I’ve been nervous about running on the road again, but this evening ran three miles (yes only three miles, but read on), including some hills.

This friend and this one both told me in the past two months that they were inspired by my running. What running?! I thought at the time.

As of this week, I’m back in the saddle after wickedly tearing my hamstring last June. Along the way I experienced some pain and more stupidity (my own), much physical therapy and a lot of strengthening in the gym, plus a little jealousy of Beckley’s upcoming NYC marathon. We ran our first together last March in Atlanta - excruciating and unbelievably exhilarating. I’ve never been in better shape in my life, which was pretty cool.

So I decided this week to prepare for the marathon anyway and if I can’t get in via the lottery maybe someone I know will drop out and I’ll take their spot.

Tonight I ran a meandering path in the lovely Québec City. The only thing missing was the sweet reward - our traditional high five at the end.

Last weekend I installed The Sparkling, an interactive video installation, in an abandoned antique shop in rainy Hudson, NY. Being alone in the space with the piece, which I was for the days and nights of installation, gave me the creeps.

This, in a back room corridor, didn’t help. Okay I set it up but still:

The project featuring several artists in storefronts and outdoor lots, Plugged In, is curated by Hudson’s Melissa Stafford. Plugged In also features a wonderful installation in an outdoor used furniture lot titled Everything’s Rosie by my good friend Christine Sciulli, and a video piece called Plain Text above and in the windows of a furniture design shop by the quirky and fascinating Fernando Orellana.

My dad sent me this postcard recently upon moving back to Newfoundland, the province of his childhood. I thought the image was a bluff. Apparently not. This summer we’re going to visit him there and I’m hoping the icebergs are still there, not to mention puffins, light houses, cod tongues, screech, blustery cliffs, whales, clams, fog, and other promises. Who needs the tropics - bring on the North, eh!

My Word Press blog was hacked last week, which explains the spate of spam comments pushing my inbox ever-wider. I found spam-a-lot inserted into my own header.
Beckleyworks saved the day.

I came across a post about the use of silence in the film The Descent as a defensive weapon in direct opposition to screaming, on Ben Woodard’s Blog, Naught Thought. The Descent is a British film about a group of friends, all female, who go spelunking in The Appalachians, and find themselves battling a cave full of blind cannibalistic creatures. They soon figure out that though the hungry monsters can’t see, their hearing is extra sensitive, so their utter silence is the only thing that can save them. (Spoiler!!) But it doesn’t do much good in the end, there’s neither a happy nor a cliff hanger ending here.

This interests me in relation to The Screaming, my recent video work, in which I scream in order to scare away or destroy various onscreen horrors.

I made it to WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution - a massive traveling exhibition that is amazingly the “first comprehensive historical survey of feminist activism and art-making” from the late 1960s through the 1970s - on the last day of the show. It was good, if awkward and painful, to see work by the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Yoko Ono which inspired me in my early 20’s. My highlights are three works which seem, in 2008, less dated.

Ana Mendieta’s People Looking at Blood Moffitt (1973), is a set of documentary slides featuring people’s curious glances at blood stains on a sidewalk. This public intervention is fascinating and more subtly provocative than Mendieta’s earth-body art. Strange, however, is the installation at P.S.1 in which slides are viewable on a light table, rather than projected.

Marta Minujin and Richard Squires’ Soft Gallery from 1973 but recreated for this exhibition is a stunning and functional piece, and was full of lounging gallery goers when I arrived.

Martha Rosler’s series of collages, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows no Pain from 1966-1972 are funny and disturbing, a notable accomplishment. Her Bringing the War Home series are equally good (she’s recently updated the series using contemporary wartime imagery). Pictured above, Cargo Cult. Unfortunately this looks less dated because, after all, the beauty industry still has a healthy stranglehold on our wallets and collective consciousness.

Speaking of which, on my favourite new radio program, Q, I listened to an interview with Michael Salzhauer, plastic surgeon and author of My Beautiful Mommy. If you’re wondering why post-surgery mommy looks like a Disney femme-bot, the book designer worked for Disney. In the book, written so young children, particularly girls, may “understand” why mommy needs to beautify herself under the knife (I doubt it explains that culturally loaded question), mommy only gets a new nose, breasts, and tummy. She doesn’t get the butterfly wings pictured on the website. They might befit the spotlight sprinkling of pain-free Tinkerbell dust.

From my northern location I am surprised to discover that I cannot access my usual crack dose of web version TV episodes. Lost, for one, blocks those of us attempting to peek from non-American soil.

Speaking of Lost and obsession - if I wasn’t speaking about it I was certainly thinking about it - check out Lostpedia (spoiler warning).

While surfing to the tune of other distractions, I happily came across CBC radio’s archived Q podcasts, hosted by the smooth-voiced Jian Ghomeshi. Billed as “your daily dose of arts and culture”, Q is a boisterous programme. Contemporary art, music, sports, food, tv, pop-culture, science, books, design, sex - it’s chock full of all the good stuff. I dare you to listen to just one.

Virginia B. Spivey wrote a detailed and wonderful article about Fanatic, my recent show in Richmond Virginia, just published in the May/June issue of Art Papers magazine of contemporary art.

Writes Spivey, “The engagement of audience is one of the greatest strengths of McDonald’s work. In addition to its use of humor and physical involvement of the viewer, the work also enlists interactive platforms that reach beyond the confines of the artworld, such as the Internet. In this way McDonald’s work builds a community of fans - people united by their shared experience and interest in her art.”

1708 Gallery posted a copy here, but I highly recommend purchasing the magazine now and in the future. Art Papers has come a long way under editor Sylvie Fortin’s creative team. It’s smart, international, and the only magazine I read cover to cover.

Through June 4, I’m at La Chambre Blanche in the beautiful and rainy Québec City working on a website to provide info about and invite participation in my upcoming horror-themed smart mob performances. For example, Zombies in Condoland, a night long performance at La Nuit Blanche in Toronto. The masthead is the work-in-progress fruit of tonight’s labour.

I was at La Chambre Blanche in January 2002 for a similar residency. I fell in love with the city then and it remains my favourite Canadian city for simply walking around. Today I watched a thin sliver of orange sunset between the grey clouds and the horizon below my feet from the vantage point of the haute ville. Wandering the crooked little streets I found the windows as I remembered them - with open blinds showing every room filled with warm light, books, and gardens of potted plants. Maybe I’m romanticizing but either Canada really is amazing or there’s no place like home.

Here’s one for Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. I’ve never been much of a shopper, but this is enough to make me quit cold turkey.

Today in the loo I noticed that in the bottom seam of the yellow Forever 21 shopping bag I used to tote home bathroom caulking supplies yesterday is printed “John 3:16″ - according to Wikipedia the most oft-quoted bible verse. God is everywhere, or at least his evangelists are, including on the bottom end of a sack that once held low thread count fashion and will eventually hold my forever decomposing household trash.