Liens du Moment 3/22

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Varg

Sewage and Water Board looking to copyright meter cover utilized by artists and T-shirt shops.
Leggo our logo! S&WB asks state to protect emblem
Nola.com

A great page of Katrina images from Tulane Deptartment of Earth & Environmental Sciences. The diagrams are all well worth checking out as well as the images of levee scour and trenching.
Katrina Images
Stephen A. Nelson

NPR story on Katrina tours. Not sure how I feel about them. Good thing is that they get the scope of the disaster out. Bad news is they are exploitive.
New Orleans Tours Include Hurricane Ruin
NPR.org

6 thoughts on “Liens du Moment 3/22”

jeffrey says:

May 21, 2007 at 12:46 pm

Freakin’ S&WB! Next thing you know they’ll be looking to sell their tap water in bottles… oh wait they floated that idea already.
jeffrey says:

May 21, 2007 at 12:49 pm

Sorry.. meant to include a link in there.
Tim says:

May 21, 2007 at 4:28 pm

Thanks for the link to that NPR story. I missed that. Now that they’ve demolished the house on the corner, the tour buses visiting the London Canal breach have a nice view of my FEMA travel trailer as they go down the cross street back to Paris Avenue. I do not wave. This ain’t Disneyworld.

Peace,

Tim
Varg says:

May 21, 2007 at 7:27 pm

Do THEY wave?
liprap says:

May 21, 2007 at 8:16 pm

Well, y’all can always do the one-fingered wave, but that would truly be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.

Then again, so is gawking at ruined neighborhoods as though they are Museum of Natural History exhibits…
Karen says:

May 22, 2007 at 9:03 am

I rode along on 3 disaster tours. Each time it was with Organizations here looking for more information about what has happened, or not happened. I went on each one hoping that when I looked out the window no one would recognize me. So I guess ashamed would be a proper description.

What bothered me most is that at the end of the tour no one offers any sort of “what you can do to help” info. It seems that at the very least Grey Line could hand out a flyer with the contact names of the Neighborhood Organizations that they just traipsed thru.

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Rejoice!

I say that a lot. I sign many pieces with it. I do this because I believe our lives are a true happenstance. A brilliant occurence from nothingness. We are so rare. We are so unlikely. And simply being born isn’t enough. From there we must survive, endure. So each morning, after our Sun departs and is reborn again. Please, for the sake of your ancestors and the Universe in general, hoist that cup of joe up and say, “Rejoice.”

Ours is a soulful existence. No matter how many McMansions, polyester fabrics, auto-tunes, modified foods and social networks we surround ourselves with, we are all still native, passionate beings made of ancient matter. We are organic and we have soul.

Wood also has a warm, soulful quality. Wood has a memory. It retains smells, traumas, events. It even has a calendar. This is why I have chosen it as my medium, for its old soul. I like to think the wood in my work is in its third incarnation. First a tree, then a home and now art. If you have a room that needs a little soul, get a piece. A room can never have enough soul.

My inspiration and subject matter comes from many sources, among them: Humanism, old ballads, trickster tales, flora and fauna, science, myths and folklore, stringed instruments, brass bands, amber spirits, lady vocalists, general relativity and quantum mechanics. Some of my pieces are there just to make a short, simple statement about what’s important in life. Some are more diffuse and abstract in meaning. A personal drama, an enduring line from a poem or novel, a poignant song lyric, the legacy of an important person, a fleeting thought … these are the subjects of my art.

I use hearts often because they are a very abstract way of depicting the human soul without also employing the very subjective human form. The symbolic heart is an apt representation for a person’s experience and essence. A body can immediatly conjure happiness, sorrow, youth, age, anger, bliss. These emotions can get in the way. Sometimes it’s simply about the experience.

I am the son of a sailor and a social worker, the grandson of a gypsy, a dancer and a nurse. I spent my youth moving from port city to port city, watching a lot of road go by and reading World Book Encyclopedia. After my parents settled down on the Gulf Coast, I was a miscreant youth, destroying cars and taking the wrongs things too seriously and the right things not serious enough. Eventually I began replacing my imagination with experience.

I will use any salvaged wood but prefer swamp cypress and longleaf heartwood pine.

I despise waste. Particularly the waste of organic matter. Trees are magnificent. They were here before we arrived and they’ll be around after we are gone. I’m making an effort to save as much wood as possible. Creating art is fun too. But beyond communicating with folks, but beyond making money ad providing for myself, beyond rescuing flooded parts, beyond reveling in the ethereal aroma of heartpine that hasn’t seen the light of day in 400 years, beyond all that, I am trying to make a simple comment on waste.