June 12, 2006

Well, I'm finished. I'm a little tardy in my report, but I bolstered the levees on June 1st, the first day of hurricane season, as I promised. 

Packing the dirtcase.

I was pressed for time, so I hired a Chinese Adam to help me. We packed our dirtcase and embarked on the chairbike so that one of us pedals and one of us sits in the front-mounted chair. We started at the Audubon Zoo and sprinkled a trail all the way up to Rivertown in Kenner; and there we shook out the last of the dirt and heaved the dirtcase into the weeds. 

I'll admit, only a small portion of the dirt is protecting Orleans Parish, but that levee bike trail is just so smooth and pleasant to ride.  Besides, there would be liability issues if I bolstered the portions of levee that are in danger of giving way. And I'm sure it's not the first time resources have been mismanaged in Louisiana.

So I'm FINISHED with the Dirt Drive. I wash my hands of this Dirt Drive. Stick a fork in me cause I'm done. Owww.

I found that concept art takes a certain diligence that I seem to lack.  But among other things, it was eduacational because I'd never had a website before. I've got this other one now,  www.farringtonsmith.com, for the art gallery I, my wife and my business partner now have. And my wife keeps on top of that site.

Much thanks for all the dirt!  I'm sorry I don't have individual reviews for more recent contributions, but thank you to Douglas Bourgouis, Pyhllis Ewen, and my twin nephews Jacob and Henry.  It was some fine dirt. Thanks to everyone who helped at any point along the way.

March 10, 2006

I'm getting another website for my other project, Farrington Smith Gallery that's at 832 Royal St.  My web designer says I'll get more traffic if I blog on it, so I'm going to practice here, and write about things that, though they might not be directly dirt-related, exist in relatively close proximity to dirt. This one's called:

MY KITTEN!

I got a kitten yesterday, and named him Wally, because he was inside a wall.  Rufus the border collie used his locator abilities.  I call him Roofy, or Roofity-roof, for short   Anyway, Roofy and I found Wally in the wall of an abandoned ranch house that had no roof. Its this really long, low brick bunker ghetto palace nestled up by the Claiborn overpass.  The roof burned, and its been going back to nature, with light coming through the holes, and wisteria blooming across the gaps. You can tell it was lived in untill it burned, because the possesions were all around, turning back to dirt.  

There's a hall that runs the length, and its weird to peer into the different bedrooms with the beds sinking into themselves and stuff growing out of them.  They are those low, console kinds of beds for when people get modern.

Roofy and I walked down the hall and popped out the back door into the teeny yard with a teeny swimming pool all covered over with a layer of duckweed.  Roofy kept going, and fell in, but I pulled him out with his leash. Smooth move, Roofy! 

While going back, we heard some noises in the kitchen.  Roofy used his powers, I poked a hole in the wall, and there was Wally the kitten!  It was like opening a sheetrock present!  I carried him home in my shirt pocket and gave hime to my wife.  Girls like kittens. He's black with white parts, and Amy bought him a little nipple for sucking formula through. He's not very mature, but he sure is rad.

-Adam

March 9, 2006

Fresh matterial now! Update alert:  My dirt drive office got outsourced last week. 

I'd been neglecting it too much, and he guest currator thought it was cluttering up his exibition space. So I swept it all into a hefty bag and took my office home.I guess it was really insourced instead. 

It seemed a little disorganized to sweep everything into the same sack, the dirt and the crayons and letters, and the cookies...

it's all mixed up and out of order.

But then thats what dirt is all about. Order will rise from my sack of chaos.

Untill my eviction, I hadn't been around the gallery for a long time... I'm a very busy man.  Thats the funny thing about hurricanes, they grind you're life to a complete halt, and then slowly life gets back up to speed again. So I've got some unopened dirts downstairs that I'll tend to as soon as I get the office up and running. 

Luckily I live above a commercial property with a storefront, so I won't have to contend with any of the usual issues connected to running a home office. I live on the St. Claude bussiness corridor, which is mostly stripped of its bussiness at this point, so a combination office/gallery space would set a good precident. 

At this point, with my relatively meager collection of dirts, my plan is to keep collecting untill the first day of hurricane season, when I will begin my epic journey down the levees that protect my home.  I think I'll start at the dog park near the zoo, and head up river.  I know that its not the frailest part of the levee system, but It's scenic, and I'm familiar with it. Then I think I'll tend to the ponchartrain levee, it's so wide open and breezy.

-Adam

Dirt Reviews

This girl artist...I forgot what her name is, but she's famous, at least enough to be in this book that Andy was showing me in his gallery...She makes these great assemblages out of all this top notch junk...Andy says she's got a source.

Well this is her dirt, but mixed in with this "native" levee dirt,  see, its like starting some sourdough culture, or making holey water or something...  well her dirt is from some holey place near taos,  pretty granular, this picture doesnt do it justice really, its mostly louisiana levee dirt by volume. At least I'm a relatively inclusive meglomaniac...  I will be supplimenting this soon with another picture, and her name. 

her names on an envelope that might be in my drawer, hopefully. 

So, it's been a long, long time since I've done anything to assure the safety and future of New Orleans, with my dirt drive...  And I take full responsibility.  It's easy to take on more respnibilities than one is prepared to follow through on.  I can kind of sympathize with George Bush and his Jackson square promises, now that I find myself in a similar position.  First of all, I shouldn't have embarked on a dirtdrive before I owned a computer or knew how to use it.  But I've remedied that now, so I hope that I can regain the support of my public, as I attempt to lead the way to a drier tomarrow. (I'll get her name soon)

  I finally dug around in my sock drawer, which I don't keep my socks in anymore, but I've got a lot of little rumpled bits of paper there, with various bits of information.  Anyway, this dirt was contributed by Andrea Senutovitch.I finally dug around in my sock drawer, which I don't keep my socks in anymore, but I've got a lot of little rumpled bits of paper there, with various bits of information. Anyway, this dirt was contributed by Andrea Senutovitch.

Ofcourse my mother, Susanne, sent me some dirt.  Her feudian slip is showing again.  She's right though, I am handicapped and disadvantaged.  All Americans are, but it's more apparent when you live within the levees.  She sent this nice big clumps of clay that she dug out of the pond behind her house in upstate ny, years ago. She's a potter and suffers from diy tendancies. Thankyou mother, I don't know where I'd be without you.

This is a family website, so family comes first. Thankyou baby sis.  She sent her dirt in a little shaker, for ease of distribution, and that jar has some roasted peppers in it, and she sent me a bunch of cookies too, which are well on there way to being dirt by now.  I also crumbled one directly into the mix.  MMMMMMMM

One of my sisters cookies...  But that photo on the left is of a Zen garden in New york city!  Thats where the pebbles came from.  It makes me ponder the issue of particle size, and what qualifies as dirt.  To be safe, I decided to smash them up with a hammer, for ease of mixing.  I was going to be more zen about it, and wear them down in a babbling brook, but I was in a rush.

So it was like that.

Then a concept artist named Nicole sent me this dirt from chicago.  It had lots of moisture content, and very organic, all sealed in freshness, in a ziplock bag, fun to squeeze.  I pulled a hole in it and used it like a pastry bag, I squeezed one out on top of my matchbox car, but by the time I took the picture, it got sort of dried out,(the stuff on the car)  The manifest destiny of random squeezing made the bag of dirt look like one of those ruined statues with all the important parts broken off. That's the Zen garden in the background.

She is a concept artist, which was very incouraging to me, since I am a concept artist too, and I was begining to think that concept art was impracticle.  I found her project, heat 05 to be very inspirational. Go see it at www.nicolegarneau.com  

Oh, and, maybe the dirt that looks like a statue, doesn't just LOOK like a statue, it really IS a statue, because everyone COMES from comes from dirt, and turns BACK into dirt later, so its very limited to say that its just a statue if it represents a person in their between dirt phase.  It's like a statue of dirt, thats made out of dirt, and see the zen rocks, those are stone statues of stones, which is just a harder kind of dirt...(which could be mashed up with a hammer, like I did. In reality, a particle cant be quished,(if it was a quark, especially) just re-arranged in relation to the others, for an illusion of squish.

A bunch of powdery dirt from India.  She sent it from the embassy or something, I have to review my notations.

But she also sent some calvin and hobbs cartoons also, about snowmen, and snow is just water in its dirt form.

Its pretty conceptual to mail me copyrighted american stuff from India, cause she did'nt have to pay a tarrif on it either. I put some dirt on it.