Uplifting song from Evan Rock and Charles Haines. Both moved to the big island of Hawaii a few years ago as I understand it, to explore a life of sustainability via minimilism, spirituality, an tropical fruit.
Evan Rock is currently putting together retreats that are centered around 80/10/10 low fat raw vegan eating, as well as an embracing of spiritual growth. All good stuff.
One of the elements that catches my attention and interest is their willingness to harvest play and silliness. Keep on keepin' on boys.
Livin' Free by Evan Rock and Charles Haines- The Love Ambassadors
Today marks the15th year after Columbine. Each
time this year, I settle in for some reflection, & often a good dose
of reading.
Feminist-sociologist, Michael Kimmel, has asserted that
mass shootings seem to have a common theme. Male. White.
As a person in the mental health biz, I do know that it can play a part
(and I am not suggesting that it had or had not within the Columbine
events) but I also think we cannot ignore, that it's not about just
illness, and guns. It's often anger, about race, and gender.
There is great love for all those who want it, and share it--but anger is the only real emotion that is rewarded among men. Aren't we done yet? Can we put down privilege? Can we put down patriarchy? Can we create and move forward with resources for all?
If you read, write, hear, utter the word strawberry or if you are to draw or see the image of one without thinking of a Beatles song in some way; I don't want to know you.
This is a Trailer for LOVE.
Release Date: February 14, 2014
Director: Larry Wessel
Music: Swan Lake Dub by DuBoLoGy (Album: Dub Lab on Angel Dust Records)
LOVE
is Larry Wessel's new feature-length documentary about an extraordinary
painter from New Mexico and her astonishing works of art.
Beth
Moore-Love is perhaps the greatest living artist working in America
today. Her works can be found in private collections throughout the
United States and Europe. She is a national treasure and yet, she is
virtually unknown. Filmmaker Larry Wessel is determined to change that
with his nine year labor of love...his upcoming feature-length
documentary called LOVE.
THE ART OF BETH MOORE-LOVE
"My
'artwork' has always been very cynical and ANGRY. I read a quote once, I
don't remember who said it, something about the purpose of art being to
soothe the spirit after a hard day of 'reality'. What does that mean? I
once saw a two-page advertisement for some stupid car, on one side of
the fold-out was a photo of Monument Valley, morphing into the skyline
of Manhattan. On the other page, over Monument Valley was written 'The
Dream', over Manhattan was written: 'The Reality'. And I saw right away
that this was completely backwards. So my purpose as an artist is to
soothe these people who turn our world up-side down for profit? These
people who feel spiritually bereft after a hard day of raping and
pillaging? F*ck that. I will NOT. I'm going to sneak it on the wall, and
slap the sh*t out of them with the truth of it. Is there ugliness and
horror in my work? Absolutely. Do you think that my work is
distatsteful? You are correct!"
- Beth Moore-Love
Follow LOVE...
Up to the minute LOVE News, LOVE Reviews, Screening and Film Festival Announcements and much, much More!!
I should have purchased tickets for more than one night.
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros is performing at The Los Angeles Historic State Park October 17th-20th, under a circus big top. The event includes a farmer’s market, and performances by various musicians, vaudeville comedy, contortionists, acrobats, puppet masters, and more. Sunday held a matinee for children an family as well as a full bodied show after.
The music of this band is so freeing but at times I am saddened as I wish I could run away with them. To be a part of a community such as their tribe. I can't sing. I imagine it's wonderful for those who can do know they can and do it with abandon.
Such a dream that I found myself quite depressed when it ended and I had to shuffle through the saw dust on the floor and go home. A tragic walk back to my car. Crisp cool air was no longer mine.
Per front man Alex Ebert: "These days a band is a fast machine, cramming in dates, cutting fat,
making the most money it can. Far gone are the ancient days of the
traveling troubadours, lingering in towns, meeting the people,
entertaining for days. If you tour, or you have been to a “professional”
show, you may have had the sense that something is missing from the
experience…And so, here comes the idea of Big Top – a one-off experiment
in reaching for a more colorful, soulful, way to tour."
----via Zumic
A larger that life performance to see humans up close. This was actually quite depressing. They are blood, flesh, and bone, however, it was remarkable to see these musical figures in 3rd dimension.
When entering the big top, all concert goes were given a yellow paper bracelet with pink stars and blue diamonds so we were able to get in and out of the big top, signifying that we had purchased tickets. As childlike as this sounds, I slept with the bracelet. Yep, that's how magical it was.
The men and women on stilts made me nervous. I couldn't make direct eye contact as their wide eyes frightened me, and I feared they would fall. Who would be there to catch them. Me?The road beneath this gentleman's feat is filled with wooden shards. When he posed for this picture I believe I was in the near vicinity, I saw that he couldn't remain still when he posed. He had to march in place. That may just be the nature of the stilts. Inside the tent was a ground laid with saw dust. Better?
The show grounds were spotted with various vendors.Gluten-free vegan food from various local companies. I ate from White Guy Pad Thaifrom Venice and Queen of Kale from Alabama.I enjoyed speaking with the vendors as they shared their stories of building their companies and selling.
This particular Vendor is a Venice shoe company called SOIYL (soil).
Here she is. The shoe maker herself. I met Dolorous. Sweet gal.
And who should be behind her but Mr. Ebert. Photo credit for above three images. SOIYL facebook.
Ferris Wheel. I've never been on a ferris wheel and I didn't intend to start. Nice to gaze though. Photo credit: Edward Sharpe facebook.
Saturday night. Oct 19th. Impromptu after show!I missed this as I attended the Oct 18th show.
Lucky
folks. Wish I had bought tickets for tonight as well. So much joy. I
wonder how free they feel when they play--when they lift their faces up
to sing. Knowing that what comes out will come out right. I wonder if
they know how good they are. I wonder how they maintain their united. I
wonder why despite how wondrous it is to see this pack, that I cannot
help stare at the glow of buildings behind. I wonder I wonder I wonder.
Here are a few samples of other vendors selling at the show.
Flower crowns and hair accessories by Emily High-Fash. Here Emily sits with Jade Castrinos and her ever lasting infectious smile. She's known for it. Don't we all wish we were that happy? Photo credit. Edward Sharpe facebook.
Alexis Smart Flower Remedies of Bach Flower Remedy Formulas to balance emotion. These bottles are made for stress relief of varying kinds. A lot of hooey if you ask me. Also, there is bourbon inside. Photo credit. Edward Sharpe facebook.
The concept of time or how one perceives it is interesting to me. I can torture or delight. The show seemed as if it were ages ago, the day after. It's 7ish pm at the moment and the show will begin at 8.The band will hit the stage at 10. Tickets are still on sale and will be on sale at the entrance. Work/responsibility gets in the way of so much doesn't it? I would have gone to last night's show but it sold out.
Christopher Wonder has Ta-Da tattooed on his stomach and The End on his behind. Um...alright.
This one prompted those quivery pre-sob breaths. Not glistening tears came, but not necessary to feel every bit of this. Bone marrow and Edward Sharpe equals one happy dude.
Amanda Palmer: The art of asking- 2013 Video Description
Don't make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer. Let them. In a
passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a
dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new
relationship between artist and fan.
TEDTalks is a daily video
podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference,
where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their
lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology,
Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the
arts and much more. Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate
A magazine I never read posts an article which makes me glad I did. Below is the full article from Elle magazine.
Kim Gordon Sounds Off
In an exclusive in ELLE's May issue, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon
talks candidly about her next chapter, and what really happened between
her and Thurston Moore.
BY Lizzy GoodmanApril 22, 2013
Richard Kern
The last time I saw Kim Gordon, she was preparing a chicken for
roasting. This was several years ago, and I was reporting a piece about
the bohemian style of the Northampton, Massachusetts, home of indie
rock’s most powerful couple, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, of legendary
noise-rock band Sonic Youth. Moore gave me a tour of the veritable
record store that was his basement, and Gordon showed me her art studio
and racks of vintage clothes. I saw the rumpled sheets on the couple’s
bed, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer box set in their den, and the
refreshingly girly bedroom of their teenage daughter, Coco. But later,
to my friends, what I described was sitting at their kitchen table
watching Moore assemble cassette tapes for an upcoming release on his
Ecstatic Peace! label while his wife of some 20 years was elbow-deep in
poultry stuffing. In that moment, Gordon was the ultimate hipster
Renaissance woman I aspired to be, a feminist rebel who could make
avant-garde art all day, then cook a killer dinner for her family at
night.
Since forming Sonic Youth with Moore in 1981, Gordon has come to
personify two qualities generally considered incompatible: rebellion and
maturity. She played bass and guitar, wrote songs, and sang for Sonic
Youth, a band whose mission— infiltrate the mainstream with dissonant,
defiant guitar noise—shaped ’90s alternative rock. Gordon coproduced
Hole's debut album, Pretty on the Inside; nurtured a young Kurt
Cobain; put a teenage Chloë Sevigny on-screen for the first time,
alongside the infamous collection for Perry Ellis by then up-and-coming
designer Marc Jacobs; and, via the band’s album-cover art and videos,
helped popularize the work of such visionaries as Spike Jonze, Todd
Haynes, Gerhard Richter, Mike Kelley, and Richard Prince. Over the past
30 years she’s been considered an indie sex symbol, an iconoclastic
performer, and a de facto professor of modern feminist pop mystique (her
interest in Karen Carpenter, Madonna, and, more recently, Britney
Spears lent them depth).
And yet, as scrutinized as she has been, Gordon has always been
considered a mystery. A typical Sonic Youth interview featured Moore
waxing philosophical while Gordon, in sunglasses, sat by his side,
nearly silent. Aloof, remote, and intimidating are often used to
describe her. After decades in the public eye, it seemed like this was
the way things would always be. Then, in the fall of 2011, Gordon and
Moore announced they were separating. The news called into question the
future of Sonic Youth and devastated legions of music fans. Jon Dolan,
one of the flintiest rock critics around, began a piece for Grantland
about their breakup with this plaintive cry:
"Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"
"I can understand people being curious," Gordon says when I ask her
about all the attention she’s gotten since the split. "I’m curious
myself. What’s going to happen now?"
It’s late afternoon on an unforgivingly cold winter day in New York
City. Gordon arrives a few minutes early at Sant Ambroeus, the
understated West Village restaurant she chose for our meeting. She’s
wearing eyeliner, a black-and-white-striped sweaterdress, and
cognac-brown boots. I find myself dissecting her look so I can copy it
later; such is the immediacy of her style. It would be rude to say
Gordon doesn’t look her age, which is 59. That’s a line reserved for
those who are desperately trying to appear young. There is nothing
desperate about Kim Gordon. When the subject of dating comes up, I’m not
surprised to hear that younger men are vying for her attention, though
the couple is not yet divorced.
"We have all these books, records, and art and are getting it all
assessed; that’s what is taking so long," she says after ordering a
glass of rosé. But both have moved on. Among her suitors are a
restaurateur, an architect, and an actor. "It’s just weird," Gordon says
of navigating new romance. "I can’t tell what’s normal." And Moore has
regularly been seen with the same woman, fueling the rumor that his
affair helped doom their marriage.
(Thurston Moore declined a request for an interview.) "We seemed to
have a normal relationship inside of a crazy world," Gordon says of her
marriage. "And in fact, it ended in a kind of normal way—midlife crisis,
starstruck woman."
Some years ago, a woman Gordon declines to name became a part of the
Sonic Youth world, first as the girlfriend of an erstwhile band member
and later as a partner on a literary project with Moore. Eventually,
Gordon discovered a text message and confronted him about having an
affair. They went to counseling, but he kept seeing the other woman. "We
never got to the point where we could just get rid of her so I could
decide what I wanted to do," Gordon says. "Thurston was carrying on this
whole double life with her. He was really like a lost soul." Moore
moved out. Gordon stayed home and listened to a lot of hip-hop. "Rap
music is really good when you’re traumatized," she says.
The first few months were rough. "It did feel like every day was
different," she recalls. "It's a huge, drastic change." But slowly
things improved. She adjusted to the framework of semisingle parenthood.
(Coco, their only child, is now a freshman at a Chicago art school.)
Gordon kept their colonial filled with friends—a musician, a poet, and
Moore’s adult niece, with whom Gordon has remained very close.
"Sometimes I cook dinner and just invite whomever," she says of her
improvised family life. "Everyone helps out a bit with the dogs. It’s a
big house. It’s nice to have people around." Things were stabilizing.
Then Gordon was found to have a noninvasive form of breast cancer called
DCIS. "I’m fine; it’s literally the best you can have," she says of her
diagnosis, which required a lumpectomy. "I didn’t do radiation or
anything, but I was like, Okay, what else is going to happen to me?"
Sitting across from Gordon, who has long been a role model for women
who want to be tough without becoming hard, I’m struck by how
well-placed in her our collective faith has been. "Kim comes off all
cool and badass, but she’s really sweet and gentle and feminine,"
longtime friend Sofia Coppola says, praising Gordon’s ability to draw
power from vulnerability. That trait is much in evidence when Gordon
discusses the recent past. She’s sad, and unafraid to show it, but she’s
also clear-eyed about how the dismantling of some areas of her life has
freed her up in others. “When you’re in a group, you’re always sharing
everything. It’s protected,” she says of being in Sonic Youth. “Your own
ego is not there for criticism, but you also never quite feel the full
power of its glory, either.” She’s done with that for now. “A few years
ago I started to feel like I owed it to myself to really focus on doing
art.”
Gordon has been painting a lot, in anticipation of a forthcoming
survey show at the White Columns gallery in New York. She also recently
worked on a capsule collection with French label Surface to Air and,
with Coco by her side, shot an ad campaign for Saint Laurent. She’s been
onstage quite a bit in the past year too, singing and playing guitar.
She joined musician John Cale in his tribute to former Velvet
Underground bandmate and muse Nico at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
toured Europe with the experimental musician Ikue Mori, and took part in
the renowned “Face the Strange” music series hosted by the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago. And Gordon, like Moore, has a new band. This
year she’ll tour in support of the forthcoming debut album of Body/Head,
which she formed with longtime friend and collaborator Bill Nace. “I do
have a lot of things going on right now,” she says with a slight smile.
Gordon grew up mostly in Los Angeles; her father was a sociology
professor, and her mother a homemaker with creative tendencies. “She’d
make long caftans with hoods and sell them out of our house,” Gordon
remembers. Her mother and father had few traditional expectations of
her. “They were from a generation of hands-off parenting,” she says, and
cultivated in her two traits that an artist needs to survive:
intellectual curiosity and a near antiauthoritarian level of creative
independence. “I’ve never been good with structure—doing assignments for
the sake of them or doing things I’m supposed to do.”
She attended a progressive elementary school linked to UCLA and loved
it. “It was learn by doing,” she recalls. “So we were always making
African spears and going down to the river and making mud huts, or
skinning a cowhide and drying it and throwing it off the cliff at Dana
Point.”
The way Gordon talks about the L.A. of her youth conjures the
bleached-out, diffuse brutality of the city as portrayed in Joan
Didion’s classic collection The White Album. “I remember when we were
young, playing on these huge dirt mounds that became freeway on-ramps,”
Gordon says. “And my mom pointing to Century City, saying, ‘There’s
going to be a city there.’ I have a lot of nostalgia for Los Angeles at a
certain time—just the landscape, before it was overgrown with bad
stucco and mini malls and bad plastic surgery. It wasn’t like I was
happy. I don’t want to be back in that time, but it felt a lot more
open.”
If you had to describe the core sensibility of Gordon’s
work—painting, vocal performance, or dress—it would be that
quintessentially Californian expansive desolation. It’s a feeling, not
an idea, and it’s what first pulled Gordon away from fine art and toward
rock ’n’ roll. “When I came to New York, I’d go and see bands downtown
playing no-wave music,” she recalls of her arrival, after graduating
from art school. “It was expressionistic and it was also nihilistic.
Punk rock was tongue-in-cheek, saying, ‘Yeah, we’re destroying rock.’
No-wave music is more like, ‘NO, we’re really destroying rock.’ It was
very dissonant. I just felt like, Wow, this is really free. I could do
that.”
So she did. The Sonic Youth discography includes 16 studio albums and
numerous EPs and compilation albums, not to mention music videos and
documentaries. Their 1988 LP, Daydream Nation, was added to the
U.S. Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2005. Sonic
Youth is not just revered within the indie rock world; it’s an indelible
part of American pop-cultural history, a sort of byword for tasteful
and progressive art that’s also popular. “She was a forerunner,
musically,” says Kathleen Hanna, of the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill and
later the dance-rock group Le Tigre. “Just knowing a woman was in a band
trading lead vocals, playing bass, and being a visual artist at the
same time made me feel less alone.” Hanna met Gordon when she came to a
Bikini Kill show in the early ’90s. “She invited my band to stay at her
and Thurston’s apartment,” Hanna says. “As a radical feminist singer, I
wasn’t particularly well liked. I was in a punk underground scene
dominated by hardcore dudes who yelled mean shit at me every night, and
journalists routinely called my voice shrill, unlistenable. Kim made me
feel accepted in a way I hadn’t before. Fucking Kim Gordon thought I was
on the right track, haters be damned. It made the bullshit easier to
take, knowing she was in my corner.”
Gordon’s anodyne vocals and whirling dervish stage presence are as
much a Sonic Youth signature as Moore’s and Lee Ranaldo’s discordant
guitars, but her pursuit of additional creative outlets helped others
think more broadly about what it could mean to be in a rock band. “Kim
inspired me because she tried all the things that interested her,”
Coppola says. “She just did what she was into.” Hanna agrees. “I loved
so many kinds of art besides music, and it sometimes made me feel torn,
but Kim seemed very comfortable doing whatever she felt like at the
time.”
“I never really thought of myself as a musician,” Gordon says. “I’m
not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way
it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about
popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do
something.”
We’ve finished the dregs of our wine, and the sun has set. I’m
interested in something Gordon was filmed saying about imprisoned
members of the Russian activist punk band Pussy Riot: “Women make
natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they’ve always been
second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.” Gordon
nods as I read back her quote: “I mean, who made up all the rules in the
culture? Men—white male corporate society. So why wouldn’t a woman want
to rebel against that?”
Part of my own affection for Kim Gordon, I realize, is her
association with an era when even boys thought it was cool to call
themselves feminists. I’m not sure when exactly that changed, but I know
that by the time I was aware of experiencing sexism firsthand I’d
already gotten the message that to identify myself as a feminist would
limit me. I envy and admire the way Gordon—and the pop-cultural heroes
she helped shape, like Hanna and Coppola and Courtney Love—seemed
unafraid of that word. But I am even more envious and admiring of the
way the men in Gordon’s orbit—from the Beastie Boys, who played with
Sonic Youth over the years, to Moore to Cobain, who was very close to
Gordon—seem to have taken cues from her about how to be good men.
It’s easy to forget that the ideals Gordon championed are now taken
for granted by a younger generation, a fact driven home when Gordon
mentions Lena Dunham’s Girls. Despite being a fan of the hit
show (“I love that all of the sex scenes are awkward and kind of a
failure”), she’s troubled by what she calls a “misleading” scene in
which Marnie sleeps with Hannah’s gay roommate. At one point Marnie says
no, but they proceed to have sex, and her objection becomes part of
their sex-ual play. “It’s a mixed message about what no means,” Gordon
points out. It’s part of an “ironic Williamsburg hipster” pose, she goes
on, that considers political correctness kind of square. “If you’re
going to do that [in Girls], you also have to—in some other
instance—show that it’s not cool.” For a show that’s been written about
nearly to death, it’s an observation that seems both totally obvious and
underdiscussed.
“What the breach of generations shows is that there’s more than one
way to be feminist,” Gordon says. Indeed, her admirers put her in the
same hallowed category in which she puts such figures as Didion, Jane
Fonda, and, now, Hillary Clinton. When Gordon recalls Clinton being
grilled by Congress in her final hearings, it’s with deep reverence. “It
just showed how experienced she is and how inexperienced those other
guys were—she was masterful, the way she handled them. She’s a living
embodiment of being pro-women.”
I believe story telling is an art form and blogging is a medium in which to share stories and ideas. Within this blog I hope to cover a spectrum of topics. From the serious to the silly. Here you will read my views and inquiries about subjects such as feminism, other various socio-political issues, psychology, spirituality, sexuality, and general interests such as film, art and music. You will also be exposed to my obsession with cupcakes, tea, books, Hello Kitty, and quirky day to day journeys. I enjoy learning from others as I am constantly attempting to introspect, grow and evolve. During this process I will be jotting down musings on this blog. Pull up a comfy chair and a spot of tea and join me!
Here she is. The shoe maker herself. I met Dolorous. Sweet gal.
