Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Music: New CDs - Spoon & New Order

After much hemming and hawing, I picked up the new Spoon: Gimme Fiction. This one grows on you after many listens.
Also got New Order: Best Remixes off iTunes (available online only). Can't go wrong with No.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Quotes: Stumble

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand. -Emily Kimbrough, author and broadcaster (1899-1989)

Friday, July 22, 2005


IMG_0299, originally uploaded by Shrez.

Near the corner of 2nd and Congress. Street art by Matthew Rodrigues. March 2005.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Art: Liebovitz/Kubricht - AMOA


Current show at AMOA
Annie Liebovitz: American Music
Charles Mary Kubricht: Scanning the Grand Canyon
The latter was interesting - engaging you with the massive landscape of the Grand Canyon in a unique way.

Art: New American Talent 20


New American Talent: The 20th Exhibition at Jones Arthouse.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Technology: Marrying the physical and virtual worlds

Article from today's NY Times - Marrying Maps to Data for a New Web Service. Nifty ways of marrying the physical and virtual worlds.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Movies: Rize


Saw Rize with Theresa, Tim and Marie at Dobie. Documentary by David LaChapelle about dance phenomenon in South L.A. - clowning and krumping. I love that word - krumping.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Movies: Paheli


A Bollywood film - Paheli - based on a folk tale and directed by Amol Palekar who has mostly done art films. Good story - somewhat over the top - but what Bollywood film is not. Made me homesick.

Art: Arthouse space to be renovated

Wow! Arthouse is going to renovate it's space. They have become a fixture in the contemporary art scene in Austin (and Texas). This is a great step forward and a boost for the art scene in Austin. From today's Statesman:
"Arthouse, the statewide contemporary arts organization, is expected to announce today that it has selected the up-and-coming New York-based architecture firm Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis to design a $2.5 million renovation of its building at Seventh Street and Congress Avenue." (full article)

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Music: ACL Fest Schedule released


Woo hoo! The ACL fest schedule is out and I have already marked down the shows I don't want to miss: Built To Spill, Doves, Wilco, Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Bloc Party, Thievery Corp., Allman Brothers, Lylle Lovett.

Monday, July 04, 2005

Austin: Stacy Pool

An article and photo gallery about Stacy pool in today's Statesman. I swim there some days in the winter when Deep Eddy is closed.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Technology: OQO handheld

Tim has one of these OQO handhelds at work. Nifty - very nifty.

Friday, July 01, 2005

Art: How a Japanese Master Enlightened the West

An article from today's NY Times about an exhibition in Washington: East Meets West: Hiroshige at the Phillips Collection
"Legend has it that mid-19th century French artists discovered the wonders of the Japanese woodcut when they examined papers used to wrap imported Japanese ceramics. Today, looking at the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, the greatest of Japanese woodcut printmakers, it is hard to fathom that their works could have been viewed as the equivalents of our funny pages.
And it is easy to see how Modernists from Manet to Bonnard could find in the lucidity and technical and formal economy of those Japanese artists inspirational guides for escaping the suffocating conventions of Beaux Arts and Victorian painting.
[It] interweaves the print series that made Hiroshige famous - "The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido" - with paintings from the museum's collection by famous artists like Cézanne, Whistler and Braque, as well as by artists of less sturdy repute like Augustus Tack, Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast.
....
Hardly any of the Western paintings in the Phillips Collection show convey that adventurous feeling of traveling through or into the picture.
That dimension of pictorial and psychic travel was left undeveloped by Western Modernist painting, which has tended to try to arrest the eye and the mind in the empirical here and now. But Hiroshige's kind of narrative did not die out. It flourishes in comic books, graphic novels and animated films that Eastern and Western artists continue to churn out in great volumes, transporting minds all over the world."