Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Whew. Lots to tell, lots to tell. Let's try starting with New York.

We got an early flight out of SLC, carpooling with the other girl, LaReina, who was attending the conference with me. It was hard to sleep on the plane, and hard to concentrate on the papers I brought along to grade, but I had a good book with me that helped pass the time. Wayne thought the flight took forever though (he didn't bring a book!).

What *did* take awhile was figuring out how to get from the airport to our hotel in Manhattan. We had a crash course in NYC's public transportation system. I had done research before we left, determining that a week's unlimited pass would be the best deal for us to get around, but did not know where to obtain such a pass. Apparently they were *supposed* to have them in the terminal when we landed, but they were out and we had to walk to another terminal to find a pass for sale. We took the bus to a subway to our hotel, and quickly decided we liked the bus better. Who knew? I absolutely hated the buses in San Diego and Los Angeles. But the buses in NYC weren't so bad at all. I vote that it's because *normal* people ride public transportation there, and in CA it's mostly just crazy people who think they are Christ that ride the bus. :) [oh MY!]

So we checked in, grabbed some food at a fun pizza place with a horrible waiting staff. At least the ambience was good. They built the restaurant in a building that used to be a church. Really fun place with drawings on the walls themselves.

Thursday LaReina and I went to the conference all day while Wayne visited the first of many art museums. It was an interesting conference - more Linguistic-y oriented than what I've been doing my thesis on, but still an interest of mine. There were a lot of talks on eye-tracking people reading and measuring brain waves while people read linguistically interesting sentences and such. Wayne had trouble pacing himself at galleries on Thursday, spending a long time in the Guggenheim and breezing through the MoMA because he thought he was running out of time for everything. When we met up that evening, we were both over stimulated, and so we found a place to eat with singing waiters and waitresses [I believe this was the sort of place people who can't get jobs on broadway yet go to make money while they try to get their good "break."]. Another win.

Friday was similar - conference for me all day, art museums for Wayne. We presented our poster, I took lots of notes. Some guys at MIT had a system for using the mouse as "the poor man's eye-tracker." Another talk was on how people use private and shared information in the course of a conversation. And in the evening we both went to the Museum of Modern Art for free (yay for Target!) [Friday evenings are free courtesy of Target stores. However, that means they're also packed!]. I finally got to see lots of good art too! :)

Most of the time we felt pretty safe in NYC. Out hotel was on a pretty busy street so even walking home in the dark wasn't bad. There was only one alley I made us walk fast down to hurry through, and one other Wayne just turned the other way and we went down a different street. So we felt lucky that between the precautions we took in making ourselves not look like easy targets, our paranoia was fortunately not validated.

Saturday was the last day of the conference. I went by myself (LaReina's dad flew into town to hang out with her), but it was the best day of the conference (not because I was by myself, but because of the talks... :) ). Wayne saw the Met pretty much all day, and even took time to do some sketches [roman sculptures do a good job of holding still and presenting great lighted poses]. In the evening we wandered around in the shopping district window shopping at really, really big stores. Too bad we didn't need anything, but we had fun just looking.

Church on Sunday was at the temple in Manhattan. Church was on the third floor, the temple was on the fourth. Cool. Right by central park. So afterwards we had a small picnic lunch (we brought PB&J and fruit and crackers with us from Utah, to try and cut back on expenses as much as possible since BYU wasn't paying for the food).

We visited the Met (i.e. more art). Monday we checked out of the hotel and dragged our suitcase to another gallery in Queens, featuring contemporary art [i really appreciated this one video/social project piece where an artist went to film practice sessions of children singing "magical world" in Bosnia. quite a pragmatic and dramatically thought provoking piece. The James Turrell room was closed for repairs. I was unhappy, so i poked my head in anyways. -wayne].

That was an adventure, and we were a little worried about finding our way from there to the airport, since we hadn't spent much time in Queens and didn't even have a bus/subway map of the area. But we made it. The one unfortunate part is that our butter knife is still at the airport. We brought it without even thinking about it, to spread the PB&J with, and were only "caught" in a New York airport. Hehehe. Somehow I'm not surprised. Well, at least we still have 7 butter knifes...we'll just have to invest in plastic ware if we ever have more than 5 guests to our house. That, or make sure everyone knows it's BYOK. :)

Whew. So that was NYC. Wayne posted pictures on the website.

Last week we just played catch up mostly. I have lots to do before the paper deadline my advisor wants me to shoot for. Wayne had an exam the day after we got back. We went to a ward dinner on Friday. We made it up to SLC for general conference this morning, and came right back afterwards to Karl and Angela's for the afternoon session and dinner.

Oh cute story about Star. We came back late Monday night, and when we opened the door, she raced past us and up the stairs, heading for our upstairs neighbor's door! We were most confused, until we saw our neighbors the next day. We found out that they heard Star crying for attention while we were gone (thought it was their own child), and decided to leave our door and theirs open so she could come visit as she pleased! What good neighbors. Granted Star is still terrified of their two year-old (interestingly, she doesn't mind their dog). But at least she had human companionship while we were gone!

And we're still waiting for the last two schools to make up their minds, so we can make up ours. :)

The week started out at 70 degree weather. Then, it jumped to 30 degree weather with snow, slush and rain. Then the next day it was back to 60 degrees.

Monday evening, we flew our kite at Rock Canyon park. The wind was just right as the evening wore on and we got in lots of stunts. We even had a a group of kids that just wanted to watch us fly a kite. So we put on a show for them.

We tried to pick up some new jeans for Rebecca on Tuesday, but no luck there. All her jeans have been dying all at once, so we need to replace the old ones with something new. I went with my class to see the documentary New York Doll. It was very well done and I highly recommend it to people.

Wednesday we helped Gallery OneTen some more with their website. Thursday it snowed heavily. Rebecca had mutual and the girls came over to make cookies for a service project. The good thing is that despite all the cookies and frosting around, Rebecca and I stuck to our guns and didn't try any of it: we're still on our sweets fast. The bad thing is that at the end of the day most of the girls wanted to "give service to their family" and just take the cookies home and eat them. I think they got too attached to the cookies and instead of wanting to share them with others, wanted to keep them for themselves. So, I guess they missed the point of service. Anyone have any ideas how to teach REAL service?

I've been spending a lot of time editing video footage that I filmed some time ago about Mckell Brockbank. So I've been thinking a lot about him and about how to present good documentary materials. Or rather, I've been thinking about researching movies. Friday night, Rebecca and I went to the Library and reserved a room where we could watch some of their films they wouldn't let us check out. We watched a documentary on paperboys (entitled 'Paperboys') and another on the artist Bill Viola. Paperboys was a real highlight. Because I grew up being a paperboy, I was intrigued by this portrayal of them. The film was really well put together and was an interesting look at small town life and the good things that come with responsibility.

We tried to fly kites with Karl and Angela Saturday evening, but the wind died down too fast up in the canyon. It was sad because, when we came back into the valley, all the flags were waving...but we just couldn't get our kites high enough. Best of luck next week. Congratulations to Melissa and Russell and gang for their new baby.

We do know that we aren't going to Ohio though. And that Wayne is on "hold" at Mass Art. Whatever that means. The sooner we can find out yay or nay, the better.

I've already started submitting resumes and whatnot in both Boston and San Jose though. Wish me luck on my first phone interview this week, though I think they are looking for someone with a PhD. I expect I'll find that with a lot of positions...I'm either overqualified with a Masters (programmer/developer positions), or underqualified without a PhD (researcher positions). Hmm. I'm hoping to find a research developer position, helping develop programs the researchers want to work on. But a job that pays would be better than nothing. :)

We also heard that Wayne won an award (most likely a scholarship) from the visual arts department at BYU for this summer. Yay. We won't hear official word about amounts or whatever until Wednesday evening at the awards ceremony. And I thought BYU had blacklisted Wayne...one instance in which I'm glad to be proven wrong!

Whew. We did lots this week. We saw Swan Lake performed by Ballet West Friday night. It was soooo much fun. We were very impressed by the talent and beauty we experienced that night. It was my first time seeing a professional ballet, and it made me wish *I* were a ballerina. Who knew? :) My one complaint was the cheesy ending, but I can understand that they wanted to appeal to the typical Utah crowd. [I don't think that the original ending included a "Saturday's Warrior" feel to it. -wayne]

Saturday we spent up in Salt Lake all day for one of my college friend's wedding. It was a long day, and I wasn't even the one having to smile and greet people and pose for pictures! But it was well done. And a lot of fun to hang out with friends I don't see very often, who also came into town. I liked the chinese food theme for the reception.

Today we had Easter dinner with Karl and Angela, and were sad we couldn't talk Aunt Sharla into coming. :) But we understand. I enjoyed the traditional Madsen dinner, but this time I added my own element too. :) Deviled eggs! Mmm. Because, Jesus was tempted by the devil for 40 days, and they have mustard in them for the mustard seed, and because they symbolize birth (we can be born spiritually in Christ). I knew I could work them in somehow....

We also had stake conference today. Wayne leaned over a little bit into it and asked if our stake has especially rowdy kids or something, but I remember last stake conference was actually an especially good conference. We decided most of the kids probably either were on sugar highs from Easter candy, or wanted to be. Hehehe.

Well I think that's about all folks. Hope everyone has a good week. We should be pretty busy this week; finals are approaching and we got lots to do still!

This is the last video teaser I'll be making for our "Knights of North Park" film. The filming has turned out nice and we've got plenty of good footage to work with. In the past weeks of filming, the Knights have brought us a uniform we played in, as well as letting us hear some of their personal stories. Because I have officially switched over to editing all my film work in Final Cut Pro, all my videos will now be in quicktime format, no longer in Windows Media Format. Please download Quicktime 7 before viewing this video.

• View video (Requires Quicktime 7)

Going backwards. On Saturday, we spent half the day doing some heavy cleaning. One of the worst things about being in school full time and working the other part of the time is that our only available time for cleaning our apartment is on Saturdays. I'm sure this isn't something most people care to read about, but I grew up doing cleaning and so I clean with Rebecca. We actually have our set rooms: Rebecca does the kitchen, the bedroom and folds the clean laundry, while I do the bathroom, living room and the washing part of the laundry. The reason why I bring this up is because I've noticed lately in movies that the woman is still always the one doing the "cleaning" around the house. It is interesting how archetypes portrayed in the movies are still real. Speaking of movies, we went to the dollar theater and saw Curious George. Rebecca and I love the books, but I went to the movie with my expectations very low. The movie didn't have any problem fulfilling those. Although there wasn't anything special about the film, that monkey was just so cute. They really nailed Curious George...always going from one adventure to the next. A good movie for really young kids.

Thursday and Friday we came down with colds. Luckily they weren't horrible. I spent most of my time painting at home while Rebecca did her best trying to stay on task with applying for jobs [and thesis stuff, of course]. Friday evening we went over to one of Rebecca's friend's house to play some games (who knew that Yatzee isn't as fun when you don't cheat?) and Thursday evening Rebecca made kites from scratch with the girls at our church.

Wednesday evening we went to an awards ceremony for the visual arts department. I got a talent award, yay for free money this spring term! Rebecca also got two presents on Wednesday; her birthday was on Tuesday but some of her presents were delayed. Tuesday evening we had cake and Karl and Angela came over.

Lastly, we saw a video called "The Natural History of the Chicken" this week for FHE. In my search for good documentary films (I still highly recommend seeing "Paperboys"), I came across this PBS film which was highly recommended by some people as being "a real eye opener." Which it was. This isn't so much of a history of the chicken as a series of weird stories about people and chickens, some of which are really funny but all of which make you think about chickens in a new way. They do have their own personalities, possibly because some people look at chickens differently and that gives them new attributes. At any rate, I felt like this film gave justice to chickens and defintely gave them a much higher status in life than what I previously would have attributed to them.

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

- Albert Einstein

To Phoenix and back again. We left Wednesday morning for the greater Phoenix area to work on a group art project that Wayne's professor invited him to participate in. 240 pictures and over 1200 seconds of sound clips later, we came home. That's the essence of our week.

Before we left, we worked like mad: Wayne had to finish finals and a project for the upcoming Box Show at Gallery OneTen, I had to finish my contributions to a paper a professor and I submitted yesterday. We also managed to watch New York Doll Monday evening and hang out with some neighbors Sunday evening for a last minute dinner. Tuesday was spent spray painting an image on CDs and burning some images (that was the Box show project) and packing. Oh, and printing off some directions from MapQuest. [We could talk for a long time about the film New York Doll; needless to say, we highly recommend it to ALL viewers.]

But MapQuest failed us yet again. When will we learn?? We should verify directions with another map engine...so we don't end up at Zion's National Park entrance, and face a decision to either pay $20 bucks to drive through the park, or turn around and backtrack 25 miles (which makes a 50 mile addition to our trip). We opted to backtrack. The project has some funding, but the funds we will be reimbursed are not unlimited, and we had hopes of still reaching our campgrounds at a reasonable hour.

It all would have worked out fine, except that we didn't plan gas stops to account for those 50 extra miles, and had to make another 20 mile detour to Tuba City - middle o' nowhere Arizona - just to make sure we didn't run out of gas before Flagstaff. In the end, the fatal MapQuest mistake cost us about an hour of our time. And thus we got to the campground 20 minutes after sunset. It's a bit tricky pitching a tent in at unfamiliar campsite in the dark, when your flashlight is out of batteries and you're worried about stepping on fireant hills or scorpions or other pleasant desert creatures. :) [Scorpion stings were my high priority to avoid. -Wayne] It all worked out in the end though. We got our tent up and zipped and were pretty fortunate that it was just us (i.e. no bugs) in our tent. Whew. But next time we'll get a second opinion on the directions. :) [It was really windy that night, but a very starry sky and we left the top of our tent off.]

Thursday we woke up bright and early and hit the road. Wayne was assigned the southwest corner of the greater Phoenix area to take pictures, and I was in charge of recording interesting sounds. [This is Rebecca's first chance to be on the artists listing for a project.] We headed first to the Indian reservation on our map, and found some interesting things. The type of camera Wayne was using is meant to capture "movement" pictures, so it was a bit disappointing that we couldn't find people to photograph, but I think we found some interesting shots anyway. That is, until a guy in a big white vehicle told us to "stay on the road." [I had told him what our project was and how we were trying to show the wonderful diversity that is brought by the Native Americans in the area. I asked if I could take his picture and he wasn't happy about that idea either.] We stayed on the road, but interesting shots were harder to come by. Also, we learned that some schools would not let us take pictures of their students without "parental consent." But some would. Go figure. Not surprisingly, we liked the schools that helped us out. :) [None of which on the Indian reservation.]

After leaving the indian reservation, we met some nice people at the YMCA, the 7th day adventist church, and some kids at a bus stop (when Wayne asked them if he could take a picture, he had to ask three times and eventually one of the kids shrugged his shoulders and mouthed the word "whatever." He couldn't even be bothered to voice a response.) We found a skateboarder in an otherwise empty park that showed off a bit for us, lots of dust, construction everywhere, and 19 "dollar" stores (my favorites were the ones that looked like small, brightly painted mexican shops with a big "dollar store" painted on the sign). There were almost more dollar stores than gas stations in our area!

We opted to stay at a hotel Thursday night; after a long day of work we were almost too exhausted to put up at a campground. That was the first place that asked my age (if I were under 17, I would have been free...). The second place was at the casino. Don't you just have to be 18 to go in a casino? We had to go back to our car to get my license; I'm not used to being carded I guess. :)

Friday was a good day. We found a golf course, where one of the guys in charge drove his cart up to us and told us we did things wrong by not signing in, and we weren't supposed to walk on the course without permission, due to liability. We thought we were being kicked off, but when we went to go sign in, they asked what we were doing and gave us a golf cart to drive around FOR FREE! Wheee! Vroom vroom, vroomy vroom vroom! [Everyone at the golf course was really cooperative. I asked a handful of people if I could photograph them for our project and they were really excited about it.] We also found more kids at parks - just when we were beginning to think no one used the parks in Phoenix. By the end of the second day, we didn't get quite as many pictures in, and kept getting boxed in by construction, but we did finish the 10 rolls of film they sent with us. That's a lot of picture taking in a 2-day span of time.

The hotel was a nice break from camping, since we could shower all that desert dust off us, but our room smelt like wet dog. Since wet dog isn't a nice smell to fall asleep to, we camped again our last night in Phoenix. Friday night is a more popular time to camp, so we ended up in the "primitive" campsites. Not bad, just really rocky. We slept just fine, but woke up to a flat tire. Hmm. Not sure if the tire was already leaking air before we got to the campsite or what. But we were certainly glad that the spare was easy to put on, and that we found a Discount Tire place only three exits on the freeway north of us. They were pretty speedy about changing the tire, too. We barely had time to walk to Walmart and pick up some bagels before they finished.

On the way back, we didn't make the mistake of driving through a road that cost 20 bucks. See, we can learn! :) We made incredibly good time, and made it home again by 8:30. And I'll have to check, but I think we were pretty much on budget for the trip too. Yay. Now we start gearing up for spring term; classes start on Tuesday. And I have another phone interview on Tuesday. Hopefully I can find some workplace I'll fit in at soon....

All through September at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Center, I will be apart of a collaborative of artists who will display photographs and sound encompassing the wide diversity of the Phoenix/Mesa greater area.