This is what your garbage produces!

(I've been re-working my landfill video for a DVD compilation.)

The finished work:

"Carney Time" by Jesse Wiedel

The Crazy Surf at the Redwoods Acres Fair:

(One of Jesse's budding efforts as a video artist.)

My old brain:

(Its been recently replaced.)

Peter Cusack's "Sounds From Dangerous Places" (click here)

"Recent travels have brought me into contact with some difficult and potentially dangerous places. Most are sites of major environmental/ecological damage, but others include nuclear sites or the edges of military zones. The danger is not necessarily to a short-term visitor, but to the people who live there or through the location's role in geopolitical power structures. Some are areas where extreme and hostile conditions have been created, in others the danger has been hidden or absorbed into the local economy. In yet others regeneration is underway.

Such places include the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine; the Caspian Oil Fields near Baku, Azerbaijan; the Munzur River (a Euphrates tributary) valley in Kurdish Turkey where 19 very controversial dams are planned; Thetford Forest beside USAF air bases in the UK; North Wales in the areas where Chernobyl fallout will effect farming practice for years to come.

Many sound recordings were made at these sites. Photographic and other visual images were taken. Interviews and background research provide textual documents. It is noticeable that environmentally damaged sites can be both sonically and visually compelling, if not beautiful and atmospheric. There is, often, an extreme dichotomy between an aesthetic response and knowledge of the 'danger', whether it is pollution, social injustice, military or geopolitical.

"Sounds From Dangerous Places" asks the questions, "What elements of the soundscape of a dangerous place are effected, changed, created or destroyed as a result of its 'dangerousness'? and, "What insights can sound offer into the environmental, social and political contexts of a 'dangerous place'?" The project presents the field recordings as they are, in the belief that such recordings offer insights into the locations and issues that are different from, and complimentary to, those of visual images and texts. Supplementary questions are "What information about place can field recordings give that is special to sound?" and conversely, "What information is given by the other media that sound cannot?"

Kid: "That miniature golf course in LA was so awesome! It was all painted glow-in-the-dark."

Mom: "Interesting... You can edit with the latest version of QuickTime."

Kid: "Mama! You did it again!"

Jesse Wiedel at Jack The Pelican Presents (New York):

Click on the link above! I am so proud of my husband! Woo Hoo!

Basura Quemada out-take:

An action-packed clip of smoldering manure and the sounds of a garbage truck! (Since my camera broke, I've been combing my archive for interesting audio.)

Kid: "I hurt my leg."

Mom: "Hmmm... That must be it! The cross-dissolve didn't render properly."

Kid: "Mama! You never listen to anything I say!"

Another Exportadora de Sal out-take:

(These big pumps drive the whole operation--lots of exciting action in this one!)

The Samoa Pulp Mill:

The Schmidbauer Lumber Company:



(Good places to capture interesting audio in Eureka, CA)

The Center for Land Use Interpretation

"An exhibit about the liminal, substanceless, and static space of automotive transience."

A few bullet points from Dave Hickey in last month's Art in America:

3. Teaching art, in my experience, is a genuine privilege that comes with its own oath to "do no harm." It also breaks your heart.

4. Art is a cosmopolitan practice best taught in cities near the water. Teaching art in a provincial cultural environment that does not celebrate and embrace change is totally self-defeating. It transforms art into a compensatory discourse that can help a stranded student maintain his or her sanity for few years in the boonies. It cannot, however, help people who teach under these conditions maintain their sanity. These people are doomed...

5. Teachers of art practice have one overriding obligation to their students: to be intimately familiar with the contemporary standards of art practice, discourse, trade and exhibition against which their students' work will be measured--so their students will know the unspoken rules they are choosing to break or not to break. The art market itself should be dealt with evenhandedly and explained in detail. It is a fact and an option from which students should not be cloistered. Demonizing the art marketplace does more damage to students than exposing them to collectors and dealers who are irrevocably a part of the art world.

6. Art school must be free or cheap. It is virtually impossible for a young artist to establish a mature, courageous practice with a six-figure educational debt.

7. Art students should not be placed under the authority of older practicing artists whose work they are mandated to render obsolete. This guarantees bad advice and destructive criticism.