Planking, by Takashi Shibuya

Takashi Shibuya was born in New York City, raised in Tokyo, and went to college in Portland, Oregon.  He continued with this tradition of globetrotting by heading to Hawaii, and most recently, to Panama, Ecuador, Chile, and Peru.  Not content to take standard photos of the scenery, he gathered up his friends to take the possibly the most hilarious and imaginative planking series since the meme debuted earlier this century.

Sometimes requiring a closer look, sometimes involving a good many animals, and occasionally requiring the assistance of traveling companions, Takashi Shibuya’s planking photos are anything but orthodox to the meme!

Beautiful Steampunk Altar Pieces and Jewelry by Portland Metalsmith Couple

Amy Buettner and Tucker Glasow of Portland, Oregon have taken the art of steampunk to a whole new level.  Not content to simply assemble period components together, they photoetch eldritch symbols into their surfaces.  Their pieces are primarily original metallurgy, not just “upcycled” gear.   They create elvish-looking latches and doors to house objects that would look at home next to an orrery or bonzai tree.   Best of all, their objects fuse the ancient geological with the modern industrial, creating that ephemeral bridge between nature and tech.

What is described here is their “Celestial Navigator – Steampunk Stargazing Kit”.

Highly ornate latch to the altar door

Ritual piece within the altar door.

Contents of the altar box

With the steampunk meme so abundant that even Justin Bieber’s producers have adopted it, it can be hard to find practitioners who do more than merely imitate the look and feel of one of the most beloved genres and fashions.  Amy Buettner and Tucker Glasow inject the art with more mystery and redefine the mastery of metallurgy.

Free Geek Portland’s Computing Nostalgia

All things scuzzy...

Free Geek Portland, located on 1731 SE 10th Avenue, is a great place to get computer parts that would otherwise be very expensive.  Recently we needed a parallel port cable and found one there for only $2.  Best Buy would probably have charged closer to $20, if it carried such a thing at all.  But lest this blog post become a Yelp review, it must be revealed that stepping into the Portland Free Geek was like walking into a 16th century curiosity cabinet that happened to be about computing.

Take for instance, these hard drives (that tiny thing in the middle is a present-day, internal, 100 GB IDE drive for a desktop).  The dude behind the counter said that the one on the right was a 100 MB drive from the early 1980s.

You could store a lot on 100 MB back in those days...

Or the Osborne 1, the first portable computer ever created – back in 1981.  Can anyone complain about the size of their screens today?  I imagine the early computer enthusiasts were akin to the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, plowing forward despite adverse conditions and lack of tasty foodstuffs.

Ancient Days of Computing

The next display had a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, from the same era as the Osborne (1981).  It didn’t even come with a floppy drive, yet it supported Pascal and even was capable of text-to-speech synthesis (if you’d get the right cartridge.  It was also the first 16 bit personal computer, with a processor running at blazing speeds of 3 mHz and 256 bytes of RAM.  Despite what we see as heavy limitations today, its users could play games such as TI Invaders (a nearly perfect clone of Space Invaders).

Also you can see the Teddy Ruxpin doll, a surprisingly complex toy for its age.  It used special stereo cassettes on which one track would play the bear’s voice, and the other would contain the data for its movements, using a kind of signal known as pulse-position modulation.  Luckily, Teddy could recognize his proprietary cassettes from regular ones (because of a hole), otherwise his body would probably go berserk if he’d try to interpret the other channel of that Michael Jackson tape…

TI-99/4A, the first 16 bit PC.

I didn’t photograph the more familiar computers – there was of course a Commodore 64 that made my heart cry out for the days of a blue command prompt screen, an Apple IIE and the first cute little Macintosh.  However, there was a lot of creativity taking place on the walls that caught my fancy, and I felt that it needed to be published for posterity.

I bet you didn't think to do this with your AOL disks...

Finally, they had this weird little diorama, “The Land of the Dinosaurs”.  I suppose that somebody had to keep up the tradition of Keeping Portland Weird.

Along with the parallel port cable, I also found a Fallout 3 collectible lunch box and the periscope-lens component of an overhead projector (you never know what you’ll end up building with such things).  It was a great thing, to be in a store that reeked of a very exclusive kind of nostalgia.  Free Geek Portland is a place like no other.

Occupy Seattle Results in Resolution 31337

I had the opportunity to visit the Occupy Seattle protest earlier this November, set up on the front lawn of Seattle Central Community College.  I expected there to be a lot of angry, aggressive people with holier-than-thou (or harder-working-than-thou) attitudes, but was surprised to find a much more peaceful vibe.  A fellow played a guitar decorated with visionary style art while a troupe of teenagers sang along.  Some people carried signs, others clipboards with petitions.  It was actually very quiet, and, despite rumors of homeless people appropriating the camp, not at all smelly.  The neat arrangement of tents and canopies were reminiscent of the Burning Man tent city, particularly when you include the kitchens and public meditation tents.  Seminars and yoga classes were held in beneath other canopies, and the kitchen was in the process of phasing out disposable silverware, enforcing a rule about bringing your own bowl and spoon.  Everything was amazingly well-organized, and all the more surprising as the protesters maintain their stance into the late fall in chilly Seattle.

Much of the conservative media is making the Occupy movement look like a lot of shabbily clad, disorganized, bored slackers.  The truth is that a physical presence is often the only way to get heard.  There’s nothing quite like a real, live person – or a whole lot of people occupying a space – to get your attention.  There’s a lot of debate as to whether or not the Occupy movement even means anything, leading some pundits to refer to themselves as the “98%” – neither the super-rich, nor the “lunatics out there in the streets”.  It’s so much easier to discount- even attack-  protesters aren’t blending in to what counts as “proper behavior” than to address the serious economic injustices done in recent years from which we all are suffering.  Why don’t they just go home?  They look like such idiots.  However, it’s important to remember that the most momentous advances in civil rights have been accomplished exactly by such civil disobedience.  Whenever we feel uncomfortable that relatively minor laws are being broken about camping out in a space, perhaps they should recall how trillions of tax dollars were swindled out of our collective pockets without anybody going to jail for it.  It certainly sounds trite to put it that way, but we’ve all got better things to do than to put down the Occupy movement.

There is tension now between the college – who wants the Occupy tenants out, claiming costs of $20,000 a day to the school in extra security guards and cleanup fees (it seems an absurdly high number) and the Farmers’ Market, located less than 200 feet down the block.  The Farmers’ Market is concerned with revenue loss, caused by people, oh, I don’t know, frightened away by the protests.

Yet even with these issues, the City of Seattle has shown solidarity to the Occupy movement, today passing Resolution 31337 (http://clerk.seattle.gov/~scripts/nph-brs.exe?d=RESF&s1=31337.resn.&Sect6=HITOFF&l=20&p=1&u=/~public/resny.htm&r=1&f=G) , containing passages such as:

“Section 2. The structural causes of the economic crisis facing our society require decisive and sustained action at the national and state levels. Cities are harmed by the crisis and must play an important role in the development of public policy to address it. By adoption of this resolution, the City Council commits to the following steps to minimize economic insecurity and destructive disparities:

1. The City will review its banking and investment practices to ensure that public funds are invested in responsible financial institutions that support our community. The Council may also consider future legislation to promote responsible banking and provide an incentive for banking institutions to invest more in our City, particularly with regard to stabilizing the housing market and supporting the creation of new businesses. This review should include evaluating City policies on responsible depositing and management of City funds.”

Though a dance party planned by the protesters was not able to acquire a permit, official recognition in Resolution 31337 is far more than the peaceful protesters in Oakland, Portland, or New York received.  It is a symbolic victory, and though we don’t know what the resolution will accomplish in the coming months, there is at least a modicum of comfort that in one city, the mayor was listening.

Improv by Nature

Florida physicist, engineer, and jazz musician Johnnie Tips made a recording of himself playing a positively sublime improvisation that defies genres.  On his Tumblr, he dedicates it to the 99% and writes,

“A personal improv composition while contemplating on the solidarity of natural systems, and the responsibility of people as super-organisms to regenerate and prosper in our quantum, unpredictable universe, where change is constant.”

Listening to this piece one can envision vast landscapes and narrow city canyons.  The rolling waves of the collective human experience and its discoveries.  The constant drive to create something new yet coexist with our nurturing environment so that others can continue to do just that.

John and I went to New College of Florida together, and I had the privilege of listening to him play at one of the school’s many public pianos on a number of occasions.  The fellow could roll out entire compositions like a master storyteller spinning a yarn – and would hold your attention the same way.  His other friends and I would then lie on our backs, listening and watching our minds expand under the influence of this musical soma.  This video is but a taste of those delicious times, and a glimpse of an undiluted musical genius.

How Medieval people used to save their information, or a Medieval PDA!

I was at Faerie Worlds 2011 in Mt. Pisgah, OR, when I met a fellow with an interesting leather case.  Inside, he revealed what he called a Medieval PDA – or a booklet of waxed pages.  The outer bindings were usually carved from ivory, though this one was cast using modern techniques.  Simply marvelous!

Russian Graffiti in St. Petersburg

The Graffiti of St. Petersburg, Russia

You can tell the richness of the local culture just by looking at its graffiti.  If the local riffraff rises beyond the simple name tags and expletives into well designed, premeditated, complex work, you’re in a place worth exploring.

St. Petersburg, Russia, appears to have a street art scene that’s teeming with creativity and humor.  Most of its historic buildings aged upwards of two centuries were left alone, but some streets resembled Newspaper Rock of American fame.  After you check out the Russian Museum and the Hermitage, it’s time to get a bit gritty with the works that pop up overnight like a fairy ring of mushrooms!

Something about paparazzi, I guess.

Ganesh

Most of the graffiti, like this Hendrix, were stencils.

An anti-nuclear waste (or weapons?) campaign. Translates to "Magic trick".

Another in what seems to be the same anti-nuclear series. Translates to (not exactly), "Yet these are flowers!"

Fantastic sticker work!

The mysterious further adventures of our stickers' protagonist!

Salvador Dali

The MENT are St. Petersburg's Militia.

A weird one...Translates to, "Let's go drink tea!"

Cool cat stencil

Elegant Wasp

Oh, you're just envious.

Looks like the zombie phenomenon is everywhere...

Little green men in St. Pete.

Abraham Lincoln in Russia?!

And of course, there is the attempt to translate an English curse into the local language.

The Wonderful Things About Spinning Fire

This is, of course, inspired by 1001 Awesome Things , but that blog will probably never write anything that’s fire-arts specific…so I have no choice but to take it upon myself to cover each luscious aspect of fire spinning.  Leave no lovely portion of life undocumented!

1) The whoof-whoof sound that the flames make as they fly around you, reminding you that you’re in the center of a serious force of nature as you spin.

2) Making trails, when the opportunity presents itself.  ‘Cause it looks like that scene in “Back to the Future”.

3) The smell of burnt hair, disgusting for anyone else, is a total turn-on for pyros.

4) Getting tiny burns that sting for a day and go away.

5) The awesome performance you give when you hear a song that overpowers you to the point where you forget everything else and just spin away, no mistakes, no faltering – one with everything.

6) The instant when you light your poi (or whatever you use) on fire, and the flames are gigantic, billowy, and slightly intimidating.

7) Virgin poi (or other equipment) and the greenish-yellow of the fresh Kevlar.

8 ) Watching your friends spin fire their first time.

9) Spinning by yourself…ommmmmmm.

10) Spinning fire in a natural setting without a lot of people around.

11)  When you’re burning on the beach, and a bit of fuel gets onto the wet sand, spreading itself all over the place.

12) Doing a bit of the competitive thing with your friends – seeing who can learn the most complex moves first – and then seeing someone who just started a few months ago completely overtake you in all realms.

13) Getting air wraps or hyperloops, whatever they’re called, to work.  It’s like a little bit of zen magic in the world as you tangle the chains and they untangle on their own.  Especially when you get it so well that it doesn’t make a sound.

14) Doing possibly the simplest of all moves, the wheel, and having your audience cheer really loud just then.

15) Being so entrenched in the fire arts community…and then doing a burn for people who have never seen it before. 

16) Finally, finally, getting that move down.

17) Spinning in the enclave of a burning effigy.

18) Having your safety equipment out but not ending up using it.  I believe this one gets taken for granted a lot.

19) Fire duels or duo performances!

20) Trying out a move you’ve never done before while on fire, and actually getting it right. (I do not advocate this practice!)

21) When total strangers let you use their poi and/or fuel.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

22) Being really wary of that dude who comes up to you asking to use YOUR poi, and ending up watching the sickest performance you’ve ever seen.

23) When it’s time to burn and the strange music ends up being surprisingly suitable.

24) Sweaty hugs with friends who have just spun.

25) That it’s like being inside a burning, 3-D spirograph.

26) When you spin at a party where you don’t know anyone, and have instantly broken the ice for making new friends.

27) The beautiful and bizarre fire gadgets some of your friends pull out at parties.

28) Being soot-covered and sweaty and not caring.

29) When it’s just rained and it’s a million times safer to spin.

30) Practicing…practicing.

 

Feel free to add anything that seems to be missing.

9 – Your Cute, Potato-sack Bodied Saviors!

Last night I finally went to see 9, which I’ve looked forward to since I first saw the trailer a year ago.  The organic, unorthodox animation held promise of a truly unique movie with as much imagination as the fictional creator of the numbered beings themselves.  *Sigh*.  Sometimes, it’s better to go see a movie you KNOW is going to suck, just for the special effects and explosions (such as 2012) – because at least this way you don’t walk away disappointed and heavy in heart.  9 simply did not deliver what its immensely beautiful and visually explosive exterior implied to contain.  It was like finding a box on Christmas day wrapped in holographic paper with tons of ribbons that had a knockoff toy from the dollar store.

The visualization was stunning.  The machines in 9 had their inner workings revealed enough to make it look believable – even familiar- despite its fantastic origin.  The potato sacks that were the bodies of the main characters looked coarse enough to touch, and their aperture eyes were truly endearing (a tricky feat in the day when there seem to be formulas for saccharine cuteness in all degrees of strength).  Possibly the best part was how these doll-sized beings handled mundane items and turned them into tools, weapons, and other items of every-day life.  Everything that was made from wood, metal, string and paper was rendered so lovingly that it possessed a tactility previously unseen in movies.  A tiny lightbulb was turned into the magic object of childhood that begged to be held and examined.

This is where 9‘s strengths end, sadly.

The characters (all numbered, 1 a stuffy minister, 2 an insatiably curious inventor/scientist, 7 a woman warrior) were undeveloped and spoke in dialogue that told the story but left nothing for the tastebuds to relish.  “You’re wrong.” “We’re going back.” “Look where your ways got us.” “You’re a coward.” “You know something.”  Sometimes, simplicity is good.  Dickensian elaboration does not a good story make.  In this case, the script was no better than most Saturday morning cartoons.  The archetypes were standard and easily recognizable- alien-like twins to an oppressive minister and his muscle, to the outspoken but typically dull hero.  Their relationships to one another were equally tired – don’t we already know that the church doesn’t like thinkers?  And that the hero will be bold and in-your-face with a kindergarden-level vocabulary?

And then there’s the villain.  Spoiler alert!

These days, even the youngest of movie-goers expects a slight twist in the array of villains and heroes.  Haven’t we evolved past plain, polarized definitions of good and evil to make one think for a moment?  The cyclopian machine that was the “bad guy” in the movie was perfectly sinister, malevolent, and was artistically rendered to appear just that.  As a storyteller and artist, I am thoroughly disappointed.  Great.  More bad machines that destroyed the world and are going to destroy it again.  Oh, great.  It kills and sucks out souls, too.  How absolutely orthodox, and DULL.

Possibly the most predictable, unlikable element in the plot that few stories dare to transcend is the idea of a limited yet essential form of energy.  In ’9′, it was the idea of the soul.  Though there seemed to be plenty of energy to operate a giant malevolent machine that built many descendants with their own sources of unlimited power, for a reason nobody dares to ask about, the potato-sack people can’t themselves reproduce – even when given the obvious means.  It’s the SOUL, dammit!  Independent from intelligence, strong enough to power a living being, an element we know nothing about or have completely fabricated – and yet few storytellers treat it as anything but limited.  One soul, one person (unless they’re possessed). And then there’s the whole ban on necromancy.

In essence, 9 has a plot line that’s standard and repetitive to the core.  Greedy humans, evil technology, cute little good guys who are not invincible and fight amongst themselves with the same outcomes.  Pretentious!  BORRRRRRRRRRRRRRING.  But looks pretty.

A Few Good Links

Ah, epic space photos, strange places to explore, beatnik blue cats, steampunk sculpture, and Russian cartoons from my childhood.  Here are some fascinating links for this week!

New Hubble Images

Hubble has tons of new images from the upgrades the telescope has recently received.  Many are high enough resolution that one can make homemade posters.

Atlas Obscura

An atlas where you can look up strange, less known things all around the world based on location.  Check out to see weirdness and beauty in your hometown and beyond – or add what others have overlooked.  Come to think of it, the Parvie Fault in Sweden needs to be added.

Pierre Matter – Opera Gallery,  Pierre Matter – sculpture photos

Steampunk lovers take note!   The photos don’t show the size of these amazing copper sculptures, Raie Mantheus being a flying manta-ray machine 8 ‘ wingtip to wingtip.  Painstakingly detailed and exquisitely beautiful, this guy practically defines the steampunk art category.

Nu Pogodi!

Classic Russian cartoon, a kind of Soviet-era Tom and Jerry except with a wolf and rabbit.  The title loosely translates to, “You just wait!”.   Filled with dozens of cultural references from that time, but universal enough for any non-Russian to understand.  Papanov, the vocalist of the wolf, is excellent and plays the acme of uncouthness.

The Cat Piano

Stunning beatnik animated short film narrated by Nick Cave.  It’s amazing that you can now watch award-winning animated shorts on the web instantly, rather than seeing clips of them at the Oscars and wondering where in the world you can watch a copy…for years on end.

That’s it for now, and don’t forget to check out my own art and photography site, www.dreamsandtravels.com.

Masha