Classified Ad

This classified ad is from my local Shopper's Guide this week. I can't believe they ran it. What an obvious sexual solicitation by a horny old cowboy! "No pay, just fun?" This guy must be out of his mind. What college girl is going to want to "ride" this "older" (geezer, I'm sure) "gelding." For you city slickers, "gelding" is country code for either "no balls" or "can't get it up." Any experienced sex workers out there looking for a pro bono opportunity? Maybe by next week he'll get a clue and at least offer money for the requested "riding" services. I'll keep you posted.

By the way, anyone want to venture a guess what a college girl's "saddle" is?

Stan Herd

This is a poster of the one acre image created by crop artist Stan Herd to commemorate the introduction of the new Kansas quarter. The sunflowers were fashioned from corn and the buffalo included hay, mulch and soil. The background is an alfalfa field; the border is formed by a circle of 4oo standing people.

You can see other images of Herd's work as well as read about some of them at his website.

European Rednecks

This article from the NYT is hilarious! Who would have thought that the British have their own white trash? More seriously, perhaps we should rethink the current policy of throwing money at problems relating to the poor and uneducated victims of the hurricanes. Would you rather have poor dumb people or rich dumb people? Maybe we should change our tactics and work toward helping them become poor smart people.
-----------------

New York Times
September 30, 2005

At Wit's End, a Town Dithers Over Its Millionaire Pest

By Sarah Lyall

SWAFFHAM, England - Except possibly for Howard Carter, who discovered Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 (and who died a long time ago), 22-year-old Michael Carroll is by far Swaffham's most famous resident.

Known across Britain by his tabloid nickname, the Lotto Lout, Mr. Carroll won £9.7 million (about $15 million at the time) in the national lottery three years ago and showed up to collect his prize while wearing a police-issued electronic ankle bracelet. The question now raging in Swaffham is whether he deserves to throw the switch at the town's annual Christmas lights display, as he was briefly invited to do.

"I personally have nothing against him," said Terry Drake, a prominent local businessman who owns a hardware store on the main street of this busy old market town. "But a convicted criminal shouldn't be in a position to do something that children are supposed to look up to."

At this point, Mr. Carroll is not likely to be turning on anyone's lights except his own. After a huge public outcry, the town has rescinded the invitation and will probably have no holiday display at all this year (Mr. Carroll was going to pay for it).

If nothing else, Mr. Carroll, who did not respond to messages left at his house, has proved since winning that he is not the sort of person to let money turn his head: he has kept having run-ins with the authorities, the only difference being that he now drives nicer cars to court.

"Before he won the lottery, he was a nuisance," Charles Joyce, a local official, said. "He decided to carry on being a nuisance."

Among other things, he has appeared in court more than 30 times in the last three years. He has spent three months in jail on drugs charges, paid thousands of dollars in fines for vandalism and been evicted from several hotels after, for instance, ripping a chandelier from the ceiling while trying to swing from it.

He was recently ordered to perform 240 hours of community service - later increased to 300 - after shooting ball bearings through 32 car and shop windows with a catapult as he drove around in the middle of the night.

He has been issued with two antisocial behavior orders in two local jurisdictions forbidding him to threaten, harass or intimidate anyone in a 400-mile radius. He has been told by local government authorities to stop throwing raucous late-night parties and to stop holding demolition derbies on his land.

And he has been told to clean up the yard of his house, strewn as it is with tires, beer cans, food wrappers, wrecked furniture and the hulks of half-smashed-up old cars.

Mr. Carroll is an object of national fascination in part because of his apparently pathological criminality, and in part because he represents a kind of Briton known as a chav. Chavs, whether rich or poor, tend to favor gaudy jewelry and expensive-but-tacky clothes with big logos and to behave in a way that others find coarse or obnoxious.

Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a "council house facelift," from the term for public housing.

Mr. Carroll has "King of Chavs" printed on his Mercedes, a car known in the newspapers as the Loutmobile (its license plate reads L111 OUT).

The derivation of the word chav, which began to be widely used about a year ago as the problem of binge drinking in Britain's towns and cities became a huge national issue, is murky. Some say it comes from an 18th century Romany word meaning "child"; others believe it may come from the town of Chatham in Kent, known, apparently, for its large chav population (the theory that it is an acronym for Council Housed and Violent is most likely untrue).

Chav behavior - outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting - provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material. Among British women, Coleen McLoughlin, the girlfriend of the soccer star Wayne Rooney, is seen as a celebrity chav.

Ms. McLoughlin - whose new house with Mr. Rooney reportedly includes its own spray-tanning booth - is rarely photographed without a variety of designer-store shopping bags and a thong showing above her pants. Her 18th birthday party last year descended into chaos when the free drinks ran out and Mr. Rooney's uncle began yelling abuse at the waiters.

Others in the greater chav universe are David and Victoria Beckham, who would hate to be considered chavs but who nonetheless wore matching purple outfits and sat on matching thrones at their wedding; and Jordan, a former topless model who recently traveled to her own wedding in a Cinderella-style carriage shaped like a pumpkin and pulled by six white horses.

Mr. Carroll, who collects chav products like jewelry, cars and tattoos, has also experienced the underside of famous chavdom, with friends denouncing him publicly. His now ex-girlfriend told The Sun that Mr. Carroll believed that "the trees in his front garden are actually people disguised as trees," and spent his nights prowling around the house looking for intruders. "I'll tell him, 'Come back to bed, you stupid twit,' " she told the newspaper.

The Christmas lights offer came from Swaffham's honorary town crier, Eddie Godden, who is responsible for organizing the display this year. But after receiving letters of protest from across the country, the council not only decreed that Mr. Carroll was to go nowhere near the display (if there is one) but also removed Mr. Godden from his post.

"He has misbehaved, but he's done what most teenaged boys would do in winning that sort of money," Mr. Godden said of Mr. Carroll. "He's 22 and he's had a lot of bad publicity and he's already been to prison. This is the first conscious public thing he's done to give some money to a good cause. I think he was ready to make amends."

Is he ready to make amends? Mr. Carroll's lawyer, Neil Meacham, would not say.

"I get so many calls from television and the newspapers that unless you pay me, I really don't have time to talk to you," Mr. Meacham said in a brief interview. But he allowed that Mr. Carroll was "vigorously contesting" many of the outstanding charges against him.

Mr. Carroll recently participated in a charity boxing match with a television gladiator named Rhino, but Mr. Meacham declined to comment on the latest rumor: that his client is negotiating to star in a reality television series about the chav lifestyle.

"The only thing that is certain in life is uncertainty," Mr. Meacham said, and hung up the telephone.

De Stijl & signage

1. You can view and read (if you read Dutch) several issues of De Stijl, which was published from 1917 - 1932. Very cool.
   
2. In case you need to perform your own acts of guerilla public service, you might need these reference materials: Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) & MUTCD Standard Highway Signs.
   

Richard Ankrom: Guerilla Public Service

This story is brilliant! I know it's old, but I just got around to remembering it and posting it for posterity. And it continues to inspire me. This part especially interests me: He cites performance artists like...De Stijl, a Dutch magazine and group co-founded by Mondrian, which advocated an art which would invisibly blend into its surroundings." One of my approaches is almost a reversal of this statement. I like to find (what I consider to be) art that is commonplace and blended into its surroundings and highlight it through an art piece for all to recognize. If you want more about the story below, go to www.ankrom.org.
------------------------

Guerrilla Public Service: The Man Who Would Be Caltrans

Paul Cullum - LA Weekly

Passing north through downtown on the 110 freeway toward Pasadena, between the Third and Fourth Street overpasses, artist Richard Ankrom found himself suddenly confused by the lack of official signage for the 5 North exit. Not clearly labeled overhead like signs for I-5 South, those for the 5 North, which occur two miles later, are haphazardly stuck on a roadside traffic pole, an afterthought at best. Ankrom could have called Caltrans and officially complained, further burdening the beleaguered civic bureaucracy. But being an artist, he did the next best thing:

He fixed it.

That is to say, following explicit specifications he found on the Internet and verified in the field, he crafted a red-white-and-blue "5 shield" and green "North" sign out of 0.080 mm 5053 aluminum, covered it with zinc chromate primer and Pantene colors, added an "age patina" of gray paint, and even special-ordered button reflectors, which are discontinued and stockpiled in a warehouse in Tacoma, Washington. (He had to tell the pesky warehouse clerk it was for a movie -- not altogether untrue, as it turns out.)

After stashing the sign and a ladder in the roadside shrubbery -- and stenciling the side of his truck with the logo "Aesthetic De-Construction" -- he parked on the Third Street bridge just north of the existing sign, set out two orange traffic cones, donned an orange safety vest and hardhat, and physically mounted his homemade handiwork (taking care to sign the back first). He even mocked up a phony invoice, in the event that anyone objected. Yet despite legitimate road crews working the same stretch of freeway, no one seemed to notice.

Nor, in all probability, would they ever have, the sign having functioned perfectly fine since August 5, 2001, when he first erected it. Except that, being an artist, Ankrom felt compelled to document and display his actions in the form of a 10-minute installation video, which was shown at small gallery events and his own Brewery loft during the Art Walk two weeks ago, and has been posted on Netbroad caster.com since November. Opening on a GPS view of L.A.'s 527 miles of freeway, the video documents the entire artistic process from start to finish, culminating in the installation itself, which was witnessed by 11 observers (including the woman who once rescued the Chicken Boy statue from a downtown diner), three of whom were armed with video cameras. It also lists his accomplices by name, including the guy who gave him the haircut that made him look passably respectable, begging the question whether "criminal barberage" is a crime.

And then, against a backdrop of Martin Denny cocktail jazz and Jerry Goldsmith's theme from In Like Flint, there is Ankrom himself, eyes glowing pink in the pre-dawn light, looking like Satan, proclaiming: "I have taken it upon myself to manufacture and install these missing guide signs to ease the confusion and traffic congestion at this section of the 110 freeway."

Like the best art, almost nothing about this action was arbitrary. Interstate 5 links Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest, where as a child in Washington state, Ankrom used to dream of the pulsing megalopolis which lay Oz-like at the other end of it. Disillusioned with two months of junior college, he hitchhiked to California, where he has been self-employed for the past 20 years -- as a commercial sign painter. (His work can be seen at Ross Dress for Less, in the Moulin Rouge section atop the parking garage at the Universal CityWalk and in several hundred feet of relief-wall lettering at the Santa Anita Racetrack, which he completed while on the end of a 90-foot snorkel lift.) As antecedents, he cites performance artists like Chris Burden, who once had himself nailed to the top of his Volkswagen, as well as De Stijl, a Dutch magazine and group co-founded by Mondrian, which advocated an art which would invisibly blend into its surroundings.

"Essentially it's a conceptual piece," says Ankrom today from the imagined safety of his downtown loft. "It's such a broad swath -- it overlaps into performance and installation and public art and all these other things. I think the most interesting things are controversial. And I'm out on a limb too, because I don't know where I'm going to go with this now. But this is my idea of art. Art should be incorporated more into the government's system of design and concept."

He christens this new utilitarian commando aesthetic "Guerrilla Public Service."

Ankrom's past work generally incorporates the element of social critique. He has fashioned a series of acrylic hatchets, axes and medieval broadswords featuring flower petals suspended in the transparent blades. In response to the L.A. riots, he created a number of neon Taser guns, many with S/M overtones, which used active electric arcs. And long before the recent power crisis, he envisioned an art completely autonomous from the power grid, in the form of a satellite which would collect solar energy and microwave it back to a sculpture installation on Earth. (He plans to discuss the project with an upcoming delegation from the French consulate.)

But it's his recent additions to the 110 freeway, once known as the Grand Army of the Republic Highway between here and Long Beach, which currently preoccupy him -- in no small part due to the legal ramifications which still remain largely unexplored.

"I think the worst thing they could charge me with would be trespassing and defacing property, which I believe are still misdemeanors," he says. "But whatever the consequences are, they are. And that would again be part of the documentation of this thing. Even if I went to court, I'd get a public attorney, get a video-friendly judge, and videotape that. I wouldn't be able to pay the fine, so I'd have to do public service, which is sort of what I'm doing anyway. So it all comes full circle. But I would think if they were smart they wouldn't touch it, because it would only make them look worse.

"I really wasn't trying to give Caltrans a black eye," he insists. "It's too easy."

New Rule from Bill Maher

"Don't live close to the sea. If you build your home in a place where weather knocks houses over, weather will knock your house over. People who live in the Land of Oz have houses dropped on them all the time. You don't see them marching into Emerald City demanding a handout, do you? I'm sorry a big wind came and blew everything away but the La-Z-Boy and the orange velvet pool table, but hurricanes are God's way of saying, 'Get off my property!'"

If you haven't picked up Bill's book New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, you most certainly should. At least go spend an hour with it at the bookstore. It's refreshingly hilarious and offensive to everyone.

Re: No Postage

As evidenced by the overflowing Comments page, many of you have wondered, "What does it mean?" So I'll tell you: it doesn't mean a fucking thing! I just think it looks interesting; I like the visual vibration of the black bars; I like to highlight common visual sights that are generally overlooked. How many of you have ever counted how many black lines are under the "No Postage" box on a return envelope or postcard? They always fall out of the magazine when you're reading them; don't you look at them? Come on, people--observation! Do you know what those black bars mean? They don't mean a fucking thing either, as far as I can figure out! The number of bars varies, the sizes vary and the fonts vary. I really think the lines are just there to grab people's attention and let them know it's a postage paid envelope or postcard. Otherwise it would be easy to visually confuse them with the envelopes that say "Place Stamp Here" or something like that. If you must know, this piece isn't just some generalization of the common visual elements I've been describing. There are many different versions of the reply postcard, and I've made an exact model of a specific card. The dimensions are exact, the font is exact, the number of bars is exact. I used a table saw to cut the wood, but otherwise everything is handmade--hand sanded, hand painted. This is a folky-art replica of a mass- and machine-produced reply card from Dwell magazine.

Okay, maybe I just ascribed a bit of meaning to the piece. Now go inspect a reply card.

Latest Piece

NO POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES
Enamel on wood, with metal hardware
24¼ inches x 10⅛ inches
2005

NYT Art Story

(I like the ideas of Ms. Zittel much more than the finished products. I might describe myself as a conceptual artist, but instead of saying the ideas and processes are more important than the product, I would say they are certainly as important.)
----------------

September 25, 2005

Art as Roadside Attraction (click for photo option)

By Jori Finkel

AFTER five years of living in the high desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California, the artist Andrea Zittel has begun to toy with the idea of turning her home into a roadside attraction. "I've taken a lot of road trips and have always loved those places where you have to pay 75 cents to see carved stones or U.F.O.'s," she said. "Besides, I'm so close to the highway that it just seems right."

While she has no U.F.O.'s for now, some of the objects designed by Ms. Zittel for her 1930's homesteader's cabin might well be described as alien. There's her kitchen table, for example, into which she has carved small craters on either side to hold the food - no plates needed.

Or maybe the Raugh (pronounced raw) furniture dominating her living room - gray, high-density foam that she has cut into a mountainous shape, with enough nooks and crannies to serve as a chair, desk and daybed in one. Outside, you can imagine a line forming to try out her Wagon Stations, futuristic-looking steel sleeping pods planted in the dry, dusty landscape.

But the main attraction at A-Z West - as her home and workplace are known - would be Ms. Zittel herself. "I know that opening my home like that would be impractical," she said, sitting at the dishless kitchen table and glancing at her one-year-old son, Emmett, on the floor. "But maybe one day in the future I could figure out how to do it."

To some degree her home has already become an art laboratory, design repository and exhibition venue. She has opened her doors to a stream of artists, students, curators, and writers, and shared her 80 acres of land with other artists for a series of earthworks exhibitions called "High Desert Test Sites," which began in 2002. For the last Whitney Biennial, she created a PowerPoint presentation, "Sufficient Self," that offered an intimate tour of A-Z West and a meditation on the American tradition of rugged individualism.

"I moved here looking for one site where my entire artistic process could be unified," she said, adding, "I've struggled for years with the fact that museums and galleries are not the ideal settings for my work."

That issue is pressing as Ms. Zittel, 40, puts the final touches on her first American museum retrospective, "Andrea Zittel: Critical Space," which opens next weekend at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston before traveling to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in January. In February, the Whitney Museum of American Art will display her steel Wagon Stations at its branch in Midtown Manhattan.

The Houston retrospective covers 15 years of activity in a wide range of media, from her furniture to her more ephemeral personal experiments. "We're trying to show her whole trajectory, starting with the early pieces," said Paola Morsiani, a co-curator. "But because Andrea is so prolific, deciding what to put into the museum was a bit challenging."

So is showing just how closely her art is related to her everyday life. Like Rirkrit Tiravanija, who famously cooks Thai food in galleries at his exhibitions, Ms. Zittel often frames seemingly mundane experiences as art. When she moved to New York in 1990, fresh from graduate school, she was touched by the sight of so many discarded and broken objects on the street, like a wooden table with two legs missing and a plastic hubcap bent out of shape. She began taking the orphans home to her 200-square foot apartment and studio in Williamsburg to fix them up. She called the series "Repair Work."

"She works with propositions like a conceptual artist," said Shamim Momin, a curator at the Whitney, "but she never goes to the extreme where that gets really dry. She never goes so far as to say that the ideas behind the work are more important than the objects she makes."

Ms. Zittel ultimately gave her Brooklyn space a title, A-Z (since called A-Z East, to be distinguished from A-Z West), as if it too were a work of art. The conceit arose from frustration over not being taken seriously when she called manufacturers and suppliers for her projects. "I have this Southern California mall girl twang," she said, courtesy of her youth in a suburb of San Diego. The people who heard it, she said, "wanted to know who I was calling for. I would say 'me,' and they'd basically hang up." Soon, she began saying "A-Z Administrative Services" instead, and found it did the trick.

She still brands most of her artwork with the A-Z, and sometimes it's hard to tell where Andrea Zittel ends and A-Z begins. As she has told her students at the University of Southern California, where she began teaching as a "new genres" professor this semester, "For me the best things never start as art: they just start for fun, or as an experiment. You can always formalize them as art later on."

Take her A-Z Uniform series. As a gallery assistant in 1991, Ms. Zittel faced a challenge common to many entry-level New Yorkers. How do you dress well while making a measly $17,000 a year? Her solution was to pay a tailor good money to make a sturdy black linen dress that became her one and only outfit for six months.

It may sound like an experiment in sensory deprivation, but she insists, "I really did like that dress, and I felt I looked good in it, so I felt I looked good every day," said Ms. Zittel. "And the thing that kept me from going crazy from monotony is that the whole time I was wearing it, I was doing drawings of what my next uniform would look like."

The uniforms, which now include more than 45 variations, taught her a lesson: some constraints, especially those of one's own choosing, can be liberating.

She likes to make lists of things she can and cannot live without; for the latter, she offered "hot water, epidurals and heat." She has tried living without natural lighting for a week. She has purged her kitchen of plates and cups in favor of bowls. She taught herself to crochet without tools, using her fingers in place of needles.

She also welcomes space constraints. She has over the years built several kinds of portable chambers - most no bigger than a small closet - that can be plunked down into any apartment to serve various domestic functions. There are chambers outfitted for daily living (A-Z Living Units), cleansing (A-Z Cleansing Chambers), sleeping (A-Z Wagon Stations), even daydreaming (A-Z Escape Vehicles). In the cleansing unit, the bathtub doubles as a sink.

Because of her interest in industrial design, Ms. Zittel has been embraced by shelter magazines as the art world's answer to Philippe Starck. But she rejects this label and has declined requests to have her designs mass-produced. "I am not a designer - designers have a social responsibility to provide solutions," she said. "Art is more about asking questions."

"A lot of people think of me as a lifestyle artist," she said. "They talk about the bowls, or the uniforms, but they never go on to say that it's my way of commenting on the fact that our need for constant variety becomes oppressive. I think of what I do as a kind of practical philosophy."

Her New York dealer, Andrea Rosen, compared her to Richard Tuttle, suggesting that both use art to achieve a high level of consciousness. "Imagine that everything in your life, everything in your house, became an opportunity to find meaning," Ms. Rosen said. "Usually we wait to read that great book or have that great conversation to find meaning, but Andrea has created a structure whereby everything in her life becomes an opportunity for thoughtfulness."

Ms. Zittel prefers the word mindfulness, with its Buddhist connotations, saying it was one of her motivations for moving to the desert five years ago. "The desert focuses you," she said. "I thought it would make me a better artist."

Another draw was the community of artists she had met in Los Angeles through various teaching jobs. "All the artists I knew in New York were making art to show, art oriented to exhibition," she said. "My peer group here showed a little less, but they did things in their personal life that were fascinating to me. They had weird hobbies like building a 31-foot steel-hulled sailboat in their studio, or baking cakes and identifying bugs, or obsessively gardening, or getting their master's degree in knitting."

She now collaborates regularly with some of these artists, like Jennifer Nocon (the gardener) and Lisa Anne Auerbach (the knitter). Many of them have cooked up large-scale, site-specific works for her off-the-grid exhibition, "High Desert Test Sites." And several have signed up to customize the steel Wagon Stations that Ms. Zittel designed with both covered wagons and station wagons in mind. The plan is for each artist to individualize one of the stationary vehicles, which will essentially become their overnight desert lodgings once the works return from the Whitney to A-Z West next spring.

Then there's a hiking club, involving many of the same artists. For several years, the group took to the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles on Sundays. More recently, they have begun tackling the trails in the back of Ms. Zittel's property. Everyone who hikes wears a costume. Ms. Zittel wears her A-Z Uniforms.

She is careful not to claim the hiking club as her idea-"I don't want to co-opt it as my own; it's really a fun group activity." But, like so much in the "gestational pool" that is her life, these hikes are just one small step away from becoming a work of art. And that step will be taken from Oct. 21 to 24, during the Frieze Art Fair in London, when Ms. Zittel will organize a series of costumed hikes. She will also be pitching a tent in the fair's exhibition hall, where the dozen California hikers flying in for the event can camp out and greet visitors.

"The people at Frieze probably expected me to design chairs for the cafe," Ms. Zittel said. "But I wanted to do something more alive." Which, now more than ever, seems to be the driving force behind her highly inventive work.

A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park

New York Times
September 24, 2005
A Miniature Gate in Hot Pursuit of a Miniature Central Park
By Randy Kennedy

It is not an easy job, towing 150 tons of conceptual art around Manhattan all day. There are tides and wind currents to negotiate. There are ferries and container ships and police boats to avoid. And then there is the precious cargo itself, not exactly your average garbage scow: "Floating Island," designed by the artist Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, is a kind of waterborne jewel-box version of Central Park, built on a barge, with live trees and shrubs.

It's enough to give a tugboat captain angina. So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson's island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.

"I got my own job to do, you know what I mean?" Captain Henry said.

Approaching the Rachel Marie on its starboard side was a small motorboat, affixed to which was a replica of one of the saffron-colored gates created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that dotted Central Park last winter. Captain Henry remembered "The Gates" and, putting two and two together, he worried that maybe the man in the motorboat was planning on boarding his little version of Central Park and planting a gate somewhere among the trees.

"He was coming up on me a couple of times," recalled Captain Henry, the owner of Island Towing and Salvage in Staten Island and a plain-spoken 40-year veteran of the harbor. "I was trying to wave him off."

He added, sternly: "When I saw the kind of rig he was running, I didn't want him getting no closer. Joker like that? In a motorboat? I don't need that."

As all this was happening, a group of graphic designers in a studio in the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn, who had been monitoring the Smithson project's daily passing from their office window, caught sight of the little floating gate chasing the little floating park.

"We all thought it was kind of hilarious," said Ian Adelman, who took some photographs. A fellow designer, Elizabeth Elsas, went down to the waterfront, where the motorboat driver and a man with a video camera who had been towed behind the motorboat were already getting out of the water. A crowd of supporters were waiting, as if to receive Lindbergh after crossing the Atlantic. But the would-be art pirates, whom she described as being in their 20's and "art studenty," were not forthcoming with their identities or even particularly friendly.

"They said that they do some public art pieces themselves, and they thought the 'Gates' project was stupid and kind of wanted to comment on public art and make a joke about it," Ms. Elsas said, adding that, apparently, this joke was not meant to be funny.

"We were laughing about it," she said. "But they weren't laughing."

I live next door to an orgy of incestuous Chihuahuas.

Day and night they prance around their yard, frolicking, flirting and fucking.

First there were only Lily and Pepper, a stately middle-aged couple who enjoyed afternoon sun. But not long after Pepper's organ flared and his humping muscles hit high gear, Lily bore two wee Chihuahua children, Murphy and Patty.

One might be safe in assuming that a middle-aged couple with two children would present a most respectable addition to the neighborhood. One would be damn wrong!

Around mid-February, as the weather warmed and spring fever swept the canine community, Pepper's organ once again pulsed with desire. Only this time his gaze drifted, and he mounted his beloved young daughter, Patty, while his wife lounged serenely in the shade! Later that day, his passions yet undiminished, Pepper settled for his wife's plump tail end, out in the middle of their suburban yard.

Just yesterday, after silver-haired Pepper once again had his way with his submissive child, he turned for more to his wife, only to find his place usurped. The boy pup Murphy, after observing his father's frequent philandering with great interest, climbed atop his mother's ripe round rump and proceeded to hump the hell out of her!

Did Pepper angrily chastise the boy for his Oedipal urges? Did he save his quiet wife from such shame? No he did not! He merely sat down beside the pair while the bestial boy had his way with his own mother. And then he swapped his son for the sister and both had a second go!

Do your neighbors have any peculiar hobbies?

Home funerals

I heard a fascinating radio story on home funerals in South Dakota. You can listen to that specific segment by streaming it here: http://www.nextbigthing.org/stream/ram.py?file=nbt/tnbt031705d.ra.

The radio piece was taken from a documentary on the same subject called "A Family Undertaking." You can read about it at the PBS website.

I find all of this very interesting and appealing, as opposed to creepy and weird. But maybe I'm strange. I think I'd like to explore this option a bit more for my own circumstances. I have frequently thought that cremation would be my first choice, but recently wondered if a pine box wouldn't be more natural. I'd like to have a tree planted overhead, to benefit from my decomposing body.

Death and the Fibonacci sequence

My wife's grandmother is "on her death bed." I never knew what that meant until now. While family members were mingling and reminiscing, I was reading the hospice care pamphlet on the end table. They list a whole sequence of signs and symptoms of the approach of death. The body methodically slows and shuts down, while going through the process of dying. There were notes about skin color, body movements, eating/drinking habits, etc. Last was a note about breathing that reminded me of the birthing process. The lengths of time between gasping breaths slowly increase, much like the lengths of time between contractions slowly decrease during labor.

In the beginning, professionals keep tabs on the spaces between the contractions. Life takes its time getting started; the spaces between the contractions slowly get smaller and smaller. Like an old truck engine slowly cranking over, until the engine takes off and roars to life.

At the end, involuntary contractions of breath gradually decrease in frequency as life's watch spring winds itself down. The spaces between the contractions slowly grow longer and longer. We feel the need to measure things out, even to the end.