Vapor Trail

Comic books: This is a challenge to step up the game.

bitch-cat:

fuckyeah-nerdery:

Saw this picture on imgur and just had to post it here, because this is without a doubt, one of the most badass women alive. Meet Katrina Hodge, a corporal in the British Army and Miss England 2009. According to Wikipedia, she enlisted back in 2004 after her brother challenged her to and earned the nickname “Combat Barbie” after showing up at her assigned unit wearing false eyelashes, kitten heels (whatever those are) and carry a pink suitcase. In 2005 her unit, the Royal Anglian Regiment, was deployed to Iraq, where she saved the lives of her comrades from a prisoner by wrestling not one, but two rifles from him and then knocking his ass out with her bare hands.

With her bare hands.

Then in 2009, she decided to compete in the Miss England competition to destroy stereotypes about women in the military. She didn’t win (she placed runner-up), but still became Miss England after the woman who did got into a fight and gave up the crown. While Miss England, Hodge convinced the people running the competition to ditch the bikini contest, because she felt that it was more important to be a role model than looking good in a bikini.

In 2010, she handed over the crown and returned to military service, being deployed to Afghanistan.

This woman is both a BAMF and a HBIC. Damn.

be still my heart

Sometime cartoonist Wendalyn Lewis reminds me why I wish she was all the time cartoonist Wendalyn Lewis

upjumpthedevil:

Found this amongst my images, I made it for Dec many years ago now, it’s a little stab in the gut, and a little smile, for the good times. They were so good.

Tom Friedman.  Check out more at the new, improved Blogspot home of Vapor Trail.

I’m moving my blogging over to http://brownstein.blogspot.com  I hope you’ll continue to follow me there!

Within a window on a quiet street in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood, Michele Basta-Smith has produced a powerful installation that reaches deep into the spectator’s subconscious mind and creates an arresting fascination that lingers long after he has walked away.  It is part of the installation series fittingly titled: “Haunts of Strange and Far Places.”  It is a captivating work of art that drew me back to visit it five times in my travels.  Here is the artist’s portrait of the full tableau:

The work creates a whole from Basta-Smith’s recent output, including the charcoal floor, the central sculpture, “Companion,” and the illuminated background “Love Letter 1 - 8.” 

The floor consists of charcoal drawings simultaneously evoking a surreal sea-scene and cave painting.  An octopus, insects, ancient boats, and flying dragons are roughly drawn upon the space.  It looks like a message from a distant human relative that either hasn’t acquired or has, perhaps, abandoned language.  I didn’t get a very good picture of it, so here is a picture from the artist’s website that captures an earlier use of the same space:

A pedestal rises from this ground, dried paint evoking water flowing off of it, and the sculpture “Companion” stands.  This chimera contains human, dog, and reptile features.  I’m not sure how the body was constructed, but the skin was definitely executed with encaustic on top of something else, papier-mache maybe. Photography doesn’t do much justice to the work, which first draws you in through the expressive eyes of the animal portion, and then into the human’s distant gaze, and at last the tortured imaginative physicality of the sculpture as a whole.  Here is the best I could do, in terms of the order of vision that drew me into the piece:

The background components, Love Letter 1 -8, are panels of wood, fiberglass and resin frames containing panels locking vegetables, fruit, flowers and cuttlefish in resin, and then illuminating them from behind, creating a ghostly effect of life trapped in amber.

The installation, taken as a whole, evokes a powerful meditation on life forms, and the life force within them.  The chimera’s animal eyes are warm and compassionate, while the human appears shocked, dazed or vacant.  The body of Companion, viewed from different vantage points, shows an accurate portrayal of the component anatomies fused together.  This establishes readings that include the depiction of a moment within a long process of transformation captured in time; a comment on the co-dependent relationship of man and beast; or merely a surreal and disturbing vision that reminds the viewer of man’s underlying animal status.  The panels and floor capture life in a way that taps into distant sense memory, evokes something we don’t remember with our civilized mind, but recognize deep within our animal one.  Basta-Smith succeeds in creating ghostly, beautiful, and surreal figures that look like they inhabit a post-human spirit world.

Basta-Smith is making some very interesting art that is worth examination.  Please go check out her website, the rest is equally striking.  If you live there go see it.  This art is worth your time. It will surely be in a museum one day, so see it now before it is a legend.

“Haunts of Strange and Far Places” is located at 3214 Burgundy Street. 

When I came to visit New Orleans before Christmas, I stumbled across a Pecha-Kucha event attached to the Avant-Garden local arts market where I heard for the first time about something called The Music Box in a neighborhood called the Bywater.  It was one hell of an interesting and ambitious project, phase one of an art project called Dithyrambalina:

The Music Box is an interactive musical village in the city of New Orleans. It was built by over 23 artists. Each structure houses an invented instrument that investigates the notion of playing a house. The sound artists who made these instruments are experimenting with musical architecture.  They are preparing for Dithyrambalina, a full-scale musical house collaboration with the artist Swoon.

This temporary installation can be explored by visitors of all ages who are encouraged to play the town. The Music Box also hosted a three-part series of performances. The Shantytown Orchestra was comprised of a changing roster of world class musicians under the conductor Quintron. During these performances musicians took their stations amongst the shanties and shacks where they played invented instruments for sold out audiences.

I knew it was closed for the winter, but I was still curious about what I’d see, so last Tuesday I took a walk up to the Bywater to see what I could.  I’m glad I did, because that whim of a walk introduced me one of the most interesting artistic neighborhoods I’ve had the fortune to encounter since I fell in love with Williamsburg in the late 1990s.

If you want to see good pictures of what the Music Box looks like when the gates are open, I strongly encourage you to look at the links above.  But even when it’s shut, it can be quite striking. 

Here’s the front gate:

And another view:

And here’s what you see when you peek through the wall:

I hope to be back when it’s open — this is an extremely beautiful structure with conceptual ambition unlike anything else I’ve seen in my recent travels.

The Music Box is on 1027 Piety Street in New Orleans.

I walked down Piety towards Burgundy to see what else the neighborhood had to offer.  The houses were pretty and colorful shotguns, and in between were a variety of small restaurants, coffee, and art studios.  The first art studio I encountered belonged to Christopher Porche-West, a photographer who has been shooting New Orleans for 30 years, and makes mixed media assemblages that encompass his photography with found objects.  His work is interesting because he finds objects that each contain an aura of use, or of decay, or of otherwise having lived, and marrying this old photography to the pieces creates a tactile presentation of lost time regenerated as memory or art.  It’s very effective work.  Here’s his window display:

His website has a lot more stuff, and a lot of it is pretty interesting.  Porche-West’s studio is at 3201 Burgundy Street.

As I walked on towards the end of the neighborhood I saw a number of other examples of interesting homegrown art and design.  I really liked this design, affixed to a traffic sign:

Down the street there was this piece of cautionary art, and yes, there is a mugger in the neighborhood right now, so be careful: 

I got to the end of the road and started to turn around, walking back towards the quarter and enjoyed the art on this tattoo studio:

I also liked this graffiti across the street:

This is all just the tip of the iceberg.  There was a beautiful wooden sculpture on St. Claude that looked like a ghostly bird or ship, but that I couldn’t get an adequate picture of.  There were houses painted with such care that they may as well have been art.  There were artisan restaurants and junk shops assembling the creative detritus of the neighborhood’s last forty years.  And the people tended to embrace a genuine Bohemian spirit that is unusual in this slick, careerist era. 

There was one more piece that blew me away completely there, but it’s so amazing it’s getting its own post.  In the meantime, I strongly encourage a walk through this neighborhood.  Interesting things are happening here.

I’ve spent the bulk of the past week working at Flora Cafe in the Marigny neighborhood.  I love it here.  It’s low-key, the baristas are extremely nice, and sometimes Devin, the lady working behind the counter this afternoon, will take a break from the register and play piano in the back.  There’s a pleasant creative atmosphere here, and it’s definitely established itself as my favorite place to work in New Orleans.  They also make an extremely creditable black bean burrito.

Today as I was revising an article for the CBLDF there was the distant thump of a trombone, and then some drums.  Next thing I knew, everyone in the cafe raced outside to watch the troupe marching our way.  Here’s what I saw:

Flora Cafe is located at 2600 Royal Street in New Orleans.

I’m pretty enamored of Ed Luce’s comic Wuvable Oaf.  The series chronicles the lives of an ensemble cast orbiting around Oaf Jadwiga, a large, muscular, hairy, and exceedingly sweet gay dude who loves kitties and the Smiths and is looking for Mr. Right.  Part of the humor is that Luce juxtaposes personality against physical type so strikingly.  Oaf is a menacing looking character whose behavior is so shockingly sweet that a lot of humor is mined from that dissonance.  And part of the strength is that Luce has a tremendous command of his page with powerful b/w design and great physical acting.  I think it’s the best alt-comics sitcom to come around since the days of Peter Bagge’s Hate and Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage. 

So, it was a little jarring when I was at the gym today and met a dude who looked exactly like this:

I had just come in from the fitness floor and was listening to High On Fire, when I double-taked on how much this guy resembled Luce’s lovesick character.  His mouth moved to say something, so I took off my headphones.

“You all done,” he asked?  He was extremely soft-spoken and cheerful.

“No,” I said, opening up my locker and putting my notebook away, “I’m just heading out to do weights.”

“So you do your cardio first?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I used to do that,” he said, “but I found that it affected my gain.  That, and after doing the 30 minutes of cardio, I found that I’d be too tired to do weights right.”

“So, do you just go straight to weights?” I asked.

“I’ll do some stretching first.  Or you can do like 10 minutes of cardio to get your heart rate going.  But if you do your weights first and then do your cardio, your muscle gain will be better.”  Then he broke into a conspiratorial tone and said, “And if you’re looking to lose weight, you’ll actually lose it faster.”

“Thanks, man,” I said, “that’s interesting.  I’ll try it out.”

“No problem, brother,” he said.  “Us big guys gotta take care of one another.”

I met Wuvable Oaf at Downtown Fitness at 380 One Canal Place in New Orleans.  If you don’t have occasion to meet him, or even if you do, you should read the comics by Ed Luce.

355:365 - Occupy Possibilities by andrewsulliv on Flickr.

I think about this every single day.

I love visiting comic book stores for the first time.  One of the more endearing facets of the comic book industry is that our retailer base is made up almost entirely of idiosyncratic, personality driven businesses that reflect the characters of the people running them.  There’s something refreshing about that kind of authenticity in this era of corporate homogeneity.  It’s one thing to expect the same product from any Denny’s that you visit anywhere in the USA.  But for story driven businesses to all look and feel the same, well, that’s just downright depressing.  The individuality of comics retail is unique in this big box world, and it’s something that I hope never gets washed out of our industry culture.

For a case in point, today I got to visit More Fun Comics, located on 8200 Oak Street in New Orleans’ East Carrollton neighborhood. When I walked in the door, shopkeeper DC Harbold was standing at the counter scrolling through a VHS tape that turned out to be full of footage from the early 90s Howard Stern TV show.  I haven’t seen that stuff since I was a kid and I watched it late at night, to my parents’ chagrin.  We cracked up over a bit where Stern played Michael Jackson in a painfully funny skit.  “That’s why you gotta check these VHS tapes,” DC said, “This one was marked ‘Comics Restoration!’”

Stern’s old show wasn’t the only cool thing I saw there that resonated from childhood.  More Fun is one of those treasure trove types of stores that you see less and less of.  The space is packed from floor to ceiling with cool stuff new and old.  This is what you see when you walk in:

I fell in immediate love with that Silver Surfer painting.

Coming from New York, where real estate is insanely pricey, it’s always a treat to see a roomy space like this, and to see such full use made of it.  Here’s a couple of other views:

DC told me that the shop was started in the early days of comics retail when the original owner acquired a full run of “More Fun Comics,” providing the name for the store.  From its inception to the moment when the current owner, Steve Thomas, took over the shop, DC told me it was floor to ceiling gold and silver age comics.  It must have been a real sight to see.

When Katrina hit in 2005, Steve & DC lost their houses, but the store was barely effected.  “It was eerie,” DC said.  “Both our houses were underwater, but except for some broken glass, the store was pretty much how we left it.”  The pair got back to work immediately, opening the shop a mere six weeks after the storm.  I was astonished that they could do it so quickly. 

DC has a double life, like so many in comics retail.  By day he runs the shop and at night he plays in a large array of bands, with excellent punning names like Bi-Polaroid and A Clockwork Elvis.  Here’s a picture of DC with a Clockwork Elvis doll that a fan made for him:

More Fun Comics is located on 8200 Oak Street in New Orleans.