Chairy Tree

I am constantly finding more and more that supports my senior thesis for my BA, so this doesn't surprise me at all. It is kind of interesting though, so here it is, the "Chairy Tree."


Also, a particularly interesting vacant chair by Jeremy Mora; I have chairs on the brain.

Get thee to the Getty!

The Spring season at Astrocamp is finally over! All I can say is that it has been a very long five months, and I am happy for a few days before I have to be back for Summer. I have been told that the summer is a reward for the craziness that is Spring, so hopefully this feeling of relief will last for the next few months. Since many of our instructors are leaving to go do other things, we have all made many airport trips. I volunteered to drive to LAX to drop off my friend James because I know that the Getty is just up the 405 from there. So off we went! Fahim went with me, which was interesting because he claims to think that art is ridiculous. In a way he is right, art is a luxury for those with leisure time and money. Regardless, I did catch him admiring the architecture and the garden. I also noticed how enticed by the Italian painting wing he was; conveniently this is also one of the few galleries that they let visitors take photographs in, so I snuck a shot of him appreciating a gilded scene. The conversion to art snob has begun.

U-G-L-Y You Aint Got No Alibi

I have a friend getting married next month, and I have decided that I will not do what I normally do and procrastinate while choosing what to wear. It's a formal, evening, wedding so I have been looking for a nice dress. Today, however, I was reminded of a website called uglydress.com. Thank you Victoria's Secret for making me laugh by categorizing this ugly thing as a "sexy" dress, and for inspiring me to laugh at some other ugly dresses too.

In Honor of the Idyllwild Tradition

It's tradition in Idyllwild that Memorial and Labor Day weekends are for yard sales. They are EVERYWHERE; my family has had our fair share and visited our fair share. Sometimes they are wonderful, last year I got some amazing ceramics and there are some other notable items over the years. However, yard sales also bring about the worst driving conditions ever; people cruising around the winding mountain roads, not paying attention to anything but the neon signs pointing to possible treasure...or junk. So in honor of this weekend, here is a clip from Homestarrunner.com, a sight I used to visit with my freshman year roommate.

This girl means business!

I am currently finishing my last shift as a PC, but I am just learning some of the best tricks and am almost sad that this is the end. Example: this morning my friend Chris, who lives in the dorm my group is staying in, sat down next to me at breakfast and said "Kelly...5:45." I looked at his drowsy face and knew that the kids next door had woken him up at that ungodly hour. "I'll take care of it," I told him, "tomorrow you will sleep in peace." So I took this photo of him.

I showed the kids who woke him up and said, "This is my friend Chris. He was woken up at 5:45 this morning...by you... and it was too loud for him to get back to sleep. Look at this face, he had to teach ALL day like this. Tomorrow morning PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, respect the quiet hours." They apologized and promised me that they would be good. I also hung this sign in the hall outside of their rooms, just to ensure that poor Chris gets some sleep. I mean it kids! Don't mess with the sleep of your instructors, it's a bad idea.

Art Garden

There is an art garden on the highway on the way to Hemet. Every time I drive past I watch it grow, but I've never really had time to stop, at least not while to gates were open. In fact, when I stopped the other day the garden itself wasn't open, but I decided to check out the sculptures outside of the gates anyway. It was a warm sunny day, and as I walked around the open grounds I kept thinking that I would see a rattle snake. The sculptures were worth the risk though, I'm glad I stopped.

Submerged

My first introduction to the concept of submerged towns happened while I was going to school in Redding, near Whiskeytown Lake. Though I'm not sure if this is true, I was told that there is a ghost town under the water at Whiskeytown Lake. The concept of a submerged town is eerie, but extremely alluring. Much in the same way that I am both intimidated by, and drawn to, a darkened archive or archeological sight I am drawn to the concept of an abandoned history. Both destroyed by and preserved by the water, I imagine foundations at the bottom of the lake, bridges no longer traveled, windows no longer looked through. I imagine the town in black and white, like a photograph from a time I can only imagine through archival images, as though the people of that period couldn't see in the visible spectrum we technicolor decedents now see in. I know it's a ridiculous idea, but that is the image I remember while swimming in that lake. My imagination went wild, what if my toe grazed a roof top while swimming across the surface? Like stepping on the splayed out rodents carcasses left out by my cat, would adrenaline rush through me at the recognition of the texture as I swam to shore to escape the ruin at my feet? Before returning to the spot to gaze at the discovery? This never happened. In all our lake visits I never once found anything but the all too familiar lake like things, but I am still fascinated with submerged towns. I am not a diver, so this fascination is lived through google searches and tales from other people. Here are some of the pictures I've found recently, so cool.

Solar Experiment

Solar is one of the few classes where being a tech is basically nap time; after setting out the solar powered toys, aligning the telescopes, and putting out the cookies to bake you get to kick back in your lawn chair and read. Every fifteen minutes or so you check the telescopes to make sure they're tracking and move the solar ovens so they stay in the sunlight, other than that it's the most relaxing "job" here. Well, one of our ovens was broken last month and getting enough cookies for a whole class has been a challenge, so last night I made my own oven out of a pizza box. I think I need to make a couple of adjustments, but overall it worked quite well.

Happy Mothers Day!

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

Joss Whedon, creator of so many wonderful shows, brings you Neal Patrick Harris as Dr.Horrible. This is a clip I found on youtube, but the whole first episode is on Hulu.

I See

This is already on a couple of my friends blogs, but I deem it worthy of being on mine too; bravo MOMA.

Cecil

Chalk it up to not being an Andy Warhol fanatic, but I never knew about the story of his taxidermied dog 'till today. Don't get me wrong, Warhol has his place in the history of art and I am well aware of his contributions to the art world, but this little tidbit about his life is kind of cool. Care of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, this quote is from the exhibit titled Canis Major: Warhol's Dogs and Cats (and other party animals.)

Warhol once wrote, “I never met a pet I didn’t like.” Indeed, the artist had many pets throughout his life, including his childhood dog Lucy, over a dozen Siamese cats, and his dachshunds Amos and Archie. His studio, the Silver Factory, had two resident cats, Black Lace and White Pussy, and he was fond of his friend Brigid Berlin’s pugs, Fame and Fortune.

The artist was also a collector of taxidermies, and owned a lion, a peacock, a penguin, and a moose head. The most famous animal in his collection, however, was the Great Dane, Cecil, who stood guard at the Factory’s door from about 1969 to 1987. Many superstar visitors posed with Cecil during visits to the factory, and he also appears in Warhol’s video Factory Diaries.

Recent scholarship by canine photographer and genealogist Kerrin Winter-Churchill has discovered the true identity of “Cecil,” his pedigree as a Westminster Champion, and the strange tale of how he arrived at Warhol’s door. The dog, whose real name was "Ador Tipp Topp" was born in Germany in 1921. As a puppy, he was purchased by an American, who entered him in many competitions, including Westminster where he won a blue ribbon. After his death in 1929, Ador was sent to a taxidermist who was building a collection of champion dog breeds at Yale’s Peabody Museum. By the 1960s the collection had been relocated to storage, and Ador’s remains were sold to a Yale drama student for ten dollars. The dog was eventually passed on to an antiques collector, who claimed he had belonged to filmmaker Cecil B. deMille. Warhol believed the story and purchased the dog in the late 1960s.

Seeing Beyond Sight

Tony Deifell is the author of Seeing Beyond Sight, and instigator of a project that I find particularly interesting. Tony had an idea for something he calls a "passion project", teaching photography to blind teenagers. He was unsure if this project would foster confidence in the students, or if this project would be a cruel experiment. What he found is that artistic expression is healing, even in those who can't fully see what they have created. All of the students have varying degrees of blindness, so the results vary based on that, but these photographs are intriguing and I encourage you to check it out.