Something to rally around

Dune Premonitions: BP oil spill mascot

bloated & leaking

Tilted Arc

by Richard Serra in 1981
COR-TEN steel 120'x12'x2"Commissioned by the GSA for the Federal Building in lower Manhattan
A political power move or genuinely abhorred by the building's inhabitants.
The work was dismantled in 1989.

Weekend: Wake Up

I have to wake up tomorrow at 5:45 am. Anyone that has lived with me knows that I annoyingly sleep through alarm clocks. So, when I found out that I had to be up and functioning in downtown Manhattan this Sunday I promptly went out and purchased Clocky. The appeal was that I knew that Clocky would wheel away after one snooze. Ergo, I would get out of bed and turn the alarm off. What I just found out is that Clocky makes an ungodly loud digi-screeching noise.

Burn

Richard Euringer, director of the libraries in Essen, identified 18,000 works deemed not to correspond with Nazi ideology, which were publicly burned. cerca 1930's-1940's

Bailout

image via

Retrospective

The shelf is ah-huge. I may or may not post the outcome. All I can say is that S and I have been busting a** for two weeks, nights and weekends. Tension some/all-the-times high. But last night we broke out into a fit of laughter.

Mailer for Mayor

In 1969 Norman Mailer from for Mayor. Thanks Diego. via

If the time and money aren't going into making great art for campaigns then where is it going? Ahem. Focus groups. Yes we have asked (and paid) you the American public and you have responded. You want to most bland and dumbed down version of everything, you definitely want everything you've seen before but you like blue not yellow and really why bother arguing with such a thoughtful perspective..... I digress

Finding Myself

exactitudes.com.
Today I found myself in a meeting with a writer taking notes on my verizon wireless bill whose signature red and black colors had melted like water colors into the math. I was writing on the bill because, in the excitement of leaving my office to meet in Starbucks(which, at any other time I would have refused) I completely forgot all the notes I had taken last, at home on the brief in which we were meeting about, let alone, a notebook . The bill was wet because yesterday morning I treated myself to fancy water, a Perrier, of which I am clearly not accustom to closing since the entire contents of the bottle ended up in my bag thusly deading my cell phone and threatening my passport, now, my only photo id since I managed to loose my driver's license last weekend somewhere after the security check but before boarding the plane. I think I actually broke up with a guy when I was 19 who had similar experiences insisting that he was being immature.

Together We Can Fight the Nothing

1/2 of my spam for the week

Sally Sidebar: Alarmed for a Cause

'Hey! Where did my alarm go? Oh, Clocky!!' If you remember my previous rant about alarms and my inability to wake up on time, then you know why this clock would be of interest. If this alarm is not turned off soon enough it runs away and apparently has the capacity to "jump from 2 feet". Though, there is no way to be sure that I still wouldn't sleep through it, its totally cute. Thanks Sally Sidebar!

GoOn!

Why? Why? Why does MoveOn.Org email at least 4x a week? Since when did they fall prey to the reasonings of spammers and cheap product advertisers? Effective people! More is just more. I don't like to read your redundant rants. Once a week- or what the hell! even once every two weeks- pull your shit together, get to the point IN ONE SHORT EMAIL. put a link in there and if I want to read the cute-with-a-cause copy then I will click the link and read it.
I just feel like if you've already got me down as a prior volunteer then its pretty safe to assume that we are on the same page.
So, I receive this:

And all I need is this:
MoveOn.Org needs volunteers to make phone calls from your home tomorrow:
We need you to:
1. make calls to other move.on members

2. have these members to call congressmen to ask them to stop the Iraq escalation

Click Here to find out more about this volunteer option>>
Click Here to find out more about the Senate vote on the war>>

Anyway, if you are fed up with this war and have some free time tomorrow night then sign up here.

While we are on the topic I thought I might point out some great design for a non-profit. I am sure that I have mentioned Stefen Sagmeister before... and now I am mentioning him again. Here is some work he did for Ben Cohen's (the Ben of Ben&Jerry's) True Majority:

Cause For Alarm

Firstly, I can't wake up to a clock alarms to save my life. You can ask any poor soul that has lived with me starting with my family. Its a genetic disorder, to be sure.
I currently use my cell phone's alarm function. It allows me to set 3 different alarms, all of which I use. I like to turn the volume up to high, stagger the times about 15 mins. apart and vary the alarm "ring" on each. Still, I wake up about 30 mins later with the phone craddled in my hand right next to my head. "What wakes me up?" you ask. Oh well, a number of things really... my cat hovering over my face, a nightmare that I woke up late, sunlight, a fed up roomie....

... OR sometimes I wake because of the car alarms going off next door at the car wash. Lucky for me, if they are going off, then they start at about 7 am.!(read as extreme sarcasm) I am not sure why the car alarms wake me up and my scheduled clock alarms don't(!) but what I would really like to discuss(selfishly) is why the guys(fully awake) at the car wash repetitively set the alarms off. One would think that they would get sick of hearing the noise and.... I-don't-know... turn the alarms off till the car is clean(?) Alas, this is not the case. 4 days out of 7 alarms are set off long enough to go through all the different sounds twice.
If you don't live in the city it may be difficult to understand the breadth of my hatred of the car alarm. Basically, I feel that they are a poor attempt at eliminating car theft.
In my misery, I like to contemplate ways of resolving this problem... on a national scale. Picture this: