St. Augustine April 23

Scott, Filip, Raven, Dana and I met at 8.30 to head to St. Augustine, where Bartram visited in 1765 and again in 1774 I believe. However, our first stop was at the Farmers' Market and Flea Market near Deland on route 44. This was a real flea market and the shopping was quite good. We weaved through the aisles and I purchased numerous odds and ends for my project. Now that I have seen the Bartram cupboards I know more or less the scale of objects I must collect.

(photo courtesy of Scott Hocking)

(photo Courtesy of Scott Hocking)

St. Augustine is a city of hyper-tourism. The once quaint city streets are crammed with hordes of overweight, t-shirt wearing tourists. The food is the same as what one might expect in Charlestown or such a place.

We ate at such an unreliable place and then made our way to the fort--Castillo de San Marcos, but we were not keen enough to pay the six dollars to go in and gawk at the re-enactors firing muskets for onlookers. Raven had to lie down, so we found a little corner out of the wind and tried to make plans

(photo courtesy of Scott Hocking)

We did manage to see one truly fantastic thing while in the city, which was a vast museum that used to be the Alcazar Hotel and is now called the Lightner Museum. It is a collectors showcase haveing a large number of strange gatherings of objects from buttons to paintings and decorative arts. The Alcazar opened in 1888, and was Henry Flagler's second Florida Hotel. It closed in 1931. In 1947 magazine magnate, Otto Lightner purchased the building for his 50,000 object collection, which he gathered from estates ruined in the 1929 stock market crash. Inside are the remnants of a once remarkable hotel with the world's largest swimming pool, Tiffany windows and chandeliers and Turkish baths. The curator of the space seems extremely enlightened with a keen knowledge of museum history.

After this I went to the post office to mail Lime Projects a disc of material and yet another water sample. This took time. I then popped into a used bookstore and strolled through the local streets to O.C. White, a bar where we all agreed to meet up at 5.00.

After stopping at the BBQ joint on the way back we arrived in time for the presentations of Nancy and Barbara, both people well versed in speaking about their work and both producing interesting art.

April 28th: Visitors, Visiting and Snake Wrestling

Things have become remarkably hectic and thus I am filling in this journal sometime after the events. It will doubtlessly lack detail and exact accounts of all events.

Julie Courtney arrived on Sunday night and was hosted by the Lang, Bocanegra household. She turned up at our door at 8:40 AM ready to work. We discussed numerous bureaucratic aspects of the Bartram Project and after lunch she and Suzanne Bocanegra made presentations for all the associates. They did a fairly good job and Julie drummed up much enthusiasm by showing aspect of her Prison Projects. The Associate artists really responded to her relaxed and open manner. Gregory Volk, cool as ever arrived from the airport in time to enjoy the presentations. He is here to try to get a grip on the Bartram Project for the Catalog. He is a quick and insightful study and in no time he had a clear grasp of various complexities. Both Gregory and Julie were generous with there time with the artists. They added a relaxed but rigorous intellectual element to our time.

In the evening we were forced to attend an event called La Salon, which is somewhat of a fundraiser and outreach event for the ACA. Sadly the associate artists were not allowed to attend. We drove with Ann and Nick and the rest of the ACA Staff to a white house in the suburbs of Orlando. Here we met elderly white Patrons over pizza. The pies were delicious and David, Susan Marshal, Julie, Dana Gregory and I joked and chatted up with the locals. We were then led to a small room of many chairs with a piano and music starts at one end. Here a French Canadian couple and their three children (14,11 and 9) were to perform for us. The head of the family is the music conductor for the Cirque du Soleil in Orlando. The little girl who played the violin was adorable, the young boy somewhat devilish and the teen aloof and dour.

They played a piece of Baroque music and then moved on to play a work by David. He had apparently tried his best to discourage them from playing his work but they had insisted. They tried their best, this Florida Von Trap family and David put on a brave face, I felt a bit like being in a Ben Stiller movie. Both Susan and I also had to make brief presentations. We all tried our best to be friendly and entertaining. When it was all over we retreated to ACA to find my artists still watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. We discoursed on the nature films and watched the famous episode with anaconda wrestling match. Gregory dug how in tune we all were with the subject.

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