Raise your flag

I have exactly 5 days left before I hand in my grant to travel to Copenhagen next year. It has drastically changed as I though it would. No longer concentratin on Knud Rasmussen, I will be working with the entire Arctic Institute's collection along with the Danish Polar Center's photographic collection and hopefully the Danish National Museum's ethnographical collections. The Arctic Institute is very excited about my project and have been absolutely wonderful. I am also going to apply for an American-Scandanavian Foundation grant as well but that isn't due until October...thank god...

I am back to teaching classes and the new school semester. Yesterday I gave a brief presentation of my work to my group of 22 senior students along with my fellow grad student Sara Blakely who works in graphic design and animation. She does amazing work and I wonder how she is surviving this grad program?

I think I prefer the summer. It is already chilly in Ann Arbor but at least the skies are still blue instead of Michigan grey. But the tree outside my house decided to get naked: it dropped almost all of its leaves in the past few days. This has me quite sad. There is no Fall color, even though Michiganders keep telling me there is... Nothing can compete with the rolling hills of the northeast or even Pennsylvania.

I am working on a series of sculptures that are using weather balloons as their buoyancy and the sky as their canvas. I am quite excited. They are dealing with such things as Scott & Amundsen's rush to the SOuth Pole, the lowering of ponies onto the Arctic landscape, and pulling one's igloo behind them wherever they may go.

The Bjork concert in Detroit on Tuesday night was another inspirational moment. Though i was a bit disappointed by her stage design. She had a few small monitors that showed her dj's hands the entire time BUT she did have an all woman 20 piece horn section. And no costume changes? I was a little sad but her voice and choice of songs made up for it.