Islewilde

As of today, and until Sunday, I'm a full time resident of Islewilde on Vashon Island. This is the 16th year of a festival started by the UMO Ensemble as a West Coast version of the Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus. While the puppets and performances remain, the festival has morphed over the years into a charming and rules-free 10-day party in the woods, at which dozens of artists from across the country, their friends and familes, and a handful of Vashon locals, come to put on a show, learn some new skills and laugh. I've been participating for years in a wide range of roles, from Artistic Director to Camp Cook and most jobs in between. This year I'm a rover, and am likely to find myself playing in the band, leading shadow puppet workshops, and staying up late looking for the elusive last drop of wine. It's a great festival with lots of creative people in a warmly chaotic environment. If you have the time and a ferry pass this weekend, come on by.

Graffiti in Barna Update

While I've been squeezing in all the playtime I can before summer draws to a close, my hard working father-in-law has been snapping photos of new graffiti as it appears in his Barcelona neighborhood. These pieces have all appeared over the last few months in Horta-Guinardo.

It's been exciting to see more graffiti than ever popping up on the streets of Seattle, and a few dedicated practitioners have been working like crazy recently to cover a lot of wall space with their good looking throw-ups and gorgeous pieces. Still, until there's a dedicated movement here to simply overwhelm the forces of reaction, we ain't never gonna see graffiti art with the depth and polish you can find every day in cultural hubs like New York, Mexico City, and the splendidly colorful Barcelona.

Large? It Contains Multiples

The Davidson Galleries in Pioneer Square is currently hosting a rare and amazing exhibit in the suite of rooms that makes up the rear of their Antique Print gallery. Under the direction of curator Emily Pothast, Davidson is exhibiting a complete set of all six of the famous SMS portfolios released in 1968 by American Surrealist William Copley.

SMS (aka. “Shit Must Stop”) was a short lived collaboration between some of the most important artists of the 20th century. Centered around Copley's loft on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, SMS was an open-ended experiment that epitomized the idealism and community ethos of the late 1960's. Frequented by artists, curators, performers and composers both accomplished and aspiring, Copley's loft became renowned for its utopian morale and hospitable working conditions, which included "a perpetually replenished buffet, an open bar, and a pay phone filled with dimes."

The six volumes of the SMS portfolio were the crowning achievement of the experiment. Copley assembled the portfolios and mailed them directly to subscribers. Each portfolio included meticulously editioned works by an unparalleled roster of artists which included Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Ray Johnson, Claes Oldenberg, John Cage, Yoko Ono, and many many more. The portfolios included meticulous instructions on how to un-pack and re-pack the assembled works.

Davidson Galleries has scored a coup on the 40th anniversary of the portfolios, and is celebrating by exhibiting a complete set of all six. This is a world class exhibit of some of the greatest printmakers in modern art, on display until September 27.

Larkin

Today, August 9, is the birthday of English poet Philip Larkin. Larkin is one of those cursed poets who is as well known for his personal life as for his work. He published only 5 books of poetry during his lifetime, never married, had numerous affairs with married women, and famously rejected official accolades including an appointment as English poet laureate. In recent years he has been the victim of an ill-considered posthumous book of letters and several humorless biographies which have mercilessly exposed his fondness for pornography, a streak of racism, his increasing shift to the political right wing, and his habitual outpourings of rage. But to me, and to many other readers, his poetry remains powerful, forthright, deeply personal and wonderfully entertaining. Larkin had a unique gift for finding significance in the most quotidian objects and events and for making the trivial poetic. As a case in point, I offer his poem "Money."

Money

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

- In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Power on Power

Journalist, writer, and academic Samantha Power has a very good article in the latest New York Review of Books explaining how the Democratic Party can and should seize upon National Security as a campaign issue. She recognizes that the Republican party has historically been seen as the 'national security party,' and then offers some very clear, and in my opinion wholly accurate, analysis for why the Dems shouldn't be intimidated by this assumption. Closely observing recent security decisions in Kosovo, in Iraq and here at home, Power offers some concrete suggestions that Obama and the Democrats can use that combine good policy with smart, aggressive politics. She exposes a long list of fallacies in the conservative approach to national security - everything from losing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union to neglecting Iraqi refugees in Syria - while putting forward a convincing liberal alternative.

The Democratic Party today is in a strong position to show that it will be more reliable in keeping Americans safe during the twenty-first century. If the party succeeds in doing this, it will not only wake up the United States and the world from a long eight-year nightmare; it will also lay to rest the enduring myth that strong and wrong is preferable to smart and right.

Power, who is currently affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, was a senior adviser to Barack Obama until her well publicized slip of the tongue in March 2008. Her book on genocide, "A Problem from Hell," won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. This must-read article reads like a policy briefing, and makes one hope that Power can reclaim her rightful role in the country's national security apparatus.

Free Sheep Foundation

Two great looking art openings/ events in Seattle this weekend.

On Friday 8/8/08, at 8:00 pm, Seattle's nomadic arts organization, the Free Sheep Foundation hold their second opening at their current home at Third Avenue and Battery Street in Belltown. DK Pan and his revolving roster of artists have created a series of exhibits in the display windows, on the sidewalks, and on the walls, floors and ceilings of the slated-for-destruction 10,000 foot gallery. The theme of the current program is 'Childhood Olympiad' and features glosses on games like tether ball, hopscotch and hangman from local artists Static Invasion, Karn Junkinsmith, NKO and DK Pan himself.

The cabaret show begins at 10:30 and features a performance from local hiphop legend Specs, aka. "The Holy Ghost of Northwest hip-hop."

The Free Sheep gallery is open to the public on Friday afternoons. Writing in the Stranger, Jen Graves said: "what draws Free Sheep artists together is their sense of theater, of event-ness, of time. So far, the artists behind Free Sheep have delivered ephemeral monuments to the ephemeral monument we all live in, the city. They've been mythic and short-lived; the challenge now will be to preserve that spirit over the length of a three- or six-month lease...It's a moveable feast of artists in real-estate purgatory."

Eating Gifted Children

I was glad to learn that Phaidon Press is going to re-issue all of the 1950's and 60's children's books of Tomi Ungerer. Ungerer's pioneering illustration style utilized deceptively simple lines and colors to create powerful images that seemed to bubble out of, and back into, a child's subconscious. His haunting and unusual books for kids have been out of print in the U.S. since the 1970's, for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with the quality of his art - he published a steamy book of interviews with dominatrices at a bordello in Hamburg, printed a series of drawings of bizarre sexual machines called "Fornicon," and was an unabashed critic of the Vietnam War - none of which endeared him to American children's book publishers.

Despite his relative obscurity, Ungerer has been a powerful influence on many of our best known children's book illustrators and graphic designers, including Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak and Milton Glaser. It will be interesting to see whether his books gain a toehold among the fearful American public of the 21st century. I'll certainly buy some for my little one.

One contemporary illustrator who learned many lessons from Ungerer is the Bulgarian-born Luba Lukova. Lukova, who now lives and works in New York, also uses economical lines and juxtaposes unusual images to create unexpected metaphors and capture complex themes. She recently published a portfolio of 12 thought-provoking posters called "Social Justice 2008," a tour-de-force series of deceptively simple, yet formidably brilliant images. Available here.

Films of August

A number of very interesting films opening around Seattle this week. From North to South:

The film "Silence Before Bach" opens today at the Northwest Film Forum. Catalan film maker Pere Portabella made a name for himself by producing films by Carlos Saura (“The Delinquents,” 1959) and Luis Buñuel (the Franco-freaking “Viridiana,” 1961), and started making his own films in the late 1960s, at times in collaboration with other Catalan artists like Joan Miró. An intermittent fixture on the festival circuit, he received the first North American retrospective of his work in Chicago in 2006, with the Museum of Modern Art in New York following suit a year later. Through a series of seemingly disconnected set pieces "Silence Before Bach" considers J.S.Bach as a jumping-off point for different visual and aural ideas and associations, including the cross-cultural reality of European identity. Following Bach’s influence, the film bounces all over the map, crisscrossing the continent from Spain to Germany by way of various travelers, their harmonies and rhythms.

At the McLeod Residence, Gurldogg's favorite Film Maker/ D.J. /Screen Printer /Sculptor Rob Zverina is showing a collection of photographs and short films. The show is called "memory (w)hole." and will be on display until September 27. Rob carries his camera wherever he goes and shoots films daily that are anywhere from one to 30 seconds in length. He then selects the best clips, annotates them with descriptive keywords and logs the date, location, and subject of each micro-documentary in a process he’s dubbed "autobioanthropology." Today, August 1, Rob will turn into DJ Port-A-Party at the reception to spin 45's on a self-contained portable record player.

And the SIFF Cinema is showing "A Man Named Pearl" through August 7. The film tells the story of iconoclastic topiary artist Pearl Fryar from Bishopville, South Carolina. The film documents the prejudice that haunts Fryar, a black man in a predominantly white neighborhood, as he trims his bushes with such skill and vision that his home becomes a major tourist destination.

Ignore the sun this week! Watch movies instead!

Handmade Nation

Long-time Seattleite and current Milwaukee resident Faythe Levine just returned from a promotional visit and art auction in Los Angeles. The visit and auction were coordinated to raise money and attention for Levine's new film and book, "Handmade Nation." Faythe, who runs Paper Boat Boutique and Gallery in Milwaukee and coordinates that city's version of the Punk Rock Flea Market, the "Art vs. Craft" fair, is filming and editing a documentary about the swelling wave of independent artists making a living by selling their handmade crafts. The film frames the contemporary craft movement as the bastard offspring of traditional handiwork and punk rock - a genuine alternative to mainstream consumption rather than a lifestyle trend. To date Faythe has spent hundreds of hours filming and interviewing artists, crafters, organizers, critics, curators, cultural theorists and historians at boutiques, studios, galleries and craft fairs and through websites, blogs and online stores. The independently produced and financed documentary is slated for a 2009 festival release.

I'm sorry to have missed the auction on July 19th which featured exquisite work from such artists as Nikki McClure, Dawbis, The Polaroid Kidd and many others. I'm hoping that we can arrange a similar event later this year with the help of the Punk Rock Flea Market. Until then, Faythe has recently posted an 8 minute trailer of her film, available right here.

Who Controls the Blog Controls the Future

A few months ago, while re-re-re-reading Down and Out in Paris and London, I remarked to a friend that I was "going through an Orwell phase." "You and the rest of the world" he responded. As if to prove his point, The Orwell Prize has announced that they are going to publish every one of George Orwell's diary entries, exactly 70 years after it was written, on this blog starting August 9. As one would expect, the diaries cover events both personal and political and will allow readers to follow the egg production of Orwell's domestic hens, his recovery from a gunshot to the neck during the Spanish Civil War, and his observations on the descent of Europe into World War II.

It sounds like a very clever way to introduce readers to the range of interest of one of the 20th century's most important writers, as well as being a smart and timely blog. "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

PRFM Follow Through

Damn.
Another great Punk Rock Flea Market.

In the end, we had 70 vendors selling everything from comic books to hunting knives to pocket watches to Crass records. Among the scores of the day: Count Spankula had a huge collection of bootleg Residents recordings, and the "What would GG Allin do?" t-shirts went like hotcakes.

Local graffiti hero Heck showed up at the last minute to sell stickers and hand painted tiles and Bruce Pavitt, the founder of Subpop Records, made a killing and cleaned out his attic at the same time. The entertainment was spot on as well. We couldn't keep it all contained during the day, so DJ's Grindle and Isepp moved the sound system into the parking lot. Scott Adams showed up with his banjo for a few hours, and after the sun went down the music was insanely good. Heaping helpings of fantastic music from Geist & Samuel Joseph, the Wrecked Chords, T.V. Coahran and the hugely popular Suburban Vermin.

Hope you made it. If not, check out some great photos at espressobuzz or my flickr page, or visit the updated PRFM myspace page (thanks to The Corey.) Keep an eye on Gurldogg for news of the next one. Peace out!

Race to the Bottom

For a chaotic group of rebels and misfits, the Dead Baby Bike Club sure gets a lot accomplished.

The perennially raucous Seattle bike club is holding the 12th annual Dead Baby Downhill bike race on Friday August 1. The race, which began as a lark by a bunch of drunk bicyclists in Belltown, has grown into a 4-day festival of competition, bike culture and punk music that draws hundreds of people from up and down the west coast. For the first time, the race begins on the north side of town. Riders of tall bikes, small bikes and assorted dangerous contraptions surrender to gravity at 7:00 PM sharp, from El Chupacabra, high on Phinney Ridge, at 6711 Greenwood Ave N.

In addition to the teetering-on-catastrophic downhill race, the weekend brings a track stand competition, bunny hop limbo, the midnight Huffy heave, and the always popular tall-bike jousting. The group has also arranged 2 screenings of their Dead Baby Short Film Festival on Thursday June 31 at the Central Cinema. The highly entertaining film collection first screened at the Underground Events Center back in May, and has since been picked up by a number of larger venues and festivals across the country.

More info on all of this, including race registration, is at the Dead Baby website.

Out of Sth

Briefly showing on the streets of Wroclaw, Poland is an extraordinary exhibition of graffiti as part of a festival called "Out of Sth." The groundbreaking exhibit features beautiful and deliberately provocative paintings in extremely public places and is sponsored, in part, by the Polish Ministry of Culture. Among the works now adorning the streets of Wroclaw is this amazing piece, on a commandeered billboard, by Polish artist Peter Fuss.

Many more images here and here. If you happen to find yourself in Poland, the exhibit is on display until August 17.

The Measure of America

On July 20th , the study The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009 was released by Columbia University Press. The book, commissioned by the Oxfam charity and several foundations, presents a wealth of data demonstrating the profound and deepening social decay of the United States. Using figures provided by the US Bureau of the Census, the report documents the dramatic decline of American society relative to other advanced industrialized countries, and the mounting social disparities within the US. The resulting portrait shows that much of our country’s population live in conditions that can only be described as “Third World."

Some key findings from the The Measure of America:

* The U.S. ranks #24 among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy - yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

* One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

* Fourteen percent of the population - some 30 million Americans - lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

* African American students are three times more likely than whites to be placed in special education programs, and only half as likely to be placed in gifted programs.

* The top 1 percent of U.S. households possesses a full third of America’s wealth.

* Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

* Over the course of a year, at least 1.35 million children are at some point homeless.

* The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s people - but 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.

* African Americans are imprisoned at six to eight times the rate of whites; the rate is much higher for African Americans who do not graduate high school; by age thirty-five, 60 percent of African American high school dropouts will have spent time in prison.

* In 98 countries, new mothers have 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. The U.S. has no federally mandated paid maternity leave.

* The U.S. ranks forty-second in global life expectancy and first among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

You can find out much more about the report at their very impressive web site. The site lists key findings from the report, a Well-O-Meter which allows you to approximate your own human development index by answering a series of questions, interactive maps, and tables.

Reachin'

Lots of weird and interesting art popping up in Belltown recently. This is a nicely modified billboard on Bell st.

And here's a storefront display window at 3rd & Battery.

Pes

...and in another burst of synchronicity, illustrator and animator Pes posted a beautiful new film while I was gone.

Damas y caballeros, I give you "Western Spaghetti."

Pessoa

Back in town just a few hours, I checked out the NY Times to see what I missed while off the grid. I was surprised to find this story about Portuguese poet and novelist Fernando Pessoa.

Even writing in the mid-20th century, during an age of modernism and literary experimentation, Pessoa was noteworthy for his daring and inscrutability. He wrote hundreds, possibly thousands, of poems and stories under the guise of “heteronyms.” Unlike simple pseudonyms, Pessoa’s heteronyms were imaginary characters who not only wrote in different styles but were fully developed personalities with their own supposed physical appearances, biographies and social lives. Several heteronyms published their work in different languages (Pessoa wrote fluently in Italian and English as well as Portuguese) in various countries. Pessoa never revealed the extent of his disguises, and according to the latest count by his editor Teresa Rita Lopes, work by at least 70 of his heteronyms was published during the poet’s lifetime. There may be many more not yet uncovered.

This photo of Pessoa is one of very few that exists. The poem below is attributed to one of his better known heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro.

Pity the flowers in the corners of formal gardens.
They look as if they fear the police.
But such goodness is theirs that they bloom just the same
and they wear the same ancient smile
they wore before the first look of that first man
who, seeing them emerge, touched them lightly
to see if they could talk.

Turning Beastly

Gurldogg is heading out of town for the next few days to premiere a pair of new puppet shows at the Oregon Country Fair. After not making any puppets for several years, it was important that the new shows be well considered, well made and unusual. Following Pepita's lead, as always, the two of us have spent the last 8 weeks crafting two wordless shows based on dance performances. One show features a puppetized version of Argentina bandoneon genius Anibal Troilo explaining, in song, the genesis of the tango. The other is a 3 minute flamenco performance by our puppety homage to La Farona, Lola Flores. I'll get some photos or footage up here when I return.

Youtube was a great help in developing the dance moves for these pieces, and one particularly helpful video was this odd little motion capture of a flamenco dancer who metamorphosed, like the characters in Ionesco's famous play, into a rhinoceros. Enjoy.

Ryhmes with Ohio

Local musical luminary Amy Denio is briefly back in the Northwest for a few must-see solo accordion concerts. You’ve already missed the Experimental Music Fest in Olympia, which took place last week, but there’s still time to catch her at the Rendezvous in Seattle on July 9 and in Everett on the 17th at Under The Red Umbrella. Both shows also feature Gohger & Audio Antethesis from Ghritztopia.

Kode9 from Outer Space

Back in the late nineties, Scottish born DJ Kode9 began making "Weird Garage" music at his home in Edinburgh. Moving to London he started the influential Hyperdub blog, and in 2002 put out his first release, a 12" by dubstep superstar Burial. The blog became a label and the rest - including his chest-busting remix of Massive Music's 'Find My Way' - is history. He's bringing his sound laboratory to Chop Suey this Tuesday night, July 9. The Stranger's Charles Mudede has a well-informed (if slightly overheated) write-up here.

This video for a Kode9 dubplate remix from 2006 features lots of archival footage of the legendary King Stitt, "the world's oldest living DJ."



According to reports, Kode9 is currently researching and writing a book on sonic warfare.