postloserism

The Red Sox won the World Series for the second time in, like, 90 years. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that by now, around here, even if you have absolutely no interest in baseball. Which is fine by me. I'm not really into sports but, like religious beliefs, I respect the fandom. In fact, I'm a little envious of that kind of passion. Sometimes I wish I was that into something. I guess I'm passionate about art. It's kind of like having faith in God, riddled with doubt of course.

Anyway, I was too busy hanging out with my niece and nephew this weekend to catch any of the World Series games. When we were inside we watched Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network, and the Disney Channel instead. There's a whole segment of popular culture completely foreign to me and probably most adults somewhere between childhood and parenthood. Did you know Billy Ray Cyrus is on a Disney Channel show with his real-life daughter Miley Cyrus, who plays Hannah Montana? Well, she plays herself, kind of, and in the show, also plays the persona of Hannah Montana. Seems there's a very fine line between reality and fiction in kids' shows. I was so confused that I had to ask my niece and nephew about four times for clarification. Wait, so Miley Cyrus is her real name, and she really is the daughter of Billy Ray and wait, she's also on Hannah Montana? Wait, so she plays herself playing Hannah Montana in just the one show? Ohhhhhh, okay. And on other shows, lots of actors go by their first names, like Drake Bell (a.k.a. Drake) in Drake and Josh. And then Mindy, played by Miranda Cosgrove, has her own show, iCarly, in which she plays a different character. That happens a lot on the Disney Channel (which is why I thought Miley Cyrus might be on two different shows). It's like kid-friendly Saturday Night live skits, spread out over the entire week's schedule of shows.

But I digress. On my drive home from central Connecticut this morning, I caught a bit of their 9 a.m. segment, which is BBC News in Boston, but a program called "Where We Live" in Connecticut. You see, Connecticut is on the "front lines" of the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry so it's not surprising that they'd be talking about the Boston Red Sox on a show called "Where We Live." Anyway, they had various Sox fans talking about the recent win, how this win differs from the 2004 win and the lifting of the curse, etc., and one of the speakers addressed the difference between the two in the sense that the younger fans in '07 don't have the same sense of hardship and that under-dog quality that an older fan had three years ago, after waiting for the win for 86 years. And I thought, wow, that's kinda like postfeminism and the complaint that a younger generation of girls and women are coming of age, and in New York, for example, beginning to make more than men, without an adequate education about the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers (or older sisters, for that matter). Hmm, maybe baseball and art have more in common than I thought.

And then I remembered how New Englanders are just gluttons for misery.

OMG

This looks so great. Michel, je t'aime.

how did I not know about this?

I learned (a couple of days after the submission deadline) about this blogging scholarship because an undergrad at my school apparently got his blog into the finalist round and sent out a school-wide e-mail asking fellow students to vote for his blog. If he wins - and it doesn't look like he will - he gets $10,000. For blogging about "interesting" and "unique" topics while attending college full-time.

I clicked on the blog with the most votes so far expecting to find some freshman rantings, you know, the kind of kid who has 367 "friends" on MySpace and has been blogging since birth about the indie film they just made, the novel they wrote at age 9, and/or the various small businesses they've started. Instead, I was directed to this blog, about "one mom's journey through life, law school, and breast cancer." Wow. Talk about putting my semester gripes into perspective...

recipe for a thesis show

Two rolls of white paper, about eight feet wide by 36 feet long. Quikrete concrete forming tubes, 10 inches in diameter by about 4 feet in height. 24 of those. Velcro. Resin owl figurine replicas. A pound of gold glitter. 24 water globe kits with wooden bases. Three postcards. A lot of screenprinting ink. Four months of travel and inspiration. One month of brainstorming. One month of second-guessing. Six weeks of frantic production. And voila, you have yourself a thesis show.

Almost. I've been busy collecting materials, test-printing, modifying images, re-ordering items that weren't quite what I expected, and I think I finally have a solid plan and I'm ready to get to work. Just in time for my one and only full thesis committee meeting on Monday. I'd share images of work in progress, or at least give you some idea of what a pound of gold glitter looks like, but my digital camera is kaput as of about a week ago. I have to say, life as a blogger is difficult without a digital camera. Especially considering how torn I usually feel if I go an entire blog post without a single image to share. I guess you'll just have to use your imagination.

As crazy as things have been, I still manage to watch t.v. just about every night, although I hate to admit, with all the good fall shows back on, that I've been an incredibly distracted viewer. Rarely do I watch a show and do nothing else while it's on. Thursday nights - The Office and 30 Rock specifically - and t.v. on DVD - Entourage, Weeds - seem to be the only times I give the t.v. my full attention. So it's probably a bit unfair to complain that not too many new shows have sparked my interest, or that past favorites like Heroes don't really hold my attention too well anymore. Even ANTM I watch mostly out of some strange sense of loyalty to the show. I think after watching it for so many cycles (there were only one or two that I didn't watch religiously), I can't stop now just because Tyra is a total egomaniac or because the photo shoots are completely uninspired remakes of her career as a model. It's like if I stop watching I'll always wonder what's happening on the show. And I do still enjoy it. No one model hopeful has really stood out for me yet. But I'll keep watching.

turning 30, with the help of the Internet

I blogged about turning 29 right around this time last year. In fact, I even made a t-shirt to commemorate the event (that I wore again today). I wrote then, just a few days after my birthday, that I was mostly okay entering the final year of my 20s. Turns out, that was a pretty difficult birthday for me, although, I was also just about to have an art breakdown, which worked out pretty well in the end. Needless to say, October wasn't exactly a highlight of 2006.

So I'm hesitant to write about how I feel on the eve of this particular birthday milestone. Was 29 difficult so that 30 doesn't have to be, like a hard-working parent paving the way for their offspring? Will I blog again in a couple of weeks with a completely cranky outlook? Who knows. All I know for sure is, I definitely can't afford another mid-semester crisis!

And if I am feeling down about the big 3-0, there's lots of advice on the Internet to help me process it all. If you google "turning 30" the top result is this site, I guess to help you feel like 30 really is the new 20 (Gosh, can you imagine if that was really true? As if you were teleported back to the age of 20 at the exact time you turn 30? I think I'd prefer, say, 27. 30 is the new 27. Yeah, that's good). Anyway, this is a pretty good idea, a site that's been passed on from one 29 year old gal to the next as she documents the final year of her 20s. Also in that google search is an article about the eight financially-related things you should do before turning 30. I think I've identified my goals...at least once. I've paid off credit cards...and then charged them up again. How do you define investment, exactly? And how can I establish a strategy to pay off student loans when I'm still accumulating them? Oh, but I have traveled! Check!

my week in Thai food

Wow, what a week! If for no other reason, I've found over the past couple of years that I look forward to winter for the simple reason that people in Boston seem to act slightly less crazy in colder weather. Maybe it's because it's too cold to stay out in public for too long. As soon as it gets even mildly warm and muggy, it seems like the streets are just teeming with extra J-walkers, crazed drivers, construction detours...We've had a couple of bouts of Indian summer over the past few weeks and I have to say, there's very little I like about this trend. Anything over about 74 is too warm for me, both meteorologically and socially.

Otherwise, it's been a busy mix of freaking out about my thesis and attending visiting artist lectures. And a lot of Thai food. One of my side jobs this semester has been to coordinate the visiting artist program for the area I teach in. Every area does it a little differently, and in TIA (that stands for Text and Image Arts), we like to do all of our four or five talks in one week. That week ended today. We invited an up and coming new media scholar/future new media curator, a book artist, a copyright attorney and today had a really fantastic presentation about a few of artist John Craig Freeman's projects, from public art, to digital interactive media, and ending in Second Life. This was his thesis project. So much for my paper columns, glitter globes, and postcards.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Also this week we hosted the second of the four '4 Painters' visiting artists. Since there are only so many dining options near the Museum School, we tend to treat our guests to delicious Thai food at Brown Sugar, just across the park. Which meant that this particular week, when the visiting artists aligned just so, I got to enjoy, for free, three lunches (Pad Thai, Chicken Cashew Nuts, and Yellow Curry) and one dinner (Thai Fried Rice) at Brown Sugar. The one day when the TIA and Painting lectures conflicted, I had free pizza instead. And because it was such an intense week, my workout schedule was thrown completely off track...


I continue to freak out about my thesis, only partly because the publicity materials deadline was today (but mainly because I have less than 8 weeks to pull this thing off). It's really difficult to boil it down to 75, preferably very descriptive words, more about what the exhibition will include and less about the concept. Here's what I came up with, with some help from Neal and the gallery's outreach coordinator:

The subject of my installation Neither Here Nor There is the fragmentation, dislocation, and replication of the Parthenon, in an effort to investigate the idea of place and the relationship between an original and its copy. The installation incorporates architecture, print media, and the souvenir to represent the complex impressions left by my travels to London, Athens, and Nashville, Tennessee and to explore notions of authenticity, artifice, and desire.

Since I'm doing an installation that won't fully come together until the week before our opening reception, I don't have any documentation of the thesis project so far, so the surrogate image is from a spin-off, if you will, where I became interested in stereograms and the idea of creating the illusion of a three-dimensional image from two images of different versions of the same thing. It doesn't work the way a stereogram should work, of course, but it's still fun to cross your eyes and try to get the two Parthenons to line up and do...something...magical. Anyway, as for the thesis project itself, it's the "architecture" component that's keeping me up at night. I'm feeling pretty confident that the installation will involve gold glitter, though, so I'm looking forward to that.