Recently in art Category

So I'm currently working on a (probably) overly-ambitious project to organize every photo that has ever passed into my possession, ever.  This involves editing all the image files' metadata to ensure the correct date/time is embedded, as well as doing all sorts of extra content tagging for location, people, events, etc.  And in going through every photo you've ever had, ever, you can get pretty nostalgic.

On another note, the weather had finally gotten consistently nice and sunny for the past two weeks.  But yesterday and today have been cloudy/rainy/pissy, and have immediately filled me with dread at the thought of 9-10 months of rain to come.  So since it's an icky day, I'm here at the house tagging photos and I just so happened to be on the folder from my trip to Scandinavia in 2006.  Cue music to reminisce by....

I was at the Kiasma Art Museum in Helsinki, and wandered into a viewing room for a video installation.  The featured video was called "Helsinki Complaints Choir," and the concept was that a composer conducted a survey asking a bunch of Finns what their biggest complaints about life were.  She then consolidated all the complaints, set them to music, and got a large choir to sing the song about all these random (and very Finnish) frustrations of daily life.  It was completely charming and wonderful...and I loved it so much that I sat in that video installation room and watched the video from start to finish three or four times.

Just like I did a few minutes ago as I was tagging it.  And sadly, these two lines caught my attention as far too relevant:





The rest of it isn't quite so depressing: Helsinki Complaints Choir on YouTube.

halee: i think my sister is going to come visit me in june. 
matt:  which sister is it?
halee: staci.
matt:  staci, lindi, barbi, harpi
halee: i'm harpi, right?
matt:  yup
halee: and i have a blonde afro and a little horn i honk?
matt:  you know what happens now right?

15 minutes later.....

Last entry about Portland, I swear.  Yesterday (Saturday) the weather was totally perfect...the sun was out, it was about 80 degrees...it's the kind of weather I've been waiting for for the past 8 months.  I purposefully spent most of my day walking around outside, soaking up some much-needed sun. 

• I walked up and down 21st and 23rd streets, which are part of a funky little neighborhood full of independent retail shops and weird bars and cafes.  The Goodwill Store had a very high percentage of Jim Nabor albums in their vinyl section.
  
  
• Powell's Bookstore - my god.  Someone said it was the biggest bookstore ever, and shit, they were not kidding.  It reminded me a bit of Recycled Books in Denton...rooms leading to other rooms which lead to nooks which lead to secret hallways, which lead to a whole other set of rooms!  Every section was color-coded, an organizational detail which I of course appreciated.
  
  
• On that note, I should also mention that 21st and 23rd are part of the Alphabet District, where all the east/west street names are in alphabetical order: Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Glisan, Hoyt, Irving, Johnson, Kearney, Lovejoy, Marshall, Northrup, Overton, Pettygrove, Quimby.  I love the organizational aspects of that, too...but if I were a city planner I totally would have mandated that all the establishments on those streets had to start with that letter, too. 
  
  
• We went down by the riverside and watched elderly hippies juggle sticks, then went for a sky tram ride to the hospital.  (Why the destination of the sky tram is the hospital, I'll never understand.  That doesn't give me a tremendous amount of confidence in the safety of the sky tram.)
  
  
• And probably the best part of my day other than the $1.75 PBR tallboys and pinball I enjoyed at the bar later that night, was the Velveteria Velvet Painting museum.  I highly, highly recommend this to anyone ever visiting Portland.  The two people who run it (who I had read about on the website) were there, and could not have been nicer or more interesting.  The place was pretty dead, so they walked me around and told me all sorts of neat stories about all the paintings.  Of course it wouldn't have been right for me to take photos, but goodness me...they had some ridiculously amazing stuff.  The best I can do is share my list with you, and let your black velvet imagination run wild:
  
  
• Dog the Bounty Hunter
• Mr. T with actual gold beads glued to the painting for his necklaces
• Macho Man Randy Savage
• A slightly monoloid-looking Hulk Hogan
• Dolemite
• Jack Lord
  
• A overly manly ballerina who looked like a love child of Gorgeous George and Ric Flair
• The Heaven's Gate Cult leader
• A whole section of black light paintings, mostly focused on sad and/or gambling clowns
• A whole section of nudie paintings, mostly focused on Filipino boobie girls
• A whole section of Elvis paintings, mostly with him crying
  
• A whole section of bandido paintings
• And most importantly, a whole section of unicorn paintings called "Unicornucopia" which included:
• Glam rock unicorns
• Satanic unicorns
• A genie lamp with a vaporous unicorn coming out of it
  
  and the pièce de résistance...
  
  
• A unicorn with an extra long mane, which ebbs and flows into a giant wave, which then becomes the long hair of a beautiful woman.  Carl and Caren lovingly refer to this one as "Unicorn Combover" and I am happy to be able to show you a half-assed picture of it:
  
  
  

Also, I should stick in a plug for them as I'm sure my massive readership will really add a spike to their sales...but they've written a book on black velvet paintings that will be coming out soon.  Note to whoever: I would love to have this for my birthday.

And thus concludes my visit to Portland.  I will definitely be going back, as I did not get to go to Big Al's bowling alley or to try the macaroni and cheese at Savoy.  And next time, I'm going to take the long way home up the coastal 101 for some scenic beach driving with the sunroof open.  Summer, please hurry up.

This is exciting.  A friend of mine at work saw the Excel screencap of the needlepoint I made, and she runs analytics on artofoffice.com, which is a site where (mostly) Mac users flex their Microsoft business application software muscles to create art using Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.  She made me submit my template, despite my PC-user status.

So I am now on artofoffice.com, lookie!

I'll be expecting an email from Mark Mothersbaugh (the site's featured artist) any minute!

As a young child, my friend Matt wrote and illustrated an amazing fable starring a wolf, a crane, and a dove.  It was ingeniously titled "The Wolf, the Crane, and the Dove."  To read this riveting tale, go here.  Important details to note:

• The wolf is shirtless, and wearing jeans.
• The artist has gone to painstaking efforts to show that they are not just any jeans, but Lee jeans.
• The moral of this fable is "Three can keep a secret if two are dead," which is pretty damn morbid and awesome for a 4th grader.

Matt's birthday was in January, and I really struggled to come up with a good idea for a present for him.  Anytime that happens, I always revert to what I call my "macaroni necklace tactics," and try to make something.  From the heart.  So I decided to make him a needlepoint with the catchphrase from his fabled fable.

First, I had to plan, organize, and graph out the gothic-style letters I nabbed from a needlepointing site.  Back in my Girl Scout craft jamboree days, I would have used map pencils and graph paper.  But I am no longer 1986 Girl Scout Halee.  I am 2008 Web Analyst Halee, so I used Excel:



Then over my Christmas break, I diligently needlepointed the yuletide away.  When Matt's birthday rolled around, I was done with the needlepoint, but hadn't had time to get it framed.  So I threw this piece of fabric at him, and then immediately demanded it back.  Note: I am currently angry with myself for not taking pictures to incrementally document the progress and make a time lapse animated gif. 



Two months later...I finally got around to having it framed and viola!  I was worried that a gray and brown feather didn't really match up with a crane and dove which are typically white.  But then again, Matt's crane and dove were bright orange, so screw it!

Greetings, I apologize for disappearing off the face of the internet for a while.  I hope life has been treating you well, and that you have received your W-2s and have found success in achieving a big fat federal income tax refund!

My friend Val had this hanging up in her cubicle when I used to work with her.  Her son intended to praise how cool Texas was, and inadvertently inverted the 'a' and 'e' in Texas.  This is way better, anyway:



In celebration of this tax season, I would like to share a little surprise with you.  I got a discount on TurboTax through my investment peoples, so use this link and you can get a couple of bucks off, too!

http://turbotax.intuit.com/affiliate/trowep4

Sorry I didn't hyperlink that.  But I'm in web analytics and I'm paranoid they'll run a referring URL report and find that I sent you there, and renege my discount.