All of the above.  It’s the rainbarrel I designed and painted for the Chicago Recycle the Raindrops project, which recruited local artists to paint rainbarrels to promote the city’s rainbarrel program.  So far the barrels have been on display at the Chicago Green Town Conference, the Chicago Conference on Science and Technology, as a backdrop for a Mayoral press conference, and at local businesses.

View the listing for my barrel on the Recycle the Raindrops webpage

Get yourself a rainbarrel!

On April 11, I participated in Transistor’s Roundtable with Rani Woolpert webcast. Below is the portion of the show containing my interview, in advance of my April 17 workshop at Transistor, Fundamentals of Code for Artmaking.

Listen to the complete Roundtable.

After hearing that it can be helpful for a laboring woman to have a point of visual focus and to concentrate on imagery of an opening flower (to help everything open up that needs to), I built this full-screen visualizer to play during our breathing sessions.  We brought it along to the delivery room, but let’s just say anyone who wants to whip out a laptop on a woman in active labor has my sympathy for what follows.

The only controls are: Number keys for speed variation and ESC key to exit out.

Download the Mac version.

PC version available soon.

Moostrakis’s office was well-lit and adorned with artifacts from around the earth.  In the corner was a gilded globe that tinkled merrily if one spun it, and hanging from the wall were all manner of glittering tapestries; colorful posters made proclamations in all the languages of the world.  Moostrakis was on the phone.  “Very good,” he said.  “I’ve got just the thing.  The den, you say?  Fabulous.”  He twirled a corner of his fat moustache.  “Why of course, I can deliver just this afternoon!”  He hung up the phone, trudging happily out of his office.  He gave the globe a spin as he passed, and it sang to the carpet on the floor of his office after he left.

In the gloom of the warehouse, a square of light spread.  In silhouette was the stout form of Moostrakis.  As he’d never bothered to install lighting in the warehouse (he considered this dangerous), he had to navigate the towering racks of carpets by hand-held illumination.  He struck a match in the dusty air and lit an oil chalice from Khazakstan, a gift from a carpetmaker there.  The lamp shimmered in its own light.  A long way down the corridor before him, Moostrakis beheld a sight that astounded him.  One of the carpets was lying, still rolled, on the floor.  For a moment, an image came back to Moostrakis, one of his childhood in Greece during the civil war, when he would bring water to his mother the nurse, as she tended wounded rebels in the drafty makeshift hospital.  Once he nearly stumbled over a feverish soldier who’d slipped from his bunk and thrashed on the floor, exposing a black gangrenous leg.  The child Moostrakis had dropped his pitcher of water, which soaked into the floorboards as the man ceased foundering and became still, and then pale.

Moostrakis went to the carpet on the floor.  In the light of his chalice, he could faintly see red and orange lines, diamonds, criss-crossing patterns woven by foreign hands.  He knelt by it.  Trembling, he touched it where it lay still.  Suddenly Moostrakis was aware of the looming towers, thousands of carpets lurking silent above him.  He caught his breath and rushed out from the warehouse.  A minute later, two workers from the warehouse dock came in wielding flashlights whose beams crawled over the carpets.  They found the carpet on the floor and fastened their lights on him.  After a glance at one another, they picked him up and carried him, sagging, out to the truck, where he was once again packed in the dark.  They delivered him to a bright room soaked in warm light that bounced softly off deep wood fixtures and settled into the his hues.  Occasionally a cat without claws came and nestled upon him, purring.

The carpet never forgot the drab warehouse or his thousands of bretheren, and he never knew that after his escape, Moostrakis had, for a reason he did not fully understand, installed soft, undamaging lights in the warehouse, and an air filter as well.  After that, when he went in to select a purchase, he felt a twinge of gratitude hit him, from somewhere, he knew not where.  It came from above, hit him where his shoulders met his spine, and shivered down to his fat red legs.

A project to produce a podcast of mini fiction and poetry designed to be read on mobile devices in those thin slices of modern leisure time.

Read the pieces / follow the RSS feed.

First fall of ashes
Rained and turned the grasses brown
Dusted my fingers with pulverized time.

I sat out through it, and slowed my breath to the stench of our broken censer,
Smashed by that man we made, Atlas with his singed skin.

Too dry, this deluge, too choking white.
A molten river flow might wake things up, might somehow steam.
But those chambers are fused, and only bone slakes the land.

I thought those first flakes a miracle, wondered at the sky.

Someone’s roof or dog or bed
Hit me in the corner of the eye.

So once when I was scoochin down the sidewalk, kickin at the loose gravel with the frayed lace stuck to the bottom of my sole, a bird flew in my face, and lost in the fearful confusion of feathers and claws, I turned away and smacked the bird full in the rib cage. I could feel its thin curved ribs against my knuckles. The bird wheeled back through the air and crashed into the trunk of a tree. It was messed up pretty bad. At first I thought it was just some entrails hanging out of its gut, but I realized, inching closer to inspect what I’d unwittingly wrought, that not entrails but worms were crawling from a hole in the bird’s body.

One of the worms tipped his cap to me. You saved us! You saved us! they were singing.

I don’t know what I did, I said. That bird just flew in my face and I didn’t want to get scratched, so I guess I punched him.

Well, said the polite worm with the cap, you surely saved all our lives, except for bob there, he’s pretty well digested by now; he’ll prob’ly have to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was the early worm that was got by the early bird, and anyway well the rest of us, we were up partying pretty late last night and didn’t actually get out till very late this afternoon ourselves and I guess that’s why we’re still alive. That plus your generous intervention.

Yeah, I said, scratching my head, I was up pretty late last night too.

We were playing poker, said the worm.

How on earth do you hold your cards, I said.

Under the earth, the worm corrected me. We just stick them in the dirt in front of us like dominoes. And we wager nuggets of dirt.

But you live in dirt, I said.

The worm looked around suspiciously. This is the good stuff, he said.

We wager for money or plastic chips, I said.

Ha ha ha ha, said the worm, well what’s the value of that?

Well, I said, you can trade them both for stuff.

But, said the worm, don’t you live surrounded by stuff to trade for?

I stared at him. Then I stepped on him.

All the other worms fled into the grass.

Enjoy your dirt, worms! I called.

Screw you, they called back in tiny voices, we’ll eat you when you’re dead!

Had I a nickel for each batting eye,
The quinticential counting of a lie,
I’d take my bulging bag of riches far
To scatter all those pieces on the bar.
With every hundred nickels down my throat,
I’d kick myself for playing such a goat.
When chance was mine, to bare my treasured heart,
My pretense marked its own protective art.
Resuscitate me now, relight my torch,
I’ve stuporously passed out on your porch.
Oh take me in and put me down in bed,
And let me breathe noxiously on your head.
With poisoned vapors masking all my fear,
My heart can pour out on you now, my dear.