also, I'm a dork.

Yes it's video
Yes it's 31MB
Yes the sound quality is a little low.
but David Byrne is certainly...

Burning Down the House

The video is linked from TinyNibbles. What is TinyNibbles? It's the website of Violet Blue, and from what I can tell she's an "Open Source Sex Educator." Who has written several books on the subject,
and... AND!
She works with The Survival Research Laboratories! She builds machines and then turns them on their mechanical brothers with one purpose. Fight to the death, or rather, fight to the destruction. And I'm not talking shitball BattleBots either, the Survival Research Machines breathe fire and propel sharpened 2x4s through sheets of metal.

I think my head just exploded.

anyway the point is, this video is hosted by her, and I am linking to it without permission, so it may go down at any time. Who knows what will be up in it's place. so be warned.

What is it with Mash-ups and The Beatles? Don't get me wrong I love the genre, it just seems that everybody making Mash-ups uses The Beatles.

CCC is a guy named Chris, who makes mashups. He also blogs about them.

Grab his newest offering CCC:Revolved featuring, you guessed it, The Beatles mashed-up with various other artists. The album is well made and mixed perfectly. Even though some of the tracks aren't exactly my style, some of them really jumped out at me. (like That's All Yellow with The Beatles mixed over Genisis) I know Mash-ups were born out of DJ's mixing songs at dance clubs, but my favorite mash-ups are less dance and more plain good old music. (original link via boingboing)

Last night marked the second round of Dodgeball games for us in The Atlanta Adult Dodgeball League.

Our team is comprised of the guys from Sealab, plus perennial Sealab attaché Pat, as well as our thinly framed intern, one sprightly Dave Willis, and the clunkygirl. Together we are known the world round as...

The Respek Knuckles.

with a whopping record of 2-16

Our record did not stop our cheering section from cheering. Yes, we had a cheering section, thanks to The Spider Monkey Crew, and friends. Also, I should mention, I don't think we could have gotten even one of those two wins had it not been for our "coach" C-Dub. Whose taunting from the sidelines was most motivating. Next week we're going to get him a clipboard he can throw on the ground.

Yeah, we're not that good, and my elbow hurts. We played the Weather Channel team (Balls on the 8's). They were pretty organized, and I have a feeling they could predict where the ball was going to go, meteorologist style. We however, were not organized, nor do we have magical powers to control the weather. So far we have recorded 2 pulled thigh muscles, various smallish bruises, and a pulled groin. I can't wait for next week!

Roger Ebert recently got a proper website.

At Rogerebert.com you can search his extensive database of Movie Reviews, some of which are particularly funny and interesting. The database has a search function were you can specify the number of stars Ebert awarded the movie being reviewed. While I don't always agree with Ebert's comments they are almost always entertaining, especially if he hates a movie. When he does hate a movie, it is usually within the opening line of his review the he states his case for hate the best.

One of my favorite things to do is enter a half star as my search criteria.
A small sampling of the results:

Death To Smoochy
"To make a film this awful, you have to be enormously talented, and think big."

Dream a Little Dream
"The sound track is wall-to-wall rock 'n' roll, all of it bad, none of it necessary."

Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas
"Pale shadow of previous Flintstones movie, which was itself no masterpiece."

and my personal favorite:

Pearl Harbor
"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle."

On a related note, check out Ebert's book, "I hated, hated, hated this movie."