Shepard Fairey Around Boston

Shepard Fairey is coming to the ICA in Feburary (Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand) and the ICA set up some approved areas for him to post his work (Radical chic Shepard Fairey posters Harvard Square). I thought it would be a fun project to go around the greater Boston area and take a look at all the spaces.

I work in Central Square so I decided to check out the graffiti wall near Central Kitchen on one of my lunch breaks. I could not tell what was his and I had no camera so I decided to come back on the weekend after I had had a chance to see the Harvard Square site.

On Saturday I got on the T to do some graffiti (Street Art) hunting. I thought it would be fun to take Granger, the best English Lab in the world, on the T. I got half way there and I remembered Big G's stair phobia. He might not make it up the stairs once he got down. I hoped there were elevators. Granger paused at the stairs at Alewife and skittered a little on the tile floors. Once we got on the train he did great and got some attention from passengers. There were Elevators at Harvard so he was fine.


The first space I came to was at the Massachusetts Ave / Brattle St / JFK St‎ intersection on the walled off store front of what was previously The Greenhouse. The Greenhouse was a great little dive with really good fries and chocolate cookies. I don't know why they closed it down and why nothing has replaced it. Around the corner at the wall outside of the Gap and the basement of The Tannery is the second Harvard Square entry. I really liked this piece.

There was a blues duo in the square. Two older guys. One doing some nice guitar work and the other had a classic blues voice and played the harmonica. I called my friend CJ back in LA to share the musical joy. The high pitched harmonica was the only thing that made it past my cell phone speaker.

After that G and I walked down towards Central Square. We passed the Harvard Lampoon building on the way there and I was happy to see it decorated as a pumpkin for Halloween. Nothing seemed particularly Shepard Fairey but there was some really cool stuff there. All central square visitors should stop and take a look at the graffiti wall.

There was a little bit of a struggle to find a stair case with the proper lighting and width (He doesn't like closed dark spaces) to keep Granger from being spooked. Once he got past the T security doors he was pretty calm and got on the train with no problem. At Alewife he was happy to take the elevator up and all went well.

The next weekend I ran down pretty close to sunset with Pam to Union Square to see the display there. I was not that familiar with the square so it took awhile to find it and we had to wander a bit to get our bearings. Pam noticed a comic book store and suggested we ask them. Props for her keen eye. I asked the girl behind the counter if she knew where the Shepard Fairey street art was displayed and she kind've looked at me cross eyed. Then I showed her the clip out of the Pheonix (See Above) and asked where the Boutique Grand was. She knew exactly what I was talking about and pointed us in the right direction. By the time I got there the sun was pretty low and I was worried about the quality of the photo. When I went to take the picture I realized that the battery in the camera was dead. No biggie. I should come back when the sun is higher anyway.

The next Saturday I was determined to get all of the remaining sites captured. Granger jumped in the back of the Mazda and we went on our trek. I first went back to Union Square and took a picture of the little girl holding a hand grenade rose. Provocative, No? I like all of the images of flowers with weapons. Of course it reminds me of the famous image from the 1967 March on the Pentagon. All of his subjects seem very unconscious of the message they are sending.

There was no convenient place to tie Granger off so I skillfully to took the picture while simultaneously holding his leash.

Next I went down to Montgomery Street in the South End. As always is the case in the South End or anywhere in Boston proper it was challenging to find parking and I had no idea where on Montgomery Street it would be. Finally after circling the neighborhood a half dozen times I stole a residents only spot in front of the school on M Street. I assumed the display would be on some concrete wall near this urban looking area. I took Granger out of the hatchback and started to look around. There was no street art to be seen in this area so I walked west towards the town homes. The street looked quite nice with the fall colors. The poster space was at the end of the street. When I got there a couple was putting there child into their car and seemed slightly curios as to why I was standing outside of their townhouse.

This poster was a combination of The Tannery and Union Square displays.


Coming back to my car I was happy to see that there was no ticket and no one had taken particular offense to me taking a private spot.

Next stop was the International Bicycle Center in Alston. As I was traveling down Brighton Ave. I found an open spot but there was someone double parked just in front of the space. I waited to see if he was going to take it but eventually assumed that they were not interested. I started into the spot and suddenly the car started moving aggressively into the space. After he parked I felt bad so I pulled up next to the driver to apologize for appearing to steel his spot. He misinterpreted my intentions and gave me the evil eye. I motioned for him to roll down his window and he started to but then waved me off. I found a spot two cars behind him and lingered with Granger a little to see if the offended parker would walk my way but he never surfaced. Was I looking for trouble or some imagined restitution with this stranger. I guess I felt bad thinking that he would be pissed off all day thinking he was hassled by another, in this case imaginary, obnoxious Boston driver.

Just as I got to the International Bicycle Center a couple arrived to look at the display. The guy kept trying to take a picture of the poster unpolluted buy his girlfriends attempts to obtain his attention. Every time he would tell her to get out of the way she would move and then jump back into the frame with a whimsical little dance and pose. Finally he got his picture or just accepted his lot in life and left the wall for me to photograph. You can sneak a peak of the pair on the left.

All in all a great way to spend a couple of weekend days. If you want to see all of the pictures and download larger size images see my photo stream on Flikr.

Oh and this is my desk top as of Dia de los Muertos.


Addendum: schmeeeb found this at Harvard. http://tontowasgreen.posterous.com/shepard-fairey-art-in-harvard-square

A conversation with John and Me about Darwin's Black Box

Seriously .. u are asking me if I think the earth is 6K years old after I have been arguing in favor of evolution for the last few months. I don't believe the earth is 6K years old becouse that would be silly.

How do u fit God into this?You mean the Christian God. Well God is everywhere

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

The supposedly "Random" effects may happen at the quantum level. Maybe God directs that with gentle nudges until he gets what he wants. It seems to me that most creationists are actually deists who believe that God has created the world and it will run it's course as prescribed with no room for novelty.

Here is an Exert from Wikipedia on Deism "Enlightenment thinkers, under the influence of Newtonian science, tended to view the universe as a vast machine, created and set in motion by a creator being, that continues to operate according to natural law, without any divine intervention."

To me it seems like the God of the bible is a dynamic God who wants to interact with his creation but also allows his creation to have it's own creative force.



----- Original Message ----
From: john hariot
To: Michael Jones
Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2008 12:54:31 AM
Subject: Re: a biochemists viewpoint on how the eye works and evolution

very interesting what you say. I think im following you.How do you merge
or blend God into all this?
And i was thinking about another thing. Do you beleive like many bible
scholars that the earth is 6 or 10 thousand years old? And why or why not?

Michael Jones wrote:
> I read Darwin's Black Box a few years ago and thought about this issue of irreducible complexity. One thing struck me. Viruses that are likely to not have been around at the dawn of time such as HIV have seemingly irreproducible complex mechanisms in there interaction with humans. And we see similar but equally irreproducible mechanisms with other species such as monkeys. It is more likely in my thought that human HIV evolved from a monkey strain rather then God creating both irreducible mechanisms at the beginging of creation. It is true that we see these very complex mechanisms in the cell but we also see lots of seamingly uneccesary components and redundant components. Another explanation for the aperance of irreproducible mechanisms is a trimming down of the redundant components, as they are unecessary, until all the fat is gone and we have a mean clean machine.
>
>

I saw the Movie Hombre this weekend in the wee hours of the morning. I really liked the character Jessie. I thought she was mean at first but she really grew on me. Here is some dialog.

Doris: I like Dr. Favor.
Doris: He has such lovely manners.
Doris: I was noticing his hands.
Doris: He keeps his nails so nice and clean.
Audra: He's very proud of his hands and feet, they're so small.
Audra: I, on the other hand, am proud of his brain. It's very large.
Doris: He reads a lot, doesn't he?
Doris: Far into the night, which is just as well. 'Cause when he takes his trousers off and folds them neatly and hangs them over the back of a chair, that sharp, exciting intelligence of his doesn't count for very much. All we're left with is thin, spindly legs with those little blue veins on them and all the knots and bumps.
Jessie: A love match, huh?
Audra: When I was 18 and a student of his and I heard him read Robert Browning. But now I'm 35, and I hear him cough up phlegm.
Doris: They all make those noises... bathroom noises and bedroom noises.
Audra: Well, I suppose we've all felt the same chill.
Jessie: Not me. I like men. They may have put a little gray in my hair, but I keep coming back for more, so they must have something.

Dusk at Cubist Castle

I really like this picture. Seems like a place I would love to visit. I like the starkness of the landscape set against the minimalist hotel and the telescope off in the distance. I wonder if they have to dim the lights for night viewing.




Space.com Image of the Day

Quote from Pam

i made tuna
it sounded good
i ate that and then fell asleep

Windmills

IMG_0447
Originally uploaded by Michael Jones.

He was buried deep when he felt the turbulence around his right foot. The sheet of blue green fell in front and to the right of him as the opposing surface raced up on the left. There was an opening straight ahead that he raced for. That's the problem with the green room. You rarely enjoy it while you're there since you are always trying to escape. This is especially true when you’re suspended only 3 feet above a solid razor sharp surface. Daylight came into view only to reveal the wall curving in towards the shore and the curtain falling in front of his new opening. He knew it was closing in from behind as well. This time the opening at the end of the tunnel was large but it was a long way off and it was closing. He lifted his arm out of the water and rapidly alternated his position slightly to increase his speed. He made it to the opening just as the white foam obscured any path to escape. He could imagine the disappointed groans from the local boys on the cliff. He knew the cost of getting caught in the collapsing cave. This wave was triple overhead when he took off on it. It was big and steep at Windmills and even though it was crowded only one rider was paddling for a wave at a time while the rest scrambled up the face to avoid getting thrown over. The drop was vertical and the takeoff contained a moment of uncertainty when he could have just as easily gone over the falls. The wave retained all of its power but it was concentrated in this small room that was feeling more and more claustrophobic by the second. The collapse would hurt. At best knock the wind out of him and at worst drag him across the reef while he tried to find a way back to the surface. He reached down to grab the nose of his board to attempt an escape through the back of the wave. That'€™s when he heard the hissing. The wave was collapsing behind him and like a freight train the compressed mist was approaching, ready to push him through the recently collapsed exit. He flew out of the barrel and as the wave collapsed behind he coasted into the channel. He heard the boys and girls on the cliff hoot their joy and disbelief. He outstretched both of his arms towards the sky and gave the crowd the finger with both hands. He felt they deserved that much. He thought about paddling in. Best ride of the day. Can’t get any better then that. He flopped down on his board and paddled out scratching over the face of the last wave of the set.

The Ride from Anadarko

I know the day my life changed. My family and I were heading to California. Home from a trip to visit my grandma. We were leaving the holiday inn heading out to New Mexico to see the Carlsbad Caverns and then to Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon. My Dad was going to meet us in Las Vegas. The holiday inn had the best lemonade I had ever tasted in my 9 years of experience. Dad was with us most of the trip but flew home early for work. I knew a time in Las Vegas meant unprecedented freedom. We would stay at some kid friendly hotel like Circus Circus. I would get unlimited quarters for arcade games and I could wander around the hotel without anyone checking up on me. I loved sneaking around in the stair wells that were only meant to be used for fire escapes but were open to the outside. I would try and sneak into the basement or best of all get onto the roof and see the strip, or some other feature of the surrounding area, from a perspective that I thought no one else appreciated. I remember some strange mechanical structure in the parking lot. I think it was a crane. At the time it seemed like some great relic of industrial development. The mysteries of the adult world were apprehensible to the attentive young boy. I admired the women who flirted with me and the men they attached them self’s to in the elevator. This was ideal road trip for a 9 year old boy.

The trip to the inn was just as memorable. I loved my family and I loved experiencing new things. We came to my grandma’s house by way of Fort Worth. This was where my Dad’s parents lived. We had to call them Grand mother and Grand Father. They were Methodists. It was summer and the road was hot. I saw those mirages on the ground at every dip in the road. They still amazed me. How much they looked like water. The desert north of Fort Worth is flat and barren, as I remember it. The July sun was blazingly hot. The heat was dry. In contrast to the incredibly humid Fort Worth heat. I tried to appreciate the out doors once at Grandmothers house. I went into the back yard and laid in their hammock. Within minutes I was miserable from multiple mosquito attacks. I scratched for days after, until the swollen wounds bled. Mom was able to convince me that scratching wouldn’t help. We had no air condition in the car. Dad gave each of us water so that we could cool our selves off on the drive. We were told to save it till it got really bad. Soon it was really bad. I poured a small amount of my ration on my chest and it evaporated immediately. I then dumped the remainder on my head and it ran down my back and sides but never hit the seat. I could tell my mom was begrudging my dads hack attempt at making the ride tolerable. The road was a long, strait two lain road. You could see boring flat desert in all directions. Not like the amazing Arizona or Utah deserts I had seen before. At one point Dad let me sit on his lap and steer. This made mom very anxious and he immediately stopped the procedure.

When we crossed over into Oklahoma we came across rivers whose waters were colored by the red mud which could be seen along the shores. My mom always pointed stuff out like this because she knew these natural phenomena interested me. They interested her too. She told us a story. My grandfather had taken a dare from his friend to swim from the shore of one of these murky red rivers to a log they had spotted near the edge of the opposite shore. He tired himself out swimming across and had intended to rest on the log when he got there. Unfortunately when he touched the log he quickly realized that it was a sleeping alligator. He rushed back to his shore of origin. The landscape had changed as we crossed over the boarder. The land was green with rolling hills. I think I had been complaining about how flat it was because my mom pointed out that there were mountains in Oklahoma. I mocked the ones I was seeing. Quietly or vocally I don’t remember. They were dwarfed by the Santa Monica Mountains that surrounded the west San Fernando Valley and they were made insignificant by the Sierra Mountains my brother bragged about scaling. I was already learning to express notions of superiority and a monopoly on the truth. I am not sure when my father left us to head back home but I don’t remember him at Grandma’s house.

Grandma’s house was very old. It was the first house in Anadarko to be built and occupied by a non Indian family. My grandmother was the first white women to be born in that town. This fact seemed to not be very intriguing to some local Indians whom my sister found to make small talk with on a subsequent visit. They politely ignored her comments. The house had a garage, or work shop, filled with ancient treasures. I remember an old ice box and my other brother told me about a first addition playboy that was hidden in there. The one with Marylyn Monroe on the cover. He spent more time in Texas and Oklahoma then any of the kids. He went to school in Waco. On one visit they told him that he could take anything he wanted from the garage. He had always been a collector. Particularly a collector of magazines. I had previously defiled his meticulously arranged collection of mad magazines as I read them and folded the hidden message page on the back on summer days. Great summer days of country time lemonade, I hadn’t experienced the true lemonade of the holiday inn, saltine crackers and messing up the chronological order of all of my brother's Archie comics and Mad magazines. For my brother the First playboy would have been the mother load. Actually that would be a great investment for anyone who understood the collectors market. He was two embarrassed to ask for it. He is sure that some, not all to altruistic do-gooder, who volunteered to “Clean Up” the garage after my Grandma died, got all of the good stuff. I think the house was Spanish style. There were rounded arched passage ways between rooms. I could clime up them side ways with my hands on one side and my feat on the other. Like a chimney clime in a wide gap. The house was adjacent to a small apartment or office rental that Grandma owned. It had two rooms. It was a great place to escape to when you just wanted to hang out with kids. My brother had come up at some point on this trip with some of his friends and a cousin or two. They all wanted to hang out there one night. I didn’t want to be left out and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want me there. Mom made my brother include me. He seemed only slightly disappointed and then tried to make me feel included. I thought that the older boys were mocking me when they all came back from getting burgers. I unwrapped mine and it had a bite taken out of it. It was intended as a joke for one of the other guys. And they made the true victim accept the damaged burger as he protested. “I’m not going to eat it. You gave it to him!”. They responded, “Common you can’t make him eat it”. Later that night Johnny Carson made a joke to one of his guests which featured an innuendo that went strait over my head. As they all laughed I begged them to decipher it for me. They seemed to all speak in chorus that I was too young. This was a joke for older people. Gramma’s house was also filled with bugs. They would fall on you at night from the ceiling. Very creepy. I don’t think she was uncleanly. It was just the nature of an old house in an area like that. The bugs at night did creep me out although I cried and fought with my sister over one daddy long leg that she insisted must die and I insisted was a living being worthy of our protection. I don’t think I saved that one.

Grandma was great. She could be silly like my mom could be. She stayed up late and played cards and she joked about her age when I was amazed that the skin under her arm swayed to and fro as I batted it back and forth with my hands. Grandmother would have never have appreciated the humor in that. Grandma, however, could not cook and Grandmother was amazing. That made up for a lot of the latter’s diminished since of fun. I also had an accident in the Anadarko house. I peed in the bed. It wasn’t that I was prone to bed wetting or that I had been subjected to any recent trauma. I simply needed to pee so I dreamed that I got up out of bed walked to the bathroom in Grandma’s house and released the pressure in my bladder. The dreamed turned sour as I wondered why I wasn’t hitting the toilet and why my leg was getting wet.

I don’t remember leaving grandma’s. I just remember the great anticipation I had about seeing the caverns in New Mexico and visiting, what my oldest brother had referred to as, the world’s biggest whole in the ground. We would get bored on the drive and play some standard games like license plate alphabet or 21 questions. We never played slug bug. Maybe it didn’t exist yet. Better then that, we all got a turn to tell the story of some movie we saw. I think that was mostly my brother's idea. And he was the best story teller. He loved movies. I wished that I could tell the stories as well as my sister and brother and they got bored when it was my turn. The holiday inn was great. I already told you about the Lemonade. The pool was inside and it was surrounded by internal walkways to the rooms on all levels. I thought this was amazing. The water was clear and cool. Not like those cheap hotels that had so much chlorine in the lukewarm warm murky water that your eyes would burn all night. I left the Mexican Jumping Beans that I bought at one of those roadside tourist traps in the sink in our clean bathroom. There was a mummy at the trap and about 100 signs every few miles preceding the location.

The next day we were to make it all the way to Carlsbad. I was anxious to leave but was conflicted as I realized that my Jumping Beans were no longer jumping. I kept taking them out of there bag to see if I could revive them and asking Mom if we should go back and return them for some that were less dead. I also realized they were some sort of bug and I felt bad as I realized they were dying. Not as bad as I felt when I caught a Monarch butterfly in the enclosed porch at Grandmother and Grandfather’s house. We went to dinner and on return I searched for it and searched for it. I finally found it folded on a beam in an upper corner of the patio. I cried as I only wanted to keep the butterfly for a short time because it was beautiful. I thought my actions had killed it. I was assured that they live a very short life and that it would have died anyway. I then realized that I diminished the experience of its last few hours of life. My mother was exasperated.

That morning after Mom had talked to Dad we were told that we were not going to Carlsbad or the Grand Canyon and that we would not be meeting dad in Las Vegas. She told us, or I overheard, that he had noticed a lump on his neck. That he went to the doctor and that he was worried. He didn’t want us to change our plans. Mom apologized to me since she knew that I would be disappointed. We needed to go straight home and be with Dad.