Engineer's Daughter

escape from dullsville

Fair warning: The current Small Press Spotlight on Andy Ristaino at the Cartoon Art Museum is really just three panels.  But they're totally awesome panels, including the original black-and-white ink drawing for the cover of Ristaino's graphic novel The Babysitter (pictured here).  Ristaino is exceptionally good at composition, at times cramming something into every conceivable inch of space in his comics and other times leaving the art plenty of room to breathe.  He also plays theremin for Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, one of my favorite local bands, and has done a couple of gorgeous album covers for them as well.  So go to the museum to see those three panels and pick up a copy of The Babysitter in the bookstore, but while you're there peek in on the rest of the exhibits too, especially the Batman show that has a whole slew of the original pages that Paul Pope did for Batman: Year 100.  Those stopped me dead in my tracks but Pope's work always does, even here fifteen years after I first picked up a copy of THB #1 and it melted my brain.

red rocking chair

I don't know what the rest of the Decemberists are up to right now, but three of them (namely Chris Funk, Jenny Conley, and Nate Query) were at the Rickshaw Stop last night performing live for what Funk said was the first time ever (not counting the house concert in the above video) as new group Black Prairie.  Fellow Portland musicians Annalisa Tornfelt and Jon Neufeld round out the band, so the collective talent onstage was a little mind-boggling.  Their sound is old-timey bluegrass and traditional folk with plenty of dobro, accordion, and fiddle, and the tunes ranged from exquisitely mournful dirges to some real toe-tappers.  You can bet I will be snapping up their debut album Feast of the Hunter's Moon the moment it is released.

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public service announcement

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, February 28
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

angel echoes

Tonight's Four Tet show at the Independent had been sold out for weeks, and I had completely resigned myself to putting on his fabulous new album There Is Love in You and having a dance party of one in my apartment this evening.  But then just this afternoon my friend Khris hipped her friend Nicole to the fact I was looking for a ticket, and Nicole put her tickets in my name at the box office, and suddenly I was there nodding my head to Kieran Hebden's sweet beats.  The show was actually a little more of a rave party than I was expecting with Hebden seemingly intent on keeping the audience hopping as he mixed tracks from a set of computers up front, but he always inserts enough interesting details into his music to keep me absolutely engaged.  I did stay until the last dog was hung hoping he would bust out some of his more introspective electronica (I was crossing my fingers for "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth") but no such luck.  Still it was tons of fun to dance away this horrible week that was, especially once the bass got going.  Thanks again to Nicole and Khris for making it all happen!

ex cathedra

Up-beat, up-front: music school façade, USA c.1953.  I don't know where this picture was taken, but the buildings remind me of where I used to live in San Francisco's outer Richmond.  If it's Photoshopped I don't want to know.

lending library

I've been meaning to check out Royal NoneSuch Gallery for a little while now, and I finally made it over to their excellent space on Telegraph last Sunday to see their Lending Library group show.  Curated by Dena Beard and organized around the idea of the library as a place to freely exchange knowledge, the show features source materials from seven different artists.  I predictably made a beeline for Trevor Paglen's section which features a shelf with serious-looking hardbound reports as well as books on Robert Smithson and Walter Benjamin.  Maps of various kinds are pinned to the wall, and a small spiral-bound memo book is open to display his handwritten notes.  For a person like me who loves any opportunity to snoop around people's bookshelves this was heaven.  Desiree Holman also has some of her notes on view as well as a pair of her creepy "reborn" dolls and a monkey face mask, while Anthony Discenza's shelf is almost nothing but DVDs.  Though the originals are not actually available for check-out the gallery has provided a wall of scans and photocopies free for the taking so that visitors may make their own intellectual associations, and I helped myself to one of each page along with a nice manila folder to keep everything organized.  I laughed out loud to see that Paglen's offerings were copies of old ads from Rockwell, the company my dad worked for throughout my entire childhood: "Like Yosemite National Park, Tactical Weapons Systems are a national resource."  I was also drawn to Andrew Rottner's obsessive lists, one of which is pictured here.  Besides gallery shows Royal NoneSuch also schedules music, storytelling, films, and other community events, and on this particular afternoon I stumbled smack into a craft market and BBQ.  Art for me, a catnip felt fish from Boutique Alicia Marie for Richter.

icons of attention

The fantastic Kamau Patton is the most recent artist to take up residence in the upstairs gallery Yerba Buena has dedicated to their PAUSE exhibitions, the Center's new series that puts the emphasis on process rather than result and encourages artists to collaborate both with each other and with the audience itself.  For his show Icons of Attention Patton has filled the room with an ambient soundtrack that shifts from discordant noise to ethereal song, augmented by the sounds made by visitors on a number of musical instruments cleverly disguised as modern art.  Everything has a contact mic attached to it, so as you rattle a piece of sheet metal or bang on a wooden ring or even just tap your foot on the floor the noise is magnified exponentially, and then all of this is broadcast out from a low-power transmitter so that radio listeners without a two-mile radius of the gallery can hear too.  When I was there on Saturday Patton was also projecting a giant sun on one wall reminiscent of Olafur Eliasson's project for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall especially in how it created a visual point of focus in the room.  I timed my visit to coincide with a live workshop with Patton and Josh Clayton, who closed the doors to the gallery and led our small assembly in a very loosely guided improvisation.  I purposefully let go of my customary fear of participation for a couple hours and watched what happened when other people did the same.  I met and shook hands with strangers, made music with them, heard a woman sing in my ear just for me, listened to passages read from Ulysses, wandered around the room howling like a sick dog, occasionally felt awkward and acutely self-conscious, laughed a lot.  I surprised myself with how much fun I had, probably because in these technology-infused days even a little bit of intentional human contact can feel like a radical form of expression.

max roach

I am holding in my hands the awesome new 7-inch by local band No Babies, who celebrated their record release with a show in Oakland this afternoon.  It was their first live performance since December, and Strip Mall Seizures, Pine Hill Haints, Sass On 3, and Whitman rounded out the bill.  There were also awesome vegan sloppy joes on hand, but I digress.  The No Babies 7-inch has something of a Lovecraftian theme going on with its "Miskatonic University Fight Song" and its side A and side HP.  It also has a gorgeous hand-silkscreened cover, no two the same.  Pick up your own copy when they play Mama Buzz this Friday.

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