spectrum yum yum yum

a blog about rainbow colored things...
lots of nice images.
via laura gyre

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awesome bark

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_deglupta
looks like acrylic worked with a palette knife if you ask me... gorgeous... imagine growing this into a living space, like espalier but more three dimensional... even as an outdoor space it could be beautiful, especially closed off in portions with passion fruit vines or some such... but alas, the rainbow eucalyptus doesn't grow in pittsburgh due to the freeze, but it could work indoors...

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dance your asses off...

Well... so much dancing & fun... DJ Ripley & DJ/rupture both played my monthly D.J. night (awesome, the both of em...), checked out the Tomb Crew with my favorite local deejays, and i've been going nuts on the resurgence of tribal percussion in dance music... but it was seeing a Chicago juke video that reminded me of my promise to Olivia of Zafira Dance Company to write a post about my the influences on my dancing... While i can't do all of these moves, i can do a lot of em, and i try to combine them into a fusion that reacts to the diversity in a great deejay set. note: the music in these videos is somewhat secondary... i picked 'em for the movement primarily...

first, wicked fast juke dancers to set the mood. pure gold.



so the club is packed, you have to move, but how? here's some kuduro dancers, which interest me because they dance at 140+ b.p.m., a tempo range that's very au courant...



the guy at 1:59 in that kuduro video blows my mind... love that walking in place shit... anyway, speaking of kuduro... get some legwork tips from this one... swing those knees!



there is some arm and hand miming in that one, but really no hand and arm work is complete without peeping the master himself, flattop...



here's another with terrible audio, but a bit longer... he's really the best popper/locker/strober i know of... very flexible, too... does some yoga-like stalls...



that movement is really all about isolation... working different sections of your body without moving the others... something any tribal style bellydancer knows all about... Mel here kind of does what i'm talking about... though a bit more fluid obviously than a pop-locker... i've seen her perform with her partner from Kassar some way slower shit than this, which is my real fave.



here's another... it's again similar to (but not as good as) the utter badass slowness one might have seen from the mid 2000s Zafira girls... I'm sure they still rock that style occasionally, though it's been more raucus and balkan from them lately. Note: if you're looking for great bellydance troupes and links, start nowhere but this collection (right at the top are the women of Zafira, our local tribal style geniuses...)



while it's a bit more ass-centric, the dutty wine is another of these isolation-based dances. based in dancehall culture, it's a farily sexualized dance, that non-the less gets some real props in my book from a skill level. humorously, the wiki cautions that "Some doctors have warned against performing the Dutty Wine, claiming it may cause serious muscle trauma, and ligament damage." this white boy is unafraid.



to me this all starts to get combined in liquid dance, or basic rave dancing... before going too deep into the liquid stuff... let's start with a fairly clubby version of breakdance one finds at the better, more cosmopolitan dancing events. I saw this woman at DEMF 2007, and she's still great on youtube.



but yeah... liquid... often made fun of, but pretty fucking cool anyway... it's an adaptation of tai chi, and is all about continuous, fluid movements, often very arm & hand oriented... he's doing tiny bits of "tutting" here, too...



this guy's a bit stiff and isn't moving the rest of his body much, but this is a great example of the basic hand movements of classic rave dancing. i swear this evolved because of the tightly packed
dancefloors that don't allow for wild arm movements...



there are two dancers in this next one, and while they incorporate a ton of pop-locking and other breakdance styles, there is a liquidity here that's great... especially the second dancer. don't be fooled by how much of a dork he seems at first... mad skills!



no post about dancing would be complete without crip-walking... especially the transcendant foot-work at 2:39.



ok... some details. my dancing also contains some small details i think make a big difference... i take a cue from kathakali dancing in terms of face control...



hands: tiny fluttering movements that complete the tighter areas of the body's natural spiral... the belly dance name for it is "lotus hands" i can't find any better examples of this, but she basically does it. I'd like to think my version of this is cooler... a lot more cascading individual finger movement...



fingers: this guy does some finger tutting, which is really fun... i use tiny bits of these actions...



directions: the dancer has a lot of axes to work with... in this clip from james brown's pilot t.v. episode, future shock, this guy at 3:15 is dealing with time in a mostly 90 degree way, but with a ton of moxie and funk...



feet: while we're with james brown, he does some great sliding footwork in this video early on...



feet: of course, there's always michael's footwork...



someone has adapted the moonwalk to the breakdancing style "gliding"...



i do a think where i glide in a circle with my feet basically never leaving first position, but i can't find anyone else doing that. i realize i'll have to step up at some point and upload a video... it will take goading... anyway, interms of other dancingthen there's the stuff that i don't even pretend to incorporate, but i find terribly inspiring... there's the lindy hop:



and of course really bad ass breakdancers... my buddy jubz had some videos of aerialists that youtube has never bested, but here's an amazing windmill compilation i found:



even further there is the not-exactly dance movement that rocks my world, like capoeria:



sometimes the music makes me move slowly, like in tai chi:



and sometimes it's all about spirit... "duende", as flamenco would call it. maybe it takes just being goofy, just being energetic or whatever, but you have to feel it. here are some Rajasthani dancers (who feel it!) from the spectacular film, Latcho Drom:



P.S. (i'm sure i forgot some AWESOME dancing that I love... and some that isn't even my thing but still rules... so feel free to leave some more tips in the comments... i'll update this post if anything is really crucial!)

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two animal abstractions

a mostly meh collection of cartoonish adobe illustrator drawings yields these two gems of abstraction involving animals...

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"The Bird of Babylon" complete! (mostly...)

first, a money shot... (notice the piles of materials and tools below it!) this shot was taken after a 24+ hour art binge before the visionary arts festival...

second, a note on photography. this bird suffers a bit from under-documentation. for example, the only shots i have of the finished bird were taken in a severely sleep-deprived state, or by attendants of the arts festival. some day i'll have a professional photographer shoot it, but that will have to wait. also, i've marked all but the first two photos with a creative commons license... please link back here for any use... the bird says thanks!

The Bird of Babylon... it's a piece that's been knocking around my head for a while, so it's great to have it out of there and in the world... basically i've been collecting scraps of colorful trash for years in the hopes of making something out of them... when i found a huge cache of fake flowers tossed unceremoniously in the muddy landfill of a local cemetery, the piece just clicked... i could use the flower petals to make bird feathers...

i brought all the junk i had collected, along with a rotary tool and some knives, to my friend laurie trok's studio... she has a similar interest in junk and found materials, so it seemed a good environment to work on the piece. after an hour or so sorting through the bits and bones, it seemed obvious laurie should help with the project. while i brought her the idea of making a bird out of trash, she is an equal author of the final object...

at first we thought we could make something like a bas relief... mounted flat on a wall... the first sketches of the head reflected this idea. but upon playing with the stems from the fake flowers, it became clear that we had great material to make a complete sculpture. we made a simple armature out of just the stems pieces, but eventually created a stronger structure using four flower arrangement stands also found in the cemetery...

the legs, feet and interior structure are fairly visible in this shot.

the structure is mostly held together by the stems, a plastic coated bundle of posable wire, however we also used a good amount of obsolete intercom wire i pulled out of the penn avenue basement. the poking out ends of the stem wire and the intercom wire provided a useful base to attach the old knit cotton t-shirts for use as skin. by tightening the shirts into the sculpture, we created a convex and concave musculature...

the inner torso of the bird is lined with bright red leather from a golf bag... we hoped to make a visible interior area of the bird, with a smaller bird inside, and still may...

laurie knotted together the fabric around the tail to create a very naturalistic rendition of that area.

we then began experimenting with various feather making techniques. i was convinced that i would be able to sew the feathers together with the intercom wire, but this proved incredibly difficult and time consuming. laurie saved the bird with the strong suggestion to get over the fetishization of found materials and use some hot glue! we glued the feathers to each other, onto strips, and directly to the fabric skin...

the finished product is largely a concoction of the wire fabric and petal/feather technique, but other parts of the bird required some different techniques... the neck was created using some iridescent ribbon found at the cemetery, and was stuffed with some of the uglier flowers... the head was assembled using a combination of cut automobile panel, flowers and other trash wired together through drilled holes...

this shot shows a little of the front of the wings, which we left mostly exposed to show the armature... it also shows our pictures of the anhinga, the real bird we based the anatomy of our bird off...

this back shot above is high resolution - click here to enlarge!

this head shot above is high resolution - click here to enlarge!

a face only the artists could love! notice the shattered lighter used as the upper beak flap. my wife laura suggested we retain some of the ugliness of the trash and i hope to integrate more of that idea in the finished product... so that the piece says more than "trash into treasure". there is something important to me about the beauty and ugliness of "babylon", both as a reference to modern culture and to it's opposite, "paradise"...

this shot shows the top of the log we stood the bird on. the log is scarred by chainsaws, and seems an apt perch. the feet, claws and legs will be finished when we do the final installation of the bird wherever it finds a home. we've got some really sweet pieces for the claws... fierce!

me posing with the bird for scale.

so while there is some touching up and more details to add, like the feet, the inner chamber and the final perch... the bird exists now... the theory behind it has changed and evolved through the process, through collaboration and will change even more in the final presentation, but there is no escaping the image of a phoenix arising out of the excesses of babylon, the natural world insisting upon space to spread it's wings...

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that veiled gazette #369

blogging is hard...

it's been a long time since the last digest... a lot of current events have passed, scandals, debates, triumphs, miseries... i'm not going to touch on most of them... but only share with you the fragments i collected in the meantime... just things i dragged into the ever-over-flowing folder of "blog ideas" on the bookmark bar... blogging has been a weird fit for my current efforts, and there has been much talk and some action on quitting the internet around me... BUT, i feel the flame hasn't died quite yet... and we'll see where this shrouded deer leads us next.

quality performance art...

ART, FASHION : fascinating article about faking a vermeer... old pal's art on boing boing video... dj ripley has been posting a lot of great jamaican fashion from her trip there. here, here, here, here, and here. flower mandalas and other decent new-agey art. speaking of new-agey (old-agey?) this celtic talismanic jewelry reminded me of calder's contour drawings of animals. this guys design is supercolorcleanskillz. subway mind fuck art. did you know that motorcycles used to look WAY cooler? here's good billboard mod. and more book sculpture.. this time a face. the results of this camera art are boring, but the idea is good. more pretty art on basic sounds... also, van gogh didn't cut off his ear... it was gauguin!

MUSIC: flute-boxing. daichi-boxing. woman-boxing. competition-boxing. music of colombia via geko jones. love this guy's tabla style. blue daisy sounds like flying lotus, burial and a nice hum. great new mellowish dubstep artists here, here, and here. afro punk interview. LOVED this 10 essential wiley tunes article. poppy music blog. lovin' this old school jam. wendy carlos interview (if you don't know about her, you need to read up...) a bonus for those who actually read these digests, i picked my favorite brian eno tracks off his first four pop albums and put them here. old buddy from college's remix site, remixin. skweee... get hip. oh, and can someone please toss me khalid's secret eq chart?... yeah, thanks.

90 degree angles get old quick...

ARCHITECTURE, ECO, DIY: holy shit, dangerous tea house! splendid, extensive collection of beautiful and bizarre houses... including the one above... great inspiration there for designing or remodeling buildings (both of which i've been doing recently)... i've posted before about art made with books, including shelves, but here's a cool upside-down book shelf design... LED lights can now do pretty much every color... some interesting eco work... saw it on the colbert report... ceiling porn. bottles and cob. laundry water greywater system. other bizarre houses and furnishings chronicled in dornob magazine.

one of many real angels...

SEX: i continue to be interested in finding a way to fit sex into this blog. i enjoy it being mostly family friendly... but there's something to the eroticism of brian's blog that helps counterpoint the brutal truths and mystic bliss. apparently obsession with sex goes back some ways. anyway, as erotica goes, mod fetish tends to be more artful and interesting than most, but is mostly just photos of naked women... i guess there's just a big part of me that would rather be naked at burning man... and that's about all the sexual openness i can muster for the moment.

ALEXANDRIA IS OPEN, GREATSITE, TECHNOLOGY : the pirate bay just got sold, but that's o.k. because google is the new pirate bay. it's a silly issue, because pirates buy more music than non-pirates. this is a nice collection of rainbow design tutorials, (including how to make lines like in the picture above). good source of high res photojournalism is the boston globe's big picture and the wall street journals photo journal. I always enjoy looking up words on the online etymological dictionary (try magic!), but the urban dictionary is indispensable for slang (try hyphy!) dig the voting process. yeah, yeah, change the internet forever... and phones. i'm up in the air about internet privacy issues, but this tool seems to make it simple to stalk. oh, and if you're going to waste time playing video games, this one helps map proteins...

BABYLON, POLITICS : the g20 is in pittsburgh soon, and that fucks with me... mostly because i have some outspoken anarchist youth using my first floor to feed people and have meetings, and cops love to fuck with innocents. grr. obama - he releases some important secrets, blocks other important secrets. i could do a whole post just on how complex my feelings are about obama and the new senate... among the issues are the "two" wars... the cronyism going on that he campaigned against, and the fact that the soldiers are still being told to "hunt people for jesus". (of course the bush era version of this was far weirder... really, really weird.) after 5 years, portugal's drug decriminalization has produced some seriously positive results. did you know that as many people are making their living from blogging as are from being lawyers? old bomb scars. face transplant successful (warning, graphic images) here. old castes in newly revealed maps... constant police brutality. how will the newspapers survive? there's no huffington post without the new york times, so can the grey lady stay alive by being a non-profit? REX84... yuck. and google beware.

WEIRD, SUFI: plants can recognize genetically identical cuttings... i'm a big fan of rumi... and never heard him weigh in on hallaj until reading this poem. great zen motivational poster from the great mojo1000. weird water properties. weirder other substances, including the ferro-fluids in the video above. earliest bible online for free. gurdjieff's long gone, but a movement technique not unlike his exists(youtube)... tap the wisdom of the crowd. it appears having religion is good for your health... remote viewing experiment - hey, you don't have to convince me. mentalist whoops master chess players(youtube). remember, death is milliseconds away.

seriously...

HUMOR: stephen colbert in iraq... i had profoundly mixed feelings about the whole thing, partially because apparently conservatives don't realize stephen colbert is joking (seriously!) laura and i were hurting from laughter watching this old snl thing. this may not be funny to some, but a lot of people got weirded out when amazon dropped all of it's search results for gay and lesbian books, but it may have just been one lone hacker making a "point" facial hair contestants. mark twain motivational posters. funny silhouettes. married to the sea.

VIDEO: parkour (first 7 seconds AMAZINGZOMGWTFAWESOMESOX)... free running... speed stacking... psychedelic yoooooouuuutube... and now witness a baby give a fiery sermon. it's not what you say, but how you say it, apparently:

PERSONAL, POINTSOFPROCESS: mixing dirty was named as a tie for mix of the year. I've got a brand new deejay night, which i'm gonna call "The Garden of Earthly Delights". Way more details (and previews of the gorgeous flyers i made) coming. as i've been blogging less, i've mostly been tossing little tidbits on facebook. i post compelling images in an album called "incarnations", and some art in an album called "art i like" Some links that probably aren't here are here on facebook. maybe i'd have more time to blog if i had a monkey babysitter. but seriously... kids are awesome. i love my son... he's such a joy... and we're having another in february. but then that's enough. two will do... i'm travelling now to take him to see his 6 grandparents... which is why i have the leisure to blog. pittsburgh too hot! i-man haffi cool out, up on the mountain top...

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the bird of babylon

i've been working on a sculpture with laurie trok for the visionary arts festival i call the "bird of babylon". it's made entirely out of discarded materials... the bulk of which comes from a disgusting landfill in the allegheny cemetary... wire flower tripods for armature, fake flower stem wire for connective tissues, sun-bleached fake flower petals for feathers... an old boot, crushed lighters and other plastic crap for beak and other anatomical details. just two days ago we finished the under-structure...

...and designed the method we'll use to feather the bird... they're glued down for now on strips of fabric, but we'll sew them in strips and lay them over each other to create the illusion of wings... it's a lousy photo and only covers two strips, but we've got lots of colors of leaves and petals to repurpose...

we've done a prototype for the head which will likely be dis- and re- assembled with less junk... and a terrifying beak!

there are several esoteric aspects of this piece that aren't visible here and i won't reveal yet... but it's more than trash into treasure!

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the love of Kjersti Andvig & Carlton A. Turner...

When Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig initiated a collaboration with someone called Carlton A. Turner, who at the time was on death row in Texas, she aimed to expose a system which she perceived as a unjust mix-up of right wing politics, strange religious beliefs and cruelty. After their artistic work had ended, they fell in love.

"State-administered death is always a greater horror than any other by virtue of the methodical reasoning that precedes it. French philosopher Albert Camus wrote that "capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. "For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life."

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via

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works in progress...

massive Music organization

and many Painting efforts,

including "Springtime in

the Desert of Al-ʿAẓīm",

pictured (incomplete)

here July 6th 2009.

click to enlarge:

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love.

due to some beautiful love from (one of my favorite bloggers and teachers) brian today, i feel i should make a quick post for any recent vistors... regular readers will know i've been a busy bee recently, and posting has fallen by the wayside... fear not! my wife and i begin two weeks of art and creative pursuit monday. blogging is included in the list of important fun to have.

but for now here's a taste...

• here is a mandala I made recently:

here is a song i've been really digging... it's a dubstep remix of a folk tune. it's pretty and broken. i bought it (& "soundkilla"!) and you can too over at maxulis.com

(mp3)max ulis - "i don't want you"

here is my little sister's new blog. she just graduated high school and is one sharp cookie. she's a writer, and artist, a free thinker and is just starting out... follow her journey there.

here is the michael jackson video that moved me to write brian... watch the eyes, people. bliss.

oh... and here's an 11 year old graffiti artist she's good! I have so much more to write, about michael, about iran, about all the things i've been saving up while busy working with my hands and my neighbors... but it will have to wait till next week. peace, my bredren and sistren.

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that veiled gazette #349

editor's note: sorry for the delay getting out this issue. i've been super busy, so blogging has been hard to get to, but admittedly i've also been a little geeked out on using facebook for the first time. finding old friends, writing letters, posting little things for them, becoming a "fan" of hummus, etc... for real though, it has been fascinating watching people from completely different periods of my life talking with each other. not that that doesn't ever happen here, but, well, it's a different audience. i love you both, and that veiled gazelle isn't going anywhere...

painter in bangladesh, via wall street journal's picture of the day

ART: the delicate special works of rachel sumpter. the composite (time not space!) photography of peter funch. the (street art blog) wooster collective truly continues to put out great stuff. check out sally's blue wall or this colorful wheatpaste. my old friend fran (thank you, facebook) documented a cool piece that involves ink drawing on walls and an air compressor. design is fun, but "hyperbolic bronnerism" is even more fun. it's a little hard to navigate, but the site neocha is a collection of independent chinese culture. also, check the vibrant, subtley pagan, mucha-like (mostly) nudes of svetlana valueva. also, while he's a bit miffed about watchmen (his work, originally...) that's o.k., because alan moore is a super-genius. witness video (direct link here):

MUSIC: wizards are better posts some good bassline & dubstep stuff (and some hipster crap). are you annoyed that pirating music takes so much time? take the wait out with skipscreen. blackdown makes a mind map on the origin of scenes. promotion services for world musicians. frieze article by dj rupture on the "decline" of digging. also, i hadn't heard about soul singer phyllis hyman, but she's got a nice voice (video) (and is from pittsburgh!) three more youtube music links here: kinsmen (indian jazz ensemble), carl craig classical remix, and some ethiopian heat. anyway, i've been posting A LOT of DUBSTEP. so here are seven songs that aren't:

(mp3) atom™ - "wellen und felder II" - bizarre, yet entrancing ambience from uwe!

(mp3) dinosaur l -"go bang" (walter gibbons mix) - classic arthur russell material

(mp3) amon tobin - "twelvses" - throwback gorgeousness, not two fingers style

(mp3) morteza - "morteza"? - weird iranian pop i was given for my nouruz gig

(mp3) isoleé - "a nightingale" (original mix) - abstract & beautiful tech-house

(mp3) hermutt lobby - "play" - twisted, wonky, slow glitch-hop type shiznit

(mp3) jakes - "swerve" - fun drum n bass track... with an mc! ~1996 style?

your's truly spinning at global beats march 2009. photo by carla.

TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE, DIY: great rhyme writing resource in writerhymes. inflatable hood for sleepy travelers. do dumb shit to photographs with pikipimp. laura's always been a proponent for local currency... learn about algebra (i forgot all mine in art school...) create large wall posters with little printers. nice home-made picture frames out of jars. and for the record, artificial life could be created within 5 years, whatever that means...

ECO: meditate on the size of the earth and how lucky we are. 25 reasons why you should consider earth-sheltered technology. paris is grey, and sarkozy has a plan. another weird plan on the table for global warming issues. or is global warming all a hoax? i dunno, i'm not a scientist... something tells me that it's not a bad idea to act like it's real, if only because we might help with the bio-diversity problem. good soy milk recipe. candle-powered heat? i don't live in these cities, but: space in detroit. space in baltimore. i found some nice eco stuff on chelsea green, including this article on the case for "small" hydro-electric power.

british kid in thailand, via wall street journal's picture of the day

BABYLON, SCANDAL, POLITICS: you know about Carnivore and ECHELON, right? their giant spy networks that troll everyone's communications for these words, among others... well there is at least one more ghost-net recently discovered, this time in china. here's what you might look like to your government. there are some sneaky shenanigans in the obama copyright treaty... france is ready for rebirth of the "violent left"... that's a hilarious article, but to be fair, they have had some history of awesome riots (which in turn left us a lot of slogans.) there's been a tiny crack made in the travel restrictions to cuba, but then there's the wholeembargo thing. why? chomsky has some ideas on that... also an OLD scandal may be getting some light shed on it.

SUFI, WEIRD: perfect memory, anyone? bahauddin's book sounds pretty great. my friend found one of the (super rare) copies ofthis book in a junk shop... still haven't seen it yet. for free, an archive of female sacred poets. amazing horse dancing in pakistan (video... jump ahead for the fast parts.) the thousands of inscriptions are getting translated, finally. i'm starting to think i ought to learn a bit more about ramon llull. creationist science fairs... first prize in the high school division actually sounds pretty interesting... top ten secret scientologists. get your daily weird at the daily grail. finally, the sisters of perpetual indulgence celebrate 30 years.

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