DAY TWO *second half* : Sasquatch Music Festival [Sun. May 30, 2010]

June 23, 2010 in Global Destruction, Music, Politics, Reviews, With Video

TO READ THE FIRST HALF, CLICK HERE

Towards the end of The XX‘s set, Kim woke up confused.  She was half asleep and must have still been lost in a dream, because she was talking nonsense.  She tried to prop herself up and people were stomping and moving all around her, so she had to make like a recently birthed giraffe and get to figuring out how to walk with the quickness.  I got her up and we started moving out of the crowd, but it seemed like she was doing even worse.   She was having some trouble breathing and, as is often the case with panic attacks, it was difficult to figure out if she was actually physically sick or if it was just an anxiety issue.  It was clear that she wasn’t feeling well, but didn’t want me to miss the festival. “We are going back to the tent, now. I don’t want to talk about it… c’mon.” Read the rest of this entry →

EXCLUSIVE WEEN PHOTOS: The Sasquatch Music Festival [May 31, 2010]

June 5, 2010 in art, Music

Last weekend marked the 9th annual Sasquatch Music Festival at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wa.  The lineup was pretty impressive this year and included MGMT, The XX, LCD Soundsystem, Nurses and even Pavement.  Closing out the festivities was a performance by one of our favorite bands of all-time, WEEN.  I was there all weekend so that I could report on everything that went down and regurgitate it back for you assholes, but I am still putting everything together, going through photos, and simply recovering.  You may have noticed that we don’t typically just post updates here and there.  It’s much more important for us to process everything and provide something that is more adequately thought out.  Hopefully it’s something that will actually provide the reader with new information and, if we’re really lucky, something that can even moderately stand the test of time.  With a situation like this year’s Sasquatch, however, there’s a lot to deal with, so I’m going to do things a little differently.  I’m covering the entire 3-Day event all by myself, including photography, reviews, editing, etc, and so there’s a lot for me to organize.  The reviews will be posted soon but, seeing as I have a ton of images and only a handful of them will be used in those reviews, I wanted to drop some photos from the WEEN set right here and right now.  These aren’t all of the photos even obtained at the WEEN show, but it’s a lot of them (24 to be exact).  This is a little update for everyone, while I process everything else, because I’m assuming that a lot of you probably still don’t know about our Flickr account.  More images will be popping up on that account as we process them, so keep your eye on there if you want to see more.  For now, please enjoy the images of Gene and Dean provided below.

Thanks Read the rest of this entry →

A Conversation w/ Har Mar Superstar [Star of Ghosbusters 3?]

February 14, 2010 in Comedy, Interviews, Movies / Television, Music, With Video

LSD…  it’s a helluva drug.  Back in the day, I did my share (and, perhaps, the shares of a few others).  Some believe that it has the potential to help turn you into such a super genius, that you appear freakishly insane to anyone else that’s not “on your level“.  Then again, it’s always possible that the reverse is happening and they really are going so ape-shit crazy, that it only leads them to believe that that they have a growing mental superiority.  One thing’s for sure; these chemical roller-coasters have the ability to twist up and whack out a synapse, like eating a parasitic egg-salad-sandwich from the vending machine of an interstellar truck stop bathroom.  The reality is that, even with all of the epiphanies and life lessons that one may obtain during these odysseys, there is really no scientific control for the experimenter/guinea pig and, short of a clone or view into a parallel dimension, no one can ever really know if they would have arrived at those same conclusions without the “aid” of the hallucinogen.  The good part is, since there is no way to make that determination, it doesn’t really matter and there are more detrimental things in the world than examining the differences between arrogance and confidence, exploitation and opportunity, respect and glorification, inspiration and contrivance, hustling and…well, hustling.  Despite the blatant self-aggrandizement implied in his stage name, SeanHar Mar SuperstarTillmann seems to have an incredibly firm grasp on these concepts and plenty of others.  Of all the electric realizations that I had, however, there is one specific principle that truly epitomizes Tillmann‘s career for me: “Regardless of how clearly, simply, honestly, or directly you express a pure truth, it doesn’t mean that anyone else will, necessarily, hear, believe, or even understand what you are trying to relate to them.Read the rest of this entry →

Mark Jenkins Drapes a Dead Broad Across a Billboard [VIDEO]

September 28, 2009 in art, Global Destruction, PSA, With Video

billboardRecently, Washington DC artist, Mark Jenkins caused panic in the streets over another one of his crafty life-like sculptures.  Locals in Winston-Salem, NC bugged out and “lost they damn minds” after noticing, what appeared to be, a woman laying motionless across top of an abandoned billboard.  Fearing that the woman might have been dead, shocked pedestrians called in law-enforcement officers to investigate the situation.  Of course, after removing “her” from the sign, authorities quickly realized that the it was nothing more than an elaborate sculpture formed from packing tape.

My only guess is that their assumptions were either:

A)

For some overly dramatic statement, a dying woman must have used her last ounce of remaining strength to scale a huge billboard, only to fall into her eternal slumber length-wise across it’s form.

OR

B)

In a misguided and poorly thought out plan, a murderer chose to hide the remains of their victim on top of the one structure created, specifically to bring attention to anything posted on it.

Here’s Sept. 23, news footage of the scenario via CNN.com:

Read the rest of this entry →

Worried Shoes: Unreleased Daniel Johnston Converse All-Stars

June 16, 2009 in art, Music, The Web

[UPDATE: read Part 2 - featuring images of low-top model]
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Daniel Johnston converse shoe all star logo

So, I finally created a Flickr account for Monster Fresh.  I have a backlog of concert photography and extra shots that never even make it on to the site.  Since I’m new to the Flickr game, I decided to knock around the site to see exactly what it had to offer and what else I could find in the photo sets of other users.  I typed “Daniel Johnston” into a search and was surprised to find a photo pop up that was titled, “Extremely Rare Daniel Johnston Converse“.  I knew about the, somewhat tentative, plans for the collaboration, but I never knew if I would actually see the final product come to fruition. Read the rest of this entry →

Pigeons, Shit, Tampons, Heroin, and Vomit: Mark Jenkins’ “Purple Splendor”

June 13, 2009 in art, Global Destruction, Politics, With Video

Purple Splendor monkey FlyerI first discovered Mark Jenkins‘ work about 1 1/2 years ago and I didn’t like it.  Sifting through the January 2008 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, I came across, what I believed to be, a lot more intriguing work.  There was a page on pop-surrealist GregCraolaSimkins‘ “I’m Scared” exhibit,  painter/low-rider bike artist Dzine‘s tricked out ski-boat called Dnipro (equipped with a DJ set up, lazers, smoke machine, 9 TVs, etc), and a spread/interview with illustrator/inker/digital artsit Tomer Hanuka.  In the mix with all of the rest of the great features in the magazine, Jenkins‘ work was lost for me.

His photographs of young girls shoved in a locker or sitting on the ledge of a building weren’t very thought provoking.  There was one of a woman passed out with her face in a plate of food in the middle of a cafeteria, but it just seemed very “high school” to me; a little bit edgy, but nothing new or particularly magnificent.

It probably took about a week or two of me reading through the other articles before I noticed something that I hadn’t before and which made me take a second look.  It was a picture of a man leaning towards a concrete building with his head embedded into the side of it.  After reading the interview with him and looking over the images again, I found out two things that gave me a completely different perspective and a ridiculous amount of appreciation for Mark Jenkins and his art.

1) Jenkins work is not really photography based at all.
2) Those weren’t even real people in those pictures. Read the rest of this entry →