by kierenmccarthy on October 11, 2009
Week before last, I was in Washington DC to see and play a small part in the signing of a new agreement between ICANN and the United States government, called the Affirmation of Commitments.
This was an important moment, not just for ICANN but also for the whole future of the Internet and its domain name system. It has been somewhat simplistically summarized as the United States letting the Internet navigate its own course, rather than decide that somehow one country’s lawmakers had a better idea how to deal with this global communications network than any other country’s. Unless you are an Internet governance addict, that explanation should suffice.
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by kierenmccarthy on February 20, 2009
So I was in Palm Springs this weekend in an effort to get out of Los Angeles and relax a little. We stayed at The Riviera – which was apparently where Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe etc used to hang out when Palm Springs was full of young Hollywood stars rather than old gay couples.
The Riviera was great. Palm Springs was great. But the highlight of the weekend was an art show on a patch of grass that we stumbled across while having a stroll on Sunday. This is no doubt a famous show and I’m showing my ignorance, but I have to say I was impressed – the quality was very high and the prices very reasonable.
There was an artist called Greg Clarke who did some great work, using different chemicals to stain a huge piece of copper according to this designs. Mostly he drew women – faces and forms – but filled the outline with lots of other faces and people. You could spend hours looking at it – very precise and neat. Unfortunately they were also huge pieces of copper and cost a few thousand dollars each so I took his name and decided that if his pieces kept playing in my mind, I might have to do something about it.
So we wandered around some other work – lots of pictures printed on canvas, some nice landscapes, some bright and colourful cartoon-like pieces. And then I turn the corner of one of the lines of stalls and was struck dumb by a number of walls of striking beautiful Asian art. I’ve very glad they were priced reasonably as I have no doubt I would have walked away with one of these pieces, no matter what.
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