Less Skull, More Lion (Shanghai minority gallery)

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: doesn't raise one's faith in humanity, but definitely the best part of this week's Monday...In other words, if you don't have something nice to say, it's time to post some pictures.* 

*Hmm, that really sounds like an intro to internet blackmail//online shame and humiliation, doesn't it? Sorry to disappoint. I've got the goods on exactly: no one.

In lieu of that, let's take the escalator to the third floor of the Shanghai Museum. You almost missed the National Minority gallery, you barely looked at the map! And now you're tired, are too lazy to take notes on the (scanty) placards, and damn if your picture taking skills are falling short. But look! Welcomed with a dragon! How could you resist its lure?

If you are sensible, you can not. And look, birds alight on its brightly lacquered, noble snout.

The main gallery is lined with mannequins in native traditional/ceremonial dress. Tibetan, Mongolian, from far reaches; I tended to think that the flip side of such gorgeously intricate robes were rather difficult existences, or at the very least, lives lived amidst battering elements. For the garments which were not donned for specific rituals, how many days, weeks did one inhabit them? Some garments looked to easily add 20 pounds to the wearer. Still, hard not to romanticize the people from these museum artifacts: walking through halls to the tinkling of myriad silver cones dangling down your front; beaded strands dangling from the crown of your head to your waist; the common white four-holed button, appropriated for much snazzier fare.

More photos here.

*****

The room to the right of the gallery entrance is a wall of deity masks for cham dances in Tibet and elsewhere. Though not blue or many limbed, they call Kali to mind, with their ferocious gaze and crowns of skulls. I am easily drawn to the morbid anyway, so they suck me right in.

A guard approaches me. As with most museums, guards are everywhere. These however, I couldn't help noting, did not stop people from touching the sculptures in the sculpture gallery, which just about gave me a conniption. Most did not speak English, so I couldn't get the nice little asides from them that I am used to.

He eyed me and tapped the glass: "BYOOO-ti-ful." He nodded.

"Scary!" I said, "but yes, Beauutiful."

"BYOOO-ti-ful," he intoned and tapped again. He told me something doubtlessly edifying and completely unintelligible to me. I nodded. "Very. Old." He added. We nodded.  I found it interesting that he enthused about beauty before the grimmest, most ghastly pieces in the place, rather than strolling over to a ceremonial garment to intone the same thing. Was he testing the tourists? Challenging us to protest or grimace? Was he perversely setting up an "If I say the sun is the moon, it is the moon" beholder scenario? Or did he feel protective of the misunderstood beasties, with their gilding and their power?

Traditionally, deity masks like the ones above would be stored with their eyes covered, until a monk or lama chanted or prayed over it, prior to a ceremony. Makes sense to me. They seem just a bit to powerful to be just hanging around. Though clearly museum glass is created with all kinds of barriers in mind...

More photos from the gallery here.

And much more exciting -- process shots from Travel Lust, of monks preparing for a cham dance, in Ladakh, India. Plus even more great shots, from the same source!

I was initially googling cham dance videos, but wasn't so happy with the results I was finding. HowEVER, as you are sooooo aware, it's like a field of flowers, the farther from the path you go, the prettier the blossoms. To wit, don't pass up the Tibetan snow lion dance!  Based on this, I'm thinking Tibet figure in Barkely's heritage. The things you learn. Ayyyyand last stop on the random train, we have this. Who has Joi Ying Lion Dancers at their wedding? Darren & Tracey! Aside from a few cheers and claps, the banquet goers are disappointingly unastounded. Half a dozen metallic red and purple shaggy lions have entered your midst, people! Jaunty backsides, waggling tails, leaping and unfurling gold and red banners, as only the most literate of luck bringing/wealth bestowing lions will! Can't imagine how much money they would cost, but really, dancing lions would be *the thing to have*, to usher in an exciting life of connubial bliss. Am I right or am I Right??

Part the Second: DO go see Appleseed Collective

So, um, now we arrive at what I meant to share, in case one of my local readers may be persuaded. If you have been this patient, maybe you will also be swayed. Mwahaha.

A few weeks back, I met up for friends at the most pleasant Midnight Madness in my recent history. It's one of those nice buy local, get festive events, which I often wander about, but am (apologies) rarely inspired by. I usually have most of my present by then and it's usually (like last year), frigid cold and one is huddling and irritable. If you're me. But this time around the weather was perfect: cold enough to be brisk, not so cold that your forehead wanted to clatter off your face like a rock ledge with a pivotal crack.

And Chris Roberts-Antieau had a pop-up gallery on 4th Avenue, with the fresh-faced Appleseed Collective playing in their store window. Somehow it's even more fun to swing by this Michigan-based globally known textile artist's place once you have also had the opportunity to check out her gallery in News Orleans (photos still on my little ole laptop which oh-so-thankfully does not eat every third line of text, much less hundreds of photos). It behooves me to mention this NOW, because the Appleseed Collective was ever so fun in a nice Django Rheinhardt kind of bluegrassy way and is playing AGAIN tomorrow night -- which is to say FRIDAY night, for free at the popup gallery on 4th -- from 8:30-11 PM. Lucky you! Go see them! They are playing a group Holiday Show this Saturday at the ark, but it is already SOLD OUT, so clearly, you should just saunter on down. Sine the artist has a love of mixing high and low art, the snacks followed suit, It was surprising how I took to red wine and cheetos. Cheetos, how I have missed you and your glowing orange detritus! 

next store at Aunt Agatha's

Before the place got hopping.

Bird bones in foreground, Humanzee and Killed by Their Creations in the background.

Bonus treat: the artist left her sketchbooks out. I leafed through but felt like I was spying.

Nightmare tree, made of exploded Xmas dreams past

Bad Dog Art Gallery

Lincoln Corner in Back!

Appleseed Collective in Front

Great voice + gorgeous steel guitar

Yay, washboard!

More than a passing resemblance to Andrew Bird, non?

Love this one. But my FAVORITE is this one.

Everyone's lunchbag puppets should be so festooned.

Everyone's address book should be so festooned.

...And outside, we had a fire thrower. Associated with Tickled Fancy, who also performed?

We worried she would set her hair on fire.

She did. But she was blase about it. Her relations, less so.

Let's end on an incendiary note, shall we? No fireworks, to report otherwise...

Part the First: Don't Go in the Basement

Maybe 2013 will be the year I cease to moan about not blogging often enough and just...write. And leave off with the wahhh, I can't get up early! and just get up...and run. Maybe, maybe, maybe. If wishes were horses, all of us would ride, right? It's times like these that I may listen to Nikka Costa's "Can'tneverdidnothin'," which I'd love to link to here, but the YouTube versions are lacking. Hop on your spotify, it's funky.

Anyhow. The Winter darkness has indeed been descending, and fittingly, I have been dwelling in my basement in the evening hours. Mainly with the horror (periodically felt anew) of all the clutter everywhere, packed into my various areas of existence. Get it out, pare it down! Out, out, out! This time, a call with my dear sister last weekend served as the springboard, wherein we discussed Psychological Attachment to Possessions* and the Odd Role this Can Play in Families, etc., etc., etc. There has been lots of bustling, shuffling of art supplies, inventory, and tossing out of ancient papers. 

*This was not an intervention. Relax. I don't hide tuna fish sandwiches in the TV console, or BOGO offers from 1980, nor do I water my records in the garage (likely the coolest part of this post, but which I can't really expound upon b/c it's not my story to tell.). But I will say this: based on a peek in a couple beaten up boxes, my basement had and still has journals of heartfelt, absolutely awful scribblings from a new adult. At their worst when they attempted to be clever. It's only appropriate to nod to This American Life's Cringe episode. So, ahem. Outside of that, and it leads one to cringe in another way, I also discovered things like this:

....WOW. So, I think this had 1/10th the ability of my current (not smart) phone

Oh, I remember it well. The screen showed three lines of text, green letters against a black background. After it had been on for several hours, typically when one was frantically writing something to pass for a first draft, hands shaking from pots of coffee at 3 AM, the processor would tire. It would be hot, and fatigued. It was at this point, it began to issue protests. You would type type type type out your harebrained line, and a second and a third. The cursor would blink at the line's end. And then it would swallow one of the recent lines.

"WHATTT ?!? No! What. Fuck." You'd retype the line and know that it was beginning. The intermittent info. swallowing. Just when you most needed peace of mind, it was sure to withhold it. And as, Pavlov would attest, it would be exactly the sporadic nature of the info. swallowing that would keep you going, but on edge. Ahhhh, those were the days. And now our phones laugh at these machines. Our ipods and ipads could swallow one of these as if they were single kernels of popped corn.

Getting help: prospect dim.

The first sentence says it all: If a document exists in memory, you have to erase it from  memory before you can create a new one.

Odd to find so many things from distant past. The hokey dreams books with all their pat psychology can not entirely be dismissed: things are lurking in your basement, the lower order of your mind. The water heater about to blow*, the informational grad school packets you had wiped from your memory, the warrens of tiny animals, letters you may never read again.

*True, dat. New one being installed tomorrow. Current one, slowly weeping out its contents from the base, though blessedly still performing, thank god, for I love a steamy shower. And maybe the new one will be even more delicious. The sales man/co-owner who stopped by for a free (pricey, nauseatingly pricey) estimate also saw fit to segue into politics, which at this point is expected. If you come to fix something at my house, you will surely go off in some way, I don't know who made this rule. I don't actively dissuade it, b/c sure, let's hear it. "Haha, We didn't come to blows!," said the guy yesterday evening. Well right, I said, we are on the same side. Which could not have been said of the loquacious plumber from a few months ago, who WOW had a lot to say about (his many) guns and maybe some Mary Jane, but he was certainly QUITE an entertaining storyteller. Worth the price of admission, really. To some, garbage disposals actually lack integrity, they are LIES. That's what I love getting to: the heated quirks in perception that every single one of us develops from whatever path of work we take. Surface: all fine. Get to the details: whoa. Funny! and Whoa~~.