Tonight is the second full moon inside the walls of December, making it the Blue Moon. The last Blue Moon to fall on new years eve was in 1990, and that was a long time ago. Above are some photos from last nights nearly blue moon. On December 1st i woke up from a feverish flu sleep with the idea to paint the moon each night until the new year in an effort to gain some traction on what always proves to be a landslide of a month. I did not realize at the time the special blue surprise waiting at the end, but now it feels like a perfect punctuation of our time with this first intense decade of the still new millenium. enjoy the moon!
i love this recording. talk about a barely there back track. amazing. one of my favorite snowblink shows was at the hotel utah when we each sang a piece of this song karaoke style.
just before heading to the east coast i went out to ye olde fort for one last visit before the new year became the now year. things were dark and green and mossy and mushroomy. california winter....a bit different from things here on the east coast where it's 5 degrees. i was just outside doing some watercolors and the paint actually froze on the page before it could be spread. when i brought the picture inside it thawed and started to run. winter wild. somehow this little dude found her way out through the woods and now seems to stand as the resident fort guru...ask her your deepest questions in your softest voice.
deep bro chris duncan has begun a residency over at KALA in berkeley...it primarily includes getting people together to play drums and let it out. pretty much the best thing ever. here's some photos of the first drum sesh.
frank, taking a key from felix, showing a little tail.
hope everyone is enjoying the last sliver of 2009....i'm in brooklyn at the moment, ankle deep in snow, knee deep in presents. not bad at all.
here's the last day of the ukiah visit...on the third day there was light, and clothes. lots of exciting ideas are abrew for this project, it's going to be totally next level. the bros, at it again....everything just looked too cool i guess. hopefully we'll get to check out some of their shots since i know there were some serious gems (including frank's video of jamie mud slipping down a gauntlet of loose rocks).
a true rainy day inside day...fire, games, martinis, and of course, a very special little naked friend. felix is an inpsiration, the man did not wear a shred of clothes for 36 hours.
last weekend i went up to ukiah to do some vibe research for a future project with some of my favorite people...including the dashing and ever clever, former ribbons fore father, frank gilbert lyon I, in from new york. our first day was spent in the mist, taking pictures of each looking so cool. behold.
inspired by my sick day building block idle times, I came fresh faced to school with a challenge: in one hour and fifteen minutes, can we build something using all of the school's 1500+ kapla blocks as a team, no block left behind. a true challenge requires true courage, and with the help of some powerful bros, things got serious. Spanning the great gulch between the two couches, we built a bridge perhaps more sound than our fair bay bridge....until the earthquake came.
my bud garrett mid creation epiphany.... first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
this is what an epiphany looks like
dang girl, nice tower
as the time limit was drawing closer, and things were getting more and more heated, kids kept joining in to help....I just remember handing out handfuls of kapla blocks and yelling "build!" It was amazing to see how intent everyone was on making the challenge happen....however things got a little dark when the original core crew of challengers, who all along had been getting excited for the final moment when they could go godzilla on their creation and level it, started to feel the crowd surging closer and closer...The bridge was starting to feel more like a wall, and the scene was starting to feel more like something from Pink Floyd's The Wall/the taking of the Berlin Wall/Lord of the Flies. The picture below is my sweet friend garrett losing a stroke of his innocence as he was yelling for everyone to wait wait before just demolishing the whole thing
it did not work.
the temptatation was too strong, the group mentality too strong, so the moment the first little nudge happened, the wall came down and became a sea of kapla.....it was wild and everyone loved it. expect garrett. we had a loong talk about disappointment and the loss of control, and there were some apologies to be made, and in the end we came up with a good solution....he got to chill out on the couch with a snack while everyone else cleaned the place. he was psyched about that.
It reminded me of the Cave show last fall at Woulds, and the destroying of the cave with Lucky Dragons, ...total release moment. It reminded me how good it can be to make things just to enjoy the breaking of them. Usually breaking things is considered negative, but we need to let it out sometimes.
this is the watercolor set i've been using to paint the moon...kind of looks like a galaxy just on its own.
