The Great American Pixel

TL;DR: Puppies, Hollywood, The Real RoboCop, Visiting Friends, 30th Birthday, TEDxDetroit, Land Blanks, Paintings On Billboards, Paintings On Hotels, Soccer, You’re Hired, Crush It, Etc

It was a week+ for the record books. Still processing everything and getting back into workflow. Gather around and I will tell you a story.

First, Mary got a puppy. His name is Jacob or Pasta Batman. There is now a tiny nipping and yipping force in the house with a 1/2 name borrowed from a This American Life story. He’s quite cute:

Last Monday through Friday I got called in to be an extra on a Hollywood movie being shot in Michigan (if that’s how it’s said) and it ended up being quite elaborate and intensive. It was less extra work than it was extra extra work, with a lot of choreography and one mega stressful 24 hour work day just as I was getting sick. But it’s in the can now and more satisfying in my rearview than it was out the windshield, but a great mini adventure nonetheless. I can’t talk about it yet but look forward to sitting in the theater and seeing if maybe just maybe some tiny part of me is visible. It’s fun to think about how every anonymous person on screen for 1/2 a second in every film ever represents so many tiny stories and smiles between family and friends…

Saturday morning, on a few hours sleep, I rolled into Detroit Fanfare, a big comic book convention held downtown to help tend the RoboCop statue booth with Brandon, John, and Bryan. RoboCop star Peter Weller was one of the headliners so we finally had a chance to meet him in person, which was awesome. My friends Brad and Ryan made the pilgrimage from Brooklyn to show off The Spirit of Detroit Vs The Blight painting that’s also being turned into a video game, which features RoboCop as one of the characters. Peter came cruising over from his autograph station in a golf cart to check it out and really liked it, which was also awesome.

I’d heard that he’s quite the thoughtful scholar and that turns out to be very true (he’s finishing his PhD in Italian Renaissance Art at UCLA). All conversation kept coming back to art history and meta patterns of civilization (his very first comment about the statue was that we need a way to protect it from bird poop, as bird poop has been the scourge of statuary throughout the ages). He made it out to PJ’s Lager House that night for a little fundraiser party for Forgotten Harvest (the charity selected by RoboCharity back during statue fundraising) and gave an amazing interview about Detroit, the Tigers, politics, the statue, and other topics to WDET’s Rob St Mary, right there in the parking lot while smoking a cigar. Highly recommended listening.

I gave Brad and Ryan the royal tour of Detroit, hitting as much as we could in a few days, which is always a joy. And it’s a double joy when your friends see what you see in a place. Neither had ever really been to Detroit before outside Ryan’s short tour of the College of Creative Studies, and before coming it was just an ambient matrix of negative stories peppered with a few faint cheerleaders and me somehow wanting to be here. But it doesn’t take long to pick up on unique urban energy here and get juiced by the significance, scale, and possibility of it all. Here they are on the steps of the stuffed animal house at the Heidelberg Project:

Larry also flew out from his new home in Portland and on Wednesday, which also happened to be my 30th birthday (thank you, thank you) the gang of us headed to TEDxDetroit where Larry and I manned a LOVELAND booth and Brad and Ryan displayed the painting and enjoyed the talks. Here they are after a long day:

TEDxDetroit is a really great event, and inspirational in the non-cheesiest of ways. The TED brand has done a great job of franchising itself out to cities, and all the speakers bring their A games. They also bring their A game to the photo booth as evidenced by my friend James and me:

Larry and I were showing people the Why Don’t We Own This? foreclosure auction mapping system, and it was humbling to have so many people saying thank you for making something so heavy and unclear more transparent and user friendly. Connected to that, we’re working with our friend Andy Didorosi on something called The Land Blank where we’re going to experiment with crowdfunding a few unsold $500 properties at the auction and try and find them great owners. TEDx surprised us by selecting The Land Blank as one of several charitable projects to donate a percentage of ticket sales towards. Andy and I got called on stage to receive a $1,500 check which we’ll use to buy 3 properties at the auction.

Our friends James Feagin and Miguel Belozro were also there in the exhibition area showing off one of Miguel’s paintings that will go up on a billboard in Detroit once their $3,500 crowdfunded goal is met. This is a really really cool thing I’m helping them out with in a modest way as a sideline whip cracker, helping hand, and human form of Gatorade to drink during the marathon. It’s been softly slipped onto the internets (shhhh) so check it out and more about it soon……

That night a bunch of friends came out to the Lager House to celebrate the big 3-0, including LOVELAND’s first angel investor, Bernie Sucher, who dropped in on his way from Moscow to Chicago. That’s love, folks.

In the morning the Imagination Station campus was buzzing with a group of artists from Montreal called Dare-Dare who are doing a new installation in Lefty, and graffiti artists bringing the boarded up front of the Roosevelt Hotel to life.

photo of Mike Han (on right) painting the hotel by Amber Tourtillott:

Larry and Mary and I met up with a web developer and a designer that want to collaborate on LOVELAND projects and the vibes were really good, so we’ll see where that goes. We also had some high level meetings with people who reinforced the strength of our interactive city mapping. Now we just gotta keeping doing what the title of the book Brad brought on the trip says:

“Crush It.”