"On this road like a rolling stone"

Well took me a quarter of the year to do this again. In a nutshell it's been two months of laying low at home and trying (and failing) to find a job and one month of having found a (part time) job and manically planning how to avoid getting another one.

The longer version is this.



This is mostly what I have to show for my time at home. I organized my possessions and made this installation to represent both the last few years of my life and the fact that I am an incurable packrat. I think I have stubs from every movie I've been to since I was 10.



I went back to Boston in February and promptly visited this much hyped Shepard Fairey show at the ICA (above). I didn't realize this guy was behind Andre has a posse/Obey/that ubiquitous Obama campaign image, it's pretty odd that a street artist has been on my cultural radar for so long but flown low enough to avoid name recognition until now. I think he would be disappointed by that. Despite Fairey's rep as a stencil vet, his New England punk credentials, and his heroic legal battles with the Boston PD and the Associated Press, I can't shake a suspicion that much of his artistic persona and some of his output is a cynical appropriation of the dumbed down mass marketing techniques that he explicitly imitates in his design and that implicitly, I think, contribute to his own personality industry. I'll stop myself before I start getting too banal or buzzkilling, I'd rather just show you some of the art in the show but in an unsurprising bit of irony I was told by an ICA docent that I couldn't take pictures because they didn't have the ©.

In any case after I saw the show I couldn't stop seeing Fairey's stuff all over Boston (which works were, I later learned, part of a promotional effort on his part), so I availed myself of the freedoms of that publicker space to snap a synchronic shot of Shepard Fairey in Boston in early 2009. (Note: as I'm writing this I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Antigua, Guatemala (see below) and across the way Fairey's Obama image is staring out at me from the cover of Time Magazine. There is something extremely laudable in the omnipresence of that design, which in itself qualifies Fairey as one of the more significant artists of our time.)






So I also got a job. Part time working at the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History (hereafter referred to as ICEAACH). I was primarily involved in scanning and seeking images of covers of obscure journals, which turned out to be an amazing trip through mid-70s social science publication aesthetics. So much gold here:









So what else... gripped this bad rider, which I guess makes me more credentialed than your average unemployed individual (sadly this isn't even true). But it looks cool. I've been working on a couple of projects, most importantly this China summer program at the Linden Centre:



More on this as it develops.

Odds and ends:

-homemade 阴阳
-my current jam
-cool non-Fairey Obama zine art
-some free advice

So as I parenthetically mentioned I'm back in Antigua. I have a penchant for returning places. Now I have a better camera and a functioning computer so hopefully I'll be able to augment my Guatemala reportage, which was notably lacking last year. But I'm only going to be in Antigua for another few days, then it's back to San Bartolo. I will be doing a lot of this, some of this, and none of this intentionally, but if I have a repeat encounter and it's equally docile to last year's I will not complain.

Enough of these epic posts. If I haven't already alienated my entire readership with my scarcity I guess I'll have to do it with my bombast. But if you're still hanging in there, I'll make the next one shorter, sweeter, and maybe prettier.


-JOSH