Love, Larken

Found out that the shack is in fact leaky. I proposed a plant solution with tendrils of viny hanging plants, equipped with a water encatchment system below for any run off.

Keelan proposes fixing the roof by either re-building it or adding tar paper. First he’s busy cleaning the kitchen top to bottom. Najva comes over tonight after her awesome poetry reading at Berkeley.

Here is a scene I thought you’d enjoy from West Oakland Bodega

Tuesday December 7th, 2010, 8:10pm

First night in Oakland.  Keelan and Larken are stocking up on fresh tortillas, jalepeno jack, and ask the guy behind the counter to help us get some eggs.

Guy behind Counter:  Jumbo, Cage Free, Organic?

Keelan: Smiling, in disbelief of such fresh and humane options at the local Deli he repeats the options over, recounting them slowly: Jumbo. Cage Free. Organic. Jubilantly he chants: JUMBO!

Me: Wait we don’t need eggs.

Keelan: We need eggs.

Me: We don’t need to buy eggs.

Keelan: Because we have CHICKENS!

Guy behind counter:  You got chickens?

Me: We just moved in today, we forgot that we don’t need to buy eggs because we have chickens.

Guy behind counter:  How many chickens you got? You really got chickens?

Me: Yes. 6 I think.

….& the coop is built out of——you guessed it—-bike parts!

Love Shack in Oakland-$250/Month

We were warned that it was messy, leaky in the rain, and one of the windows was shot out by a bee-bee gun. What we found was a Punky Palace, mini-Make Fun, with a lofted bed area with crocheted bird cages, custom unicorn pillows and lacy bird curtains.

In the middle of a garden, in the back of a yard, our Oakland Love Shack shares a wall with the chicken coop and does in-fact leak in certain places, but is adorable and perfect for figuring out what to do next.

Right when we arrived our housemate knocked on the door, “Hey wanna go get coffee down the street” Unanimous Yes. “Hop on my bicycle built for two!  I’ve got a tandem tall bike at my studio too.”

Keelan and I both smiled. We are not wearing coats and we are about to take a bike ride. On a bicycle built for two.  This rocks. 

“You’re it—

I mean, you’re Really IT!”

Now
It does not matter
What you believe or feel

For something wonderful,

Major-league Wonderful
Is someday going
To

Happen.

— 
- Hafiz

Empire Drive In

This post apocalyptic Empire Drive In, by Jeff Stark and Todd Chandler made me swoon with my lover on the top of a broken down Ford as we cuddled and heard a live score played by Dark Dark Dark and watched Flood Tide Re-Mixed at the SJ-01 Biennial. 

The huge airplane hanger across from the San Jose Convention Center was completely transformed into an antique Drive In with cars from the local salvage lot.

Floodtide is a film project by Tod Chandler, which captures somewhat fictional or hyper real re-enactments of the Swimming Cities Collaborations of summers previous. 

Mark Tribe also likes to play with Cars in site specific work. 

In Carpark he had all of the people who park at Southwestern College park in color coded lots.  He recently lectured at the How To Do Things With Words Exhibition of Radical Speech Acts at Parsons The New School about his goal installations so that people can feel like they are in the original crowd who heard the speech. He feels that he accomplishes this best in the Port Huron Project  “a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the Vietnam era. Each speech took place at the site of the original event, and was delivered by an actor or performance artist to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. Videos of these performances have been screened on campuses, exhibited in art spaces, and distributed online as open-source media”  The re-enactments are shown on two screens, with the videos rear projected and the audience members in the video are at the same height as the audience members in the gallery.

Jeff Stark’s art and theatre pieces are notorious for making me feel more alive and participatory. IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations, 10, The Sweet Cheat, and of course the amazing old school Idiotarod are all classic examples of how site specificity and unanticipated interaction lead to euphoria. Jeff Stark rips down the screen and reveals that your life is the art work and then documents you living it.

Thank you to the cast and crew behind Empire Drive in and Swimming Cities (especially Serra Fels and Tod Seelie) for putting me in the photos that I’d like to be taking of myself.

This kind of art makes me feel alive.

She explained that recapitulation consisted of “recollecting one’s life down to the most insignificant detail” and that when a woman’s recapitulation was complete she “no longer abided by the limitations of her person.”[1] She further explained that in the process of recapitulation one recounts all the feelings they invested in whatever memory they were reviewing.

— Florinda Donner