art is the new religion

man on wire

Philippe Petit is my hero.

©2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images

On August 7, 1974 he stepped out onto a tightrope he and his friends had illegally stretched between the tops of the two twin towers of the World Trade Center, then the highest buildings in the world, and he danced across this wire, wirewalked, for 45 minutes, a quarter of a mile above the ground, without a net, while pedestrians and police watched in awe.

Man On Wire is a documentary of Petit's unthinkable obsession, from the birth of it - the very first inspiration to "conquer" the towers - through the plotting, planning, detailing, practicing, recruiting, cajoling, problem solving, sneaking, daring, dreaming, all the way to the final mad dance of it.

You have to see this film.

Even though you know what the climax of the film will be, director James Marsh does a tremendous job of creating suspense and wonder about everything that leads up to "the coup."  He draws out the details to make the unbelievable feat more real, but it's easy to forget you're watching a documentary.  Petit and his cohorts had the foresight to film and photograph themselves plotting and planning, so the documentary switches back and forth from present day recollection to real footage of the group's scheming.  My brain kept trying to convince me the footage of the young Petit and his cohorts was skillful reenactments by actors, that this whole film was merely a fairy tale.  As the footage switched from 70's planning to modern-day interviews, I had to focus in on inimitable details of the players' faces - moles, irises, teeth - to remind myself that they weren't actors, this film wasn't cast and scripted, this really happened.  These people, over 30 years ago, really did this.

They broke into the twin towers and strung a wire across the tops of the buildings, so their friend could dance across it.

You have to see this film.  It should blow your mind, and hopefully make it really hard to ever again say, I can't do this, impossible, it can't be done.

"It's impossible, that's sure. So let's start working."

here's some dogs

The latest edition of Tiny Showcase comes out today, so I clicked over to the site to see if I could catch it right when it went up.  Instead of the new edition, I caught last week's edition which I had somehow missed!  It's by San Francisco's own Jay Howell, it was printed by Providence letterpress artist Dan Wood and it's awesome.  Too bad the limited run is already sold out. 

It's called "Here's Some Dogs":

I'm sad I was unable to purchase one of these.  I need some cheering up:

I'll conclude this post with two inspirational quotes from the artist Jay Howell:

"Take a stand against the jerks from hell. They are out there and they want you to feel bad just because they do. You will not be taken down, YOU are from Tuff Town and they are from the lame village across the river. We launch rocks at them for a reason."

"All I'm saying is that it's so important to be yourself. That's all you have to offer so just be honest. It's really scary to put yourself out there knowing that everybody is going to come down on you because they think they know where you're coming from and what you've been through. That's never, ever true. Personality is art."

Support local artists this weekend in San Francisco

All this week I've been writing about buying local and buying directly from artists and makers.  So I'm excited to tell my blog readers in San Francisco about some of this weekend's opportunities to do just that.

The Capsule Design Festival is back this Sunday in my gorgeous neighborhood of Hayes Valley:

Capsule Design Festival
Sunday, October 19, 2008
11:00 am ‘til 6:00 pm
Hayes Valley Park
Octavia and Hayes Streets, San Francisco, CA 94102

Sunday's event will feature 160 clothing, jewelry, children's, lifestyle and accessory designers so you're bound to find something you love.  Check out the complete list of designers.  This video shows an aerial view from the event they held this past spring.

SF Open Studios continues this weekend.  Weekend 3 concentrates in the following neighborhoods:  Bernal Heights, Castro, Duboce, Eureka Valley, Glen Park, Mission, Noe Valley, Portola.  I'm planning on stopping by Art Explosion Studios in the Mission, which offers a chance to see well over 100 artists across three locations which are within walking distance of each other.

Also on Sunday is the 20th Annual Festival on the Hill in my old 'hood, Bernal Heights.  Reason I mention this is because a band I heard last Sunday at Indie Mart, Blue Rabbit, is playing the festival at 12:45pm. Blue Rabbit is fronted by three women, with Heather penning the songs and Sarah and Arami cooking up some gorgeous lead harmonies.  Their playfulness and beautiful blending of voices remind me a little bit of Tilly and the Wall, but the addition of a cello player adds a moodiness to the music.  A very fun band to see live.

good times are coming

I've been chronicling my experience at the Indie Mart at Thee Parkside last Sunday.  Buy local, buy handmade -- it's the best possible way to shop.

One of the last booths I perused at Indie Mart was Kate Durkin's.  She makes adorable cloth purses and pillows adorned with birds, bees, bicycles and other simple and natural motifs.  A very versatile visual artist, she's also created some wonderful murals and even painted an entire room at the Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco.

I brought home this optimistic and very affordable little piece of art by Kate, which fits wonderfully in my art collection.

Visit Kate Durkin's blog and Etsy shop for more good stuff like this. 

art for the weekend

We're coming up on the second weekend of the 33rd Annual SF Open Studios:

"For over 30 years, San Francisco Open Studios has provided the public with an opportunity to see artists in their workspaces. As the largest and first open studios program in the country, San Francisco Open Studios showcases artists without judgment and invites art lovers to make friends and start or build their art collections."

Each weekend presents opportunities to see artists in different neighborhoods.  This weekend I'll get to stroll around my neighborhood to meet some of the artists who live near me.

Weekend 2: October 11 & 12, 11am-6pm
Buena Vista, Diamond Heights, Fort Mason, Haight, Hayes Valley, Marina, Mount Davidson, Pacific Heights, Richmond, Sunset, Twin Peaks, West Portal (see the full map)

 

I love SF Open Studios.  It's a terrific excuse to wander around the city and meet some neighbors, and a great way to explore a neighborhood you don't know very well.  It's also fascinating to see the space where an artist works, and discover some of the creations that are being made inside buildings you may pass by every day.  Many of the artists make a bit of a party out of it, serving wine and snacks and offering up conversation about what they've been working on.  And if you fall in love with a work of art, you can buy it directly from the creator.  There's nothing better than that.

Speaking of buying art directly from the artist, I'm kicking off my art-filled weekend tonight by going to see a new exhibition by Annie Galvin (aka Wexford Girl) called 49 Reasons Why.

Two of Annie's paintings hang in my bathroom and serve as a constant reminder of life's mysteries:

(Read the story behind these paintings.)

Artists do important work.  They strive to know themselves, tap into their inspiration and persevere against the odds to turn the vision in their heads and hearts into tangible works we can enjoy.  We should support them and celebrate them, and this weekend in San Francisco gives us plenty of opportunity.  So get out and enjoy some art! 

a receiver, held to the ear by a headband

Continuing on the headphones theme from my previous post:

Ginevra was surfing around on some blogs (as we do) and came across a post about Nokia's "Music Almighty Headset Competition" that challenges you to design some sort of fantasy set of headphones, and Nokia will produce the winners.  (There's a "social media" component where entrants drive traffic to the site by haranguing friends to vote for their design.)  She sent me the link to amuse me.

The post provided a sample design, presumably to inspire some submissions:

I cannot stop staring at this image.

The contest website (located at the awful URL here) features some appalling 3-D animations of similarly "inspiring" monstrosities, in case you need to get your creative juices flowing. 

I have so many questions:

• Whose idea was this?
• How did they get the rest of Nokia to approve it?
• Nokia makes headphones?
• I thought part of the benefits of advancing technology was that all gadgets get increasingly smaller and more discreet.  What does it say about Nokia's technology to create larger, heavier, more obtrusive headphones?
• Would anyone wear these headphones?
• Why are they adorned with sound-amplifying flourishes in the form of mic heads, organ pipes and little foghorns?
• Seriously, would anyone wear these headphones?

I suppose now that I have blogged about this, Nokia wins.  (Although, now that I do know they make headphones, they still haven't made my short list of "companies to buy headphones from".) 

They promise to manufacture fully functioning custom-made ("bespoke" as the Brits say) sets from the top 5 winning designs to display in their stores then award to the winners.  No plans to manufacture them en masse.  So I'm choosing to see this more as an art competition.

In which case, I'm voting for these:

 

Because I need some tiny megaphones to blare music directly into the back of my neck, whilst the white tiger just dares you to make fun of the fact that I'm listening to "Endless Love" by Diana Ross & Lionel Ritchie.

Trip to LA Part 2: Fossilized Mammoths

I'm about to tell you about the second half of my LA trip. Catch up on Part 1 of the trip if you missed it.

Laurie and I kicked off Saturday evening in LA by meeting up with my friend Kene at an art opening at the Lawrence Asher Gallery.  Joe Davidson makes some truly impressive art out of scotch tape.  Says Joe:

"My repetitive and seemingly meaningless actions are explored symbolically as reflections of the passage of time, emotional isolation, and escapist fantasy.  The compulsive or obsessive acts required to create the pieces necessitate the omission of other perhaps more traditionally meaningful or useful activities.  The viewer is asked to contemplate this notion of what has been lost through the time consuming details of the piece."

This particularly interesting piece represented all the alcohol he drank with his friends over the period of, if I recall correctly, one month.  All rendered in scotch tape.

As we walked out of the gallery, Kene asked us if we'd ever visited the La Brea Tar Pits which were right across the street.  Neither of us had.  I've heard the phrase "La Brea Tar Pits" many times, but I had no idea what they were;  in fact, I pictured them as a stinky, desolate wasteland where no one would ever voluntarily visit.

Turns out the La Brea Tar Pits are pretty fascinating!  Kene acted as our tour guide as he led us around the grounds, pointing out fun facts about this cluster of pits where tar has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years.

The sticky pools created by the seeping tar could be mistaken for bodies of water, and many animals were trapped in them and fossilized.  Excavations have yielded fossilized plants and animals dating back to the last ice age.

New fossils are still being discovered, including dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, bison, ground sloths and mammoths! 
 

Next time I'm in LA, I'll be sure to stop by the tar pits during normal business hours so I can get a better look at everything.

We departed the tar pits in search of dinner.  Going off a recommendation from someone who knew we were vegetarians, we ended up at The Hungry Cat.  "Where would you like to sit?" asked the hostess.  "Just not near that giant bowl of seafood," I responded, gesturing to the jaunty display of ocean life by the open kitchen.  She scowled at me and seated us at the bar, where we perused the menu of dishes that all contained seafood.  Since when does "I'm a vegetarian" mean "I eat all kinds of fish!"  It seems that our restaurant-recommender did not realize there is a difference.

We vacated The Hungry Cat and walked right around the corner to the next place we saw, Cafe Was, where we sat at the bar, talked to the friendly bartender and waitstaff, ate decent food and were serenaded by a guy at a rotating piano in the center of the restaurant.  He made the best of the presumably "only play covers" gig by at least keeping the covers unusual: I recognized "Miss Ohio" by Gillian Welch, and he also ran a Nirvana song through his Neil Diamond-meets-Billy Joel filter, interpreting the music beautifully on piano.  If that description intrigues you, listen to Corey Landis on MySpace.  (Note to Corey if he googles and finds this:  describing your new album as creating "a new ground zero for (your) work" is maybe not the image you were going for?)

Apparently Cafe Was just opened recently.  I recognized owner Ivan Kane from watching some reality show that ran on Bravo about his burlesque club Forty Deuce. (This is why I don't own a TV anymore, because when I did, I wasted precious moments of my life watching shows like that.)  I asked one of the waiters sporting an ironic moustache for the story behind the restaurant's name.  Turns out Kane was looking for an old cafe sign, and when he found it the letters of "always open" were burned out to spell "was." 

Just as we finished our dinner, our dear friend Fil joined us!  Fil, Laurie and I spent many nights together running around the Lower East Side drinking drinks and listening to music.  Actually, it was often Fil onstage playing the music and Laurie and me in the audience drinking the drinks.  Until he was done and would join us in the drinking drinks part.  I love Fil and Laurie.

On Sunday morning, Laurie and I stopped by the real Hollywood farmers market which we loved, and not only because I got to swoon in the proximity of dreamboat Eric Stoltz.  Our last stop before I had to leave for the airport was the flea market on Melrose and Fairfax, where we ate food and shopped.  Kene met us there with his new dog Charlie.

Isn't Charlie cute?

Trip to LA Part 1: Kiss Pez

This past weekend, I flew down to Los Angeles to visit my dear friend Laurie.  She lives in Brooklyn and I haven't seen her in about two years, so when she told me she'd be in LA for business I jumped at the chance to go see her.

We checked in late Friday night to the Farmer's Daughter hotel.  After a late night dinner and survey of the strange scene at Canter's, we called it a night.

On Saturday we woke up early to visit the "Farmers Market" at the Grove, which was right across the street from the hotel.  I put quotes around it because it wasn't the kind of farmers market I was expecting - it was more like an overgrown food court at a county fair (they had funnel cakes!), with a few stalls of produce of unknown origins that appeared to be there year-round.  When I complained to an LA acquaintance about calling it a farmers market when it wasn't really one, he replied, defensively: "Well the Castro isn't really a Castro."  Indeed.

After brunch at the hotel, we drove around a bit and went shopping.  For no good reason at all, I got kind of excited when we passed by High Voltage Tattoo.

Uncle Jer's is one of Laurie's favorite stores.  They sell tiny scooter shirts for the kids:

At Uncle Jer's I finally bought two sets of chopsticks, per the advice of my friend Case, who prefers to eat his salads with them.

One of the coolest stores we visited was Zanzabelle in Silverlake.  They sell toys and food and clever, functional art like punk rock pillows:
 

And custom-crafted Ramones Pez dispensers:

And some amazing Kiss Pez dispensers:

Now, you'd think that the enterprising Gene Simmons would have made Official Kiss Pez dispensers aeons ago, but apparently all this time if you've really wanted Kiss Pez dispensers you've had to make your own.  About a month ago, there was announcement that Kiss was finally releasing their own Pez candies, but the dispensers will only have album art on them, not the likenesses of the band.  Considering the vast array of custom merchandise they've churned out over the decades, it seems like Kiss really missed an opportunity with creating their own Pez dispensers. 

Or, maybe the Pez company is just afraid of rock n' roll?

All this information makes these custom Kiss dispensers at Zanzabelle even more attractive.  I shoulda bought them.

Now that I look closely, Gene appears to be fashioned out of a Pebbles Flintstone dispenser, and Peter is secretly Lucy from Peanuts.  My guess is that Paul and Ace and all the Ramones used to be Wonder Woman. 

Sounds like a fun weekend project!

Chad VanGaalen's "Molten Light" & other beautiful, threatening lyrics

I've posted many times about my love for Chad VanGaalen's music and my awe for his animated videos.  Here's his latest, a video he animated for the song "Molten Light" off his new album Soft Airplane, out today on Sub Pop.  (Go buy it!)

(Warning: The video features a nude monster-woman prominently throughout, so it may be a little NSFW depending on the standards of yourself & your coworkers.)

The beautifully sung variations on the chorus of "I'll find you and I'll kill you" reminded me of two other songs that feature jilted women and stalker-worthy lyrics.

First up is an old Fleetwood Mac song that was written in the 70's but made it to most people's ears when it was resurrected as part of Fleetwood Mac's reunion in the late 90's.  Stevie Nicks wrote "Silver Springs" about Lindsey Buckingham when she was angry with him, knowing their relationship was over but reminding him he'd have to listen to her on the radio for the rest of his life.  (She was right.)

"Time casts a spell on you, but you won't forget me
I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me
I'll follow you down til the sound of my voice will haunt you
You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you"

The other song that sprang to mind was PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me" off her second album, released in 1993.  Here's a live performance from 2001:

"I'll tie your legs
Keep you against my chest
Oh, you're not rid of me
Yeah, you're not rid of me
I'll make you lick my injuries
I'm gonna twist your head off, see
Till you say, don't you wish you never never met her?"

I don't mean to make light of stalking or threats here, but I do think it's far better for a person to express anger or bitterness through art, rather than taking any action in real life.  (All the same, it is an odd feeling to find myself inadvertently singing along with Chad's "I'll find you and I'll kill you, I'll find you and I'll kill you"...)   

The Selby is in your place.

If I had to choose only one website I could stare at for the next week, I'd gladly choose The Selby is in your place.

I don't know much about Todd Selby, other than the fact he's a talented photographer who lives in New York City and has access to scads of cool and interesting people.  But that's enough for me to know right now. 

Every few days Selby adds another photo set centered around a person or a couple in their home.  He gives the person's full name and occupation, but doesn't give the context around why he chose to shoot them, although clearly they're all creative people with an established aesthetic and point of view: fashion designers, publishers, musicians, photographers.  Without any more context than that, Selby presents photo after photo of whatever seems to catch his eye in the interior of their home.   You'll see close-ups of tchotchkes on shelves, little tableaus on a nightstand or kitchen counter, revealing collections of books, albums and art.  After the first few photos, the subject's tastes and obsessions start to reveal themselves; some are overt, others are more subtle.  As I browse through each photo set, a million questions pop into my mind and I start looking for the threads of meaning behind each of their choices, every little tchtochke, imagining their stories.  I bet even the subjects themselves discover new patterns or have a personal revelation after seeing their space documented with such a careful and observant eye.

One recent feature was the home of "jauretsi saizarbitoria - director and dj", whose name I recognized from years of reading Jane Magazine.  Serious apartment envy:

Ever since I discovered Selby's site, I've wondered what my own apartment might reveal about me.  His photos were part of my inspiration for yesterday's trip to the antiques market.  Selby, next time you're in San Francisco you're invited over to my place!