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.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/5930?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Vegas+bids+to+cash+in+with+plan+for+%2450m+Mob+museumch=World+newsc3=The+Observerc4=US+news%2CWorld+news%2CObserverc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Kevin+Mitchellc7=2008_11_23c8=1122543c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=United+Statesc13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FUnited+States" width="1" height="1" //divpLas Vegas, the desert city with an insatiable thirst for reinvention, is turning to some old friends to reboot its faltering economy: the Mob./ppBuilding projects have stalled up and down the Strip, unheard of in a town where the sound of explosions on worn-out casino sites was as commonplace as gunfire, when the old constantly made way for the new. Now, as credit and the gambling nerve of the hotel bosses dry up simultaneously, the town invented by Bugsy Siegel in the Forties is going back to its dubious past for inspiration./ppWork has started on a $50m museum that will open in the spring of 2010 celebrating the Mafia's links with the gambling capital of the world. It is an initiative that excites the mayor, Oscar Goodman, but dismays others weary of the city's historical association with organised crime./ppGoodman is more than a mayor. He is a celebrity in a city that lives and dies on fame. He knew Frank Sinatra. He knew John F Kennedy. He knew Marilyn Monroe. This is a town and a civic administration that was as comfortable with the Mob and its attendant guest list as it was with the certainty of another sunny day./ppGoodman told The Observer the project was 'as cool as it gets', dismissing suggestions that it might not be universally popular, given the nature of the Mob's activities./ppThe museum has been the subject of controversy since it was announced in October. 'The Mob museum and media try to romanticise these monsters for money,' wrote a blogger on the Las Vegas Review Journal's website. 'These romantic characters are really just lunatics and degenerates who preyed off society. If Las Vegas wants a museum, build one to commemorate the victims, not the criminals.' There is no denying, though, that exploiting the fascination with gangsters here is a profitable exercise. On a two-and-half-hour, $70 'Mob Tour of Las Vegas' last week, Vinny the guide said that even real-life hoodlums come to have a look. /pp'Three weeks ago,' he said, 'we had Henry Hill, who is in and out of witness protection, and was played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. He was pretty stewed. But he loved it.'/ppGoodman said: 'Nobody's given me an opinion other than they like it. You want a watercolour museum? You want a porcelain museum?' A robust populist who mines his colourful past as a prop in his political shtick, Goodman is in his third and final term, a Democrat approved by eight out of 10 voters in a city that is an unashamed cathedral to capitalism./ppGoodman is no ordinary civic leader. As he is occasionally reminded, over three decades he acted as counsel for some of the country's most notorious mobsters, men who built and ran Las Vegas. His clients included Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal and Anthony 'Tony the Ant' Spilotro, whose barely disguised doppelgangers were portrayed by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in the eerily accurate 1995 movie Casino (in which Goodman had a walk-on part)./ppAnd, no, he did not find his own 'Mob history' an embarrassment. 'What? To defend people, and protect their constitutional rights, and make sure that the government doesn't take advantage of them? You find that offensive? That's the reason we left England. OK?/pp'I don't care whether it is or it isn't [popular]. I care that there are people going in there and spending a lot of money and the city of Las Vegas is getting the fees and the concession money and making a fortune. It's going to be phenomenal. It's going to bring hundreds of thousands of people into our downtown.' /ppIt might be stretching it to say Goodman 'knows where the bodies are buried' in anything other than a metaphorical sense, but he does know how to generate money. And the city that has been his home since he moved to Nevada from Philadelphia in the Sixties as a public defender has rarely needed his entrepreneurial instincts more than now. /ppStatistics released last week make grim reading: visitor numbers are down 10 per cent, year on year, to 2.9 million in September; room rates have been slashed by 21 per cent as tou6rist numbers dwindle; hotel occupancy is 84.3 per cent, down 7 per cent; across Nevada, gambling revenue dropped 5.4 per cent to just over $1bn; and on the Strip the take was a mere $525.5m for the month, down 5.17 per cent./ppThose are numbers of dollars lost by Mr and Mrs Wisconsin at the slot machines, as well as the high-rollers at the baccarat tables. Las Vegas wins because it is full of losers. 'Life is a risk,' said Goodman. 'When I have my drink tonight, I'm risking it may be my last.'/ppThe Mob Museum has been his pet project since he was elected in 1999. He got the idea from an unusual source: the old Post Office down the street from City Hall. It was in that building in 1950 that Senator Estes Kefauver conducted the Nevada leg of his famous inquiry into organised crime, butting up against the intransigence of witnesses unbothered by official scrutiny./pp'We hired the folks who are doing the Spy Museum in Washington DC,' Goodman said. 'When you go in there you're going to be mugged, you're going to be booked, you're going to have your Miranda rights [the 'right to remain silent' legislation] given to you. And who knows if you'll ever get out? Because we're going to have machine-guns there, which will be provided by the FBI.'/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Newscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227399527309112300260553996"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Newscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227399527309112300260553996" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

Category: Navigation
Released: Nov 09, 2008
Price: Free

Description:
The postcode database - which turns a postcode to a latitude/longitude and back - is not free in the UK. In fact, it's very expensive. The Post Office owns it and sells it to various companies that make use of it for things like insurance or parcel tracking. There are however many people who'd like to use it for non-profit purposes. Say you want to lay out events like free concerts / gigs on a map and you only have the postcode... you have to buy the database. Instead, wouldn't it be nice if it was free like zipcodes are in the US? To do this, you need people collaborating with GPS units, noting positions and postcodes. Hence this app to simplify collection of that data.

Website: http://blog.johnmckerrell.com/ifreethepostcode/
Support Website: http://blog.johnmckerrell.com/ifreethepostcode/

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: iFreeThePostcode