Welcome to My Neck of the Woods

Ok so last week as I was taking a stroll during my lunch hour, I saw all this broken glass shattered everywhere a few metres from my office. I had no idea what it was about until Christian sent me this video of the incident:

The title is "drug deal gone bad" but it turned out that it had nothing to do with drugs; according to our building manager it was a crazy homeless guy going after the driver for apparently having stolen his coat, cell phone and money.

On another work-related topic, a couple of guys at my office made this animation in response to Kramer's infamous racial outburst. Watch it, love it, share it.

And All That Jazz

Last Sunday I went to see the musical Chicago playing a 2-week run at the Princess of Wales Theatre. It was only after I had decided to see it at the last minute that I found out that Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys was in it, which made me tingle with excitement. And holy smokes, was he ever amazing- I can go as far as to say that he totally made the show. He played the role of the sleazy, money-grubbing Billy Flynn and performed the most enjoyable and entertaining numbers of the night. The set design was very simple but worked really well to create a vaudeville show feel. It was an evening of laughs, comical surprises and great songs, plus we had amazing centre seats in the orchestra section (with a 40% discount, no less)!

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Tonight I just got back from a lecture at Ryerson demonstrating Apple's Aperture software for editing and managing photos (particularly RAW images). The speaker just showed some basic features of the program, which compared to Photoshop, really makes the editing workflow so much easier and faster. From my experience, just the simple task of wanting to carefully examine and compare several photographs up-close is a bit annoying to do in Photoshop, but Aperture actually has a really elegant feature to execute this. As most people already know, I'm really not a big fan of Mac computers, but I would seriously consider getting one just for this crazy Aperture doodad :O I guess it will come down to what is the most important tool I should put my money towards: Leica D-LUX 3 (no, 7 cameras aren't enough for me :P), good film scanner, photo printer, or a laptop. Decisions, decisions.

In Flight

My In Flight exhibit is coming up! On Sunday December 3rd there will be a public preview day for the opening of the exhibit (among others) and to see the new International Pier at Terminal 1, which officially opens next January (and will become a post-security travellers area after that). I'm really excited to be a part of this exhibition and I would love it if you all would come to check it out as well!

Details

Date: Sunday December 3, 2006
Time: 10am - 6pm
Location: Destination West Gallery, Terminal 1, Toronto Pearson International Airport

Whodunit?

The OCAD Whodunit? Mystery Art Sale kicks off today with a public preview until Friday. During the preview you get to look at all the pieces to decide which you want to buy (each piece is 5 1/2" x 7 1/2" and $75). Then on Saturday between 9am to 5pm it's a first come, first served sale to get a hold of your favourite pieces and to find out the mystery artist. Check it out! Yours truly has donated a couple of pieces to the event- can you figure out which?

Life List

According to this article I read last week, Ellen DeGeneres is all about the life list this year. Basically, it's a list of things that you want to accomplish in your life.

So here's mine so far:

• design my own house
• go whale watching
• get my Masters of Fine Art or Design
• live in Stockholm
• cruise to Antarctica
• tour around all of China
• open up my own cupcake bakery
• ride a gondola
• learn to surf
• have my own solo exhibit
• be represented by a gallery
• publish my work in a book
• road trip to southwest US
• raise a shih tzu dog
• volunteer for the Beijing 2008/Vancouver 2010 Olympics
• get my software idea off the ground
• improve my Cantonese and French
• see the Aurora Borealis
• go up in a hot balloon
• travel the world

Dance, Food, and Santa

Friday evening was a girl's night out. Christina and I met up after work to have a scrumptious dinner at Il Fornello, where we split a pizza with caramelized onions,smoked chicken, spinach and roasted pine nuts, a pear and strawberry salad, and tiramisu. Although we were pretty full already, the tiramisu was so delicious that we just had to order a second one, haha, oy! After dinner we went to the opera house to watch The Sleeping Beauty ballet. The performance was so beautiful and the costumes were absolutely stunning. The dancer in the role of Aurora was spectacular, having done a really difficult feat of both strength and balance (as was explained to the audience in an informative lecture before the show). Apparently the principal dancer goes through 2 or 3 pointe shoes every show; just goes to show you how much stress and pressure their feet must endure. The most surprising thing was that I didn't realize the Disney movie used variations of the music from the ballet, so I could recognize a lot of different parts the orchestra was playing. It was really quite interesting to see how the music was interpreted so differently in the ballet and movie: most notably, a piece that was played with a really sensual, playful and jazzy tone during a cat dance was the same piece used by Disney that became evil and menacing during a witch scene. I was kind of expecting a big dramatic climax when the witch dies, but all it took for her defeat was a simple cut of her string from the spinning wheel- like, where was the part when she's supposed to turn into a dragon?! Haha, j/k j/k... but still, that "climax" was kinda cheesy. Aside from that, I had a wonderful time and the 3 hours just flew right by.

Saturday night was Tony's birthday dinner so we went to the new Wasabi Japanese buffet that just opened in Richmond Hill. The place was so jam-packed that it was a struggle to get around the food area. But the selection was quite impressive- they even had a chocolate fondue fountain! I ate too much though (especially desserts :X) After dinner I made Christmas sugar cookies from scratch, which turned out surprisingly okay, considering how disastrous the dough was turning out. The dough was so dry and crumbly that I had to add in an extra egg and water to bind everything together. In the end only half the batch was successful, as I had turned the other half into rock-hard discs. What a terrible recipe; I'm not even going to bother posting it up this time.

The Santa Clause parade was yesterday and I with some fellow dodgeballers volunteered to help Sick Kids sell necklaces and toques to the crowds. The weather was so cold out that day, and after walking around from 10:30am to 2pm yelling out to the crowds, my feet were so frozen that I was limping and my throat was so sore. I think overall we were able to raise a lot of money for the hospital so that all made up for it :)

Toronto Alternative Art Fair International

The TAAFI was held last weekend at the Drake and Gladstone hotels. At the Drake there was a cute old-fashioned photobooth I was checking out when I bumped into an old classmate from my landscapes class at U of T. We were catching up and she took me to see her pieces at one of the Queen street galleries, where she introduced me to the gallery owner. The owner agreed to take a look at my stuff to see if my pieces are worthy of representation, which is pretty exciting! (But now I gotta spend some a lot of time putting together my portfolio) I spent an hour there checking out the pieces and chatting around before I continued westwards to the Gladstone, where my 3rd year drawing instructor, Ed Pien, was showing as a Gladstone invitational. The first room I stepped into was that of Bruno Billio, who is the residential artist. I met him and he asked me to help him take a few shots around the room for his documentation. The rest of the afternoon I got to see a lot of really neat and unique pieces. Here is a collection of some of the artwork that were there. After finishing up with the exhibits, I headed back to the Drake photobooth to take some fun pictures of myself. Due to the silly/retarded nature of my poses, I'll withhold those from public viewing.

Really Mini!

I finally got my Rolleiflex Minidigi back in the mail after sending it in for replacement. I had barely gotten the chance to use it before it already died after a month. There went an extra $40 for shipping back and forth, haiii. That added to the burning fire that was my whole stressful one-month ordeal with Amazon.com and Adorama in getting my camera in the first place. So not worth all that trouble for this camera... but now I have it back so I better make the most out of it.

Rockin' It Like Noooobody

During our lunch break today Christian and I went over to Active Surplus to to find some headphone extensions. Instead, we found two massive buckets of Personally Yours wallets, each sporting a killer combination of flashy fluorescent colours and your own name! So we spent the next half hour digging through the buckets of electric orange, lime green and hot pink searching for specific names for our friends. I found one for myself- misspelled and everything. Now we can all be tacky wallet buddies!

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I tried a muffin recipe I found in the newspaper. It asks for blueberries but since those are like 5 bucks for an itty bitty box, I replaced them with apples. I'm not sure whether you can actually call them "muffins" since they don't even have flour, sugar or butter. More like... baked oatmeal patties? They didn't turn out very sweet, but they're actually pretty nice to snack on, and they're super healthy! Continue reading for the recipe.

Apple Banana Muffins

3 bananas
1/2 cup canned pears
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tbsp vanilla
1/2 cup apples (e.g macintosh)
1 1/2 cups uncooked oatmeal

Mash 3 bananas with the canned pears in a large bowl. Add cinnamon and vanilla and mix well. Fold in apples and oatmeal. Thinly coat muffin pan with olive oil.

Pour batter in muffin pan and bake at 450F for 30 to 45 minutes.

Yields 6 muffins.