POPPING THE SEAMS

A talk by Al Larsen at the Doe Bay Yoga Center, Olga, WA at 7:30 pm on July 29, 2009.

What sprouts in the wake of the financial crisis? A slideshow and talk about hope and opportunity: DIY public works projects, local food production, and guerilla urban renewal.

Photo: Daniel Greene, Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

An Open Discussion on Making it Happen
What the Heck Fest 2009
Sunday, July 19th 10:00 am
at the Croatian Club- 7th and N

Roll out early and join a discussion or two on creating events, running venues, and kick-starting special moments.

What works where you are?
What is happening elsewhere?

What kinds of face-to-face moments are important in a hyper-connected world?

How do we keep going when everybody?s broke?
Participants to include:

Mariella Luz (Olympia All Ages Project, Olympia, WA)
Marc Moscato (Dill Pickle Club, Portland, OR)
Aimee Buyea (Sugar City, Buffalo, NY)
George Wietor (Division Avenue Arts Cooperative, Grand Rapids, MI)
Hollow Earth Radio (the internet)
Kevin Erickson (All Ages Movement Project)
Joe Ahearn (SleepWhenDead and Showpaper, NYC)
and… YOU!(?)

Marc Moscato is an artist, curator and activist living in Portland, OR, where he directs the creative cultural center The Dill Pickle Club. His short films and videos have screened at film festivals, theaters and non-traditional spaces across the country, including the New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Video Mundi Festival and many more. He has more than 10 years experience in marketing and communications, and has worked for Museum of Contemporary Craft, City Club of Portland, Microcosm Publishing, Peripheral Produce and Squeaky Wheel, in addition to directing DIY arts center My House in Eugene, OR, 2001-2003.

Joe Ahearn is deep in the all ages soup. He lives at a space called The Silent Barn in Queens, NY where bands play in his kitchen, books shows there and elsewhere throughout Brooklyn as SleepWhenDead, and runs a non-profit newsprint publication called Showpaper, which lists every all ages show in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) every two weeks on one side and a poster-size piece of artwork on the other. He works real hard on all these things, but it never feels like it, because there are a lot of other kids working just as hard all around him, and that’s too inspiring to be able to do anything else.

Hollow Earth Radio “We are an online (streaming only) diy radio operating literally out of a basement. We feature found sound, field recordings, story-telling (sometimes paranormal), dream-collecting, radio plays, live house shows and local in-home performances. We also support local and northwest music and other underground/indie music from around the world. We broadcast 24 HOURS A DAY everyday.” (Hollow Earth Radio)

Mariella Luz – The Olympia All Ages Project is a non-profit interdisciplinary arts organization promoting art and music for all ages in the city of Olympia.

Aimee Buyea is a graduate of the University at Buffalo Media Study Department. She is just coming to terms with the fact that she can now call herself an artist without people giggling. Her energy has recently been spent running a grassroots alternative artspace located in Buffalo,NY called Sugar City. Aimee likes vampires, is afraid of the dark, has a favorite blanket and tries her best to live holistically.

Kevin Erickson is Program Director of All-Ages Movement Project (AMP), a national network of all-ages venues and youth music organizations working to raise visibility, share knowledge & expand resources. Kevin’s background includes a special focus on carving out spaces for cultural resistance in unlikely spaces, as an organizer of shows in rural areas and small towns, including 3 years at Department of Safety. He is a contributor to AMP’s forthcoming book “All-Ages Movement Project: A Manualfesto for Youth & Music Space Everywhere”, out November 10.

Organized by Al Larsen and Kevin Erickson as part of What the Heck Fest 2009.

Timothy Radar: There is a great of talk in “modern academia” about emergent systems, but these talks usually end up talking about mass communication, the internet, software, ect. It seems to me that d.i.y. music and culture could be a system of emergence. For the longest time there is this idea that one great artist, or set of artists are so tapped into the world that through them they end up “telling the world”. I think shifts in art and social movements just happen because of the climate of the area, they are happenstance. They need an impetus to come about, but they will pretty much out of necessity. The original punks didn’t come up with something totally unique and spread the word from one point to another, a common idea and trend was manifesting world wide, and communication helped expedite the process.

Rubin Steiner – Another Record Story

THIS COULD BE THE LAST TIME WE ARE HERE TOGETHER

performance with rope, guitar, voice, custom electronics, amplifier, public address system

July 20, 2008
Department of Safety, Anacortes, WA
(as part of What The Heck Fest)

Black Is, Black Ain't, Marlon Riggs (1994)

Black Is, Black Ain’t, Marlon Riggs (1994)

Near the end of the film bell hooks talks about the idea of the “black community” saying that often the concept is seen in terms of turf – who is included and who is excluded from this community – the unity in community is emphasized. She says that rather than thinking in terms of community, it would be better to think in terms of communion…. Communion emphasizes communication.

part of a video-a-day series…

…the word “Seattle” stands for a lot more than its music scene. In writing about the Seattle scene, critics are not just chronicling a random success story. They are grappling with the notion of a geographically specific scene itself. – Charlie Bertsch, Making sense of Seattle Issue #5, March/April 1993

Writing in 1993, with the “Seattle Sound” just past its media peak Bertsch considers how the grunge phenomena was closely bound to anxieties resulting from changes to US economic geography and world political geography. He claims that in the 1990s the rise of “Edge Cities” in the US, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union had destabilized the ways that identity could be formed through geography.

Starting in the ’60s suburban developments become increasingly important as sites of economic production. They are no longer just bedroom communities for commuters who work in the city, but become sites of office parks and industrial facilities. Commuting may mean traveling from one Edge City to another, bypassing the urban “center” altogether. These Edge Cities are characterized by their newness – they have no identifiable local culture and they may not even be named.

In contrast to the generic Edge Cities, the specificity of Seattle as a place is seized on. Far more than just the home of some popular bands, “Seattle functions as a conceptual refuge.” The city “becomes a hedge against Edge Cities named after the intersection of interstates, malls or not named at all.”

The concrete geographic particularity of a Seattle, its definition as a real place not interchangeable with any place else masks the landscape of Edge Cities. The obsessive, almost frantic turn to Seattle as an origin of independent culture (…) transcends the world of music.

For music critics, then, “Seattle becomes a way to make sense of the world” in a time when the stability of national and urban borders is in question.

Bertsch notes that the idea of Seattle as origin of the musical style gross oversimplification. Underground/alternative/independent music scenes operate in networks of regional and transnational exchange. Even niche-audience local bands tour small venues in the US or distribute their recordings outside their own localities. In the 1990s fanzines and small press magazines were an important mode of communication between different regional scenes. Many independent artists that reach a higher profile in the US do so by first gaining attention in the UK and other international markets, demonstrating that even obscure self-releasing artists are engaged with a global audience.