A satire, a post-appocalyptic circus, a mechanical spectacle; performances by Mark Pauline and SRL are all of these. Started over 30 years ago in San Francisco, SRL has become a venerable force in industrial art and robotics. This was the first SRL show since relocation to Petaluma. It featured the Running Machine and Big Arm. While there were no pyrotechnics and no fumes or noise, that old element of danger was still there. A steel bar from the photo kiosk that was destroyed early on, went flying off at almost lethal velocity but landed in a random (and empty) section of field nearby (pieces of the demolished kiosk are seen in the foreground of photo #1). Mark Pauline is in the black cowboy hat.
Archive for the ‘Of Interest’ Category
Survival Research Labs in Petaluma
Monday, July 26th, 2010Polaroid Lives On
Saturday, March 27th, 2010There have been a lot of changes in photographic media in the last 5 years. Though I love my Nikon DSLR and my Lumix point and shoot cameras, I long for contact sheets and other lost materials of the analog world. I miss the local one-hour photo shop that did super enlargements and prints from film or cd. I miss Polaroid film (I have just one, outdated package of 600 film left, that I am saving for some special photoshoot with my 680 SLR).
The Impossible Project has saved the day for Polaroid lovers. They have just introduced a newly manufactured black and white Polaroid film for the SX70 camera (I’m going to have to bug my Dad to look in the garage, because I think he has an SX70 in a cabinet out there). Soon, The Impossible Project will have a new color film, and they have good stock of surviving 600 film right now.
What a cool endeavor, The Impossible Project. Dutch scientists took a ten-year lease on an old Polaroid factory and proceeded to reinvent the unique Polaroid photography process. As the world becomes digital, TIP is valiantly preserving the analog.
Here is a mini gallery of favorite polaroids; Ships restaurant in LA, demonstrates the rich natural color the film was capable of; a thousand-year-old egg that was a chinese new year gift from a student; a birthday card, based around my son’s arm cast, which we had just painted. © stefangutermuth 2010.
The Moral of the Story
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Boomerang Gallery in Petaluma is mounting a new show later this week. The call for entries asks artists to use found objects. I used an old french poetry book and a McGuffey’s reader from 1857 as the core of this collage titled, “The Moral of the Story”. Along with acrylic paint and colored pencil, there is a scrap of a cool japanese calendar from Hida Tool in Berkeley and Joss paper from China.
I’m taking a new direction with my collage work. As a jeweler utilizes beautiful antique beads to make new necklaces, I have been collecting some rare ephemera to use in collage paintings. I found the old McGuffey’s reader at the Mountain Man festival in Santa Fe. Tattered and worn, with many torn pages, the book is not valuable on its own. As collage material, it is priceless.
Boomerang Gallery is at 46 Kentucky Street in Petaluma. 707-773-3222.
Reno (a short film by Cory McAbee)
Friday, November 13th, 2009Cory McAbee is a fascinating character (actor), film maker and songwriter. He fronts the Billy Nayer Show and wrote, directed, and starred in a cult classic, The American Astronaut. He has a new website chock full of entertaining items.
Reno, is McAbee’s witty, funky and totally brilliant tiny film geared toward smartphone viewing. (Sundance provided support for a number of artists to create tiny film shorts, which are all available through the link)
Here is a description of Reno from McAbee’s website: “To create a “mobile film” McAbee chose three styles that people were already used to seeing on small screens: still images from digital cameras, bodega security monitors and video loops. The subject for the film was a singing cowboy bragging about his travels through Nevada on a Honda 50 to a store security camera. The Cowboy (McAbee) performed a dance that was captured from four different angles and then edited together as one dance performed by four characters.”
Watch Reno.
Aria—A Gallery to Get Very Distracted In
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009For a worthy field trip in San Francisco, head to North Beach, and check out one of my favorite spaces in any city, Aria, located at 1522 Grant. Bill Haskell, longtime proprietor, lives part time in Paris, so his store is often closed (you’ll still get a sense of Bill’s specialized taste from his window display). When he is in town, his large storefront overflows with exotic ephemera, antiques, objects, and art that he ships back from flea markets and warehouses all over Europe.
Many of my favorite things have come out of this store, from a stainless steel desk, to a 1930’s school room wall map of California. Bill has sold me old prison mugshots from Alcatraz and a random old photo that looks like my former North Beach friend, Nini McCabe, shooting a rifle. Aria is never dull and often fabulous, a curio shop for the visually inclined, where browsing is always welcome. Bill’s struggle to make order out of his eccentric inventory, is definitely performance art.
October Storm
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009A luminous, magical light drew me out of the house. It seemed the air was suffused with gold. All was still between rain showers. I grabbed my Nikon with an 18-70 mm zoom and headed for the Petaluma River.
Unabashed Rave Review
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009A few weeks ago, in September, there was a lot of media hyperbole about the release of the complete Beatles oeuvre in digital remaster.
The hyberbole was largely justified and even if you were laid off this month, especially if you were laid off this month, I would suggest shelling out the 16 bucks to get the White Album. There is tremendous value in this new package. You get an entire universe on these 2 cds.
The Beatles White Album is a full out masterwork, juxtaposing poignant rustic melodies with dense orchestral arrangements and careening rock and roll. Listen on high fidelity headphones to get the full effect! The new release overflows with an abundance of fidelity. Even if you have heard the songs one hundred thousand, million times, you will hear something new in these remastered cds. If you grew up listening to this sublimely creative LP, you will revel in the sound quality of this new release. If you have somehow never heard it, welcome to a plateau of all modern culture, an epiphany, a revelation. Don’t hesitate, you can even buy it at many Starbucks stores.
Save Our Parks!
Thursday, September 24th, 2009I spend most of my time sitting in front of two computers. My waking hours are consumed by the Adobe Creative Suite, and other software. My eyes track colored pixels and photons across a vast electric plain.
Saturdays and sundays, I need to focus my eyes on something softer and multi-dimensional, and I’m ready for a lot of fresh air. Hiking is the answer.
The cost of living has always been high in California, but the access to outrageous outdoor environs is good compensation. The San Francisco Bay Area has some of the most accessible outdoor getaways of any urban mega-city, and some of the most spectacular. Now, that is threatened by recent fiscal disasters and budget deals, so that some parks will be closed, perhaps as many as one hundred.
Certainly an easy target for closing is a small, historic state park such as Olompali, near Novato. I hiked at Olompali last sunday and caught a tiny blue bellied lizard in my hat. The dappled forest light soothed my eyes and the oaks shielded me from the intense sun. It was cool in the woods and ferns. I paid eight dollars to park in the parking lot for 4 hours, and I had access to a huge, uncrowded, wooded preserve just minutes away from my home. I would pay twice that. I would also pay a vehicle licensing fee of fifteen dollars, another idea that was floated to solve the crisis.
There must be a way to keep more parks open.
We need all of them.
The Sheltering Sky
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009The NY Times published an article this week on Paul Bowles’s debut novel, The Sheltering Sky, first printed 60 years ago this fall. It was a surprise best seller in 1949, on the Times best-seller list for 10 weeks, with over 200,000 copies sold that year. The real surprise in this, was that the book is full of existential dread, more akin to Camus’s The Stranger, than to any contemporary American fiction.
I pulled out 2 old paperbacks from my Bowles shelf, both designed by unidentified cover artists. The Sheltering Sky paperback published by Signet, came from Kayo books in San Francisco. This 1951 illustration totally misses the point, by trying to slot the novel into a pulp romance genre, with a seductive harem girl (Bowles’s fiction is never romantic). The original City Lights cover of A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard does a much better job of envisioning an exotic Bowlesian scene. It has the right sense of the primitive and the unknown.
Recycling (for habitation)
Thursday, August 20th, 2009An inspiring new blog, dornob, features some unbelievably cool ideas for recycling offbeat structures into dwellings. Old firetowers, train cars, silos, factories and bridges are all suggested as source material for innovative living. This billboard house is a concept from Front Architects.
