Down There By The Train

Well...after a 5 hour train ride (which included such highlights as driving through Mister Rogers birthplace!!!!), 4 hours of hanging out in the beautiful, bridge beaming Pittsburgh for dinner, another 6 hours of train riding, 4 hours of being stationary on the train in Bryan, Ohio due to a hazardous material explosion in Indiana and, finally, a 3 hour bus ride (thanks to the HAZMAT derailment!)...we are in Chicago! YAY! Come out tonight at 6pm to the Rubloff Auditorium at SAIC to see Brent lecture while we play music behind his ranting...! For some reason they put us in a giant theater so please bring a seat filler with you! More on the wonders of train travel to come!

I Am Posting From A Train!

Every so often I like to update what our friends and fellow bandmates are up to so...here is another edition of "Some of the Musicians We Play With and What They Are Up To! Woohoo!" A lot of our band has been traveling lately it seems....Drew is on the other side of the globe. Drew may or may not be chasing a woman whom he met when we played Gravity live in Australia. Best of luck Drew! I expect many presents! MANY! Todd Chandler, our occasional upright bassist and fast band van driver, recently returned from a trip to Mexico where he was lucky enough to catch the celebration of San Juan de Dios, the Patron Saint of Pyrotechnics of course. When Todd told me he was going he supplied a video in which a giant bull on wheels was filled with explosive, set ablaze and then proceeded to ambush the crowd...Luckily Todd has returned with all of his fingers and plenty of beautiful, beautiful images! Brendan Canty also just returned from Mexico too where he joined filmmaker Sam Green in a few shows of his Utopia in Four Movements live film project...Brendan also has been playing shows with his new band Death Fix, if you are in the D.C. area keep an eye out for them! And, speaking of traveling, we were lucky enough to snag both Jim Becker and Joe Adamik from their constant world touring with the band Iron & Wine long enough for them to join us in Chicago this week for a little lecture/performance on Wednesday at SAIC! (Hi Joe! -waves emphatically- I never met you!)

Other bandmates have been busy on the creative side too...John Swartz is clicking away with his camera, Mike McGinley has (FINALLY) put his wonderfully interesting painting work in digital format on the world wide web and the elusive drummer Jim White has a new album out, Toward The Low Sun, with his band The Dirty Three! And me? What I have I been up to? (I know you didn't actually ask but...) I just finished the final touches on my brand new studio (pictured) which now sits across from the barn! All of the loud soundtrack recording and gigantic moving sculptures and general messiness were encroaching on my own creative space so I now have a little haven in the yard to complete my own projects away from the clamor and sawdust cloud that is the Nervousfilms barn studio! Yay! Ok, I know I am missing updates for TONS of others who have played alongside Gravity and other various Brent Green projects but, I am sure that wherever our fellow musicians are everyone is making music in this perfect Spring weather! GO OUTSIDE!

!!Mike Plante's Home Movie Show!!

 
I don't know what else to say but that while I watched tons of movies and soaked in various hottubs throughout Park City Utah during our stay at Sundance 2012 Brent was out following a bunch of amazing filmmakers around with a camera under the direction of Mike Plante...as expected, hilarity and confusion ensued! Watch here as stunts & ghosts unveil themselves...or something....!?

Chicago, Chicago, Chicago!

In proper Hitchcock style...Brent & I are taking a train all the way out to Chicago next week (!with a roomette & all!) to perform a live lecture and host two theatrical screenings of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Visiting Artists Program and the Conversations at the Edge series hosted by the Siskel Center!

The live lecture is a thing we started out in Ohio where Brent rambled, answered questions and screened some short films while the band ebbed and flowed along with the events...it is a little on the strange side but definitely a nice way to make a boring old podium lecture more fun (I think/hope) for everyone involved...! The band this time around will feature Chicago native Mr. Mike McGinley, along with Jim Becker and Joe Adamik of the band Califone (video of one of my favorite Califone songs below)! And me on foley of course...! We rarely show Gravity in the U.S. without a live band too so... come see this rarity if you find yourself in the Chicago area...and also, we have some free time on our hands while out there: what do we do? Besides eat a hot dog, a donut, gawk at some deadly flying fish and see a real live indoor U-Boat that is...!

3. Erica Magrey: A Green Screen Alter Ego Vision in a Moonage Daydream World

When I was first introduced to Erica Magrey’s alter ego, Metalmags, I felt like I was meeting a vision of artistic creativity in green screen video form. How to describe Metalmags/Erica Magrey? Well, she is a musical traveller creating metaphysical costumes, sweetly rich addictive synth pop songs, and exploring other planes of existence through a sci-fi film universe all her own- a manufactured surrealist minimalist cosmos where you are never sure which way is up or down or what lies within the next portal. Her blog, Tag Sale Cosmology, is a great journal of her life documenting her adventures as an artist, building her visions into a reality…whether those realities become abstract dance troupe costumes or re-imaginings of pop songs as placid alien monologues or even creating her own fully functional shoes, Magrey is a new era digital artist whose work is a contemplation of sound, movement and image in a video art world that tends to want the green screen to over stimulate, clutter and crash. We are just little specks in the big cosmic picture and Erica Magrey is looking to add to the madness in a way that I think is both thoughtful and constructive while capturing a feeling of possibility, wonder and purpose in this world and beyond!

 1. How did you discover the green screen? I know it is such a standard film practice at this point, I think it even comes as a normal computer function now (!), but I feel like the first time I learned about it as a child it was completely mind blowing, and it is still mind blowing…did you have a moment of green screen recognition? 

Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ve gone so far down the green screen wormhole that it’s hard to recall where it all started. I certainly liked fantastical movies growing up, but I’m not sure when I became aware of the use of green screens. I like to really settle into the fictional world of a movie or TV show and suspend my disbelief, so I don’t naturally look for tears in the seams. As a kid I wanted to believe that it was all real, and I think that’s still true to an extent now. Except that now when I see the process reveal itself due to low-budget execution, I find it really charming.

I often don’t have an a-ha moment with something until I’m seeing it at a point where I understand how I can directly use it for my own ends. For me, that point coincided with the emergence of the physical image of Metalmags, which previously had simply been the name of my long-term music project. Once I started to use her in videos, I quickly realized that she was not of this world, and that the real world wouldn’t cut it any longer as far as settings go. After experimenting with the green screen, I became obsessed, totally blown away by all the possibilities that it presented. It still amazes me to this day, and I get so much satisfaction from the whole process: miming interactions with imagined objects in an environment, placing myself in impossible or artificial spaces, and figuring out how each part fits together to provide some semblance of believability. I hope it never loses its charm.

2. I was reading about a project you did called “Costume-Object Workshop” [pic directly below] where you went about making these things that might be sculptures, or costumes, or murals, the endpoint not being the focus. I really love this idea of forming something without expectation and letting it interact with it’s environment and even yourself…what led to this idea? Where did you end up with it? Do you think our society is too focused on product as opposed to process?

When I was in Switzerland last year on an artist residency, I spent the first month finishing a video I’d been working on for the past year. During that time, I had tons of little sparks of ideas of what I wanted to do next, but it was unclear whether they would materialize as costumes, sculptures, stage props, or wall hangings. I was finding fabrics at the local thrift stores that were mostly bedding and curtains, so that drew me to their decorative potential. Also – the costumes I had been making at home were primarily spandex-based, and that kind of colorful, kitschy material was harder to come by in this medieval city, where novelty fabrics were really only used for Basler Fasnacht (spring carnival in Basel). I had wanted to experiment with fabric outside of costuming for some time but hadn’t somehow gotten around to it, so that was one of the goals of my residency. I was also inspired by the Bauhaus costumes of Oskar Schlemmer to make costumes that took on different forms and obscured the shape of the body, rather than emphasizing it, so that brought potential costumes and objects into the same category.

This experiment of not focusing on the end result was pretty interesting. I ended up making several costumes out of sheets, duvet covers, pillow cases, and curtains, but also stretching sheets onto stretchers and painting on them, stuffing and hanging small sculptural objects, creating large panels, and hand-knotting nets. A few of the items served as either costumes or objects, depending on how they were presented. Many became part of the set that I performed in at the end of my residency. This practice of investigating multipurpose objects has become more of a staple for me now. It feels liberating but also provides me with something more solid to add to my performances, which typically include the more ephemeral video/music/costume combo.

I think more attention is paid now, in the art world at least, to process, but of course it’s still primarily the product that sells. I’ve tried to think about how I can become more product-oriented, but I think my brain doesn’t really work that way. And I’ve been lucky to have some support for my performances, due to audiences opening up to non-product oriented artworks. But yeah, it often feels to me like the process is just as important as the end result, if not more so, but it’s harder to communicate that. I like to try to use a performance or video as a way to confront a particular fear, and the process of navigating that can be very therapeutic, but I don’t know if really comes through in the end.

3. There is this sort of weird 70s, sci-fi superheroine in Metalmags. She inhabits this ultra-modern futuristic space world while at the same time there is a connection to these kitchsy feeling fabric prints/70s poly-fakeness that once meant progress but has such a different connotation now…even the sound of your (amazing!) songs are these soulful sweet meditations but with the most synthetic of backing instruments. Metalmags could go anywhere but she is rooted in this awkward materiality, what drew you to these styles in your work? To me it seems partly a design decision but it also feels like there is a little angst about the state of humanity in there…?

I think of Metalmags as a mutable alterego whose image, surroundings, and investigations can be adapted to parallel my own, so I think there is some variety there, but yes – ultimately she is usually depicted as belonging to a “future of the past” aesthetic. In Ode on a Terran Urn, she uses elements of classical Greece via 60s/70s sci-fi rebirth; in An Opportunity for Social Engagement, she’s riding more of a 70s/80s sci-fi wave; and in Troubadour, she’s employing a sort of 21st century psychedelia. All of those depictions deal with how we have considered and incorporated futuristic visions in our fantasies as well as our actual lives in the last half-century. In most of the world’s cultures today we have mythologized technology, and we pin our hopes and dreams for the future on its promises of potential. And it makes perfect sense because it’s a primary force that drives us onward and upward. But we see through a lot of sci-fi works from our recent past that we also hope it will help unite us on a greater level, achieving more of a global identity so we can come together to deal with (or against) other forces in the universe. Despite the political bent of the space race, the impact of that initial broadcast from the moon must have been monumentally moving for everyone who was able to witness it. That’s why I have this fantasy of being an astronaut or space explorer – I want to experience humbling and beautiful visions that confirm that there is hope for us. And this character allows me to approximate those experiences. She also allows me to engage with identity in times of burgeoning feminism, which greatly informs how I perceive and present myself now. But that’s a whole ‘nother story…

So I actually feel optimistic about humanity, honestly because I have to. I’ve had darker times when I often felt worried and depressed about the state of the world, but I felt helpless to do anything about it. So this is my solution. If I can make work that makes me feel hopeful and excited about the future, that’s a start; if it can rub off on others a little too – even better.

(More on Metalmags, music and movie distribution after the jump!)

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Kilns, Bones and Marisol

On another unseasonably warm day this week (is anyone else completely freaked out about global warming?) Brent & I decided to head out to State College PA to pick up the ceramics pieces he has been working on out there...I didn't understand why he had been spending so much time in the art department at Penn State until I saw it with my own eyes: a magical wonderland of art facilities, filled to the brim with bright & talented professors, artists & students! O, and an on campus creamery who, rumor has it, sells ice cream that is so creamy it is illegal to sell in stores because it will kill you....delicious!

Anyway...the ceramics studio at Penn State is phenomenal, kiln after kiln (pictured above) was available for students and an energy just permeated the entire space as kids seemed to be everywhere sculpting or firing or brainstorming. This feeling of creative wonder extended beyond the ceramics studio too with students roaming the halls crushing charcoal onto a painting with their feet or trying to plasticize raw food or determining the best way to make a head out of cheese balls all while the profs were on hand urging along and offering their own kind of brilliance...! If anyone is actually freaked out by global warming it might be the art students here, a certain natural element was buzzing through a lot of the work including some cast bronze crab legs & ceramic coral (pictured) by one student and mussels & bones drying in the sun (pictured) belonging to another and also some robot and dinosaur mugs (which we most certainly own a few of now!)...one student's detailed ceramic mushrooms looked so real you couldn't tell the organic from the sculpted! I didn't see too many finished pieces but all of the precise and beautiful work I saw in progress made me really wish I could follow the projects everyone was working on...

The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State was a weird one...a lot of classical paintings, and pottery but also a really strange array of other genres as well. One exhibit was composed of paintings from the 30s & 40s, a WPA, carnival, Hopper vibe that portrayed weird tableaus of alienated life in painted form. Another exhibit of Hogarth's satirical engravings was pretty neat, social and political commentaries from the 18th century, a precursor to modern political cartoons but with so much more artistry....The one artist I discovered at this museum that has since blown me away is Marisol, a French born, American, Venezuelan & European raised sculptor who is now 82 years old. The piece on display was titled Blackfoot Delegation to Washington 1916 (poorly pictured at top) and it has a crazy history about it: Native Americans invited American artists to contribute art to a World's Fair Pavilion in exchange for a blessing from a Shaman, Marisol was the only artist to respond. The piece that she created for the exhibition was based on a photo taken to commemorate when members of the Blackfoot Indian tribe attempted to negotiate a land deal with the US Government in 1916. There was something so detailed but so rough about her work, depicting something so important and forgotten in a way it will always be remembered- I completely love it! Her other pieces I've since seen online are equally as disturbing in their execution, an edginess in form and content that looks so contemporary in style and vital in content, she is amazing!

...and then there was ice cream! And an impromptu dinner party (at an insanely talented professor's house)! And a trip to a really nice grocery store! And a brief stop at the indelible Helen O'Leary's house (a joy & a wonder whose Irish accent I am convinced makes Brent listen to the Pogues more)! Yes, Penn State Arts...and you thought they were only good for football!

Film Review & Spring in Central Park

The one thing I miss about New York (apart from the food, the public transportation and my darling friends of course!) is the movie theaters. I was a movie junkie when I lived there. Anytime I had a two hour block of free time I was in those span of blocks where the Angelika, Film Forum, IFC Center, Sunshine Cinema, Village East Cinema, Cinema Village & Anthology of Film Archives all seemed nearby- air conditioned (!) escapes for the sometimes overwhelming city, brimming with new (and old!) cinematic ideas! Earlier this week I practically bailed out of our car on a trip to NY as we passed the Angelika Film Center (lobby of pictured below) so I could make it to a screening of We Need To Talk About Kevin, a film that I had heard a few things about, mainly that Tilda Swinton (swoon) was fabulous in the main role and that Jonny Greenwood (bigger swoon/Radiohead member/composer) was on the music, two things that pointed to something worth jumping out of the car and into a theater for!

Based on a novel of the same name, the film is a portrait of a sociopath teenager, a seemingly emotionless kid drawn to violence and hate told through the story of his mother (Swinton). The characters were ones I have never seen (a slightly un-motherly mother forced to deal with her increasingly detached son, the coming of age of an angry teen, the aloof father whose love and manipulated state cannot see past his son's intensifying problem, even the brief role of the little sister who is eager to please her eerie sibling) and were all portrayed in a withholding story structure that tensely inched along, giving you some information, implying, doubting- the construction of the film alone was truly unique and it kept me engaged even through the obvious symbolism and the humdrum (un-Greenwood-like) pop song interludes...and even engaged through the audience of elderly people punctuating the action through retellings in the name of broken hearing aids and plot misunderstandings, "It starts off weird 'cause she was a flower child" the woman behind me (inaccurately) proclaimed...(I cannot wait to get old!)

In a landscape of indie/non-Hollywood film styles that have flattened out into formulaic music video kind of unevents, We Need To Talk About Kevin was a newer directorial voice (even when holding onto some hard to shake recent tropes cough-kitschy use of Buddy Holly as seen in every "offbeat" movie in the last 5 years-cough) that told a version of a now that is seldom told and did so in a distinct approach, an approach that I have heard differs greatly from the book too making me think the filmmaker, Lynne Ramsey, is what really made this movie shine.  Beastie Boy Adam Yauch's label (Oscilloscope Laboratories) distributed this movie, a label I feel like I see creeping into the onscreen title cards before films more and more, taking risks and keeping it ill (?eh?) or maybe keeping it fresh (?eh?)...either way Oscilloscope seems to be doing something right, if only they could get even bigger: everyone needs to talk about Kevin! Ok, ok that was a little dramatic...here is a picture of the beginning of Spring in Central Park, another thing I miss about New York...!

Home Recording

Starting to flesh out the soundtrack for the new film has led to a thing I never thought would happen out here at Nervousfilms: we've created a home recording studio with semi-professional equipment! Wha?!?? I am still in disbelief but being that the story for the next feature film, Anatomical Maps With Battle Plans, is a very personal one for Brent, revolving around the fabled tales of his volatile grandfather, it makes sense that he would want some solitude and space to record the dense stories that he has been plotting away at in his little red notebook...it also makes sense that a little more control is wanted over the sound for the next feature film too, a thing that wasn't a main concern with Gravity, especially since that film was most definitely meant to be performed with a live band!

Slowly but surely we become slightly more professional by the day...but, who I am kidding, we did hang all of the guitars in the new studio up on the wall with straight up screws, I am pretty sure that there is a  microphone duct taped to the piano, and the drum kit? Well, it only sort of resembles a drum kit...!

Here are some pics of our new barn recording set up! Another step towards another film! Yay!

Didion, Fischl and Why We Make Art

I've been reading a lot of Joan Didion again. As I walked around the gallery district of Chelsea NY yesterday, after having just finished her new book Blue Nights, thoughts of her kept echoing in what I saw. Of how she takes in the world and is able to make the intricacies of human life worth living, a fascination and wonder in every aspect- from loss, to the building of a tacky government mansion, to the patterning of a generation. The looming Didion was even more pronounced when, to my surprise, I entered Mary Boone gallery and saw a portrait by Eric Fischl of Didion with her husband John Dunne (image below). Fischl's show was strangely beautiful...composed of mostly grotesque pictures of the famous, garish yet reflectively painted, like exalted posed photos taken by a family member on a beach during a vacation but rendered in strokes so crudely precise and huge and thoughtful that the connotations of celebrity lead to pathos, enjoyment is confused in an expression: wonderful!

I started thinking of the work I did like in Chelsea (aside from the Fischl's there was one piece by Alan Rath, pictured below, made of feathers suspended on motors, that cooed and vibrated like a living thing, making us fear the future loss of nature, to wonder if the mating dance will be stripped down to this weird voyeuristic interaction that has no chance of procreation...and I also liked The Dolemites Project by Olivo Barbieri too, geologic porn with the oddest field depths that the nature lover in me couldn't help but resonate with) and the art I didn't like in Chelsea (cutesy little snowy staged landscape images and another show of painted & drilled carpets with kitschy concrete hobo clowns?). I read the artists statements, many of which just described the work and then added things like "it is obviously political" or "I was thinking a lot about walls" with no more explanation or depth. Then, on the way home from New York as I was reading The White Album by Joan Didion, I came across this passage:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

I do tend to prefer narrative art. Things that tell stories or are implicating a life experience in them, looking for a meaning or reason or beauty in a line, written or drawn. What I do not like, is things that are not only missing this aspect but are also not affirming much of anything... When abstract art first arrived it wanted to express an intangible quality in being and things, to stray from exact representation and show the philosophically changing world. I think the current contemporary art world tends to think it is following in this tradition: abstracting things, creating a lexicon of images that express the confusion of a new time. But, when the abstraction reaches a point where neither meaning nor feeling is apparent, where no Dada or Fluxus manifesto or profound artist statement is outlining the terms, or even apparent skill is present, then what happens? What story are you guys trying to tell? Is it that the world is so crazy it doesn't make sense? No, it doesn't make sense. But, as artists, writers, filmmakers, thinkers and all other people who are crafting our culture the stories and works we decide to leave behind-whether inherent in the work or as the people making them- should be ones of experience and hope, they should tell a history of when we live and why we live and how maybe we can do so better. If for no other reason, art should do these things in order for there to be a future. We make art in order to live and more contemporary artists should take this truth to heart...or they should at least be funny!

The Most Interesting Thing About Noah

I missed this yesterday thanks to an unexpected, work related jaunt to New York City to drop off some needed materials prior to the Armory art fair...damn! I messed up. But, I am posting it anyway so that people can be sure to catch up on the rest of the online exhibit and maybe see something they normally wouldn't have!

 So for diehard Gravity fans (is there even such a thing? anyway...)  apart from the feature film a few shorts were edition-ed as well, each with different music and in some cases even unused footage! When we exhibited the entire town in museums these shorts were screened inside of the set houses, each house was turned into a little black box theater (using the curtains from the set!) to see glimpses of the feature film in this form. In a rare event, one of the vignettes, will be on display March 6th only as part of an online exhibition! The exhibition is called Time Lapse, a reference to an art exhibit in 1969 called One Month in which the curator Seth Siegelab held an experimental "exhibit" featuring only a catalogue in which different artists contributed for a different day of March, and will be taking place over on the Site Santa Fe website. This exhibit, updated for the fleeting space of the internet and also not exhibiting in real world space, will be featuring different art every day during the month of March so, click on over there to see our short...and also the 29 other transient pieces of art!

The vignette we will be screening is called Noah. It uses footage from both my first live trout buying experience, my first animal & children wrangling on a film set experience and it was also responsible for a 2 week period when everything in my house was covered in blue oil paint and for a time where I had a weird ache in my knees from kicking under the roof, while Leonard hammered above, to make nails flood frame by frame! O, and also, listen to the words! It is a beautiful alternate telling of the Bible tale of Noah, shifting the focus of the miracle to the realities behind it, realities maybe our world should focus on a little bit more too!

Buffalo

So the place we are currently working at up in Buffalo, NY is a strange little hub of arts activity seated in the middle of this little, formerly huge, formerly industrial town. Hallwalls is a contemporary artspace that literally began as a hallway gallery organized by a group of local artists outside of their studios located in an old converted ice house- one of it's founding members being Cindy Sherman!!! Hallwalls has since moved on from it's humble ice house beginnings and moved into the sprawling arts complex that is Babeville. Babeville (partly pictured here!) is a former turn of the century Methodist church complete with a towering steeple and features the performance venue/sanctuary (which we will be playing in tomorrow!) called Asbury Hall, the headquarters of Ani DiFranco's music label Righteous Babe Records and, of course, the newest permutation of Hallwalls- complete with a gallery/exhibition space, an on-site cinema that hosts screenings, and even a full on recording studio which we are in right now!

Hallwalls also offers a residency program, H.A.R.P. (Hallwalls Artists-in-Residence Project), which uses funding from different grant organizations to host artists to shuffle up to Buffalo and work on a project! In our case, Brent, me and Mike McGinley are here through the help of H.A.R.P. and the National Endowment for the Arts (and upon further inspection the Andy Warhol Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts) to map out the sounds for the new film and to perform Gravity live! Hallwalls is a pretty spectacular model for what a contemporary artspace should be: supporting the work of all types of artists, sharing them with a community and expanding the creation of new work! I think I am starting to love Buffalo...even despite the unearthly frigid winds!

Acquiring and Exhibiting Art of the Present

Buffalo is home to one of the leading American contemporary and modern art collections? Really? Well: IT IS! And it is called The Albright Knox Art Gallery. And it is incredible. I don't think I've ever seen a collection quite like this...only being rivaled by the Tate Modern in my mind! I hate enumerating the works that they have (Emin to Chagall, LeWitt to van Gogh) but at every single turn was another breathtaking, (literal) masterpiece, hanging or sitting in a way that was not only compelling but that also seamlessly flowed through the building- at no point did anything look out of place or jarring or forgotten in a lonely corner of dead space! I scoured the internet for information on the original namesake of this collection, John J. Albright, but the more and more I read about him & the museum the more sprawling and interesting the story seems to get...!

The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, one of the oldest public art institutions in America, set out to develop a space to exhibit art work. The museum was intended to be part of the World's Fair (!!!!!) Pan-American Exhibition (you know! the one that took place in Buffalo in 1901? where McKinley was shot! And Tesla's AC current brought electric light in its infancy! And Edison debuted the X-ray machine! Why don't we have World's Fairs in this country anymore people!?) but it wasn't completed by the time it rolled around...? Albright, who hailed from Pennsylvania where he got mixed up in the coal business and then went on to become a wealthy industrialist acting on behalf of steel companies and the like, funded a big portion of the museum's completion and later, Seymour H. Knox Jr., heir to the Woolworth's empire and art enthusiast, funded an expansion of the space which now bears his name too. The American history of this space alone makes it such an interesting and inspiring place, the nexus for a new era in the American Dream- art! electricity! culture!

I can't imagine being alive in the beginning of the 20th century to watch as progress unfolded in such strange ways and horizons were being expanded on a daily basis...it's so weird to think that we are sort of on the cusp of the same sort of era, of the fast pace of technology, the abundance of change. One can only hope that we, as a country, keep in mind the need for an openess in ideas that lead to things like the establishment of progressive art institutions and electric light, manifestations of the things that our country was founded on: a feeling of infinite possibility, freedoms and progress, feelings and rights that have become so skewed with each Republican primary debate I bear witness to...roar....I know what would fix this: a World's Fair!

Trains Across the Sea

It's pretty strange to have a screening of Gravity in Madrid on the same day we are performing a live show in Buffalo, NY! ...and in places so faraway from this chicken that the neighbors got who has taken a liking to me....March 4th is the day, come one, come all! Super busy, more on our recording session in Buffalo soon!