dayton is not in ohio

Jimmy Rollins hit a walk-off single in the bottom of the tenth inning tonight to beat the Reds. Thank you.

Below, a little graphic I whipped up of where Ryan Howard’s homerun in Wednesday’s game would have landed in right or left field based on where it landed in center. I created the arc for the actual homerun in the 3D program and then rotated it. Left goes over all seats to the base of the scoreboard. Right… deep into the cheap seats.

Big double-header with the Mets today. If the Phils sweep this series they’d take the NL East lead.

Oh, the Phillies…

It had the makings of an awesome night in baseball… Ryan Howard becomes the fastest player in MLB history to reach 100 home runs, and does it by hitting the longest blast in the history of Citizens Bank Park. 505 feet to straight-away center field. That’s one and two-thirds football fields. A tenth of a mile…

…followed by a pitching implosion that sees the Phils lose to the worst team in baseball 9 - 6.

The main reason I love Christians in the Visual Arts is the people. I have some very good friends in CIVA and I only get to see them once a year or so at a meeting or conference. Many of these folks are at least ten years older than myself, but more and more CIVA is beginning to become populated by folks my age.

So rather than write my own recap of the conference, I’m just going to link to the recap of Wayne Adams, an artist from NYC. Wayne and I hit it off, and I like his take on CIVA because it’s so similar to the way I approached my first conference. Here’s a link to some of Wayne’s artwork.

Also, while I’m at it, here’s a link to a website that Wayne’s blog made me aware of: instructables.com

I just can’t apologize for neglecting to post much on the blog this summer. I’ve been busy doing a lot of great stuff. Here’s an update on what’s happening:

I’ve started my new job at the Art Institute and it’s great. I’m learning how to use a variety of really great tools such as the huge CNC router and the vacuum former. Any time I learn to use a new tool, it opens up new possibilities for what I can make, and that’s fun.

The CIVA conference was great. This deserves a huge post unto itself, but in the meantime I just want to mention Allan and Ellen Wexler. Allan was one of the artists who presented in a plenary session and it was wonderful. Allan describes himself as an architect in a sculptor’s body and I really loved his work. Interestingly, he was a part of the very first exhibition of installations at Eastern State Penitentiary. He’s represented by Ronald Feldman gallery in New York and has done a variety of public artworks in collaboration with Ellen. Definitely check out their website. I had the opportunity, with Albert Pedulla, to have dinner with him and his wife the evening before he spoke. I’ve been in a real artistic rut, and I’ve really emerged from it with some excitement thanks in large part to my conversations with Allan and with the conference in general.

Finally, for now, I got the exciting news that I was selected for an award and am going to be part of a show. I had applied for this after being nominated by my department in March and just found out last week. Twenty-one students were selected from a national pool for the 2007 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. The award is given by the International Sculpture Center, located near Philly in Hamilton, NJ at Grounds for Sculpture. Perks of the award are being in a show that lasts from October to April, and having an image of the piece in Sculpture Magazine. The piece they selected was Infinite Bridge.

I was able to catch a Phillies (versus the Chicago White Sox) game last night with Rob Matthews, and it was not disappointing. Adam Eaton got the shutout win and Pat Burrell, Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins scored the three Phillies runs on solo homers. On the Howard shot, the right fielder didn’t move a muscle after the ball came off the bat. He just watched it go up, and then dropped his head. A no-doubter, even from the cheap seats where it’s always hard to judge a ball. Crushed. I listen to the Phillies on the (internet) radio for almost every game, so it was great to finally see them play in the flesh on a beautiful Philly night, and to be treated to a win.

Since school has ended I’ve not generated many art ideas, and this is a sure sign that I need to refuel. Refueling always involves looking at a lot of art and reading great fiction.

About eight years ago I bought an old paperback copy of Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green from a church rummage sale in Jackson, Mississippi for 25 cents. I started to read it, then stopped, and it’s been on my book shelf ever since. A native of Jackson, Welty won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimists Daughter, but is best known for her short stories, of which A Curtain of Green was her first collection, published in 1941. She also happened to live across the street from Belhaven College, my alma mater. I remember that I could see her house from where I sat in my freshman English class back in the fall of 1993.

So recently I’ve decided that I’ll read Welty this summer. I’ve been away from the south for a long time, and I think it would do me good to reconnect through the words of one of the many great Mississippi authors. This time around, though, I decided to begin the book with care, and peruse each page, which I had never done. This is what I discovered:

I’m not George, but that’s Eudora, and I appreciate him selling me his book for a quarter