Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Second day of filming. This time we ran across a guy named Aaron who works at Home Depot but is a top class fencer. We plan on talking with him again. While filming basic fight footage at North Park, we filmed two guys who had heard of the Knights before. Apparently they call themselves 'Battleguard'. Not much footage that can work on its own, but a good day of filming. Here are some highlights.

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Jerk Wrap
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1 1/4 lb chicken breasts, cut into 1/2 cubes
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/3 cup jerk sauce (liquid)
2 cups cooked long grain rice
3/4 cup diced pineapple
1/4 cup chopped nuts (macadamia or cashew are good)
3 TBS chopped mint
2 tsp fresh lime juice
salt
Four 10 inch flour tortillas

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Combine chicken with 1 tsp salt, cinnamon, and allspice in a medium bowl. Add jerk sauce and mix.
Spread chicken mixture evenly into a 13 x 9 inch pan. Bake until chicken is cooked through, 10-15 minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix. Divide among the four tortillas and then wrap.

Serves 4.

Not another Ceasar Wrap
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1 TBS plus 2 tsp dijon mustard
1 TBS lime juice
1 TBS lemon juice
1 tsp orange juice concentrate
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp minced garlic
1/4 tsp salt and pepper
4 TBS olive oil
1/4 cup grated parmesan
1/2 lb chicken (cut into small cubes)
2 1/2 firmly packed cups chopped romaine lettuce
1/2 cup crutons
2 10 inch tortillas (suggested tomato)

Combine mustard, citrus juice, orange juice, worcestershire sauce, garlic, and 1/8 tsp. Gradually add 3TBS olive oil, wisking with fork. Stir in cheese, and set aside.

Fry chicken in 1 TBS olive oil, add 1/8 tsp salt and pepper, until brown. Cool. Toss in chicken, romaine lettuce and crutons; drizzle with sauce mixture. Wrap.

Serves 2.

Graduate schools have begun to contact me. Of the seven I have applied to, three have already responded. CMU and UIUC sent a simple rejection letter. Rebecca was frustrated because a CD we sent with the slides burned incorrectly and didn't have the video presentation I made on it. And the whole reason we made CDs to send to schools was so that CMU would get one. I guess it's not the end of the world that I didn't get into UIUC, but CMU was my dream school. I wasn't upset because I didn't get into the school, but I was upset about not being admitted to UIUC. Isn't that odd? Well, UIUC was at the bottom of our list for choices but by being rejected by one of the bottom schools (a last resort school), I started to get worried that I wouldn't be admitted anywhere. Rebecca kept pointing out that schools aren't admitting on a "best art" basis, but a "best match for the program" basis. I can handle rejection, but I worry about comparative matches.

With that said, I was admitted to San Jose State the next day. However, since then we've been agonizing over the wait to hear from the other four schools. In order to make a decision where we will go, we need to hear back from all seven schools and have all the possible options and variables known. So, now we play the waiting game. Again. Rebecca is also a bit frustrated because she wants to know where to look for a job, but she can't do that until we have decided where we will move to.

This week was marked by Dr. Seuss' birthday, so we had our traditional Dr. Seuss Day party. Except, this year we couldn't have the party on the actual day because Rebecca had mutual that night. And she only had one girl show up to mutual. We moved the party to Saturday night and we had a much better turn out this year than most years. We made some non-sweet snacks for everyone, made up a Dr. Seuss version of the game Balderdash (which turned out to be a REALLY good game), and watched Dr. Seuss cartoons. We played until late and I think the last folks left at around midnight. Silly us, we forgot to take pictures. (The highlights: we had the traditional story time where most everyone gets to read a book, storytime style. It's quite a treat to read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus in a group and have everyone yelling 'No!')

Also, Faith came for our Dr. Seuss party. She flew all the way from Oregon just to play with us Saturday night and Sunday morning. Well, she was actually in town for a wedding and she spent the night at our house. But it was awfully nice to have her come by. I just wish that Jon could have come as well.

Non-sweet snacks. Camilla challenged us to actually do "lent" and go 40 days without chocolate. I challenged Rebecca to go 40 days without anything sweet. So we started on Wednesday. It wasn't so bad until you go places where there are delicious snacks lying around. We went to a new art gallery opening Friday evening where there was chocolate dipped strawberries and it was hard to resist them. The art was just okay, but it's good to see new gallery spaces opening up. I just wish that, for Provo's sake, people would start buying good artwork from the area.

Mike, Jamin and I went out and filmed some more on our current film project "Knights of North Park." The project is coming along well, but after filling up 2 1/2 hours of tape, I've begun to consider my options for editing this video. Documentaries filmed this way can quickly become a mammoth task in editing, because there is no rhyme or reason to the plot. Normally for editing, I borrow an Apple computer from a teacher or use a lab computer. However, it's becoming more apparent to me that as I do more with video in art and life that I might need to purchase a good editing machine. Which doesn't make me very happy because I don't want another computer in our lives. I'm hoping that I get scholarship money for Spring/Summer term and then I won't feel guilty about using it to advance my art tools and buy a computer.

Rebecca's coming along with her thesis work. She's a bit stressed because although half the semester has come and gone, she's not at a "halfway point" in her work. The IRB hasn't gotten back to her whether she will be permitted to do her human testing for her research. But here's looking forward to the second half of the semester!

Third day of filming 'Knights of North Park'. While Mike, Jamin and I were out at North Park practicing, we met a guy who wanted to stop by and play Battleguard with us. He called himself 'Gobo' and gave us basic group training. We knew right from the start we were in trouble...he could beat all three of us in under 30 seconds. By the end of the day, we felt we had drastically improved our fighting technique, so we took him on again. The three of us were beaten by Gobo in under 20 seconds.

This is a summary of our day's worth of filming, learning from Gobo.

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Papers, a presentation, and the stomach flu. That’s what our week consisted of.

Wayne had a couple of tough papers to work on all week, one for his Psychology class and one for his Art History class. Fortunately the Art History paper was just a rough draft, and the Psychology paper was just a 2-pager. The hardest thing was finding a relevant paper to write about!

The presentation was here at BYU, the Deseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium. I presented the work I have done so far on my thesis project. It was nice to do, because it gave me a couple of new ideas to work with and helped me put what I’ve done so far into perspective a bit. And it was nice to be able to present at a low-key thing. I dressed up a bit, but wore no shoes. Yay.

And the stomach flu lasted a couple of days early on in the week, and we’re all back to normal here. Thank goodness for that. And thank goodness Wayne was hit less hard than I was, so he could take care of me. I haven’t been sick like that for a long time, and had forgotten what to do!

We also broke our laptop power adapter, so we’re laptop-less until the replacement we ordered arrived. [it broke itself...because it was old and cheap! -wayne] I knew we should have backed up a couple of weeks ago! Then I would actually be able to look up things like my address book and finances and recipes. Oh well. Such is life. We ordered a new one and we’re waiting for it to arrive. We’ll just play the waiting game.

We’re still waiting on a few more schools...hopefully this week we can hear back from more. We’re down to Los Angeles, Ohio, Boston, or, of course, San Jose.

Oh and Friday night we went to a free concert on campus...experimental music performed by the composer, Christian Wolff, and his trio, and a few of the exercises the BYU group for experimental music played with them too. It was interesting, and I enjoyed it, except for the lady who kept squeaking and yelling all the time! I have to admit I enjoyed the second half of the concert better when it was just the trio (i.e. no screaming lady). I guess we did something else this week besides papers, presenting, and getting sick!

Anyway, have a good week. Happy “pi day” to everyone on Tuesday. May the day bring lots of yummy pie. Or in our case, pizza pie.

Computers die. In this case, we had two computers die on us. All of our computers. Luckily they weren't catastrophic problems and thanks to newegg.com, we were able to get our machines back up and running quickly with new power supplies. Rebecca had a lot of research and presentations to plan, so having computers die wasn't a good idea.

But most of this week, we spent working ahead because we'll be gone to New York for six days. As you remember, Rebecca's research group was accepted to a conference in New York and BYU is paying for her trip [especially nice since we found a cheap enough hotel that BYU is covering all but traveling in the city itself, food, and Wayne's plane ticket. It's a good deal, for sure. -beck]. This should be a good opportunity for me to go see some great museums and gallerys in the NYC area. But it means that I'm going to have a really late Monday night trying to finish two papers that need to be turned in by Tuesday before we leave. And somehow I need to study for a physical science exam I have to take the day after I get back from NYC. Meh... it's worth it, right?

This past week, I began to feel a serious lack of painting in my life, so I decided to go against my decision to only work on conceptual projects this semester and do a bit of traditional painting. Well, traditional probably isn't the right word. It probably was also because I didn't have a functional computer to use for my conceptual projects, so they screeched to a halt and I was forced to use a different outlet for my artistic ideas.

I haven't been posting pictures of the things I've been working on this semester, but I will once I have better ways of displaying them. Right now I'm really absorbed in a digital photography project that takes up a great deal of my time, but it's a bit like carving a stone: it takes a long time and there is always very little to show for your work. It is a new sense of process for me, one that I've never been comfortable with. Most of my work is usually based on neo-expressionistic reactionary work ethic: if it doesn't capture raw speed, then I don't want to do it. I never liked carving stone in sculpture classes. But this digital project is turning out nice, albeit slowly.

This week was somewhat of a blur. Between Rebecca getting ready for a presentation and working intensely on research, and myself painting with a fury and trying to get all class work covered for the next week and a half, we ended up being very busy. We still were able to take some time Tuesday morning to race up to Salt Lake City and get tickets to see Swan Lake. I kept telling Rebecca that we needed to see Ballet West before we left the state, but never was able to do any more than talk about it. My parents graciously got us tickets for Swan Lake as a Christmas Present, so we had to go and pick them up. Unfortunately, the ticket office was a block away from Sam Weller's. Fortunately, we only had five minutes in the store before we had to race to our car because the meter was up. So, instead of leaving with a big pile of books (in five minutes we had accumulated five books from only one small row of books), we only bought one: a book on Susan Rothenberg. But that biography on Marcel Duchamp looked very tempting as well. We're so bad in used book stores. [I second that thought...it's good we didn't have time to visit the cookbook section!]

In other news, I have been helping a friend of mine put together a website for her new gallery. Although nothing is up right now, there soon will be virtual space at GalleryOneTen.com. The guy who purchased the site for her didn't give her any information on how to upload the files. So we wait.

We also made the switch to Cingular wireless. If you remember from before, we've been on AT&T wireless and Cingular had bought out AT&T. But they wanted to charge us $18 each to switch to the service, loose our current plan, pay more, and have to buy new phones. It never made much sense to us. But this week, we got an email from our local Cingular carrier saying that they were willing to drop the $18 transfer fee. We still weren't willing to change unless they dropped the prices on some other things, but since Rebecca's phone was dying we decided to use our rusty bartering skills and see what we could get. And...we were able to get them to drop the price on good phones to a reasonable price (free) and to make our billing charge less as well. So now we're Cingular people, I guess.

Saturday was a good day as well. Rebecca did well at her presentation, I went filming and painted. In the evening we played at Karl and Angela's house. That's about it for the week. See everyone in two weeks.

Another brief clip from our video documentary on the "Knights of North Park". Mike made us new swords which are in accordance with the rules and regulations of the game. We went Thursday evening to practice with for the first time with the group. It was too dark to film, but we talked about the experience. Less fighting, more talking in this clip. We're getting close to finishing filming and then we go into post-production. Should be done soon.

• View video (15:42)

Hummus
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1 can (15 oz.) garbanzo beans
1/4 cup tahini (sesame seed paste)
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1/4 cup lemon juice
salt
pinch of cayenne pepper
2 TBS olive oil
3 TBS chopped parsley
1 tsp ground cumin

Put beans in food processor and pulse to puree. Add the tahini, garlic and lemon juice and puree. Add water very slowly while mixing to create a spreadable texture. Season with salt to taste.

Spoon the hummus onto a plate and smooth with a spatula. Drizzle the oil, cumin and parsley on top. Serve with pita.

at least, for right now. I've become obsessed with this song because I think it's one of the most uplifting and inspirational songs I've heard in a long, long time. And I for the past two years, I've wanted to share it with my friend Jon, but I've never been able to get it to him. But I think that he'd really appreciate it. And so should everyone else. Anyways, I listen to it all the time in my car now. I think Mac would have loved this song.

So here ya go Jon!

Lyrics - Dropkick Murphys - Heroes From Our Past
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And so the story's told of a hearty group of men, it's a tale of their triumphs and their woes.
Be it raids in melees ancient or the modern worker's struggle that inspires men to stand up for their rights.
And should we fall down by the wayside in this ever-changing world
we can look back to these heroes of our past.
With their staunch determination and ferocious iron will,
no tyranny would quell them in their task.
It's an age-old situation with an ever-present message:
that time and tide waiteth for no man.
So without fear of confrontation of the consequence of outcome,
it's for freedom and for happiness they toiled.
And in looking to the future,
we can see a better place where we can shake the yoke of tyranny for all.
It's been paved by generations who have gone now to their rest.
It's just remembrance of their dignity we ask.
Chorus:
So come on rally round this brave and valiant cause with tradition, pride, and honor at its core.
With swords drawn to defend stood these noble-hearted men Faugh-an-ballagh,
clear the way, me boys!!
Under perilous conditions with small hope of success they left behind the lives that they once led
and by virtue of their fortitude and single-minded strength they cleared the way for the people of today
so when we think back to our ancestors respectfully we hark
and thank the men whose struggle broke the chain it's a long road up ahead of us
let's forge on while we're strong and leave our mark of honor once again
So the story has been told and it comes now to an end.
It's setting any era, any land.
When abusive tyrants force the hands of matters great or small,
it inpires men to stand up for their rights.

Listen (3:31)

This past year has been one of travel for us. We just got home from a six day adventure in Manhattan. Rebecca had a conference and I spent all my days in the art galleries and museums. I saw a David Smith retrospective at the Guggenheim and they only had three of the Cubi series pieces. I couldn't believe it. The MOMA blew me away and I had to come back on a second day because I was so over stimulated. The MET was great too, most of these pictures are from either the MET, the MOMA or just other places we visited while we were out.

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time before the trip to plan very carefully or I would have gotten to the Sonnabend and some other places in Chelsea. I also was quite upset that none of the major galleries in NYC had any Basquiat, Robert Irwin or even a James Turrell. Talk about disappointment. But enjoy the photos.

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