by Jean Marie Carey | 23 Oct 2011 | Animals in Art, Art History
So the Swede Film Festival Tampa was last night at the Muvico in Ybor City.
It seemed like about 100 people and hipsters showed out which mainly included the filmmakers and casts and their friends. Still it was fun in the way that comic events are more entertaining with a group who is into it.
Of course I was one of the animals in Dumbo. Jim Reiman made this film but his voices for the various characters are what blew me away. Adam Kitzerow and Deon Blackwell are especially hilarious in Top Gun and Robb Fladry has incredible fun original music for Weekend at Bernie’s. The Sweded Apocalypto and The Shining were pretty madcap, too.
I think it would be fun to work on a version of There Will Be Blood.
by Jean Marie Carey | 6 May 2011 | Art History
People have been asking about the photo-documentation of the spectacular black eye and other bruises incurred in Bike Fall 2, so here are some images. One of the main purposes of this blog over the years has been to keep track of the various injuries of dogs and others, and I am cheerful to take my place alongside Marcie, Queequeg, and Astra (the Secretariat of accident-prone-ness). As bike accidents go, it was pretty bad, in that it happened so fast I couldn’t jump clear of the handlebars (or the pavement) and pretty good (I was wearing my helmet and didn’t get further run over by a car).
The most upsetting thing was when I went to inspect and clean up the bike. The sprockets, frame, wraps, seat, post, and tires are covered in sprays and drips of blood. I can’t believe I rode home. It was a good method research experience for being riding along one second and in exigent circumstances the next…
As bizarre sociological experiments go, the response to the black eye has been interesting. The power of denial is great, so a surprisingly large number of people — even those who see me pretty regularly and over a long period of time — just ignore the situation and act as if it is normal for an acquaintance to suddenly sport the rings of Saturn. A slight majority — probably 60 percent — evince some sort of reaction. People who have a more intense level of connection have more agitated responses. I guess this is what you would expect. One person who particularly loathes and despises me was quite effusive {“That looks like it must hurt a lot…you must be in a lot of pain!“}. Close friends and family have responded with an onslaught of soup, which is fantastic.
by Jean Marie Carey | 26 Jan 2011 | Art History
We went to look at the American Modernism show at the Tampa Museum of Art but mainly to experience some avant garde, modernist — experimental, really — music presented by the University of Tampa’s Minaret New Music Ensemble. One of the best parts of the event was Bradford Blackburn’s Ph.d. dissertation, Phrase and Rephrase 3/2, a concerto for Harry Partch Ensemble with live augmentation with Donald Martino on bass clarinet and cellist Lowell Adams. Our hearts were stolen, though, by microtonal guitarist, composer, and luthier Ron Sword.
This was one of the best things we’ve seen in Tampa. The park outside the museum is very lovely too and gets a lot of use, even on a cold Wednesday night.
by Jean Marie Carey | 11 Sep 2010 | Art History
More Florida Radar Excitement
by Jean Marie Carey | 7 Sep 2007 | Art History
Crack at the Edge of the World
It is clinically and physically possible to inhale a heart-stopping dose of crack cocaine. Yet in the majority of death-by-rock cases in Tampa and other urban centers during the drug’s heyday in the Eighties and the years since, the cocaine dilute has been no more than a contributing factor.
In fact most crack-related fatalities were caused not by toxic rock but by lead poisoning courtesy first of small-caliber handguns and then by increasingly high-powered automatic weapons, often wielded in crimes auxiliary to the actual use of the drug. As convenience store and gas station clerks were gunned down for twenty dollars by desperate rock fiends and hollow-points blasted through children’s bedroom windows, crack’s collateral victims came, almost obsessively, the attention of affluent, white Floridians.
Throughout the Seventies and the early Eighties, Tampa Bay had a fearless if uneasy relationship with cocaine, the party drug of the wealthy and popular. In 1980, suffering hallucinations and insomnia, comedian Richard Pryor set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine — the drug is rendered with ether making it smokable as well as highly flammable — and suddenly it seemed the free ride the suburban white powder had winkingly got in the media was over, becoming the gritty slush of the ghetto.
Juvenile Ibis, August 2007
Freebasing, in which cocaine hydrochloride was chemically converted was clearly too uncontrollable for even the most high-craving fiends. Crack — a mixture of coke, ammonia, baking soda, and other filler ingredients solidified into rough pellets for consumption via a glass pipe — was more stable. Containing only about ten percent pure cocaine, it was also much less expensive than the polar powder inhaled in discos, selling for as little as ten dollars a hit.
The physical effects of smoking crack are instant, extremely pleasurable, — and very brief. Like modern-day scourge meth, crack produces a spurt of intense euphoria, reduced hunger, and trenchant wakefulness .As the rush evaporates after as little as fifteen minutes, these sensations are replaced by an intense depression and the irrational but seemingly irresistible desire for more crack.
The so-called crack epidemic victimized mostly the poor, and inordinately the black, so much so that claims by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton that crack was introduced to African American population centers by the CIA were taken quite seriously. Throughout most of the Nineties, gangs dueled for crack-selling corners in housing projects in Tampa and St. Petersburg with frequently fatal results, while police waged a “War on Drugs” in those communities and the justice system executed a no-tolerance-for-possession policy which resulted in insanely long sentences for those caught with just a few rocks.
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were pretty madcap, too.
