ACL Isn't Real

ACL (Austin City Limit) starts this weekend.  Unfortunately for us long-time Austin residents, the weather is projected to be absolutely great - cool evenings and only moderately hot days, with no rain.  Unlike the day shown above, where we were sure a spaceship would come out of that rain cloud.  Nope, within 5 minutes of that cloud forming we had the rain pouring in:  

These views are from our balcony.  That shiny stuff in the bottom right corner?  Well, Susan thought there was an ugly scratch on the railing so .... aluminum sticky tape like the air conditioner repair people use.  She thought about spelling out in morse code something really tacky but just randomly wrapped strips around instead.  Sometimes we have incredible sunrises:

Why do we care what the weather is this weekend?  We want it to be horribly bad so that all the people coming in to Austin for ACL will not say "Wow.  What a great city with terrific weather.  Let's move here!"  No, No, No.  Don't come.  We are full.  No Vacancy.  10th worst traffic in the nation for medium-size cities.  Stay where you are!

But if you decide to come, here are some bands you'll be able to hear:

Foals

Chairlift

Band of Horses (do they know Foals?)

Jazzy Ash & The Leaping Lizards 

Frightened Rabbit

St Paul and the Broken Bones

Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds

I have no idea what any of those sound like because I listen to Oldies from the 50's and 60's on Pandora.  But cool names!  I need to get more creative when naming my ceramic pieces, instead of calling these pieces "Bird 1" and "Bird 2".

BOHICA

Finally my Blog Wrangler notices that Google will remove the slideshow option from this blog at the end of the month. That's the little pictures that flip around at the top right where it says "Some Of My Art".  Thanks a lot, Google. First you take away Picasa Web and now this.  Just another example of:

BOHICA:  

Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

And I have no reason why my name is in this urinal but it seems to go nicely with this blog's topic.

What's On Your Bulletin Board?

It's a little different from what I displayed back in February.  If you can't read what the top note is, this is what it says:

Unlike math, art has no wrong answers

I like to pick up stuff I spot on the ground when I'm walking or biking.  I've had little nut-like pods on my shelf for a while and Susan decided one of them needed to go with a little Sweater Child.

The Sweater Children also become Train Children and travel to .... somewhere. They latch onto the trains via a strong magnet glued to their backs so I hope they stay in place at least long enough for someone to spot them.

Shuttlecocks and a Train

A fellow artist told me she liked reading about places we traveled to because she didn't get to travel that much.  So that's why I'm backing up to show you more of stuff we've encountered on our recent trips.  Actually Susan does hours of research to determine the bestest and mostest good stuff to see, so much research that by the time we get ready to go she complains she doesn't need to go.

A 17-foot high shuttlecock on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.  The good thing about this sculpture is that the bird poop doesn't show up. 

The sculptures were very controversial when first proposed, but, as usual, loud protests probably came from people who didn't bother to read the artist statement, here. 

Why were we in Kansas City? To see art, of course.  The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art had a special exhibit of 6 ceramic artists and the Nelson-Atkins had an exhibit of 24 different ceramic artists.  I saw so much inspiring stuff my head exploded. Both museums were within walking distance of each other and that made it nice.  Also nice was good weather so we got to enjoy the outdoor sculptures in a well-designed space.

At first it looked like a tree painted silver, but then we got closer to it.  Somebody did a lot of shopping at Home Depot.

We really liked Kansas City, easy to get around and the grounds at the Nelson-Atkins were a nice break from the heat..  A second reason to go to Kansas City was to see the World War I museum.  We'd been there once before when it just opened but only saw a small portion of the exhibits - we go slow and read all the signs. Hey, it's History!  This time around we still didn't see everything so we'll have an excuse to go back again. 

Watch the trains in your area.  There may not be many more carrying hitchhikers like this because they've quit stopping near where I live probably because of the nearby MoPac-olypse construction (2 years late, zillions over budget.) I'm under strict orders to avoid trying to put anything on a moving train

We Remember, September 11

Pop, we remember.  Rest in peace. 

Whatever

 

The Blog Wrangler speaks:

Life is never simple.  I loved Picasa Web. It was simple. It was easy. It went away.  I hated that.  I finally had to suck it up and throw these pictures into some other Google thing I have to figure out.  I hate that IE, which I've used for a zillion years is cranky so I have to use Chrome just to read the daily newspaper.  And Twitter?  Won't let me log in via IE so I have to go to Chrome.  Don't you nerdy people dare tell me other browsers are great, I hate having load one more program onto my desktop.  (But I love the Hanx Writer app on my phone.)

 

Pop-up ads?  EVERYWHERE.  No, I don't want your coupon, I just want to look at your website.  No, I don't want to evaluate my "experience" on your website - If you want my opinion, pay me for it!

 

You can tell I'm really cranky about all this.  Yep, and not only am I  cranky, for months now I quit looking at stuff, lots of stuff, lots of blogs, lots of websites.  Okay, I'm getting over it.  But I'm not making any promises. 

 

What about Don?  Not ONCE did he ever ask me when I was going to update his blog.  He is a wise man and preferred to keep his head (and his junk) attached.

 

Enough about me. Don has been making lots of little guys.  And birds. He gets his head into a Zen Zone and makes lots of dots on things. 



What have we been doing for the past spring/summer months, besides, on my cranky part, whining a lot? We took a 4,500 mile road trip to the east coast and over to Ohio.  We took another trip to Kansas City, which we liked - lots of art to see there.  We are in the process of redesigning my studio area which is a little hard to do in a small apartment.  I say its like redecorating inside a submarine because no matter what you do there won't be anymore square footage. We went to Phoenix last month for ArtUnraveled and right now Don is at AdornMe in Houston.

This post took me about a hour to do.  I had to figure out the picture deal, then had find the Blogger password and then figure out what the heck I used to do to get anything going.  I need a nap now.

Late edit:  A title! Dang-it, I knew I'd forgotten something.