inlikeflint

It's a Dynamo...

Just posting Updates on THE Art Show...

"Vanishing Point."
Will be Opening on Saturday MAY 23rd.
(Memorial Day Weekend!)
From 1pm to 4pm, you can come down and have time to do there things around town if you feel compelled to do so!

Friday May 29th is still on, but for those who like to avoid a few thousand people and all of the freeloaders...



I personally believe that U.S. Americans use the Google maps...

~One of the best and easiest routes to the gallery is off of Waterman Street. (This is sometimes accessible off of Washington, but it is currently under construction so... From Kellogg (Highway 54/400) going either East or West, exit onto South Broadway and head North on South Broadway. From South Broadway you will take a right (East) on Waterman until you reach Commerce Street. Then Take another right (South.) and the Go Away Garage/Commerce Gallery is on the left. (Just the way we like it.) Not too far from the new stadium being built for the Wichita Wing Nuts!

<a href="http://www.wichitawingnuts.com/">
Wingnuts Link!</a>


Kellogg is accessible from Interstate 35, 135, and 235 if you happen to be that far out on the loop.

IF you arrive early, there are plenty of things to do to burn a few hours like; The Wichita Art Museum, which has a Dale Chihuly installation (Go figure.) and the World's largest collection of Mary Cassatt paintings. (Currently there is a pint sized Calder Fiber exhibition that might interest somebody, and some sort of broke-back Western cowboy/Indian themed stuff they're calling art in another room.) Anyway, IF you go to burn some time, it costs $5.00 per person. It is kind of cool to see some Hoppers and oddball Marsden Harley paintings.

Here's the link;

<a href=" http://wichitaartmuseum.org/">
WAM Link</a>


Here's the address for the Art show!

Go Away Garage
Commerce Gallery
508 S. Commerce
Wichita, Kansas
67202

Who would have ever thought that Tea Bagging would have ever become this popular?

 

I remeber hearing about it in a John Waters movie called Pecker. The main character Pecker becomes a famous photographer... At one point in the movie, Pecker is at a gay bar and there are signs posted all around the bar banning Tea Bagging. Pecker manages to capture the perfect Tea Bagging shot witha customer and male stripper. Ever since seeing the movie, this has been the established definition of Tea Bagging for me.

(At some point if someone were to ask what Tea Bagging was, I would reply; "See Pecker." Hard to avoid the puns.)

 

I find it kind of strange that the conservaties keep having associations with gay themes... (Okay, maybe it isn't strange... but why call it Tea Bagging if you know what the definition means... What's next? The Dirty Sanchez party... The Hot Carl protest?)

This may not be a bid deal to a lot of West coasters... (Particularly those close to San Diego.) But it has been a balmy winter in Kansas. To be more specific, It was 72 degrees today and this is not typical of the climate for the middle of February. A week or so ago, it was almost 80 degrees. Tonight it is supposed to freeze, so I decided to take some before and after photos to show what winter plants look like in a non tropical environment.


These are... I am not too sure. I did not plant them and they are growing in the rocks in my dry river bed. They are so bright and yellow, they almost burnt my retina out before I snapped the photo.


These are Day Lillys that think it is March... Man, it is going to kill them when they figure out they are a month early.


This is the pond... This sort of shows you how warm it has been... That's water celery and it going to be a real mess to clean out of the pond this year.


Just growing like no tomorrow... there were a few rowboat bugs already working the bog over. AND mosquito! I was bit by a mosquito. Who gets bit by a mosquito in February? (Shit, I did.)



Looks like the vines think it's April...


Those are daises... They don't bloom till may... (You know, after the April showers... they bring May flowers.)


...and the water puppies. They are supposed to be sleeping right now. Something called hibernation. They don't know what time it is, they are all messed up right now thinking I am going to feed them. (It's okay they can much on some of the water plants that are growing and the algea that is not supposed to growing yet!)

February is usually considered winter 'round these parts... I am not complaining, but there are going to be a buttload of bugs this year... That means locusts and grasshoppers that eat the shit out of grain... Might be a good idea to plop a couple bags of flour in the freezer this year.

I also might invest in an asphalt company and front end allignment businesses because if things keep going like this and it does freeze, there are going to be pot holes the size of St. Louis.

Yes friends... It is that time once again!

I am dropping most of the dead weight out of my profile so I can make room for better friends. To be quite honest, I have had a lot of shitty friends. If you are reading this and you were deleted from my profile, I placed you in this catagory. (Don't feel bad, you can attempt to be my friend again durring the open enrolment period.)

Recently I have stopped adding friends, as this is not the open enrollment period. I am presently keeping a three week window available in the month of November for new potential friends and acquaintances, so if you have a chance to mark this on your calendar, please be sure and do so.  For many of my friends out there, I know how you must feel being deleted from my profile, but this must happen to make room for more productive friends. These are friends who actually take the time to say hey or buzz my profile every so often. Borderline friends are staying on board as temps so that I can further evaluate their panache and their post response prowess.

Some of my friends that have just been lurking... You motherfuckers are treading on thin ice. (Consider this your first and last warning.)You can either start posting some responses, stalking, and getting with the snark, or it is time to move on. Please do not take up valuable friend space, it's a waste of space and a waste of time. These are the new rules I have laid out and you are just going to have to learn some good friend skills to stay on board.

The Paypal option will be added as a feature for friends who think that they might be borderline. I will allow donations of five dollars a week until the borderline friends can get their shit together.

This concludes my friend clean-up announcment.

I had a bag of Jolly time microwave popcorn for lunch.

It was delicious.

I know that everyone that reads this is going to be jealous.

It had the Good Housekeeping seal on it... So you know it was good.

Who wants to touch me?

Here is another example of chicks with dicks and The Devil in Mrs Jones depicted in the center. I like the Adam figure to the right... Ow stop! my neck, my neck ow... Great action paintng here. ("i can has apple?" NO... Rejected!)

RetroCrush The World's Greatest Pop Culture Site!

   

Here is part of  my story And There We Were... (A couple paragraphs from pgs. 5 & 6.) The photo is of me (Left) and my toothless Bosnia friend where a mortar pit was set up and a mirror on a pole that let the mortars aim and drop rounds on their target from a few blocks away. I think this is only the second week of being in country, I am still pretty clean considering it took well over 60 days before I get to take a shower... and then another feww weeks before I could get one with hot water (March/April in the Balkins.)

(And There We Were... Pg, 5 & 6...)

     -I spent more time fixing the Bradley than running it. I did not care about the game anyway. Green Bay and the Patriots could have gone to hell for all I cared. Besides, I had a couple of diet Pepsis and was more concerned with scrounging around for my stash of pougey bait. A new pack on the Bradley is a Cummings 501 diesel engine and an attached transmission that requires few adjustments and a couple of bolts to install. On a concrete pad on level ground in daylight, a mechanic and small crew can change a pack out in under and hour. This was normal provided that the crew knows what they are doing. Using headlights from the M88 (Mechanics wrecking vehicle.) and a couple of flashlights, we placed the pack in the Bradley in just four hours. Eighteen gallons of oil for the engine and ten for the transmission is normal for vehicle operation when getting a new pack. This is the discovery I had made when having to fill the pack from five-gallon containers in extreme cold weather. Sometime the oil would miss the hole and flow like the consistency of honey across my boots, pants, and hands. Jumping in and out of the driver’s hatch to turn the vehicle on and off gave me a chance to locate my emergency provisions. While the mechanics were bending into awkward positions to attach the drive shafts to the pack of the Bradley, I was inventing new ways to drink diet Pepsi.

     Depending on the condition of stress and feeling like crap because of a head cold, the proper amount of diet Pepsi should be consumed. If the conditions are not too severe, one third of the diet Pepsi can should be consumed so that there is enough room to mix one part Jim Beam. However, if the conditions are severe like not being able to go to the Super Bowl and working on the Bradley till the sun comes up, consume the diet Pepsi concoction until a third of the can is left and add more Jim Beam. This recipe agreed with me and the small handful of mechanics that were not able to participate in the early morning festivities.

     Lying down in the mud fixing mechanical parts on the track was a nightmare. Lying down in the mud in the dark fixing the Bradley was sadistic harassment. If your grip on a bolt with a tool did not slip causing you to slam your knuckles into other metal parts on the track, the mud would prevent you from threading the bolt into its proper hole. I had no problem with any mechanical part or mud, because I could not feel my fingers anymore, so working on the track became kind of fun. By the time the sun started to come up, the track was up. Crane had come back with the other Super Bowlers, and said that I didn’t miss much. They had stood out under a tarp outside watching the game in the cold. The Patriots had beaten the Packers, and all they got was some left over French bread and sodas. Crane asked me how it went with the track.

I told him, -You didn’t mish mush.

(It's short, but it is a short story, so I can't give away too much... )

 Derek

(White Stripes.)

Wichita is the kind of town like Dodge City, Kansas. You just sort of end up here and you want to get the hell out of. I was not sure what I would take photos of today, so I just sort of wandered around downtown and looked for touristic stuff. I call it touristic stuff because Kansas is one of those places that uses a historical register as something to stoke a fire with. (Because that's how they roll.) Other than having a couple people in town who know something about culture and art, and maybe other things like that the Earth is not flat and there is something called evolution... Wichita, Kansas is usually 20 to 30 years behind the rest of the nation... (Minimum wage in the state of Kansas is $2.65 an hour. I would say that it is better than some other state, but I can't because that is the lowest in the nation. Illegals don't even work for those kind of wages. It's just your typical Christian Conservative cow town.) Thank you to the distinguished gentleman from Topeka by the name of Brownback.)


Welcome to Wichita State University... You are looking at the Ulrich campus art museum. That there is a Joan Miro on the outside of the building... (It is under restoration.) WSU has more sports facilities and things related to sports than any other campus in Kansas (With exception to K-State or Kansas State ...maybe.) Xavier McDaniel, Antonie Carr and his Brother, Wilt Chamberlain, and a ton of other sport stars went to school here at one time or another and played professional sports with a ball of some kind. Wilt probably has the record for "hide the salami" for the short time he was here. Dennis Raider also went to school here, but he never played sports... He was a tiny man in stature and those guys with little man syndrome usually end up to be serial killers.) Most of the students here are from places more rural than Wichita... That means it is always easy to get laid if you are an executive at one of the Aircraft companies or one of the major oil companies that Bush comes to visit every so often. ~When minimum wage is less than $3.00 an hour, Christian Conservative girls will do anything for a five dollar bill, or somebody famous like Wilt Chamberlain.)


This is the rail bridge next to the Union Station building in downtown Wichita. Right now it is owned and used by the Cox cable company. (They suck.) Cox has to have the slowest broadband cable I have ever used. I have had faster download speeds on a phone modem. Anyway, this is a photo of what the bridge looks like underneath. It is a good breeding area for pigeons and Conservative girls looking to earn a quick $5.00.


This is the top of the rail bridge with trains that they have pulled up there to park. Parking and pulling a train will run you $10.00. (Thank you Jesus.)


Union Station of Wichita, Kansas... This is the place where the Cox work in and out of.


Here is an artist rendition of what the place looked like in 1910. They had trains there that would take people from city to city. I think this is how Wichita started to grow... There were bars across the street and people would get laid over before their trip to Chicago or Kansas City. They would end up staying at a place called the Eaton Hotel if they were not rolled first. Wichita has always been a rough town and people have been shot up all over the place. At one time Wichita had more crime per capita than Washington DC. Since Wichita has always been behind the times, out in front of Union Station, the horseless carriages from out of states are prostitutes waiting to get their first lick at all the new arrivals before they get rolled under the bridge going to the Eaton.


This is not the Eaton Hotel, but was another hotel that was closer to Union Station. Anyway, This is some of the original advertising in the alley that was not too clear until I saw it though the magic of Digital Camera and Photoshop technology. This is a big improvement over the Kodak Disk camera that I used to have. I had to get my digital camera in Kansas City. They are still using Polaroids here.


The Eaton Hotel. This building was put on the historical register in 1972. Unfortunately, this means that most of the stuff in this building is no longer here on the inside of the building. It is okay because when I was growing up, you did not want to hang around this hotel because of all the homeless people who used to squat here. I have been in a lot of places and seen a lot of homeless people. However, if you are homeless in Wichita, you are really homeless and selling your ass for a dollar ain't going to happen because that racket is completely saturated by the upper middle class. Anyway, the homeless made the place smell like piss and Night Train, so finally some entrepreneurial spirit from another state decided to come in and restore the Hotel in all of its splendor by ripping out the gas lamps and replacing them with original coaxial cable and Cox internet and fancy fangled copper wires for electricity and turned the place into Lofts. (What a novel idea, who would have ever thought that people would pay to live in an old building with loft style apartments?)


This is the top of the Eaton Hotel and I am not sure if the top floor was reserved for the poor because of cowboys with guns, and all those stairs to climb. Anyway, there was a bar down in the lobby or something... Some crazy prohibitionist bitch from Kansas City (Cary Nation.) came to town and went crazy with an ax and chopped up the bar and and one of the store room doors. (That one of my friends bought for $20.00 in an auction... no lie... and the bar is owned by the Smithsonian.)

((And that door smells like piss.))


Down where the bar used to be is a restaurant where you can see people eating.


For some reason I am thinking this is not the original glass, but it looks old... actually it looks like somebody ran out of gold window paint... That stuff is expensive and is more than a days wage in Wichita.


We say goodbye to the Eaton as it settles with the sun and we go deeper down Douglas to look for other interesting buildings owned by somebody else from another state or country.


This is the Brown Building. I am guessing that this is what color it used to be because it was build just before the Great Depression... And someday when we finally get out of the depression here, people will stop throwing them selves off this building with ticker tape parachutes.


I am so depressed right now.


Here is another old school advertisement from way back. It looks like something is .50-.60 cents... whatever it is, I am sure it is expensive and thanks to the restoration crew from California for coming in and deciding to make more Loft like places that made you think about real lofts.


This is the new Bank Building that is old now because it is a modernist structure. Most of the banks have changed and it is now called the Bank of America Center and is owned by some guy named Phil Ruffin who makes buildings with some geezer named Donald Trump. Whatever. The building is not really that important but if you can peer though the reflections and the crazy 60/70's groovy smoke tinted glass you can see this giant mobile that is hanging from the ceiling. This is actually an important piece of art work and it could potentially be worth way more than what it was originally purchased for back when the building was built.


Here is another angle... this is an original Alexander Calder mobile (A real monster of a piece.) This is more of a historical piece because of what happened to the work, not so much the scale or that it is Alexander Calder... For some reason the bank who owned the building decided that it needed to remodel and the color orange was out of style, that they decided that they needed to go with a more dominant cool color like purple. The bank decided that they would paint the sculpture purple because it no longer matched their new interior. (...Oh yes, they did...) So Calder eventually found out and he was still alive to take them to court and win... and then the bank had to pay for removal the shipping of the work back to Calder's studio, the paint removal and restoration work, the court costs, shipping back and installation... maybe even taxes too. Anyway, it was sort of a landmark case where it just sort of lays down and enforces the copyright rules in the visual arts and another reason that the buyer of visual art can never own the work outright just because they purchased the work. (Did I mention that Wichita was a real Christian Conservative cow town?) I am sure that the interior decorator and the banker had to live down under a rail bridge for a few years to pay that debt off.


Looks like one of the secretaries downtown has gone renegade with a label machine again. Can't keep the riffraff out of anything nowadays.


Just a little further downtown, down by the river... there is a statue that was donated because the city of Wichita was too cheap to give anything to the local Indians... "Keeper of the Plains!" This was put up right before the bicentennial year of 1976 by an artist named Blackbear Bosin. Anyway, you don't see the artist's name anywhere near the sculpture or on even on the bronze plaque that has everybody's name but the artist. There's the landscape architect's name, city council member names, the guy who operated the bulldozer, and the gofer who brought all of them donuts and coffee in the morning. Blackbear's name ain't up there. Do you know why? Because Wichita is a Christian Conservative town and the name Blackbear Bosin is too exotic. It has the word bear in it and nakedness is not tolerated in the city limits, and then there is the black thing, not to mention that most of those white people that are named on the plaque don't like Indians or the minimum wage crackers they paid to move dirt around and string up a bridge.


This is a photo of what the Keeper of the Plains gets to keep his eye on everyday since 1976... Power lines... I now understand what the Wichita Linemen song was about. Wichita loves power lines so much they string the bridges together with them. They have power lines all over the place and coax cable... Must be a modernist thing. I haven't the heart to tell anybody here that the modernist movement ended about 30 - 40 years ago. (And you thought North Korea was behind the times.)
(Off in the middle of the photo is a tall building that used to be the Holiday Inn. It is now law office and owned by Phil Ruffin... This is where we are going next...)


This is Century II. The round building that landed here many moons ago. I am on the second floor of a gated off - what used to be the parking garage of the Holiday Inn. Unfortunately, they turned some of the building into offices and ... (You will never guess...) Loft like places that were once hotel suites that make pretty crummy loft like places the size of hotel rooms.. This building reminds me of the video game Grand Theft Auto. You can drive right up to a good vantage point and...


...observe the chic chain link. It just screams Kaucasian Khristian Konservative. Many years ago somebody went crazy further up and decided to start shooting people from the top of the building. When I travel though Wichita... I ... Understand... The woods are lovely dark and deep... and miles to go...


One of the finer qualities of Wichita are the ways that the builders and architects of this city have really kept up with continuity and managed to fit about every architectural design element of any time period and jam it all in one city block. You have this Romanesque revival thing going on next to a modernist structure and it is all strung together with power lines. Historical buildings are scuttled out and sold off to people in towns in neighboring states... Somebody always asks what Wichita can do to make this town better or more interesting for tourists. I love my retro city and Wichita is a great place to visit. If you have old clothes and old cars and make less than $10,000.00 USD a year, You are going to love Wichita. (Okay, maybe not, but it was worth a try.)

I am still not sure what the band White Stripes was singing about, but maybe the Wichita they were talking about was in Wichita Falls, Texas.... And maybe somebody will tell me for $5.00 and a spin around Union Station.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1144548/

(It seems I am not the only one who has noticed the B.S. closeout sales prices.)