I’ve always enjoyed this song, but never knew what the lyrics translated to.

The video above contains four short video clips I recorded from my Canon SD750 on February 6th, 2010 in & around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. The video clips show the what the snowball fight looked like when I arrived, a dance party, a fallen tree on New Hampshire Avenue, and an SUV pulling a snowboarder. The camera is rather beat up and there is a noticeable dark spot on camera lens– sorry!

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This is my favorite video of the snowball fight. It was filmed from a building overlooking Dupont Cirlce:

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At least there were no guns.

Today I received the two calendars I ordered last week. I decided to make this short video to show prospective buyers what the calendar looks like when printed out. In the video above I simply hang the calendar on the wall and flipped through each month of the Color Edition of my 2010 Cartographic Calendar. Its a somewhat simple method of showing the maps in the calendar, but I think it helps to visualize what a 17″ x 11″ calendar would look like on your wall.

On August 5th, 2008 I made the first version of this mashup, East Meets West and with the newly created contraflow bicycle lane on 15th Street NWDC, I decided to make the second version, North Meets South.

The two videos were taken from one continuous video recording that I conducted while riding on my bicycle from U Street & 15th Street to Massachusetts Ave & 15th Street and back. At home I split the videos into North & South and used the crosswalks as the starting & ending points. The object of this video mashup is to find the exact time when the two recordings pass each other on opposite sides of the street.

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A few notes:

Last night a friend of mine from college, Andrew Wiseman, left a message on my Facebook wall saying that he saw the map I made on Current TV. Knowing that I had met the film crew back in June of this year at the 18th Street Lounge, I was expecting the show to eventually broadcast. Earlier today the full show was uploaded to YouTube:

Around 18 minutes into the episode, while Eric Hilton and Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation are at the record shop Som Records (about 4 blocks from my house), Rob picks up the record Supreme Illusion, which I licensed Pentagon Quilt and Lower Manhattan Quilt as the cover artwork.

If you don’t want to watch the entire show, you can skip to 50 second mark on this truncated version of the show:

This short video documents my temporary photo installation called “Welcome to my room.” for FotoweekDC 2009. The installation consists of about 24 random photographs that I had doubles of in my archives. They were stapled to the temporary wooden walkway on the west side of 14th Street near the intersection of T Street, NW, Washington, DC. The building for which the temporary walkway was constructed will become the chain department store called Room & Board. So welcome to my Room, I hope you are not Bored. Please add your own photos to the walkway and make the room ours. Send me photos of your additions.

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UPDATE – I’m pleased to say that in the week since I installed the photographs, they’ve all been removed. Every other day I walked by the exhibit to see how many were remaining, which were mixing with the leaves on the sidewalk, and by yesterday they were all in the urban ether. The installation was never meant to be permanent nor really even a serious photographic exhibit, just an experiment, and since the photographs were all duplicate photos from 1992-2002, their sacrifice totally was worth it!

On Sunday afternoon I filmed this timelapse video of the crowd of people at FiestaDC walking down Mount Pleasant Street in Northwest, Washington, DC. My good friend has an apartment right above the street which made for some awesome people watching (I think I called it “people watching caviar”). This elevated perspective allowed me to capture this unique footage of the festival participants. The audio in the video is from a separate recording of the same location played at normal speed. I did this to capture the sound of the festival without having to resort to some cheesy music playing over the timelapse video. As for the opening title sequence, I decided to play around with the fonts of the title for 15 frames each. I don’t really know why I did that except to add some random flair to the footage.

Last Friday, on the evening before the Taxpayer March On Washington, a large group of teabaggers, patriots, small-government conservatives, and libertarians staged a rally at CityCenterDC, the site of the old Washington, DC Convention center. Little did they know they were standing on Astroturf.

Astroturfing is a word that describes political, advertising, or public relations campaigns which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior. Being that the Taxpayer March on Washington was promoted heavily by Fox News and other conversation media organizations, it was far from being a grassroots mobilization. So when I realized the demonstrators were actually standing on astroturf, I decided to make this short video to highlight the irony of the spectacle.

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Related Taxpayers March on Washington, DC Entries:
- Photographs of Friday’s Opening Rally of the Taxpayers March on DC at CityCenterDC
- Photographs of Friday’s Opening Rally of the Taxpayers March on DC at CityCenterDC
- Photographs of the Taxpayers March on Washington [PART ONE]
- Photographs of the Taxpayers March on Washington [PART TWO]
- Photographs of the Taxpayers March on Washington [PART THREE]

Today I read the New York Times article American Antiwar Movement Plans an Autumn Campaign Against Policies on Afghanistan and noticed that Rethink Afghanistan was mentioned. Earlier this year, during Easter weekend, I was solicited by a friend who works with the organization to voluntarily dress up like the easter bunny and hand out easter eggs around Chinatown and the White House. The video above is the result of two days of volunteering and while I was saving the video for a blog entry next Easter*, I felt compelled to share it today.

…..4 months after this video was filmed……

• There are more soldiers going to Afghanistan today —-not less
• 51 percent of Americans now feel the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting
• August 2009 was the bloodiest month since the war began
• Afghanistan is the graveyard of Empires

Obama campaigned on bringing the troops home, but he hasn’t done so, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Imagine all the money that could be spent on free healthcare for all Americans that is currently being spent fighting unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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* I also have about a dozen pictures of this action and another video of me trying not to get arrested by police officer in Chinatown. I plan on posting them in a future entry…

I made this YouTube video yesterday evening after I downloaded all the photos and video I took from last weekend’s excursion to the to the Shenandoah mountains. The 25 video clips are played in sequential order, starting with me getting into my friend’s vegetable oil-powered Mercedes Benz, driving out of Washington, DC, driving through the country, seeing a spider eat a moth, lights projected on trees, a spider with eggs crawling through the grass, chasing a butterfly among lilies (probably my favorite scene), insects devouring a large dragonfly, a few clips of the band Stripmall Ballads performing, caterpillar at night, lightrope on a rock, an American Goldfinch bathing in a creek in the middle of the road, and driving back home.

All in all, I had a great time. I just wish I still wasn’t tired from hiking up and down the length of the property!

This morning after I returned home from picking up my morning beverage, I was approached by Jennifer Donelan, a reporter for WJLA ABC7, who was doing a story about the recent up tick in crime in my neighborhood. She asked if I’d be willing to be interviewed and, surprisingly, I made the edit and show up about 50 seconds into the segment.

About a month ago, at probably the height of the car break-ins, I conceived the idea of doing a photo series of nothing but broken glass on the street & sidewalk. It seemed that nearly every day I would walk by a car with a smashed window and I felt compelled to document this travesty. But alas, I never seemed to have my camera with me when I needed it and the concept has since fallen by the wayside.

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Related Crime Entries:

Back in April, I was home late on Saturday evening / Sunday morning and stumbled on to the Washington, DC PBS affiliate station WETA showing a Federal Bureau of Investigation recruitment video on their All-Access programming. It’s the first time and only I’ve seen this type of sponsored recruitment video on public television before.

Every 4th of July for the last 5 years I’ve watched the massive firework display on the National Mall from a rooftop in the Washington, DC area. This year I finally decided to see the display from my rooftop and make a video of it. The music is the Washington Post March by John Philip Sousa and performed by the United States Marine Band. One of my favorite aspects of being on a rooftop in DC on the 4th of July is watching everyone shoot their own fireworks. You can see them exploding in every direction!

Before the fireworks, I attended my friend’s second annual “Jerk Off” BBQ competition in Rock Creek Park. And to continue my other 4th of July tradition, I rode around the city with my Adbusters Corporate flag attached to a large flagpole attached to my backpack. Like in the years past, people would still applaud when they see it, most not knowing there was a subtle protest waving before their eyes. Next to being on rooftop, waving this flag is my second favorite 4th of July tradition…

On Saturday June 13th, 2009, I attended the Artomatic “Meet The Artist Night.” As an experiment, I decided to place my digital camera on my exhibit wall. This time-lapse video documents what it would be like to be a fly on the wall at my Artomatic 2009 exhibit.

About midway through the video, I remove the camera from the wall and a friend takes a photo of me with a couple friends and then I place the camera back on the wall for the remainder of the filming.

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Music used in the video is Azul (Gianma’s Drum and Bass Remix) by Natalia Clavier from her El Arbol EP (2008).

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You can also view a somewhat better quality version of the video on Facebook.

After growing my hair out for the last year, I decided to film the long-awaited haircut in my living room using my digital camera’s time-lapse recording function. While the haircut was taking place a couple of my housemates come home and watch the haircut unaware that there was a camera recording in the background.

The video gratuitously starts out with a couple photos I took of myself from July of 2008 until March of 2009 then transitions to the footage my Canon SD750 recorded using the one frame per second time-lapse feature. I would have included more photos from June of 2008 to March of 2008, but I couldn’t find any photos on my hard drive.

Anyways, I doubt I’ll grow my hair out like this again for awhile, but honestly, I enjoyed having it.
Up next: the sideburns!

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MUSIC: Concerto for Flute and Orchestra in F Major by Antonio Vivaldi
Performed by the Gardner Chamber Orchestra. Audio directed by flutist Paula Robison.
Audio courtesy of Archive.org

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Artwork Note: On the wall, behind me to my left, is my map “Washington Monument Lenz”

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Related YouTube Entries:

Earlier today I attended the Capitol Climate Action on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Organized by Greenpeace and the Rain Forest Action Network for the Powershift09 conference, the demonstration was billed as a “mass civil disobedience” designed to shut down the Washington, DC’s biggest polluter, the Capitol Power Plant. Although I wasn’t able to stay for the entire demonstration, I was able to slice together some of the video clips I took from around 1pm to 3pm:

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See the rest of the photos of the demonstration:

Today I attended the Business Meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs dressed in my colonial attire. I wear this costume for every congressional hearing related to representation for the residents of Washington, DC. I arrived early enough to snag a decent seat and sat down next to my friend Shadow Senator Michael D. Brown. As the other Senators arrived for the meeting he & I chatted about ideas related to what we can do next to get statehood for the District of Columbia.

A few minutes later when Senator Joe Lieberman walked in, Shadow Senator Michael D. Brown stood up, greeted him, and shook his hand. Senator Lieberman then looks at me and said something along the lines of “I’m glad to see that we have a colonist here. Do you go by the name of Paul Revere?” I said, “No, I’m just a DC colonist.” He followed, “So you don’t have a name? Just ‘DC Colonist’?” and I responded, “I’m just a DC Colonist that suffers taxation without representation.” He smiled, walked over to the end of the table, and sat down at his seat. A few minutes later the hearing began and he decided to greet me publicly…..

Click here to listen to the audio
or
Click here to watch the video

[to watch the video, you first need to hit play, then scroll the slider over to about 21:10 to watch the introduction]

Senator Lieberman said:

I do want to note and welcome Mayor Fenty of the District of Columbia we are honored that you are here and a somewhat older resident of the District from colonial times [laughter] also present. I gather you are making the general point about taxation without representation [off camera I nod in the affirmative]. Okay I don’t need to make my case any stronger than that [laughter]. Thank you for being here.

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Also worthy of mention is that later on in the hearing (at around 43:15 into the video), Senator George Voinovich mentions the time when the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were in Washington, DC and we lobbied them on the Potomac River (right photo). Hearing him mention that day made me laugh. It was one of my favorite demonstrations I’ve ever taken part in! I remember watching the parliamentarians applaud our efforts from the ship and the following day they passed a resolution calling on the United States government to give DC residents congressional representation.

In the end, only Senator John McCain voted against the bill, S.R. 160, the senate version of the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009, and it passed the committee with a vote of 11-1. Unfortunately, I agree with McCain’s opinion, only states should receive representation in Congress.

I feel that DC Vote and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton wasted a huge opportunity to give DC residents equal representation in Congress by reintroducing this three-year-old, constitutionally questionable legislation that was written for a Republican controlled congress. Times have changed, however, the bill and its constitutional underpinnings have not. I’m not sure what will happen next to the bill, like when will it be voted on, but I am sure it will be challenged on it’s constitutionality. In the meantime, I’m going to continue to work with my Shadow Delegation on lobbying for statehood for the District of Columbia.

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UPDATE: February 12th, 2009 – Comedian Stephan Colbert interviewed Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton the following night:

Its too bad the editors missed the chance with the Colonist…

Related Colonist Entries:

Last night attended the DC Statehood Green Party’s forum called “DC Statehood, Now Is Our Time.” The event featured the entire elected shadow delegation as well as two city councilmembers and other leaders of this civil rights struggle. I also recorded much of the event, but I haven’t put a video together yet.

Hamil Harris from the Washington Post who made the video above, also wrote a brief write-up of the event if you are interested.

My favorite snippet:

Charles Cassell, who chaired of the DC Statehood Constitutional Convention during the early years of Home Rule, said the late activist Julius Hobson would be upset had he lived to see this day.

Earlier this week I decided to add this archived video to the repository known as YouTube. I’ve had it for 6 years now and decided to finally upload the video because I could not find anywhere else on-line. I still feel the message that we were delivering then is the same as now: don’t go into debt buying presents for others during the holiday season and if you must give presents, try making them first.

The article that was published in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch regarding this demonstration was the first time my name appeared in newspapers. The story behind this video goes like this….

On October 2nd, 2002 I created a Yahoo Group dedicated to the planning of Buy Nothing Day in Saint Louis. After a few planning meetings and e-mail discussions, the members of group decided to create giant credit cards that we’d drag around the malls in the Saint Louis area. We also produced & handed out fliers with suggestions on how to avoid going into debt during the holiday season.

This video by Aaron Michaels highlights the news coverage we generated and documents the message we were advocating. The first part is a music video featuring a modified Christmas carol sung by Sara Lucas spliced with footage from the news & us dragging the cards and handing out fliers. The second part of the video features news clips & interviews with participants highlighting why chose to demonstrate. I show up around 4:35 into the video.

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I haven’t gone out of the way to purchase gifts for my family this year. Its nice that we’ve stopped doing the gifts for nearly 10 years now. I am going to Colorado next week to visit some of my family and I feel my presence will be the best gift I can give to rarely-seen family. Interestingly, I think yesterday’s commissioned map follows closely with this video’s messaging because the client was asking me to make her a gift. It wasn’t like client decided to hitup Walmart for the gift that millions of others might get, rather she went for something that’s truly one of kind.

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Related Adbusters Entries:

This morning I scoured the intertubes for videos related to yesterday’s shoe demonstration outside of the White House. Below are the videos I’ve pulled from YouTube and other media outlets.

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The rest of the videos: