Last week we headed down to Brooklyn with (e:uchina) and (e:yesthatcasey), to celebrate Paul getting old (40)!

(e:paul) found a super fance apartment in Prospect Hill. It was my first real time in New York and it looked how I pictured Brooklyn to be like (stately ol' brownstones). It had more than enough room for all of us and was cleaner than our house.







The first day in New York we went to the Mueseum of Modern Art. I have to say I was pretty engaged for the first three floors.

What I liked the most an exhibition on utilitarian modern design from central and northern Europe. They had a plain ass looking model kitchen and everything - no crevices to get dirt or crumbs, everything cleanable metal etc.

It got really meta when they exhibited posters, about exhibitions of American appliances in Germany, again in New York. I think someone should make an exhibit about exhibits of exhibits of modern American appliances for 50 years from now.




I don't know much about art history but I never made a connection between modern art from the early 20th century, and pretty much everything that you see from the early 90's.




Octopus fingers for (e:uchina)

I made two more things in 3D with blender. The first one I was experimenting with particle effects and wood textures, plus some simple animation. I had to downsize to a tiny gif and it's still 632k. I think (e:paul) or I should add HTML5 video - I hate uploading to youtube for short clips.



The next render I followed this blender expert's tutorial on youtube.

I'm pretty happy with the doughnuts even those the doughnut mesh is weird.


I freaking love 3D modeling so far, especially compared to most art forms I've tried. It seems way more intuitive to deal with something that that has depth and perspective built in vs for me trying to learn and translate a 2D projection of what I want.

Plus Blender is pretty awesome software and entirely open source. It went open after a crowd funding campaign bought the source from a failed Dutch ompany, all the the way back in 2002.
(software)

On my machine rendering is pretty slow and limited to the CPU. But Terry's computer is blazing fast and I haven't even gotten CUDA GPU rendering set up yet. Once I do, each of the GPUs 2580 cores can be set to rendering instead of the i7s 4 cores.

I was stuck on thinking of new things to program or try out today. So instead I fired up the open source blender on my laptop and ran a tutorial to make a 3d render of a mug.

(e:paul) helped me run through the basics of compositing and using blender. So I ended up making these purple velvety metaballs to go alongside the mug, cushioned on a field of stiff AstroTurf (and with the obligatory "hello world" text).

I watched him play with a trial of Cinema 4D and he made a model of a vase in about a minute.

The output here is dumb but it was ridiculously fun to do something new on the computer. Scripting something here with Python could be interesting. The interface in Blender is confusing but I also don't know the language of 3d compositing.

I'd like to try animating it, on Terry's mega Warcraft machine.

I didn't really infringe much besides (e:joe,60612) the shadow penii I contributed to (e:czarkasm). I was sad I missed (e:terry)'s taxbot though.

The infringement puppet show at Colonial Circle was cool. The lady who ran it made intricate puppets of a mouse, a buffalo, a frog etc, and the performance was well done.

Later we saw the fire jugglers at Days Park. There was an off-leash ferret leash who acted just like a dog. You could even snap and he'd come to you. So freaking cute.

I hope you put these to good use (e:czarkasm).

Mysteriously abstract



Stuck in a good book

Who could that be behind the mask?

Saturday was a lot of crafts and lounging at (e:uchina)'s.

We went out to brunch and (e:terry) had a giant fried french toast. I had a tofu scramble.

While we were there I tried my hand at crocheting. I am not very good at keeping my hooked holes tight.


Later back at the apartment, we drew a little bit. Masumi made valentine's, Paul made his trippy animals, and I drew an otter. Sometimes I wish I could draw better, but it's low on my list of things to practice. I try to follow those "sketch a circle, and another circle etc" tutorials - is that how people actually draw animals?




This lovely work of art was made by (e:uchina) at a Japanese restaurant near her house. Beautiful! I feel like I'm being swept away at some fancy ball(s).

The Squeaky Wheel peep show was last night at 500 Seneca street. Most of the building was swank modern offices but the sixth floor was unfinished old factory space. the event was pretty fun - (e:terry) volunteered and helped organize a lot of it.

The art itself was a mixed bag - some was cool, some was kind of lame. I loved the dirty bird exhibit and satanic rabbit pentagram.

There was also delicious coco food, including a white bean arugula salad, and fancy chocolates. There were also free drinks. I still don't like gin.

I think my favorite scene of the night was Nick's drag getup. I seriously didn't recognize him when he came up to me.

While (e:paul) went for a family dinner, (e:terry) and I helped Jax and the Squeaky Wheel crew move out of their old office. The result was I spent a day surrounded by artists and art.

The old location is a hoarder's paradise. Most of what we moved consisted of tons of old, broken projecters and TV's ready for the e-scrap yard. There also was the boxes upon boxes of physical media - VHS tapes. Even (e:uchina) would have found it to be vintage.


After we dropped the waste at the scrap yard, we stopped for Breadhive's bagel brunch at Hydraulic Hearth. (e:terry) and I split a kimchi/yogurt bagel and a pepper hummus bagel. I learned that Jax loves invasive species, and this other girl Anna wants to be the mushroom foraging pioneer of Buffalo.

The restaurant had a phonebooth art installation by Leslie Zemsky - Howard Zemsky's wife. She designed and decorated most of the restaurant.


Afterwards, we brought the rest of the tapes and shelving to storage in the Hi-Temp Fab warehouse on Perry Street. Being in such a big old warehouse was neat. It also was covered in art.



One gallery had a this super strange painting of a bare-chested Aunt Jemima atop a stack of pancakes. I can't decide if this was supposed to be racist or not.

There were plenty of safety bicycles there too if you wanted to take a spin. i think artists may just be hoarders.


Afterwards we went for a hot toddy at Jax and Kyle's place. Spiced whiskey is a little much for me. But we got to show off the Samsung VR Goggles and compare them to VR art on the Oculus Rift VR1. The Samsung headset is so much better to look at. The field of view and resolution is a million times more advanced.

We got to sample these legendary macaroons from a hospital in Massachusetts


The last artsty thing we did before walking home was visiting Julian Montegue's bird photo exhibition. Normally I think his drawings are cool, but honestly, I didn't get this. It was blurry pictures of birds in Buffalo, like my mobl post quality.

I was ready to go home and work on the new Squeaky website at this point.

Friday we headed down to Brian's 30 for 30 event for Squeaky Wheel. He video dj'ed for 30 hours, a world record (hopefully) in honor of Squeaky Wheel's 30th anniversary. (e:terry) volunteered - (e:paul) and I had to be there also from 12-4am.




Stinky the wino came too

Outside Curtain up was happening. I always thought it was an old people thing your parents did, but it actually seemed like an awesome street party. They had kettle corn, performers, a weird puppet show - I haven't seen that many people on Main Street since before the square moved.



The squeaky wheel event was at Cowork Buffalo on Main. They had these cute little bead buffaloes everywhere.

Terry and I went back for the end the next night. Brian made it without sleep. The videos he were playing got kind of creepy at the end (people on fire, screaming, mental patients etc).

(e:steve)'s monster is artvoice famous in this past week's article about the DIY fest. Noice!


Luckily we have an original.