Play Me, I'm Yours

This is just so great. Imagine waking up one day to find a rainbow-paint piano sitting in the park near your house. Last summer the artist Luke Jerran and non-profit Sing for Hope got together and scattered all these beautiful refurbished pianos across New York City. They were for anyone to play, and apparently created all sorts of beautiful moments. The website is here.  I hope this happens in Portland someday.

You are a Tiger

I'm not above some psuedo-artsy photos now and again. It harks back to the days of my black and white photography class in which I did a human roadkill project and made my friend Killian lie in the street with raw hamburger coming out of his head. Because it's Nostalgic Photo Week, I'm posting a few photos of my favorite subjects, Liz and Alexa. They are always willing to pose for me, even if it means being infected with  bedbugs or lying on a thistle. I direct them in the manner of a coked-out fashion photographer and they do the modeling. This how a good friendship works.  

From Top:

You are dying in the desert and the only water is alkaline and tastes like Pabst.
You are a vagrant with really good shoes hanging out in your sidewalk living room.
You are a raptor.

Who I used to be

I once heard that the books that really impacted you as a kid, the ones that you read over and over and over again, are the ones that will impact your writing voice, for better or worse, forever.

I think the same thing applies to drawing. I draw in a very certain way, a strong-lined method that brings to mind those old hand-drawn animations. One of my favorite movies as a child was the Last Unicorn. It is the most magical movie. I love all the lines, the curves, the colors, the epic journey, the lost self/lost love story, the America soundtrack. Yes, it was kind of a musical but that only made it better.

I recently stumbled across Caitlin Hackett's work on my love for you is a stampede of horses.

So beautiful and all done with ballpoint pen. Not only artistically inspiring but I immediately thought of the harpy in The Last Unicorn. I would bet money that Caitlin watched The Last Unicorn as a child.

Music Appreciation

I am having a weird time right now musically. Sometimes I am really good at finding new things I like and sometimes I'm just awkwardly obsessive in the manner of a really lame teenager*.

Hence, repetitive listening of Florence and the Machine's Lungs and the Decemberists' Hazards of Love. Hopefully it will end soon. I mean, I'm enjoying it and everything, but it's getting kind of embarrassing when people ask me what I've been listening to lately and I say the same two albums every time, neither of which are particularly recent. Recommendations are certainly welcome.

This is a sweet video. Right up there with Kate Bush twirling around in a meadow.



*Ask Charissa about my Chris O' Donnell phase.

Neon Indian Night

Saw them last night at the Wonder and had do to do some research (Wikipedia) to figure out what was going on with frontman Alan Palomo. He was doing lots of mad scientist action, twisting knobs very intensely, flipping switches, etc. and I was curious about how much of it was necessary and how much was complete theatrics. Apparently he uses Abelton Live which is some high powered, loop-based software sequencer. My conclusion is that most of it was theatrics. However, he also had a theramin and playing a theramin is pure drama. The guitarist had a guitar with some sort of lit-up tie dye hologram screen on it and he was all about the guitar solo. What I'm trying to say is that this is the sort of band that you take drugs before seeing. There were clouds of smoke billowing above the crowd at all times. Also, we saw Wayne Coyne. From the Flaming Lips. He was wearing a gray suit and had that crazy hair and was being a normal person attending a show until this girl started shouting about Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips as we were exiting and he disappeared into the floor like a sprite.

Thrashin'

Kyle Arthur and Emily hosted a screening of Thrashin' last night. So great. The premise is a battle between The Daggers and the blonde kids (led by Josh Brolin, not sure if they had a crew name). I sincerely want to be Velvet (lead Dagger girl) for Halloween but Emily and I may have to rock-paper-scissors for it. So much good fashion, horrible dialogue, amazing music, and extreme skating (Tony Alva was skate choreographer and Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, and Steve Caballero were amongst the stuntmen/actors).

Here is the synopsis: "Corey Webster, a young skateboarding champion, comes to Los Angeles for the breath-taking, classic downhill race, "The Massacre". He is forced to contend with a rival gang of punk skateboarders led by Hook, a tough rival, who breaks Corey's arm in a skateboarding joust. Despite his injury, Corey is determined to win the grueling race and must overcome Hook's deliberate attempts to run him off the road as the skaters tackle the steep mountain course. Only the finishing line then stands between Corey and the greatest challenge of THRASHIN'..."

I found these stills on the internet. Amazing.

These are the Daggers at their headquarters. They have no respect for breakdancing, cars, or small blond children.

Velvet applies Hook's warpaint prior to the joust. She is his lover. At one point she makes him an earring out of her hair. There may or may not be an Flowers in the Attic thing going on with Hook and his sister (Josh Brolin's love interest).

This is Josh Brolin's training montage. There are a lot of random, unsuccessful powerslides to show how difficult skating is. What this photo doesn't show is how inept he is at tearing duct tape.

The next movie night is going down at 834. It's going to be Purple Rain.

Lasers! Glitter! Guitars!

Prior to attending the Scissor Sisters last night, I would not have said I was pro. Certainly not anti, but definitely not pro. However, Jesse got bronchitis and it turns out that I make an excellent default date.

When one just wants to dance, I can't imagine a better show. The crowd was varied and incredibly enthusiastic (suburban mothers, light-up cowboy hat bearded types, lithe men in denim short-shorts hopped up on substances, women of all sizes wearing Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman before she's rich dresses). The presentation was all vinyl and leather fingerless gloves and some backup singers in spandex doing synchronized dances. Clothing came off throughout the show, culminating in the finale, with lasers, glitter confetti, and something similar to a wrestling singlet (but skimpier). At one point Ana reminded us that she was raised in Portland and pointed out her beaming mother on the balcony. The crowd truly was the best part. After the zombie crowds at Panda Bear, it was nice to see people of various ages smiling, laughing, dancing, and having a legitimately good time. I felt bad for not wearing a dress composed mostly of lycra, but there's always next time.

Panda Bear Wednesday

So, Jocelyn, Sam and I went to Panda Bear last night. I wish I had some cool picture of him playing his little guitar, twiddling various knobs with authority, and all the crazy projections in the background, but I don't because I feel like a jerk when I start waving my camera around above everyone's head trying to get some average shot of the stage that doesn't look as good as the real thing. So I didn't take my camera and I danced. Unlike most people there. When did things get so somber? At one point we decided to move from our vantage point in front to a place where we had some room. We worked our way through the crowd and everyone was just kind of blank, like they were confused about what they were supposed to be doing. It was a fun show, walls of noise, long awkward moments of discord and apathetic rhythm, and then Beach Boys on acid over a solid bass line. Jocelyn and I danced. We looked a lot like we did in the picture above except we were wearing different clothes and we were in the Crystal Ballroom instead of Jocelyn's backyard. Sam and I finished up at East End. I love that bar.

Sleigh Bells

I've been listening to these guys all day. They are all sorts of hyped-up and apparently are a great live act. I wouldn't know because I missed them when they opened for Yeasayer. We were too busy doing karate in the dark down the street. Seriously.

I can only imagine all the crashing and squealing and lasers and projections and sweaty kids on drugs that this sort of show would entail. And you know what? I'm stuck imagining it because while LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, and Sleigh Bells decided to do a bunch of shows together (amazing heart-breaking dream show), they also decided that they would just go ahead and skip that little town in Oregon with all the bikes and bad venues. Like total assholes. I'm actually hurt. Mostly by Hot Chip. This is probably abnormal but I feel like this some sort of personal affront. I'm thinking about writing a letter.

Romulus and Remus

So, I was looking at Mark Ryden‘s work, which I kind of like. I like the precision, the painterly portrait aspect, the clean figures doing twisted things with blank faces but the the faces with the too-big doll eyes? It’s a little too manga for me, or something. I’m obviously not an art critic. I was one of those people in class that says, “Um. I like it!”
But I’ve been working on some paintings with fairy-tale themes, so it’s nice to see what’s out there. Which brings me to this painting, which made me laugh when I read the title (The Ox Suckling Romulus and Remus) because I remembered this story:

I was in Rome and I was walking around with Fede and Lisette and we had passed the Colesseo and all the multi-lingual party hustlers with their flyers, and the fat men in gladiator costumes saying dirty things and winking, and the Chinese men selling fans and hats and the overdressed tourists with their flimsy shoes and tanlines and we had sat at the cafe at the top of that big building with the horse statue out front (Monte Capitolino) that looks over the ruins all sunken and rounding and all those Italian stone pines arching over everything, and we ate fruit and salad in front of a huge fan with a mister.
We were walking down the stairs after paying to use the bathroom and Fede asked me if I could find the famous Romulus and Remus statue. You know the story. A she-wolf suckles Romulus and Remus and then they found Rome. You know. She said, “It’s huge.” And I stood there on the steps and looked around and I couldn’t find it. I saw tourists and marble and all that hot sky but I did not see this statue. And I was looking all around me and still wasn’t seeing it anywhere and feeling really bewildered and Fede was laughing and finally she pointed it out to me. And it was tiny. It was this tiny bronze on a pedestal with the wolf and her teats and then there is Romulus and Remus awkwardly standing under her with their mouths up and open and their hands waving around. It’s ridiculous. And it was a replica because apparently the real one is inside in the Capitoline Museum.
And it’s like that sometimes, when you are looking for very big things, what you are actually looking for is very small.
And we had a good laugh about it and then we went and wandered through all these narrow brick alley ways and you turn a corner and there’s another beautiful fountain with vines growing over the walls and children kicking a can around and all the women were tan and wearing very high heels and picking their way over the cobblestones like birds. And later, at dinner, we drank wine and it turned out that Lisette could speak English and she and I had halting conversations and she would blush as she answered my questions.