Monday, October 29, 2007

Happy Halloween!






After involved negotiations and lengthy deliberations, we finally arrived at a win-win, (or happy-happy) decision: Princess by day, Frog at night. ( :

As for me I'm going as a pirate so I can say "Whhhaaaaat?! I'm a pirate" when I go around the neighborhood stealing kids candy...

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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Fall in Sixty-Six Seconds



As much as the leaves and the rain falling, it's the salmon spawning that punctuate this time of year around here.

This footage is from last week, from where the Tolt and Snoqualmie rivers converge, and from the pumpkin patch. Music is from Uncle Dave Macon's "way Down the Old Plank Road" off Harry Smith's classic American Folk Music compilation.

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Sunday, October 7, 2007

Marsupilian Concoctions




The show must have been pretty good because the other day while driving around she suddenly said, lets go to the museum.
We didn't go, but we went last week, on a drizzly Sunday, a perfect day to visit the Frye. It's a good show, droll, not too deep - maybe it was the special fx dept look, maybe not - either way, despite the mutational fleshiness, it seemed there was always something to make one smile. The artist puts up a solid veneer, but she also let's it crack, which is good. Time and again a monkey peaks out from behind folds of morphological skin, and smiles. There's reference to possums on the wall plaques, but to me it had more of a monkey feel. The videos were definitely a draw for my three year old and in retrospect, felt like the final destination. They made the sculptures feel more like props waiting to be animated. Not to say they weren't contributing to the animation - - watching people react was almost as much of the show as the show...
It was fun, there were more kids than usual, definitely a family pleaser, and definitely beyond disney.

I love the Frye. Even before the stellar curation of the last few years, I loved going, it's such a nice building. Low key, elegant, manageable, a soothing space. And now, some of the best shows in town. I went to the recent Dresden show at least three times. I've never spent so much time looking at a painting as I did Matthias Weischer's "Tuch". That one just really did it for me. The spatial and referential shifts were phenomenal, as was the handling of the paint - it totally succeeded as a painting. There is no way you could ever get at the experience of that painting by looking at a reproduction, it was all in the painting. And of course in me... or whoever... it always takes that doesn't it? The holy trinity of any artistic experience - artist:piece:viewer.

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