Back in New York. For now. The Realizing the Impossible Tour was super fun. Every night we stopped in a different town and played at the local infoshop/radicalbookstore/free school/community space– in places like Portland, Montpelier, and Wilamantic Connecticut. We swam in the ocean, muddy rivers, creeks, and a deep, icy cold river gorge with a covered bridge. We ate tahini/kale sandwiches. 13 shows in row without a day off was a lot, and I’m glad to be home.
Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority Book Tour & Multi-media Event!
Just published on AK Press, Art Against Authority (edited by Josh MacPhee & Erik Reuland) is 300 plus page collection of writing and images investigating the instersections of art and anarchism.
The authors will discuss the book and present documentation of creative art actions from around the world.
Dark Dark Dark will play their music to melt your longing heart.
Dara Greenwald will make you laugh and cry with her revolving and evolving collection of short videos.
Who we are:
Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator and activist whose work often revolves around themes of radical politics, privatization and public space. His first book was Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of the Street Stencil (Soft Skull Press, 2004). He also organizes the Celebrate People’s History Poster Series and is part of Justseeds Visual Resistance Radical Art Cooperative.
Erik Reuland (AKA Erik Ruin) is a Minneapolis-based, Michigan-raised puppeteer, printmaker, and erratic editor of Trouble In Mind, a zine about the intersection of art, everyday life, and radical politics. He works/has worked with several art collectives, including UpsidedownCulture, Street Art Workers, Prison Poster Project, Barebones Productions, and Justseeds.
Dark Dark Dark is a group of musicians informed by the mountains, plains, seas, and cities in a tradition of exiled wanderers. City Pages of Minneapolis calls it “a gently spooky American folk with eastern European exoticism.”
Dara Greenwald makes short videos that capture the interesting and strange sides of life, subculture, and the bizarre inner workings of her brain. New site coming soon.
Tour Schedule:
|
Date |
City |
Venue |
Address |
Start Time |
|
5/26 |
Albany |
Ironweed/Free School |
8 Elm Street, Albany, NY
|
8 pm
|
|
5/27 |
Boston |
Lucy Parsons |
549 Columbus Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts |
3pm |
|
5/28 |
Portland |
People’s Free Space |
144 Cumberland Ave. Portland, Maine
|
7 pm |
|
5/29 |
Montpelier |
Black Sheep |
Langdon Street Café 4 Langdon St. Montpelier, VT
|
7 pm |
|
5/30 |
Amherst |
Food For Thought |
106 N.Pleasant Street Amherst, MA
|
7 pm |
|
5/31 |
Providence |
Building 16 |
39 Manton Ave. Olneyville
|
8:30 pm |
|
6/1 |
Brooklyn |
AdHoc Arts |
49 Bogart Street, Buzzer 22, Unit 1G, Brooklyn |
6:30 pm |
|
6/2 |
New York (music only show) |
ABC No Rio wi/ Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?
|
156 Rivington Street, NY, NY |
3pm |
|
6/3 |
DC |
Brian Mackenzie Infoshop |
1426 9th St. NW (btw O & P St) Washington, DC |
6 pm |
|
6/4 |
Baltimore |
Red Emmas |
800 St. Paul St. Baltimore, MD 21202; (410) 230-0450 |
Call for time |
|
6/5 |
Philly |
Temple Gallery |
259 N. Third St., Old City |
7 pm |
|
6/6 |
Connecticut |
Wrench in The Works |
861 Main Street Willimantic, CT |
7 pm |
I think I left off with the Greyhound…
I finally got off of the bus in San Francisco, where I met up with Marshall and Nona to play Dark Dark Dark shows up the West Coast.
San Francisco: Surfing (not me…holding out for warmer waters), climbing hills, and a super fun house show with Ghost Family, Covena Turpentine, Leyna, and Broadway the band.
Eugene: Long long drive. Tiny Tavern. 5 people. The mechanical bull finale of Urban Cowboy was playing on the television. Chickens and ducks in the backyard=fresh eggs for breakfast (thanks Lydia).
Portland: My sister and I got our nails done together. We played an unexpectedly fun show at the Know (bar) that included wheeling my bass around the bar in a pram (baby carriage).
Olympia: Relationship drama (not mine, not the band’s). Catching up with old friends and old chairs.
Seattle: Scribble Squat was a magical place to play. There were candle chandeliers and honey cake and kids dangling their legs from half-burnt ceiling beams. The police started banging down the door halfway through and we played a few more songs. Afterwards people went outside and talked to them and the most memorable part of the conversation (as it was relayed to me) was:
Cops: We’re just trying to be cool here.
Kids: (reassuring) You’re being cool! You’re being cool!
Cops: We know you hate us.
Kids: No! We don’t hate you! Why would we hate you?
Cops: Yeah…people told us that you hate us.
San Juan Island: The ferry was f’in expensive. We busked in attempt recoup. Our friends Juniper and Sean put us up at the lovely Juniper Lane Guesthouse. We swam in the freezing ocean that was framed by forest and driftwood lagoons.
Seattle:
My flight back to New York was canceled. There was an ice storm. And I only had 24 hours to get back there in order to make my flight to Costa Rica the next day.
to be continued…
A kind friend gently reminded me that I’ve been neglecting this site. Oh right. I didn’t know I had readers. What to say? Well, on my birthday I played a show with my friends Marshall and Nona from Minneapolis. In the course of preparing for that show I got completely sucked into the band and have fallen in love with them and the music that we’re playing– and left town to play shows from Philly to Minneapolis. I think that’s a fair enough excuse for neglecting a blog.
I just got back from Minneapolis where we played a fun show with the Blackthorns (hell yeah), Dreamland Faces (swoon!) and Ice Cream Social Anxiety. Then I packed my bass in a plastic hardshell case the size of a large studio apartment in Manhattan, heaved it onto the baggage counter at the Minneapolis airport (it cost more than my ticket to get that thing back to New York) and flew home. I’m here for two weeks and then I’m inflicting a bunch of uneccessary pain on myself by taking a slow bus (literally) to Los Angeles. Eventually I’ll make my way up to SF and meet up with the rest of Dark Dark Dark and play some shows on the way up to Seattle. From there I’ll proceed to torture myself some more by taking another Greyhound back across the country to New York. After that, I go to Costa Rica for two weeks to housesit, lay on the beach, take care of my friends’ dogs and write (that’s where the torture ends).
I’m doing all of this Greyhound riding because I’m fascinated by the bus and the strange intersections of people and the temporary intimacy of it all and how utterly American it is in a non-Patriot Act, non-flag-waving kind of way. It’s on the bus that I’ve met Vietnam vets and fresh faced recruits en route to basic training, retired bureaucrats, English teachers, and folks just out of prison. It’s on the bus that I’ve divulged secrets about myself that almost no one else knows– and it’s on the bus that I’ve listened to the most intimate confessions of strangers whom I’ll never meet again.
So, I’m taking these 3000 mile bus rides to collect stories, or rather to find the story of a film that I want to make, about a cross-country bus ride. It’s a research trip, in a way. Of course, I know it’s not all romantic and gushy like I’ve just described. It’s uncomfortable and stinky and boring and people are annoying and loud and the only food available is Arby’s and McDonalds…and sometimes you just don’t want to talk to your neighbor or they don’t want to talk to you, so you both just watch the homogenized landscape of the interstate roll by or stand awkwardly under the florescent lights of a rest stop stop in Elk City , Oklahoma smoking cigarettes at 3:00 A.M.. But I think that’s part of it too.
So, yeah. That’s where I’ve disappeared to.
33 is a bad year for blogging. But it’s a good year for following dreams.
current soundtrack to dreams:
New York Song: