Crisp Morning by Xinapray. From our Flickr pool.

Face pressing forward
into the glass mountain west,
through the train window

Thanks, Jeff, and enjoy!

Light Reign, a James Turrell Skyspace

There can be only one…

Triptych of the performance: On Hiding An Elephant In Plain Sight: A Performance Of Private Acts

Last night I stopped by Occidental Park in Pioneer Square to check out the Free Sheep Foundation’s art performance entitled “On Hiding An Elephant In Plain Sight: A Performance Of Private Acts.” This performance is described by the artists as:

D.K. Pan, NKO and Holly Brown explore the intimate relationship between reader, author and text. Featuring the words of Haruki Murikami’s “Wild Sheep Chase” (NY Times Book Review – http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/02/14/specials/murakami-sheep.html), two ‘authors’ transcribe the novel as it is read aloud: one pens on the exterior of the box truck (which serves as stage and ‘literary vehicle’), the other types the text on an endless roll of paper. The reader will be stationed atop the box truck, audible via a PA system. Accompanying the performance will be the Hanley Family Elephant Ear stand providing deep-fried goodness.

This overnight, endurance performance serves to highlight and expose the intensely private acts of reading and writing along with the conflicting desires they engender. The relationships of voice, hand, and typewriter become intertwined in the act of imprinting memory onto a public site. A silent transformation occurs, unnoticed. A box truck becomes an elephant, text escapes the confines of its pages; we awake from a dream and find ourselves at the beginning of a journey. Murikami’s tale of search, longing, and reconciliation serves as the point of departure for this performance action.

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Light Reign, a James Turrell Skyspace. Photo courtesy of the Seattle PI.

Next weekend, August 14th-16th, Seattle poetry press Wave Books, with the UW’s Henry Art Gallery, is hosting a poetry festival: three days of poetry, film, books, art, book arts, et cetera, et cetera. The event will feature Wave authors and take place in the Henry Auditorium, as well as the James Turrell Skyspace.

Authors scheduled to read are Joshua Beckman, Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Anthony McCann, Eileen Myles, Richard Meier, Maggie Nelson, Geoffrey Nutter, Matthew Rohrer, Mary Ruefle, Dara Wier, Jon Woodward, Matthew Zapruder and Rachel Zucker. Various authors will read 7 – 9 PM on Friday and Saturday, but all will read in the Skyspace on Sunday, 11 AM – 4 PM.

The festival is limited to 150 tickets, and run $50 for students, $75 for regular folks. A limited number of day passes ($25 each) are available for Friday and Saturday admissions only; there are no Sunday passes.

Also at the Henry next weekend is Ann Lislegaard’s 2062, a trilogy of digitally animated installations based on classic works of science fiction by Ursula LeGuin, J.G. Ballard, and Samuel R. Delany. 2062 closes August 23rd and really should not be missed. The other must-see exhibit is Chiho Aoshima’s The red-eyed tribe, a digital mural influenced and inspired by traditional Japanese painting, modern pop culture, manga, and kawaii.

The red-eyed tribe by Chiho Aoshima. Photo courtesy of Blum and Poe.

A fire at the Lawrimore Project yesterday torched SuttonBeresCuller’s There Goes the Neighborhood, a living room in a trailer that has been hauled into King County’s suburbs. No other artworks were damaged because of some remarkable consideration on the part of the firefighters, who moved some art works out of the way of their hoses and contained the water so that it didn’t flood the basement. It was an awfully thoughtful move on the part of the firefighters.

Lawrimore’s Spite House opens tonight: “SPITE HOUSE is an exhibition that will reveal invisible territories of spite. By articulating the threshold between spite-r and spite-e, the work in the show emphasizes that the vacillating polarity between these two extremes depends on how you scrutinize the property line.” The fire was accidental, but it had some interesting timing. In honor of it, the gallery will have a bar serving flaming cocktails set up in the charred back sculpture yard.

(Via Slog.)

Local environmental artist Buster Simpson has a long and rich history of creating art for public commissions as well as for private galleries and institutions, exhibiting his work in one-person and shared exhibitions, teaching and consulting on art from coast to coast and around the world. Among his many great public works are Whole Flow in Pasadena, CA, Offering Hat, Drinking Cup, and Illuminated Boat in Kansas City, MO, and Portal at WSU, not to mention Parable, Rosettarray, Ping Pong Plaza, Beckoning Cistern, Mobius Band, Water Table/Water Glass, Moment, Bio Boulevard and Seattle George Monument, to name a few of his works around Seattle and the Puget Sound area. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve probably seen his work.

In recognition of Simpson’s many contributions to public art, Americans for the Arts, a national organization to promote the arts which recently held its annual conference here in Seattle, recognized him with the 2009 National Public Art Network Award. This award “was created to recognize and honor innovative and creative contributions and commitment in the field of public art.”

Congratulations to Simpson; this is an honor truly deserved. Highly recommended is viewing his website to get a look at his projects on film and then going to them in person when possible.

a few pictures from saturday [flickr].

On Saturday night, people stretched around the block waiting to have a look at the insides of the Moore turned inside-out curated by the Free Sheep Foundation and featuring a wide range of Seattle’s finest. The event felt a bit like wandering through a haunted mansion, with paintings, performers, installations, musicians, and participatory experiences lurking in nooks, corners, balconies, and staircases of the century-old theater.
I’m not entirely sure that FSF is at their finest on a vast canvas not slated for imminent destruction; with security guards preserving our safety and the theater’s integrity, the possibility of the art overwhelming the crumbling walls, the visitors, the lengthy architectural monologue, and the set schedule was less present. This, though, is only a minor observation easily offset by the experience of ascending from stage to balcony to applause, finding artwork interspersed everywhere (I very much hope that they leave the back stairway untouched), seeing everyone toting watermelons throughout the hallways, and hearing the brass band bring our evening to a close. Congratulations to everyone who helped to pull it off.

Urania returns courtesy the Seattle School

James Moore built the Moore Theater back in 1907, giving the building a simple exterior so he could lavish attention on the ornate interior. The Moore’s lobby was built with mosiac floors, an elaborate ceiling fresco and carved wood, stained glass, marble, onyx and metal. One of the key components of the decorating theme was the carved representation of the Muses designed by architect E.W. Houghton.

If you’ve been to the Moore, you’ve seen the Muses, but did you ever notice that one of them is missing? Greek mythology says their are nine but the Moore only has eight. Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, was omitted from the theater since her area of influence has nothing to do with theater. You’d think they’d have included her for the (admittedly weak) pun of having “stars” appear on stage, but no matter: at long last, the muse is back with her sisters, at least for one night.

Urania Returns is a performance piece by the Seattle School that reunites Urania with her sisters in the Moore lobby. She will work out “elaborate equations using stars, architecture, and portraiture of attending audience members to satisfy calculations that none of us will understand, but all of us will eventually live through.” Per Seattle School, Urania’s a tricky sort of muse so her eight sisters (the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry, the muse of tragedy, the muse of written history, the muse of lyric poetry, the muse of music and dancing, the muse of erotic poetry, the muse of epic poetry and rhetoric, and the muse of sacred hymns and harmony) have been enlisted to help keep her in line.

Urania Returns happens from 6pm to 10pm on Saturday, June 20, and is part of the Free Sheep Foundation and Seattle Theater Group celebration of the Moore, Moore Inside Out. More than thirty artists and groups will be presenting installations and performances throughout the theater to celebrate and reinterpret the theater’s long history.

The NW New Works Festival begins this Friday, June 5 and runs through all of this weekend and the next. Tne NW New Works Festival is an annual festival of world premiere works by Northwest-based artists and ensembles.

Performances vary so much that there’s some thing to appeal to just about any taste. Works this year include an operatic solo performance that relates the story of a restaurant delivery man stuck in an elevator, a dance performance in which the two dancers demonstrate the vulnerability of sharing a home, and a video and audio presentation explores the intersections of sexuality, conflict, and attraction.

As an added bonus, showcases are reasonably priced, offering you a better and better value the more of them you attend. It’s still worth it to attend only one, too. For details and tickets, visit the On the Boards website.

The Original A. Birch Steen Muppets

Back when the Muppets were huge (and they really were huge) everyone had their favorite character: the one they identified with completely and forever. For the average 70’s teenager, Henson offered the psychedelic, totally out-of-it Muppet on shrooms who wore sequins and stared at goldfish tanks all day long. And the grandpa in your family could find commiseration with the the old men in the balcony. 

There were, of course, also plenty of fantastical, bizarre puppets in the early days of the Muppets, like the puppets of Planet Koozbane who mated by running towards each other and exploding in a plumb of smoke, and the slinky-like puppets made of plastic tubing who were there to “just dance,” as the song goes. But even these puppets were meant to appeal to a select niche of the audience: the eggheads like you and me who just want to watch things to try to understand the symbolism of everything. Too much wacky, too much egghead, too much satire, and the family wouldn’t be able to watch the whole show together gathered ’round the sole television. 

Jim Henson didn’t initially get in the game of puppeteering to ‘comment on society’. He just wanted to get on the teevee. His advantage as a puppeteer was that he didn’t know the rules, and didn’t know how many of them he was breaking. He cut the fabric for Kermit from an old coat his mom used to wear and it just so happened that Kermit’s head was the ideal shape for exploring hand movements; Henson could fiddle his fingers to make Kermit look perplexed, and he could also scrunch ‘em up to make Kermit’s grimace like he was sucking on sour grapes (Kermit often sucked on sour grapes as he was always ‘ever the diplomat’, picking up the mess of those around him). 

The Muppets ‘101′ lecture at EMP/SFM was a lot of fun, and not just because all of this Muppet history has been downloaded into my ‘noggin forever (Craig Shemin, staff writer for the Muppets since 1988, is a charming and memorable speaker with the familiar, guttural voice of a Muppet ). No, no, no: the reason why it was so exceptionally, incredibly fun was because the crowd was in such a Muppet luvy-duvy mood that I found myself watching old clips with a renewed interest, like I was the psychedelic Muppet staring at a goldfish tank and thinking “wow…fish”. I started thinking all these academic thoughts, trying to figure out why it was I was so drawn to Muppets and why puppets allow us to criticize culture while wearing a mask and what does parody mean and what does satire mean and what do all the puppets symbolize??? (I’ve since erased that portion of this essay due to…uhm…space constraints). But seriously: there was/ is something about that show that’s totally beguiling. 

You know what? Let’s just let the pictures do the ’splainin. 

Shocked

Angry / Happy

Love?

The Q/A portion of the show was equally entertaining. Question: “What is the official Henson stance on ‘Avenue Q’?” Answer: “We’re trying to distance ourselves from the character of Trekkie Monster, since we, well, we also produce Sesame Street. Henson doesn’t want to damage its goodwill with parents.” 

(Trekkie Monster, for those of you who despise / ignore / don’t care about musical theatre, sings a song in the Broadway musical Avenue Q about how he spends all night hugging his horn to “porn! porn! porn!” Trekkie Monster was created by the Henson company, along with the rest of the cast of Avenue Q. In fact, the creators of Avenue Q initially intended on creating a Muppet movie called “Kermit: Prince of Denmark.” Then they created Avenue Q instead. Which was probably a good call.)

Question: “How do y’all feel about Elmo hogging the spotlight?” Answer: “We’re happy for him, but we hope other puppets get their time in the spotlight, too.”

Then there were some boring technical questions I didn’t understand. Let’s skip to the last one, the one on everyone’s mind: “What’s next?” Aren’t the Muppets a dying franchise? Yes and no. They’re still getting gigs. For one, there’s an internet-only Muppet Cooking Show coming soon that will star everyone’s favorite Swedish chef and “an English speaking chef.” Also: Henson Alternative (”HA!”) is busy creating puppets for shows like Avenue Q…puppets who show their puppet boobs and talk about puppet porn. If you go to the ‘Henson Alternative’ page on the website, you can find a description of an upcoming show called “Tinseltown” about a gay puppet couple (one’s a pig, the other’s a bull). It looks bizarre and not funny.

Then there’s the contract with Disney, and Miss Piggy’s contract with places like “Anne Curry’s lap”, and, oh, yeah, Sesame Street…always and forever.  But here’s hoping the Hensons can find a way to entertain us the way the Muppets once did. Maybe it’ll involve more Muppet boobs, or songs about porn, maybe it won’t. Personally, I could watch old Youtubes of the balcony guys all day long and be perfectly content without Muppet boob. But that’s just me. 

There are 8 more Muppet-themed events at EMP/ SFM (through August 15th) and really, it sounds weird, but you should totally go. It was a lot of fun. Check out empsfm.com for dates and times and all that good stuff.