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These crowded scenes, and the mysterious alchemy of their shape systems, have not always been Baker's subject. As recently as 2012, the artist concerned himself equally obsessively with painting empty rooms, and he still speaks eloquently on behalf of those images of uninhabited interiors, saying, "a painting without any figures is generally easier to sell. It's like the picture is asking the viewer to come in, and through buying it, this space that the artist has painted becomes their room." So, why the shift away from these marvelously intricate, colorful, and apparently very sellable interiors? For his answer, Baker steps to the Rembrandt, and says, "I'm not naturally good at drawing figures, but I know that by transcribing these great paintings I am bound to learn something. One thing I discovered from copying "Night Watch" was that Rembrandt really mastered the moment. Look at the main figure -- the shape hanging from his right hand is his left glove, which he's taken off to make a point. In terms of the moment depicted in the painting, that just happened, and so did the drumming behind him, and so did a gunshot from one of the figures on his other side. It's like boom, tap, pow -- all of these things happened at once." Watching as Baker moves around in front of these large canvases, gesturing like a Night Watch captain to make his points, I'm struck by how strong a contrast this shift in his subject matter really is. You don't get 'boom, tap, pow' in an empty room.
The other thing Baker learned from copying was something he calls "getting the whole painting active." "You've got to create a democratic surface" he explained, "there has to be energy and information everywhere." Although it's not the only finish he uses, Baker consistently employs a big palette knife to achieve this "democracy" of visual interest. He uses the knife not so much to scrape as for a kind of controlled horizontal smear of the still wet surface. Although the gesture estranges the representational image from its referent, it also activates the image. Baker describes how the smear works for him by saying, "David Hockney said that the eye wants a clean edge, and I agree, so you'll see many clean edges in what I do. But I also like to use the big knife to free things up. Moving the paint with it helps me eliminate the brushstroke, which can become something of a cliché, and that in turn allows me to not think too much when I'm painting figures, because I know that in the end, I can pull the image a bit and get that exciting distortion."]]> Baker describes his technique with the big palette knife in a way that recalls his enthusiasm for Rembrandt's moment. "It's very experimental," he says of the smear "in the sense that I never know for sure that it's going to work that time. When I set up to make that pull across the fresh paint, there's always the chance that I'll end up wrecking several hours of work. When it's good, it gives that art hit that you crave, that feeling of something great happening in a single instant. When it works, you get instant mystery and motion."
Baker demurs at the suggestion that the knife technique constitutes a style, saying, "style -- now that's the word that would condemn it completely." But after reaching this Wildean moment of critical self-consciousness, Baker becomes self-conscious in a more ordinary sense, adding that he has "only so much" to say and no more about his work because "a painting should be seen and not heard."
No sooner has he said this than Baker's conversation naturally flows back to the wellspring of his current creativity, Rembrandt's "Night Watch." "You've got to understand that this represents the spirit of the reunited Netherlands," he tells me, gesturing at the carnivalesque group in the painting. "It was in essence a republic, and although there was an aristocracy, there was not a royal family or a royal court in the same sense that there was in the other Western European nations at the time. These people that you see mustering here, and creating this kind of chaos, they are an important representation of democracy." "It's total chaos," Baker says, smiling, "which is what democracy is."
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Top Image: Chris Baker, "Pacific" 2014. Oil on canvas.]]>
THE ODYSSEY PROJECT - a journey home from Global Access Media on Vimeo.
Michael Morgan looks every bit the successful actor that he is -- a tall man with chiseled features and an easy smile, he radiates the kind of calming strength and natural leadership necessary for blending these two distinct populations. "I see it as my mission," he told me. "We are taking two institutions of the state of California -- UCSB, with all the sense of privilege and entitlement that would seem to stand for, and the correctional system, with all the negatives associated with that -- and bringing them together into one powerful, unpredictable new whole." And it is not without its risks. As one veteran gang prosecutor and observer of the California prison system remarked, "it can be very hard to raise money and get support for programs like this. People look at the metrics on this age group --16 and 17 year old male offenders -- and the recidivism rates are so high that no one wants to take them on. If the numbers are bad, it makes it hard to look like you are having an impact when the time comes to reapply for that grant." Yet Morgan is undeterred. If anything, he relishes the challenge of changing the lives of those who others have deemed too hard to reach.
The training takes place over an action-packed six week summer session, during which the boys are brought onto UCSB campus in a van by a probation officer for class every weekday. For the first three weeks, the students write, using their own experiences to elaborate on and draw parallels with the adventures described in the "Odyssey." In weeks four and five, a team of mentors arrives to coach the group in dance, martial arts, and masking, as they develop their scripts into something that can be staged. In the final week, they perform, typically one time only, in a real theater in downtown Santa Barbara, and for an audience of friends, family, UCSB students, and not a few probation officers.
When asked about the mechanics of the process, Morgan is quick to say that it's geared very specifically towards the task at hand. For example, he says, "I don't expect them to read the "Odyssey" -- instead I tell them the stories to get things started. They will confront enough of the text when it comes time to learn their lines." While explaining the process, Morgan slips almost imperceptibly in and out of the manner he uses with his students. At one moment he's telling me that when he sits down to tell them a story from the Odyssey, he "likes to have something in mind about where I'm going with it," and the next he's demonstrating, saying that "Odysseus came out of the long years of the Trojan war a winner, and even though he knows that the best thing would be to go straight home afterwards, he can't resist making one quick stop on an island, Ismaros, for a little raping and pillaging. What he doesn't know is that by doing this, he is angering Zeus, and bringing down the curse on him that will make his journey home so long and difficult." And that's when Morgan breaks off and asks the first of many questions to his mixed audience of college students and juvenile offenders: "have you ever not gone straight home even when you knew that would be the best thing to do?" From there the group is off and running.
While the impact of the program on the boys of Los Prietos is only beginning to be analyzed -- these young men are often difficult to track once they are released -- the impression it's made on the participating students from UCSB could hardly be more dramatic. When I met with six of them in Morgan's office in the fall of 2013 I was stunned by the intensity and downright reverence with which they regarded the transformative potential of the theater experience. Clearly this work engages them on a very deep level. Through their encounters with these young men they sense the reach that two competing total institutions -- the prison and the gang -- can have in the life of a young man. On the one hand, the boys are rowdier and more difficult on days when a probation officer they don't like accompanies them. "If they feel he disrespects them," one young woman said, "they are going to act up." This makes it difficult to work. At other times, like in trust exercises in which participants much hold hands, the subculture of the gangs rises into plain view. Two boys from rival gangs will not shake hands, even as part of a play, because "there are eyes in the room that will see and report it," said one of the UCSB students who witnessed this.
Beyond the awareness of other ways of life that these encounters create, there's an additional perspective on their own lives that many of the UCSB students shared with me. "I support myself, and I got to UCSB after going to community college" said one young woman, "and it was a surprise to some of these young guys that this was even possible" she said. "They said they didn't know you could do that." According to Morgan, part of the goal of the program was to allow the sense of possibility that the college students experience become something that the boys from Los Prietos can share.
Ultimately, the most powerful lesson for the UCSB students centers on the tremendous disadvantages of bearing a social stigma. As one of the participants from Los Prietos wrote in a piece he called "the Cyclops' prayer," "you may see me as a monster, but I have a big heart." These young men exhibit multiple self-limiting ideas and behaviors when they arrive -- crosstalk during class, taking all direction as criticism, an inability to remain focused -- and there can be no doubt that such tendencies have grave consequences for them. But exploring the idea of a hero's journey home in a safe environment alongside people who do have these skills may be just the thing that will help these young men discover for themselves an expanded idea of what's possible.
For more information about the Odyssey Project, and to view a short film about it, visit:
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Top Image:Odyssey Project at UCSB | Photo courtesy of Michael Morgan.]]>
It's 21 feet tall, and weighs 12.5 tons, but even back in 1991, when it was erected, the Chromatic Gate had a somewhat retro feel to it. Herbert Bayer had come to Montecito to retire, with his legendary work mostly behind him, including ad campaigns and corporate logos for some of the world's biggest companies, all in his crisp, clean Bauhaus-trained idiom. In Los Angeles, Bayer created Double Ascension, the bright orange painted steel sculpture that sits atop the fountain in the City National Plaza at 5th and Flower. When it was installed in 1974, Double Ascension, which Bayer wanted to call Stairway to Nowhere, a title that ARCO rejected as at odds with their mission, was the first work of public art in the renovation of L.A.'s downtown. It was cutting-edge in its day, and Double Ascension remains one of downtown's most recognizable landmarks. But how appropriate was it as a model for public art on what is otherwise a pristine waterfront, with no skyscrapers nearby to give it a context?
Enter Paul Mills, the dynamic director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from 1970 to 1982, and a tireless promoter of California art throughout his distinguished career. Mills befriended Bayer, and when the opportunity came to seek funding from ARCO to erect a public sculpture in Santa Barbara, Mills leapt at the chance and championed the exposed waterfront location. Soliciting funds both from the oil company and from an array of local patrons of the arts, Mills succeeded in procuring the Chromatic Gate for Santa Barbara. Without his stewardship, this sculpture, which is dedicated to the artists of Santa Barbara, would never have happened.
So, what did the artists think of it? Not all of them were pleased. Hank Pitcher, who is probably the best known living Santa Barbara artist, has been an outspoken critic, citing the work's location as disruptive of the natural beauty of the shoreline, and its jarring geometric challenge to the more sinuous contours of the ocean in front and the hills behind. When it was created, Chromatic Gate retained the Bauhaus rigor of Bayer's L.A. work Double Ascension, but added the further 70s touch of a rainbow of colors, each painted with the glossy finish of a well-waxed Detroit muscle car. That glossy look was not to last. Decades of wind and rain wore away at the Gate, leaving its bright surfaces faded and its edges tinged with rust. By the end of the 20th century, the Gate was a shadow of its former self, and the park in which it stands had become a place where the homeless gathered to lay in the sun and relax on the grass. For those who were staying at Fess Parker's plush resort hotel across the street, or visiting nearby East Beach, the Chromatic Gate was well on its way to becoming an eyesore.
After several years of preparatory efforts, the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, the City Arts Advisory, and Visual Art in Public Places succeeded in forming a coalition capable of restoring the Chromatic Gate. Many people and groups in the community came together to raise the more than $75,000 that the restoration cost, and to create an endowment to fund the future maintenance of the work. After an initial $10,000 donation challenge was made by David Jacoby of the Jacoby Family Fund, generous donations were made by the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation, Jon and Lillian Lovelace, Santa Barbara Beautiful, Inc., the Resnick Family Foundation, Inc., Anne and Michael Towbes, and the Santa Barbara Inn. Patty Dominic and the Arts Fund organized a "Save Our Rainbow" campaign that raised awareness and brought young people into the group as well. When the money raising phase was complete, the Arts Commission hired Patty West's South Coast Fine Arts Conservation Center to advise on the restoration, and Michael Fitzpatrick Auto Refinishing to come in and completely repaint the sculpture -- an arduous process that was frequently delayed by wind and other weather issues. Painters Taylor Smith, Ruben Mijangos, Marcello Santiago, and Fernando Silva devoted hours to sanding, resurfacing, priming, and painting the Gate until, on Monday, July 15, it was once again ready for its close up. The unveiling ceremony featured a half dozen speakers including Paul Mills' son Mike, who is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Mike Mills' 2010 film, "Beginners" told the story of his father's coming out after his mother died in 1999, and the sight of Mike Mills standing in front of this immense and shining metal rainbow gate, and talking about his dad certainly resonated on many levels. For Mike Mills, the rededication of the Chromatic Gate, which now not only honors the Santa Barbara fine arts tradition, but also his father's leadership of it, was an occasion to reflect on the extraordinary powers of persuasion with which Paul Mills pursued his vision.
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Top Image: Photo by Nell Campbell.]]>
It's an exciting time to be involved in this project of historical documentation, as, unlike the archives of many comparably important art movements, the records and objects that define California's taste and style from the Gold Rush onwards remain in many instances scattered and disorganized.
Consider for example the suite of watercolors by Edwin Deakin that is currently on view (through June 30). Deakin created these beautifully harmonious and understated studies of the missions of California in the final years of the 19th century; they were intended for a book project that never came to fruition. Deakin himself, aware of the extreme delicacy of the colors, particularly the blues, in these images, sewed them up neatly in a black cloth bag designed to keep out all light. There they remained, unseen for nearly seventy years, only to turn up first in an East Bay storage facility, and then in the hands of a private collector who has loaned them to the gallery for this show. Images of the missions are of course ubiquitous, but few are as fresh or as mindful of the historical moment as these quietly intense paintings. The colors are so intense, the skies so real, and the ruins so carefully observed that it can be a shock to recall that they were made over 100 years ago.
Deakin was one of the many artists and writers to take up the project first popularized by Helen Hunt Jackson's novel "Ramona" (1884), and later codified by Los Angeles journalist, author, and tireless booster of the Southwestern lifestyle, Charles Fletcher Lummis. As the city editor of the Los Angeles Times in the 1880s and 1890s, Lummis pursued a vision of Southern California that idealized the Spanish colonial period as a lost paradise of pastoral living, yet employed this image to market the state to the incoming masses who would make his Spanish feudal landscape over into 20th century suburbia. As an acolyte of Lummis and the Spanish myth that he propounded, Edwin Deakin, armed with nothing more than a palette, an easel, and paints, set out on a pilgrimage to paint all the California missions. More than most, he succeeded in making this cult of the mission into something specific, permanent, and real, avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentality and sensationalism by working much of the time en plein air and adhering to a strict program of observation and reflection.
In images such as "Nuestra Senora de la Soledad," Deakin plays the angular bare ruined choirs of a neglected structure off against the rugged landscape in which it tenaciously hangs on. The missions are the heroes of these depopulated images, bravely testifying to the undying spirit of those mostly imaginary forerunners that Charles Fletcher Lummis liked to call "the Spanish pioneers." Insofar as the mission culture provided a blueprint for a modern society, these claims were perhaps fantastical, but, as Deakin and other proved with their art, California did indeed have a verifiable and eminently useful Spanish past. The great and powerful paradox of the Spanish Colonial, or Mission Revival style is here stripped to its essence, as nothing says "stability" like a cohesive set of ruins. By traveling the old route of El Camino Real, and making the pilgrimage that once defined the vocation of the Franciscan fathers, but with the important difference that he would be doing so as an advocate of art, rather than religion, Edwin Deakin merged with the single strongest cultural current in the history of the state, a dream of order, dignity, and coexistence with nature that takes as its primary symbol a rustic mission, isolated, often decaying, but still alive with the sights and sounds of the landscape. See, for example, the swallows circling the cross in Deakin's "San Francisco Solano," or the variegated canopy of trees that relieves the repetitive arches in the façade of "San Juan Bautista." By capturing these moments, Deakin set other dreams in motion, and even today, those fantasies of freedom remain potent symbols of the life that California continues to promise.
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Top Image: By Edwin Deakin]]>
Parmet, whose work has been shown at the Annenberg Center for Photography in Los Angeles and the Carpenter Center for Art at Harvard University, as well as galleries in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Paris, was not always an artist in this sense. She began taking pictures in college, and was inspired by a great teacher to go to graduate school in journalism and become a working photojournalist. Parmet was part of a generation that believed that, with the right images, they could change the world. In many ways, they did. "I got out of the school of Journalism at the University of Missouri during the Vietnam War, and some of my teachers there had been photojournalists covering the Civil Rights movement. In both those situations, you felt like the work had influenced history. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, for example, my mentor was Will Counts, who took the famous photos of Elizabeth Eckford, the young black teen who was one of the students to integrate Little Rock High School. They are considered among the most influential images of the 20th century." As she talks about those heady days for journalism, I look around and absorb the way that the newsroom's urgency still lingers in the workspace Parmet has created for her fine art. A desk with a computer sits at the top of the stairs, acting as a command post from which the entire space can be surveyed in a glance. On the room's longest wall hangs a giant figure composed of multiple tiles of cloth pieced together with safety pins. This big photo-assemblage exudes a mixture of mystery and sensuality, and has the presence of something much older, like an ancient tomb carving in stone that has somehow manifested again through photography, cloth, and composition.
During what we agreed to call "the long 60s," referring to the anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, and other protest movements of the 1970s, Parmet covered a lot of demonstrations. "I wrote, shot, and laid out my own stories," she said, "and I went wherever there was news." After a series of positions in such east coast cities as Baltimore, Parmet moved to Santa Barbara in 1978, when the city was still in its golden age of populist environmental activism. While working at the Santa Barbara News & Review, Parmet reported the protests that derailed the proposed Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) project at Point Conception in 1979. "We slept out there to cover that story" Parmet recalls, referring to the sacred Chumash land on which the proposed liquefaction facility was to have been built. The image of this outdoor vigil speaks to the crusading spirit with which she pursues her work today.
In an essay accompanying her 2012 show at Crista Dix's wall space gallery, Parmet wrote of her most recent work that "the figure is offering the viewer a glimpse into an extraordinary circumstance, each time measuring how far, how high, how long, and how amazing it is to be 'The Measure of All Things.'" The show's title comes from the Pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras, who is best known for his declaration that "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." Together, these two quotes illuminate the connection between Parmet the photojournalist and Parmet the post-modern artist, as they each address the degree to which witnessing remains the fundamental constitutive human act, the ur-gesture that precedes all others, in which we make the world we live in by becoming aware of it.
The romantic figures in such recent Parmet images as "Leap," from 2012 appear both unmoored in history -- it's hard to tell what period these characters are from -- and relentlessly focused on a specific moment. In "Leap," a female figure in what appear to be 19th century clothes is depicted in mid air, and with no indication of where she might land. Her headgear may or may not cover her eyes, raising the question of whether or not this leap is blind. In this and other photos from the "Unveiled" series, such as the image of a woman in another long skirt conjuring ten white doves with a magician's top hat and wand, Parmet explores an analogy between being seen, as in a photo, and being set free from the conventional bonds of reality, such as gravity. When her figures enter the world of her images, they undergo a transformation that leaves them afloat, both as physical bodies and as floating signifiers, free to incorporate whatever associations the viewer may bring to them.
Nowhere is that strategy more apparent than in Parmet's latest work -- the image of the woman underwater described above. Here we see the contradiction between embodiment and weightlessness that Parmet is constantly restaging brought to a particularly acute crisis. Languorous without being soft or conventionally seductive, the figure, which we behold from an unusual oblique angle, another Parmet signature move, appears perfectly at rest, yet of course she is underwater, so this pose can't last; indeed it can't have lasted for more than a moment, as at some point the model would have to breathe. As in "Leap," the artist and the model collaborate to create an image that exists only for an instant, yet that requires hours of preparation to realize. It's like a continuation of the work rhythms of reporting, in which journalists endure hours of boredom and sleep deprivation in order to be on the scene for the action.
Parmet describes her process as that of a motion picture studio with one employee --herself. "I've always sewn, so I make the costumes, and I tend not to use assistants unless I absolutely have to, because that's not what I'm about. For me this work involves a very intense bond with the model, so I don't really want someone else there. It's because I'm looking for a moment with that person, and we have to find it together, so it's usually best if it's just us two." Apart from her solitary work pattern, Parmet's other artistic behavior is almost the opposite. She's a member of two active art groups, one of which is a book club of Santa Barbara curators and dealers, who somehow agreed to admit this lone artist, and the other is a small Los Angeles-based artist collective.
It's through the latter that Parmet has recently begun to work with university-trained critics, who like to describe her work in terms of feminism and post-structural critical theory. Parmet accepts such interest with simple gratitude, saying, "it pushes you. My favorite recent conversation was with a professor of critical theory who recommended that I write about what I am doing in those terms and then reminded me, 'but nothing too squishy!' I love that. I knew exactly what he meant by 'squishy,' and I feel the same way." When asked about the sources of her inspiration, and whether or not she fears that her ideas might dry up, Parmet replies with a smile, saying "I don't really worry about that, because I have 'aha' moments all day long. It's to the point where my husband laughs at me. I will come back into the house from the studio after a morning's work and he'll ask, 'so, did you have another huge breakthrough?'"
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Top Image: Photo by Barbara Parmet.]]>
This scenario may sound far-fetched, but, as a new exhibition called California Dreaming: Plein-Air Painting from San Francisco to San Diego, on view now through June 16 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art demonstrates, it was not at all uncommon at the turn of the 20th century. Painters flocked to California at that time to take advantage of the fabulous scenery, the warm climate, the abundant natural light, and, above all, the chance to participate in the artistic discovery of a new world of landscape. Curatorial fellow Rachel Rossner, who put together the exhibit, recently shared with me some of her thoughts and observations about the beginnings of the plein-air landscape painting movement in California.
Your scholarly background is in Eastern European art. How did you come to this project?
In my dissertation, I looked at the later 19th century in Europe, and at the way that painting staged various perceptions of the east vs. the west, in particular among the Croatians and the Czech, between 1870 and 1920. The Croatian critical perception was similar to that of the American perception of landscape painting, meaning that it was understood as a vehicle for the truth, that the land was somehow expressing itself through this genre of art. The land is understood as compelling the painter to paint it. In this view, Impressionism is both rationalistic and pantheist.
Do you see the plein air movement in painting as having ties to nationalism? How does that observation play out in the relations between northern and southern California?
Painting en plein air becomes a symbol of the national story of the land. With Tonalism, which was more popular in the north, you get a real cohesion of style. By the 1870s, San Francisco, for example, already had an art academy--it was part of the European establishment. And this establishment makes it difficult to deviate from the program. There was a market there.
So Tonalism appealed to a more established, academic community of artists in the Bay Area. What was happening in southern California?
Los Angeles was always a different kind of settlement. What develops in Southern California seems to have been more dependent on the illustrated press and on a kind of cosmopolitan regionalism, rather than on a single academic tradition.
What tendencies do you see as uniting northern and southern California plein-air painters?
As often as not you find that these painters were choosing not to go with the most avant-garde tendencies in the art of their time, but rather to provide documentation and even a type of propaganda for their region and its land. Many of them made images that were then given to the railroads, sometimes in exchange for fares, and that were used to advertise the west as a destination.
The Santa Barbara artist Alexander Harmer is represented by a great picture of a garlanded garden trellis. What made you choose that painting for the show?
I love the warmth of the dappled sun in the Alexander Harmer. He corresponded with Thomas Eakins, and he established one of the earliest artist's studios in Santa Barbara.
If the stereotypical rationale for dividing the state into northern and southern cultures based on sunshine versus rain is not the most useful way to think about this show, what is? Can you provide some ways of understanding the south and the north that aren't so familiar?
In southern California, the style of plein-air painting in this period is mostly popular and relatively safe, and it's not hyper-finished. In the north, m any of the plein-air artists are responding to a specific idea, Tonalism, which actually began on the east coast as a spiritual movement. The dominant colors in a picture were supposed to correspond to certain spiritual concepts. It's the influence of the Barbizon school, but it's also the idea of presenting the quiet blessings of the land. In the north, they didn't really like the Impressionists. They thought Impressionism was too loud. A painter like Carlsen was coming to landscape from having been a still life specialist, and he was painting to adorn the Gilded Age houses of San Francisco, where they typically wanted their pictures to be more quiet, contemplative, and spiritual.
So much of this work feels like it belongs to the era of the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 in San Diego. Is that a fair association?
There were many World's Fair type expositions in this period, and painting was very much a part of that. So it's not necessarily all about that one exposition, but rather about an era of such optimism and rapid expansion.
California Dreaming: Plein-Air Painting from San Francisco to San Diego can be seen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through June 18. A second, related exhibition, California Scene Paintings from 1930 to 1960, exploring the next major movement in representational painting in California, opens at the Pasadena Museum of California Art on March 10 and will remain on view until July 28. For more information about California Dreaming, visit sbma.net.
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Top Image: Soren Emil Carlsen, "Autumn Landscape", 1904. Oil on canvas. | Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. Scofield..]]>
Your "song of the week" project was certainly ambitious in terms of deadlines. Have you been able to sustain it?
Well, lately I haven't been as weekly as I was. I work for other people now, and those are my real deadlines. The song a week thing was just a way to get motivated. I think that deadlines are the key to anything -- deadlines and constraints. These are the things that turned my hobby into a job, and that keep it fun.
I know you are playing some gigs again with Nerf Herder, but what have you been doing recently on the Internet?
The project I'm most proud of recently is something called Storybots that I did for JibJab. I wrote a song for every letter of the alphabet. It's pretty exciting. When I finished A and B I sent them in and they were like, "Can you do two a week?" They are all about a minute long. And that was great for me, since I like short forms and I like deadlines, so of course I said "yes." It was just the perfect 13-week project.
Do you have a favorite letter now?
One of the things I discovered by doing this was that all the letters of the alphabet are incredibly great, but if I had to pick out one favorite, it would maybe be L. Q was probably the most challenging, because the way that I did it meant that it required the most voices.
Did you ever feel you were you working in the shadow of Children's Television Workshop?
I did feel like the precedent set by "Sesame Street" put some pressure on me, but I love it. Bring it on, "Sesame Street!" If you want to see me at my most anxious, look at A. A and B are definitely the shakiest. After that I'm locked in the groove.
Did the people at JibJab give you a plan or feedback?
There were some instructions, like script notes that indicated, "this is where the robots talk." But that's really nothing. I'm very used to working like that from doing commercials.
Interesting. Can you say something about the different forms?
Commercials are more demanding in certain ways. I just finished the new Hungry Hippos campaign for Hasbro, and that was exciting because it will get aired all over the world -- it's the first international spot that I've done.
So why was it harder? Did you have to go somewhere to do it?
No, it didn't change my working process any -- I still recorded at home and sent the music to them digitally -- but it was part of something much bigger than what I usually deal with. There were actually two different advertising agencies involved, and every version of the song had to go through both agencies and then back to Hasbro. After each of these review processes I would receive notes, things along the lines of "you have to add these three words." And it's important to realize that we are not even talking about a whole minute here -- the spot is more like 15 seconds. But I enjoyed it. It was a challenge adapting to all the feedback I received. To me it's like playing Tetris. And then there's Hallmark. I've been working with Hallmark for a long time. They are a mainstay for me.
I understand that you grew up on an orchid farm here in Santa Barbara.
Yes, the orchid nursery has been in the family since 1957 -- since before me. I still live near it, but I don't live on it anymore. For many years I lived on site, for instance back when I was in Nerf Herder the first time around. I actually lived in the office, and sometimes I would get back late from a gig, and when I woke up there would be a tour group of Japanese orchid fanciers outside my window. My dad, Paul Gripp, started it and he has done some KCET television about it, with Huell Howser. The studio where I record is there. It's in a converted shipping container.
Do you think the orchids influenced you?
I don't know. For a while, I was very into it. Breeding is the main thing with orchids -- people compete to develop hybrids. I studied to be a judge. I went to all these shows and took a lot of exams, and in the end what I realized was that, while I loved the orchids, I hated judging things. I didn't want to constantly be faced with the task of saying which one was better. It was actually an important realization for me as an artist. Ever since then, one of the things that I've been constantly striving for is to eliminate that moment of deciding about the quality of something, where you have to say it's either good or bad. I'd rather make more stuff, and let someone else worry about that.
Are you saying that you try to avoid critical judgment across the board?
Well, let's see, maybe I can explain it more with an analogy. When I was at UCSB, I was enrolled in the College of Creative Studies. We were all supposed to write fiction, and there was this one student who only wrote Star Trek fan fiction. Now some of it was actually pretty good, but it was never for a moment acceptable in that context. Every time it would come up, everyone was just like, "no, that's Star Trek fan fiction, we are not interested." And I suppose that, on the boards over at StarTrekfan.org, or whatever the fan fiction site is, the opposite was happening. I'm sure the response over there was, whenever some subject or technique crept in to this person's work from what we were learning in school, they were probably just as quick to say, "no, that's not Star Trek fan fiction, so we are not interested." I guess what I'm trying to say is that to me, quality is inextricable from context, so I'm happier letting it stay there, embedded in whatever context it came from.
Speaking of context, how are you feeling about your status on YouTube these days?
It's my fifth year that I've been posting to YouTube and I just passed 100 million views. That's aggregate, over all my videos, with two different stations running now. The Parry Gripp station has almost 87 million views, and the Parry Gripp Radio station is at about 25 million.
That sounds like a lot. Are you one of the most popular artists on YouTube?
I think I am in the top 1000. I don't know anymore -- it changes rapidly. I do feel like I lived through YouTube's "wild west" period. Now the monetizers are figuring it out. It's the number one outlet for media for kids, which is kind of interesting, because you aren't supposed to be able to have an account unless you are over 13. That's one of the reasons that Netflix is huge; because it's getting all the younger ones who are going online with their parents.
Do you see this ongoing rise in popularity as having an impact on the viewer experience or on YouTube's policies?
With YouTube, it just seems like it's so powerful now that there's no way that it can stay the way that it is. They have tweaked the search functions within the last few years, and already I can feel the difference. My revenue from YouTube declined by half in late 2011, and I'm sure that's because they did something to the algorithms. They had been looking for ways to give it a more curated feel.
Which of your videos is the most viewed?
I think the biggest one is still "nom nom nom." That's at 19 million views now and it's going strong.
What kind of reach do Internet meme video songs have?
There's an episode of the Ricky Gervais series called "Derek" in which Ricky, as Derek, shows off his favorite thing on the Internet, which is YouTube, and then he says that his favorite thing on YouTube is the animal videos, and that his favorite animal video is called "Hamster on a Piano." Then he watches it on his computer on the show. I'll be the first to admit it was very satisfying. I love Ricky Gervais, and Ricky, as Derek, loves "Hamster on a Piano." The circle is complete.
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Top Image: By Parry Gripp.
While Chuck D from Public Enemy probably made the biggest impact on Friday's conference, there were lots of other great stories being told, and plenty of interesting advice and inside information to chew on for the audience, which ranged in age from as young as 11 to well over 50. Addressing topics that ranged from the art and business of sustainable songwriting, to marketing your music, to women in the music industry, and the importance of all-ages venues, the panels were consistently funny, inspiring, and unpredictable. Several of the most distinguished speakers were returning to their hometown. For example, Tom Osborne, head of marketing at Epitaph/Anti grew up in Santa Barbara, and was back to light up the panel called "Brand New Marketing" with recent tales from his experience working with the Black Keys and Tom Waits, among others.
Songwriting was particularly well served by a two-person panel with Santa Barbara residents Zach Gill (ALO, Jack Johnson) and Glen Philips (Toad the Wet Sprocket, Nickel Creek). Moving with ease from technical discussions of song form and strategies for overcoming writer's block to anecdotes about the ups and downs of making a living by writing songs, the pair ended up offering an extraordinarily positive message to the aspiring artists in the crowd, an attitude best summed up by Philips who said, "it's about three things--being good at what you do, working hard at getting your stuff out there, and finally, above all else, being nice to people." The optimistic, "be nice" conclusion to Philips' proposed three-part program was reiterated in many forms throughout the day. Most forceful of all was Chuck D, who praised the conference as a "priceless" opportunity for people to exchange ideas and information, and then went on to proclaim that while the rapidly shifting economics of the music industry has been "brutal for the establishment, it has opened a lot of doors." On the All-Ages Venue panel, which included Chad Peterson, talent booker at Goldenvoice, which is perhaps the biggest promoter in Southern California, Muddy Waters Café owner Bill Lewis, opined that the biggest issue for him with booking all ages hardcore shows, which he said he liked, was that there was a "certain dickbag factor that you have to take into account."
There was certainly no dickbag factor at the Festival's many concerts, which were packed and pumping with sounds both local and imported. Highlights included a frenetic set on Friday night at Velvet Jones from Central Oregon acoustic punk bluegrass freaks Larry and His Flask and a windy but well attended outdoor afternoon show with Y La Bamba and Gardens and Villa playing on a stage set up just for the day in the middle of Mason Street. For connoisseurs of the radical transition, the programming was exquisite, allowing for journeys of less than a block that took you from violinist Lindsey Stirling, who one listener likened to "Comicon comes to a concert," to the jazzy post-punk of Mike Watt and the Missingmen to the conscious hip hop of Saul Williams and Blackalicious.
In some ways, the biggest victory of this year's New Noise was the one that was won on the streets--not just in Saturday's block party, but all over downtown Santa Barbara, and due in large part to the upward spike in attendance, which created the crucial critical mass that leads to all kinds of socializing. Zack Gill's response to the scene on Friday makes a perfect illustration of what went right this year. After talking for an hour on the sustainable songwriting panel, Gill hung around backstage at the Savoy for another to answer questions and shoot the breeze with a group of middle schoolers who were there to get their start in the music industry. Wandering out of Savoy onto lower State Street, Gill spotted one of the many uprights that had been placed there as part of the "Pianos on State" project. Plunking himself down on the corner, Gill proceeded to entertain anyone who wandered by for the next forty-five minutes with an improvised set of classics, standards, and new grooves, all done just for the hell of it. Be nice is right--you never know who that guy is playing piano on the corner.
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Top Photo: New Noise Music Festival and Conference.]]>
Every scene in every city experiences it eventually; the moment when suddenly the sort of thing that once seemed permanently marginal goes moderately mainstream, and powerful forces collide. The original impulse that characterizes an arts district, which is typically the urge to avoid any kind of scrutiny or regulation, meets the inexorable progress of development and commercialization. In New York City, the short-lived and legendary East Village art scene met its backlash in 1987 during the Tompkins Square riots, when Peter Missing's upside down martini glass graffiti suddenly appeared seemingly everywhere, and the crowds in Tompkins Square Park pushed police sawhorses through the glass doors of the Christadora House while shouting "Die yuppie scum."
It hasn't yet come to that in Santa Babylon, but the scramble is on to stake a claim not only in the city's burgeoning post-industrial real estate bohemia, known for better or worse as "the Funk Zone," but in the culture at large, where a recent national study suggests that there are potentially big bucks to be made by those savvy enough to successfully navigate between the Scylla of cool isolationism and the Charybdis of overt commercial ambition, otherwise known as greed. Two recent events have catalyzed a new level of hype and anxiety in our traditionally laid-back town, a place where the unofficial but strongly felt implicit motto has always been, "when in doubt, mellow out."
Strikingly, the two incidents occurred just a couple of days apart. On Thursday, October 4, civic culture leaders and city officials gathered in the historic Lobero Theater to hear the economic good news presented by Washington-based lobbying group Americans for the Arts. Their message took the form of a 32-page report on the benefits that non-profit cultural organizations confer on the local financial situation. It turns out that Santa Barbara enjoys a significant, some might even say distinctive, advantage in relation to other cities of similar size in its rich offerings in the arena of culture. Compared to the median figure of approximately $78 million dollars in economic benefits generated by non-profit culture organizations and their audiences in cities with populations of between 250 and 500 thousand people, Santa Barbara sports a whopping $124 million arts and culture windfall, with spending by organizations alone topping the median aggregate number for elsewhere. Translation: Santa Barbara's non-profit arts and culture organizations generate $79 million even before the first audience member enters the picture. When it comes to the economic benefits that cities derive from arts and culture, Santa Barbara starts out ahead and ends up over the hills and far away, out of sight of the rest of the pack.
Yet paradoxically, when it comes to what many younger people see as evidence of an art scene, Santa Barbara has for many years appeared to be sadly lacking. There's no shortage of self-identified artists in town, and the hottest names in Pitchfork Media routinely swing by Muddy Waters on Haley Street for small shows in between larger gigs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but at least until recently, when it comes to the kind of neighborhoods like Echo Park, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Eagle Rock, or even Venice Beach, Santa Barbara has had little to show for itself.
Cue "Focus on the Funk Zone," the one day public event that occurred on Saturday, October 6 to mark the official coming out of what promises to be the answer to that perennial question of "where are all the artists in this city?" This ten square block area that straddles the train tracks to the east of lower State Street has, in just a few years, gone from being a sleepy post-industrial wasteland where the RVs of nomads line the streets at night and few pedestrians venture after dark to being just possibly the new capital of hip. Early adopters like the Arts Fund Gallery, Red's Coffee House and Wine Bar, and the Oreana Winery have been joined by such relatively recent arrivals as Municipal Winemakers, wall space gallery, Channel Islands Surf Shop, Pali Wine Company, and the Latitudes Gallery. Long a safe haven for visual artists and such artisans as surfboard shapers and scuba divers, the neighborhood has seen its studio population double in the last two years, with now over 60 people choosing to work in the neighborhood in a variety of media, with a particular emphasis on painting and graphic design. On October 6, the action started early, with volunteers from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative led by arts blogger Nathan Vonk and creative community organizers Laura Inks, Clay Bodine, and Nils Hammerbeck hitting the streets to plant distinctive Funk Zone logo flags. At the Arts Fund Gallery, visitors could see a charrette of locally produced ideas for developing the neighborhood while retaining its character and function as a place where artists and other creative types can meet, mingle, and make noise at virtually any hour of the day or night.
By mid-afternoon, the event was in full swing, which meant different things to different people. At the numerous open studios taking place, the action revolved around art sales, several of which were made on a handshake and personal check basis to people who had never been in the neighborhood before. At the corner of Helena and Mason, several murals were still in progress alongside other finished works, all of them made possible by Laura Inks' tireless advocacy on behalf of public art and opportunities for street artists in the city and the program she founded there called AMASS. At J7 Surfboards, just half a block down Mason and a stone's throw from the burgeoning tasting room row anchored by Muni Wines, shaper/proprietor Jason Feist and a few friends were slow roasting a turkey in a black Bell charcoal grill on the sidewalk.
Later that night, activity shifted north of the tracks to the alley behind the Kirkegaard gallery and studio space, where giant art cars with bars presided over a scene amped up by live music and DJs. This portable throw down attracted a wide range of people, from curious passerby to dancers from the Spearmint Rhino outpost on the corner to fire spinners straight out of Burning Man. As two a.m. approached the music and festivity rolled on, with the police long gone, having shown up only once, around midnight, to shake their heads and shove off in support of the long -standing agreement between the city and the Funk Zone that the rule in this small area is that there are no rules.
The question that remains, now that the debris from "Focus on the Funk Zone" has been cleared away and the brighter light of day now shines where sparkling fires once spun, is how long this little piece of bohemian utopia can continue to exist in this form. There are already several major outside developers who have made multiple acquisitions in the area, and it looks as though whatever property remains available right now will soon be snapped up by eager speculators. Brian Kelly of the Boston-based Eastern company Eastern Real Estate has amassed the most impressive new portfolio of properties, with three separate parcels situated on either side of the train tracks all acquired within the last two years. His next move remains to be seen, although work has begun on a coop space that reportedly will house tasting rooms, a brewery, and a boutique distillery for small batches of the hard stuff. Kelly's representative to the community is his sister, Katie Hay, and while she has assured the local artists that the properties will be remodeled to accommodate rent-paying tasting rooms, a quick look at the Eastern website reveals a company with something of a split personality. Luxury properties that Eastern has taken over like Shutters on the Beach and Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica are listed alongside radical flip jobs in which a suburban lumberyard, a downtown Boston Woolworth's building, and several failed department stores have been acquired, remodeled, and sold or rented, mostly to big box stores, national chains, and health clubs.
The bulk of the Funk Zone properties remain in the hands of a small group of Santa Barbara families like the Castagnolos (fishing), the Nancarrows (the Carrows restaurant chain), and the Sanchez (car dealers), now controlled by the rentier class grandchildren of the men who operated fish markets and car dealerships in the area when the land was known as the East Boulevard neighborhood. The remnants of this era, such as the grain tower of the bakery on Santa Barbara Street, are the prizes that artists and other creatives seek to secure as their playground going forward. Developments that are likely to raze these often decrepit, sometimes toxic structures will destroy the character and limit the use value of the neighborhood for artists, or so say the activists who have banded together to "hold the space." For a closer look, why not hit the next big Funk Zone event, which will take place during New Noise Santa Barbara Block Party on Saturday, November 10, to witness a neighborhood in the process of evolution.
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Top Image: Funk Zone | Photo: Laura Inks, Creative Collaboration Network.]]>
When Contemporary Arts Forum curator Miki Garcia offered Ybarra a chance to create a big show in the organization's main space on the second floor of the Paseo Nuevo in downtown Santa Barbara, Ybarra saw it as a chance to apply some pressure on his family, many of whom, he told me, are "serious collectors of stuff." "They didn't want to let go of anything at first," he said, "but then I explained to them that it was for this important show, and that the things I was borrowing would be labeled and treated as art, and that idea began to soften them. 'So,' they kept asking me, 'are you saying that my stuff will be in a museum?' and I said 'Yeah, that's right, in a real museum.'"
The installation, which takes up three full rooms, includes a wide variety of objects in equally far-ranging states of repair. Some, like the colorful shirts that hang near the entrance, are relatively unmarked by their passage through the closets of Ybarra's uncles, while others, like the Black Widow killing stick of Tío Claudio, Ybarra's father's older brother, are loaded with the marks and scratches of years of hard use. Ybarra devotes one entire wall to his own collection of toys -- plastic Transformers and superhero figurines, all of them carefully preserved by the artist, who freely admits that, "some are worn because I used to play with them."
While the practice of introducing "ready-made" objects into the gallery space is as old as Marcel Duchamp's notorious urinal, the way that Mario Ybarra, Jr. presents and connects to his Tío Collection stands at a distinct distance and angle to more familiar artistic practices of appropriation and re-contextualization. Unlike an artist such as Duchamp -- who may have admired snow shovels, bottle racks, and urinals, but who was not known for telling family stories about them -- Ybarra selects only those things that can serve as points of departure for anecdotes about significant moments in his life. The wall of jigsaw puzzles that stands opposite the entrance to the main room bears witness to the long and challenging process of rehabilitation that Tío George went through after a serious car accident left him partially paralyzed at age 18. "George was required to do these puzzles as physical therapy," Ybarra told me, "and through the puzzles he was able to get back the use of his hands, and in a way, of his mind. He went on to become the first one in our family to graduate college, getting his degree in engineering from Cal State Long Beach."
"I can remember one very long car trip we took as a family, a big caravan of us in separate cars, and I was with one of my uncles in an old VW bus at the back of the pack," Ybarra went on to say. "The VW bus broke down, but this was before cell phones or anything, so no one up ahead noticed that we were gone until they were far away. My uncle and I spent the night on the side of the 5 freeway, waiting until morning for help to come. Every one of these pieces has a story like that, some almost tearjerker element, at least for me." In front of the wall of jigsaw puzzles stands a classic California-style oil drum barbecue grill. This belonged to Tío Jaime, and Ybarra's art students have decorated it as a memorial to Jaime's now deceased dog Cisco. The grill also carries a stern warning that, unless you have brought some food to share, keep your hands off the meat! It's this constant criss-crossing of sentimentality and humor, practicality and frivolity, that gives the Tío Collection its distinctive bittersweet tone, a tone that captures perfectly the artist's own dry wit about his life.
Talking about what he wants to accomplish with the show, Ybarra, who was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, emphasizes the way that the viewer responds to his work, saying "I hope that people leave the gallery and go back into their homes and the homes of their relatives with new eyes for what counts as art. I want people to see where the family is creating culture on the level of style, even when that culture does not aspire to be understood as high art." The artist's father, Mario Ybarra, Sr., did however aspire to create art, and in such deft and satirical works as Funny Face Ybarra, a bright blue sculpture from 2005 that's made out of a railroad spike and some discarded nuts and bolts, Ybarra, Sr. strikes a note that will be familiar to those who know the history of Latino art in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s.
And it's through these subterranean connections to a more overtly political period that the philosophy and agenda underlying Ybarra, Jr.'s warm and friendly persona reassert themselves. Despite having "made it," the artist remains balanced on a precarious point somewhere between the solid ground of success and the sea of solidarity with ordinary people leading less privileged and aestheticized lives. As he told me, "I still wake up sometimes at 3 or 4 in the morning wondering 'why?' My style is all I really have--a combination of looseness and attitude that allows me to make things work with whatever I have to hand. You know, 'it is what it is!' Like that. I get the laid back thing from growing up near the water, but then there's this side of me that identifies with the port, and that knows about the idealism of organized labor and the struggles of the unions, so I am still made of both."
As a parting gesture, I ask Ybarra how it feels to be in Santa Barbara, a place that seems on the surface to be quite far from the Wilmington he has just described. "It feels great," he tells me, "because you see I have a tío here in Santa Barbara, and I have some beautiful memories of coming up here with my father, driving the 101 in his old red Datsun 280Z, so even this place is a part of one of my stories too."
The Tío Collection is on view at the Contemporary Arts Forum through September 30.
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Top image: Mario Ybarra Jr., Recollected Robot Toy Collection, 2012, Mixed media, Dimensions variable, Courtesy the Artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Wayne McCall.]]>
The strange truth is that just such a mythical figure once existed: Peter Meller. Although the art of UCSB professor emeritus Peter Meller is only now becoming available to the public, Meller actually does represent just such a fascinating and nearly lost chapter in the epic story of the European intelligentsia who moved to Southern California to escape Nazism and World War II. Through a pair of exhibitions organized by the UCSB Art, Design and Architecture Museum currently on view in Santa Barbara, and a publication, The Zodiac of Wit: Peter Meller and the Graphic Imagination by Robert Williams, Peter Meller's secret career as an artist is finally reaching an audience.
Unlike its elusive creator, who never sought recognition beyond a small circle of intimate friends and family for his prodigious output, Peter Meller's graphic art is extraordinarily accessible. He deemed his charming (and scary) origami "harpy" paper airplanes to be suitable for children's play, (and much to the dismay of their parents) so did the children who received them.
Despite the fact that Meller was a professor of art history who possessed a commanding knowledge of the Renaissance and of classical culture, he chose standard office supplies as his media, in the process elevating such lowly items as rubber erasers and liquid Wite-Out to the ironic status of contemporary stand-ins for the techniques and materials of the Italian Renaissance, and even for the illustrated vases of Greek and Roman antiquity. His favorite method of printmaking was to make multiple exposures of a drawing on a standard office-type photocopier. It is Meller's gift for working with these decidedly "minor" or non-standard emergent technologies that gives his brilliant and learned images their unique place in the history of art. Through this darkly comical and highly self-aware vision, Peter Meller, whose work was virtually unknown until after his death at age 85 in 2008, may still earn his place alongside such of his contemporaries as Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch as one of our region's greatest émigré ironists.
As a professor of art history at UCSB from 1968 to 1994, Meller earned the respect and gratitude of his students and colleagues for his deep knowledge of European culture, particularly of the Renaissance and classical antiquity, and for the dry wit of his extraordinarily well-informed lectures and seminars. Yet, on the level of publication, that great academic standard of productivity, Meller's output remained relatively sparse. Certain manuscripts, including a projected translation of Lucretius' philosophical poem De Rerum Natura, were lost during his years of exile in Italy, and while at UCSB, although he published several well-received articles, the big book that would make his reputation alongside Gombrich and Panofsky never materialized. His son-in-law, John Moore, who has now taken over managing the large archive of Meller's work, remembers him as someone who exemplified his contemporary and fellow-émigré Theodor Adorno's concept of a "damaged life." "No one knew he was an artist on this scale," said Moore, referring to the many thousands of individual works and hand-carved ink stamps in his possession, adding that Meller's "involvement [with creating graphics] was not exactly casual."
The two shows now on view, one at the UCSB Art, Design, & Architecture Museum through September 16, and the other, also organized by the AD&A but located in downtown Santa Barbara at the Jane Deering Gallery on East Canon Perdido (that one will be up through September 29) demonstrate the range and ingenuity of a major artist, albeit one who celebrated the joys of working in supposedly minor genres. Meller's gift manifested in many ways--he made drawings, prints, sculptures, ink stamps, printed silk scarves, and even refrigerator magnets (!), but he never lost sight of his beloved antiquities, which were a common source of imagery and inspiration. For example, in the remarkable photocopy image of Aristotle and Phyllis, Meller recalls a common story about how Aristotle's uxorious nature led his overbearing wife to ride on his back.
Elsewhere Meller brought forth mythological figures and loaded them with ironic sympathy for the limitations imposed by human vulnerabilities. His Mary Magdalene uses a mirror to admire her recently acquired halo, and his numerous cupids, satyrs, and fauns rarely meet with the kind of reception they expect. His wise Minerva, her lips pursed as she learns something from an intelligent pig, is unforgettable, even as the classical reference that served as the inspiration for the image remains obscure. The fate of his reputation as an artist remains to be seen, but for now it is clear that the art of Peter Meller has much to offer audiences today, and the UCSB AD&A Museum is to be congratulated for making his work widely available for the first time.
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Top Image: "Aristotle and Phyllis." Photocopy. | Peter Meller.]]>
Of course this nightmare scenario, in which the student doesn't even get through the first performance of a piece without interruption, is merely the stereotype, something derived more from such dramatic representations of the experience as Terrence McNally's play Master Class than from reality. It is certainly not typical of the work that takes place virtually every day during the eight week summer season of Santa Barbara's world-renowned Music Academy of the West. This venerable institution, which celebrates its 65th anniversary this summer, offers approximately 150 master classes every year, all of which are open to the public, and many of which are free of charge.
Audiences flock to these occasions for the thrill of observing not only the development of top young talent in every discipline of contemporary classical music--from trumpet and oboe to percussion, vocals, and collaborative piano--but also for the drama of looking on while a performer is asked to make adjustments on the fly in front of a teacher who may hold their fate in his or her hands. It is, needless to say, quite a high wire act, especially when someone like soprano Marilyn Horne is in the onstage chair. Indeed, the Academy's yearly vocal competition, which is considered one of the most prestigious such awards in the world, and which takes place this summer on Saturday, July 21, is named for Horne--the Marilyn Horne Song Competition.
This is just one of the reasons that in recent years a second distinguished Academy faculty member, the pianist Warren Jones, has come to the fore, not only for his abilities as an accompanist and as a coach of collaborative piano, but also, and even primarily, for his superb work with singers. Long known for his sensitive chamber work with such professionals as Kiri Te Kanawa (a Music Academy Mosher guest artist this summer) and the Santa Barbara-based chamber music group Camerata Pacifica, Jones has developed a passionate following among master class devotees for his work with singers. His vocal master classes (there's one coming up on Friday, July 20) nearly always sell out the Academy's elegant main venue, the lavishly remodeled Hahn Hall, and last summer, Jones took to the orchestra pit where he conducted the Academy vocal program's season finale, a fully staged production of Rossini's The Barber of Seville. This year Jones will try something new on Thursday, July 26, when he will direct performances of three song cycles by Southern California composer Alan Louis Smith in a program of vocal chamber music titled Leaving Home, Seeking Home.
The opera this season, The Rake's Progress by Igor Stravinsky, will be performed twice at the historic Granada Theatre in downtown Santa Barbara with Alexander Lazarev conducting, once on Friday night, August 3 at 7:30, and then again in a matinee performance on Sunday, August 5 at 2:30. Stravinsky's English-language masterpiece imposes significant demands on the orchestra as well as the singers, and Lazarev, who has been a favorite of the Music Academy's fellows in previous years as a conductor of purely instrumental works, will be on hand for three full weeks to be sure that the production goes off without a hitch. The Academy's yearly opera, one of the highlights of musical life in Santa Barbara, typically receives reviews from such publications as the Los Angeles Times, and can launch a young singer onto the international stage.
Through a special grant from patrons Linda and Michael Keston, this and other orchestral performances taking place at the Granada can be seen for as little as ten dollars for certain seats, putting one of the world's most refined (and expensive) art forms well within reach of students and other cash-strapped members of the Santa Barbara community. And, while such outreach is certainly the primary motive for the Keston's generosity, there are significant benefits of such an arrangement for the musicians as well. Scott Reed, the dynamic young president of the Music Academy of the West, puts it this way: "giving our fellows the opportunity to perform a fully staged opera to a sold-out audience in a hall the size of the Granada (1400 seats) is exactly the kind of training experience that we can offer that they just can't get anywhere else."
Of course there is much more to the Music Academy than these vocal pyrotechnics, as even a quick glance at the schedule (available online) will reveal. Tuesday evenings at Hahn Hall are reserved for the faculty and distinguished guest artists, who put on extremely rich, varied, and instructive programs of chamber music under the rubric "Tuesdays @ 8." Most Friday evenings are devoted to the Academy's popular Picnic Concerts. At these Santa Barbara institutions, guests are invited to eat their picnic suppers in the lushly landscaped gardens of the Academy's elegant bluff top campus, a Montecito estate known as Miraflores. Local students dining on takeout sit cheek by jowl with millionaires who bring fine wines, gourmet suppers, linen napkins, china, and silverware with them in elaborate wicker baskets. After the food is put away, everyone drifts into Hahn Hall where the Academy fellows are responsible for everything, including not only the choice of music, but also the sequencing and the personnel decisions of the ensembles. These good-natured affairs offer young musicians an unprecedented opportunity to take the presentation of their talents entirely into their own hands, and the results are both surprising and delightful. The Picnic Concert experience is just one of the ways in which the Music Academy of the West distinguishes itself from all the other top summer music festivals around the world, and the spirited spontaneity demonstrated by the fellows on these Friday evenings is perhaps the single most commonly cited reason that so many audience members come back to them every summer and every week.
No really important summer music school would be complete without its share of visiting luminaries, and the Music Academy of the West is no exception. Already this summer, violinist Gil Shaham has played a recital, participated in Tuesdays @ 8, presented a master class, and given ten lucky violin students private lessons. Next week, on Wednesday, July 18, pianist Ingrid Fliter performs in recital at Hahn Hall, and the Miro Quartet will play string quartets by Mozart, Dutilleux, and Beethoven at the larger
Lobero Theater in downtown Santa Barbara on Sunday, July 22.
Everyone has their favorite visiting artist, and mine is a conductor--the irrepressible baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan, who will direct the Academy Chamber Orchestra in a program of music by Bach, Haydn, and Mendelssohn at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara on Saturday, August 4. McGegan runs the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra out of San Francisco, and his yearly visits to the Music Academy of the West are consistently memorable. Whether he is excerpting the exciting bits from a six-hour opera by Handel, or driving the group through a propulsive period-style version of a Beethoven symphony, McGegan always seems to wring that certain something extra out of the young talent under his baton. Whether you are a visitor or a resident, taking time out from the frenzied street life of Fiesta weekend to enjoy one of these immensely satisfying concerts can feel like being transported into a different, and better, world.
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Top image: The Picnic Concert | Photo: David Bazemore.]]>
Although "Portrayal/Betrayal" was not initially conceived with the Instagram audience in mind, there are at least two aspects to Sinsheimer's curatorial approach that make this exhibit an ideal real-world stop for anyone who's contemplating their next shoot. First, there's the fact that this is, thanks to the museum's "guide by cell" technology, a thoroughly interactive experience. To hear the opinion of someone else on any work you encounter, just dial the number on the wall card and punch in the photo's ID. Some of the recordings you will hear are made by professionals in the field of photography, while others are the responses of audience members just like you. And, if you happen to find one that you have something to say about, go ahead and leave your own track. Who knows? You may trigger someone else's next big insight.
Second, there's the curatorial concept, which discards the idea of a meta-narrative of development capable of corralling all portrait photography into a single story, and instead invokes the pluralism of multiple solutions to the same aesthetic problem -- how to create a meaningful image. It's not only a relief to enter a museum that doesn't tell you what to think, it's an intense rush to discover some of the many ways that other artists have overcome the obstacles that stand between the viewer and a rare experience.
Take toilet paper, for example. Or, more specifically, take the rolls of toilet paper with which photographer Hendrik Kerstens adorned his daughter's head for "Paper Rolls," the 2008 image that adorns the cover of the exhibition catalogue. It's an incredibly rich image, reminiscent in its luminosity, tenderness, and pose of Johannes Vermeer's classic painting "Girl With a Pearl Earring." It works as an amazing kind of visual sleight of hand, with that most down to earth (and necessary!) of contemporary domestic items, the roll of toilet paper, standing in for the bourgeois headgear of the Dutch 17th century. For Sinsheimer, this image was one of her most thrilling acquisitions. "As soon as I saw it at Photo LA, I knew we had to have it. It's such an iconic work. Plus, only months later, the value of Kersten's work had already shot up."
So, what does it take to get noticed (and acquired) by an experienced curator of photography? Once we had admired Kerstens' handy way with a headdress, various other devices for framing the subject within the image began jumping out at us as we traversed the gallery. In Steve Davis's "Robert, Oakridge 92005" a boy stares out at the viewer over the gum bubble he's blown to cover his mouth. The bubble vies for attention with the boy's impassive gaze, but it doesn't take on its full range of implications until one knows that it comes from a series called "Captured Youth." Robert's gesture reflects his captivity; the bubble is one way he's found to resist the sense that he no longer controls his own life. By picking up on this, the photographer not only found an object that nicely sets off the image's primary subject, which is the face; he has also revealed the subject's intent, and indicated his state of mind, all without a trace of sentimentality or moral judgment.
Elsewhere, Instagram addicts would do well to consider the basics, as they are expressed in one form or another by nearly every image in the show. Take "Suzanne in Contortion," a 1990 image by Joyce Tenneson. Color, check; gorgeous model, check; but "contortion"--what is that doing here? The answer is something that every amateur portrait photographer would do well to consider. By including the model's hands and arms as integral parts of the composition, Tenneson realizes one of photography's most fundamental goals, which is to make sense not only of the thing pictured, but also of the stuff around the thing. By taking it to the next level, and exaggerating the pose, so that, rather than throwing up another clichéd gang sign, Suzanne is doing something that's intense, beautiful, and symmetrical -- not to mention considerably less difficult than the attention grabbing title would indicate -- the artist has arrived at an image that's not common, but rare.
Another major benefit of crashing the galleries for a visit to see these images in person is the physicality of work that has been successfully printed and framed. Looking at Nicholas Nixon's "Brown Sisters" photos in sequence would probably work if they were to appear as an album on Nixon's Facebook page, but thank god they're not. In the flesh, these black and white photos are enormously evocative, producing a record in black and white of the way one family has known that "eternity is in love with the productions of time." These photographs separate iPhone photo junkies from the golden-eyed photographer, forever changing the way see -- or take -- a picture.
'Portrayal/Betrayal' is on view through September 16 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. For information, visit their website.
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Top Image: Joyce Tenneson, Suzanne in Contortion, 1990. Chromogenic print. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Arthur B. Steinman.]]>
Started in 1990 as the reaction to cuts in the arts at the city's schools, a group of Santa Barbara parents started Art From Scrap. It functions as a teaching facility, a gallery, a store for reusable and new surplus art materials, and a community center, rolled into one. Downstairs, the Reuse store overflows with brightly colored and attractively displayed stuff, all of it either donated or recycled. There is paper, tape, tiles and picture frames, every imaginable kind of plastic or cardboard container, and even some industrial remnants, like polyurethane slivers thrown off in the process of creating skateboard wheels. Upstairs, where the rocket ship and UFO-making workshop has landed, does double duty as a workspace and a gallery. The current exhibit showcases a number of artists in a group show called "Local Legends" featuring Tricycle magazine contributing artist Neal Crosbie. He is just one of the more than a dozen accomplished assemblage artists who make Santa Barbara home, a fact that gets a great boost from the existence of AFS. It's their clubhouse, workspace, and school.
In addition to hosting educational events, AFS also travels to the schools. Through the Green Schools program, AFS serves more than 12,000 students and teachers each year with in-class lessons and field trips that focus on waste diversion, water quality, and school gardens. These lessons have an impact. Katie Romanov, a Middlebury College student and Santa Barbara resident, recently won the title of "America's Next Eco-Star," in this program sponsored by SmartPower and the United States Department of Energy to recognize young leaders in sustainability and energy conservation. Romanov recently returned to Santa Barbara from Vermont to see her family and friends before heading off to Washington, D. C. for the summer, where she will be working as a research fellow at SmartPower and helping to market the ideas of clean energy and energy efficiency to young people. Not one to let an opportunity to make a difference slip by, Romanov used part of her time back home to visit her local alma mater, Laguna Blanca School, where she joined Morgan Raith, LBS class of 12 and current Middlebury College student, in conducting a class on keeping homes at a comfortable temperature year round through non-energy consuming means.
For Raith and Romanov, who leads Middlebury College's "Sprout" program, which educates Vermont children about the environment, working with kids generally means building things -- in this case scale models of energy-efficient green homes and buildings. And when it's time to build stuff, their first stop is Art From Scrap's Reuse store. "I love coming here" Raith says, "because there's so much more than just all this great stuff. What's really useful about the Art From Scrap store is that when I shop here, I don't just pick up things--I also get ideas." Upon returning to Laguna Blanca, laden with materials for the classroom demonstration, Raith was able to translate the time she had spent browsing in the Reuse store into dozens of new ways to build scale models, which demonstrate concepts as building with stone slab floors that retain heat in the winter and remain cool in the summer to kids.
For artist Tara Patrick, who works at AFS and exhibits her paintings at galleries in Santa Barbara, the store is a place to connect with all of the many practitioners of the art of assemblage who call Santa Barbara home. Tony Askew, Dug Uyesaka, Anne Luther, Susan Tibbles, and Rod Lathim are all well established in the field, and regular visitors to the store. AFS director Cay Sanchez is not only an administrator; she too makes vibrant and original assemblage works out of the wild assortment of things that streams through these doors. Sanchez believes that Art From Scrap makes an ideal platform from which to communicate the organization's core values, which are stated in its motto/mission statement: "Everything is connected. Everything ends up somewhere. We have options. We make choices."
AFS has also demonstrated a flair for successful fund raising with its annual One Night Stand event, which will take place this year on Saturday, August 11 at Gallery 27, a professional gallery space in Santa Barbara that is associated with the Brooks Institute. At One Night Stand small works of approximately 9"x9" are solicited from hundreds of contemporary artists from all over the country. On the night of the event, all of these works are for sale for the same price: $200. Some are by relative unknowns, and others are by famous artists and are thus worth many times what will be paid for them. The trick is that none of the names will be revealed until after the purchase has been made. This playful tactic raises interesting questions for each piece: Is that a real Yoko Ono drawing, or Jeff Bridges photo, or John Nava painting, or does it just look like one? The surprise is part of what makes this enormously popular event so successful. The crowd at last year's One Night Stand overflowed the gallery space for hours as people stood in a line that went around the block to get a look at the big wall of 9"x9" wonder and mystery.
With events like One Night Stand, and gallery shows like the current one, Local Legends, AFS extends its reach beyond the world of assemblage and into the far corners of fine art. It's a way of life. What is trash and what is treasure? How can we build from what we already have? As AFS has it, "we have options, and we make choices."
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Top Image: Olivia with Rocket Ships.]]>
The Piano Kitchen earned its name from its floor. It's a black and white linoleum checkerboard that conjures up classic diners or 1950s kitchens. But instead of waitresses tearing across the floor, slinging milkshakes and cheeseburgers, this checkerboard was home to hot rods in this space's previous life as a custom car showroom. Today, the space is a piano repair shop and studio space. Pianos are black and white, like that checkerboard floor, and the place bristles with their innards. By day, we hear the sounds of pianos being fixed and practiced, but at night, jazz, Americana, classical, and folk--and even the occasional siren call of the unmistakable sound of a musical saw-- can be heard by the musicians who congregate here.
The "Live from the Piano Kitchen" show serves as a kind of "Urban Home Companion" for Southern Californians. Imagine what Garrison Keillor might be like if he had grown up on Mountain Drive listening to the Blasters and X. On one side, there's the crafty clowning of Mills, a natural vaudevillian and a professor of, among other things, stage combat. On the other, there's the dark humor of Michael Bernard, a version of David Sedaris that's a lot closer to Charles Bukowski than the real thing. And finally, wrapping the whole thing a in a wild and wooly sonic blanket of banjo, percussion, and ambient noise, there is Jim Connolly, live soundtracker extraordinaire.
Connolly is Santa Barbara's busiest piano tuner. When he's not fixing ivories, or hosting shows at the Piano Kitchen, he travels the world as chief sound artist, songwriter, and resident sonic alchemist for Lit Moon Theatre and The Gove County String Quartet. Large matching paintings of bright, largely empty blue skies cover the walls of the Kitchen. They were once the set of a Lit Moon production about a boy who flies with the ducks, and they fit here, giving the room an airy, spacious feeling that stops just short of flight.
This inconspicuous workshop does not operate as a proper commercial theater or nightclub, but rather as a place where Connolly and his friends can pursue their art, and as such, it has been home to some of the best music, theater, and radio drama to happen in Santa Barbara in the last few years. Santa Barbara has a shared black box theater, Center Stage, that's reasonable and accessible. It also has a few small theater groups, rather than one "alternative" theater, and, after years of bubbling up together through one production crossover or another, a critical mass has been achieved around this new spot.
Jeff Mills, a leader of the Boxtales group who provided the Irish tunes that cold night at the Piano Kitchen, has known Jim Connolly for years, but it wasn't until Mills started acting with Lit Moon that he and Connolly discovered a mutual fascination with unconventional locations. For his part, Connolly had already had one such venue, another piano-dominated space, only a few blocks away in the large room behind an antiques shop. When that closed, he found the Piano Kitchen.
For Mills, the dream was to do a live radio program from one of his favorite places, a bookstore that used to be on State Street, a place called Earthling. "Live from Earthling," Mills says, "it sounded great to me. I have always loved radio and vaudeville, and I just wanted to find the right space to launch from." The lapse of Earthling lead to another promised deal, this one with a wine bar and café in the Paseo Nuevo called Live Culture. "Perfect name, right?" Mills says, "so I had everything set to go there, as 'Live from Live Culture,' and the proprietor wanted to do it, but then one day I went by there, and it was suddenly just gone." These venue disappearances disrupted the creation of a "main drag."
The radio dream lived on long enough for Mills to find Connolly, and for their downtown Santa Barbara game of venue hopscotch to land them both on the same square. Another catalyst for the radio show, and for much of what happens at Piano Kitchen in the way of storytelling, is Michael Bernard. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Bernard has worked in New York doing theater and television and writes macabre comedy for a variety of outlets. When his wife, the actress and professor Anne Torsiglieri, took a job at UCSB teaching acting, Bernard found himself wandering the mean streets of a place where he knew next to no one. Fortunately, Mills was also teaching at UCSB, and, through a series of conversations, the idea of doing radio from the Piano Kitchen once a month on Friday nights at 10pm was born. "We thought it was important to do it late like that" Bernard says, "because we felt more badass that way."
Now that they have settled in and found a groove, the show has become a classic embodiment of a certain intellectual goofiness that infects all the great underground products of Santa Barbara, from the twisted eclecticism of musician Spencer the Gardener to the Sex Wax surf mysticism of fine art painter Hank Pitcher. At any given moment, about half the audience of the Piano Kitchen would have its nose in a book, trying to hunt down just the right Yeats poem to read aloud. Mills, who is a prodigious classically trained actor, is in the habit of memorizing anything that comes his way, and routinely reels off the lyrics to intricate ballads and fantastic obscure Dylan songs as if it were no big thing.
Around the corner, the Muddy Waters Cafe on Haley ought to be in the indie rock hall of fame by now. This tiny space, with barely room for 75 people after a band has set up on the "stage" portion of the floor in the main room, has played host to virtually every Pitchfork Media darling you can name, from Bon Iver to Girls, just to name two. In contrast, Piano Kitchen is typically less a venue to be booked for out of towners, no matter how hip. It's more a place for an organic scene of like-minded locals, their families, and their friends to create together. But, this does not mean this is amateur hour. Most of the folks involved are professionals in either music or theater, or both, and not a few are connected in some way to the nearby University of California, Santa Barbara.
What friends they have, too. Start with Anna Abbey, the pianist, singer, and songwriter who is Jim Connolly's partner in life and art. She brings an amazing ear for the unorthodox arrangement and a wonderful voice to the proceedings. Connolly's main axe is the acoustic bass, and together, he and Abbey perform an uncanny version of the Mission of Burma's "That's When I Reach for My Revolver." The show itself contains multitudes from the most collegiate-style varsity show satirical skits to some psychedelic storytelling a la Joe Frank. What keeps it all together is Mills's steady hand on the wheel and Connolly's banjo, which some nights is so prevalent that Mills jokes that "we could call it the banjo kitchen." This is Santa Barbara eclecticism, served.
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Top Image: Photo by Michael Bernard.]]>


text:
August 2, 2014
Parents and students in Page County came together Monday night to tackle bullying.
They learned new ways to do this through the story of one of the victims of the Columbine High School shooting.
The presentation showed a video recapping the shooting that killed more than a dozen people in Colorado.
One of the victims was Rachel Scott. The presentation told her story and featured an essay that she wrote just days before she was killed.
Rachel wrote that if people are kind to each other, that will create a chain reaction of kindness.
Monday night's presenter says the group 'Rachel's Challenge' tries to spread this message to schools across the country.
"Rachel gives us the power, or empowers us that we can be nice and kind and compassionate to someone else, and by doing so, that small act, we can uplift our school, the community and ultimately the world," said Torski Dobson-Arnold, the presenter.
Hundreds of students in Page County got to see this presentation during school earlier in the day.
© Copyright 2014 WHSV / Gray Television Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Have you ever tried to perceive the absurd ideas the enemy puts in your mind? Forget it, because you can't do that! In this book you'll learn powerful principles to create a spiritual battlefield that will prepare and equip you to have greater spiritual authority to victoriously defeat satan. Discover that:


text:
Updated Nov 26, 2012 - 3:47 pm
ASU's Will Sutton named Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year
Sutton, a junior from Corona, Calif., led the conference with 20 tackles for loss, ranked third with 10.5 quarterback sacks and helped the Sun Devils lead the Pac-12 in pass defense and pass efficiency defense.
Sutton also garnered First Team All-Pac-12 honors -- he was the only Sun Devil to win that distinction.
Senior linebacker Brandon Magee, junior safety Alden Darby landed on the second team defense, while senior punter Josh Hubner was the second team punter.
Magee led the Devils with 104 total tackles, including 17 in ASU's Territorial Cup win over Arizona in Tucson last Friday. For his efforts, Magee won the Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Week honor. Magee's accomplishments come just a year after he missed the entire 2011 campaign with a ruptured Achilles tendon.
Darby finished the regular season with 72 total tackles, three interceptions for 154 yards and a touchdown. He also broke up four passes and forced a fumble. Darby also became the first Sun Devil to earn the "PT42" camouflage practice jersey this season. The jersey pays tribute to former Sun Devil Pat Tillman and in the words of head coach Todd Graham "embodies all the things that he emulated."
Hubner led the Pac-12 in punting with a 47.13 gross average, which also ranked third in the nation.
The following Sun Devils received Pac-12 honorable mention:
LB Carl Bradford, CB Deveron Carr, TE Chris Coyle, OT Evan Finkenberg, RB D.J. Foster, RB Marion Grice, DT Jaxon Hood, DB Osahon Irabor, S Keelan Johnson, QB Taylor Kelly, RS Rashad Ross
- ESPN ranks ASU's Taylor Kelly and Jaelen Strong among top 100 players in college football
- ASU coach Todd Graham excited for Taylor Kelly and offense's potential in 2014
- Arizona State coach Todd Graham confident defense will be fine
- Michael Crow and Larry Scott agree that change needs to happen
- ASU president Michael Crow: compensate coaches on performance
- Dr. Michael Crow, ASU president - Wednesday July 23ASU president Dr. Michael Crow is this week�s guest on the Fork Report.
- Adam Archuleta, former ASU & NFL defensive back - Wednesday July 16Former ASU & NFL DB Adam Archuleta is the guest on this week�s ASU Fork Report.
- Darren Woodson, former Sun Devil & NFL defensive back - Wednesday July 9Former Sun Devil DB Darren Woodson shares his thoughts on ASU football.
- Herb Sendek- ASU men's bball coach - Wednesday June 25ASU men's basketball coach Herb Sendek talks Sun Devil basketball and the NBA Draft.
- Fran Fraschilla- ESPN college basketball insider - Friday June 20ESPN College basketball insider Fran Fraschilla joins the show to discuss the 2014 NBA Draft.


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text:
Aug. 22, 2012 — The editor:
Thank you to the 26 businesses and organizations for contributing to the Welcome New KCU Student gift bags. We had 50 items placed in the 260 bags! Thanks to McCloud Eye Care Center, Carter County Library, Commercial Bank of Grayson, Grayson Rural Electric Cooperative, Citizens National Bank, Grayson Subway, Grayson Tourism & Convention Commission, City of Grayson, American Health Centers, Horton Bros & Brown Pharmacy, Tres Hermanos Nunez Restaurant, Cash Express, Divas Salon & Spa, MaMa Hazel's Bakery, First national Bank, Carter County Broadcasting, Architectural Planning & Design, Carter Caves State Resort Park, Dairy Queen, Kmart, City National Bank, American Veteran's Post 14 of Kenova, WA, McDonald's of Grayson, Eastern KY Voice and Family Eye Care.
Pat Collier, Coordinator
Grayson Area Chamber of Commerce


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text:
Sandy-Stricken New York Sequencing Facilities Start to Recover; Losses Limited for Most
November 06, 2012
Sandy-Stricken New York Sequencing Facilities Start to Recover; Losses Limited for Most
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