Month: January 2008

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Crankie Archives Page

I’ve had three people call me up this past year asking questions about the cranky (crankie). Three years ago I produced CRANKYfest at CounterPULSE here in San Francisco, and this nifty storytelling device continues to demand attention by curious performers who usually want to know how to make one. I know of at least three devices that have been built since the event, and I am surprised that my site is still the main source out there for Crankie knowledge.

Today, I got a call from a friend who’s making a motorized crankie, so I once again went online looking for other sources of the art form. I only found two other sites, one with decent diagrams by George Konnoff. The other one was just a photo of the performer’s crankie. So I’ve decided to put all the links I can onto one page, and add to it as new content comes along. I also decided to post the new page on the RSS feeds as well (the post will not be updated in the future).

If you’ve found this site and have your own crankie, or hold knowledge, please pass the info along!

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Dream: Free the Festival

A college of students living in a vaulted graveyard which runs down a hillside wants to participate in their university’s film festival. Other Cinema is the only group allowed to be in the closed festival, so they illegally bribe the graveyard college to not participate. They try to bribe them first with wrapped gifts, then they offer potential sexual favors. When this doesn’t work, Other Cinema uses baseless intimidation. They get caught using this last tactic and exit via the bottom of the graveyard. Another group then walks through calling for revolution in France.

I must be a leader of the group that wants to be included in the festival because the Other Cinema’s tactics have been heavily directed towards me. I tell a revolutionary marcher, a man with curly dark hair and a green anarchy star button on his shirt, to quit joking around about revolution. He tells me he wants to seriously protest traditional marriage, so I suggest a transgender wedding on the steps of City Hall. This activist is hoping to have a famous person in this protest.

Fragments

A vampire is haunting a futuristic San Francisco. I have been stuck in a theme park ride which goes out into the Bay, and keep seeing the monster kill victims. I have also been on the streets with a group of friends, stuck between the sound barriers/walls that protect the houses on the other side.  Bits of the dream lead me into someones house (mine?) and back in the street.

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Winter Lull

A small bit of news on the book project. The artist who made the stencil that ended up on the book’s cover finally got in touch with me. Am glad that this happened before the book went to press, so now he can get proper credit in the book. Jennifer guessed correctly that the person staring at us is an actress who was part of Warhol’s scene. I have been focused on the Stencil Archive upgrade, as well as a Critical Mass party at CELLspace, so the book has been on the backburner. Wished that Stencil Archive would go quicker but it has taken months to get this Drupal site going. Haven’t been able to work on a site for StencilNation.org, but managed to create a new one-stop source that will have all the info you could need on the book here on Happy Feet. It should do for now (Stencil History X just has a MySpace page for its site). Justine is back from her vacation, so I hope to see a second revision of the book soon. Am still working out a tour in June, up to Seattle or BC, and need to get back to working out the book opening events here in SF. I keep asking myself, “do I really want to self-produce a tour when I know that producing one show can be a pile of work?” It’s a dream realized so I’m jumping in like a fish in water.

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Free Buttons at RIDE!, CELLspace’s Fri Benefit

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Man, $5 for three bands, two DJs, a VJ, random bike videos and images…

…AND free punk buttons for the first 100 folks who walk in the door?

I’m making the buttons myself, thanks to Janet “Bike Girl” Attard, Flickr, and Raven’s button-making machine. Hope to have some excellent bike buttons for all the kiddies who hit up CELLspace this Friday and hand ’em out at the door. I know a free button isn’t much, but sharin’ the bike love is what it’ll be about at good ole’ CELL.

Oh, and helping to ease the rent pain for that org as well!

Gift up the 2-wheeled revolution…. See you there!

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Shaken, Not Stirred at Cloverfield

The United States has a huge monster in its closet. Before you even see the beast, it tips over an oil tanker, creates a huge explosion, tears the head off of the Statue of Liberty, and maliciously throws the head into Midtown Manhattan. Hmm, oil, destruction, and liberty; a monster who sadistically destroys the symbol of a great American Dream: to own a building that reaches up to the heavens. Closer to God at the end times?

The movie Cloverfield is basically a tale of a heroic, or stupid, group of friends that jump into a fantasy land to rescue a woman in distress. That fantasy land includes a lot of walking, lights that are always miraculously on where ever they walk/run in Manhattan, and other athletic, death defying feats (with screaming and jokes thrown in).

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Beta Grover

Over new years, I caught a great feed with a link to the new Sesame Street Video site. So I have spent the last week randomly searching for all things Sesame St. Quite a treat to type in “Grover” and get a list of his skits to watch. Then search for “cookie” so I can watch back-to-back videos of Cookie Monster losing it over cookies. Tried to throw a curve ball when I searched for “Pinball” and got the Pointer Sister’s classic song twice! The beta version seemed to get hung up when I searched for “numbers” but when I put “paint numbers” in, the Mad Painter was listed. Haven’t seen those clips in a long time. Classics. They do not allow embedded videos, nor do any of the videos have their own links. So you’ll have to go to the site to catch the madness.

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Phone Photos 2.0

 Lowrys SC Erwin House

The Erwin House, first built as a cabin in 1800, stands in all its antebellum  splendor. This is the house my mother grew up in, which I visited time and again in my own lifetime. I look back at those memories, cane pole fishing in the pond out back, playing football by the green bean fields, and running wild in the woods as some of the first connections to nature that I cherish today. Got to make it out this visit for my Grandmother’s 82nd birthday.

Kennesaw Mountain Shadows

Long shadows after a short hike up part of the Kennesaw Mountan National Battlefield Park.  Spent a freezing New Years Day morning with my friends Todd and Jeni, hiking up the hill that barely kept Sherman’s Union troops from taking and burning Atlanta.

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Who’s that person in the drivers seat?

I am doing some urban spelunking with three friends of mine. We go to several run down houses and walk around in them in the dark. We use our flashlights to look at some interesting things. One of the four of us is the main tour guide. He shows us things in the buildings and speaks about them like he was on a TV show.

In the last house, we go up to the second floor to look at things. As we climb down a ladder to leave the building, I see another person climbing down another ladder. I catch him out of the corner of my light. On the lower level we have to walk through long sheets of plastic to get to our car. Me and a woman who I am with get into the back seat, and the tour guide comes around on the shot gun side of the car. He looks at the man who is at the wheel and asks, “Who’s that person in the drivers seat?”

Before we can react, the stranger starts the car and quickly drives off.  I frantically think of many things at once: where’s the person that was with us, should I jump out of the car without the woman, should I attack the driver, who is the driver?

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First Draft Revisions

Things finally converged towards kicking out the list of first draft revisions today. I spent a bitter cold day at the dining room table, flipping through Stencil History X, cross-referencing photos, looking at the new photos that Logan gave me, and adding all of those changes to the list that I made a few weeks ago. I had to buy the book from a store in Paris, and then had to have the owner ship the book out for a 3-day delivery here in SC. It took Chrono, the shipping company, six days to get the package to me, and the book came out of the envelop damaged in the lower left corner: a big ding that tore out that corner’s binding. Not happy about that so had to deal with seeing if there’s some type of compensation from Chrono after working on the revisions list. Samantha, the book author, sent me to David. All business was smooth with him, which was good to rely on over Christmas. Today, I got to flip through the book to try to see where our photos overlapped. Peat and Adam5100 had the most, so I dug into the other submissions for Adam to cover that overlap. Logan gave me some new Peat photos which I threw in and shuffled around. I had to take two photos out of the Difusor section, move some around for M-City, Jef Aerosol, as well as reshuffle Logan’s section. It went much smoother than I thought and will most likely add ten new photos, along with the reshuffled ones, to the book. After about 8 hours of working through the changes that I had amassed, I ended up with 78 tweaks, corrections, redesigns, and photo reworking. Zipped the new image files and mailed it off to Justine along with the updated file credits and the list of the tweaks. On to the second draft! Had to mention this: froze my ass off yesterday stencil hunting in Atlanta. Went to Krog tunnel and walked down both sides and the pillars in the middle (dodging rush hour traffic) to shoot all the great art in there. Man, was it cold! Headed over to Little Five Points and found about a dozen other stencils there. Didn’t take long to lose the feeling in my fingers. Ah, suffering frostbite for my art. Or is it an obsession?