Towards A New Architecture

Heading back to Texas for two projects that we've been working on

NOV 30 & DEC 1
Aurora Picture Show


DEC 6
Steve Nalepa
Johnny DeKam
Mitchell Center for the Arts

Finished our last show of the EU tour!!!
For the next week we will be in a seaside village on the North Sea with no internet, phones or stores. We will observe a bit of blogger radio silence and enjoy this remote holiday. See you in a few days.

Last April at the C6 Symposium Creative Time Director Anne Pasternack mentioned an upcoming project with artist Paul Chan that took my breath away. Together they were working towards presenting Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward & Gentilly neighborhoods of New Orleans.
I was thrilled to read that Waiting for Godot debuted on November 2 in the Lower Ninth Ward and is being performed tonight in the Gentilly neighborhood. "More than a play, the work is a socially engaged performance at the heart of a national crisis" said curator Nato Thompson. For more about this inspiring multi-phased project go to the Creative Time website.

This statement is taken from Paul Chan's statement about the project:
I have seen landscapes scarred by disasters of all sorts. In Baghdad, I saw kids playing soccer barefoot on a wide boulevard and around the concrete rubble that came from US troops shelling the buildings near the Tigris River. I thought I saw the same kids playing in the ghost town known as downtown Detroit on a side street during an enormous labor demonstration in 1999—with shoes but no shirts. Life wants to live, even if it’s on broken concrete.

New Orleans was different. The streets were still, as if time had been swept away along with the houses. Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science fiction movie. Waiting for a ride to pick me up after visiting with some Common Ground volunteers who were gutting houses in the Lower Ninth, I realized it didn’t look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times. It was unmistakable. The empty road. The bare tree leaning precariously to one side with just enough leaves to make it respectable. The silence. What’s more, there was a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope. It was uncanny. Standing there at the intersection of North Prieur and Reynes, I suddenly found myself in the middle of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Photos by Stew

Seems the NY Times & I are having both having a love affair with this bike city!
Article: In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels

Video: The Business of Biking

Untitled 17 (hotel)
This is one of my all-time favorite photographs & I have a print of it hanging on my wall at home (when I am there). The photographer is Lucas Blalock, who recently relocated from the wilds of North Carolina to concrete & steel of New York City.

Today we are just outside Bilbao, in an airplane hanger styled convention center, nestled by Bavarian looking hills. All of the glass walls are etched with 00011000, making it apparent that this building was pitched to the local community as a hub for showcasing some type of high-tech media. Currently there are several huge New Media centers being established all over Spain, but this one certainly did not live up to its future-land promises. My guess is that this building was conceived around the time that the Guggenheim Bilbao was built. It is ironic to be surrounded by all this computer code etched glass & unable to find an open WiFi connection.

The endless garage doors and poured concrete floor make this most artists dream studio & it is actually a totally beautiful building. But it is less than ideal for a rock show! This will be our final show in Spain, as tonight we head for France.

This has been our route- with only one week to go!

not really... Johnny took this photo as we passed through the beautiful south of France on route to Spain.

We are all thankful to be done with the Italian shows, it is so difficult to work there. This morning I woke in Switzerland, beside this lovely community of garden sheds. I have always wanted to do a photo series of these little garden villages, which I have also seen in Sweden, The Netherlands & England