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These are the lights that form the large rubiks cube art installation that some friends have been working on. I am a member of this art project, but remain largely devoted to other things and am concentrating on this project where i can actually add the most value (like, helping out with ordering safety gear and stopping by the work site in my spare time or when my task is 'thinking about stuff')

It's been an interesting project. Very different than the last large-scale art project I was part of. More organization, less running around and paranoia. Lots of fun, basically, and I've met a bunch of neat people while doing it.

This picture is the cube electronics stretched out on the floor of a friend's house. There is a *lot* of electrical wiring there and even more impressive is the huge amounts of work that people are doing.

this is a photograph from rimrunner's wedding last year.

Yesterday, I went to a public art performance in Seattle's Camp Long as part of my quest to enjoy as much public art as I could this summer. It's funny when at the entrance to the art show they have wine and bug spray because you might want some of either.

The general genre of the performance art were:
- unfolding
- dance
- pitchshifted

The overall piece was a metaphor for the water supply of seattle and its gradual improvement over time. All pieces in the series are a metaphor for that, as it's funded by our public utility agency.

There were several sorts of pitchshifted and slightly circuitbent devices used as accompaniment to the dance, and the dance was one of those where the artist starts wrapped in something and the whole dance is spent with the artist working her way free of it. That's a relatively common visual metaphor for overcoming or struggling towards freedom in performance art.

In general, this piece wouldn't have worked well on a stage but in the setting of camp long's forest canopy by a pond and alongside a stream it worked really well. The webby stuff in the trees is still there and will be for a couple of weeks. It's crocheted and was put together at a series public workshops that friends of mine went to. So far as I can tell, it's about 100 yards long.

This was a pretty great piece. Although a lot of the elements of the actual performance were very much standard (the unwinding) or in line with current fad (the circuitbending), it was a great time. It would have been a sublime transporting experience if not for the kids in the audience, who changed the experience into something more dynamic by acting as a sort of antiphon to the droning music.

Also, some ducks came by to investigate and were quacking at the audience. That was also great.

I went to the Jason Webley show last night with rimrunner, loopback, and 11^3 other people. It was the best time I've had in a long time and I'm feeling better about the world and life generally. Jason's big seattle shows are beautiful things, and keep you uplifted for several days.

I've gone to a number of these shows over the years, they're always a different spectacle / narrative / vision. The show tonight combined elements of three or four different of the big narrative shows that I recall from the past. It was epic.

There was Jason Webley, Amanda Palmer, Artis the Spoonman, Rev. Peyton, Andru Bemis, Orkestrar Zirkonium, and Jay Thompson.

There was singing along, and balloons, and running around, and then eventually an afters with tomato cake freeway park. It was a magical time.

Celiaq.com is slowly lurching to life; the project was about 75% bigger than I thought it would be, and we're just wrapping up the final changes to source this week. The second week of July is the current targeted launch date. This post mentions this, and also is a test of the integration with livejournal.

Things are still blowing up in a somewhat location-dependent way, but the bug list is steadily decreasing now. I'm fairly confident that the remaining issues are well-characterized.

Celiaq -- The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide -- Gluten Free Book Info

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Skipped the David Byrne concert because I'm trying to conserve cash at the moment. However, I went to the Extra Action Marching Band's afterparty at the Comet, and it was basically a great time. The XAMB is a great band. They've wrapped more cheerleading and dancers into their act than the other similar bands I've seen, and they have a different feel in an enclosed space because of it.

This is the first time I've ever seen them off the playa, and then versus the usual comet crowd versus the david byrne fans versus the other folks who got drawn in versus the bachelorette party was an interesting environment. The enthusiasm of the show let alone the cheerers and marshalls on top of all the tables and bars pretty much devastated the Comet, and I can't tell you how great a time I had despite currently being in the process of doing exactly that.

Also, David Byrne can *really* dance. You get that feeling watching him on stage or in videos, but being a couple of feet from him and watching him just bip along to the music is *inspiring.*

The highlight of the parade for me was when the road was clearing at the end of the parade and the police were driving down the road slowly[1], when some drunkish woman walked onut on the street and flashed them.

The cop deadpanned "yeah, get on a bike" at her through the megaphone, and she just turned and walked away.


[1] for those who don't do parades locally -- the police drive down the road at the end of the it mark the transition between 'parade' and 'normal road operations. It's a safety measure as well as useful as a social demarcation between space functions.

A friend and I watched Underworld: Rise of the Lycans Saturday night. It's a surprisingly good movie, with relatively strong performances from a number of actors. Significantly, most of these characters were the good actors from the first movie who mostly died tragically or nobly or whatever. They weren't in the second movie, which was basically suck.

So, basically, you take all the good actors in a franchise, you put them in an earlier version of the story, and let fly. It was pretty good, and more than made up for the second. They could make a fourth movie following the third and I'd watch it, but it appears that the fourth will probably follow on from the second -- Kate Beckinsale is a good actress as such things go, but she's left without a significant supporting cast.

The weird thing that kept distracting us while watching this movie was the lead actress, Rhona Mitra. She used to play Lara Croft live (and actually somewhat resembles laragoth, but with a bigger nose), but Mitra had had collagen implants in her lips just prior to screening this film and it made her somewhat odd looking.

Odd looking to the extent that we had to keep rewinding closeup scenes to watch the weird biomechanics of her cheek muscles moving with the collagen. It was causing strange deformations in her cheeks not usually seen in nature. It looked like a special effect at first, but then we realized (thanks to imdb) that it was done before the movie was filmed and has been slowly receding since.

So, yeah, that was distracting in what was otherwise a great B-movie. It was really bizarre to have to stop and replay face deformations over and over again like we were detecting replicants, but that's apparently how we roll around here after a couple of shots of bourbon.

Aside from that, it's been a pretty relaxed weekend. Lots of randomly running into friends and hanging out, but also lots of resting and random nonsense. The redwings losing on friday made me pretty unhappy, but largely because they made it all the way to the end only to fall prey to injury and exhaustion. I fear that next year might be a rebuilding year, but certainly this current lot has had a pretty good run and the upcoming noobs have kicked ass.

The Westboro-Phelps antiChristians are going to be protesting around the area June 13-15, wandering from area site to area site and apparently some high schools.

I was hoping for one of those Guatemalan bands with the drums and flute. Why can't we ever get any good street entertainment in this town?

The title of this post is a reference to the book of the same name by local author cherie priest. The book is excellent, go read it. But once you go to these festivals, it sort of alters your life around for a while. I've been thinking a lot about meaning recently, current global problems relating to creationaism have me weighing the distance between epistemology and teleology a lot.

I think that there's this huge battle at war in american culture between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology (namely, whether god's plan for the universe should drive you to be part of the great wheel of being or attend to your own salvation/inner light.) Intrinsic teleology leaping out and making events happen in the world isn't the same as extrinsic teleology.

This phenomena, which I've started to call intrinsic escapism, means that doing the things that you should internally is good for the world as a whole. This is the path of jihad wack and shooting Tillers in church. Extrinsic teleology means that you strive to improve the world as part of the great machine of the world. I don't know, it's possible to revert these categories as personal preference, but what I see a lot of in the world is the Intrinisic Teleogical springing from people's foreheads like cut rate Athenas and picking up the bloody axe of dogma and whinging it around a lot.

Those who would deprive you of a tiller are probably without rudders themselves.

But to return from the gravitas to the gravy: Leaving the event, I took the event with me, staying over at strobe's house and talking to the b3 camp. I hung out with various flipsiders that night, and the next morning I went over to spiderhouse coffee to get some work done. It was a panoply of eventful people, with Easy-E and deeptape arriving first, then kukiri and D-. After they left, some friends other friends and flipsiders came through and then just as I was wrapping up for the day tiarasaurus and flipsideghost came through and warned me that K-, B-, and a big chunk of gigsville were en route and I may wish to flee. I went over and hung until my friend was ready to receive visitors and then I went forth and was received. (The next day, I met silona and her guy at the same venue.)

The day before, in a similar process of reception, I was at a state park bordering a dam on what was probably lake austin, and because of memorial day there was a ranger directing traffic. The park ranger said to me, "I heard people from Oregon don't like Texans" in a fairly serious voice. I told him that I was from Seattle and I had been camping near Pedernales state park for the last 4 memorial day weekends.

This is true although it omits all sorts of relevant information and was sufficient to let me pass and please the park ranger. Having turned the wheel of the day again, I went and crashed and prepared for the morrow, which will return with a more conventional narrative and includes geocaching and many wheels of travel.