A terrific (47mb) video by Olivier Bonin of the Serpent at the Crucible’s 2007 Fire Arts Festival The thing to watch!!
SF Chronicle coverage here and here (article title: “Hot-and-heavy sculpture gets artists warmed up Enormous flame-breathing creations at Fire Arts Festival are prelude to Burning Man. Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer. Friday, July 13, 2007”)
Here is the schedule of who worked the performance… There’s a lot of Girls, aren’t there?
First some good news:
SWARM, an offshoot project of FLG is a funded project for Burning Man 2007. The project is coming along very nicely. http://orbswarm.comhttp://blog.orbswarm.com
A couple weeks ago, Charlotte and I went to the SOEX 7th Annual Monster Drawing Rally. We got to watch a few rounds of 20 artists make something in 60 minutes. It wasn’t nearly as fun as we thought it would be though since all the art produced was very so-so. Apparently it was a great fundraiser though since the line-up to buy the pieces for $50 apiece was quite long. It had the possibility of being fun with the festive, crowded and hip atmosphere and the bar…
This past Sunday afternoon: played Diplomacy for the first time. I was surprised how much fun it was even though after 6 hours of game play it seemed the game was only a little more than 1/2 finished. Before I went, I thought, “15 minutes per move? That sounds so terribly boring.” It wasn’t. :-)
Sunday morning Charlotte and I helped Charlie with an art contract building a 14′ tall metal wire horse and gold gilded grass around it.
This weekend, Charlotte’s friend Keith came by from Boston. Most notably, he acted as a neutral third party and confirmed what we have long thought was the truth, that our bed has evil tentacles that pull you in. He sat down on it, leaned back and asked in a startlingly sleepy voice, “What kind of bed is this?” Seconds later he was deep in a 3 minute nap.
For reference, he was fully awake before sitting down, it was noon, he wasn’t jet-lagged or worn out from the night before and was well rested.
On January 21st the Flaming Lotus Girls made a presentation to “MAG”, the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco. Olivia, Jordana and Charlotte made presentations and I helped out.
They spoke mostly about their personal experiences with the group and why they make art. It’s really quite a good talk. Skip to the end of the last section to see some fun fire art in the parking lot of the Fort Mason Center.
This Sunday, January 21st, Charlotte along with 3 other Lotus Girls, Olivia, Jordana and Lucy, will be making a presentation to the San Francisco Metal Arts Guild in conjunction with MAG’s first meeting of the year. This is a huge thing seeing as MAG is such a “serious” organization. It feels like we’re a bunch of race car drivers giving a talk to a group of physicists about the G-forces encountered on the track. ;-)
From MAG’s site:
2007 ANNUAL MAG METALSMITHING DAY
Sunday, Jan 21, 2007 from 2-5 pm
Where: Fort Mason Center, Building C, Room 260 San Francisco
“HOW TO PACK YOUR WORK FOR SHIPPING” – demo by Harriete Estel Berman and emiko oye, jam-packed with valuable info on packing your work for an exhibition or gallery, relative to artists in any media.
San Francisco based FLAMING LOTUS GIRLS will give a slide lecture about their work as well as give a fire art performance (performance outdoors, weather permitting).
MEET THE BOARD – info on upcoming events, opportunities and an open forum for members to become involved with future programs.
Contact: Carol Windsor 650-343-5656
Each Girl will have an 8 minute or so presentation talking about one aspect of being part of a this collaborative art group. I won’t be presenting but I’ll be along to help out.
Carol tells me that we can bring as many friends as we like. If you’re interested in coming to the meeting, seeing the presentations and (hopefully) see us run 2 feathers from the Angel of the Apocalypse, give me a buzz!
We’ll be meeting at the Box Shop at 11am Sunday to finish packing. We’ll go on starting about 3pm.
I have been starting a business with my girlfriend, Charlotte. We are tentatively calling it Safe and Secure. It is an earthquake preparedness business where we go to people’s homes and institutions and ready them for the kinds of earthquakes that we inevitably have here in northern California. It’s turning out to be quite interesting and fun. We are becoming experts in the field. :-)
In my personal/art life, I have been working on several projects getting ready for Burning Man. One is called Swarm. You can take a peek here: http://www.orbswarm.com/. I am also helping to rework the Serpent Mother… that is the giant snake that we worked on last year. You saw pictures of that, yes? Take a peek: http://lee.org/blog/2006/10/03/serpent-links/
We have just barely gotten to putting The Serpent Mother away. Hopefully next week we will be able to put a tarp over all of her vertebrae so she does not corrode too badly while in storage. In the last few days, we got the head elevated into the top of the shop for storage. I am afraid that the serpent mother will not be coming out again for quite a while. There are many other projects that we are working on.
Upcoming, we have the ever present shop maintenance… I volunteered to fix a welder of ours… though I know nothing about fixing such things.. It won’t be too hard, I hope. Charlotte is going to be fixing up a cabinet at the shop. We’re going to be moving the head of the Angel of the Apocalypse to a spot in the city soon. We’re working on nabbing part of a large grant from Redwood City to build birdbaths. And we’ve got to start thinking about our Burning Man 2007 project. Grant Proposals are due February 15th! And during that time, several Lotus Girls will be in Australia on tour with the Hand of God at this travelling event called “Big Day Out”!
I’m still working on getting the business going with Charlotte. That’s going ok. :-)
Last night, Charlotte and I completed our training as Neighborhood Emergency Response Team members!
This is one vital step in our multifaceted strategy to take over the world!
We have been studying disaster preparedness, fire safety, light search and rescue, triage, basic disaster medicine with the SF Fire Department. We even got to put out a real fire and make a mess in the parking lot with a 3A 40BC extinguisher (the kind of extinguisher that YOU should have in your home, car and workplace… you have one in each, right? If not, we’ll sell you one, at a very reasonable price…).
We got gloves and super duper ity bity flashlights (I almost blinded Charlotte, oops. But the veins in our hands look really cool) submersible to 500ft and guaranteed against… let me read the manual, “Pelican Unconditional Lifetime Guarr… blah blah blah… defects in workmanship… blah blah blah…. THE ABOVE GUARANTEE DOES NOT COVER SHARKBITE, BEAR ATTACK OR CHILDREN UNDER 5.” Ha!
We were instructed never to walk into a building and shout “NERTS! We’re here to help!” People would just look at us funny. We’re supposed to say “Rescue Team!” Already our self esteem is being tested by the industrial firefighting complex. ;-)
This is an important part of our disaster preparedness business. Which, in all honesty, is looking pretty tenable.
