Don't plan too far in advance

Last night I finally watched Fitzcarraldo, directed by Werner Herzog, after having it sit around my apartment since April (it's hard to find time to watch a 2 hour and 40 minute movie).

Klaus Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, an Irishman obsessed with the idea of bringing an Italian opera house to the natives of the Peruvian jungle. After a few false starts trying to raise money for his project by selling ice in the Amazon and trying to obtain sponsorship from local rubber barons, Fitzcarraldo comes up with a far-fetched plan to raise the money by starting his own rubber empire.

First he purchases a remote parcel of land in the Amazon, rehabs an old steamboat, and hires a crew. He maps out a route up the river which involves clearing the jungle and hauling the steamboat across a narrow strip of land in order to relaunch the vessel in the parallel river. Now here's the part that I thought was particularly crazy, but perhaps also the most believable: I don't think he ever really knew exactly how he would get the boat into the other river. I think he had some vague idea, but I think he planned on figuring it out once he got there. Despite the fact that this step was absolutely crucial to his plan, he basically winged it.

The interesting thing to me is that I'm starting to think that perhaps this is how extraordinarily big things get down. You can't possibly plan for every unknown when undertaking a large project. Certain aspects will simply have to be dealt with in the present as the obstacles arrive. If you try to solve every problem from the very beginning, everything would either go wrong at the first unforseen problem or it would be too discouraging to even start.

Perhaps a slight spoiler, but I'm leaving out all of the details which make the ending interesting: Fitzcarraldo eventually gets the opera to the Amazon, even if it's not exactly how he planned it in the beginning.

images: stills from Fitzcarraldo, found on the Internet

Busy month

I haven't had much reason to post anything lately. June has been a very busy month of social obligations for me and it's not over yet. I've only managed to get to my studio once so far, and I've got unfinished work that I've started waiting for me in my studio, plus a bunch of other ideas I'm anxious to get working on. It's a little frustrating, but next week I switch to 4 day weekends which will mostly be spent on my new projects.

In the meantime, I'm hoping I can find some time to see Werner Herzog's new film at the Film Forum before it closes. Encounters at the End of the World, filmed in Antarctica. Here's an interview with Herzog on Gothamist.

Here's the trailer:

The Assasination of __________

I just found this on the NY Times City Room blog:

<snip - from City Room>

"This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama,” in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level."

</snip>

My immediate reaction was just another hack artist relying on controversy to support an easy, dumb project. However there's much more to this than some inflammatory text stenciled on a storefront window. Yazmany Arboleda created a fake exhibition for each candidate which only exist on the Internet in the form of 2 websites documenting the work:

The Assassination of Hillary Clinton
The Assassination of Barack Obama

I don't know if any of the artworks in the exhibition are real or not, but they are really good. The show goes beyond simply being controversial and really probes at the way these public figures have been portrayed by the media and are perceived by the public. All of the tensions, prejudices, and insults underlying the entire campaign are magnified and exagerrated to the point of ridiculousness. Outstanding.

If you read the comments on the City Room blog, it's clear that either the work went waaay over the heads of most people, or they really weren't looking at it at all.

image: from Yazmany Arboleda's Hillary Clinton website

Give it up already!

Even after she loses she can't bow out gracefully and admit defeat. Please, Hillary, give it up already. I don't align myself with political parties, but your really hurting the Democrats right now and unless you want 4 more years of McSame, you need to fall in line behind Obama and bring your supporters with you.

do-it-yourself

Awhile back I mentioned that I want to start making sculptures that would avoid some of the storage, weight, and environmental problems of my prior work in concrete. Well, despite the fact that I still have some new ideas that will be big, heavy, and made of concrete, I have started a new project that will re-use old materials and be very lightweight. I'm not ready to divulge the content of the project, but it involves fusing plastic bags together to form thick, durable sheets of plastic, similar to Tyvek, which can be used like a fabric to construct forms.

After spending some time experimenting with various techniques of fusing the bags, I decided that I should try to actually make something:
This is a waterproof liner (left) for my cotton duck army surplus bag (right). Cotton duck is virtually waterproof on its own, but if it really gets soaked, water will make it's way through the canvas and this liner should protect the contents from getting wet. It fits perfectly:
Besides being good practice for my upcoming sculpture, this should be useful for my bike camping trip this weekend. The army surplus bag is another example of DIY engineering. My bicycle is set up with racks for mounting panniers so that I can carry stuff. I bought 2 of those army surplus bags and modified them so that they would work with my bicycle racks.

First I sewed a strip of webbing (cannibalized from the excessively long straps on my backpack) on the back of each bag so that I could attach bungee cords to the bag (left pic below). I bent a wire coat hanger into a hook on the midpoint of each bungee cord so that I could attach the bags to the rack. The hooks on the ends of the bungee cords are hooked onto the buckles that were conveniently already on the bags (right pic).
Actually, those buckles are really convenient, because they are for backpack straps. I can take the bag off my bike, remove the bungee cord, and wear it as a backpack. The other bag can be worn as a shoulder bag. Here's a picture of the bags set up for shoulder and back use:
After getting the bags attached to the rack, I needed to come up with a solution to prevent the bags from bending backwards into the spokes and potentially locking up the front wheel, which would be very bad. I found a bumper on the side of the road from a car wreck and cut it into plastic strips, which I bolted to the interior of each bag to stabilize the back side (see pic below...note the grommets on the bottom corners to allow for water drainage in case the bag gets flooded):
That's it for all of the functional modifications. The only other thing I did was to give each bag some character. I sewed on a bunch of old patches I acquired by trading with other kids back when I was a Boy Scout. I think it looks pretty good: