teatro de los muertos

The Flyer (Tom's on left, Michael's on right)

Michael has been living in the garage for the past six months. I suppose "garage" is a poor term for the building. Really, it's a redwood-plank shack that would probably have fit a Model T once, if you didn't have to open the doors. More precisely, it's a shack with two electric wheelchairs, a barcolounger, a disco ball with saturn rings, wall to wall carpeting, an enormous subwoofer, and an incredible amount of... stuff. And Tom. Tom is also always out there. In fact, Tom and Michael are so often in the shack, they've dubbed it the MAN SHACK. When people come over, they rarely even bother to come to the front door anymore. The living room hasn't seen guests in weeks, but there's almost always somebody sitting in the barcalounger out in the man shack, being uh, manly, or something.

One of Tom's Collages

The MAN SHACK, since it was rid of cobwebs and moldy furniture left behind by the old neighbors, has also been the source of endless creativity. Tom, it turns out, is rather handy with an X-Acto knife and has been making some really insane collages out of religious icons and old Time-Life books. Michael is making dioramas from pretty much anything he can get his hands on. Except for tonight, tonight he's making a drum set out of a banjo and some pots I think he found next to the trash pile. I'm hoping he gets over that one soon. Quite a racket. (He would like me to point out it is a racket with excellent rhythm, however.)

Bigger on the Inside Than the Outside

Anyway. The volume of work Michael and Tom have created has reached something of a critical mass. So much so that they ran out of shelves to put them on, then they ran out of places to put new shelves. So, a couple weeks ago, they opened a show of their work, entitled Teatro de los Muertos, at Red's. Being that Halloween and Dia de los Muertos are just around the corner, there are lots of skeletons and Day of the Dead references. Also lots of gold spray paint and shoe goo, but I don't think that had so much to do with the timing of the show.

The opening was great. Lots of people came, though inexplicably almost none of them were people we'd specifically sent invitations to. Most all of them had picked up a flyer somewhere and come by to see the art. Tom and Michael weren't expecting quite so many people who were there not just to drink free wine and humor their friends. They also weren't expecting to sell anything, and were pleasantly surprised when they did.

Michael and Theater of War

Michael took several of the early people around to explain each of his dioramas, which are a whole lot more complicated than they look. I know, hard to believe. I did get a kick out of my dad trying to explain "Theater of War" to our friend Nicky after getting the Tour (So.. Jesus is a DJ, see here? And he's 'dropping the bomb' - that's a DJ term! Did you know that was a DJ term? And that's the bomb, the bomb is a nuclear bomb... See?)

The Fishing Channel

The photographs of the artworks don't even pretend to do them justice. For one thing, you can't press any of the buttons or light them up or watch the little mechanized things go round. As promised, here's a picture of the radio cabinet we got for $20 from David-Beckham-who-is-not-the-footballer, for example. The cabinet now has a lake in it, and a skeleton fishing for an ever-elusive anglerfish with a disco ball, which swims underwater past the lower window once every minute or so. Apparently words don't do it justice either. Needless to say, there was generally a crowd around it giggling every time the fish came round chasing a disco ball.

No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind and Michael's Dada Shrine both had not-so-obvious push-buttons. The former lights up and lets off a horrible racket as little psychotic looking dolls aim machine guns at you. Everybody who presses it immediately thinks they broke it. The Dada Shrine has a spinning Ken doll head (Not! A! Real! Ken! Doll! Don't! Sue! Us! Mattel!) and a REAL 'COON SKULL, which we procured from a really scary redneck in an unblogged section of our roadtrip last winter which went through Quartzsite. But I digress.

Dadaist Shrine

Michael and Tom never have really considered themselves Artists (Tom's a journalist, Michael's aiming toward a degree in social work), so they weren't very practiced with the scholarly, esoteric explanations for the fine art aficionados in the room. One woman very seriously asked Tom about the recurring circle motifs in his work. "Because circles are easy to cut out?" he says. Michael explained to another art patron that his main source of inspiration is the dollar store. Quite a few people wrote long, well-thought-out critiques and put them in the suggestion box, only to realize it was actually a paper shredder when their comments came out in strips at the bottom.

Another of Tom's Collages

Since Tom and Michael, who usually DJ, were obviously preoccupied, I dusted off my old super-sine-wavy-circa-1995 ambient music collection for the first time in almost 10 years and played them all night. Toward the end, I played Charles Dodge and Weird Blinking Lights simultaneously and I think maybe nobody appreciated it except me. Actually, I'm pretty sure nobody did, because Dana came by to tell me to play it louder so more people would leave and she could close up.

If you happen to be in Santa Barbara, the show (by Tom Schultz and Michael Long for those who don't know who the hell I'm talking about) is going to be up through the second week in November at Red's Espresso Bar and Gallery, 211 Helena Street at the corner of Yanonali Street. They'll also be in another show at the end of November in a temporary gallery space in the Funk Zone, but I don't have the details for that yet.

More fun with the scanner

My friend Lou, of aforementioned fire dancing fame, also makes beautiful organic-looking fused glass and silver jewelry. I have a pendant he made, which I wear pretty much every day - I think I get a compliment on it at least once a week.

With further experimentation, it appears that the lowly scanner is the perfect way to capture the look of fused glass jewelry. So Lou came over the other day and we scanned his entire collection. This made me happy, 'cause I didn't have to drag out all my lighting stuff and a macro lens.

Now he has a few of his one of a kind fused glass pieces up on ebay. Check them out! Buy one for somebody you love. They're even more gorgeous in real life.

He also does custom work (which you may have seen around the necks of many Burning Man attendees lucky enough to have run into him), so send him an email. He rocks.

bad day good pictures

I spent six hours today trying to shoot product shots of a perfume bottle and then the processing machine ate half my film after I broke down the set. Then I came home and found a bill for a really really really large amount of money because my crappy student health insurance apparently DOESN'T COVER MEDICAL TESTS TO FIND OUT WHY YOU ARE IN ACUTE ABDOMINAL PAIN. Apparently I'm not going to die of cancer or appendicitis and my ovary did not actually explode back in July, it just felt like it. This did not, however, prevent them from charging an ungodly amount of money to find that out, nor did it mean anything to the insurance company, who enjoyed leaving me on hold for 45 minutes and then hanging up on me, twice, before finally informing me that I'm stupid and should have read my policy more thoroughly before experiencing an alleged "mysterious pain". Did I mention I'm having a really, really bad day? Anyway.

I'm trying to make myself feel better by looking at stuff for inspiration and working on my notebook. Some finds:

Eric Meyer wins my personal award for best Burning Man photos ever. The best lit ones, anyway. I looked at his bio and he went to Art Center. There is hope! Right?

Renee Rhyner represents some of my favorite photographers, notably Fredrik Brodén and Brent Humphreys. The navigation on the website leaves a lot to be desired, but there are some interesting images to be found.

Snapcity by emilie wilson valentine has always been one of my favorite photo sites. She hasn't updated it in years I think but the fact that she was able to post these interesting, intimate little snaps of her life regularly for over two years is pretty impressive. I used to carry my camera around with me everywhere, before I got spoiled on large format. I haven't printed off a 35mm negative in a really, really long time. I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

English illustrator Joe Magee was fired from his weekly gig at the ultraconservative Daily Telegraph for putting messages like "Thatcher Fucked Us" in braille in his illustrations. He's my hero today.

I think I feel a little better now, kinda.

the spanish disease

I have a Manu Chao CD in my car that doesn't ever come out. I know all the words to Clandestino even though my French is rusty and my Spanish is nonexistent. Every time I play it with somebody else in the car, they ask me who it is. Even though Manu Chao is filling stadiums from Madrid to Tokyo, nobody here seems to have heard of him. I think they played Me Gustas Tu on the Spanish language alternative radio station down here in LA a few times, but that's about it. You say "Manu Chao" to a European, though, and watch them pee themselves with excitement as they pull out all of his CDs. Prepare to sit for a while as they do a full-on singalong while regaling you with tales of whichever Manu Chao show(s) they saw at some soccer (ahem) football stadium or rock festival. Extra points if they saw him with his first band, Mano Negra.

We're driving around in Santa Barbara. I put Proxima Estación on again, and John groans. John is English.

You've got the Spanish Disease, he says.

dude-ism

Krk just called me to tell me that the genre-bending balkan gypsy polka funk punk band Kultur Shock will be playing a show at the Crocodile while we're in Seattle.

I am beyond excited. I think they are my most favorite live band ever. There's just something deliciously sick and wrong about a funk band with an accordion. They have been known to cause people who would never ever ever dance in public start to shuffle, and multiple exposure to Kultur Shock shows has been known to cause non-dancers to actually start sweating and flailing around on the dance floor with hot Russian chicks and the occasional Bosnian grandma. If I could have a perfect wedding, they would be the band.

And now, I present for you the principles of dude-ism, according to Gino Srdjan Yevdjevich:

1. Love your dude.
2. Don't ever judge another dude.
3. Dudes are non-exclusive. Anyone can be a dude.
4. Don't ever leave your dude if your dude doesn't leave you.
5. No dude is higher than any other dude. No hierarchy, no aristocracy, no blood line.
6. Don't ever do to a dude what you wouldn't like a dude to do to you.
7. Every dude must memorize #6 because it's complicated.
8. Dudes don't think, dudes just do.
9. Dudes don't worship, even dude-ism. Fuck ya.
10. Dude!

Listen to KulturShock in RealAudio.

Dude.

cut and paste

I spent most of today sitting on my bed going through my giant bin full of magazine clippings. I'm a completely compulsive cut-and-paster. I gave myself a blister with the scissors. If you know me, you probably also know those ubiquitous black hardbound sketchbooks, which are always pooched out with pasted-in pages and all my polaroids and idea sketches.

People don't let me get near their magazines. I show no mercy. Your Communication Arts photo annual? Oops! But I really liked that picture! The second page of that really great story in this month's Esquire? It's a ragged edge where I ripped out the page because there was a cool photo illustration on the other side. I mean it. I'm dangerous. Give me your magazines.

I was digging through old sketchbooks trying to find ideas for a shoot this week and found a page of pictures I'd pasted in by a very talented artist/photographer named Kim Stringfellow. So I looked up her website and spent a really, really long time looking at it tonight. I like to pretend sometimes that I could possibly be that good.

A good part of her website is devoted to an ongoing project about the Salton Sea. I love the Salton Sea. I find it bizarre that even Californians, even people who live an hour away from it, have only heard of it because it's a bad Val Kilmer movie.

I went there on a sort of photo field trip in the early spring of 2001. I took pictures of a feed processing plant in Calipatria at night. Usually people freak out when you drive up at random and say "Hey, can I take pictures here?" but the three guys who were working there were completely enthusiastic about having a couple of random people take pictures of their job site at eleven o'clock at night. We set up our cameras and they brought us cokes and told us in broken English about the heat and their families in Mexico, and all the trains that come in stacked with corn, which gets roasted and mashed and piled into 20 foot high mounds of processed cattle feed. They seemed genuinely excited and proud that we were taking interest in this feed plant where they worked. I would be too, I wouldn't last two hours shoveling mashed corn in 120 degree heat.