Catalog Christmas Day 8: Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2012 everybody. May your lifestyle choices be easier on you than Little Peter's are on him.

Catalog Christmas Day 7: Searching for Santa

Happy New Year's Eve everybody. Here's one last Santa card, since I figure I can't really get away with them anymore after today.

Catalog Christmas Days 5 & 6: Creepy Santa

This is hands-down one of my favorite cards I made this year. 

 Seriously, you don't want to eat that.

Catalog Christmas Day 4: Turkey

I got these bitches a turkey.
Bitches LOVE turkey.

Catalog Christmas Day 3: Thankful

She just looks so ... deviously self-satisfied ...

Merry Christmas with 12 Days of Catalog Christmas Cards

Merry Christmas, faithful readers, or at least Happy Boxing Day. This year, like last year, I'd like to celebrate the end of 2011 and the holiday season with some of my catalog Christmas cards. I made a raft of them, but I think I'll post about a dozen, one for each of the 12 days of Christmas. Here are two for today since I took the day off from the internet yesterday.

There was nothing inherently funny about the lady looking at her crotch until I figured I could put a wreath down there.

They were selling these things called "spirit hoods" and all I could think of was children raised in the woods by wolves.  Or in this case, owls.

Cheap Date: Opening Night of The Great Puppet Happiness Machine

My boyfriend and I were fortunate enough to catch the opening night of The Great Puppet Happiness Machine by Puppet This! at Annex Theater. We had seen the posters go up last week and decided it would make a good event for date night; wandering in on opening night last night was just our good fortune. Our decidedly peculiar ideas about what makes a good date paid off - The Great Puppet Happiness Machine is ridiculous and well worth $10 ($5 for students).

There are basically two premises to the show: 1) a bunch of puppets decide the best way to make their sad puppet friend happy again is to visit a mad scientist and 2) improv. Improvisational comedians running around a blackbox stage with puppets on their hands does not sound like a recipe for success, but it works. Watching puppets gesticulate and flop around is way more interesting than watching the people behind them (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...). It helps that the crew of Puppet This! are pretty funny, even when things don't go quite right.

The BF and I agree that the show was a little rocky: some of the song numbers stuttered when the puppeteers couldn't make up lyrics fast enough, and the crew was still trying to figure out who should chime in when. That said, this was the very first show of the run and my BF was so enthused about the whole thing he wants to go back again. I admit I'd be interested in seeing how the show changes over the season, and would find it vastly amusing to watch my friends discover the puppet-y wonder of "The Great Puppet Happiness Machine".

[TGPHM shows Wednesday nights at 8pm through May 18th]

PS This makes me really regret missing Manos: Hands of Felt.

Slight Awkward Holiday Humor

The homemade Christmas cards below are a product of my relative poverty, perverse humor, three weeks off for winter break and a few strange photographs from catalogs that I will not name (they know who they are). I've only put up the ones I figured wouldn't keep me from getting jobs in the future. I swore to myself that I would get these posted shortly after Christmas. At least I've gotten them up before Epiphany.

2010 Bend-It Extravaganza Call for Queer Artists

Bend-It is calling for all Queer Artists to be a part of the 2010 Bend-It Extravaganza

We are currently planning our 3 day art festival which will be June 25th-27th in Cal Anderson Park and Hugo House on Capitol Hill. Get the word out there!
We are hoping to showcase some new talents as well as some beloved favorites.

That means all you Acrobats, Singers, Breakers, Jugglers, Storytellers, Burlesquers, Poets, Pop Divas, DJs, Painters, Photographers, Hip Hop Artists, Drag Queens, Dancers, Film Directors, Clowns, Actors, Body Painters, Fashion Designers, Drag Kings, Boylesquers, Zinesters, Ukulele Strummers, Belly Dancers and Rock Bands AND artists! We are especially excited about young, local, and people of color artists.

Check out our website and use the Get Involved section to submit information if you have interest in performing, organizing, or just learning more.

Or, you can contact one of these organizers directly:

Sam - Sam.J.Irish@gmail.com
LT - ltmkt2@gmail.com
Quinn - quinnwyatt@gmail.com
Eden - Ourrainyparade@gmail.com

This year as part of the Bend-It Extravaganza , we will have a table where queer zinesters can leave, or pass out their zines for free. Everyone who contributes is guaranteed free photo copies for work sent in by June 11, so tell all your friends. If you've never written a zine before, but have always wanted to, now is your chance. We are accepting all kinds: lit zines, comics, poetry, adventure stories, cooking, mental health, DIY, etc., but would ask that they be in agreement with our mission statement and values.

Mail your submissions to:

Bend-It
PO Box 20252
Seattle, WA 98102

All submissions must be postmarked by June 11

For more information contact Quinn at
quinnwyatt@gmail.com
and go to benditbandits.org

Bend It is a queer artist activist collective that makes the world a more fabulous place by building welcoming, liberated spaces, strengthening community, and creating meaningful alternatives for queer young people and their friends.

Since 2003, Bend-It has been organizing a three-day arts festival during the weekend of the Seattle Pride Parade in June. We designed our festival as a meaningful, non-corporate, proactively inclusive alternative to Pride, hosting community artists-led workshops, concerts, photography exhibits, film festivals, fashion/drag/burlesque shows, and spoken poetry open mic nights. We have encouraged DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIT (do-it-together) mentalities by offering reciprocal skill-building workshops—as opposed to top-down, one-way interactions.

Call to Artists: Capitol Hill Station Wall Project - Roster of Artists

This particular call to artists is of very personal interest to me. I live not too far away from the station site and wish to be treated to challenging, boundaries-pushing, world-class art on a daily basis. I'll also be on the selection committee (I got to help pick DK Pan as lead artist! So cool!), so I really want a great group to choose from. And, yes, I also happen to like Broadway and wish the best of financial success on its businesses, and I do believe that great art on the construction wall can do a lot to keep foot traffic from abandoned the street in droves.

So, tell all your awesome artist friends who do large scale, edgy work to send in an application. The future of Broadway and my viewing pleasure depend on it.

This Week in Kickoffs: The Uprising Art Opening, Office Nomads Resolutions Party, & B-Way Light Rail Stations Construction Begins

The Uprising, this Tuesday night's (8-11pm) Zombie Art Show Reception & Zombie Potluck at Zero Zero, begins my week in Capitol Hill kickoffs. This is a must-attend: you can meet Zero Zero's Jason of the amazing double handlebar mustache, and of course, there will be zombie art.

Thursday is going to be an event double-header with Office Nomads Resolutions Party/Winter Open House and then the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station Construction Kickoff over at Seattle Central. The party at Office Nomads goes from 6-9pm and the Construction Kickoff presentation will go from about 6:30 to 8pm...yeah, so maybe it isn't actually physically possible to make it to both. But I can try.

Feeling crafty

Since it's now autumn and Steam-Con will soon be upon us, I've been feeling exceptionally crafty of late. The problem is, as always, I don't have any money but I really want to go out and buy supplies. What is an impoverished crafter to do? Get salvagepunk and hit the bargain bins.

My favorite Hill stop in the autumn and winter is the Value Village basement. They're open late and they price all their stock to move cuz they're constantly getting new stuff in. Also, since garage sale season is over, if somebody's moving and wants to get rid of all their extra crap, a quick stop to drop things off at Value Village is the best way to do it.

Second favorite is the Capitol Hill Trading Post on 12th. They're prices are a little higher, but they have the neat vintage shtuff that is essential when putting together steampunk contraptions. The only real problem I have with the place is that they're hours aren't too extensive, which makes spur of the moment shopping a little difficult.

I'll be honest - you need to have a practiced eye, adequate self-control, and a willingness to sort through lots and lots of crap. But it's totally worth it when you figure out that all that lovely cloth you found as fabric samples turns out to cost all of $2 a yard.

Haunted by Street Art

I found these little buddies on my street just this week. They're all along Boylston and Olive. Thanks artsy neighbor!

This Thursday: Arbitrary Art Grant Show + Marination Mobile + 500 E Pine

Yep, I'll be there.

UPDATE: Or not...it was raining, I had a good book, what can I say. CHS Blog did go, and here is their coverage on the event. I take some comfort in the fact that Marination Mobile didn't make it either because while I may have missed out on $500, at least I didn't miss out on their delicious tacos.

Coming right up: Chill 'n' Grill on the Hill

The neighborhood is invited Tuesday evening, August 4th 2009 to attend the newly renamed “Chill-N-Grill on the Hill,” formerly the Fifth Annual Olive-Howell Street Block Party. The event is organized by volunteers from Unpaving Paradise (that's me!), the Capitol Hill Community Council (hey, that's me too!) as well as local residents. The Chill 'n' Grill is sponsored again this year by City Market, Metropolitain Café and the Crescent Lounge.

It will be an evening of awesome, with free hot dogs, hamburgers and soft drinks and a line-up of diverse and talented local bands including Mighty Tiger, Eagle Seagull, Norey, Viva la Villain and The Autumn Electric. Local Artists are invited to participate by bringing pieces for display.

This is an all-ages event. Set up of the stage will begin at four p.m., and the event will start at 6:00 pm and run until 10:00 pm.

The event will be held on E. Howell Street, between the intersections of East Olive Way, and Bellevue Avenue E. For more information go to: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/events/2009/08/04/chill-n-grill-on-the-hill/media/picture706.png/medium

$10K + 500 Pine = Big Ass Block Party

I read this three times before I could believe it: those crazy mofos at Cap to the Hill are going to have a $10,000 party resurrecting the lost 500 block of Pine on what is now the empty 500 block of Pine. And they want your help to do it.

What is amazing is not just what they want to do, but how they got the money to do it. I can't believe they have contests/grants for this kind of thing. I can totally believe they won, though. Massive street party and neighborhood revitalization all rolled into one... it is genius.

Man, the uses of that empty lot just keeps getting better and better. First the Capitol Hill Garage Sale, then the Park(ing) Day bonanza coming up in September, and now this.

Our neighborhood mantra: Have space, will party.




* 500 Pine - RIP *

Busy weekend

I caught a car crash while I was gardening at ROW, spent a pleasant afternoon with anachronistic crafters in a church basement, and made it to the Annex's Theatre's All-Holiday Party in time for Halloween. And on Sunday, I mostly took a nap.

UPDATED Belated Happy Friday Tidings

It looks like we have another entertaining Cap Hill summer weekend in store. Besides the Steampunk Swampmeet (SO AMAZING-TOTALLY GOING), the most amusing thing I've seen so far is this Saturday's possible convergence of nakey cyclists and Shakespeare in the Park. Am I intrigued by the possible collision of new theater and old theatre? Or do I just find it funny that classical theater-goers may be in for some nudity out of left field (literally)?

Speaking of entertaining happenings in Volunteer Park - just read The Stranger's bit on Waterlines, a performance piece by Stokley Towes about drinking water. It's staged in an office trailer behind the Seattle Asian Art Museum. It sounds like good performance art: creative, evocative, playful, relevant. Since I missed this week's performances (it runs Wed. - Fri., 7pm), I'll just have to wander for the second run next week. I'll tell you how it goes.

ONE MORE THING I JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT RIGHT NOW: Home Alive is having a benefit concert tomorrow. If you don't mind heffing over to West Seattle, and you have some free time, you should go. Home Alive is good people and they could use the money.

Art Grant as Art

It's an art grant that's really a performance piece encouraging other artists to create performance pieces. Delightful - thank you Vital 5 Productions.

SIFF Reviews: Short in the Dark and Dead Snow

Instead of virtuously attending the 12th Ave Stewardship Council meeting last night like I meant to, I was gang-pressed into taking in a SIFF double-feature: Short in the Dark at the Northwest Film Forum and Dead Snow at Pacific Place.

I just barely made it into Dead Snow, even with friends waiting for me in the Will Call line way ahead of time. Seattle likes their foreign, friends-go-to-an-isolated-cabin zombie films that much. We were not disappointed, though the short film that accompanied Dead Snow might have been better than the feature we came to see.

Full Employment is a German short about an employment assistance agency for the elderly who still need to make money but aren't getting around so well anymore. It's full of mockumentary goodness and jokes about how all young people in Germany are unpaid trainees or volunteers. And the best part: Mr. Jones, the elderly man who's day we get to follow...is a zombie hunter.

Short in the Dark is a series of experimental short films, some of which were really great, others of which were...definitely experiments.

1. SHU (dir. Philipp Lachenmann, 12 min.)
   12 minutes of time-lapse filming watching night fall over an isolated high-security prison in the Mojave Desert. Mostly, you just hear the wind. It is quiet and beautiful. It is frightening to stare into the vast clear vault of the desert sky as it turns to night.

2. Puccini Conservato (dir. Michael Snow, 10 min.)
   Oh man... ten minutes of fuzzy closeup pans of someone's Panasonic stereo system as Puccini plays in the background. It was so bad. The sudden, silent cuts to a fireplace, flowers, and open water were so unexpected and bizarre that the threater burst into laughter.

3. Garden/ing (dir. Eriko Sonoda, 6 minutes)
   The whole short is a constant loop around a glass door that looks into a garden. The viewer seems to be approaching the door, only to go through it and see that they're looking at the same door again, somewhat like an inescapable revolving door that just keeps dumping one back into the lobby over and over again. Over time, the view of the garden through the door switches from the "real" view to a projection of that view to the entire screen being a projection of the "real" view of the room and the view. It was a fascinating study, although the constant circling motion made me rather queasy.

4. Dig (dir. Robert Todd, 2 min.)
   A seizure-inducing series of signs painted on the street to guide road construction is accompanied by the sound of jackhammers. It works - it does indeed "[reveal] a restless array of mysterious geometries". Thankfully however, it was kept to two minutes so that the audience did not succumb to seizures or sensory overload.

5. Slow Boat to Thassos (dir. Jon Behrens, 7 min.)
   Speaking of seizure-inducing... seven minutes of rapid-fire reverse colored photographic images with weird-ass noise in the background. This film would be perfect for brainwashing and hypnotic suggestion.

6. Horizontal Boundaries (dir. Pat O'Neill, 23 min.)
   This one nearly killed me. It certainly brought back ten-fold the queasy feeling I got from Garden/ing. It was supposed to be some kind of statement about LA's cityscape, since all the images used in this unending brainkill were of that particular metropolis. What it was was an eternity of vertically overlapping images of the city accompanied by a mind-breaking soundscape of music/noise/old radio plays/dogs barking. I would be interested in 2-5 minutes of this. I could stand 2-5 minutes of this. But after nearly half an hour I was surprised I didn't have a migraine from my body's rebellion against the aesthetics of the piece.

7. Somewhere (dir. Salise Hughes, 4 min.)
   Roy Rogers and Maria from West Side Story, cut directly from their native film stock and pasted onto a brightly colored backdrop, sing "Somewhere". Clunky and meh.

8. Adulte (dir. Carlos Reygadas, 7 min.)
   Very, um, experimental. It certainly was surreal watching a naked man sitting in a coffin, lamenting, rolling himself and the coffin to the cliff, and then throwing the coffin over the edge while wearing a (miraculously self-attiring?) suit.

9. Bedtime Story (dir. Sarah Jane Lapp, 2 min.)
   It's great, mostly because its a cute little story with a plot.

10. The Chronicles of Cleo and Jack (dir. Karn Junkinsmith, 15 min.)
    Hands-down, this is what made Short in the Dark worth my while. Well, and SHU too. Two young hipsters skateboard all around Seattle trying to deliver a package and get away from Hari-Krishna types that dance like the hippies in Hair. It's lovely in black and white, and Karn Junkinsmith is right - skateboarding is like dancing, at least when she films it.