TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Friday, September 20, 2002

3:05 AM
Posted by jodi rose

Eldridge St, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Marking the end of another action packed farm visit with the weekly trip to the city. Got in 2 hours late, after packing and delivering restaurant orders, and the storefront was chaos with disappointed shoppers waiting patiently for their organic vegetables to arrive. Luckily Peter showed up, so I comandeered him to run it while I bought beer and chilled out on the street chatting with geoff and marcel and shu-lea, who arrived back from london yesterday. The garlic trading project is all going on, with colour glossy brochures listing the locations for making your virtual garlic real, and the truck being painted this weekend - man, I'm living the post-crash garlic economy. who needs cash! Great seeing Shu-lea again, she has so much energy and is constantly travelling the world making these diverse collaborative projects happen - my guru. (other than the farming guru that is!) Talking to margaret at the storefront - she lives down the road and comes by every week, she makes sound for vr environments, and was telling me about this amazing guy who customizes microphones, so I'm going to try him for a good low-end resonant contact mike. Somehow highlighted the link between new media and organic vegetables - what is with that??!! Anyway, taking a few days off from my alternate reality as farm-girl, to go look at some art, listen to music, maybe see a movie - starting to enjoy new york city, now I have a range of people to hang out with and places to stay.
Talking with Nina last night about the anxiety that working with high-end technology produces, she is far more high-tech than I will ever be, doing a project with brain-waves and custom code, but I get the same response even with my very low-fi engagements. Maybe something about this machinery that is built for the military-industrial-entertainment complex, and when you start pushing and twisting it into other forms or use(lessness)'s the extreme rational logical hardware resists or fights back - no, that's not what I'm built for. Ah but we have to make the machines work for us, don't we?!
Possible activities in the next few days include - chelsea art galleries tonight, shu-lea's talk at parsons art school digital salon fri, rpi kids music thing friday night, dee-dee's film on the bread and puppet theatre saturday at woodstock film festival, some cafe hanging, writing letters and postcards, and maybe helping out with the garlic arrangement on the farm, check up on the new wild guinea chicks - incredibly cute and fluffy, started out with 12 and were down to 7 when we left. That's life in the country.