Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

BLUF — BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: I am starting a record label of sorts, due to Covid, starting with performers who had been booked into my concert series; the name references a landmark on the Stanford campus and or the mythology of beasts and beings.

It’s not a griffin or a Griffin or Gryphon or Griffon,  it’s a lion with wings or hopefully more than one. It’s a mask that can sing, the play is the thing; part luftmensch part Luddite.  Sentient Earthworms by Johanson and wuthering  Heights; Big Rock Candy Mountain more likely, like me?  Blues, jazz, funk, folk: ….Handheld, but you can’t actually touch it.
America the Beautiful with blue Notes morphing into Kol Nidre; take a knee; take two knees, Colin Kaepernick and Gryphon Stringed. Seeds of change. Boots and Bastille or cloth Sackett jacket. (Those little happy and sad masks they have a name — and an emoji, even, Steven — but I keep forgetting the name, no one knows the name — Socks and Buskin, or so they say).

Part “Waters of March”, Part drawings by Richard Serra, An accommodation to COVID-19 but not a capitulation.  The stic,k the stone, to bend, to fold. Two-fold and found object. Covers. Maybe. 650 + 615 minus 404 on the 101, 540, even, or is that odd? Ones and zeros, all and none are heroes. See all, I am nothing; the music stays in the cloud; the kid stays in the picture: I don’t cry when my dog runs away. Out, damn  spot; spitintheholeandtuneagain. To fly with the lion, to lie with the lamb. To jam.

preview:

And1:

Richard Serra, 1967, “To Lift”:

In the mid-1960s Richard Serra began experimenting with nontraditional art materials like fiberglass, neon, and rubber, and also with the language involved in the physical process of making sculpture. The result was a list of action verbs—among them “to roll, to crease, to curve”—that Serra compiled, wrote on paper, and then enacted on the materials he had collected in his studio.

This work, made from discarded rubber recovered from a warehouse in lower Manhattan, is a result of the rubber’s unique response to the artist’s enacting of the action verb “to lift.” As Serra later explained, “It struck me that instead of thinking what a sculpture is going to be and how you’re going to do it compositionally, what if you just enacted those verbs in relation to a material, and didn’t worry about the results?”

At the very least I’ve enjoyed so far chatting with some great artists about the possibilities or singing into their cell phones and then sending me the outcome. I hope to put a bunch of stuff on BandCamp. Until then, keep your mask on but think about your version of sprouting wings and soaring and roaring.

More happy than sad, ideally; wild and crazy yet tech savvy.