California is an island

This is pretty much how I felt last week. I always feel this way at the end of the semester. I used to get mildly depressed. It's like those stories of astronauts who went to the moon and came home depressed. How do you follow something like that? Not that being in school is anything like going to the moon, but it can be a traumatic transition from crazy round-the-clock busy-ness to nothing. And nothing is what's on my calendar these days. Well, nothing that pays or that's required for class credit. Hopefully the paid part will change soon, but in the meantime, I suppose I have plenty to do to keep me busy. I have to move out of my studio and try to cram a cubicle-sized space full of stuff into our already cluttered spare room, finish planning this crazy research trip beginning in less than a week, and tie up a lot of loose ends at school.

So what did I do last week? Well, the first bit was devoted to last-minute review board prep. There were a couple of minor additions to existing projects, like mapping where all the lost objects folks have told me about so far were last seen:


The map thing is all part of this recent focus on the theme of geographical displacement and how it relates to other ideas I've been interested in, like memory, loss, copies of things in relation to their original, etc. As I alluded to in an earlier post, Neal and I were working on a collaboration that involved mapping and remembering apartments we used to live in and the mostly crappy furniture we schlepped from one block of Oakland's Adams Point neighborhood to another over a six year period. Then we moved here and got rid of all but a half-dozen or so major furniture items. What survived the trip, I realized very close to my board, was a lot more interesting to me than what didn't make the cut, and I managed to find then-and-now/here-and-there photos, like the bed (Oakland image is on the left; Boston image is on the right):


...and the AK Rocker chair:


Going through these photos, I wondered why we got rid of so much stuff but kept this chair. I think the fact that it came apart was significant in our decision to keep it. But, anyway, you get the idea. I'm not sure where to take this, but it does have a little something to do with London and Athens and the Parthenon (believe it or not) so I'm banking on this trip shedding a lot of light and wisdom on my future art practice.