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"?