Age: 37
Hometown: Fall River, Massachusetts
Where do you now live?: East Freetown, Massachusetts
Where would you most like to live?: Anywhere on the pacific coastline of Costa Rica.
Who was your first "hero" in life?: My Uncle Louie.
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: If there are waves, surf, if not, drink beer and paint.
What is your favorite color?: Today it's red.
Who (or what) do you love?: Who: My family. What: Life.

Wooster: Who and/or what are some of your influences?

The graffiti movement of the late seventies and early eighties is probably my greatest influence. The over the top use of color and the scale of the work is something that has stayed with me. When I attended college (my first exposure to fine art) I discovered the abstract expressionist movement, I found I had a strong connection with the artists of this movement especially with their notion of making it more about the act of painting than the painting itself. More recently the street art movement has impacted my work greatly. When I discovered Wooster Collective in 2004, I changed, and so did my work. When I began researching the artists involved with Wooster and
other urban influenced artists on the internet I was like,"Holy shit, I thought I was the only one using old school graffiti and spray paint in my studio work." Ignorance is bliss I tell you. So, rather than naming names I truly believe every artist I have been exposed to since then has influenced my work to some degree.

Wooster: What other artists do you most admire?

I admire any artist that dedicates their life to creating, from the many successful urban influenced gallery artists to the 15 year old kid bombing his neighborhood with stickers he stole from the post office.

Wooster: How would you describe your art to someone who could not see it?

Imagine there is a man in a canvas walled room. Loud music begins to play which makes the man act a fool. He begins running around exploding spray paint cans, tagging, and squirting liquid paint through ketchup bottles. He doesn't care much about the color he uses as long as it contrasts the last color. The man hears a voice calling out - red, violet, light blue, green. The voice is the man's own voice. When the voice subsides the man is finished. Take the canvas walls down and put them up in a gallery. This is my art.

Wooster: What other talent would most like to have?

I wish I could sing. Well, I can sing. I guess I mean sing in tune.

Wooster: What do you fear the most?

Death.

Wooster: What is your greatest ambition?

I'd have to give you two, one I have no control over and one that I do have control over. I'd like to earn a living from my art or be a college painting professor. Although I'd love for both to come to fruition.

You can see more of Rene's art here.

Author : Glenn Blakeslee

At four in the morning the alarms went off. Lois hardly stirred, but I went downstairs to the kitchen, started a pot of coffee, and then slogged my sorry ass to the control console, next to the laundry room.

Red lights glared from the temperature control panel. The needles showed an overtemp in the secondary thermocouple but normal temperatures in the primary, so I couldn’t tell if the relay was actually over-heating or if the secondary had failed again. I dialed down the master motor-control rheostat a couple of notches —losing precious speed— but the warning light didn’t go out, so instead of doing anything more I went to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and waited until dawn.

I spent most of the day under the home. Replacing the thermocouple dimmed the warning light but I could feel, just by a touch on its titanium casing, that the number three stepper motor was running much too hot. I took the motor offline and spent a few hours tightening and replacing coolant lines. I inspected the narrow yard-tall wheels on the rear outboard truck assembly and ended up replacing the bearings on two of the twelve wheels.

Around noon Lois came down the stairs, shook her head and grinned at me. “Come on up for lunch, Herb,” she said. It was a nice day, cool for summer, so we ate sandwiches and watermelon on the veranda.

After lunch I climbed to the roof, and in the strong midday sun I dusted off the solar panels and checked the alignment on the control linkage. I stood for a while admiring our new cupola, built a few weeks ago toward the front of the house. It was expensive, but Lois and I both believed the cupola completed our home.

Lois invited the Smiths from next-door over for supper. I grilled steaks on the patio while Bill Smith drank my beer and Lois and Dorothy Smith sat gossiping. “Nice cupola, Herb,” Bill said, gloating.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Sure,” Bill said. “That thing must weigh a couple tons.” Bill’s home had been inching past mine for the last year. He’d gained nearly half a house on me.

“Lois and I love the cupola,” I said.

“You should have gotten the high-performance relays instead. Like I did,” Bill said.

“I think the cupola is beautiful!” Dorothy said with a smile.

After the Smiths left we cleaned up, and I went to the control console and moved the master rheostat up a notch. No warning lights came on. The indicators showed that we’d moved a little less than thirty-three inches that day.

At dusk Lois and I climbed the stairs to the cupola. We opened the windows, let the breeze in. “Bill isn’t racing you, you know,” Lois said.

I put my arm around her shoulders. “The hell he isn’t,” I replied, and I kissed her.

From the cupola we could see the neighborhood as it stretched toward the horizon, each home moving at its own good speed. We were heading toward the sunset, the sky before us streaked with red and gold and salmon. I was happy.

From the cupola I could see that, from here, it was all down hill.

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(Dec) Jan 1st - April 30 (dates flexible). Spacious 3 1/2 in Mile End on Parc Avenue and Fairmount. Well-decorated, furnished, one bedroom apartment: separate living room, long hallway, closed bedroom, balcony. Lots of plants, fun neighborhood, convenient proximity to McGill, grocery stores, cafes, and restaurants. $800/month including heat and electricity. WiFi.

pSo, we have a new book out, a href="http://thepitchfork500.com/"strongemThe Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present/em/strong/a, published by the Simon amp; Schuster imprint Fireside Books. It explores our 500 favorite songs from 1977-2006-- interspersed with sidebars on the most vital subgenres from electro to grime to riot grrrl-- to construct an alternate history of the past three decades of popular music. In the coming weeks we'll be posting streams of tracks from the book here in Forkcast and giving you a sneak peek at some of the entries.nbsp;/p pIf you're in Brooklyn, please come out for the strongema href="http://thepitchfork500.com/"strongemThe Pitchfork 500/em/strong/a/em/strong launch party on Wednesday, November 26. Dance and bowl (yes, bowl) to selections from the book at a href="http://www.thegutterbrooklyn.com/"strongThe Gutter Bar/strong/a, located at 200 N. 14th St. (between Wythe and Berry) in Williamsburg. We'll be there from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., there's no cover, and there will be books for sale. For a complete rundown of events, check a href="http://thepitchfork500.com/"strongwww.thepitchfork500.com/strong/a./p pemThe Pitchfork 500/em is available in your local bookstore right now (a href="http://www.quimbys.com/product_info.php?products_id=21880" target="_blank"strongQuimby/strong/a's is the shop in our Chicago neighborhood). Or you can order it via stronga href="http://www.amazon.com/Pitchfork-500-Guide-Greatest-Present/dp/1416562028/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8amp;s=booksamp;qid=1223394242amp;sr=8-1"Amazon/a/strong, stronga href="http://www.bn.com/pitchfork"Barnes amp; Noble/a/strong, stronga href="http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=pitchfork+500amp;type=0amp;simple=1"Borders/a/strong, strongspan style="color: #551a8b;"a href="http://www.insound.com/Pitchfork_The_Pitchfork_500%3A_Our_Guide_to_the_Greatest_Songs_from_Punk_to_the_Present__PRE-ORDER_Book/productmain/p/INS50216/" target="_blank" title="Insound"Insound/a/span/strong, stronga href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781416562023-0"Powells/a/strong, or stronga href="http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1amp;pid=628435amp;app=buy_now"Simon amp; Schuster/a/strong./p pAnd now, here's Mark Richardson on Panda Bear's "Bros", with a stream (good for one free play every 24 hours, via a href="http://www.lala.com/" target="_blank"strongLala/strong/a) below the text./p pimg src="/sites/default/files/brosblurb.jpg" border="0" //p p object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="300" height="254" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" param name="id" value="W48f4e8b6f7fe2a4349271d72e0ceb6aa" / param name="wmode" value="transparent" / param name="allowNetworking" value="all" / param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" / param name="src" value="http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/48f4e8b6f7fe2a43/49271d72e0ceb6aa/48f4e8b6706ccf78/ccb35821/-cpid/b0ee5e3d5fe1165b" /embed id="W48f4e8b6f7fe2a4349271d72e0ceb6aa" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="300" height="254" src="http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/48f4e8b6f7fe2a43/49271d72e0ceb6aa/48f4e8b6706ccf78/ccb35821/-cpid/b0ee5e3d5fe1165b" allowscriptaccess="always" allownetworking="all" wmode="transparent"/embed /object /p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/uNVaGEISUpjwpg61M2LRzJtEtc0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/uNVaGEISUpjwpg61M2LRzJtEtc0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pitchfork/today/~4/eo7iRscECGM" height="1" width="1"/

pSo, we have a new book out, a href=http://thepitchfork500.com/strongemThe Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present/em/strong/a, published by the Simon amp; Schuster imprint Fireside Books. It explores our 500 favorite songs from 1977-2006-- interspersed with sidebars on the most vital subgenres from electro to grime to riot grrrl-- to construct an alternate history of the past three decades of popular music. In the coming weeks we'll be posting streams of tracks from the book here in Forkcast and giving you a sneak peek at some of the entries.nbsp;/p pIf you're in Brooklyn, please come out for the strongema href=http://thepitchfork500.com/strongemThe Pitchfork 500/em/strong/a/em/strong launch party on Wednesday, November 26. Dance and bowl (yes, bowl) to selections from the book at a href=http://www.thegutterbrooklyn.com/strongThe Gutter Bar/strong/a, located at 200 N. 14th St. (between Wythe and Berry) in Williamsburg. We'll be there from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., there's no cover, and there will be books for sale. For a complete rundown of events, check a href=http://thepitchfork500.com/strongwww.thepitchfork500.com/strong/a./p pemThe Pitchfork 500/em is available in your local bookstore right now (a href=http://www.quimbys.com/product_info.php?products_id=21880 target=_blankstrongQuimby/strong/a's is the shop in our Chicago neighborhood). Or you can order it via stronga href=http://www.amazon.com/Pitchfork-500-Guide-Greatest-Present/dp/1416562028/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8amp;s=booksamp;qid=1223394242amp;sr=8-1Amazon/a/strong, stronga href=http://www.bn.com/pitchforkBarnes amp; Noble/a/strong, stronga href=http://www.borders.com/online/store/SearchResults?keyword=pitchfork+500amp;type=0amp;simple=1Borders/a/strong, strongspan style=color: #551a8b;a href=http://www.insound.com/Pitchfork_The_Pitchfork_500%3A_Our_Guide_to_the_Greatest_Songs_from_Punk_to_the_Present__PRE-ORDER_Book/productmain/p/INS50216/ target=_blank title=InsoundInsound/a/span/strong, stronga href=http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781416562023-0Powells/a/strong, or stronga href=http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1amp;pid=628435amp;app=buy_nowSimon amp; Schuster/a/strong./p pAnd now, here's Mark Richardson on Panda Bear's Bros, with a stream (good for one free play every 24 hours, via a href=http://www.lala.com/ target=_blankstrongLala/strong/a) below the text./p pimg src=/sites/default/files/brosblurb.jpg border=0 //p p object classid=clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000 width=300 height=254 codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0 param name=id value=W48f4e8b6f7fe2a4349271d72e0ceb6aa / param name=wmode value=transparent / param name=allowNetworking value=all / param name=allowScriptAccess value=always / param name=src value=http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/48f4e8b6f7fe2a43/49271d72e0ceb6aa/48f4e8b6706ccf78/ccb35821/-cpid/b0ee5e3d5fe1165b /embed id=W48f4e8b6f7fe2a4349271d72e0ceb6aa type=application/x-shockwave-flash width=300 height=254 src=http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/48f4e8b6f7fe2a43/49271d72e0ceb6aa/48f4e8b6706ccf78/ccb35821/-cpid/b0ee5e3d5fe1165b allowscriptaccess=always allownetworking=all wmode=transparent/embed /object /p

 Graffiti

Does a messy neighborhood make a difference on how people act? It sure does! Graffiti on the walls, trash in the street, bicycles chained to a fence, all resulted in a decline in how people behaved in a series of experiments.

(more…)

Publication Date: 2008 Nov 20 PMID: 19023045br/Authors: Keizer, K. - Lindenberg, S. - Steg, L.br/Journal: Sciencebr/br/Imagine that the neighborhood you are living in is covered with graffiti, litter, and unreturned shopping carts. Would this reality cause you to litter more, trespass or even steal? A thesis known as the Broken Windows Theory suggests that signs of disorderly and petty criminal behavior trigger more disorderly and petty criminal behavior, thus causing the behavior to spread. This may cause neighborhoods to decay and the quality of life of its inhabitants to deteriorate. For a city government this may be a vital policy issue. But does disorder really spread in neighborhoods? So far there has not been strong empirical support, and it is not clear what constitutes disorder and what may make it spread. In this article, we generate hypotheses about the spread of disorder and test them in six field experiments. We found that when people observe that others violated a certain social norm or legitimate rule, they are more likely to violate even other norms or rules, which causes disorder to spread.br/br/post to: a href = http://www.citeulike.org/posturl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Fcmd%3DRetrieve%26db%3DPubMed%26dopt%3DAbstract%26list_uids%3D19023045title=Entrez+PubmedCiteULike/a

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/launchpad-heading.png alt= pa href=https://launchpad.net/~barryimg src=https://help.launchpad.net/BlogImages?action=AttachFile#038;do=get#038;target=baw.jpg alt=Barry Warsaw mugshot //aOur previous emMeet the developers/em a href=http://news.launchpad.net/meet-the-devs/meet-paul-hummerinterview/a was with a man known by his irc nick coderockstar/code./p pOn the Launchpad team we have another rock star, the a href=http://barry.warsaw.us/bass/index.htmlbass/a playing Mr a href=https://launchpad.net/~barryBarry Warsaw/a!/p pstrongMatthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong In general, it is my life#8217;s work to see a href=http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.htmlZawinski#8217;s Law/a fully realized in everything I touch. To that end, most of my Launchpad work has been to add spam vectors, er, I mean mailing lists to Launchpad. I don#8217;t know why anybody would think a href=http://barry.warsaw.us/software/index.htmlI know something about mailing lists/a, but there you have it./p pThese days, the basic mailing list features are working pretty well, so I#8217;ve been concentrating on other things, though often email related, such as the recent #8220;Contact this user#8221; feature./p pstrongMatthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you#8217;ve worked on?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong If you#8217;ve used the Launchpad mailing lists, you#8217;ve used stuff I#8217;ve worked on. If you try out the new #8220;Contact this user#8221; feature in Launchpad 2.1.11, you will be using my stuff. Well, that#8217;s only if you like those features. If you hate them, someone else did it./p pstrongMatthew: Where do you work?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong I work out of my home in Silver Spring, Maryland USA. Well, I emdid/em up until about a week ago, when I moved into a temporary rental house while we#8217;re doing some work on our real house. I live about a mile walking distance from Washington DC./p pstrongMatthew: What can you see from your office window?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong Right now, not much other than the side of my neighbor#8217;s house, but when I#8217;m back in my real home, I have a somewhat less boring view of the neighborhood. I can see all the way up the street leading to my house, so I#8217;m always prepared when the Fedex truck drops off the latest awesome mugs and hoodies from the a href=http://shop.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu store/a (/me waits for his endorsement bonus check)./p pstrongMatthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong Directly before coming to Canonical I worked at a company called Secure Software, incidentally with Mailman#8217;s original inventor John Viega, though we were not working on Mailman. Secure built products around static analysis of C, C++, and Java code for security vulnerabilities. It was very cool software and allowed me to do a lot of C, C++ and Java hacking as well as the usual big pile of Python. I also did more Windows development than I#8217;d ever done before, and let#8217;s just say it#8217;s nice to be working for the makers of Ubuntu now! Unfortunately mdash; or maybe strongfortunately/strong mdash; Secure did not overwhelm in the market and, here I am!/p pI#8217;ve been pretty lucky to work at some great places, though my career has been pretty eclectic. I#8217;ve been able to do a lot of open source and free software, both officially and incidentally in my career. I won#8217;t bore you with the ten page resume though./p pstrongMatthew: How did you get into free software?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong Well, I#8217;m an old timer so I#8217;ve actually been into free software probably before the term was even invented! My first real software job was as a summer intern at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), a US Federal research lab in suburban Maryland. I was hacking on homebrew graphics systems for robotic real time control and visualization, and most of the work was in FORTH. There was a pretty vibrant FORTH community and we shared lots of code, often by 8#8243; floppy disks, 9 track tapes and over the original ARPAnet and uucp. I continued with NBS/NIST after I graduated college and our lab eventually migrated to early SunOS systems. By that time I was learning C and hacking Unix, Emacs, window systems, etc. Back then at least, the software that US federal employees wrote was not subject to copyright (because it was taxpayer funded), so it was easy to give away, and it#8217;s always seemed very natural for me to share code./p pA few years ago I searched some of the various Usenet archives for early postings of mine. I think my first public post was of some Emacs trinket I wrote in 1985. It was probably what eventually became Supercite. In any case, tapping into that culture and its social interactions really got me hooked. I made a lot of friends online and I#8217;ve been very luck to keep many of them and even meet some of them in the real world./p pstrongMatthew: What#8217;s more important? Principle or pragmatism?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong a href=http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/The Zen of Python/a says #8220;Practicality beats purity#8221;./p pstrongMatthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?/strong/p pYes, quite a few actually./p pThese days I#8217;m most active in a href=http://python.org/Python/a and a href=http://www.list.org/GNU Mailman/a, though there are probably a dozen or so FLOSS projects I contribute to in various ways. I used to contribute a lot to Emacs and XEmacs, but these days I prefer to just be a (l)user. I also tend to scratch my own itch, and hosting projects on Launchpad and using Bazaar makes that just incredibly easy. For example, I needed an email robot on some of my public email addresses, so I wrote #8216;a href=https://launchpad.net/replybotreplybot/a#8216; which tries to do that totally anti-social job in the most standards-compliant way possible. Even though the package is published on the a href=http://pypi.python.org/pypiPython Cheeseshop/a, all the project management happens on Launchpad. In fact a href=https://launchpad.net/mailmanGNU Mailman itself is hosted on Launchpad/a now too./p pstrongMatthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong a href=https://help.launchpad.net/Code/ReviewMerge proposals/a are my latest kick. We use them a lot on the Launchpad project, and I think they#8217;re a great way to manage branches, review code, and link them to bugs, milestones and releases. I#8217;m not yet sure how useful all that stuff is for smaller projects, but for a large complicated beast like Launchpad, merge proposals are really great./p pstrongMatthew: Four string, six string or fretless?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong Ah, what a great question, but those are not either/ors! img src=http://news.launchpad.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:) class=wp-smiley / I firmly believe that if you can#8217;t play a 4, you have no business with more strings. Guitar players would be wise to heed that advice. img src=http://news.launchpad.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:) class=wp-smiley / I played bass for almost 25 years before I got my first 5 string, and it#8217;ll probably be another 25 before I get a 6. My grandkids will have to slap and pop that hi C string for me though./p pFretlesses are very cool, and I played a 4 fretless (with a hipshot) almost exclusively for many years, though I am no Jaco. A good #8220;mwaahh#8221; just makes me so happy. My main axe these days though is a fretted MTD American 535. Having that gut rumbling low B string is just too much fun, though you have to use it tastefully. I#8217;m still saving up for a fretless 535 to match my main axe, but it#8217;s much harder to sneak those things past my wife these days. img src=http://news.launchpad.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:) class=wp-smiley / /p pstrongMatthew: a href=https://launchpad.net/~kikoKiko/a#8217;s special question! You#8217;re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?/strong/p pstrongBarry:/strong Okay, this is a family show, right?/p pI do purchase a lot of stuff online. I hate going to the malls and I really hate shopping so if I can get through the holidays without getting in my car, it#8217;s a success. One of our favorite places is Zappos because you can just order like $10,000 worth of shoes, keep the one pair you like and send them all back for free. I do buy the occasional software, but not too much ongoing services, though I#8217;m currently looking at encrypted, secure online backups. I do tend to like to roll my own though, since hacking is so much fun./p pThanks for listening!/p