I Have No Idea What I am Doing » ideas about creativity

TBA TBA! Wacky performance art returns

no idea — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:04:59 +0000

It’s Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s annual Time Based Arts festival again, and I’m blogging for what I think is my 5th year. As far as contemporary art is concerned, PICA effectively raised me. They started comping tickets out to Kirsten before I even graduated college, and have given me a free pass almost ever since in exchange for blogging. This year, they took over an old school as the visual arts and late night show venue, and it’s gorgeous.

Here’s my first blog on the experimental film Crock, which I warn you, is a bit vulgar.

iPhone in hand, I’ve been taking some pictures. Here’s two and a video, more soon.

The Sugar Shack, created with on site materials found in the closed school.

Local artist Ethan Rose's synchronized music boxes

I made a donation so my cardboard spirit animal could sail the world

no idea — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:05:05 +0000

Just read about her project, she’s hilarious. She’ll send you a coconut, a sailor hat, a Big Gulp full of stuff from afar… I can’t sail the world, but I sure would like to, so I’ll support it. Double points for her cool glasses.

I pledged $26.71, because I wanted to pledge over $25 and I liked the way those numbers mirror each other.

What should my spirit animal be though? Hmm.

Thanks, Kirsten, for the link.

Launching the hot dog of summer

no idea — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:34:03 +0000

A celebratory balloon launch found on the page of artist/fun maker Dickbird. Look at his site.

So, how to celebrate fall? Launch a squirrel? And a bunch of nuts, separately?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s party rules

no idea — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:25:10 +0000

“Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by the host and hostess … Weekend guests are respectfully notified that the invitation to stay over Monday issued by the host-hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning must not be taken seriously.”

Note it says the small hours of Sunday–quite the party people! Found in an article on The Seven Vices of Highly Creative People on Salon.

Image: jonbarad

Oh, my friends you are so excellent

no idea — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:15:55 +0000

I was knocking around YouTube looking at the WK Platform applications and checked in on Andrea to see what she’s been up to lately (no app video, eh? Whahappend?).

How adorable is this video for her mom? Wait till the end, it’s worth it. Having creative friends is so nice. For me. And my blog.

Say aye-ight! C-Span goes hip hop on Auto-Tune the News

no idea — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:50:37 +0000

Yes. Yes yes yes. Their YouTube page, and on Twitter, too.

(Get it, aye + aight=aye-ight! ha. ha ha ha.)

Via ecorazzi

Masking masks for Blitzen Trapper’s new video Black River Killer

no idea — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:00:26 +0000

This is one gorgeous video!

Back when my little sister was in town, I wanted to show her what Portland is like. My friend Audrey called with the perfect offer—paper maiche-ing (how do you spell that?) masks for this video.

We went to an apartment off Powell and squeezed into a living room with four other people, including the director Daniel. Each of us had a tub of goop and a stack of torn up grocery bags. The whole kitchen was filled with previously papered molds with hairdryers stuck in them. They said they were working in morning and night shifts for multiple days to make about 60 masks…and that’s before painting each!

These look like they’re coming out at you, but they’re indented.

The woman who made the plaster molds for the masks did really detailed work, so filling places like the nostrils and the wrinkles around the face took some real patience with tiny strips of paper and the end of a pencil.

I can’t remember why we were asked to write our names in them. They credited us in their official video, as mask makers, so nice of them! It’s one of the top google hits for my name now, ha.

I get the big sister award for introduction to Portland awesomeness! She didn’t know Blitzen Trapper, but I bet they will hit remote Colorado soon.

A creative think tank from Wieden + Kennedy is hiring…get on the Platform. Woot woot! Chugga chugga.

no idea — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:46:17 +0000

Ad giants/providers of free Heineken and Starbucks Wieden + Kennedy are calling for creatives who are not Mad Men (sartorial ¹ ad types) to join a think tank called Platform. Basically, you get 250 pounds per week (it’s London based) for 6 months to pull heads together with other fun people all over the world, working with clients, honing existing skills and digging out new ones, and exploring the outer reaches of creativity.

The application has two parts: First, pick something in the world that bugs you, and make it better. Film or photograph the process and upload the photos to your Flickr ². Second, create a 3 minute or less video that covers these questions: Who are you? What inspires you? What is your obsession in life? What is your greatest regret? What is your guilty pleasure? Upload the video to YouTube.

Applications are due weekend after next, July 10th (this deadline was extended from earlier). Remote work from another office is ok, so you can hang out on the roof of their awesome Portland building and bug Ava in the W+K radio station and Kirsten down at Literary Arts and everyone at PICA. It’s a regular beehive ³.

A search of Flickr and YouTube for combinations of “Wieden and Kennedy platform,” to check out the submissions, gave nil results. There’s lots of W+K produced videos on YouTube, though, including this, which is the top result for the above search (skip in about a minute):

I learned about Platform from Creativity Online, which gathers interesting print and web work into daily digests. Subscribe, it never fails to inspire.

Footnotes (I’m reading Infinite Jest):

1.) Sartorial=tailored=well dressed. Etymology, as given to me by a New Seasons Market checker last night: Tailors used to do their work by loosely crossing one leg over the other, to create a flat area. The sartorius thigh muscle makes this possible, and would get a little bent out of shape, causing them to walk funny, and they became known as sartorialists. Events like the Academy Awards are often called sartorial events, because everyone is wearing snazzy outfits. You can also use it to describe and compliment someone: Looking sartorial today, good sir! Then there’s the street fashion blog The Sartorialist, which was all I had to contribute to that conversation.

2.) This is a really crappy week for my camera to be broken due to a squirt gun accident while riding a bike dressed as a cowgirl for Pedalpalooza. Thank heavens it worked for David Byrne.

3.) Ava works at the radio station in the Portland W+K radio office, where I had hoped to do a 10 minute segment on the cradle to cradle story of everyday items. How plastic bags are made turned out to be very interesting. But my work got ahead of me, and now they’ve taken the radio off the air to regroup and reform the content. That’s what I get for being a slowpoke.

Always with the cuteness, Color Me Katie! Silhouette portraits

no idea — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:53:10 +0000

Subscribe to Color Me Katie if you don’t already. She makes fun stuff like these portraits all the time. I wish I spent more time at home doing things like this.

Little Ashes, a movie about Dali and…Lorca? The Generation of ‘27

no idea — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:56:13 +0000

I had no idea that artist Dali and poet Lorca were friends and lovers, or that Lorca was murdered at 38 by Spanish nationalists during the Spanish Civil War and dumped in an unmarked grave. Here’s Lorca’s profile from the Academy of American Poets. This movie, Little Ashes, is apparently already out. Anyone seen it? How did I miss it? Looks gorgeous. It’s playing at Living Room Theaters, where movies are $5 on Mon and Tues. Who wants to go? Tuesday, let’s say? 7:45.

(Seen Twilight? Me neither. The actor who plays Dali is apparently head vampire in it.)

I have to admit, Dali just doesn’t hit me hard. The one thing that I saw and immediately felt was the Lobster Telephone at the Tate a few years ago. It’s one of Dali’s sillier works (I dislike his gore) of a black rotary telephone with a plastic lobster glued across the handset. It’s hilarious. I think about it all the time when new techy gadgets are released.

But I had no idea about La Generacion del 27, the name for the surrealist group of Spanish artists that included Dali, Lorca, and a filmaker named Bunuel in addition to other poets.