you can't do that on comedy tour

This is way late, but we posted photos (and a link to some video) from the "You Can't Do That on Comedy Tour" that came to Thanky. Big thanks to Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Frankie Martin, Brian Blomerth and more who brought good laughs to our little gallery. And, then there was night-swimming!

Lucky Dragons performance

In July, I went to see Lucky Dragons, the musical project of Sarah Anderson and Luke Fischbeck whose exhibit at Thanky just closed. Their exhibit consisted of drawings done under the name of their other project, Sumi Ink Club. Lucky Dragons performed at a wonderful, positive small-town festival called "What the Heck Fest" in Anacortes, Washington organized by good people (including Geneviève Castrée who exhibited at Thanky in April). Lucky Dragons' sets involve a lot of audience participation to create swirling electronic music that brings everyone together.

Art Jokes!

YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON COMEDY TOUR!
art jokes, comedy videos and short comedy art plays!

with Brian Blomerth, Frankie Martin and Eyeballz, Andrew Jeffrey Wright
and special guest David Marie Garland!

It's going to be so funny you will forget to laugh!

8pm
Tuesday August 4, 2009 at:

Thanky Space

www.thankyspace.com

Mark Lord (aka C.F.) performance at Thanky

Mark Lord (aka C.F.) makes music.

On July 1st, Thanky hosted a show with Mark Lord (aka C.F.), Morgan Egg, Across and Narhwalz. Mark Lord is C.F.'s new solo project. C.F. is an accomplished musician and visual artist. On the sonic front, he has self-released a number of cassettes and cd-rs under the moniker Kites. Night People and Load also have released his recordings. He is also currently collaborating with Sakiko Mori in a duo called Daily Life.  On the visual front, C.F. has shown his art at the New Image Art Gallery, the Lucerne Art Museum, Giant Robot, Mountainfold Gallery, and the Hope Gallery (and he had a piece or two in a group show at The Bridge PAI in Charlottesville last October). He is included in Kramer’s Ergot 7 and in The Best American Comics. He also helped create the newsprint zine Paper Rodeo which included a lot of our favorite artists (like Ron Rege Jr!). Anyway, C.F.'s newest solo music project is really good, kind of spacey and dreamy.

Morgan Egg is from Providence and happens to be the same person who runs Rare Youth Records. We don't know much about him, but we really liked his set. 

Friends and evicted residents of the Church of Crystal Light Narwhalz and Across opened.

tapppppes

I just want to write about the wonderfulness that is everything that Shawn Reed does. He used to be in Raccoo-oo-oon and he now makes music under the name Wet Hair and runs a tape label called Night People. He makes art for the tapes he releases and sometimes he makes art for just showing too. He's going to show some work at Thanky in July. Check out his tape label here (NP has some vinyl releases as well):

http://www.raccoo-oo-oon.org/np/

So inspiring!

old drawing from a book called Holy Weave of the Cosmic Dream

a release on Night People with art by Shawn Reed 

The universe is expanding

It's best (for the mind/spirit) if you can find your way to a public night at nearby observatory or attend an amateur astronomy night at the city science museum, but it is also nice to just think about space and the cosmos often and sometimes to look at pictures like these from NASA:

NASA - Image of the Day Gallery

find the magic

matana roberts

"she has become an eloquent, dramatic tone-warping free-jazz artist, right out of Ayler's anti-bebop tradition."
-Guardian

"a lyrical spiritual essence that recalls the voices of reed players Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, and others–one of profound soulfulness, passion and purity. . . devoid of mimicry or pretense, because she possesses her own identity."
-All About Jazz

woo! this show looks like it's gonna be awesome!

More info about Matana Roberts:
website
myspace page

cosmic rays they're not so strange

Wow - it was inspirational to get to hang out with Ron Rege, Jr. for this show at Thanky. I am thinking about all sort of amazing things now!

And Windy & Carl stopped by the gallery during installation for The Cartoon Utopia!

I went to Baltimore to visit friends a couple times last month and saw this:





















This art work was shown at The Whole Gallery, a collectively run art space. Yes!

Windy & Carl

Windy and Carl are performing in town on Thursday, April 30th. I am so psyched for this show because I think their music is very beautiful.
















--
"the inventors of Michigan space drone" – The Wire

While it may be hard to define Windy & Carl's sound, the guitars, bass, occasional keyboard and vocals are generally ambient in nature - music great for coloring the background, or foreground, of any activity - walks in the park, driving, afternoon naps .... Similarities can be drawn to some of the 80's ambient pioneers as well as modern classical music. They create music with a wide range of atmospheres, from a warm fuzzy blanket, to a deep ocean, and to the open spaces of a frozen antarctic.

A while back, they put a release out on Kranky called The Dream House, which I sort of want to think was was a reference to this place, or maybe not. I don’t know. I just like their music a whole lot.

@ The Triple
3306 W. Broad St.
$6

James River Film Festival

PLUS

=

PERFECT.

Sometimes, Richmond, you get it just right. Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg" is showing at the Byrd on Thursday night at 7pm. Check it out, the James River Film Festival looks thoroughly amazing this year. Examples. There's some intense claymation by Bruce Bickford, think of those little scenes in "The Happiness of the Katakuris" or any other scenes of weird or gory raw claymation. Stoked. Also the shot-by-shot remake of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that those kids did in the 80s that I've been wanting to see. Also documentary about another far-out dude who made up a world called Rocaterrania and has lovingly written and illustrated like six decades of history for it, obsessive-style similar to Henry Darger. Also, more good stuff! Way to go JRFF!

Wizards

This week I have been listening to one of the books from The Dark is Rising Sequence on cassette. If you aren't already a fan, these are young adult fantasy novels from the 1960s by Susan Cooper.

Geometric Spirituality

Our friend Jeremy Taylor had a show called "Salus" at The Garage in Charlottesville last month. We attended the closing reception and it was really nice. There was a stunning pyramid-like object made from wood scraps with yarn extending to the ceiling like rays, porcelain deer, prints, drawings, and found ephemera. Beautiful!

Weekend Plans

here are your weekend plans:
1.) FRIDAY -> Attend the Kevin Hooyman: Friend of the Innocent opening at Thanky 6-9pm. He has been hanging drawings up on the walls there's going to be hundreds of them and you don't want to miss it.
2.) SATURDAY -> Attend MERCY! at Cous Cous to hear awesome soul and funk with a dude from the very excellent Funky 16 Corners site. 10pm.
3.) SUNDAY -> Attend the Dark Dark Dark/Hurray for the Riff Raff music show at Thanky. Early. 7pm doors.

things to avoid this weekend:
1.) the Watchmen movie (read the comic book)
2.) poison oak

Sign Hanging

Hanging the Thanky sign! (more photos)

Albert Ayler

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is showing My Name is Albert Ayler tomorrow, February 19th at 7 pm. $5 cover.

 

The prophetic free jazz saxophonist Alber Ayler, who today is seen as one of the most important innovators in jazz, was obsessed with his radical music and by the thought that people would one day understand it. In his own words, “If people don’t like it now, they will.”

Here is a review of the documentary:

"Kaspar Collin’s documentary portrait of the great saxophonist, who died in 1970, evinces a remarkable sympathy with its subject and his art. Born in Cleveland, Ayler first made a name for himself in Stockholm in 1962; Collin, who is Swedish, does terrific legwork to find the musician’s former girlfriend and sidemen, including one who recalls how the unheralded outsider dared to compare his importance to Picasso’s. The ne plus ultra of free jazz, Ayler performed the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues: he left chord changes and swinging rhythms far behind and emitted great spiritual wails and shrieks from his horn. Collin expertly evokes the revolutionary impact of Ayler’s arrival in New York in 1963, when an astonished John Coltrane yielded the bandstand to him. (At Coltrane’s request, Ayler played at his funeral, in 1967, and the film includes an archival recording of that harrowing performance.) The stirring presence and fascinating anecdotes of such bandmates as the drummer Sunny Murray, the judicious, evocative use of archival footage of New York in the mid-sixties, and a generous helping of the music itself combine to offer magical moments of a madeleine-like power, summoning up a vanished world that the music both thrived on and exemplified. Though the end of the film seems rushed—its seventy-nine minutes could have gone on for hours—it is nonetheless a cause for rejoicing."

-- The New Yorker

www.mynameisalbertayler.com

What we've been listening to

Nezobs

Andy made some drawings this winter. Here are a few of them. Look:

Play or Pray

My Christmas present from Andy: