Ready, set, grow!

This morning I made my way over to the annual Oakhurst Community Garden Plant Sale with my friends Nicole and Jason. (I am kicking myself for not taking any pictures while I was there! Anyways, here's some shots from their website of what it looks like. Just pretend you can see us in there... I'll get better about taking my camera along with me...). Jason and Nicole got a lovely, restrained selection of vegetables, herbs, and flowers for the pots on their deck. I on the other hand went a little overboard with excitement.

My load for the morning included romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, chard, cilantro, lemon thyme, parsley, basil, pickling cucumbers, beefsteak tomatoes, rainbow cherry tomatoes, San Marzano tomatoes, calliope eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, and summer squash.

While it does seem like a lot, I feel like this is probably a realistic amount to start with. The herbs I will do in pots that can stay on the porch with easy range of the kitchen, and the rest will go in the raised bed that my mom's boyfriend, Mike, my gentlemen, Matt, and I will all build tomorrow. I am heading to Home Depot after work to pick up materials, and then over to Gardenhood for all of the soil, compost, and mulch I will need for the bed.

The weather this weekend is perfect out and it is honestly killing me that I am stuck in the gallery at work today and am not outside working on my garden. Soon!

A few words on fate and chickens

I certainly am someone that believes that idea of making your own luck and am not totally one for predestination. But, sometimes, it is hard to ignore the fact that certain things have a way of coming into your life where pieces fall seamlessly into place like it was always meant to be.

I can only chuckle at the now aptly named title of this blog, as its near future will most certainly be shifting to more of a focus on my attempts at self-sustainability in the form of gardening, chickens (near future, please!), and the can of worms diving into those interests produce. I hopefully will indeed be cultivating my garden soon enough.

So, how is this fate? In the last month I have been doing a good amount of research and digging into the world of vegetable gardening. While my house is a mere 600 square feet, the back yard is significantly larger. While I have always had a bit of bad luck with growing things, I was suddenly overcome with a potentially insane, but optimistic nonetheless, desire to create a vegetable garden of my very own.

The first thing I did was to finally get on the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle train about two years late. I was sold. Now, any ideas that have previously been shoved off as impractical have come to a head. As I finished the last page of the book, hell as I finished the third chapter of the book, I felt like I had been given a dictate. Then, this afternoon I received an email announcing that I had won a contest for books on canning and chicken raising! It is meant to be.

So, from now on the blog will be shifting more in this direction as I begin to try my luck once more with growing a green thumb.


For more writing on Atlanta's arts community go to my other website, BurnAway.

Burn Away

I'm sure those of you who actually read this have been wondering where the hell I have been. Well, myself and fellow Atlanta art bloggers are starting something big:

Burn Away is a visual arts website based in Atlanta, GA. Through weekly reviews and columns, as well as studio visits with local artists, Burn Away attempts to answer the famous challenge issued by William Faulkner:

So limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

To "disperse and burn away"—a statement about the nature of creativity that compels us to look beyond what merely is and envision what could be.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed. Expect regular content: loads of articles and local art reviews are on the way, so definitely keep an eye on this space!

Playlist

In light of distractions at work I have decided to make you all a list of my current playlist at work. Just for kicks.

Sun Kill Moon, Carry Me Ohio
Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethania
Lungfish, Wailing Like Dragons
Townes Van Zandt, Marie
Blame Game, Lemon Drops
Captain Beefheart, Pachuco Cadaver
Secret Chiefs, Exodus
Ennio Morricone, Giorno di Notte
Jim O'Rourke, Therefor, I am
Medicine Shows, Chevrolet Car
Cat Power, I Found a Reason
Shipping News, Axons and Dendrites
T Rex, Jeepster
Smog, Dress Sexy at my Funeral
John Fahey, Desperate Man Blues

Since I am still not able to make a good post

I thought I would share this article on the disappearing critic with you. You may remember Cinque's discussions on this a few months back (I will link to these later) and thought this was a nice supplement, although belated.

The Disappearing Critic from Big Red & Shiny.

Bloggers, now is your time.

The Contemporary has certainly been a punching bag for the Atlanta art's community for quite some time now, and I must say with reason. Not to harp on the "good ole days", but the programming has not a fraction of the old exuberance and intelligence that once reigned during the Nexus years.

Local artist, curator, director, founder, activist, general bad-ass, Ms Julia Fenton has taken on quite a campaign against the tailspin that The Contemporary is caught in. After many shove-offs from board members, she has taken the matter to a higher level: the press. Cathy Fox will be doing a story on the institutions current changing of the guard. If you would like to comment or provide your opinion for this story either on or off the record, please make sure to do so before the 14th of August when Cathy leaves for China. If you are interested and do not have her information already, please leave me a comment and I will get you her information.

Below you can read a snip of the much lengthier letter sent by Julia Fenton to the Contemporary.

As I see it, The Contemporary has pretty much reduced its programming to exhibitions, and a minimal number of education programs. I feel the concensus of people I talk to here in Atlanta is that the exhibitions are marginally aceeptable, generally neither current nor cutting edge, composed of the smallest possible number of Atlanta participants and more often than not of out of town artists represented by Stuart’s fairly small circle of gallery friends. I see no evidence of sound research in putting together exhibitions, no evidence of any long range plans on the part of the gallery, no evidence of any coherent exhibition design. It has been my experience that successful programming of the kind that not just I but a number of The Contemporary’s former Gallery Directors put together took full time research, lots of legwork, and broad involvement in Atlanta’s and other major arts communities. It is not possible to run a successful, exciting, stimulating gallery schedule on a part-time basis...

Artists on the whole are rather astute about their profession, and there is a very large number of well respected artists in this community and beyond who are offended by their treatment at the Contemporary. Most professionally run non-profit galleries schedule their programming at least two years in advance. Last minute invitations to exhibit are on the whole professionally offensive. And, unfortunately, the word I hear most often used to describe Stuart is arrogant; the second most frequent comment is that the Contemporary is haphazard at best, if not sloppy, in its programming content. I believe the community also has a vague, unsettling sense now of having been used rather than served. Many of the artists in the last Biennial were embarrassed both by the look of their work in its installation and in the general content of the show. These are comments I am now also hearing from some of the Portland arts community.

now that your thighs are probably sticking to the seat of your car by the end of your commute, and there is no point in even drying off after you get out of the shower becuase you start sweating again, i figured you migth want a refreshing image to forget about the heat for a minute.