The Farm Yard Connection

.
Back to our regular programming.
Via Swissmiss, this photo by Kevin German.
From the website where you can buy it:

A 5-year-old girl shields her face for a moment from a gust of wind with her favorite chicken, Steve, after running to catch him for 10 minutes on her father's farm in Deary, Idaho. "One time I squished a chicken so hard that an egg fell out," she said.

It's a beautiful photo, but it also caught my eye because Deary is Emily's hometown, and she has some funny chicken/egg stories. I'll tell you some other time, or maybe she will – I got stuff to do. This weekend is our last free one in New York (well, there's next weekend, but we'll be getting things together for our big going-away blowout on the 6th). The following weekend, the big move begins.

Like I said before, blogging will be fairly light, but do look in for photos of this coming weekend and whatever else I come up with. And in the month or so that I'm criss-crossing the country (twice between September 14th and the end of October) look for a ton of photos from life on the road.

Welcome to the Lower 48. Now Leave.

What the F? I know a lot of still-pissed, irrational Hillary voters will jump ship, but this woman is completely unprepared to be Vice President, let alone President and Commander if McCain dies. If anyone ever says "Obama is inexperienced" we now have permission to kind of aggressively chuckle, maybe a little too loudly, as we wag a finger at the weird-ass McCain/Palin ticket. My friends, I predict about a 7% chance that she will step down in few weeks, Harriet Miers style, as it becomes clear that the GOP's cuckoo birthday boy has chosen a female Dan Quayle from the middle of nowhere.

Also, why hasn't there been even more press on the fact that McCain called his wife a C word? I guarantee that the only thing that gets the aforementioned still-pissed, irrational Hillary supporters more pissed and irrational is usage of the C word.

Defying Convention

What a week. It's hard to analyze without any real distance in the rear view mirror, but this was clearly a DNC for the record books. I don't know if Obama and his speech writing team helped people out or if they were just extra inspired, but there were so many good speeches this week, my head is spinning. Best of all – even with the weight of needing to equal his key note address from four years ago – and even more the urgency of convincing people that he is fit to step into the oval office and get to work – Obama accepted his nomination with the most eloquent, inspiring, moving piece of work I think I've ever heard in my life. Compared to the politics we've seen in recent years, even from people I like, it was other-worldly. This has to be something like the feeling people felt from the Kennedy bros in '60 and '68. We have the opportunity this year to elect someone we trust and like and can even relate to. We have the opportunity to take a different path and be proud of our country again.

If you missed the speech, and I know some of you missed it for various reasons, please pour yourself a cup of coffee or get a little snacky, get comfortable, and hit play.

Some Ol' Party Sh*t

Again, not a political blog, but I wanted to quickly weigh in on Hillary Clinton's speech last night. I can honestly say it was one of the best I've ever heard. People are saying she could have been more outspoken on Obama's readiness to lead the country, and that may be true, but I think the main goal had to be getting her supporters on board with voting Democrat, rather than going to the dark side or sitting it out. With that in mind, I think she struck exactly the right tone. At this point, those disaffected Hillary supporters who still won't vote for Obama are probably unreachable through logical discourse anyway.

I also liked MSNBC's interview with Spike Lee, whose brother and sister live around the corner from us in Fort Greene. I'm hoping to see them in the corner store rocking some new Obama shirts from Denver.



Brooklyn Slumlordz Some Ol' Party Sh*t mp3

The Sea and the Rhythm

Since August 15th, seven handmade floating sculptures have been making their way down the Hudson, stopping at different ports along the way so their 40 passengers, led by the artist known as Swoon, can step on shore and stage a series of musical and theatrical performances.

The trip will wrap up when the boats dock at Deitch Studios in Long Island City on September 7th. Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea is a sequel to a 2006 project on the Mississippi River by Swoon and the Miss Rockaway Armada. An exhibition at Deitch of Swoon's prints and structures will follow.

I first became aware of Swoon when we lived near the Gowanus Canal and noticed her woodcut-paper paste-ups around the neighborhood. I saw her speak at an AIGA event a few years later, and after that she had a fairly mind-blowing show at Deitch projects.

Her work is very recognizable and you can see it all over, though not quite as much as before, as she is obviously very busy these days.

Click here to see some of my Flickr photos of her paste-ups.
More info on Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch and at switchbacksea.org.

---

PS - I did a graphic identity project for the Gowanus Canal when I was in school at Parsons. I did a lot of research in the archives of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and this is one of the more interesting photos I found:

The Gowanus had temporarily dried up, and this crowd was having a look from the Carroll Street bridge. A police officer on duty counted something like 38 guns in the mud below.

Things and Stuff

The stoop sale was a great success, thanks for asking. It pretty much ate up our whole weekend, and it's always hard to tell if the proceeds are worth the extraordinarily large amount of time you put into sorting and pricing all the stuff you want to sell – but I always feel compelled to do it. When I was a kid we had similar sales in the driveway in front of our house, and my mom was always hitting up garage sales, rummage sales and thrift stores to fulfill our various material needs – so it just comes naturally to me to try to sell stuff I don't want before making a big trip to the Goodwill donation box. We'll do that too – I'd say we sold about half of the things we set out, and the rest will head for Salvation Army on Atlantic Avenue this week.

All in all, we ended up with enough money to fill our gas tank about twelve times. We met some new people, had some tasty afternoon cocktails on the stoop with Sky and Chad, and got to chat it up with a bunch of friends, neighbors and passersby. My man Eddie from down the block brought us a jar of honey from a Fort Greene beekeeper and told me, "when it's gone, you'll know it's time to come back." Sitting on the stoop was a great way to spend a Sunday on one of our last weekends in New York.

Posting will be fairly light for the next few weeks as we race to wrap things up before the move, but please continue to check in for some random pics, links, records, and what have you.