Saturday, February 03, 2007

Good Karma

On Friday I met up with The Wonder That Is Daniel (Magazin), to give him a CD I burned of the four songs he plays piano on, on Not Made of Stone: "How Now Is Soon", "The Jaguar", "The Great Highway", and "Save a Prayer". We realized at that time that it is 2007 -- which means we've known each other for 20 years. That felt like something that needed celebrating with dinner at Cha-Ya real soon.

Friday evening I met up with Austin Space from KFJC at the Gallery AD in downtown San Jose. It was First Friday and a good crowd had turned out to see the opening of a show by Daniel Jesse Lewis. He is a graduate of CCA. His work is very personal, intimate and sometimes disturbing. The images seem childlike at first, but as I continued to look at them I realized they were more like a child's visions drawn with an adult hand.

They are the kind of images that, when you hear somebody react to them as you're standing in a crowd of people looking, it tells you a lot about that observer's inner world...and nothing about the artist's. I got to meet and talk to the artist and some of the images were definitely self-portraits. There was another often-recurring female character. There are many drawings where one character is approaching another one from behind, with a variety of different intentions. There was an 8x13 mural piece that Daniel said he created over a period of six months, which after you look at it for awhile, you'd swear it was moving. There are dozens of different miniature scenes in it, all of which seem to be interconnected in a dreamlike sort of way.

I met Brian, one of the curators, and we talked about the sound art he has brought to the space lately. He seems like he wants to expand that part of the gallery's mission, which I'm really excited about. It was very hard, when I lived in the South Bay, knowing there was no regular venue for new music there. If Brian succeeds, musicians might get to have a central place in San Jose that's comparable to the central venues further north.

I filled Austin in on plans for the 21 Grand concert on May 16th, which will include a solo set by John Hanes, the Flip Quartet, and a solo set I will be playing in memory of Leigh Ann Hussey. Austin volunteered to record the show. His initial plan is to suspend four mics from the rafters aimed at each of the four stations, which he'll turn inward when I start improvising in the center after the Flip.

Afterwards Austin introduced me to Good Karma, which is a vegan restaurant a few blocks from the gallery. It's run by some people who are also involved with KFJC. The restaurant was also participating in First Friday and art was newly hung on the walls. It's like a miniature version of Veganopolis in Portland, and I hope it keeps on succeeding.

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