Towards A New Architecture

Highway 80 between Laramie, Wyoming and Denver, Colorado brings me back to being an 18 year old exploring the West Coast for the first-time. Thankfully, this time the landscape is green and the highway is clear, unlike that wintry Halloween weekend of my youth when they closed down the highway due to ice and snow and I was stuck in Laramie in a van with no heat. 15 years later this highway seems less extreme from the lounge of this tour bus, with its satellite TV, 2 fridges and the on-board bathroom.
After tonight’s show in Denver, we will start the long drive back to Texas. It feels like we have been on this tour for much longer than just 14 days. The work is physically and mentally exhausting, with days that generally start at 8:00 AM and end around 2:30 AM. But Johnny and I are finding our groove, honing our rig, hitting our cues and the last two shows have been gone much better. Last night in Salt Lake City, I used my robotic cameras for the first time, allowing us to catch some really nice solo shots and add them into the mix up there on the big screen.
However, we have been having endless problems with our tour bus since San Diego and our driver is at the end of his rope. The driver explained that this fleet of buses was bought as an investment by a rich man in Florida and have not been maintained. It looks like he will only take us as far as Dallas, because when we get there they will bring in a new bus that comes with its own driver. It is a shame because he is a great driver, but at this point he is so pissed at the bus owner and having to suck up the losses that come with being an independent contractor. These tours are a real leap of faith for the independent guys, like us. There is big money to be earned, but it is a risky investment with possible gear failure, personality clashes or bodily injury. For the big guys, like union houses & major concert corporations such as Clear Channel and Live Nation, these US tours are a total racket.

Hello from Berkley, CA! The weather here is cool and overcast and I could smell the ocean as I stepped off the bus.
During the month of August, I will be participating in the exhibition Txt Me L8r, hosted by the Houston Center for Photography and curated by Andrea Grover of the Aurora Picture Show. This exhibition explores the potential for distributed creativity through the use of cell phone technology- in a geographically dispersed collaboration. Throughout the month we receive text message photography assignments, which we are to respond to by shooting an image with our cell phone cameras (mine sucks) and then upload the pic to a photo-sharing site (flickr site). The results of this crowd- sourced project will be projected in the Houston Center for Photography during August.
Above is the result from the warm-up assignment: "What does Sleep Look Like?" Which was taken aboard our tour bus.

New projector up and running onto the new screen!!

Hello from Burbank, the heart of the animation industry where, thankfully, we have our first 'day off' after 10 straight days. But as they say in the rock and roll industry there are no 'days off' only 'no show days'. We will spend the day trying to solve some technical problems with the projectors.
This is the first update since we joined the dark circus and all I can say is that the first 10 days were hell! I felt like a green middle schooler on their first day of high school and my thoughts were plagued with the audio loop of "what have we done.... what have we done." We had both technical and content issues to resolve with no time to do it and were trying to problem solve with no sleep and under intense pressure. After a disaster of a first show, we pulled off the second show in Phoenix and were officially welcomed into the team. 
So now I have a new family of 20 guys and 1 other gal- thankfully. We have three tour buses and two semi trucks. I am learning (quickly) the unwritten rules of the road and are starting to decoding the social cues. The dress code of the crew is black, practical and increased cred comes with wearing shirts from the previous tours one has worked. The location of tattoos tends to be on the calf muscle or bi-cep. The backline, (the guys who care for the instruments and the musicians) have their own style, which is more of a casual surfer look, with button-down shirts and slip-on vans.
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Today we are at Universal City and upon arriving at the loading dock at 8:00 AM, it was clear that we were in Hollywood. All the "hands" look professional and the stage is so clean- like a movie set. There is a group of older men sitting here with me in catering who have worked in the industry since the 1970s. They are talking about putting their children through college, surgeries, medicare and the increased value of property they bought 20-30 years ago. It is a welcomed change from the usual 'local crew' banter and dirty jokes. The catering is wonderful and looks like the interior of a 1950s diner. There is a huge spread of fruit, bagels, cereal and hot food. There is even a sweet breakfast cook who was more than pleased to scramble up some egg whites for me "oh, yes that is healthy."  

The Countdown is almost over and suddenly I find myself feeling nostalgic about leaving. The loft looks pretty depressing with two suitcases sitting in the corner, but the echo is amazing & makes the space feel much bigger than 700 square feet.
The past week has been a flurry of activity, with the endless chore of packing thankfully punctuated by dinner parties with friends. We still have one day to finish up last minute stuff in the studio and are then off to San Diego to meet up with the gear and start rehearsals. It has been an interesting year for this New York girl making her way in Texas. In the end I have realized that Houston is nothing like I imagined it would be. Most of those negative stereotypes of Texas are missing and there are pockets of amazing activity happening all over this city. However, I have not gotten over the sprawling flatness of Houston & miss being a pedestrian!

What I will miss most in Houston:
The moody skies and amazing thunderstorms
75 degree nights in January
The clanging of the Metro as passes below the loft
Isabella Court (shown above)
Happy Hour at T’afia
Yoga Ananda
Andrea Grover & the Aurora Picture Show
The patio at Café Brasil
KTRU 91.7
Sunday movie night in the studio
The trees that blanket the Menil Museum Complex

The movers arrive tomorrow! Today will have to be a ReBlogging day, as there is no time to head outside to shoot a new photograph.
Below is a video from the NY Times about the Bike Sharing experiment happening at the StoreFront for Art and Architecture in SoHo. Sponsored by the Forum for Urban Design, this exhibition "attempts to imagine bike sharing in New York" and makes 20 bikes available to anyone for a 30-minute ride. Imagine New York City full of bike-only lanes, like you find in Berlin or Amsterdam- Beautiful!
Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, the 32-route that circumnavigates the island of Manhattan, has put maps and video, shot from the biker's perspective on-line

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge:
Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth's ecological integrity.

A few weeks ago, I created a slideshow about bikes and included photos of people moving via bike in Portland, Oregon. Having moved once while living in Amsterdam with only a bike, the notion of moving via bike made sense to me. But I thought those Portland photos documented a lovely, freak one-time event. Tonight I learned there is an actual Bike Moving movement in Portland, which is facilitated by the community cycling network SHIFT. The trailer below documents a bike move, thanks to the NAU website. While the clothes on Nau are a tad expensive, they are a responsible company and the designs are pretty hot. In planning the contents for my 1 suitcase for the upcoming year on the road, I ordered a skirt and jacket from them. They make clothes for the long haul - just what I need!

Today, I had planned to put together a slideshow of my old postcard collection, before packing them away for a year. Only to realize that I had already taken the scanner off to the storage unit.
So- the slideshow above is a mini-tribute to the start of summer and New York's Playground of Coney Island and the Rockaways. You see, I come from a family that spent their summers floating in the salty waters of Jamaica Bay off Brooklyn and Queens (and sometimes the Long Island Sound). My grandfather, August Wiedemann was a high diver in the Rockaways. And to this day, my parents hop in their car on Sunday afternoon, leaving the city heat of Manhattan, to spend some time floating out at Jacob Riis Park. OK- sometimes I get a tad homesick & I guess today is just one of those days. Sticking with this nostalgic theme, there is a good video about the sale of Coney Island's Astroland Amusement Park in today's New York Times online. Click the Cyclone image to watch it.