Aku Aku

death march for art

Back when I lived in North Carolina every weekend was about the same; I and my group of friends would go out drinking and probably see a band play. We did that a lot. We were good at it. Chapel Hill N.C. has one of the best music scenes in the country.

I rarely catch a live show here in the Bay area, and I don't drink much anymore, but every weekend is unpredictable and usually quite interesting.

But for some reason, come Monday I always have a hard time remembering what I did. I should probably blame this on all the drinking I did when in college and when I worked for ibm. Luckily I have this blog, so now I recall what I did on Friday. And I have my palm pilot which just reminded me what I did on Saturday.

Saturday afternoon I dressed up all in black and went to a funeral procession that started in Union Square and marched to City Hall. We were protesting and lamenting the death of the art scene in San Francisco. It is a huge and escalating problem here. Basically the dotcom economic boom is displacing the lower income people of the city through rising rents, and gentrification. naturally most of the artists in this city are affected by this turn of events.

As you would imagine, it was not as drab as ordinary funeral. Modern interpretive dancers were doing their take on the situation the length of the march. The costumes were little more expressive than ordinary also. For instance I was wearing a set of black feathered wings that I bought on Haight Street a few weeks ago.

Taking the BART back home I ran into my friend Sean who just returned from Thailand. He was on his way to my house to pick up his car which he had left there for the month and a half he was gone. the car had been rammed by a neighbor two days after he left but that's the story for another time. Sean told me that they had really cleaned up Bangkok in the last few years and it is no longer the sex capital of the world. I find it a little disconcerting that I no longer know where that is.

That night I was planning to go to a Ralph Nader political rally in Oakland, but I was a little puckered out from all the marching so I took a nap instead. I am glad I didn't try to go because I didn't have a ticket yet and I found out that the event sold out and people were turned away at the door.

Instead I stayed home and did some work on my ViaVoice dictation set up (I dictate all of these entries, I have a repetitive stress injury from a decade and a half of computer geeking). I run Linux at home and of course while IBM released their software for Linux they released it in an unfinished state and we coders actually have to make it usable. Wow, for some reason that last sentence was a bitch to dictate. Maybe the software was taking offense.

Anyhow, I ended up staying awake until 3 a.m. sewing together these two, I don't know what to call them, furry leg things. I bought a swath of fake fur from a piece goods store. Good quality stuff, 35 dollars a yard. I cut out two rectangles and sewed them together into cylinders about one foot tall, then I called my ex-girlfriend sometime after midnight so she could explain to me how to sew elastic into the top end. It worked out rather well, what I do is pull them over my lower pants legs and then slip my riding boots under the pants legs. Voila, ersatz fur boots!

Note: this post was originally on blogger.com

aisha eye surgery video

Tonight I brought this video of my laser eye surgery to an open screening at the Artists Television Access on Valencia. This is a video which was recorded by the equipment the doctor used to perform the surgery. It's basically just my eye being held open by these Clockwork Orange gizmos while my cornea is being sliced and burned and poked. The doctors equipment did not record audio so I dubbed in a track from a Death in Vegas album. The song actually goes well with the video because the vocals are Iggy Pop talking bizarre from the point of perspective of a psychotic murderer.
A lot of sensitive people had to get up to leave during the video. Personally I don't think it's that gruesome, I just think it's funny. Some guy borrowed the video to play at a block party on Sunday. I would go to that but it's at the same time as the Burning Man Decompression party.

After the video and film screening there was an event at the CELLspace on bryant in the mission. The title of the event was State of Art and Technology in San Francisco. There were various performances almost all of which were technology driven. A lot of the stuff was related to Burning Man and dealt with robotics and fire, two great things that taste great together, but the thing that I found most interesting was a theatrical troupe that create performances based on environment and audio which are not only interactive for the audience but actually use the audience as the main conduit for the art performance. I'll have to go into this in more detail, remind me some time. The name of the troupe is Antenna Theater.

Kal from the seemen robotics group was there. I always enjoy his projects but he doesn't run me quite right. I don't really know him, so maybe he's not always drunk and obnoxious, but then again he probably is.

Note: this post was originally on blogger.com

Live Nude Girls; Unite!

So, a couple of days ago I saw this movie at the UC Theater in Berkeley. It was called Live Nude Girls Unite and was about the strippers at the Lusty Lady in San Francisco. In fact the documentary was filmed by a couple of the dancers. The movie chronicles the ladies attempts to unionize. It is a decent film for an amateur cinematographer.

Tonight I was driving through North Beach and decided to stop and check out the Lusty Lady in person. Let me tell you about it: you walk in and are confronted by a ridiculous number of doors. Behind some of the doors are little closet like rooms with a bench and a coin operated television. Behind the other doors are the peep show booths.

The peep show booths also have a coin drop box. You insert a quarter and a partition ascends revealing a window which looks into a room with mirrors on the walls, a couple of poles, and a red carpet. There were four ladies in the room when I dropped in my quarter. They looked bored; not very lusty at all! A red light permeated throughout the room. My quarter lasted about 10 seconds.

I wanted to give the girls... I'm sorry, the ladies, the secret "go union!" sign but there probably isn't one and if there is I don't know it. Instead I took a look at the video booths. The televisions in the rooms display a computerized menu until you drop in some quarters. The menu lists the titles of the video pornography available. The titles are in this crappy white font on a blue background. It reminds me of my old commodore 64 screens back in the early 80's. When I dropped in my quarters and skipped through the channels I noticed that the menus were burned permanently into the screen. The whole thing was pretty fucking sad. All of the booths (video and peep) smelled of funk and semen.

I walked over to Cafe Prague and had a bowl of vegetable salmon chowder soup to take my mind off of that smell. I guess it worked, on the way home all I could think about was the porn burned screens.

Note: this post was originally on blogger.com