Tomorrow will be CD 1 Week 1. Pictures from all six rolls include NYC, Wisconsin, Chicago, and Austin arrival. Some of my favorites already on flickr.

Week one down, 6 more to go.

In other news, my music video animation for the band Watch out for Rockets was selected to be apart of the UT Hollywood Showcase, so I’ll be heading back to Los Angeles September 23-25.

Check it out the animation here:

I’m also made/making the website for a charming and funny Austin independent film Harmony and Me. Sophie T. is doing a lot of stuff for the film along with director Bob Byington and she got me on board, so we’ll be working together to promote it in various ways (Looks like my IFC internship is already coming in handy.)

Check out the trailer, or better yet, it’s screening at the Museum of Modern Art starting September 18th. Ooh la la!

I waited it out for about 20 minutes and eventually made it to the beach and spent several hours reading, swimming, and snapping photos under a gray sky by the grey ocean.  Is it GREY or GRAY?  I forget which I prefer.

I took some polaroids.  Lots of old people lounging about in speedos, doing exercises, “sun”bathing.  I bought my very first ice cream cone in NYC from a soft serve truck.  Got it with rainbow sprinkles.  It was perfect.  I loved Saturday.

	I watched this little girl for awhile… I think she was using her magical powers to bring in the waves.
	This guy wanted me to take his picture, but then said “You’re not America’s Most Wanted, are you?”

Tim Horton’s “Latte” is sugar water with some cream and something that sort of tastes like coffee added into it. It’s disgusting.

McDonald’s “Iced Coffee” is literally a cup that is filled up with ice, then hot, weak, and dirty old coffee is poured onto it. And it is digusting.

Ordering coffee can be a big deal.  When I asked for a “Medium Latte,” the lady at Starbucks gave me a dirty look  followed by a biting correction of “Grande?” Okay, look, I feel bad enough ordering coffee here, please don’t make me say the stupid names on top of it. The latte is okay, but the stigma and my heart is not.

I am looking for a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee coupon to put the final nail in the coffin of cheap fast food coffee drinks, though I do see a lot of blonde girls drinking giant 20 oz iced coffees from there, so it makes me wonder.

I have other notable drink observations I would love to delve into later, like how everywhere you go in NYC there are fancy drink making machines of varying liquids and styles. And my musings of why McDonald’s is pushing their McCafe campaign SO hard. And how I think drinking out of straws is a yummy and sexy replacement to sucking on a cigarette. Stay tuned.

“The boy he wants to touch your leg you should stab him in the rectum… hole!”

The pause before “hole” was the only break in his stream of thought-turned words, an after flourish to his initial declaration as he darted into the middle of the road and continued his exclamatory rambling.

So naturally I wanted this photo and went to get my pictures developed at a place where no one speaks English after the lady at Rite Aid was really rude to me on the phone.  (I live in Washington Heights)

They didn’t have my pictures done after an hour so I had to wait while they were taking someone’s portrait.  At first, all I saw was a girl in white posing in the other room, and I thought, hmm I wonder what she’s getting her picture taken for.  I looked up at the walls at some of their examples of work, and there was a HUGE frame with multiple portaits of a pregnant young woman and her boyfriend/husband whatever kissing her pregnant, exposed belly, standing behind her holding her belly, and laying on the ground with her belly in his hands like a basketball.  I thought, that’s… interesting,  and nearly silmultaneously upon registering this portrait on the wall, I saw a man appear out of the corner of my eye and enter the photo session in progress.  That young woman in white, I realized, was extremely PREGNANT, with her huge bulging belly exposed ready for its close-up.  And for the next 15 minutes, the photographer and couple exhausted all possible positions/interactions to photograph a pregnant woman’s belly.

Atlantic Avenue Artwalk. Lots of chairs, babies, old stuff, and an instance of black face (see above)

My apartment.

If you haven’t heard, it’s been raining in New York since I got here May 30th.   This morning, I woke up, and thought, “God, it’s hot,” in a lovingingly annoyed sort of way, like when you’re pissed you’re having your period but glad that you’re not pregnant.  The sun shone quite brightly into my bedroom window, and continued, gasp, all day today, and I actually pondered going to the visit a beach this weekend and wondered if I could start wearing shorts again without worrying about dirty looks or subway gropers.

Then it started pouring at 5PM.  Lovely.

But I can’t necessarily complain what with Austin in a horrible 100 degree heat wave and what with me with no  AC in a moderatate 70 degree, ideal, albeit wet, environment.

I set up my room kind a sort of  to start sewing.

What’s that? You want to take a closer look at my super awesome 1980s Bernina sewing machine from the future?

The past two days I have been wasting lots and lots of fabric trying to come up with a really nice razor back shirt pattern.   Turns out, it’s kind of hard. (I made 8 before coming up with a design I like that fit well)  Here’s an almost okay prototype for something I’ve been trying to make… this is more form fitted than I want it to be, and the sewing is wonky.

I know what you’re saying, and you’re right, the neon green.  Shhhh.  I know. Shhh.  Trust me on this, ok? Or at least let me be until I come to my senses.

Over the past week I’ve been preparing things to send out to people in Texas.  Mostly, I’ve been making postcards out of pictures I’ve had developed in New York by spray adhesiving thick resume paper on the back of each picture so I can write a message and the picture will be sturdier going through the mail.  Luckily, no one is reading this blog and these letters will be a relative surprise to most.

The first round of messages are going out tomorrow.

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Things to Make: Clothes clothes clothes

Things to Do: Clean Clean Clean

I went to Coney Island for the first time for the annual Mermaid Parade. I wasn’t 100% clear on what that meant until I actually witnessed it for myself, and among dressing up like mermaids or relevant nautical themed play-on words like “Splash Dance,” it also meant a lot of boobies, pasties, parisoles, spandex, sequins, men in drag, and freaks jumping around on stilts. Probably where American Apparel will cull their Fall/Winter ‘09 collection. The lady above was particularly a crowd pleaser.

There was an abundance of child participation. My favorites were the half naked mothers pushing their baby strollers.

Harvey Keitel was “King Neptune” and I shot a couple of close-ups of him later in the day along with a pretty decent polaroid to add to my celebrity polaroid collection that has reached a formidable total of three. (1 and 2 for point.)

Later I saw Harvey, (that’s what I call him now) telling his chaffuer to go get him some hotdogs and then I stalked the chaffuer as he pushed through the crowd at Nathan’s, eventually cutting in line and ordering (in an Eastern European accent) three hotdogs, one with saurkraut, and a small fry. And yes, I’m probably always that creepy. That’s why I have so many awesome friends.

And other Coney Island Shots

More pictures on my Flickr share.
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Things to Do: Go shopping for spandex.

As for the internship, I found out I am a marketing intern for IFC, working with grass-roots campaigns.  My work detail has included creating pages and pages of Wikipedia content for shows and walking around Brooklyn distributing flyers and trying my damnedest not to fall asleep.  I have been promised a day a week with the editing department but we’ll see if that happens.  I am in a hoteling space on the AMC floor butting elbows with a very hardworking freelancer.  I feel bad for her cramped up in here.

Emmy’s on the American Movie Classics floor at Rainbow Media

Some pictures I took while flyering in Brooklyn for the “mumblecore” web series Like So Many Things.   (Park Slope, Williamsburg, Flushing)

On a side note… I was warned, but OH MY GOD.  Park Slope is crawling with babies, strollers, and women waiting for their water to break.  And there is no significant age range in babies either, it’s like women get pregnant, move to Park Slope when they are 7-8 months in, have a baby then push it around for awhile, then up and leave to the suburbs when they’re tired of having to wait in long lines of strollers to get a latte.

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I tried half-heartedly to get a flexible job, but it looks like a minimum requirement to work in retail or food here is being at least 30 and moderately rude.

So I added one day a week to my “work” schedule with an internship at Mayhew Breen Productions.  They used to make awesome commercials, but now they make infomercials, and by infomercials I mean “Buuuut wait!  Call within the next 15 minutes and we’ll throw in an extra sharp cutting blade absolutely free!”  It’s pretty amazing.

The first day I was there, they were recording the voice overs for a new exercise device.  I got to witness an absolute infomercial KING switch from his nasally New York City accent to the commanding, firmly persuasive and upbeat voice of that infomercial guy which is embedded into every American’s psyche.  I’d have to say I can scratch that one off my bucket list.

A clip I recorded of him coming from the monitors.

I’ve been taking lots of pictures, don’t know what is or isn’t worth sharing.

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Things to Do: finish Wiki pages uughh

Things to Make: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$