Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Printer Reset
A printout from my mom's computer printer showing the ink levels/running a nozzle test. I think it's beautiful.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
The House of Pride Forecloses
The current financial crisis using allusions to Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene."
Redcrosse, 4 x 6 in., Digital Print, 2009
Redcrosse and Una, 4 x 6 in., Digital Print, 2009
Redcrosse, 4 x 6 in., Digital Print, 2009
Redcrosse and Una, 4 x 6 in., Digital Print, 2009
Eiffel Tower Project Drawings (151-191/200)
2 x 2 in. drawings by people in response to the question, "What's your favorite place you've ever been?"Friday, September 4, 2009
The House of Pride Forecloses (processes)
This is work in progress for a print I'm making about the current financial crisis using allusions to Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene."
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The most beautiful dress ever
... is made by my favorite designer: Chloé. I saw it in the NYC Chloé storefront window and went in and asked how much it was. If it was $300 I didn't care – I was going to buy it. While knowing it would be expensive, I didn't expect it to be $3,000. I almost wanted to thank the man and woman at the store for taking my question seriously and not giving each other a sarcastic look like, "More than you can afford." Maybe I did thank them, but I can't remember.
Sex and the City, The Book
Today I finished reading Candace Bushnell's book, Sex and the City. I loved the HBO series, so I wanted to check out the novel. The book was published in 1996, so when I read it I tried to remember what was going on and what the general atmosphere was at the time.
A couple years ago my Shakespeare professor told a story about a young, untenured professor. He was at a conference and was asked to give a short summary of his presentation for the next day so that others at the conference could decide which talks they wanted to attend. Since he was nervous, he misspoke and reversed the order saying his talk would be on how a contemporary writer (I forget which one) influenced Shakespeare. Other professors whose work he admired repeated back, "How interesting. I wouldn't have thought about things affecting each other in non-chronological order. But modern contemporary writers do shape how we read Shakespeare today." Now the young professor had to scramble to figure out how he was going to change his talk and what he was going to say!
Anyway, even though SATC wasn't influenced by other literature that has since been published, it was interesting to me how it was influenced by recent events. In the mid-nineties the stock market was rising and would hit 10,000, a few years later. Financial growth from the dotcoms and Clinton balancing the budget with a surplus. And now we have the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Bankers in England are told to go to work in jeans so they don't look like bankers and—subsequently—get killed. The point is that as much as I love SATC, it was a strange feeling reading the book because every other character was described as an attractive thirty or fortysomething investment banker. Seriously, half of the characters were investment bankers! I wish I had read the book in 1996 so I could see what would have jumped out at me; perhaps the social rituals or the glamour of NYC would have been at the top of the list. Perhaps I would have wanted to live vicariously through the characters, pretending I too was wearing a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Even so, I'm sure I would have found the materialism egregious back then; but I think the unselfconscious references to jobs in finance have made the book into an artifact of a time before the recession. I suppose I could re-read it in another thirteen years and see what I think.
A couple years ago my Shakespeare professor told a story about a young, untenured professor. He was at a conference and was asked to give a short summary of his presentation for the next day so that others at the conference could decide which talks they wanted to attend. Since he was nervous, he misspoke and reversed the order saying his talk would be on how a contemporary writer (I forget which one) influenced Shakespeare. Other professors whose work he admired repeated back, "How interesting. I wouldn't have thought about things affecting each other in non-chronological order. But modern contemporary writers do shape how we read Shakespeare today." Now the young professor had to scramble to figure out how he was going to change his talk and what he was going to say!
Anyway, even though SATC wasn't influenced by other literature that has since been published, it was interesting to me how it was influenced by recent events. In the mid-nineties the stock market was rising and would hit 10,000, a few years later. Financial growth from the dotcoms and Clinton balancing the budget with a surplus. And now we have the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Bankers in England are told to go to work in jeans so they don't look like bankers and—subsequently—get killed. The point is that as much as I love SATC, it was a strange feeling reading the book because every other character was described as an attractive thirty or fortysomething investment banker. Seriously, half of the characters were investment bankers! I wish I had read the book in 1996 so I could see what would have jumped out at me; perhaps the social rituals or the glamour of NYC would have been at the top of the list. Perhaps I would have wanted to live vicariously through the characters, pretending I too was wearing a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Even so, I'm sure I would have found the materialism egregious back then; but I think the unselfconscious references to jobs in finance have made the book into an artifact of a time before the recession. I suppose I could re-read it in another thirteen years and see what I think.
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