chase the light

Neko at The Derby February 28th, 2004

Yes I’ve completely lost my mind but I totally love Neko Case, and she has a new album coming out March 7th. Which I’ve already got, but that’s not point. Last year was all about her other band The New Pornographers, but this year she’s out on her own again. New Album, a website (finally, as she’s never really had one), tour dates, a Tonight Show appearance, and free stuff from Anti, her record company. She’s even going to do podcasts. When it rains it pours. The new album doesn’t feel that new to me as I’ve heard a lot of the songs from all the live shows I’ve attended. It’s a sleepier album than the others. The kind you put on during a rainy night. The first concert footage on the epk is from the Seattle show I was at last summer where it poured down rain. A friend of mine suggested a Neko intervention might be in order as I was obsessing. If I come home and all of friends have gathered at my house I’m not cooperating.

New Album: Fox Confessor Brings The Flood.

Sasquatch Music Festival: May 27th at The Gorge Amphitheatre 12:00pm.

The Tonight Show: March 9th, 2006.

New Website: NekoCase.com Coming Soon.

Free Neko Stuff from Anti-:
“If You Knew” MP3 The Tigers Have Spoken
“Train From Kansas City” MP3 The Tigers Have Spoken
“Star Witness” MP3 Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Neko Case Video Press Kit Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Micro-site The Tigers Have Spoken

Today, Ashes and Snow. First off, stop off at Alicia’s for breakfast. Hell yeah. Jill brought the bagels and Alicia cooked up some spinach and mushrooms with eggs. My fave. Perfect. Then we were off.

So, there’s like this nomadic museum and all. It was in New York last year, and is now installed in a bigger space out by the Santa Monica Pier. I’m actually surprised at how many people were there considering it’s this arty somewhat pretentious kinda experience. But there ya go, apparantly a lot of people are hungry for that.

I liked it for about 15 minutes but then I fell asleep while watching the films. Then I had to pee so I went outside. But, to get back in you have to go back to the beginning of the exhibit and walk through the whole thing again. Ugh. It took a little while because it was crowded like a cattle car. When I couldn’t find Jill or Alicia I went back out and people watched while I waited for them to finish. Then I went to the merchandise booth and laughed at the price of the big artwork book for the show at $7500. You would really have to be moved by this thing to fork out that kinda dough. I thought the $15 dollar entrance fee was too much. I love art, but I cringe when something starts to border on pretention. Some feel it, some don’t.

As I was sitting outside the exit I didn’t hear one derogatory remark about the exhibit. It was all very positive. Let’s see, I heard it described as angelic, moving, beautiful, and ominous. I would go with dark, sleepy, beautiful, but too crowded. That was my biggest beef with it is it’s probably much more enjoyable with a smattering of people. Take a long lunch and go during the week. So in honor of the exhibit I tinted my one photo of the building sepia. See, I can be all pretentious and stuff too.

Anyway… the after the Ashes and Snow plan was better. For me anyway. I thought while were down there why don’t we just hang out at the pier and be tourists and ride the rollercoaster and play in the arcades and stuff. Alicia lost her sunglasses somewhere inside of Ashes and Snow so she picked up a pair at one of the sellers on the pier. While waiting for her I was able to get Jill to pose with all the goofy shades we could find. Then we hit the rollercoaster, some bumper cars and the arcade. Then went off to The Counter for dinner. Breakfast, art, amusement park, and dinner. A damn fine day.

[SKI TRIP VIDEO LINK]

So we left work about 5:15 but the bus’s air conditioner was busted and they forgot our ice coolers! The bus got up to 86 degrees inside. It was miserable and we were sitting in Friday night traffic for two hours. So we stopped in the valley to swap out buses and reload everyone. Then we stopped in Mojave for dinner. Then ANOTHER stop in Bishop to drop off sandwich orders that we’ll pick up on the way home on Sunday. We rolled into Mammoth at 2:00am. Yikes. A nine hour bus ride.

This years ski trip included a new twist. Dog sledding. Yep I paid a bunch of dogs to drag my ass around the snow for an hour. And they liked it! Above is the only photo I took the whole weekend because I shot video instead. 54 gigs when I downloaded the video. Good grief, HD video will be the death of my computer. It’s about 11.5 minutes of fairly large footage. Bandwidth impaired people beware. On Saturday evening we all met up for the happy hour and then out to eat.

Sunday was snowmobiling, and then home with a stop in Bishop to pick up the sandwiches that we ordered on the way up. Which was total mayhem. They parked this truck van thing in the Del Taco parking lot and when we got off the bus it was pandemonium. Oddly enough it all worked out. The rest of the trip was uneventful. On the trip up and back we watched Harold & Kumar go to White Castle, Red Eye, Batman Begins, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin.

Oh Heather Joan Graham, for months your face has been plastered all over Los Angeles on billboards, buses, and production trucks. You were the queen of hearts for ABC TV. The next moment… well your face is still plastered all over except now you’ve been cancelled and are just the two of clubs. Premiering Jan 9th, dead January 16th. One episode. Cancelled. Ms. Felicity Shagwell, I’ve kinda enjoyed every morning that you and your big beautiful eyes would pull up outside my office window and watch me work all day. I know our time is short but when you do move on and no longer come to my window… I’ll be right here waiting for you Rollergirl.

A test of the new camera. HD Baby! HDV-HC1 [LINK]. So let’s see… my cell phone fell in the toilet and died, the Canon G1 I lost in the mud while quadbiking in New Zealand, the iPod didn’t live after it’s tumble down the stairs in the parking structure and my DV camera decided jump out of my hands and into the ocean when I was in Fiji. So I give this camera about a 6 month lifespan. I’d make a terrible basketball player. Be the ball.

1. Humpty buddha’s hand / in funny ways / culture sale / bouche et bijioux.
2. Dust my broom / spanning the infinite / deep in space / something fishy.
3. The flight of / partes / in platon hands / came crashing down.

The latest Exquisite Corpses [LINK] that I’ve worked. First one I did the second piece. The last two I did the first piece. It’s not all that rewarding doing the first piece as you just have to come up with something to get the ball rolling. I also bowed out of working on these for awhile as they were being sent to me fast and furious. These are the last that I worked on and I’ve now put myself back in the loop after a three month break. Let the weirdness begin.

[NEW YEARS 2006 GALLERY – 1280 x 1024]

Happy New Year, you’re about to get taken out by a wave. Ha ha ha. That’s not what you want to see when you’re looking through your viewfinder. I thought it would be nice to get a shot of the waves crashing along the rocks near Fort Point. Until a huge set came in and bitch slapped me all over the place. I’m 1 sec. away from getting soaked head to toe. Camera and all. Oh yeah everyone else thought it was funny, but it took me a minute to regain my composure before I could find the humor in it. At least I now know my camera can take the full force of a wave and brush it off like a champ!

Went on a little road trip over the New Years and stopped in Morro Bay and Half Moon Bay. Then made my way up to San Francisco and took in some sights before heading over to Keith and Shelli’s for their annual New Years DAY party they’ve dubbed “Reclination”. The storm was out of control this weekend. The surf was huge so I stopped in Half Moon Bay to check out Mavericks surf spot and the storm was going off so it was ugly out there. No surfers though, too nasty. After I got into San Francisco there was a ton of flooding and one poor bastard’s truck was killed by a tree. Headed up to Marin and more flooding until I got to Keith and Shelli’s where I parked myself for the night. The party went on for hours anyway so it was good to just crash there. Except for the fact that the drive home the next day would turn into a nightmare. I got up on Monday and headed out at noon to have lunch in San Mateo. Then decided to take the 152 by Casa de Fruta and take the 5 home. Lucky me, traffic was out of control. Gridlocked or really slow most of the way and pouring rain out. I thought that was bad until just before the Paso Robles exit they shut the freeway down all the way to the Grapevine. That’s like three hours away! I finally heard on the radio from L.A. that the winds were so high that trucks where laying on their sides and one had even hit a power pole and that was laying in the road somewhere. So they herded everyone off the freeway and I had to cut across to the 99 which was an hour away. Anyway, got home at 11pm after leaving Keith and Shelli’s at 12:30pm. Ugh. So that sucked, but in two weeks when we go on the Sony ski trip it’s going to be epic because of the storm. In the past 30 hours alone Mammoth Mountain has gotten 8 feet of snow. That is what you call duuuuumping.

After having Christmas with my parents in Idaho they headed up to Anacortes to get the boat shipped down to Southern California. It’s been up in the San Juan Islands for the past year. They got it on the truck today so if you see a big red Popeye boat coming down the 5 freeway it could be Scooter. It’s supposed to arrive sometime after the new year to its new home in Dana Point. It’s kinda weird to see a boat on the back of a Semi.

Boise airport December 25th

The holiday Bermuda Triangle. In L.A., will just be hangin’ out. Then to Idaho and doing nothin’, or shopping at one of their many strip malls. Then onto San Francisco for 4 days during the New Year! Woot! That all starts right… no, wait for it, right… one sec… now…

chrisc@beyonce:chrisc > logout
login: connection closed.

Photos from the kayaking trip to Fiji. It only took me a month this time rather than three years for the last trip. Unfortunately this time around I was hammered by mosquitos and came home with an unfortunate nightmare on my hands. I had an allergic reaction to the mosquito bites and they kept getting worse and worse to the point that they were scaring the shit out of me. They hurt, were oozing and one was the size of a silver dollar. They weren’t getting better and I had 40 of them that had gone completely haywire. They weren’t getting better so I made an appointment with my doctor and had him check them out. He prescribed me some Cipro, which was sounding oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Not because it’s a hugely powerful antibiotic anything, but… holy crap that’s what they were giving everybody that had been exposed to Anthrax a few years ago!!!! He also decided to send me to a dermatologist because he wasn’t quite sure about them. Anyway, I was miserable and with the help of the Cipro they finally started to scab over last week. I never took a picture of them because it was just to god awful to look at. But you can recreate it with pieces of beef jerky. Just take forty 1 1/2 inch round pieces of beef jerky and randomly place them on your arms and legs and you’ll get an idea of what I looked like. Meat scabs. The only thing positive I could think of was that there was no way in hell anyone was going to mug me. Mostly I kept them covered though so that I wouldn’t scare the shit out of people while out in public. Apparantly some people become more sensitive to mosquito bites the more they get them. Guess I’m one of those…

[FIJI 2005 GALLERY – 1280 x 1024]

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The first look at Ghost Rider was revealed today. Check him out [LINK]. He looks pretty freakin’ cool even in a compressed quicktime file. Official Site [LINK] and fanboy reaction [LINK] is positive. The release date is February 2007 and lots of work to do. It’s a flaming skeleton on a flaming motorcycle, that’s cool.

Just one of the tents full of people at the Sony Holiday Party. Another tent of about the same size had a band and a bunch more tables for gambling. Let’s see the food was catered by Wolfgang Puck’s Catering. Really freakin’ good and they didn’t run out of the pan seared shrimp. Even though I totally horded because I thought they would. No really, I TOTALLY horded my first plate thinking there’s no way these shrimp are going to last. Three hours later they were still bringing out fresh bowls of them so they had it covered. I was drunk on buttery oiled seared shrimp. I still am. They gave away trips to Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Sydney, New York, and Canada. They also gave away random stuff like sets of tickets to movie premieres next year, which neighbor Rachel won! I’m thinking she needs to take me because red carpets and I are like peanut butter and chocolate. Below we’ve got, Keiko, Jen, Michael, Chris, Donny, I dunno, Peter, Jill, Sony Pictures Entertainment Vice Chairman Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures Television President Steve Mosko, Blaine, Sarah, and Kenji. Yeah, sure I didn’t win anything, but the amount of shrimp I ate made up for that. I grew a tail and little prawn feet in my Kafka dream that night.

I’m home and it’s back to a normal life again. For five of the days I was paddling and I feel pretty buff. Don’t look buff, just feel buff. So, instead of Oceanic Air flight 815, I was on Air Pacific flight 811. We didn’t crash, no one shot anyone, polar bears didn’t attack me, and no one tried to burn my kayak when I tried to leave the island. I did download every episode of “Lost” to watch on the iPod in the evenings. 30 episodes at 45 minutes a piece. Since the generator goes off at 9:00 pm and there are no lights and you’re huddled in your bed under a mosquito net anyway, you might as well have something to do. Fiji, good. Mozzies bad. The girl at the pharmacy said, “Are you sure those are mosquito bites?!!!” I looked like a friggin’ leper. I’m a walking turn-off.

I’m in a kayak floating on the blue seas of the South Pacific paddling from one white sandy beach to the next white sandy beach. The photo is of the northern coast of the island of Kadavu. Kadavu is an island about an hours flight south of the main island of Viti Levu. Basically picture me paddling a kayak along that coast and stopping at the beaches along the way. That’s pretty much it! It’s an island that is made up of villages that is the traditional lifestyle of the ethnic Fijian. Indo-Fijians (those who can trace their roots to India) are by and large not present on Kadavu. Of the 12,000 that live on the island only a handful are Indo-Fijian and work for the government. After a successful coup in 1987, and a government kidnapping and second coup attempt In May of 2000, it threw the Fijian government into disarray for a few years. As of late 2004 the government is now led by an ethnic Fijian and the opposition party by an Indo-Fijian. In 2002 the leader of the attempted coup was sentenced to life in prison. So, what did we say…? HEY, I KNOW! Let’s go to Fiji between coups! There’s not another one scheduled until 2013! I even read about an entrepreneurial Fijian who was selling t-shirts at the airport that had a picture of a terrorist holding a gun and wearing a ski mask to cover his face with the words “I SURVIVED REBEL COUP IN FIJI. MAY 19, 2000.” Below is a chronological set of photos from Oct. 24th to Nov. 4th of 2002. It’s a mammoth 248 photos but never the less a document of the whole journey. The participants were me, Jill, George, Lance, Lopsie, Nicole, Dave and Hyeseung. After a long push to get Lord of the Rings out the door we deserecved a holiday. We even got to meet up with some fellow Weta employees at the end of the trip when we found them staying at the same hotel. Anyway, blah blah blah… Au sa liu mada…

[FIJI 2002 GALLERY]

I leave you with two guilty pleasures. With all of the new video podcasts coming out there are two that just crack me up. You’re either gonna love ’em or hate ’em. “Tiki Bar TV” and “The Mary and Karla Show”. If you have a current copy of ITunes installed just click HERE to subscribe to Tiki Bar TV and HERE for The Mary and Karla Show. MmmmKay…

[IMAGEWORKS HALLOWEEN GALLERY]
Damn, people done good with the creativity for Halloween. Some great pumpkins were made and some of the costumes were wicked good. The CSI:Pumpkin is awesome, and the motion capture pumpkin is probably only funny to a select few.

It’s weird but I didn’t realize until today that I haven’t been home for the last 4 years during Halloween. It was weird to see it in action. My ‘weenyness is a little rusty. Everybody started showing up to work this morning in these great costumes and I forgot grown people actually do this! Last year on Halloween night I was on a huge overnight car ferry with two different biker gangs. One was the Coffin Cheaters and the other was some other scary sounding name. They were scary bearded men with chains but not very Halloween-like. The year before that I saw a pumpkin in a window in London that reminded me it was Halloween and then the year before that on a little island sitting by a bonfire and drinking with our kayaking group. I always seem to be finishing a show in the fall so that’s when I get to take some time off work for travel. I’m actually trying to make a wordy transition here from Halloween to Thanksgiving. Which is being done very poorly I might add… so on that note…

I leave in a few weeks for a trip to Fiji and I’m busting with excitement! I can’t wait to see all the people again and give them some of the photographs I took the first time around. Below are Petero and Tony, and George and his family. Petero works at resort now so won’t be on the trip, but Tony will be guiding the trip and George will also be with us. George’s wife was pregnant in that photo so that kid will be almost three now! And to accompany me on my voyage…? A brand new video iPod! See, my last iPod decided to commit suicide this week by throwing itself down a flight of concrete stairs. It was a horrible has I had to hold it in my hands during its last dying breath. I pushed it’s little buttons like I was trying to restart its heart… So sad.

[LUCHA VAVOOM GALLERY]

Over the last couple years I’ve been meaning to get over to Lucha VaVoom but had yet to actually get the energy. On Tuesday I receive my weekly “Flavorpill” email [LINK]. It tells me all the cool things going on in L.A. so I in turn also look cool. There was a blurb about Lucha VaVoom happening this week. A Halloween edition too! At the very bottom was a contest to win tickets for Wednesday nights show. And the question…? “Which Buxotica takes a name from a rebellious ’30s-era Mexican painter? The third through fifth correct answers each win a pair of tickets to this match.” So I fill it out with “Frida Kulo” and the next day I’m a winner! I get a confirmation email from New York that also went out to Rita D’Albert who runs and performs in the show in L.A. Hmmm… that name sounds so famliar? Google it, and she used to be a guitarist in the band The Pandoras and is/was hooked up with Andy Prieboy who is one of my favorite L.A. musicians ever. He’s an incredible artist. Andy had a brief stint with Wall of Voodoo and wrote “Tomorrow, Wendy” that Concrete Blonde also covered. He also was the man behind the stage show “White Trash Wins Lotto” which caused a big stir in L.A. a few years ago. But, it’s his solo work that I really love and his few releases out there are amazing. Totally unheard by 99.99687% of the world, but loved to death by the other .00318% of us.

BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS! Because now life is defined as B.L., Before Lucha, and A.L. After Lucha! I now have to refer to myself as being born in 39 B.L. The event was total mayhem which included some audience participation that was not supposed to be part of the show. Anyway, Mexican masked wrestlers, mini (midget?) wrestlers, burlesque Buxoticas, comedians, audience dressup, etc. It was sheer insanity like a Fellini film that comes to life. It’s definitely a see it to believe kinda thing but what a blast! Pictures don’t really do it justice. It’s basically masked men wrestling, girls taking off their clothes and shaking their boobies, comedians making jokes about the whole thing as it goes on, including Tom Kenny who is the voice of Spongebob saying stuff like “Fan-fucking-tastic!” and “Ouch, that even hurt my labia!”, and a crowd full of people wearing masks or dressed up as geriatric Elvises.

During the final match two wrestlers were out in the audience flailing away at each other and some stupid drunk chick decides she wants to be part of the action and picks up a chair and goes after one of the wrestlers. I’m standing like 5 feet away and the wrestler turns and looks a little freaked out by this girl about to slug him on the head with a folding chair! Then security goes apeshit and goes all Rodney King on her throwing her to the ground and struggling with her all over the floor! There’s like 8 burly guys taking this chick down and then the stupid ass boyfriend tries to start pulling them off of her and then they turn and jump him and he starts flailing around! Then the crowd starts throwing water and shit at the whole scene and plastic water bottles are coming in and I decide it’s time to get the hell outta there because it’s escalating pretty quickly! I make my way out to lobby and quickly purchase a souvenir Mexican wrestling mask for fun and then I hear all this commotion. Security guards are yelling, “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!!!!!” as they come through the lobby dragging the idiot boyfriend out in to the street and chasing him away. I’m not even sure where the girlfriend ended up. Security handled it right though. Anyway, it was awesome and the best free thing ever.

[ABBY TRAVIS GALLERY]
[BLYTHE LYRICS]

Today had one of those “Dude you’ve totally been under a rock while this is going on” moments. There’s this thing called Tarfest every year at the museums and next door at the tar pits. Um, first off, worst name ever for an event. Tarfest! It’s tar-rific! See you at the af-tar party! Ugh. Well, I’ve lived across the street from this for the past 4 years and have never heard of it. But that doesn’t matter because it’s pretty lame. So, my point is… I was checking the website and a musical artist caught my eye. Abby Travis. [LINK] Hmmm… she’s cute, check the website quickly, music sounds great, hmmm, cabaret with a touch burlesque. Oh my God, it’s at 5:45? It’ll still be light out. In a park? Cabaret? This is going to be one tough show to pull off. Gotta check this out.

I headed over, all 200 yeards away, and she comes out and holy crap she’s freakin’ great! Daylight and all. Considering there were only like 15 people there she still put on a show. I would have crumbled in that position. Yikes, ballsy. So I have this total soft spot in my heart for burlesque type girls and was crushing on her the whole show. She did about 30 minutes and her songs were great. She’s hella photogenic too. I spoke to her briefly after the show and asked her about any upcoming stuff and she gave me her card which states… “Musician Extraordinaire Lifestyle Consultant”. Indeed. This HAD to be one of her strangest gigs.

During the last song she invited this one lady to join in, and boy did she. She started rattling off all sorts of poems and was cursing like a sailor at some parts. It was hilarious and incredible at how well it all worked. Abby actually sat down next to me in the audience and let the band just vamp and the lady kept going and going. I talked to her after the show too and it kinda ruined the whole vibe because I discovered she was a really angry woman and started bitching to me about never getting paid for her art, and how Jim Carroll this and Jim Carroll that, blah blah blah.. She even had these glazed over eyes that kinda freaked me out. Like the eyes of a yoga instructor or a massage therapist that are kinda mentally on a different plain then the world around them. Ok, nice talkin’ to you, gotta go… Give her mic though and she’s funny.

So who the hell is this Abby? I’m usually pretty on top of all the comings and goings of musical nuggets happening in town, but crap I’ve been asleep at the wheel with her. Let’s see… oh, she runs Club Mata Hari over in Los Feliz, during Lollapalooza 95 she played bass for both Beck and Elastica, oh and gee she’s just about to leave on an Australian tour as the bassist for The Bangles… [ABBY TRAVIS]

Let’s see if you like any of the following you might like her. Bowie, Dresden Dolls, Marlene Dietrich, etc… The torchy song Blythe that’s above is damn pretty. Great U2ish guitar solo too. From her new album “Glitter Mouth”, buy it if you likey it. Comes out January. You can hear more songs at her website. Singing girls make me weak.