[hypergraphia]

finally!

photo blog of Charm City:

starting off with a gorgeous pic of my apartment. yes, this is where i live and i love it. small and cosy, super dusty but with three big bay windows and high ceilings. and my own bathroom (MY OWN BATHROOM I LOVE IT), albeit no kitchen. i love looking at the tree outside my window, it’s slowly turning brown now that fall’s here. i have a basil plant that is dying on me (i can’t nurture anything for the life of me, hence i do not have a pet) and a ‘rose of jericho’ - a desert plant that ‘opens up’ when watered, though no flowers bloom. oh, that book is the ‘collected writings of robert smithson’. note, ‘collected’, not ’selected’. as much respect i have for his artwork and thoughts, that guy must have been stoned for most of his very short life.

just to emphasize how baltimore can be pretty too, here’s the view from my window. that domed thing in the distance is a church. i am living in the ‘mount vernon cultural district’: theaters, concert halls, galleries, museums, indie cinema, bike co-op (filled with too-hipster-bike-hipsters), anarchist cafe, thrift stores. how’s that for accumulating cultural capital? beats cliche greenwich, eh?

perfect time for farmer’s market! so many queer-looking tomatoes. where i am going to get my fresh produce when winter rolls around?

first awesome speaker in the line of awesome speakers at MICA (that’s where i’m studying by the way): ANGELA DAVIS! AMY GOODMAN! DEMOCRACY NOW! by the way, amy goodman blew. my. mind. so powerful. so eloquent. so inspiring. everyone needs to hear her speak at least once in a lifetime

(then we had Annie Sprinkle. oh and guess who’s coming next? DJ SPOOKY aahhhh! so nice to be a student again)

what we do at art school: throw parties in our studios! nothing beats getting drunk on a dancefloor next to bansaws and tablesaws. here’s the balloon room

art student solution to stolen bike seat: build your own! and what’s even better, leave the pencil marks on the plywood for all to see! this is potentially a cool performance piece. how much do i love perpetuating the art student stereotype? sooo much.

lantini party! helping out with nana projects right now, and as a fundraiser for the annual great halloween lantern parade, we hold adult-oriented lantern building workshops + martinis! lantinis! i’m planning to learn how to stilt walk at the parade school -

quintessential american disclaimer, right there on my “small” styrofoam cup of watered-down nestea (to wash down my $1 hot dog at the Sam’s Club in-store fastfood stand. ugh). strip mall after strip mall. reminds me of time in canada, i haven’t been to a strip mall since i moved back to hong kong, not even in philly. and now im cruising the highway with my mates in a pickup truck, jumping from costco to home depot practically every other day! YES AMERICA

speaking of philly, i was there a couple weekends ago and loved it. it was wet, it was cold, it was fantastic. here’s a melancholy pic of a long stretch of highway from the bus

…

cause in my head there’s a greyhound station/
where I send my thoughts to far off destinations/
so they may have a chance of finding a place/
where they’re far more suited than here/

-Death Cab for Cutie, Soul Meets Body

what is this?

so i was wandering around the salvation army in kowloon tong the other day, when i came across at least a dozen packs of the above. it was the mini barbara kruger that caught my eye.

on closer inspection, all the little weird pieces in the pack are miniature art pieces by well-known contemporary artists, scaled 1:12. along with Kruger, there’s Sarah Charlesworth Red Mask, Alan McCollum 5 Perfect Vehicles, Lisa Yuskavage Blonde Brunette and Redhead, Alexander Ross Untitled, John Newman Bubbles Burst (the weird blue thing that dominates the entire pack).

aside from boxes of this ‘art collection #2′, i found boxes and boxes of figurines, toiletries, teacups and mini furniture designed by established architects and artists, all part of The Kaleidoscope House. weird. the only thing that i couldn’t find was ‘art collection #1′. and everything was copyrighted under Bozart Toys and Laurie Simmons. another artist? that was enough to make me want to buy an iphone just so i could google this thing right away.

upon returning to my cubicle at work, this is what i found:
The Kaleidescope house is an interactive creative play environment for 6-year olds, conceived and designed by Simmons and Peter Wheelwright. Here’s an NYTimes article regarding the project. Simmons also has a blurb about it on her site. Bozart itself seems to be missing a website, despite all the hubbub surrounding their artist-type toys.

since everything at the salvation army was donated, i figured a toy manufacturer gave away all of these. selling price, HK$25. take note of the original selling price here, and the ebay prices here.

seems like an investment opportunity (and not really)! i’m a little disappointed by the quality of the toys… they look sort of rough and unpolished. so random to come across this in the least likely of places.

the Hong Kong government has just announced their selections for six ‘revitalization projects’. under the first phase of this scheme, six historical buildings in HK will each be managed by NGOs who submitted proposals for building conservation and creative projects earlier.

read press release here.

the selections have been controversial, especially for the North Kowloon Magistracy in Sham Shui Po. Savannah College of Art and Design, from Georgia, USA, was selected, raising concerns as to why this foreign, private art school was chosen.

so what was the government thinking? why put in a foreign art school in direct competition with the local art schools (Hong Kong Art School, City University’s SCM, Polytechnic School of Design, IVE, BU’s Academy of Visual Arts…)? i understand that competition can be a healthy thing, and that exposure to international concepts can spur creativitiy, but not when local artistic initiatives are already not getting enough support. i don’t think i’m being territorial; i just think it doesn’t make sense. if we wanted a healthy art education system, more should be done to nurture existing projects. why suddenly claim that an additional school would encourage creativity? really, it’s all for show, as if the government ‘really’ cared. and it’s not even like we don’t have the resources for the arts; it’s just that the resources are not allocated adequately or sufficiently towards art and design education.

second. why Savannah College of Art and Design? (check out SCAD’s HK website here, it’s already up and running) in all honesty, with my many many (too many) hours spent looking at fine arts graduate programs in the US, never once had i even considered SCAD. i find rankings suspicious in general, but let me just put it this way; a ranking is still a ranking, and no matter how inaccurate they are, they are endorsed by society because they have an aura of legitimacy. with that said, nowhere on the top 50 fine arts schools list in US News can we find SCAD. call me superficial, but this is what people refer to when judging one school from the next. moreover, how are they able to come up with so many professional degree programs in such a short period of time (two years?) BA, BFA, MA, MFA… digital art, studio art, art history… woah.

and why, why give a wealthy private institution the valuable resource of LAND? there are plenty NGOs to choose from who don’t have enough space or land that could benefit from the scheme. is it perhaps because SCAD has already claimed that the government will not need to subsidies any of the renovations, and that it is self-sufficient (meaning each student who enrolls pays HK$24,000 in school fees)?

on the more embarrassing side, Jacky Chan was given an honorary professorship from SCAD (click on his mug on SCAD’s HK website… it is so scary. so so scary.). dude. c’mon. who in his right mind would give an honorary professorship to JACKY CHAN of all people? and can SCAD’s promotional videos not be so stereotypically “chinese”? what sort of design school is this, promoting such ‘exotic’ cliches? With a high faculty rate turnover in their US campus, i wonder if they are really as reputable as they claim themselves to be.

all in all, the more i think about this, the more heated i get. i don’t know what the HK government is thinking, or perhaps they’re just not thinking at all. the worst part is that there has been no transparency in the scheme; no one within the cultural sector knew about the procedure or the guidelines for the selections, some were even surprised to find out that such a scheme existed. you would think that after all that trouble they got into from the West Kowloon Cultural District project that they would learn from their past mistakes…

“Then I saw Grace Mugabe coming at me. She launched herself at me, tried to grab my camera and then directed punches at my face. She hit me at least 10 times in the face and head.

“She was wearing a diamond-encrusted ring that cut into me when she hit me. She was screaming and shouting, and her bodyguard was, too. I was holding on to the camera so I couldn’t defend myself.

Mrs Mugabe was in Hong Kong as part of an Asian holiday that began in early January in the Malaysian resort island of Langkawi and then continued to Singapore, where she was joined by husband, The Sunday Times reported.

The president’s wife, whose country is heavily dependent on food aid, flew to Hong Kong without her husband on January 9 and stayed with her entourage in a suite costing about HK$6,850 a night, the newspaper said.

-scmp.com (thanks I for the heads up)

–
if i had known i would have stalked her and slapped her in the face. wtf are they doing to their country?!

How Israel Brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe

Mr. Levi-Strauss took difference as the basis for his study, not the search for commonality, which defined 19th-century anthropology. In other words, he took cultures on their own terms rather than try to relate everything to the West.

In 1996, when asked his opinion of the project [Musée du Quai Branly], Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in a handwritten letter to Mr. Chirac: “It takes into account the evolution of the world since the Musée de l’Homme was created. An ethnographic museum can no longer, as at that time, offer an authentic vision of life in these societies so different from ours. With perhaps a few exceptions that will not last, these societies are progressively integrated into world politics and economy. When I see the objects that I collected in the field between 1935 and 1938 again — and it’s also true of others — I know that their relevance has become either documentary or, mostly, aesthetic.”

read full article here

5 November 2008

Senator Barack Obama,

Chicago

Dear Senator Obama,

We join people in your country and around the world in congratulating you on becoming the President-Elect of the United States. Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.

We note and applaud your commitment to supporting the cause of peace and security around the world. We trust that you will also make it the mission of your Presidency to combat the scourge of poverty and disease everywhere.

We wish you strength and fortitude in the challenging days and years that lie ahead. We are sure you will ultimately achieve your dream making the United States of America a full partner in a community of nations committed to peace and prosperity for all.

Sincerely,

N R Mandela

- NYTimes.com

thanks E for the forward!

Uncritical Exuberance?

On 24 September, John McCain suspended his campaign and went to Washington, proclaiming that it was time to put aside party differences. Was this gesture really a sign of his readiness to end partisan politics in order to deal with the real problems that concern us all? Definitely not: it was a ‘Mr McCain goes to Washington’ moment. Politics is precisely the struggle to define the ‘neutral’ terrain, which is why McCain’s proposal to reach across party lines was pure political posturing, a partisan politics in the guise of non-partisanship, a desperate attempt to impose his position as universal-apolitical. What is even worse than ‘partisan politics’ is a partisan politics that tries to mask itself as non-partisan: by imposing itself as the voice of the Whole, such a politics reduces its opponents by making them agents of particular interests.

- LRB - Slavoj Zizek: Don’t Just Do Something, Talk