The show is a collaboration between Brown and surfboard designers, Bruce Gordon and Nick Palandrani of GP Surfboards in a combined effort to raise ocean awareness and responsbility. Brilliant.
I’m eager to see the boards (Brown promised to send some images my way and I’ll be sure to share them with you as soon as they come in.) as I bet they are stunning. I know nothing about surfboards but what I’ve seen on GP Surfboards’s website looks impeccably crafted. Just check out those fins!
This is from artbusiness.com, a site that reviews art openings in SF, kudos not only for the art but also for attracting “an atypically active, attractive, and fit crowd.” There are some great pics of the opening but unfortunately you have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see them.
A stunning display of surfing-related art includes a raft of exceptional atmospheric oceanic photographs by Brown W. Cannon III, and amazing hand crafted pictorial all-wood surfboards with inlays built by GP Surfboards of Capitola, California. These surfboards are so good, as far as I’m concerned, they’re sculpture. The good news? You can surf on ‘em too. Plus special added bonus– an atypically active, attractive, and fit crowd (for an art show, that is). The event is being held in part to support The Baum Foundation, The Marine Mammal Center, and Surfrider Foundation.
Cannon: Two years ago, I started a creative collaboration with two surfboard designers from GP Surfboards in Santa Cruz bringing fine art images to classic surfboard designs. The images are of water texture, ocean life, and coastal environments – the full scope of a person’s relationship to the ocean. I am excited about these boards because they are beautiful, usable, and innovative. I have come to feel a personal and constantly increasing sense of responsibility to the ocean and hope that this project will raise ocean awareness.As a photographer I spend a lot of time alone, which is why this collaboration became so appealing. It has enabled me to bring an idea to fruition and to get the best results by entrusting and working with other specialists. Sure I could have completed this show on my own, but the opening reception would be in 2015. It is fantastic to combine efforts with other talents and to see what can happen. Just in the simple act of reaching out and getting people involved, I have made many new friends in the creative field. That is inspiring.
Here is a vocabulary list of some words which have been occurring lately in my vicinity. I invite myself and anyone else who is interested to contemplate this list in hopes of understanding some recent news.
Here’s what I encountered walking home last night. Literally a swarm of cop cars , 7 or 8 cops standing in the front yard of a home, and a crowd of college-age kids. A drug bust, or a really heavy response to a noisy party? I asked a cop, and he said the raid was “part of an ongoing investigation of activities at this residence.” From someone I knew in the crowd, I got the info that the police had followed some of the people home from a protest, and were refused admittance to the house. The police then blockaded the house, while waiting for a search warrant to be prepared.
From this report, it appears that the earlier incident was neither peaceful nor legal but, of course, this is the SC Senile we’re talking about, so who knows what actually happened. For one thing, the reporter seems very willing to take the police spokesperson’s word that the crowd last night was “agitated” and were “taunting” officers. The one thing that struck me in fact was that it seemed so oddly quiet for such a dramatic scene. And since when is asking for a badge number a “taunt?”
The actual raid occurred about 45 minutes after I left. At that point, the landlord had arrived, and provided the police with a key. But they still broke in with a battering ram. Why? Lots of reasons, but mainly I think because battering rams must justify their own existence by being used.
Right now I feel very weird about what’s going on around the corner from my house. I have a lot of unanswered questions.
Photos from indybay.org (As usual, the photos are the most interesting thing about the post on indymedia. The verbiage is long on attitude, short on information. Also, a comment from a neighbor there makes it seem like the atmosphere changed after I left.)
Artem Troitsky, shown here bumming a cigarette off Kino guitarist Yuri Kasparian while lead singer Viktor Tsoi looks on, wrote the book on the 80’s underground rock scene in the USSR. He also seems, from what I’ve read, to be one of the few really independent journalists left in Russia. In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, he recounts how Back in the USSR came to be written, and shares his views on the Russian music scene, then and now:
“But if we’re speaking about the songs, I was more interested in the lyrics, rather than the music. I really think that poetically Russian rock is at least not worse than American, although it’s absolutely different, of course.
“So when this paradigm of the 1970s/80s Soviet rock that was dear to me disappeared, evaporated, inevitably I lost my interest in it. But speaking about the music itself, I always say that we have some quite likable guys, whose work I treat with sympathy and understanding.”
One of the most “likable guys” of that era has to be Viktor Tsoi, who I personally think can hold his own as a songwriter on any territory, though of course given the challenges of the times a lot of the recordings are pretty rough. It seems, thanks to the Knackered Hack, that I am now part of a not-secret plot to bring the cult of Tsoi to the West.
(Still dealing with post-flu lassitude, not up to much intellectual effort, but here’s a roundup of some Jonathan Richman artifacts for the common place book.)
Though my husband, the Bicycle Repairman, accuses Richman of being “Raffi for adults, ” he definitely has a place in the secret history of the 20th century. He’s been called a proto-punk for his his first album with the original Modern Lovers: The classic “Roadrunner” from that album is supposedly the first punk song, and it’s been covered by everyone, including the Sex Pistols. Though what Sid and Johnny were doing singing about driving by the Stop’n’ Shop on a suburban highway late at night with the AM radio on, I’ll never know.
There’s a story called Chest in Will Self’s collection Grey Area which isset in a sort of Chekhovian alternate London where everyone is on the verge of respiratory crisis. The pavements are covered with “Jackson Pollock murals of sputum,” people carry oxygen cylinders, pass around inhalers, and sip cough syrup from liqueur glasses instead of after dinner drinks.
I feel like this has been my reality for the past week. Though we don’t spit on the floor (much) and are likely to swig the cough syrup straight from the bottle if we can’t find the stupid plastic cup and the spoons are all dirty.
Of course, the the always-original Wonder Girl found the respiratory motif too constricting, and proceeded to throw up several times on Sunday. We were all grateful for this new distraction.
During all this the weather has been bright, sunny, in the sixties, with the sound of heavy surf drowning out the sea lions every morning.
So far we haven’t needed oxygen, or — a more likely scenario– prednisone, though the doctor did bring up the “p” word. The take-home from all this is, even if you get real cocky about cutting down on the need for asthma meds on an everyday basis, it’s a good idea to stock up on a rescue inhaler when you know a big fat hairy virus is headed your way. And to do this at a time that’s convenient for everyone involved.
“Have a fling with Comic Sans, just be sure to trash the files in the morning.”
Why isn’t there an Academy Award for “best typography”? If there was, we probably wouldn’t be subjected to horrors like Helvetica in a 1950’s tv studio. There should at least be an award for best title/credits sequences. Sometimes these are better than the movie itself: “Nanny McPhee” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events” are 2 examples that come to mind. Of course it’s great when both are outstanding, like “Monsoon Wedding.”
Someday, when I have time and can figure out how to do it without pissing anybody off too much, I will detail why I have distrusted Hillary ever since having to deal with one of her campaign staffers who was giving free -but-overvalued advice to a friend running for local office. And this was in 2006, before there officially was a Hillary-for-pres campaign.
Justin Smith on 3quarksdaily has a hilarious “endorsement” for Obama from the leading Byelorussian newspaper. Here’s what they have to say about Hillary:
Now Hillary Clinton had eight years already in White House. During that time, she set herself one goal: the creation of new polyclinics throughout America, for the promotion of health and hygiene, from Poultry Processing Plant “John Tyson” in State Missouri to High Technology Cybernetics Park “Bill Gates” in State Washington, to public high school “Martin Luther King” in City Oakland. But how many polyclinics emerged from her time in the White House? There are no more polyclinics in America now than during Great Depression. Instead Clinton left America with the “health’s management organizations,” with queues of length we have not seen in Belarus since Great War for Fatherland, and costs that are sure to make any patient “sick.” Americans should be asking to Candidate Clinton: where are the polyclinics? Where can I go for antibiotics or a mustard plaster when I fall ill? Where can I go to pasteurize my children?
Since everybody else is embedding this Obama video, I might as well too:
![](http://www.commonplacejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/view-1.jpeg")