Jesse Wiedel @ the Accident Gallery (click here)

Jonas Wood at the Saatchi Gallery:


What a painter! What a place!

Radical Nature @ the Barbican Centre (click here)

The 1970's Brutalist/Utopian architectural complex of the Barbican Centre is a somewhat chilling sight to behold. The Radical Nature show (currently on view here) is perfectly matched for the Silent Running/Soylent Green-style atmosphere of this place.

(A Chilango on Fleet Street.)

A 14th Century crenelated tower besieged by the Financial District:

"Wise men ought circumspectly to see what they do, to examine before they speake, to prove before they take in hand, to beware whose company they use and, above all things, to whom they trust."

(Charles Bailly, locked in the Tower of London in 1571.)

"Since fortune has chosen that my hope should go to the wind to complain, I wish the time were destroyed; my planet being ever sad and ungracious."

(William Tyrrel, locked in the Tower of London in 1541.)

Favorites from the British Museum (Assyrian Lion Hunt):





(The Dying Lioness is one of my all-time favorite works of art.)

Favorites from the British Museum (Hellenistic Amazons in combat):




(These ladies kick ass!!!!)

What my son remembered about the National Gallery:

The pictures of naked people.
The pictures of cows and horses.
The severed heads on plates.
A drunk, naked Santa Claus-looking guy.
People wearing spiked neck collars.
Animals eating people.
Other stuff...

(This description will have to suffice 'cause I wasn't allowed to take photos!!!!)

London is a city where everyone tries to speak English to each other.

(It's gonna be fun to figure this out.)

(Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation explaining humanity's relationship to the Geomorphological Miasma, amongst other cool topics.)

My new video--enjoy!

MEXIMPERIALI from Cynthia Hooper on Vimeo.

Stills from my new movie:









The Mexicali and Imperial Valleys, both belonging to the vast, attenuated (and now bisected) historical flood plain of the Colorado River, are two of the most intensively productive agricultural regions in Mexico and the United States. This would never have been were it not for the vision and hubris that rerouted the Colorado River into this desert some one hundred years ago. The canal dug to irrigate the region has since been bifurcated, litigated, and most recently lined with concrete—all with the outcome of reducing the Mexicali Valley’s historical access to water. This video serves as a reminder that these two valleys remain—despite the managerialist imperatives that divide them—very much one cultural, environmental, and hydrological entity. (2009, running time: 10 minutes.)

(A suitably nerdy description for it.)

A monument in Ejido Benito Juarez:

President Lázaro Cárdenas is credited with creating the ejidos (farm collectives) of the Mexicali Valley in the 1930's after purchasing the land from the gringos.