My friend’s cousin …

Wait a second. You know this is going to be good, when it starts with “My friend’s cousin.”

My friend’s cousin is a teacher at a charter school in Washington, D.C. She found this on the floor of a 3rd grade classroom and recognized it for the gold mine that it is — scanned it into a fax-to-PDF scanner immediately.

See most of the whole, exhaustive list after the jump.
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Plugging like this blog has sprung a leak!

APRIL 3 – JUNE 12, 2009
SYNTHESIS : CONTEMPORARY COLLAGE
Carroll Square Gallery, 975 F Street NW, Washington DC 20004
OPENING: Friday, April 3, 6 – 8pm

CURATED BY HEMPHILL FINE ARTS, and FEATURING WORKS BY:
D.Billy | Billy Colbert | Nathan Gluck | Franz Jantzen | Camila Rivera-Morales | Holli Schorno | Al Souza | Daniel Tierny

These are my contributions to the show… but you’ll have to swing by the gallery to check out the excellent work by the other seven artists. And, of course, to get the full sensory experience of my pieces… which may or may not include olfactory overtones of the studio environment in which they were created. (Hint: think propane heater, macaroni and cheese, Mexican Coca-Cola, and cats.*)

*Kidding. They’re unscented and hypo-allergenic. I swear.

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I’m talkin’ X-Acto knives and rubber cement, y’all!

This Friday, December 12th, 2008, Civilian Art Projects in Washington DC opens their last show of the season, entitled Media.Mix: 21st Century Collage.

They were nice enough to invite me to participate, thanks in part to my friend and former roomate Steve Frost, an excellent artist who has work in the show himself.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it down for the opening, so if you’re in the DC area, go and represent!
If you do plan on going and want to pretend that you’re me, these are the new collages about which you’ll need to make up something to say in art-speak:

I recommend heavy use of the word “recontextualized”.

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I am in Southwest D.C., lying in my girlfriend’s bed, and I want this moment to freeze and stay forever. I want this feeling to stop and hover, solid but malleable, so I can stretch it out like a tarp and wrap it up tight around my entire life.

I am just waking up from a nap on fresh cotton sheets and giant fluffy pillows, a nap wrapped in fresh green air lovingly kissed out from the hundreds of trees down here.

I love the smell of New York air — of dirty metal, concrete and a distant whiff of urine — but it’s not napping air.

I started this nap by lying very still and reading Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, a perfect horror novel that bounced right off of my sleeping face shortly after I got into the good part. It’s still here in bed for me, waiting for me to pick it up. I will, in a minute.

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The Japanese robots at the Kennedy Center’s “Robotopia Rising” exhibit are cute, cuddly ambassadors from a future packed with smiling, happy plastic slaves. Japan’s massive aging population is creating a need for robotic elder-care assistants, machines that can remind the aged to take medicine, turn them in bed, or alert working adult children to problems at home.

This makes perfect sense for a culture that worships its ancestors, loves technology and has evolved economically to the point where family can no longer afford to care for family personally. “Robotopia Rising” asserts that Japanese robots are made to emulate their pop culture, equal parts Astro Boy and Hello Kitty. Here in America, we just chuck our old folks into crooked homes and get back to making actual Terminators as quickly as possible.

“Robotopia Rising” is part of a larger exhibit at the Kennedy Center, “Japan: Culture + Hyperculture,” and it’s easily the most magnetic part. I didn’t see a lot of wide-eyed toddlers and balding geeks like me lingering breathlessly over the admittedly gorgeous lacquer sculptures in the hallway, or straining to touch the gorgeous textile artwork with trembling, sweaty fingers.

I’ve created a photo gallery from the show here … and as usual, there’s much, much more after the jump …

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Cindy Sheehan
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

o I’m sitting here in Busboys and Poets (a coffee shop in D.C) just hammering away at the freelance work when the phone rings. Its an unavailable number, which, to me, is a good sign. A lot of corporate phone numbers read “unavailable” on my cell. I’ve spent a fair bit of time these past few weeks trying to get that word to appear on my telephone. I jumped up and outside onto the street.

it was indeed a company interested in my writing/web content services. And man, it feels good to be wanted. Even when you don’t want the thing that wants you, it just feels good, like the universe is giving you a wink and a nod.

So I’m standing out there on the street, cell on my head and thumb in my ear going on and on about my services when this pack of teenage girls comes hollering on by. I could hear them down the street, hence the thumb in the ear. Then the gaggle stopped right in front of me, right as I as talking to this recruiter. And it wasn’t just boisterous anymore.

Shit got HOT and onlookers circled up and went “OOOooOOoo daaaamn I wouldn’t take that if I was you!” There was about to be a girl fight right in front of me, during my phone interview, right in front of Busboys and Poets. Looked like it was gonna be a real weave-ripper, too.

I moved down the street and hands started flying. It got UGLY. “I’m so sorry, I’ll have to call you back, there’s a fight happening on the street,” I said, hanging up abruptly.

Then I didn’t know WHAT to do. I didn’t feel like I could break it up exactly, and the crowd was growing. I just stood there anxiously, an official grownup who is supposed to DO SOMETHING, just watching and fretting and hoping it didn’t roll into the street.

The fight went into the street. Traffic stopped. The crowd on the sidewalk grew, a bunch of nervous grown white people standing around, saying to each other “somebody should really do SOMETHING,” but none of us knew what.

The fight rolled across 14th and sort of evaporated like a dust devil that just quits all of a sudden and then it was just us nervous citizens on the sidewalk. One of those nervous citizens was Cindy Sheehan and a lot of the other citizens were part of her peacemaking brigade.

I know that her thing is more stopping the war in Iraq instead of breaking up teenage girlfights, but I thought she could have tried SOMETHING. Sort of like how on an island full of castaways a veterinarian delivers babies and takes out swollen appendixes every month or so. But you know, she’s another nervous grownup just like me too and neither one of us really had a clue.

It was just me and Cindy and this big weird girlfight on the street this afternoon and there wasn’t any point to anything at all.

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It was beautiful today, one of a handful of truly beautiful days in 2007. Me and my man Martin got on the bikes and ate up the trails, winding 30 miles or so out into suburban Virginia.

There’s nothing like having the sun on your arms and the wind in your face for a workout. Being in the gym is okay and all, but it always makes me kind of feel like I’m on a space station somewhere.

The ride itself was pretty uneventful, apart from this completely typical incident on the Key Bridge on the way home. I was riding over the bridge, slowly, on the wide pedestrian/bike lane. I was going slow enough to avoid freaking people out, and calling out to people before I passed, letting them know what was going on.

Then, all of a sudden, this woman on the opposite side of the path(walking back towards Arlington) took a hard right and jumped right in front of me. I yelled out as I braked — she jumped out of the way a split second before I would have plowed into her. She shouted “fuck you, man!”

“No, actually, fuck YOU,” I said. “You jumped in front of me!”

“Well SLOW DOWN,” she shouted, loud. “There ought to be a sign up that says ‘no bikes allowed!’”

Really. I think one that says “Watch Where You’re Going,” might be a better idea, or, simply, “No Bitches.”

At that point, some kid in those stupid shoes with wheels in the heels could have dusted me. Speed was not the issue. The real issue at hand was that because I was on a bike, I was in the wrong.

This interaction is completely typical for cyclists in D.C. I’m not sure how it is in other cities, but here, you can’t win. If that woman were driving when I was riding in the road, she’d be mad at me too. Drivers honk and shout at you to get on the sidewalk, and it’s not like it’s friendly or safe up there either.

There’s one solution that keeps D.C. cyclists and Sunday pedestrians both happy though: when cranks like that lady stay in the suburbs where they fucking belong.

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A lot of people think that D.C. is just grim, grey buildings full of conservative careerists with beige bland dreams. Those people are right.

Which is why I get so excited every morning when I pass this truck at 14th and Rhode Island:

Every time I see it I think “Sun Ra is alive and well and living in a truck in Northwest D.C.”

Update

A commenter left a link on this post last night that unzipped the mystery of this truck into something weird and wonderful.

As it turns out, C. Kret is equal parts Sun Ra and Daniel Pinkwater. He may be the living incarnation of a Pinkwater character, a colorful extra from The Snarkout Boys series. He’s a children’s book author, illustrator, a rambling limerick-spouting poet. Like most other Northwest residents, C. Kret has a law degree … but prefers to beautify the world instead. Here’s a self-conducted interview.

From his website:

Itzah C. Kret is also known as The Phantom Planter because he goes around planting flowers in public places. Since 1979 he guesses he’s planted over 41,317 flowers in ten states and six foreign countries. In October, 2003, he planted 202 tulips, crocuses and windflowers right under the St. Louis Gateway Arch. On April 12, 2004, he struck in Buenos Aires, Argentina, planting dozens of Morning Glories in La Boca and in the park in front of the Casa Rosada. Last fall he checked out the Liberty Bell and decided to plant daffodils at the Brith Shalom nursing home in Philadelphia. In 2005 he planted over 20,000 morning glories in Bangalore, India. (He may have an obsessive compulsive floral disorder.)

C. Kret is an ambassador for International Ice Cream for Breakfast Day, celebrated on the first Saturday of February. From the Ice Cream for Breakfast FAQ:

Some people have been known to play a competitive card game called “Nuts” on Ice Cream for Breakfast Day. Often, the edge in such activities is had by the person who most adroitly combines a sugar high and caffeine buzz to their greatest advantage.

I’ve done a lot of wailing recently about wanting to escape D.C. It’s really encouraging to see someone who escapes it inside his mind, and may never have let it get to him in the first place.

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