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yamamanamaI assumed, and therefore, make you ass, that the River Arts Festival would be held in the same bat place as well as more or less the same bat time, and therefore missed the sculpture race. There was probably a quicker way to get there than taking the Red Line back to Park Street and then taking the Green Line to Lechmere but oh well. For something called the River Arts Festival, holding it along the Lechmere Canal and Charles River makes a hell of a lot more sense. My only gripe with it is that it's totally linear so getting from the folk stage to the alternative stage takes some time. The burro libro or whatever his name was was around, the giant baby carriage was still around, there was a giant music box that plays a song when you push it and a mosaic chimera, a guy was wearing parts of platonic and non-platonic solids, and a woman was giving away pro-happily kazoos and cards saying that ye who bear this card are an official member of the the World Kazoo Orchestra & Marching Band.
The weather was much nicer than last year, although it was cloudy when I left home. The music was great. I went in with lower expectations because it's just so hard to beat last year's lineup.
What I saw was this:
12:15 or so: Abbie Barrett and the Last Dance
The stage was a re-appropriated dock in the Lechmere Canal.
I don't think I missed much of their set. Most of the songs they played are from the second album or from their upcoming album. The booklet calls them pop-rock with an irreverent edge and says that her voice can go from a quiet, sweet lullaby to a snarky yell. I really like the songs Lake House Moon, Here To Stay, and Bide My Time.
I said they should play one more song. And then two more after that.
"They throw us in the water after that," she says.
They gave away download tickets for when their new album comes out.
1: Mr. Airplane Man.
Don't be fooled by their name, this band is in fact two women: Margaret on guitar and Tara on drums, tambourine, and farfisa. They're back from a ten year hiatus. It's like if you some 60s soul, dreamy pop, blues, and rock, and added a bunch of lo-fi and noise.
They recorded an EP with Mark Sandman.
Margaret said "I think a shark hit out platform."
The only thing they had for sale was The Lost Tapes. The case is weird, folded paper with a rubber nub holding the CD in place, but it's still not the worst CD case I've ever encountered. Tool, I am referring to you. There's some more stuff for sale on their Bandcamp.
2: An excerpt from Hamlet.
3: Damn Tall Buildings:
They're a bluegrass band but not totally bound to the genre, and they use upright bass, fiddle, banjo, and acoustic guitar.
The members are from all over the country.
4:15: Dwight & Nicole
I caught the tail end of this. Mix some soul, R&B, jazz, and rock guitar.
5: Vapors of Morphine
I was torn between Twisted Pine and Vapors of Morphine.
Vapors of Morphine is basically Morphine minus Mark Sandman, with a new guy on 2 string slide bass. Those of you who have played Civilization II will recognize I Had My Chance from the Manhattan Project wonder.
Vapors of Morphine is not a nautical band so Dana had no idea what the proper nautical term for doing a u-turn in a boat is. They played a few songs I recognize from Yes, including the title track, and probably a few songs written after Mark Sandman's death. The booklet mentions west African tunes and obscure covers. I'm not really familiar enough to know which is which.
What I didn't get to hear was Dietrich Strauss, The Novel Ideas, The DuPont Brothers, Dennis Brennan, Twisted Pine, The Once In A Blue Moon Band (featuring Shelly Neill), A tribute to Nina Simone, The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, Guy Mendillo Ensemble, Dub Apocalypse, Tim Gearan Band, The Silks.
***
On the trip in, there was some kind of small carnival in Quincy and Joe and Riley wanted to stop there. Joe said that it didn't matter if he was late because he wasn't running. Riley used a snapchat feature to exchange her face with the face of an advertisement poster, and said that at the MFA, people were trying this on Van Gogh's postman painting and it wasn't working. A woman is a makeup artist so she has tattoos of scissors and lipstick and stuff. A woman with plum blossom tattoos got on the train as I got off.
I missed the sculpture race last year as well, so I didn't know where it began.
Outside of The Middle East are painted panels inspired by the elements, along with a bigger mural depicting a diurnal lizard and a nocturnal lizard and I'm pretty sure they're of the same genus. If that's online, I can't find it.
Don't eat pizza made with cadmium. Also, there's a certain irony of using the public parks of Cambridge to represent uranium.
Oriana Gerez had some art at the Out of the Blue Too art gallery but nothing online.
A woman I drew on the journey from Central to Lechmere had a camera amongst flower tattoo.
A man had a Blinky the Three Eyed Fish tattoo done in a Japanese style. In the background was a pufferfish or perhaps a thorny fruit, and a shark.
A woman had a hand of Fatima tattooed on one arm, a cartoony explosion with the word BANG! and the word "ΙΧΘΥΣ" for her father who did speak Greek. It turns out it isn't the same thing the choir sings in the opening of King Roger, which is "hagios kyrios theos sabaoth."
Let me tell you: Unicode has a weird quirk of sticking the diacritic to the side of capital letters. Both the Upsilon and the Iota should be accented. Also, on her tattoo, the theta looked more lowercase.
She was impressed by my ability to read it. I just can't understand it.
I asked a guy if his tattoo was a basket star and he said it's a gorgon's head starfish, and he only knows it by that name. It turns out they're a type of basket star. The story goes that when Perseus beheaded Medusa and threw her head on the beach, her gaze turned the seaweed to stone and created coral. Although these guys are found in the Antarctic and Arctic and depths of the ocean and not the Aegean sea.
Dana pronounces her name like Danna. Dana likens my art to Humans of New York and thinks I should include little vignettes about the people I draw, which is kinda what I do here. Dana went through my sketchbook and noticed someone who looked a bit like her. I said that maybe it was. So I don't know when she had the surgery or whatever on her knee but now that I think about it, I don't think it was her.
She was wearing a flower pendant made by her friend Emily. Emily, however, was wearing a bead necklace. Dana used to make art in high school but now she's just an actor. She does a thing called Shitfaced Shakespeare in which one of the actors gets as drunk as Barney and the rest improvise and try to bring him back to Shakespeare.
Dana compared my art to Roald Dahl's, or rather, Quentin Blake's art. I've heard people, specifically Rebecca, say the same exact thing to me. She said that Monica looks like Monica of Shitfaced Shakespeare, and who knows, maybe she is. She says my watercolor and ink paintings are beautiful. She wondered how old Roald Dahl was and I knew he was no longer alive, but not that he died in 1990 or that he'd be turning 100 in September.
Dana likes drawing squiggly lines herself with marker.
Sam Malcolm says that everyone can benefit from street art. "if you're liberal, I'm an artist. If you're a conservative, I'm a small business. If you're Donald Trump, I'm not Muslim. If you're Muslim, I'm not voting for Donald Trump."
"Welcome to my country." He grew up on a Shoshone-Paiute reservation outside of Reno, NV. Speaking of NV, some people from Canada were having a conversation with some people from Las Vegas, and they were talking about the time a couple was having sex on the ferris wheel and "no, what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas because 240 days later, ploop."
His grand finale was to have four people pull on ropes to support a ladder made from a recycled wheelchair which put up a fight, and juggled swords handed to him by "the woman in the doppler effect dress."
He's like "you'll remember this for the rest of your life. maybe you'll grow up to be a doctor, or lawyer, or Japanese" and the kid is like "I am Japanese!" and later he said he had no idea.
Alexandra recognized me. She told me the map was at their gallery and it might be on their instagram. If Emma was there, I didn't see her, although I did mistake a few people for her. If Emily (not Dana's friend Emily but Emily from children of the revolution. They might be the same person.) was selling jewelry, I didn't see her. Riri's Pottery Haus wasn't there. They weren't listed in the booklet but neither was Bon Me nor was Gallery 253. I briefly mistook someone for Jackie.
Gallery 253 was making a quilt with our self-portraits. She said bringing a mirror was a great idea and then told me we don't need mirrors because it's how we see ourselves, and then told me I didn't need a mirror anyway. Someone drew a crocodile or maybe it was an alligator.
Julia got beads from the Czech Republic or maybe it was still Czechoslovakia.
A guy had a t-shirt depicting some kind of butterfly phoenix which I can not find by google image searching that (sometimes I swear its telepathic. Not in this case.) and a tattoo of a curling branch.
The woman with short amplified pastel green hair apologized for having a weird face but it's cool. I did get her jewelry, which consisted of: in order of most likely to least likely, rotated astrological symbols for Venus/biological symbol for female/alchemical symbol for copper, alchemical symbol for iron/biological symbol for male/astrological symbol for Mars, or astrological symbol for Uranus and symbol for platinum and not uranium as one might expect; a rather ornate septum ring; what she says is a squirrel's mandible hanging from a chain attached to her ear, it had a canine so I'm going to ask about that tomorrow, she might be mistaken or the person she got it from might be mistaken; a long cord with a vial of powder and dried flower hanging around her neck; a stick-on bead near her eye.
Her tattoos depicted chakrams and a sketch of a seated woman and a crescent moon as viewed on the Equator. Her shirt was sunset purple and spattered with black. She held a green apple.
She understands the dilemma of whether to sacrifice artistic vision or inadvertently piss someone off off.
I saw a woman wearing a kimono but I don't know if it was for something or just something she felt like wearing and we didn't really get the chance to talk.
A woman had a tattoo of a kimonoed woman along with many flowers. A man had a tattoo of a samurai.
There were two giants amongst dogkind, a papillon, and a puli, which I said looks like Cousin It with dreadlocks.
One of the interstitial songs at one of the stages was an instrumental of Beware The Blob!
Cate Great did her finale, juggling and a handstand on a tower stack with swords sticking out for added dangerousness, to Also Sprach Zarathustra and her penultimate trick, spinning around on a stack of pipes and boards, was done to the Mission:Impossible theme.
She says people ask her "who are you? What are you? Where are you from? Where are you really from? Where are you really really really from?" and she's really from New Jersey and fuck if I can remember her name. I think it started with the letter L. She's not listed in the booklet.
She escapes from a straightjacket and makes coins move around. She holds a jar in one hand and three (tres/trois/san/három/kinsa) half-dollar coins in the other and I can't tell if she's just really good at flipping coins in the air or if there's more to it. She was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt. She says she got the straightjacket from her parents. She has a rubber hand just so she can make the bad joke.
I was the only one who took the bait when she had us count the coins in English, Spanish, French, and then her first language. Or maybe I was the only one who could count to three in an Asian language who took the bait. Hey, Other Barry, let's count to three Barry's way: BARRY. DOESN'T. LIKE. being made an ass.
There were some gongs made from sheets of metal. Today, we are all percussionists.
Someone was selling glass hummingbirds, octopuses, mermaids, sea stars, dogs, rays, and crabs.
Someone from Romania was selling paintings and souvenir trinkets.
Someone was selling bead frogs made by people from South Africa.
The woman with the tiger's eye pendant is a huge fan of Morphine. I think the guy with the skeleton hand pendant is too.
Her friend had double bat earrings so I had to show her the bat pictures from the wildlife center. She really likes bats. Her vest is covered with Batman-related pins.
A woman at Park Street had some sort of l'Cie brand tattooed on her shoulder.
burning question: is there a non-WASP demographic Trump won't offend by the end of his campaign?
The weather was much nicer than last year, although it was cloudy when I left home. The music was great. I went in with lower expectations because it's just so hard to beat last year's lineup.
What I saw was this:
12:15 or so: Abbie Barrett and the Last Dance
The stage was a re-appropriated dock in the Lechmere Canal.
I don't think I missed much of their set. Most of the songs they played are from the second album or from their upcoming album. The booklet calls them pop-rock with an irreverent edge and says that her voice can go from a quiet, sweet lullaby to a snarky yell. I really like the songs Lake House Moon, Here To Stay, and Bide My Time.
I said they should play one more song. And then two more after that.
"They throw us in the water after that," she says.
They gave away download tickets for when their new album comes out.
1: Mr. Airplane Man.
Don't be fooled by their name, this band is in fact two women: Margaret on guitar and Tara on drums, tambourine, and farfisa. They're back from a ten year hiatus. It's like if you some 60s soul, dreamy pop, blues, and rock, and added a bunch of lo-fi and noise.
They recorded an EP with Mark Sandman.
Margaret said "I think a shark hit out platform."
The only thing they had for sale was The Lost Tapes. The case is weird, folded paper with a rubber nub holding the CD in place, but it's still not the worst CD case I've ever encountered. Tool, I am referring to you. There's some more stuff for sale on their Bandcamp.
2: An excerpt from Hamlet.
3: Damn Tall Buildings:
They're a bluegrass band but not totally bound to the genre, and they use upright bass, fiddle, banjo, and acoustic guitar.
The members are from all over the country.
4:15: Dwight & Nicole
I caught the tail end of this. Mix some soul, R&B, jazz, and rock guitar.
5: Vapors of Morphine
I was torn between Twisted Pine and Vapors of Morphine.
Vapors of Morphine is basically Morphine minus Mark Sandman, with a new guy on 2 string slide bass. Those of you who have played Civilization II will recognize I Had My Chance from the Manhattan Project wonder.
Vapors of Morphine is not a nautical band so Dana had no idea what the proper nautical term for doing a u-turn in a boat is. They played a few songs I recognize from Yes, including the title track, and probably a few songs written after Mark Sandman's death. The booklet mentions west African tunes and obscure covers. I'm not really familiar enough to know which is which.
What I didn't get to hear was Dietrich Strauss, The Novel Ideas, The DuPont Brothers, Dennis Brennan, Twisted Pine, The Once In A Blue Moon Band (featuring Shelly Neill), A tribute to Nina Simone, The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, Guy Mendillo Ensemble, Dub Apocalypse, Tim Gearan Band, The Silks.
***
On the trip in, there was some kind of small carnival in Quincy and Joe and Riley wanted to stop there. Joe said that it didn't matter if he was late because he wasn't running. Riley used a snapchat feature to exchange her face with the face of an advertisement poster, and said that at the MFA, people were trying this on Van Gogh's postman painting and it wasn't working. A woman is a makeup artist so she has tattoos of scissors and lipstick and stuff. A woman with plum blossom tattoos got on the train as I got off.
I missed the sculpture race last year as well, so I didn't know where it began.
Outside of The Middle East are painted panels inspired by the elements, along with a bigger mural depicting a diurnal lizard and a nocturnal lizard and I'm pretty sure they're of the same genus. If that's online, I can't find it.
Don't eat pizza made with cadmium. Also, there's a certain irony of using the public parks of Cambridge to represent uranium.
Oriana Gerez had some art at the Out of the Blue Too art gallery but nothing online.
A woman I drew on the journey from Central to Lechmere had a camera amongst flower tattoo.
A man had a Blinky the Three Eyed Fish tattoo done in a Japanese style. In the background was a pufferfish or perhaps a thorny fruit, and a shark.
A woman had a hand of Fatima tattooed on one arm, a cartoony explosion with the word BANG! and the word "ΙΧΘΥΣ" for her father who did speak Greek. It turns out it isn't the same thing the choir sings in the opening of King Roger, which is "hagios kyrios theos sabaoth."
Let me tell you: Unicode has a weird quirk of sticking the diacritic to the side of capital letters. Both the Upsilon and the Iota should be accented. Also, on her tattoo, the theta looked more lowercase.
She was impressed by my ability to read it. I just can't understand it.
I asked a guy if his tattoo was a basket star and he said it's a gorgon's head starfish, and he only knows it by that name. It turns out they're a type of basket star. The story goes that when Perseus beheaded Medusa and threw her head on the beach, her gaze turned the seaweed to stone and created coral. Although these guys are found in the Antarctic and Arctic and depths of the ocean and not the Aegean sea.
Dana pronounces her name like Danna. Dana likens my art to Humans of New York and thinks I should include little vignettes about the people I draw, which is kinda what I do here. Dana went through my sketchbook and noticed someone who looked a bit like her. I said that maybe it was. So I don't know when she had the surgery or whatever on her knee but now that I think about it, I don't think it was her.
She was wearing a flower pendant made by her friend Emily. Emily, however, was wearing a bead necklace. Dana used to make art in high school but now she's just an actor. She does a thing called Shitfaced Shakespeare in which one of the actors gets as drunk as Barney and the rest improvise and try to bring him back to Shakespeare.
Dana compared my art to Roald Dahl's, or rather, Quentin Blake's art. I've heard people, specifically Rebecca, say the same exact thing to me. She said that Monica looks like Monica of Shitfaced Shakespeare, and who knows, maybe she is. She says my watercolor and ink paintings are beautiful. She wondered how old Roald Dahl was and I knew he was no longer alive, but not that he died in 1990 or that he'd be turning 100 in September.
Dana likes drawing squiggly lines herself with marker.
Sam Malcolm says that everyone can benefit from street art. "if you're liberal, I'm an artist. If you're a conservative, I'm a small business. If you're Donald Trump, I'm not Muslim. If you're Muslim, I'm not voting for Donald Trump."
"Welcome to my country." He grew up on a Shoshone-Paiute reservation outside of Reno, NV. Speaking of NV, some people from Canada were having a conversation with some people from Las Vegas, and they were talking about the time a couple was having sex on the ferris wheel and "no, what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas because 240 days later, ploop."
His grand finale was to have four people pull on ropes to support a ladder made from a recycled wheelchair which put up a fight, and juggled swords handed to him by "the woman in the doppler effect dress."
He's like "you'll remember this for the rest of your life. maybe you'll grow up to be a doctor, or lawyer, or Japanese" and the kid is like "I am Japanese!" and later he said he had no idea.
Alexandra recognized me. She told me the map was at their gallery and it might be on their instagram. If Emma was there, I didn't see her, although I did mistake a few people for her. If Emily (not Dana's friend Emily but Emily from children of the revolution. They might be the same person.) was selling jewelry, I didn't see her. Riri's Pottery Haus wasn't there. They weren't listed in the booklet but neither was Bon Me nor was Gallery 253. I briefly mistook someone for Jackie.
Gallery 253 was making a quilt with our self-portraits. She said bringing a mirror was a great idea and then told me we don't need mirrors because it's how we see ourselves, and then told me I didn't need a mirror anyway. Someone drew a crocodile or maybe it was an alligator.
Julia got beads from the Czech Republic or maybe it was still Czechoslovakia.
A guy had a t-shirt depicting some kind of butterfly phoenix which I can not find by google image searching that (sometimes I swear its telepathic. Not in this case.) and a tattoo of a curling branch.
The woman with short amplified pastel green hair apologized for having a weird face but it's cool. I did get her jewelry, which consisted of: in order of most likely to least likely, rotated astrological symbols for Venus/biological symbol for female/alchemical symbol for copper, alchemical symbol for iron/biological symbol for male/astrological symbol for Mars, or astrological symbol for Uranus and symbol for platinum and not uranium as one might expect; a rather ornate septum ring; what she says is a squirrel's mandible hanging from a chain attached to her ear, it had a canine so I'm going to ask about that tomorrow, she might be mistaken or the person she got it from might be mistaken; a long cord with a vial of powder and dried flower hanging around her neck; a stick-on bead near her eye.
Her tattoos depicted chakrams and a sketch of a seated woman and a crescent moon as viewed on the Equator. Her shirt was sunset purple and spattered with black. She held a green apple.
She understands the dilemma of whether to sacrifice artistic vision or inadvertently piss someone off off.
I saw a woman wearing a kimono but I don't know if it was for something or just something she felt like wearing and we didn't really get the chance to talk.
A woman had a tattoo of a kimonoed woman along with many flowers. A man had a tattoo of a samurai.
There were two giants amongst dogkind, a papillon, and a puli, which I said looks like Cousin It with dreadlocks.
One of the interstitial songs at one of the stages was an instrumental of Beware The Blob!
Cate Great did her finale, juggling and a handstand on a tower stack with swords sticking out for added dangerousness, to Also Sprach Zarathustra and her penultimate trick, spinning around on a stack of pipes and boards, was done to the Mission:Impossible theme.
She says people ask her "who are you? What are you? Where are you from? Where are you really from? Where are you really really really from?" and she's really from New Jersey and fuck if I can remember her name. I think it started with the letter L. She's not listed in the booklet.
She escapes from a straightjacket and makes coins move around. She holds a jar in one hand and three (tres/trois/san/három/kinsa) half-dollar coins in the other and I can't tell if she's just really good at flipping coins in the air or if there's more to it. She was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt. She says she got the straightjacket from her parents. She has a rubber hand just so she can make the bad joke.
I was the only one who took the bait when she had us count the coins in English, Spanish, French, and then her first language. Or maybe I was the only one who could count to three in an Asian language who took the bait. Hey, Other Barry, let's count to three Barry's way: BARRY. DOESN'T. LIKE. being made an ass.
There were some gongs made from sheets of metal. Today, we are all percussionists.
Someone was selling glass hummingbirds, octopuses, mermaids, sea stars, dogs, rays, and crabs.
Someone from Romania was selling paintings and souvenir trinkets.
Someone was selling bead frogs made by people from South Africa.
The woman with the tiger's eye pendant is a huge fan of Morphine. I think the guy with the skeleton hand pendant is too.
Her friend had double bat earrings so I had to show her the bat pictures from the wildlife center. She really likes bats. Her vest is covered with Batman-related pins.
A woman at Park Street had some sort of l'Cie brand tattooed on her shoulder.
burning question: is there a non-WASP demographic Trump won't offend by the end of his campaign?
