Friday, December 31, 2010

2010, the Year of the Pacific Ocean

As year end lists roll in this New Year's Eve a pattern seems to be emerging- the Westcoast loved Gravity (our movie, not the scientific theory of course)! Jonathan Marlow, who we briefly met in the Telegraph Hill section of the Bay area (That's right! Where those wild parrots live!) added Gravity to his Top Ten Narrative Film list of 2010 on the San Fran Film Society's year end list round up! Speaking of Mr. Marlow (No! Not Philip!) check out his site Fandor (whose clandestine name had been decided on the very day we met up with him, you could visibly see him biting his tongue to keep his new venture's namesake a secret)! It is a streaming movie network for the best of alternative, international, classic & just plain great films- if our internet was faster I think I would have a Fandor problem! The Bay Area Reporter gave some Nervousfilms love as well naming Brent Green an "Artist to Watch" for 2011, which is pretty exciting too...!

Overall the Westcoast has treated us well this year- between Bad Lit (located on the web but centralized in sunny Los Angeles California), these San Fran rounds of applause, the amazing last show of 2010 in San Diego (Which we even got an awesome review from...?) and our beautiful stay in Oregon I am hoping more Westcoast time can be had in 2011! Here is a pic of the farthest South & North we made it along the Pacific coast and to think: I had never seen that Ocean until this year! Happy New Year!

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

For Now...We Toast!

Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film just named Gravity the 2010 Movie of the Year! I really can't tell you how honored I am to have such recognition especially from such a spectacular place! Bad Lit is an amazing resource for anyone interested in underground film. The brains behind the operation, Mike Everleth, writes on the subject with such intelligence, interest and genuine passion that I rarely turn to many other film resources! Mike truly understands the meaning and purpose of creating alternative cinema, reading his thoughts on it make me excited to be a part of such a growing network of experimental, creative cinemaphiles! Thanks Bad Lit & Happy New Year!

Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy Holidays!

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Heavy Head

Well, I've talked about Drew before on this here blog...and he is very photogenic so he has appeared in many live show post pictures but, since I decided to write about each band member individually, I think it's time Drew got his own post! I'm not sure how we found Drew? Or how he found us? I remember when I first moved to the barn a package came in the mail, like a kitten on our doorstep, containing a cd with sweetly sung pop songs and lush, super 8 short films. The menu alone was hypnotic enough to make you forget about all bad things in this world and dream about visions of gumballs while finding the beauty in disembodied hands...I guess this was my first introduction to the wonders of Drew Henkels!


Drew slowly became our friend and we have quickly watched him grow into an insanely talented musician, exponentially becoming better at song writing & crafting before our very eyes! His band, Drew & the Medicinal Pen, work out of Brooklyn and are constantly playing shows and recording new iterations of Drew's ideas. But music is only part of his undeniable talent...his visual art is absolutely amazing too! From his lulling films (still above) of train car riding and seashore parades to his scratchy psychedelic line drawings (which, currently, is the only t-shirt design Brent will wear- ahem- Drew, please make Brent a new one! I can't wash the one he has fast enough!) to an enormous radio sculpture (taking up the parts of his room that are not taken up by plywood, plywood that is for another Drew project) hailing from a performance piece he recently did called Fm in the Am which was a totally immersive musical environment (!!!featuring a live indoor nightmarish rain storm!!!), Drew just keeps making things bigger and better every day.


When it comes to Gravity, Drew plays just about everything- pump organ, neck pumpkin, bells, noise makers, guitar but the thing he usually amazes audiences with is the theramin! What a freaking hard thing to play! What a talented dude! I hope he remembers us when he is famous which, with his ballooning skill and pop sensibility, is bound to happen! Buy his album or perish....or just miss out on something truly awesome, your choice! Also, Drew, if you are reading this: I just realized that, after listing only a fraction of the stuff you do here, that you do an incredible amount of stuff?! You must be exhausted? You deserve a nap. (Insert lullaby here). Night Drew!

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Ghosts of You and Me

Somehow, in between our many travels, Brent was able to make a video for a showcase featuring the songs of Leonard Cohen! Eleven video artists each take on a track from Cohen's 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremonyscreening tomorrow at the Hammer Museum in L.A.! Co-curated by Cohen's daughter, (who happened to be at the Hammer when we did our first ever live performance of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then way back in June, which led to our involvement in this fantastic project), and the coolest, most punk of a curator, Darin Klein, this series is bound to be a good one!















I wish we there for the screening (taking place tomorrow at 8pm) instead of being in this freeeezing, snowy landscape! But I guess I will sort of be there in image...still cold though! Really cold! Go to the Hammer where the open air and art are always warm and always awesome!!! (Here is a sneak peak still from Brent's contribution to the tune of Is This What You Wanted, one of my all-time favorite Cohen songs).

Puppetmasters

Puppets seem to have been creeping into my life a lot lately! Actually, now that I think of it, I have always had puppets in my life, as an Emmet Otter obsessed child to an adult sitting in a darkened theater basement in lower Manhattan watching Erik Sanko & Jessica Grindstaff's The Fortuneteller (probably the single best piece of art I've ever seen in New York), puppets have always been there I guess. Hell, I am even practically a puppet in Gravity, positioned frame by frame by the likes of puppetmaster Brent Green! And even a puppet in my own stop motion too!
















Recently, while in California, puppets seemed to be omnipresent... Eating dinner in L.A. I sat with experimental filmmaker & artist Janie Geiser (whose work frequently employs the pliable puppet as character, but who also makes some haunting found footage/sound collage films) and Scott (whose amazing "kids" rock comedy show Pancake Mountain features alt music legends and a puppet host, Rufus Leaking, maybe he's a goat? or a sheep? either way, he's a puppet!). Even Will Vinton (who I actually got to meet after Brent ran into him in our hotel at the L.A. Animation Festival and asked him to say hello to me in my room where, to my surprise, I opened the door to the smiling, mustachioed, father of claymation!) basically employs puppets in his art as well!



L.A. was so puppet-centric we even spotted a tuxedo-clad Kermit tipping his hat to us as we were stuck in the traffic that is L.A. This is a perfect segue into a live show/residency that Brent is set to do on the Eastcoast next year- which will include a live performance of Gravity in February at the Silvermine Guild Art Center in Connecticut now under the direction of Leslee Asch....wait for it, wait for it....a former Jim Henson disciple! Puppets, they just make sense.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

I Green Heart Oregon

On our way away from the Westcoast we spent some time in Portland Oregon. I always knew it was a place of greatness but I guess I didn't know just how great! First we stopped at the filmmaker Vanessa Renwick's (pictured here in her sweetly patch covered jacket!) in what I think is called the Mississippi part of Portland. I can't begin to describe her house other than it is a dream; a tree to climb into bed, a basement studio brimming with work, an indoor trapeze/dog toy and the recent addition of an outdoor handmade sauna in the shape of a totem style raven's head! What?!? We spent the afternoon checking out some of her recent film exploits which were absolutely gorgeous and really true to the aesthetic & issues of the area- televisions depicting wolf hunts embedded inside refrigerators, the gruesome craft of the hunt next the passive human hunt, referencing our place in the natural world and the ways we've lost touch with it (a common theme I think is in a lot of Vanessa's work). Another piece, Trojan, must be seen to be loved...I can't do it justice in words!

















After some tea drinking we headed to a local grocery store to see this exhibit (pictured above)..yeah, that's right, a gallery show IN a grocery store! I can't imagine a more perfectly synaesthetic experience! So much nature, art, animation, film and everything else coming out of this super-natural city! I really hope we get to bring Gravity to Portland at some point but, until then, I can at least keep up on how kick ass it is through all the wonderful work coming out of it!

Friday, December 10, 2010

Dear Oregon


Dear Oregon, Your arts scene is just as beautiful as your trees! Your design sense is so compatible with mine! Your food offerings are delicious in my mouth! Maybe we should get together for awhile? Maybe you should bring Gravity back out here as a live show? Maybe we were meant to be like all of the "which city do you belong in" quizzes said? More later! Love, Donna K.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

When It Rains It Rarely Pours

Today was our first day off on the Westcoast and we definitely lived it up! The film enthusiast/programmer/creative director Richard Herskowitz (who brought us out here for our screening and was also responsible for our recent performances in Houston) spent the day with Brent & I exploring the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest, after narrowly missing a disaster involving us coasting into a gas station on fumes! Richard (pictured after filling gas tank) hasn't been in the area for too long so today's exploration included some new heights for him as well as we climbed to the peaks of a waterfall and drank some coffee at new & exotic waterside locales!

Richard has been programming the Cinema Arts Festival in Texas for the past two years now and has really been able to capture the (underseen) artistic community of Houston while still managing to bring in some (progressive) big names of the screen! I really think this festival is so unique and I can't wait to see it grow like it no doubt will! If that wasn't enough, Richard also runs Cinema Pacific a sort of interdisciplinary arts/film festival in the area of Eugene featuring works coming out of countries bordering the Pacific Ocean- an interesting concept with just as interesting content! Overall it has been a lovely filmic trip to this beautiful area, full of short film watching, trips to the ocean, wonderful food and all with the best of company! More Oregon tomorrow, followed by....home!!!

Go Ducks

Last night a decent turnout came in the pouring rain to the Schnitzer Museum of Art to watch Brent perform Carlin live followed by the theatrical version of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is an architecturally gorgeous building with such impressive exhibitions (complete with state of the art interactive information technology and a sprawling collection of Asian art ranging from intricate jewelry made from bird feathers to neo-Japanese scrolls) that it felt like a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than the art museum at the University of Oregon! A recent exhibit of Gus Van Sant and Andy Warhol's  polaroids was followed by a comprehensive exhibit of a master Italian printmaker hailing from the 18th Century, two perfect examples of just how ambitious and comprehensive the curation here is. Judging by the varied crowd at the film screening the community definitely realizes what a valuable resource this place is, I hope the students do as well! Being that my camera decided to die (possibly for good) I only got this one little cell phone picture of the front of the museum, but I think it gets across the theatricality and beauty of both the inside and the outside of the museum pretty well! Now...what kind of camera do you have?

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Oregon Trail


Oregon is so picturesque that the photos I keep taking don't even look real! How beautiful! Just a reminder that Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then will screen theatrically tonight in Eugene, OR at the Schnitzer Museum at 5:30 with a special live performance of one of Brent's shorts! Now, back to enjoying the natural wonders of this Northern haven...ahhhh....so pretty!

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

California Here I Come

 One more goodbye to L.A.! I love this city! It's especially fitting that, as I write this, Brent is being interviewed on a Californian hillside (views pictured here) for a documentary in true Hollywood form, hehe! Goodbye to this strange and beautiful city!

If I Was A Photographer

 I didn't really post too much about the venue we played in San Diego and I thought I should because it was a pretty great place. The Museum of Photographic Arts is located in Balboa Park in San Diego California where not one, but two (!!!) world's fairs took place! The hollow, ornate architecture left behind by the semi-permanent world's fairs are always insane! In this case, MOPA resides in a looming Spanish-Renaissance style pavilion left over from the 1915 Panama-California Exhibition, which seems almost fitting to be the house of art photography, not only as a great picturesque backdrop but as a nice foil to the ghostly, reproducible photographic process. The museum curation was perfection (especially the Maggie Taylor and Jerry Uelsmann exhibit which was a fantastic Victorian nature fantasy) and the theater itself was gorgeous (complete with a twinkling night sky above)! Everyone there was great to work with and the vibe (uh-oh, I've been in California too long!) was calm, cool and collected to such a comforting level. I think the greatness of the museum had a lot to do with the greatness of the show, everyone felt at home in this wonderful environment! I wish there was more on the internet to get across MOPA's feel, I guess you'll just have to visit to understand!

Coconut Donut


On our way back up the coast yesterday to drop off Drew (pictured here in a photo by John) & John at the airport we stopped to take a few touristy snapshots...I really just couldn't help it! Giant donuts and surfers made me feel like we were in an alternate universe of cool and it just had to be done. Want to give a special thanks to Adam for letting us borrow his amps, and to the violin shop for providing John with a beautiful cello, and to Mike Plante (and his wonderful wife Kate- good luck on finals!) for being such great friends and supporters through these shows (and all the others for that matter)! Heading further north today for a screening/Q&A in Eugene Oregon tomorrow!

Always on the Watch

Not really sure how to describe the awesomeness of last nights show... First, it was the single best live performance we have done to date. Second, San Diego was one of the most strangely beautiful places I've ever been. Third, the people and the area are packed with a serious rough spun creativity that is pretty friggin' incredible!

Brendan, Drew, John & Brent outdid themselves with the music this time. Every live performance is improvised (except for the theme song of course!) and for some reason last night they really came together as a band and pushed what they were doing to a whole new level! Of course, we wouldn't have sounded as wonderful if it wasn't for Davey Tiltwheel and his amazing soundman skills!

The sort of intense punk scene that rumbles throughout San Diego (and which Davey was seriously able to capture in his sound mixing) really supported the quality of what we do and the accepting, excited audience produced such a serious energy that I can't even describe it. It was pretty wonderful to be in a place with people who understand the feel of the film (and who are also doing equally as amazing, near like-minded stuff- like O, and Tristan, and Low Volts, and John, and even the Navytown tattoo parlor packed streets)! Not to mention the fact that the town is nestled on the Pacific Ocean with all kinds of canyons, and cacti, and beaches, and hummingbirds all floating around in this beautiful, unexpected way. Man, loved this town! And our show! I loved it so much I'm gonna do another post about it! Later when some pics come in! And when I am not falling asleep at the keyboard..zzzzzzz...!

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Lights, Camera, Action!

I think that Hollywood audiences probably watch films differently than in any other place in the world, making the feel of the hundred or so people sitting in front of us at The Silent Movie Theater last night an odd assortment of brightly lit dreams and critical apprehension. But, when the credits rolled a huge applause came at us in such a way that made me really excited to have shared our film with a group of film enthusiasts, actors, animation lovers, musicians- all of the people who make & love the movies! I feel like I am constantly saying the phrase to Brent "As a film nerd, you wouldn't appreciate (fill in blank here)" and last night I felt at home with my people!
I also think that's why The Cinefamily is a perfect community to exist within the borders of Hollywood. Their mission statement starts with the very reasons that I love film, especially independent film, so much; acting as communal, creative expressions teaching new ways of being & seeing. I am excited to have shown our film in such a historically loaded film spot too, (a place complete with film archives, an organ hailing from the silent movie days, headshots of early screen classics, a backyard with antique film mechanisms, the art deco fervor of the beginnings of the film world) continuing the next step in the tradition of cinematic arts! Thanks to The LAAF for having us! And please, support your local independent movie theater- movies can change the world, ask for more than explosions!

Saturday, December 4, 2010

This Is Where the Magic Happens

Hollywood, you are really a little too into special effects lately: first there was a huge fire on the runway during our planes take off, then we saw a woman drive her car, full speed, head on into a cop car! This wasn't the kind of cinematic magic I was looking for...but, the giant California Raisin shaking hands with everyone outside of The Cinefamily? Yes, my kind of magic. And a Labyrinth/Return to Oz Costume Pajama Party? YES, this IS the kind of magic I was looking for! Ah Cinefamily, providing my kind of (silent) special effects since 1942, then with sound since 2007!

In fact, talking to the theater manager today we learned that Brent's live program of shorts that he performed here in 2007 was the first show with sound performed at the space when The Cinefamily took it over! So, tomorrow we bring even more noise to (The Cinefamily at ) The Silent Movie Theater at 10pm featuring a line up of Brendan on drums, Drew on theramin/guitar/various noise machines, John on cello and Howe on piano keyboard (or possibly vintage silent movie theater organ if I can convince someone of what a great idea that would be!)! Here are pictures I was taking moments before I saw that REAL car crash earlier today..I still think our car crash is better though!

Friday, December 3, 2010

Dance Magic Dance

As we drove away from our rural Pennsylvanian home to embark on our Westcoast live shows & screening, a huge giant bald eagle flew right in front of the car! It was such a magical thing! We kept driving and made it to New York last night where we set off to find a replacement case (my case and the airport security just weren't getting along) for my foley kit, a search also filled with magic thanks to the window displays of the various city department stores, the little animatronics and Christmas scenes swaying to the holiday bell tunes are always such a beautiful, eerie thing! A perfect magical intro into the magical world of animation which begins today at The L.A. Animation Festival! I also just realized that L.A. is the home of Walt Disney, a true magician and animation mastermind! O no, the holiday magic has taken over! YAY! Now, also magic, flying on a plane!

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The World's Greatest City of the Arts and Outdoors

Also during our Westcoast adventure starting at the end of this week is a stop over in Eugene Oregon! Various internet quizzes have told me that I belong in Oregon so I am ecstatic to go there for the first time since a lot of algorithms have told me to go! The Schnitzer Museum of Art and Cinema Pacific at the University of Oregon are holding a screening and a discussion/Q&A (which was supposed to be via satellite but, since we're on that coast already, is now going to be live in person!!!) on December 8th at 5:30, stop on by! Say hello! Tell me where to get the best coffee! Here is a picture of some of the Gravity set frames from way back when the film was just beginning, who knew this film would take me to all these places? See you soon Westcoast!