July 2014

Dear Friends, Please Help Me Spread The Word

Two things I’m not terribly good at and very uncomfortable doing: Talking about myself & Asking for help. Especially when there are so many other more important things to talk about these days, but this is me attempting to do both.

A little over a year ago I started talking about an art & music project I’d been working on with some friends called Cross My Heart Hope To Die. Almost non stop since then I’ve been working on physical art pieces – photos & sculptures – that I’d hoped to show off publicly in a real art world setting. That went from a crazy idea to a goal to a plan to a reality – the gallery exhibition opens this Saturday July 26th here in Los Angeles. Admittedly this project has been very hard for people to really wrap their head around – a band that makes physical art? An art collective that releases music? Treating music like photos? Treating photos like songs? It doesn’t make immediate sense to people looking to categorize it in the context of something else they are familiar with and I’ve been immensely lucky to have a handful of friends who believe in my crazy ideas and have been helpful and supportive of them. This wouldn’t have happened without them, for-fucking-sure.

This gallery show is 2 years in the planning, and I can’t even begin to tell you the sweat and stomach acid that has been generated putting it together. And on top of that, at the opening on Saturday we’ll be performing publicly for the first time ever as a band.

I’ve put on tons of gallery shows, but I’ve never been in one. Certainly never a gallery full of work I created.

I’ve put out records and toured with bands, but I’ve never been the one on stage performing.

I’m super excited about both of these things, and at the same time horrified. Not that people won’t like it, I’m completely confident in the work and what we’re doing, I believe in it 1000% – I’m scared I will have spent all this time and all this money making this work and no one will see it. I know that is fairly irrational because a lot of my friends will be there for sure, but still. I’m scared. And here’s the asking for help part – please, pretty please, help me get the word out about the opening and help me get people there to see the work and the performance.

The details:

The exhibition is called “Vita E Morte” and is being held at SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS gallery,  1331 W. Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026
The public opening is Saturday from 8pm until 11pm and the live performance will probably be around 8:45 and should last 30 minutes or so.

Here’s some more info and images of some of the works in the show – it’s not everything, but it’s a lot of it. Full images will be together soon, in the meantime hopefully this gives a good idea of what we’re up to. It’s very high concept, so much happening behind the scenes for each and every piece, but I trust it’ll make sense when you see it all together. And I trust that the whole project will make more sense after this show. Some people see it as a band doing some weird art thing on the side, I’m confident this show will illustrate that it’s so much more.

Also we have a new record coming out next week too, you can hear some of the songs already on Soundcloud, and it’ll be up on the pirate bay soon too. Amazon and iTunes too I guess and we’ll have CDs at the gallery opening, but only 100 of them.

But seriously – if you are in Los Angeles and can come out that would be amazing, and if you can pass the word on to your friends and audiences and anyone you pays attention to you, that would mean the world to me.

Thank you.

 

Pushed it

I have a secret blog that I write in every day but I don’t ever tell anyone about. Today’s entry was a memory lane trip that I thought some others might enjoy so I’m reposting it here, not linking to it there. Which is a secret.

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Salt n Pepa’s classic “Push It” came on the radio yesterday and as I instinctively turned it up I was immediately reminded of a music teacher I had in 8th grade while attending a Catholic school in Florida. A classmate inquired once what his current favorite song was – not an odd question to pose to a music teacher but his reply stuck with me all these years. Let me just contextualize this, this teacher was probably late 30’s at the time, kind of overweight and balding. He wore a lot of polo shirts and sandals. He responded that musically his favorite song was Rob Base’s then super hit “It Takes Two” because he really enjoyed the beat, but lyrically he didn’t like it at all though this was largely due to the fact that as a Catholic he didn’t believe in premarital sex and as he wasn’t married and still a virgin, he didn’t have a personal connection to what was being discussed in the song and didn’t think it was really the right message to be sending out to people, especially younger people who listen to the radio. I’ve often thought of him and wondered how that turned out for him.

Conversely the math teacher I had at that time in the same school would often blow off the entire days lesson to tell us stories about getting drunk, high and partying with her husband and “their friends” which on more than one occasion led to a morning with several naked people waking up in bed together.

And the same year I had a nun who taught history throw a book across the room and hit me square in the face. This was after I’d caused a bit of a fuss in the school by refusing to sign a document saying I wouldn’t talk to anyone who I knew was using drugs or alcohol, which caused the school to fall just short of their 100% Drug Free Zone classification or something like that. The rest of my class was a bunch of liars.

I learned a lot about the world in 8th grade, though probably not what was on the curriculum.