Sezio

Art Trade : LetterPress for Screen Printing

After doing a masterful job on our business cards, we started talking to Tim Butler, of Quality LetterPress, about a possible Art Trade.  He was looking for unique, screen printed poster backgrounds for his band, Hot Rod Lincoln, and offered a free round of Letter Pressed posters in exchange.

The minute I saw all of the vintage looking posters in Tim's shop, I immediately thought about Blackout Party, and how this would fit their vibe.  I grabbed Brian and Andrew and we spent a day with Tim, learning how to run LetterPress machines from the early 1900's.

here are some pictures and videos from our day.

Lining up the print...

Number 1 of 40 - If you look carefully, you will notice our type-o.  It is tough to spell and lay everything out backwards...

If you want to make some posters before Tim and Hot Rod Lincoln head out on a European Tour with the Stray Cats, better email him soon.  You can find Quality Letter Press here.

Here is one of our collaborative Hot Rod Lincoln, European Tour Posters...

Furoshiki

The ancient Japanese art of Furoshiki is a fashionable yet functional alternative to your canvas grocery tote.  Check it out..

How To Carry Groceries With A Square Of Cloth

For more info on Furoshiki including products and techniques click here. furoshiki.com

For more ways to help reduce plastic bag consumption click here.

Shadow Art

These put my shadow puppets to shame.  Artists like Shigeo Fukuda, Tim Noble, and Sue Webster create intricate shadows cast from even more intricate groupings of trash and metal. 

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Dirty White Trash [With Gulls], 1998

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, HE/SHE, 2003

See more photos here

Visit Shigeo Fukuda's website here

Here's a video of shadow puppets done to What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong...for the advanced shadow puppeteer

WANTED : Kool-Aid Man

When Scott Van De Plas saw a broken wall at his work, he knew just what to do. 

..ohh yeahh..

Journal of a Record #6

That is that is that.  My work is done for now and it’s time to rest.  On Tuesday I sang the last couple songs, shook a tambourine, hit some bells, and broke a wine glass to finish up the last of my checklists.  We’re done tracking and have mixed two songs so far, which requires little involvement by me.  I’ve done everything in my power and it feels really good to know that whether I like it or not, what’s there is there and it’s going to stay.  I have never pushed so hard for so long on a single project and I feel like every last drop of blood that I have made it into it.  I’m delightfully exhausted.

I am discovering more and more that art is a breathing in and a breathing out.  We absorb things all day and then we create or rearrange to process or acknowledge what we’ve experienced.  But there’s often a tension in my body and I am just now realizing that it generates from either breathing in or breathing out for too long at one time.  Ideally it’s a constant flow in and out but rarely does it happen that way, I generally get either too caught up in other tasks to have time to create new things or I put so much pressure on myself to make things that wind up without any fuel for it.  Right now I feel like both my lungs and eyes sting from breathing one huge breath out for so long that I almost fell to the floor.  The last couple days of tracking were really a fight and I felt like I was barely hanging in there to make it happen.

Video by Wes Scheler

Now I’m finished and I’m inhaling deeply in again the way you do when you come up from a dive to the bottom of the pool.  I came home and read East of Eden for a while and then listened to a handful of LPs.  I’m extra sensitive to art and music right now; it’s a feast after a long day of hard work.  Steinbeck’s words and Cohen’s string arrangements are decadence to me.  There's mixing, mastering, artwork, replication, and vinyl pressing (that's right) to finish but I'm taking a break for a bit.  I have friends in town and I’m getting to finally enjoy Portland and the Northwestern wilderness as a means of breathing again.  And in the spirit of resting from my work, I will leave it at that and point to the rest of the journals I made in the process of putting this record together:
 
Dust Jacket