May 19, 2010

Blogging: Swimming Cities

Second post as a guest blogger at Laughing Squid hit today. As Ren (or Stimpy) might have said: "Oh, joy!"

THE OCEAN OF BLOOD ON NEWTOWN CREEK

How do you get five “boatercycles” – aka motorcycle-powered pontoon boats – to the Ganges River?

You start off with a party on Newtown Creek, the channel of toxic broth that cleaves Brooklyn from Queens.

On Sunday, some 60 guests plunked down $10 apiece to attend a floating fundraiser for The Swimming Cities of the Oceans of Blood, an art project that involves building a flotilla of boatercycles in Brooklyn, shipping them to India and navigating them down the country’s holiest river.

“I love boats and I love India and I like to hang out with my friends and build things with them,” said Orien McNeill, a 30-year-old Manhattan native who is one of the project’s organizers. “We’re creating adventure tourism art.”

(Full post on Laughing Squid)

May 14, 2010

Flaming Carousel on TeeVee

My HD footage of the Madasgcar Institute's flaming/blinky bicycle-powered carousel just appeared in an episode of Daily Planet, a show on Canada's Discovery Channel:

May 10, 2010

Blogging the Lost Horizon

Check out my first post as a guest blogger over at Scott Beale's fantabulous compendium of art+tech+culture, Laughing Squid!

THE LOST HORIZON NIGHT MARKET

On Saturday, a caravan of 30 box trucks parked along an industrial stretch of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood for the third-ever Lost Horizon Night Market.

Welcome sign

There wasn’t much to see on the street, but a different mini-world was hidden inside each truck.

Hot tub truck

Revelers slurped udon and miso in the Noodle Truck. They played Ouija and did their nails in the Junior High Slumber Party Truck. They fired paint balls at a guy in a chicken suit in the Shoot the Freak truck. And at the Sleazy Motel truck, a pair of red-uniformed bellhops took reservations and checked clients into either of two grungy bedrooms...

Sleazy motel truck