July 13th-15th Alvaro and I attended Hope9 (Hackers On Planet Earth number 9) conference in New York`s Hotel Pennsylvania.
It was a lot of fun, as usual. Besides the many and informative talks (we gave one on “Digital Security in Health Care Institutions”, the first day), there was music, booths (FSF, EFF with a girl that wanted to come to Spain to help the #indignados, Free Manning, No Starch Press Books and more), arduino and lock-picking classes, a pro-ponies and against-zombies USA Presidential Candidate wearing a boot on his head, MakerBot 3D printers, the IMMI, Hackers For Charity, AlphaOne HackerSpace (will be visiting it next Thursday with Audrey), StartUpHire, SparkleLabs (awesome presents for kids and n00bies!
Last night`s storm was, again, AMAZING. I was not exactly in a position to take a picture, “too concentrated on something else” (although I would have loved it), but this is a great shot by Ryan Brenizer.
Let me share some odd videos I have watched recently, thanks to Leaitrice and Patricia:
The famous “Sunscreen” music video (the text comes from an essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, as a graduation speech for the class of `97) which gives some amazing advice for life. There is even a StarWars Version.
Drunk History: get some history students drunk, have them narrate historical events, while reenacting them… more fun than it seems.
I have been under tropical storms several times in the jungle. But I have never seen anything like today`s storm over Manhattan. Absolutely incredible.
The Guardian. Photo: Inga Sarda-Sorensen
I have contributed an essay to the book (PDF soon available for free online, and for purchase in book format -a few sample images shown here-) of an exhibition I am curating. 3 years in the making, “Gaze, Reflexion, Fusion” is the highly poetical but politically charged work of one of the most interesting new photographers in the New York art scene: NEBULA.
From Tokyo to San Francisco, Madrid to Seoul, the Spanish photographer Nebula has traveled to 10 cities in 4 countries in order to find inspiration and the right images (somethimes a fleeting reflexion of it) to bring to life what she feels about art, identity, apropriationism, feminism, and psychoanalysis.
Yesterday I was invited to a member`s only screening of Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and post-screening discussion with Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic at MoMA Film Theater 1.
What do I do instead? I end up at Central Park, with lightning bugs around me. I think I am still there. For some reason, I have gotten trapped there, and I do not want to leave.
In a sort of “NY diary”, here is what the last two weeks of June had in store for me.
June 17th: I went to Cha`An in the heart of the East Village, for a very delicious tea ceremony. And it was delicious not just because of the great matcha tea (usucha) and wagashi, but also because Noriko-san was such an excellent host, performing an excellent otemae. Being a public restaurant, and not a private house, not everything was “perfect”, like in the tokonoma, where the scroll was obviously generic.
