I Wont Say A Word...

These are the song lyrics i cant get out of my head right now. The last few months, my poor iphone has been abused by me pressing the shit out of the "Next" button when listening to tunes. But alas, I have stumbled upon a band that is worthy of my ears, and boy am I glad. anyone who knows me knows i love music, but that love runs much deeper than i think anyone of you can imagine. Its one of those things that just cant be explained, a good song gives me goosebumps on the first listen and makes my insides uncontrollable.

I finally gave the band "Blessthefall" a chance after seeing them on magazines and in random places, and I am so glad i did cause ive been listening to two of their songs on repeat for the last 6hrs or so. They are youe typical cliche post-hardcore band with long hair that has clearly been flatironed and also holds an emo combover, they scream and thrash back and forth, toss their guitars around their necks and bang their heads. This is exactly what i needed.



Also, i need to get into a band asap. this is new york and i go to art school, you would think this wouldnt be so hard right? wrong. why? Cause this is new york and i go to art school. For one thing I had a convo with someone the other night about how most bands dont come out of new york, especially in this scene, its like its too big or something. Also the southern rock and post hardcore genre just doesnt have a home here and that works against me greatly. The other problem is that so many art kids at my school think they are too intellectual or at least try to be for hardcore rock , therefore screaming and thrashing around to rock music just isnt their scene. Theyd rather go chill with the Misshapes, dont get me wrong, i can roll with that crowd too, but i cant live with just that and i feel like thats all ive been getting. I know so many musicians but theyre all about Jazz and R&B, anything else is bullshit and not worth anyones time because to them it takes no talent. I cant say that in the last 4 yrs i have met ANYONE who likes any of my favorite bands or have even heard of them. Sigh, its ok though, it'll pan out eventually.

No new movies to add to my repertuar lately suprisingly enough. I plan to see "I am Legend" tomorrow and i also have Brian DePalma's "Sisters" on my desk along with "Neko Case Live in Austin Tx", which is funny considering my previous rock music rant. But Neko Case is amazing and should be checked out immediately. This wkd yet again has flown on by, I intended to work on a great deal of final papers today but that didnt happen due to the late night partying and champagne that did not end till 5 a.m. for me. This about sums it up:


I spent the day in bed. I will be kicking myself this wk im sure. This will be me by Tuesday night:

Screw Photography I'll Just Become a Movie Critic

Its finals time...that just dawned on me yesterday. And im not freaking out, i think as a senior, at this point it doesnt phase you anymore. Theyre all just assignments with deadlines like always. I dont have anything else to say today besides, theres alot of idots floating around today, but theyre all sleep deprived so i'll give them that.

Yesterday after missing 3 sold out shows, I finally saw "Juno". It was totally worth the gastly $11.75 and had me laughing and feeling sappy. Ellen Page was great as usual ( You should also Check her out in "Hard Candy") and I look forward to anything she does in the future.



In February she will be appearing in "An American Crime" based on the worst crime committed in Indiana state history back in the 60's against a girl named Sylvia Likens. that whole story is intense and unimaginable, basically a traveling circus family comes through town and their children are happy and making friends finally and cant bare to be uprooted again. So a nice lady in town with 6 children of her own offers her services af boarding the girls for a little while for $20 a wk till they get back. One check is late and all hell breaks loose in this quiet suburb, the woman snaps ties Sylvia up in the basement and begins to torture and allow the neighborhood children to also abuse Sylvia and eventually murder the girl. The critics have been mixed on this one, but the cast speaks for itself and the actors involved are not ones to just jump and do any picture that comes along. check out the trailer:


Im on movie overload, I have watched "Anatomy of Hell" which I do not recommend for the weak stomached or prude, ha.



"This Is England", which was great



and the classic exploitation film "Ilsa She Wolf of the SS" which was just completly out of control in a good way.

Theres alot to catch up on since I havent been posting as much or as often as i intended to. First, my "WTF?" pictures of the month, there alot of things in this world i just dont get yet I thouroughly enjoy them...






This girl and I are officially enemies because she is trying to bring those pants back and they bring up painful memories of my 3-4th grade years cause my mother forced me to wear them...I give her light props though for taking such risks


Is this REALLY necessary?


If it werent for the fact that it was raining i would still be standing on the street trying to figure this one out

Now that, that is out of the way, Ive been to alot of shows lately none of which ive been really into at all but i took the pictures so they should be posted. First up is artist Kristin Lucas's show at Postmasters titled "If Then Else End If"...tongue twister i know. weird show? i know. How did i write a 4pg paper about it? I dont know. The first room of the show has fake rocks with fake asteroids crashed everywhere and there are two wooden makeshift billboards with video projections. the projections are of Lucas in the desert talking to herself about running away and recovering from a fleshy infection that also acted as a reciever for Bingo call numbers...oh yes i said it.







Lucas also documented her name change from "Kristin Susan Lucas" to...."Kristin Susan Lucas"...yup. she did it as a "Refresh", which i kinda get but dont, i mean that shit cost money. take a nap and call it a day. but she had her friends do pieces to show how she was before and after the name change.





I had to go see a william dekooning show which was ok, although im still perplexed as to why my teacher thinks these two paintings are absolutley brilliant


Lets see...Halloween came and went, I atttempted to go to a party with some friends at some warehouse the weekend before, but it was too crowded and shut down by the fire marshall. it looked like this




nothing else too exciting these days, no real rants to go on either. I did see Saw IV twice and concluded that i didnt like it. Transformers made an amazing impression on me afer not intending to see it at all and Pierrepont: The Last HangMan gives interesting insight into what being a hangman was like in wartime Britain. I promise to return sooner rather than later

I Survived the Week

ive been procrastinating on blogging for some reason, but after having a rejuvenating Friday i am back.

Nothing to great it going on lately, im working on some ideas for shooting at the moment and im finally feeling compelled to shoot after much apathy. its great to have someone pushing you because they think your ideas a worth it and i have found this in one of my teachers. tomorrow i will be doing some engagement photos which will be interesting seeing as it is my first time doing so.

its wierd thinking about getting married right now, it truley can work for some, but just not most the people i know. I havent been to any galleries recently but i have seen quite a bit of movies. the other night i watched "Dressed to Kill" which i was a bit skeptical of at first, but i really liked it in the end.

A woman begins to doubt her attractivness and makes a pass at her phychiatrist only to be shut down. after a one night stand with a stranger she is murdered by an unknown woman. The only witness to the crime is a prostitute set on catching the murderous woman.


There are some interesting twists and turns along the way and if you havent seen it i think you shoul...come on...do it...youre not doing anything important right now.

I also finally watched "Suspiria" which is a classic horrror film, a bit campy for our time period now i think, but still good and worth watching for the sake of film. You have a girl who goes off to a dance school in europe when strange things start to happen all around her.



I also watched the romantic comedy "Puccini for Beginners" which was alright. I just got out of a movie and saw "For the Bible Tells Me so" about Gays and Lesbians in the context of the bible and where we stand basically. it was really interesting to say the least, i thought it was good, but it still leaves you with some questions, at least for me. it is full of interviews with families who are very religious Christians, but also have gay children and how they fell about it and what that journey has been like. They also include the story of the Bishop of the Episcopal Church who is as most know the first out gay Bishop. If you can see it where you live, you should. it gives some answers and asks some questions.



There has been much more happening lately which i will get to either later or tomorrow

Another Weekend Has Come And Gone

So its sunday night and the weekend is over. Friday was actually pretty good, I decided at the last minute to go to see my favorite drag king group Switch and Play which was awesome as usual.


(Photo By Me)

Performing with them was the lovely Cherry Bomb the "Bad Girl of Brooklyn Burlesque", check out her myspace page for upcoming performances and put on your helmets cause you dont wanna make a mess when she blows your mind...yeah i said it. www.myspace.com/cherrybombnyc

(Photo by Me)

Also at the show was the trans singer/composer Novice Theory who was absolutely amazing. I really recommend people check him out cause he's really great. Geo Wyeth's tunes are really mellow, but with his history with spoken word poetry he has also spawned some great hip hop as well. www.myspace.com/novicetheory

(Photo By Me)

I almost didnt make it out there but im glad i dragged myself out of bed to make it, got to meet and hang out with alot of good people. I spent my saturday night working at chocolate bar which made for a long evening. Since my last post I finally got to hang out with one of my best friends on this planet and i got to meet her new dog Ruby

When chels and i get together, im really suprise that the world doesnt explode or something, our minds most likely shouldnt be in the same room together. seriously, just hang out with us together and you'll understand.

Moving on to the "What Really Grinds My Gears" portion of this entry, im sitting here and this Downy commercial i hate just came on. I dont know why, but it kinda pisses me off. So you have this "Destiny's Child/Beyonce" like R&B song playing and as the camera pans out theres a black baby sleeping on the stomach of his dad or something, and honestly, why does an R&B or hip hop song have to be playing just cause the commercial has a black family? You know they totally did it on purpose to like reach more of the demographic or something. But i do think its kinda lame, its not gonna make me or any other black people i know wanna by Downy more. I just think its kinda lame, not all black people connect with or even listen to hip hop or r&b. I for one listen to hardcore rock music, most see me as the exception to the rule but coming from a person who was labled the "whitest black kid" while i was growing up...there shouldnt even be a rule. Its not fair to lump people in a category.

Not too long ago i was talking about this to a friend of mine who's a writer. We were talking about this stupid commercial where this black woman was jogging with an iPod and they were playing Mary J Blaige and this girl is getting looks from passerbys like "Shes got it goin on". I thought it was stupid and he explained that its supposed to be empowering which i get but its still lame. I think its just me, who knows.


On that note, I have realized lately how much I love Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph Im glad after this week she decided to stay on the show for this season at least. I leave you with one of my favorite sketches of hers:
Diana Ross In Jail

Is This Part of the Piece?

Im stuck at work in the photography building until midnight which makes for a very long day that started at 8 a.m.. The first few hours of my morning were spent fighting my eyelids in "Art and Popular culture", we watched a documentary about Claus Oldenburg which was great, but i was just super tired. For those of you who arent familiar with his work here are a couple of his famous pieces:
He basically does these gigantic sculptures in public spaces and in museums at times. They are pretty awesome if i do say so.

After class I headed to Chelsea to meet with my other class to check out some shows and they were definitely interesting to say the least. At the Elizabeth Dee Gallery the exhibition was "Ryan Trecartin's, I-Be Area".....and in my opinion "It-Be Insane in a not good way". So i really dont even know where to start, you walk into this room and its just full of "stuff" with broken objects and paint splattered all over everything. Im all for crazy art, but i just couldnt get into it:

The title for this one was pretty great though; "My Dads Dont Believe in Door knobs...My Birth Mother". Classic, seriously. There was a video involved in another room and i guess these pieces were supposed to represent the settings in the video. here is a still:

That kid is gonna have issues forever. This character was kinda scary, and dont expect me to explain the film cause i couldnt if i tried man. The best part of the whole exhibit was when my classmate and i stumbled across this thing on the floor and he asked me "Is this part of the piece?" and to be honest we still dont know:

And on that note onward and upward to PaceWildstein Gallery. Exhibition: Keith Tyson's Large Field Array. This was by far my favorite and i thought it was awesome. The exhibit was named after a field of radio telescopes in New Mexico that focuses on one spot from different view points in order to give us a better view of our universe. we werent allowed to take pictures but here are some from the website:

You basically have this room full of cubes in a way, each one of these objects i believe represents a part of our reality. I like singular objects so this show was really great i thought.

Im gonna skip a couple of galleries cause they just werent my thing, lastly we had Andrew Kreps Gallery, exhibition by Jamie Isenstein "Acephal Majical". The show was pretty minimal as far as physical pieces go, but I liked it. The whole thing was based on a magic show, so there was one of those boxes where the magician cuts the assistants head off:

The cool thing about this was that i guess for a couple of weeks the artist would come in and lay down in the box with her feet sticking out for about 6 hrs. Alot of her pieces involve her interaction, such as this one where she holds her arm out with a light bulb in her hand for hours at a time:

There was also this tv looping a video of someones hands, they were still and every few minutes would clap, the audio from the clap would set off a "Clap on" light receiver that would turn on this lamp:
Lastly she had these two videos that were playing next to each other, one was a fan blowing back and forth across these different sized glass bottles so that they would create sound like when you blow into and empty bottle

The other video was of a seemingly headless musician playing a saw, the music being created via the saw and bottles was actually quite nice and soothing, the artist had worked with a composer to score the piece.

Aside from the fact that it was stupidly hot out today, the galleries were good and so was our teacher as usual, she really is great and knows her shit. I dont think anything exciting is going on today or tomorrow that are planned anyway, but the city always brings you something random. There is a burlesque/drag king show goin on friday which i plan on going to and with the pple that are performing, the shows are always good.

Ahmadeniejad's Lame, She's No Role Model and 70's Japanese Sex In Public Parks Isnt as Interesting as One Would Think

This week has been fairly uneventful thus far, unless you want to include Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadeniejad being here in Manhattan.

-(photo taken by me)

He wasnt close to anywhere Ive been today, but If he gets his way, he will be at ground zero which is only a few blocks away from my building. Im not really sure how I feel about him being here, It makes total sense that he is here for the sake of the U.N. but to be speaking at Columbia University?...I dont know about all that. The guy is basically preaching in a dictator-esque fashion not to mention going off about "Zionist" occupation. And once you start talking about "Zionist" occupation when you hold a high position of power, most people get turned off by you right away. The guy is a little creepy I guess and not so hot of a dresser, I mean he could get a blazer that fits that is not an earthtone. Im totally waiting for him to bust out a members only jacket, which can be ok if youre a hipster, but not if youre the president of a country.

Im sitting here watching CNN's Showbiz tonight and they are going to be interviewing Hayden Panettiere on how she will never be like Britney Spears (you know, the drunken mental breakdown part) and applauding her by saying how great of a role model she is, they think she should offer advice to Spears and Lohan and even go as far as to call her a mascot for good girls of hollywood ...and I my friend beg to differ.

Everyone puts the NBC "Heroes" star out there like shes your average clean cut girl....psshhh, please. I know from a first hand encounter with our Miss.Panettiere that she is anything but. This past year my roommates and i were invited to a movie premiere party and Panettiere happened to be there as well with a mutual friend. She came to drag that friend off and was shouting in slurred words about how much of a party pooper he was. We all looked at each other and as we watched her dance alone, realized how waisted she was...did I mention she's 17? Sounds like she has a little more in common with Spears and Lohan than she would like to think or admit. Later on she was spotted outside drunkingly petting and cooing to the police horses. we were all a little bothered by the whole thing because all of the NYC clubs have made a seious supposed "crackdown" after a girl being murdered in the meat packing district last summer (where most clubs are located) yet a girl is let into a club underage (have to be 21 to get in) and let her get plastered at 17. If the NYPD are supposed to be cracking down in order to "protect us" (keeping underage people from drinking so they dont get themselves in danger), then they should be protecting them all. I know it makes me terrible, but im honestly waiting for her to get thrown under the bus by her friends with some secret scandelous pictures. I think shes full of crap.

Last week my Practicing Criticism class took a trip to the MOMA to see some sculptures by Richard Serra. This is Lucy and she is one of the funniest and most cynical people i have ever met, her facial expression basically sums up how i felt about the show.

It was ok, im not that into minimalist sculpture or painting for that matter. but it was really cool being able to walk inside of these giant metal figures, i mean theyre huge.

Wed. we will be going to some galleries in chelsea, not sure what we're seeing but i hope its good, the last few shows ive seen havent been as awesome as I wanted them to be; and i really would have thought that the photos by Kohei Yoshiyuki of people having sex in public parks during the 70's would have been realllly awesome. I guess I was going in there expecting super provocative and explicit pictures...think still porn images. But I have to say that it was interesting that in most of the photographs there are tons of people watching the act go down, which i found intriguing.

But like i said, hope its good. I will leave you with this...awesome guy i was sitting next to while waiting for the train the other night. can you say "Coming to America"?