Josh Feola

Long hiatus, Beijing stuff:

House Of Flying Daggers by Raekwon Ft Inspectah Deck,Ghostface Killah & Method Man  

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Well took me a quarter of the year to do this again. In a nutshell it's been two months of laying low at home and trying (and failing) to find a job and one month of having found a (part time) job and manically planning how to avoid getting another one.

The longer version is this.



This is mostly what I have to show for my time at home. I organized my possessions and made this installation to represent both the last few years of my life and the fact that I am an incurable packrat. I think I have stubs from every movie I've been to since I was 10.



I went back to Boston in February and promptly visited this much hyped Shepard Fairey show at the ICA (above). I didn't realize this guy was behind Andre has a posse/Obey/that ubiquitous Obama campaign image, it's pretty odd that a street artist has been on my cultural radar for so long but flown low enough to avoid name recognition until now. I think he would be disappointed by that. Despite Fairey's rep as a stencil vet, his New England punk credentials, and his heroic legal battles with the Boston PD and the Associated Press, I can't shake a suspicion that much of his artistic persona and some of his output is a cynical appropriation of the dumbed down mass marketing techniques that he explicitly imitates in his design and that implicitly, I think, contribute to his own personality industry. I'll stop myself before I start getting too banal or buzzkilling, I'd rather just show you some of the art in the show but in an unsurprising bit of irony I was told by an ICA docent that I couldn't take pictures because they didn't have the ©.

In any case after I saw the show I couldn't stop seeing Fairey's stuff all over Boston (which works were, I later learned, part of a promotional effort on his part), so I availed myself of the freedoms of that publicker space to snap a synchronic shot of Shepard Fairey in Boston in early 2009. (Note: as I'm writing this I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Antigua, Guatemala (see below) and across the way Fairey's Obama image is staring out at me from the cover of Time Magazine. There is something extremely laudable in the omnipresence of that design, which in itself qualifies Fairey as one of the more significant artists of our time.)






So I also got a job. Part time working at the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History (hereafter referred to as ICEAACH). I was primarily involved in scanning and seeking images of covers of obscure journals, which turned out to be an amazing trip through mid-70s social science publication aesthetics. So much gold here:









So what else... gripped this bad rider, which I guess makes me more credentialed than your average unemployed individual (sadly this isn't even true). But it looks cool. I've been working on a couple of projects, most importantly this China summer program at the Linden Centre:



More on this as it develops.

Odds and ends:

-homemade 阴阳
-my current jam
-cool non-Fairey Obama zine art
-some free advice

So as I parenthetically mentioned I'm back in Antigua. I have a penchant for returning places. Now I have a better camera and a functioning computer so hopefully I'll be able to augment my Guatemala reportage, which was notably lacking last year. But I'm only going to be in Antigua for another few days, then it's back to San Bartolo. I will be doing a lot of this, some of this, and none of this intentionally, but if I have a repeat encounter and it's equally docile to last year's I will not complain.

Enough of these epic posts. If I haven't already alienated my entire readership with my scarcity I guess I'll have to do it with my bombast. But if you're still hanging in there, I'll make the next one shorter, sweeter, and maybe prettier.


-JOSH

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Settling into Malang. This past weekend involved some group- and host family-bonding field trips.



On Saturday we went to Taman Safari, a half-cool, half-depressing drive-through zoo. Saw animals from all over the world, which was kind of gimmicky, but we also cruised by some locals, including a pit of lethargic Komodo dragons and a jungle gym of equally lazy orangutans. We spent a good deal of the time trying to remember everyone's name from the Jungle Book. I wanted to jump out of the car and get my Mougley on but the spitting alpacas (and pissed panthers) slowed my roll.

Highlight: Sitting spitting distance from my zodiac animal (but not spiritual co-essence, this is a Jaguar, one of which I got equally close to in Guatemala, but without the safety of steel and glass, but more on this another time)(see above)

Low point: Wandering around the zoo afterwards, which featured parrots with clipped wings and chained elephants. These reminded me of Sanchahe Nature Reserve in Xishuangbanna, another depressing elephant gawking park I visited in China, where I got much more out of human than animal camaraderie. I skipped the baby lion petting zoo at Taman.




On Sunday we visited the much more enjoyable Coban Rondo, a waterfall near a town outside of Malang called Batu Kota ("Rock City"). Coban Rondo means "widow waterfall", and it's said if you visit it you and your significant other are soon to part. Luckily I arrived in this country with the single-minded objective of 86'ing significant others from my mental, and at the risk of sounding like too much of a hippie I got a lot out of the water, got into the water that is to say, waltzed as close to the fall as I could without getting crushed and dipped my brain into the brook a ways downstream.



After the fall I hung out with this fire dude for a while while my crew caught a quick bite at the park entrance. I myself sampled the local street fare, a topic on which I'll write (MUCH) more later.



On Sunday night I met my host family, a wealthy Chinese couple with a twelve-year-old son. They were tired after two weeks traveling around Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, but over the course of this week we've broken the ice and started serious bonding. As I'd hoped, Chinese is the only language I have in common with Mei Fen, my host mother (my Bahasa and her English are like negatives of each other), and her constant appeal of "Ta shuo shenme?" at every utterance of my Western housemates has contributed significantly to our budding dynamic. On Tuesday she took us to a Chinese Universist temple called Eng An Kiong. It was the temple's 183rd birthday so there was a huge feast (above) and dragon performance, but unfortunately my camera died halfway through so I couldn't capture the impressive acrobatics (shoot out to my two favorite dragons, though). I received a Mandarin tour of the temple from an old Chinese man, and of the slightly more than 50% of this that I understood I was pretty psyched on the fo jiao, dao jiao, and kong jiao.



On Monday I also started teaching my high school class. I was apprehensive about this at first as I've never taught, but so far it's been incredibly fun and rewarding. This week we talked mostly about music and movies, but they're also interested in politics and I'm definitely looking forward to getting some help from my man here to illustrate my country's bright prospects for the future.

Tomorrow I take off for Yogyakarta, Java's cultural center and the town from which I will visit BOROBUDUR, an ancient Buddhist monument that I'm eager to see both because of it's historical significance and because in more recent times its timeless art has served as a great inspiration to my idol.



So more SOON. In conclusion, a few words about Tigers:


Because Tigers are urgent people and always in a hurry to get things done right, they usually choose to operate alone. Tigers like to work, they are hard-working and dynamic. If you assign a task to a Tiger, the job will be undertaken and accomplished with enthusiasm and efficiency.

Tigers are sensitive, emotional. They are capable of great love, but they become too intense about it. They are also territorial and possessive, if you are a friend of a Tiger, he wants you to take his side against the bad guys and because the Tiger is so adorable, you often do. As lovers, Tigers are passionate and romantic, but the real challenge for the Tiger is to grasp the true meaning of moderation.



-Josh

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