Janatastic

This video is from the Sicily trip. It's taken me a long time to post, but I really think it's worth it. I'd be surprised if you disagreed. It gets serious around sec. 48.

Christmas Ground Zero

So, our friends Z. & N. left town for vacation and they let us dog/house sit their wonderful apartment down in the Monte neighborhood. It was great to get out of our castle on the hill and down into the city. It really felt much more like we lived in a city. On the hill, it's easy to never leave the grounds, and, thus, have very little interaction with the city at large. In a similar way to how easy it is to never leave Brooklyn. Anyway, we got to dog-sit, watch TV and DVDs, and have a relaxing, "normal" life. It was both novel and delightful.

Eventually, we cam back up the hill in time for Christmas preparations. Speaking of Christmas, did I mention that I was an elf in the Christmas play? Well, I was. Every year, the Fellows put on a little Christmas play for the staff and I was drafted (thanks Lisa). Did I mention it was a musical? Have you ever heard me sing?

Surviving that, we spent Christmas Eve church-hopping. First we went to the Pantheon to what we thought was going to be a big choir. But it was only a lonely cantor. And, between him being miked and the crazy marble hemisphere acoustics of the place it was re-verb city. So we bailed and went to Santa Maria in Trestevere which was quite nice. We got there just in time for my favorite part of the ceremony where everyone turns to their neighbor and wishes them Merry Christmas and Peace be with you. Then we went home and went to sleep.

The next day, Christmas, we helped make a giant brunch for everyone around for the holidays. We've been lucky enough to have James Beard award-winning Scott Peacock as guest chef the last couple of day, which has been a treat in and of itself. But it was extra great to spend a little time in the kitchen with him and all the other Academy Fellows who helped out. After brunch, we went upstairs, read, and then watched Fratello, Dove Sei? (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?)

ADM's Drawing Machine Beta.v2

OK, I I fixed a bunch of bugs in the last release and have added some functionality, including the ability to load sample XML, split, add and divide segments. All key commands are now documented below the app. If you want the source code (still not really notated) let me know. In the mean time, check it out: drawing tool

Also, how to draw a unicorn.

Drawing Life vs. Drawing Machine

We've been having a "life drawing" session which meets almost every week. It's really nice to be drawing a model again, and this model is the best any of us have ever worked with. She's an ex-gymnast and gets the most amazing torque in her body and can hold the (often very inventive) poses for a long time. It's really awesome. Everyone in the class is mellow and excited to be there. The quality is super-high; many people doing amazing photo-realism in a matter of minutes. It's an interesting baseline. I'm not really going for the whole photo-realism thing, but am having a lot of fun feeling my eye and hand sync up again.

Also, if anyone has The Coup: Genocide and Juice, that would also be appreciated.

ADM's Drawing Machine Beta

OK, I think I've finally got a Beta version of the drawing tool you might have checked out a month or so ago. Again, I need to re-create Illustrator so that I have access to all of the point/line/shape/color information. The new version has some cleaned up code, and you can now load/adjust images from anywhere. Also, there's a whole new adjustment panel set. Code and desktop versions coming soon. Must clean everything up a little more and annotate. Please let me know if you find any bugs. Thanks.
Also, a big shout out to Linh for the Yoshimi hook-up, and how to draw a penguin

The Fall of Rome

So, Fall has hit Rome. Actually it hit a while ago, but as I said earlier, my camera with all those photos on it got jacked. So, anyway, Fall has hit Rome, which means the days are either sunny and in the 70s or rainy and in the 40s. I prefer one of these over the other. It's like Seattle, except with sun.

Oh, I keep meaning to mention that I'm missing some music, since my iPod died before I left. So if any of you have any of the following handy, I'd much appreciate it: Vampire Weekend
new Wolf Parade (is that out yet?)
Beatles White album
M.I.A. new album
London Calling
Flaming Lips: Yoshimi, and Clouds
R. Kelly
Silver Jews
or anything else that's come out that you think I'd like.

Below, you will find photos of Fall, the presentations I hosted (Amanda Field :poet, Lisa Sanditz :painter, and Jason Atkinson :composer), subway ride from the German Academy open studios, and our day trip to St. Peter's Basilica.

Nary a Falcon

So, I probably would have posted an update a little while ago, but on our trip to Malta, my fucking camera got stolen out of my luggage. Thank you Roman baggage handlers. So, this means, along with losing my pretty little camera, I also lost our Venice Biennale pictures -- which primarily consisted of shots of myself wearing too few clothes/shivering, but also had some nice shots of Venice (turns out it's still pretty) and of me climbing things.

So, we'll have to skip ahead in the narrative of our European Odessy, to the time in November when S. was asked to come down and give a lecture/reading at the University of Malta as part of American Culture Week.

Malta is a large piece of limestone, just north of Africa, in the Mediteranean. Malta is probably best know for the bombardment it withstood during WWII and for the Knights of Malta.

The tiny island had more bombs dropped on it than London. This forced the people to tunnel into their limestone home and live what was basically a troglodyte existence. This is chronicled in Pynchon's V. Acutally, for such a small place, Malta crops up in a lot of literature.

The Knights of Malta were started in the 16th century, as sort of an educated/wealthy gentleman's Catholic Marines. The idea was that wealthy European families would send a son to Malta to ensure that Catholicism didn't lose any ground to the Muslims. They were hard core, and had lots of cool symbols. The sort of white Iron Cross on a red background symbol is everywhere.

The other cool/weird thing about Malta is that they speak a pigeonized Arabic, that's written with Latin letters. As different cultures have occupied the island, they've added a bit to the language. So it's Arabic + Portugese + English + Italian + ... Only it's written out with our letters instead of Arabic script. The signs reminded me of the Celtic signs in Ireland.

We stayed in Valletta, right next to the Prim Minister's office, and right around the corner from where the Queen (of England) was holding her 60th wedding anniversary. -- She had originally met and been courted by Edward when he was stationed in Malta. She invited a handful of couples who were also celebrating their 60th Maltese wedding anniversary to the ceremony. Much to S.'s chagrin, we did not see the Queen.

Everything in Malta is made out of limestone. They excavate and stack it to make buildings, they dig tunnels, they make sculpture out of it, etc. And, what's more, they've been doing it for a long long time. Malta is home to the oldest free-standing structure in the world (older than Stonehenge) and the thrid and forth largest free-standing domes.

Anyway, as I said, our hosts were both the U of M and the American Embassy. At the U of M, Dr. Ivan Callus was really wonderful. He and Dr. James Corby took us around and gave us great restaurant recommendations.

S. and I were did a lot of consulting on how to make a good writing program and what the students and professors might expect from such a program. The delightful Abigail Zammit will be leading the new program and we're excited to see how it goes. We're hoping to be in close contact with them as it develops.

We're thinking it'll be pretty smooth as they're dealing with an exceptional bunch of students. The students, chiefly Theodore, Katrina, Charis, and James helped coordinate our entire stay and set up the reading. We were consistently impressed with these four and several other students whom we met. In addition to the great conversations and hang-out time, they led us around Valletta on our final full day. The students then made a hand-off to Dr Stella Borg Barthet, who was kind enough to drive us around, and act as tour guide.

One of the funny things we noticed was that whenever we asked someone if they were from "here", they would reply, "no, I'm from a twon that's nearly 30 minutes away."

Items of note:
the day S. was to give her lecture on Influence and Innovation, she got food poisoning and swelled up like a beet. (see below for pictures) The hotel called a doctor, but it was going to take a half hour for him to get to us. So I said, call the hospital. And they said, well, the hospital just moved this week, so they're not very reliable right now. So I said, Well, what do you do if someone has a heart attack? and they said, well, we call an ambulance, but it takes them a half hour. 911 is a joke. When the doctor finally got there and treated S., as she was getting better he said, there, now you've got your healthy pallor back.

There was a large Carravagio exhibit while we were there. Did you know that C. was a Knight of Malta before starting a brawl and being kicked out of The Knights?