Mark Maynard | 2007 | March

announcing the birth of the new monkey power trio creation: “house of the mechanical sun”

By Mark | March 18, 2007

By the time most of you read this (9:00 AM EST, Monday, March 19), the new Monkey Power Trio record will be available. Only 150 were pressed, so, if you want one, order now. As I mentioned before, these are kind of cool because we’re using recycled record jackets, a lot of which are really great… Here are some photos of Clementine and me working on them… So, if you want a limited-edition piece of Monkey Power history, just click here after 9:00 AM and send $10 through Paypal. You’ll have our new record, “House of the Mechanical Sun,” in your hands in a few days. (The FCC doesn’t like it when I make guarantees, but when you mention that you have a copy in your Match.com profile, I think it’s almost a certainty that you’ll see more action. Male or female. Seriously.)

As for the music, it’s your typical Monkey Power fare. Lots of goofy, half-written songs about life, love, the tiny robots that live in the folds of our skin, and all the usual stuff… For those of you unfamiliar with the Monkey Power concept, the band gets together one day a year to play. Nothing is pre-written. Nothing is planned. We just goof around for a few hours and then press on vinyl whatever we think works the best. Sometimes we fail spectacularly. Sometimes we stumble onto great beauty. It’s a crap shoot. And we, the members, are honor-bound to keep doing it until the last one of us is dead… This year is a bit different in that, instead of a 7″ record, we pressed a 12″. It’s also the first year that I haven’t handled most of the vocalizing. (The pinky usually does one song a year, but, over the previous dozen sessions, I’ve been forced — by the fact that I can’t play an instrument — to sing everything else.) For some reason, everyone came this year excited about sharing the mic. (I’m hoping that journalists refer to it as the “American Idol effect.”) Anyway, if you’re a fan of the MPT, this is your chance to hear the thumb and the ring finger belt out heartfelt tunes. And, if you listen closely, you’ll ever hear the middle finger rap! Oh, and this record also incorporates two sessions. It’s got songs from Minnesota (2005) and Oregon (2006). (Our attempt to launch a record in 2005 was aborted when it became clear that the entire Chinese market would be closed to us. Since then, we’ve devised a plan.)

As a result of putting this project together, I have lots of liberated vinyl here on the table in front of me. If you have a use for it, let me know. It’s pretty scratchy, but some of it is really cool. Linette thinks we should make something cool out of them, but I can’t help but think that the fumes given off while heating them up in our oven would either kill us or turn us into Mary Kay salespeople… Anyway, if you want to risk it, let me know. I’ve got a stack of about 50.

[Special thanks again to Cousins Vinyl and Paul Davis for supplying most of the jackets used in this project. Without their generous support, this little art project would have been a much bigger pain in our collective ass. And, while I’m at it, I’d also like to thank VG Kids for doing an awesome printing job with the stickers, and Linette Lao for doing the kick-ass design. Our creative team rocks like no one else in DIY. (And one day we’ll get there with the music too.)]

Posted in Monkey Power Trio | 14 Comments

branding ypsi a solar-friendly

By Mark | March 18, 2007

If you’ll recall, not too long ago I mentioned that there was a fellow here in town who had been promoting solar. Actually, that’s kind of an understatement. The fellow, whose name is Dave Strenski, has done quite a bit more than just “promote” solar. Among other things, he’s the guy who built the photovoltaic system that now powers the Ypsi Food Co-Op. Anyway, Ypsilanti councilman Brian Robb thinks that now’s the time that we, as a community, should get behind what Dave’s doing in a significant way. And, he’s proposing that we launch a new “friends” organization to lead the way. One of the names he suggests for what would essentially be a fundraising group is Ypsilanti People’s Solar Initiative (YPSI), which sounds good to me… At any rate, if you’re interested, follow that last link and hear Brian out. Personally, I don’t have an extra grand to contribute toward making City Hall solar, but I’d sure as hell help do something like plan a series of shows at local bars with the proceeds going toward such a project. I like the ring of “solar city.” [Nevermind, it’s already taken. What isn’t already taken, however is, “Most Solar Friendly City in a Relatively Sunless State.” And, I think that would look great on our official “Welcome” signs.]

Posted in Alternative Energy | 9 Comments

“happy feet” blames the penguins

By Mark | March 18, 2007

Clementine and I went to the dollar theater not so long ago and saw the animated children’s film “Happy Feet.” I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it here, especially if no one else has seen it, but I’m curious to know if anyone else out there thought that, in a way, it shifted the responsibility onto the penguins for the environmental issues that are presently degrading their habitats. Am I the only one who was left with the impression that if penguins would just get off their lazy feathered asses and learn to entertain us then they’d be fine?

For those of you that haven’t see the movie, there’s this one little penguin that, unlike all his fellow penguins, can’t carry a tune at all. Instead, as it turns out, he’s a great dancer. Really. He’s good. But no one else appreciates his talent. In fact, being superstitious, they blame him for the fact that there haven’t been as many fish to eat lately. They think he’s angered their god. Anyway, he sets out to prove them wrong. And, sure enough, he finds whitey up there pumping his oil and over-fishing the hell out of the ocean. (And, by “whitey” I mean “the man.” I realize that white people aren’t the only ones ruining international waters. I just like the way “whitey” sounded there. It had a nice ring to it.) So, one thing leads to another, he gets thrown into a zoo, and things look bleak… Until, he starts blowing people away with his dancing! In an instant, crews are dispatched to find his fellow penguins, to see if they, like him, know how to hoof like mother fuckers. Fortunately, our friend the penguin gets to them first and teaches them what to do. And then, boom, they become an international cause d’celeb. School kids start writing to their heads of state demanding that we stop over-fishing their waters, polluting, and all the rest of it, and, before you know it, everything’s fixed. The dancing penguin, who everyone hated and shunned, has saved their society.

This is an aside, but isn’t it much more likely that if we discovered a colony of hoofing penguins that people would just start bugging their local zoos, asking them to go out and, “catch a few”?

Anyway, it’s a nice story and all, and it’s great that they’re getting kids to think about the effects of their actions on the natural world, but I think there’s this “fucking lazy, unimaginative penguin” undercurrent that runs through it. It may not be a perfect analogy, but imagine a cartoon about a quirky Jewish kid growing up in a Nazi concentration camp whose dancing (assuming his fellow captives were willing learn the steps) so impresses the guards that the final solution grinds to a halt. I know I probably don’t need to ask this, but wouldn’t that be offensive? Isn’t it bullshit, regardless of how well intentioned it is, to suggest that these creatures (I’m talking about penguins again) have it within their power to stop global warming, and all the rest of it, but just aren’t clever enough to pull it off?

And I do realize that, all things considered, it’s probably a good movie. I think it’s great that kids are learning about the over-fishing of arctic waters, global warming and pollution. I just wish that I they could have done it in such a way so as not to trigger my obsessive compulsive button. (How about a Rambo-like, badass penguin that hunts down and assassinates the heads of multi-national corporations? Now, that I might be able to get behind.)

Posted in Observations | 7 Comments

amy franceschini: politics, art, farming and the rebirth of the victory garden

By Mark | March 18, 2007

Last Sunday, before leaving San Francisco, I made a quick visit to the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). There was an exhibition on the influence Picasso’s first New York shows had on American artists of the time, which was quite good, but the thing that had me reaching for my notebook and scribbling furiously was a tiny piece on the gardening-related work of San Francisco designer Amy Franceschini. Franceschini, who teaches at Stanford and heads a design entity known as Future Farmers, was a recipient of a 2006 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) award, for a project she’d developed to reintroduce the concept of “victory gardens” to the bay area. Here’s a clip from World Changing dotcom (where I also got the attached image):

…Design can be used as an activist tool, and Franceschini uses it adeptly. In the project, she uses good design to organize, and mobilize community activity. The exhibition of her pilot Victory Garden program features, among other works, historical documents, Franceschini’s own Victory Garden kits, posters advertising planting parties, a video of the pilot project in action, and related sculptural elements. The pilot gardens were realized in under-utilized front- and back yards in San Francisco using Franceschini’s vision. She supplied each garden with a carefully designed kit containing seed-packets and other tools helpful in the realization of these gardens…

If you’ve been reading this site for long, you know that I love when projects jump boundaries, and when people find new ways to attack old problems. This exhibition of Franceschini’s work, small as it was, was hugely inspiring. A lot of us think that the localization of food production is one of the critical elements necessary if this country of ours is going to make it in the future, but how many of us actually do anything about it? And, of those that do, how many approach it from an artistic perspective? I was going to wait and post on this after I’d had a chance to touch base with my friend Amanda, who runs the pro-gradening non-profit Growing Hope, but I couldn’t wait… Anyway, here’s more. This clip comes from the “San Francisco Chronicle“:

…Franceschini, 36, lives in an artists’ cooperative in San Francisco and resents agribusiness practices that produce artificially engineered food. She sees the shift in public opinion on the war in Iraq as a signal that now is a time for healing — and a time to mix art, politics and gardens. She advocates “self-sufficiency and living a life that is not harmful to the environment.”

Franceschini found her latest and perhaps most important work through personal circumstance and chance.

“My father was a farmer and had a pesticide company. When my parents got divorced, my mother started an organic farm,” she said. “I saw both sides of the coin.”

Meanwhile, a chance encounter with a neighbor during a visit to Ghent, Belgium, where her husband has a home, led to an epiphany. Franceschini was pulling out a brick in their front yard in order to plant a seedling when the neighbor walked over and informed the couple excitedly that the city would pay for fresh soil and plant material as part of a city-funded program.

The subsidies were available twice a year for planting flowers or food crops, and a family could get as much as 5,000 euros ($6,500) for such “greening.” Greening could be as esoteric as keeping bats (to prevent mosquitoes) or having three chickens in the back garden (for recycling kitchen scraps and creating a mini-farm for eggs and fertilizer).

Inspired, Franceschini proposed her garden-renewal idea to SFMOMA as part of her SECA submission and won a grant of $2,500. She designed a special kit for planting gardens that included a pogo-stick spade and a wheelbarrow that could be attached to a bicycle to transport soil and seeds. The “possible/impossible” prototypes, including drip systems, posters, flags, seed packet labels and other graphics she designed, are on display at SFMOMA.

“During my research I found a photograph of the Victory garden from 1943 in front of City Hall in San Francisco,” she said, adding that 8 billion tons of food were produced in Victory gardens around the country.

San Francisco was among the cities where gardens were most widely planted. Franceschini found more facts and figures documented in the book “City Bountiful” by Laura Lawson. “It wasn’t just individual gardens, but also city parks had gardens. It was a citywide movement, and every city that adopted the city garden did a publication”…

I’m not sure what’ll happen with the initiative now that the $2,500 has been spent, but my hope is that it lives on in some capacity. The materials that Franceschini had put together were really compelling, and I don’t see why other groups around the country who were interested in similar things couldn’t make use of them… Anyway, check out the links and let me know what you think.

(update: I’d like to thank Ed Penet for just reminding me that this is a great post in which to mention people that this spring there is going to be a community garden in Ypsi’s Frog Island park.)

Posted in Other | 9 Comments

either clementine isn’t as smart as we thought, or i look like will smith

By Mark | March 18, 2007

So, today Clementine and I were sitting on the floor of the living room, picking through old record jackets (for that project I was telling you about), when we came to DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s 1989 “And In This Corner.” She looked at for a few seconds, pointed to DJ Jazzy Jeff, and said “Mama.” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with it, so I just sat there a little longer, watching her study the album cover. She eventually looked up at me, smiled, and pointed back down at the record. This time her finger was on The Fresh Prince, and she said “Daddy,” with a sense of satisfaction that I wish I had the skill to convey right now. It was almost like she thought the whole thing had been a test, and that I’d been flipping through these 100+ record jackets not thinking that she could pick her mother and me out.