Risking life and limb, Jacob Appelbaum shot some amazing photos of today’s Zombie Flash Mob. Jake posted his account of how it all went down over on Metroblogging San Francisco.

The zombies continued their rampage and they made it to the trolley cars of Powell street. At this point, I was separated from a number of the zombies for my own safety. They had attempted to eat me despite my camera blocking their pathetic attempts. I ran for my life and the group split in two. They followed to Union Square where they continued to eat innocent bystanders. I got word from a friend being chased by the other zombies that she was safe for the moment at Powell Street station. I ran to distract the other zombies in hopes they would leave the other poor people alone. When I made it back to the station, I found that I was trapped. My friend had been caught and she was turned. I ran for my life.

UPDATE 1: Jason DeFillippo was also on the scene and shot some zombie photos.

UPDATE 2: More zombie photos are being posted as they come in.

UPDATE 3: Derek Powazek shot some great photos of the zombie horde as well, including their invasion of the San Francisco Apple Store.

UPDATE 4: Some zombie video is now online.

photo by Jacob Appelbaum

As you may have noticed, I reference the photo sharing website Flickr quite a bit and I often post links from my Flickr photostream. There’s even a Flickr photo badge on the sidebar of our website. Well if you would like to find out more about Flickr, the people who make it happen and see photos from some of their members, the San Francisco Apple Store will be hosting a Flickr event this Tuesday, August 2nd from 6:00-7:30pm. Afterwards we will make our way over to 111 Minna Street for drinks and lively conversation. RSVP over at Upcomming.org.

Flickr recently passed the 1 million mark in memberships. Congratulations Stewart, Caterina and the rest of the crew!

Some of you have asked us where you can find our Laughing Squid vinyl stickers that you see around on laptops, cars, moleskin notebooks and other things. I usually have some with me when I’m out and about, leaving them at events, cafes, etc., but if you send a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to our PO Box, we will just mail some out to you, for free of course. We borrowed the idea from Flickr, which did something similar recently with their stickers.

Send your SASE to:

Laughing Squid
PO Box 77633
San Francisco, CA 94107

Please use US stamps only. We can ship overseas, but you would need to use US stamps on your envalope.

We only check our PO Box every two weeks, so it may take a few weeks for us to send the stickers out to you.

Special thanks to Matt Dong, who created our logo. We are really grateful for the amazing design he developed for us and we get great feedback on it all of the time.

Also, some people have been asking where we print our stickers. We use Contagious Graphics for our larger stickers and Sticker Giant for our small stickers. They both do a really great job, at good price.

If you have any photos of your stickers, please post them to the Laughing Squid Sticker group on Flickr.

UPDATE 1: The stickers are 2.75” x 2.75”, in case you are wondering what size envelope to send. Postage should be First Class US Mail under 1 oz (ie. regular postage for a letter).

UPDATE 2: If you send us a larger envelope (6” x 9”) with 3 oz of First Class US Mail, we will include our full set of 10 Laughing Squid Postcards (it might be a good idea to include a note to remind us that you want the post cards as well). We are no longer sending out postcards.

UPDATE 3: I often drop off a stack of stickers at the Philz Coffee in Mission Bay (201 Berry Street) in San Francisco, so you might be able to find there there as well.

UPDATE 4: We’re out of the orange stickers, but we still have some of the purple stickers and include a couple with each SASE. In the future we are planning on printing some more colors.

Our friend, talented photographer/photoblogger, Thomas Hawk was harassed a couple of days ago for taking pictures of the One Bush Street building from a public sidewalk. In response to this, Erik has organized a gathering of photographers to shoot photos of One Bush this Saturday, July 30th at noon, followed by a photographic walk downtown. He’ll be handing out Portland, Oregon lawyer Bert P. Krages II’s flyer on photograhpers rights. Meanwhile, Matt Honan put together a contest to see how can take the most interesting photo of One Bush and the winner will receive a $10 iTunes Music Store gift certificate (or maybe even something better as his commenters are suggesting).

quoting Thomas:

Yesterday I was shooting some photos of One Bush St. (the building where Bush and Market Streets intersect) when their security guard came out of his little glass jewelbox lobby hut to ask me to stop taking photos of the building. He said it was illegal. I moved to the sidewalk and continued taking photos and he again asked me to stop. When I told him I was on a public street sidewalk he said that actually they owned the sidewalk and that I was going to have to stop taking photographs.

UPDATE: Here are some One Bush Street photos that have been uploaded to Flickr since Tom’s initial run-in with the security guard. There is a Onebush Flicker pool as well.

photo by Thomas Hawk

Speaking of Vlogs, if you are interested in finding out more about Vlogging (video blogging), come on out to “Meet the Vloggers” this Sunday, July 31st at San Francisco Apple Store. Our friends and fellow Webzine 2005 organizers Schlomo Rabinowitz and Renegade Rene will be on a panel giving tips and suggestions on about how to produce and distribute vlogs.

Join us in San Francisco to find out what videoblogging is all about! You’ll meet some amazing people who are already videoblogging, learn how to do it yourself, learn where you can find videoblogs on the Internet and much more!

Meet the Vloggers events are also scheduled for New York on July 30th and Seattle on August 6th.

If you are looking for a great way to search, dowload and watch vlogs, check out FireANT. If you want to find out more info on how to produce your own vlogs, Freevlog and videoblogging.info are two really good places to start. Vlogging is picking up some major media attention as well. Recent stories have shown up in Wired and the New York Times.

So grab a camera, get out there and make some video, like our Filmographoglogger friend Jonas Luster is doing.

Webzine 2005, a conference, expo and party that celebrates independent publishing on the internet, takes place in San Franciso on September 24th and 25th and we need your help to get the word out about it. If you have a chance, post something to your blog, podcast it, vlog it, add a banner image or badge to your website.

Webzine is also looking for sponsors, so if your company is interested or you know a company that might be a good fit, please send them to our sponsor page.

Melinda “Lilycat” Adams presents The Rough Cut Film Festival 2005 this Saturday night (July 30th) at Artists’ Television Access (ATA) in San Francisco. As part of the festival she will be showing a short clip from “You’d Better Watch Out”, my documentary (for lack of a better word) on the 1996 Portland Santacon event. For the most part it is still a rough cut which I plan to re-edit some day and give it a proper sound mix. Regardless, it is a snapshot of Santarchy from those carefree, pre-9/11 days.

The first film festival where the audience gets to help the film makers finish up their work. This is a new idea in film festivals and market research The audience finally gets to have a chance for all those “Well, if I was making this film…” to be heard and possible used in a helpful way; and the film makers get to hear the general publics opinion of their work, while there is still time to make changes. Big budget Hollywood films can do market research, but besides opinions of friends and family, low to zero budget independent film makers rarely get this feedback.

The 2nd phase of The Simnuke Project (which began in the Nevada desert two weeks ago) takes place in the form of an art exhibit that opens this Thursday, July 28th at Rx Gallery in San Francisco.

The Simnuke Project commemorates and confronts the splitting of the atom using art that ranges the emotional gamut from fear to anger, satire, and above all, a simple wish for peace. The art of the Simnuke Art Exhibit is as diverse as San Francisco itself. The show, co-curated by Sasha Harris-Cronin and Max Carlson, comprises 20 artists from the United States and Japan: 5 of them invited and 15 of them selected from submitted artworks. The exhibit pieces will range from photography to kinetic sculpture, from humorous statements to deadly serious exposes. In addition, there will be an exhibit of government documents from the Prelinger Library tracing the history of the atomic era in public policy.

photo by Jon Alloway

Bre Pettis put together a great video from Gnomedex 5.0 which he posted over on his I Make Things blog. He interviews me along with Lee Lefever (Common Craft) and Lee Hammond (Geffen Records). I talk about how blogs, podcasts, etc. are a great way for artists to get their content out there and I even sneak in a plug for WordPress.

Gnomedex-o-Rama Part 1

Along with Bre, I met a bunch of Vloggers (also referred to as video bloggers) at Gnomedex, including Boston-based Steve Garfield who’s been doing some great stuff over on his video blog. Here’s a photo I shot of Bre and Steve in action covering Adam Curry’s keynote presentation. Vlogging is following right along podcasting as an amazing way to deliver rich media content and we are going to quite a few developments in this area in the years to come. One of these days I’ll have to dig up some of my old footage from 1996-98 and put together some online video.

Varnish Fine Art currently has show up featuring the amazing works of Polish sculptor Stanislav Szukalski (the show, entitled “The Self-Born: Stanislav Szukalski”, runs through September 16th). This is the first large-scale exhibition of his work in 5 years and features many of his sculptures, drawings and photographs. Some of the pieces look like a cross between the Industrial Revolution and the Aztec Empire, and are really stunning. Last Friday I shot some photos of the Stanislav Szukalski show which was up during the Hi Fructose Release Party. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, July 30th, from 7-11pm and you can also stop by and see the show at any time during normal gallery hours.

Szukalski’s bronze sculpture bridged burgeoning 20th century art movements only to fall into obscurity until the efforts of Glenn Bray, Lena Zwalve, Decker Studios, George DiCaprio and his son Leonardo DiCaprio reawakened interest. His work has been called “bent classicism.” Szukalski was perhaps a narcissist of the highest order, as he considered himself “without antecedent or influences,” while managing, according to his admirers, to fuse the movement and energy of Futurism, the emotion of Impressionism and the geometric configurations of Cubism into a single poetic form. He is quoted as saying, “I put Rodin in one pocket, Michelangelo in the other and I walk towards the sun.”

Last Gasp has published three books on Stanislav Szukalski (“Behold! The Protong”, “Szukalski: Inner Portraits” and “Struggle: The Art of Szukalski”), all of which will be available at the opening on July 30th.

This just in from an undead friend of mine:

Next Saturday (July 30th) at 3pm, me and some friends are going to eat brains in downtown SF. You whacky folks are invited to join us. If you show up dressed as a zombie, you can probably walk among us with out getting eaten. If you show up in regular clothes, expect to be attacked and turned into one of us by our crack zombification teams (we have extra parts). When our hoarde has grown and we’re out of fresh food in SF, we’re going to bart to Colma for a picnic. BYOBrains.

Some important points:

- For more information and the location, please visit eatbrains.com.

- Bring blood, limbs, entrails, tattered clothes, bart fare, and a picnic basket. If you don’t have a costume, just wear clothes we can destroy.

- Invite your friends and family. Yes, family. We’ve got zombies of all ages, from veal to jerkey.

UPDATE: Photographic evidence of this zombie invasion is now online.

My favorite “venue” in San Francisco, Ace Auto Dismantling, now has it’s own website:

That’s right, not only is Ace Auto an excellent place to junk your car, find that part you have been searching for or even buy a car, but it has been home to many amazing events over the years, including: Power Tool Drag Races, Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, Mongoloid/Cookie Mongoloid, Attaboy & Burke and many more. Ace owner Junkman Bill has been helping out Bay Area artists for years and has provided precious obtainium to art organizations like Survival Research Labs (SRL), SEEMEN, Burning Man and so on. In fact Ace is even an employer of artists and many of our good friends have worked there including Chicken John and Cyclecide’s own Jarico Reese.

For you geeks that want get rid of all your old computer crap, Ace Auto also does computer recycling, so bring it all down and let Junkman take care of it for you.

With all the great stuff that Junkman Bill has done with Ace Auto, it’s no wonder it was voted “Best Junkyard for Artists” by SF Bay Guardian’s for their Best of the Bay 1998 issue (the same issue that featured Laughing Squid as the “Best Pipeline to the Underground”).

A fundraiser that is not for Burning Man, in July? Impossible! It’s true, SEEMEN and The Flaming Lotus Girls are headed to Amsterdam this September for Robodock, an art and technology festival, and they need to raise some serious cash to get there. To make this happen, QBOX is producing “A Fundraiser for Not Burning Man” this Saturday, July 23rd at CELLspace in San Francisco, from 7pm to 2am.

The Flaming Lotii and The Seemen have been invited to participate in the Robodock festival in Amsterdam. Robodock is a brain-tweaking display of art, theater, and technology that will of course blossom and benefit from a long-needed injection of Flaming Lotusness and (ahem) Seemen.

To do this properly, however, we must first have a debaucherous night of art, celebration, HOT FLG’s, machine art, noise performance and countless other amusements designed to instruct, delight and debilitate. Let us entertain you as we part you from your cold, hard-earned cash, the better for us to afford lipstick, fuel, and a seaworthy shipping container.

Wear your finest flame-retardant formal wear and rip-proof ball gowns and come prepared to dance (or twitch arrhythmically) to the soothing strains of our favorite noise bands and the relaxing din of stunning mechnical, kinetic and electronic art that we have brought from the four corners of the bay area for the edification of you, the discerning Qbox sychophant.

There will be prizes, opportunities, a gallery of extravaganzas available for purchase, mysterious surprises and all sorts of other things to hold your interest while our crack Qbox staff lovingly plumb the depths of your wallet.

monochrom is wrapping up their amazing “Experience The Experience!” West Coast tour this week. They have been in San Francisco three previous times this month and are returning for one more performance at Rx Gallery in San Francisco this Friday, July 22nd. This final experiment will be “Experience The Experience Of 1 Baud”, which they held a workshop for at last night’s dorkbot-sf (Here are my photos from dorkbot-sf #19). They will be attempting to send a signal, equivelant to the size of one baud, through San Francisco via participants using semaphore flags. At last night’s workshop, Johannes Grenzfurthner gave a hilarous account of their attemps to test their signaling techniques on a roadtrip to Nevada and Arizona.

The International Code of Signals serves to facilitate communication at sea. It defines the meaning of alphabetical identification codes for safety and navigation purposes. The key for “sending” was drafted by a committee of the British Board of Trade in 1855 and published in 1857. The 1969 edition, revised in 2003, is still in use today. We have expanded the flag alphabet, not just so that it also includes the @ sign, but so that city dwellers have access to pure communication. The flag alphabet will be taught in a workshop lasting several hours. After a few days set aside for study and practice, we would like, in the form of a competition, to send an identical message across the city over two equally long routes simultaneously. Will it work?

Bayennale 2005 is a large-scale, international arts festival running July 22nd through August 7th and takes place at over 40 venues throughout the Bay Area. The opening night party is this Friday, July 22nd, from 6pm-9pm at The Lab in San Francisco.

The Bayennale is an international open invitation for visual and performance artists from around the world to make their way to the Bay Area to join with local artists–and for all to create and perform new work in venues ranging from the gallery to the street to shipping containers magically transformed into art-spaces for the event. The Bayennale is sponsored by the Port of Oakland, and is the brainchild of conceptual artist Lowell Darling.