Sights and Sounds of this past weekend

It was one for the books. Too much to talk about, so I’ll just relate the essentials and give you all some links to the “sights and sounds.”

My friends from art school (and life) Irina, Anya, and Charles, drove down from New York to visit and attend a show in Athens that featured one of Irina’s videos. Their visit coincided with Derya’s birthday (which I think is still going on…) and so we all went to Athens. Yipee! I love world collisions!

Part I: Huckabee

My friends left New York at midnight and drove through the night. Charles called me at 1 pm and asked if there were any political events going on in Spartanburg, considering the proximity to the primary. I checked it out and found that Mike Huckabee was going to be at Wofford at 3 pm. They did 90 the whole way down from Virginia so they could “hucka-see.”

It was pretty surreal for me and I slept the night, so I can’t imagine how strange it must’ve been for them, having driven a good 16 or so hours and ending up at a Huckabee rally. We were late, so most of the huckabitches and huckabros had already arrived. We sat on the floor of the auditorium. We heard him speak. I have to say, I was pretty huckabored. But some of the highlights included:

-a 10 minute opening joke about mule eggs, completely unrelated to fucking anything (Charles made a good point as well that this particular joke, which was about two idiot brothers from New York, was probably originally an old-school racist joke about black people)

-a speech about the failure of our government to keep track of illegal immigrants who are here on expired visas. This is incredulous to Huckabee because “when we order a book on Amazon, we can track its progress from the warehouse to our house.” No, he was not joking with this little analogy. If we live in a country where we can track boxes, there is no reason why we cannot track people. Nevermind the fact that people, even people without green cards who speak Spanish, have key things that boxes don’t have, like legs and, believe it or not, brains. He went on to say that maybe we should give the whole immigrant-tracking business to FedEx or UPS. You know what, Huck? Why don’t we just put the immigrants in boxes when they cross the border? Better yet, let’s tattoo barcodes on their bodies! Or I know, why don’t we just implant little GPS microchips into their immigrant wrists so we can really know what they’re up to? Good fucking idea.

-These dudes came on after Huck. Irina took video, but I bet that these You Tube ones have clearer audio and I would hate for you out there to miss these awesome harmonies. If only The Beatles knew the fate of this song– they might not have written it. I can’t speak for Deep Blue Something, though. They might be Huckabee fans.

Part II: Old Gregg
When we got home, Irina showed me these videos, clips from a show on the BBC called The Mighty Boosh. We recycled lines from them them the rest of the weekend. I think they are the best thing ever.


Part III: Athica
We went to this show called Ingest at the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, where Irina had a video. Her video rules.
Part IV: Dark Meat
We saw this band at the Georgia Theatre in Athens. They rocked our faces off. We danced. Hooray! Check out their MySpace for some tunes. There were like 15 people on stage at all times…whoa.Thank you to Brian Hits who let us stay with him. For those that don’t know, he was one of the artists-in-residence last year and he is currently making some awesome work at UGA, including a painting of the view from what was his window and is now mine.He took us around the studios there. I love that atmosphere. I felt nostalgic for that community, for that part of art school, hanging out together in studios, and that was appropriate because three of my fellow art-school-mates were there too. Thanks to them for coming. We had a fun weekend.

Sorry if this post kind of sucks…As Rachel said on her blog, I think it’s time to focus on actual work, the show a mere two months away. Oh my god, is that all? Hopefully, I can get Irina to write a guest blog…