Vanessa Carr

This piece originally appeared on the SF Bay Guardian’s Pixel Vision Arts & Culture Blog, available here.

If you’ve ever seen the strange monsters and fantasies of the bizarre 16th Century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch and thought, “Man! I wish that guy could have given me a tattoo” — well, you might still have your chance with San Francisco tattoo artist and painter Mike Davis.

Mike Davis’ “Egg”

In addition to owning San Francisco’s Everlasting Tattoo, Davis is a self-taught painter whose oil painting seem plucked from another time. The inhabitants of the fantastical world he’s created include insects, crustaceans, snakes, birds, scorpions, eggs, fruit-bearing trees, trumpets, birdhouses on fire, the classic dripping ear, and draped figures.

Solo Flight at White Walls Gallery

“We show Mike not only because he is a phenomenal painter, but because no one else is doing what he is doing,” says White Walls Gallery owner Justin Giarla.

Davis’ first solo show, “Solo Flight,” opened this past weekend runs through April 12 at the White Walls Gallery, featuring 24 paintings and drawings from his upcoming book, Blind Man’s Journey.

White Walls Gallery, 835 Larkin, SF. 415-931-1500, www.whitewallssf.com

This piece originally appeared on the SF Bay Guardian’s San Francisco Blog, available here.

Bay Area multimedia project Plain Human calls this Tuesday, March 11th “Prisoner Awareness Day.” They ask that people wear orange – the color of most prison uniforms – in an effort to spark daily conversation about imprisonment and its effects on our communities. They also invite the public to participate in a group exercise regiment demonstration/performance outside of City Hall on Tuesday from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m.

“We want to break the silence that we carry as family members and members of communities that are criminalized,” says San Francisco-based artist and Plain Human founder Mabel Negrete.

With a brother in prison, Negrete has personally experienced the rippling effects of incarceration in a family. Negrete worries that her brother, who struggles with mental illness and is one of many inmates who has acquired Hepatitis C inside prison walls, may never be able to return to normal life.

“His condition [since going to prison] has worsened because there is no rehabilitation for him to overcome the isolation of the incarceration,” says Negrete. “I am not sure that he can come out of that. Conditions are such that people cannot improve.”

Plain Human is part of the year-long Prison Project at Intersection for the Arts, which has featured a wide range of programs since it started in early 2007, from multiple gallery installations and a day-long conference in February 2008 featuring Angela Davis as its keynote, to a pen pal project that connects incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists. The Prison Project’s closing exhibition, featuring artwork from both sides of the prison walls, will be on display through March 29, 2008.

Negrete contributed an installation and performance piece to the closing installation reflecting on both her experience with an imprisoned family member. She mapped a floor plan of two physical spaces of comparable size – her own bathroom and her brother’s cell – and created a plaster wall that mimics the texture of concrete, on which she etched the text of some of her brothers letters.

Plain Human also created an installation piece for this exhibition: a functional campaign office space inside of the gallery, which they have actually used as an administrative office for their organizing activities.

Photos by Anna L Conti via CC.

(photo by mr. mammoth, via cc)

This piece originally appeared on the SF Bay Guardian’s Noise Blog, available here.

With a storm of eerie electronics and crashing beats, otherworldly sounds that clang like metal pipes, and a palette of weird effects, it’s no wonder Brooklyn/Chicago-based trio These Are Powers are calling their trance-inducing incantations “ghost punk.” Continue Reading »

This piece originally appeared on the SF Bay Guardian’s Noise Blog, available here.

There’s club sandwich and then there’s Club Sandwich: one is a chicken-bacon-mayo-double-decker, and the other is a Bay Area show promotion collective committed to hosting all ages shows for under-the-radar local and touring bands. Both layer elements that don’t necessarily seem like they’d go together – but are notoriously tasty for that precise reason. Continue Reading »

This piece was originally written for the SF Bay Guardian’s Noise Blog. You can see it online here.

It’s hard to tell sometimes with the French: how much of their dry humor and peculiarity is due to their French-ness, and how much is straight up eccentricity? For French electronic music producer and Tigersushi label manager Joakim (Versatile, K7), it’s most definitely the later. Due in part to his inordinately tall, praying mantis-like frame and understated manner, Joakim’s idiosyncrasy is what makes his magic; the fact that his fantastically hypnotic live performance is also sort of awkward, for example, makes the experience all the more immediate and real.

Continue Reading »

Recorded and produced entirely in Delhi, Devotion is Cheb i Sabbah’s trance/fusion inspired take on raga (Indian classical music) and the rich and diverse musical traditions Hinduism, Sikhism, and Sufi Islam.

This piece was originally written for the SF Bay Guardian. You can find it here in the SFBG Noise Blog.

This Saturday night (2/9) at the Worldly party at Temple, Cheb i Sabbah — the Algerian-born, San Francisco-based DJ and producer extraordinaire — celebrates the release of Devotion, his seventh album on Six Degrees Records. Continue Reading »

This was written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Noise Blog here.

This Friday and Saturday nights, the internationally traveling “Yo! What Happened to Peace?” art show comes to San Francisco’s Jack Hanley Gallery. Started in 2003 in Tokyo by curator John Carr (no relation to writer) in response to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Los Angeles-based show has been traveling to cities around the globe, most recently Stockholm and London. Continue Reading »

(Photo by Telstar Logistics, via CC)

They call themselves “Piesters,” and they work the after-school shift.

They are the Mission High School students and recent grads in clean, unbleached cotton aprons serving up lattes and thick wedges of pumpkin, banana cream, and pear ginger pie for $3.50 a slice from behind the gleaming glass counter at Mission Pie. Continue Reading »

Poster by Jason Munn

And you thought you didn’t have time to write a novel.

Rebecca Varnum has three kids, a full-time job, and duty in the Air National Guard. Amanda Straw works full-time while taking graduate classes at night. Terri Houchin and Laura Stack have nine kids each. They all wrote novels in a month. Talk about busy. Continue Reading »

“When we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.” —Chris Jordan,

Bertolt Brecht once said that “art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” For years environmentalists have attempted to hold a mirror to reflect the reality of American consumerism, but no one wanted to look—and it’s no wonder. What’s worse than thinking about a problem that is totally depressing, of inconceivable scale, and something for which we are all responsible? Of course the psychological resistance is extreme. Continue Reading »