BoomCrash!

During my recent visit to Brooklyn, NY, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the public art/activism project called BoomCrash. The project exists on two fronts: politically-inspired guerilla-style art erected in strategic locations in and around the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, and a blog-style website documenting these and similar public expressions created by like-minded artists and activists working in the same area.



To see these projects and read a bit about the inspiration for BoomCrash, you should really visit the website: boomcrash.org. But in the meantime, I've taken the liberty of snaking a few lines from the "about" section to give a little window into what the artists behind BoomCrash are responding to:

"What happened here is the same thing that happened all over the country: a real estate bubble—the Boom—was manipulated into being by well-financed, well-rewarded Wall Street financiers, who used Main Street as a slot machine in their casino economy, hitting it big year after year, project after project, loan after loan, bonus after bonus, as fast as they could until CRASH!

"The aftermath is a scarred and soulless cityscape, a forest of vacant luxury glass tower condominiums, a working middle-class squeezed out of neighborhoods that have been shredded by greedy developers. In New York City there were more construction-related deaths in 2008—the last year of the Boom, when the money men and their crooked construction companies knew the end was coming and cut all the corners they could—than any year in the last 20 years.

"The BoomCrash made victims of the many for the benefit of the few. And we can see the evidence, in the street, right there in front of our eyes, every day."

So, if you live in or visit Williamsburg, check out BoomCrash's work for yourself and maybe even make your own artistic contributions to the 'hood. (Then send your pics in to be published on the website, of course!) Or you can sit around and wait for your neighborhood to be overtaken by over-priced, shoddily-constructed, glass and plaster eyesores. Oh, and look out for falling cranes!

And finally, I'll end with this little wheat-pasted gem I happened across. I'm pretty sure it doesn't belong to BoomCrash, but I just couldn't help myself...

Brooklyn Utopias?

(image: detail from "Civil Rides, Brooklyn" 2009, adhesive tape on recycled cardboard)

So in case you still haven't heard by now, my work will be included in a group exhibition entitled: BROOKLYN UTOPIAS? (Artists consider differing visions of an ideal Brooklyn).

The opening reception is tonight, Thursday October 1st from 5:30–7:30pm at the Brooklyn Historical Society (128 Pierrepont St. Brooklyn, NY 11201, 1st Floor)

The exhibition runs through January 3rd, 2010 and is open Wednesday-Friday, Sunday, 12-5pm; Saturday, 10am-5pm.

For more info on the show and related programs check out www.brooklynutopias.com.

Hope to see you at the opening if you're in the area!


(P.S. Here's an article about the show from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.)



(image: "Civil Rides, Brooklyn" 2009, adhesive tape on recycled cardboard)

Farewell, Specialist Clavel!

Just a quick post to wish my cousin Rodney well. He ships off Thursday to an undisclosed location in Afghanistan for his (first) 400-day deployment with the United States Army.

Best of Luck to you, Rodney. We'll miss you and look forward to your safe return!

(Above: Card that Irene and I made for Rodney by cutting to shreds about four different Los Angeles magazines. I recommend clicking it to see the hilarious details in the larger image. Below: Pic of me, Irene and Rodney photoshopped to resemble a Polaroid. Original, I know.)

Studio Update: The Milkman Cometh

Hello Ripcetera reader (or maybe there's two of you.) I just wanted to put up a few images of a new tape piece I recently completed. I did not do a time-lapse for this one, but I did take a few progress shots along the way so you can still get an idea of the image coming together. The piece is 50in. x 54in. tape on recycled cardboard and is a portrait of my dad. It's entitled "My Father was the Milkman."



The finished work:



And a detail shot for you detail-oriented types:



And since I have your attention I thought I'd throw in a few tidbits from my sketchbooks.





HA! I just realized that the way I arranged those sketches makes it look like the guy in the red shirt is about to give that dog a very intrusive examination. That was an accident... I swear.

Anyway. So now I'm working on a piece for a show in Brooklyn opening in October. More on that to follow, but for now I'll cap off this very image-heavy post with a few shots of my studio in "factory mode." Now back to work...

CicLAvia (and my pie-in-the-sky-bike-path idea)

Imagine a major LA auto-thoroughfare closed to all traffic but bikes and pedestrians. A pipe dream you say? Well that's exactly what one group of ambitious artists, cyclists and activists are attempting to do for one day a week in the form of a ciclovia. This group calls their project cicLAvia and explains on their website where the idea came from:

"The ciclovía started in Bogotá, Colombia thirty years ago as a response to the congestion and pollution of city streets. Now it is happening all over Latin America and the United States, giving people a break from the stress of car traffic. The health benefits are immense, bringing families out to enjoy their streets in a new way, getting them to walk and bike together."

Last Saturday, the good folks of cicLAvia held an info session and workshop at g727 (which in my unbiased opinion, is the best little art gallery in all of Downtown LA). It also happens to be on the ground floor of my former loft building and two blocks from my current one. So with g727's track record for awesome community-based events and projects, its close proximity to my home and my mild and understated interest in all things "bicycle" I figured I'd check it out.



After a power-pointy presentation about the proposed cicLAvia, the participants were invited to dive into tubs filled with small blocks, toys and assorted bric-a-brac in an effort to create 3-D representations of our ideal urban bike plans. My highly-feasible bike plan consisted of an intricate network of bridges, tunnels and overpasses reserved for the sole use of cyclists. This system of elevated roads would separate the city's bicycle traffic from that of cars and pedestrians by elevating them (literally as well as figuratively , of course) high above the grimy, hazard-ridden and auto-clogged streets below.



I know you're all probably thinking: "Mike, you're a tool." But before you jump to the conclusion that my highfalutin bike path concept was a slap in the face of the real intention of this exercise—one that would act as a medium to elicit REALISTIC suggestions for our fair city to increase the use of bicycles and alternative transport—you might want to read on, Macduff.

In 1890, the California Cycleway—a nine-mile, elevated, wooden bike path—was opened to the public allowing cyclists to pedal unimpeded from Downtown LA to Pasadena and back... for 15 cents! And in June 2009, the High Line (an abandoned elevated train track in Manhattan) was re-opened to the public as a 1.45-mile-long elevated park/pathway.



Although the High Line is currently closed to all but pedestrian traffic (no dogs, either!) I think its design and construction is indicative of a trend that is headed toward the creation of public elevated bike-ways meant to increase bike use and relieve car traffic in urban areas. Still don't believe me, huh? Well check out these other proposed, sky-bound, urban bike lanes in Chicago, New York and Toronto. Also, Bicycle Transportation Systems, a Colorado-based company, is working on an elevated bike transit system of enclosed glass "tubes" complete with artificial tail wind!

So with any luck, sometime in the near future we'll be meeting up for a ride high in the air above the streets of Los Angeles (and I don't mean on hover-bikes... or LSD.)



P.S. Thanks again to the ciLAvia folks for an inspiring, thought-provoking workshop and presentation and for letting my camera-forgetting-*ss use your pics in this post!

My Filipino Mom

Although my mother is a brilliant nurse and businesswoman who spends most of her life conversing in a language other than her native tongue, some of the expressions that come out of her mouth—especially when she's excited/angry—are no less than comedic gold. Since I often work in close proximity with her, I get a steady earful of these gems and a while back began to record them on slips of paper as she said them. The main reasons for this documentation was to 1. prove to her what crazy things she's said—she'd otherwise deny ever having misspoke—and 2. to crack up my dad who turns red and tears up laughing every time he reads the list of my mom's filipino-fied expressions.

During my mother's last birthday party with extended family, she brought up the list and said I could share it with the aunts, uncle's and cousins. It was such a big hit that I came up with the idea for the Twitter page, thinking other people might get a kick out of my mom's creative take on the English language.

So, about a month and a few dozen tweets later, myfilipinomom happens to get tagged on some people's Twitter pages and suggested by others for their #FollowFriday and BAM! overnight I get like 200 people signing up to follow my mom's quirky little tweets. I know what you're thinking: "Mike, people have like a million followers on Twitter!" Well, I KNOW THAT, but this is MY MOM's Twitter page we're talking about here, not Ashton Kutcher's. Not to mention I made little to no effort to advertise about it and now it's cracking up hundreds of strangers.



I'd almost be proud of this accomplishment if I had any thing to do with it, but I really can't take any credit. I'm just the messenger. Its actually kinda depressing when I think about it: This is the most popular thing I've ever done online and all I'm really doing is taking dictation and hitting "update." But self-deprecating introspection aside, if you want to jump on the myfilipinomom bandwagon, feel free. In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite tweets as a teaser of what's in store:

“Politic is stupid, but we can’t live without it. It’s like salt.”

“It’s like Maya Angelou said: ‘Getting old is no fun, but it’s okay.’”

“You know, you can only help a horse. I mean, you can put a horse in water, but you can’t feed them.”

(after slamming down the phone receiver) “Jesus Christ—for crapping out loud!”

On a related note, I recently found this series of youtube videos by a woman who does spot on hilarious impersonations of her Filipino family. (Warning: this may only be funny to you if you're Filipino or happen to be related to a Filipino.)



And to keep the Filipino family theme going, these two brothers crack me up as well. (Check out the Filipino mom in the background, classic!) Ahh, the talent generated from that small cluster of Pacific islands is mind-blowing. MABUHAY!

New (old) Bike: the before pictures

What did you do this weekend? Really? No way! Awesome! You did? Na-ah! Serious? Shut up!

No REALLY, shut up!

I only asked, 'cuz I wanted to tell you that I bought a new bike! And by "new" I mean an old rusty, nearly un-rideable, hunk of metal tubes with crusty out-dated components, that I can't wait to tear apart completely.

And I couldn't be happier.

For you vintage-file roadies out there, you'll be happy to know that I was able to snag a lightweight, Italian-made, steel Bianchi road bike dating back to roughly 1982. And although it is a Frankenstein of some original Campy, Suntour and after-market Shimano parts, the frame (save for its peeling stickers and copious, but seemingly external rust spots) is for the most part intact and is currently painted a gorgeous Bianchi Celeste.



Update (5/13):

So this entry is really a few weeks old and I just never got around to posting it. Actually, because of this bike, I haven't really done much else but work on it. In addition to dismantling the bike and cleaning years of grime and grease off of all the parts, I've worked on about 12 different designs for building it up, ordered a bunch of new components (which I'll list for you at a later time...I know, bated breath...) had the frame powder-coated and I've even designed all the new decals by hand, er... computer. And in my spare time I've mostly been online reading about taking bikes apart and building them up again, looking at pictures of other people's bikes and on the rare occasion, even riding one of my other bikes (but still thinking about this one.)

On Monday I picked up the finished frame, and should get all the rest of the pieces in his week. Now all I need to do is make my way back to the Bike Oven to stick everything together since the extent of my bike tools include a hex wrench, screwdriver and ball peen hammer.

Of course, as soon as its done I'll have pictures up, but in the meantime, check out the final design of the refurbished "new-to-me" Bianchi Rippstar. And once this guy is a reality, I promise to get back to some art posts of stuff I've been working on. For a teaser, think cardboard boxes...