Good Vibrations, Awesome Vistas
Portland-based artist Chris Johanson makes deceptively naive work whose honesty and exuberance draws from folk and street art, and the punk DIY ethic. For his next project, a limited-edition, vinyl-only record label called Awesome Vistas, he’s bringing friends together to create art and music in the same spirit of community, collaboration and “good vibes.”
Why a record label?
I always wanted to put out records, but my brain was too busy to organize it. Then Linda Hagood gave me these recordings to check out. I really, really love her music and, it was just like a CD-R and...
You wanted to do something special for it?
Yeah. She’s great, and is one of the reasons I really wanted to do this.
It’s nice to hear that back story. It’s nearly impossible to find anything about Awesome Vistas.
(laughs) I don’t have a Web site. I like that it says there’s no way to get a hold of us on the records. I like that they just go out there and are just these beautiful things. I’m trying to get visual art energy mixed in with the music scene. Most of the art I collect is prints, and I really love the more democratic openness of cheap art editions. I want to put that same attention to detail, the same kind of love, into records. It’s great to sell art in a gallery, and I’m happy I get to do it, but not everybody can go there.
What kind of bands will you be working with?
It’s all pretty vague right now: just people that have good energy. So far it’s been The Enablers, The Oh Sees, and Sic Alps from San Francisco; Jackie-O Motherfucker and Dragging An Ox Through Water from Portland, Linda Hagood and Flower of Flesh and Blood from New York… They’re all serious lifers. I totally love art, and I love making music, and I love people that, for them, it’s a religious kind of necessity for their life to create. Now I want to start pulling people together in different ways. I’m putting on a show in Milan called Life is Music, Music is Life with Brendan Fowler [of BARR], Tom Greenwood [of Jackie-O], Jutta Koether, Jo Jackson, Steve Claydon from Add N to X, the Sic Alps, and a bunch of other people.
So you’re forming a community by putting out these records?
Yeah. I know from personal experience that a lot of what happens in the art world is from people hooking up people together. I think that’s the way it is a lot in life. I just think that life is so harsh, and I don’t like it to be harsh. It makes my personal life experience better when I do stuff like this. I feel like you have to or the world falls apart. I think it’s a moral obligation to do things. I think it’s a moral obligation to not be by yourself. That makes total sense to me. It just seems normal.
Are you only going to be putting out new music?
Actually, the next record is an older band called Yogurt. Hickey, this infamous bike messenger gutter punkish band from San Francisco, re-formed as Yogurt because they didn’t want to tour anymore. [Yogurt] only made home recorded tapes that pretty much nobody ever heard, even though they had this cult following. We’re compiling them all now. I’m amped on the idea of putting out more specific side projects, and side projects of side projects, or recording a live show from a bathroom, and paying attention to these more quieter moments of now.
The Pop Manifesto
Please read on below for an English translation of this package for Tokion JAPAN.
New York: Eastside Theory
More than 8 million people live in New York City. Of that, nearly 2.5 million live in Brooklyn, the city’s largest borough. If Brooklyn were it’s own city, it would be America’s fourth largest. Where Manhattan is skyscrapers and glamour and The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island are still largely working class and family neighborhoods, Brooklyn is a little bit of it all. It’s neighborhoods are rich and poor, brownstones and housing projects, ethnic enclaves and bohemian communes. And it is artists, or at least those who aspire to be.
When New York cleaned up in the 1990s, the city’s creative class crossed the East River to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in search of cheaper rents and larger spaces. And they found them, flourishing so much that the nation and the world even has glommed onto the neighborhood as a symbol of hipster youth. The Gap once named a pair of it’s skinny jeans the Williamsburg cut.
But art thrives in all of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods. Jay-Z rapped about “Brooklyn’s Finest” in Bed-Stuy, and some of the best young authors in the world live in Park Slope. Though many of Williamsburg’s pioneers have stayed put through the influx of condos, organic produce and higher rents, even more have pushed further into the borough in search of cheap spaces, leading The New York Times to call Bushwick the next Williamsburg.
But wherever you look, Brooklyn is still the place for cheap drinks, cheap fun and untold neighborhood secrets.
Louis Terline at Oak
Oak, the big white box on Williamsburg’s North 8th St. is not an exclusive club, insists Louis Terline. The 3-year-old clothing store, which stocks everything from 3.1 phillip lim to Cheap Monday to the sculpturally elaborate New York label Harmon, is simply a place he and partner Jeff Madalena put things they like. It’s an open admissions society for those with “fashionable dreams,” he says. “Come on in, and if you like it’s yours.”
When I come into your store, I’m often drawn first to the menswear. That could just be my aesthetic, but is that intentional on your part? Is Oak a menswear store?
We do 50/50 men’s and women’s. But the Williamsburg look is based on not worrying about things like that. And we’ve noticed since the beginning that our men’s rack has attracted lots of women, and to be honest, we have a lot of men who buy off the women’s rack.
What is the Williamsburg look?
There’s nothing specific as to any details, I guess. You could say, oh, skinny jeans, but it’s really more of an attitude. It’s nonchalance. It’s the mix and match. It’s effortless. It’s high and low. Those are all buzzwords that everyone is using, I guess, but Williamsburg really is about the $400 jeans and the $10 top. The neighborhood really perfected that look, and it’s what we devised the store around.
We tried to sell suits and it didn’t really go, because nobody here has a need for it. These are all creative people. If they don’t work from home, they work in some loft office. They’re not really corporate. That’s why they spend that money on jeans. That’s their uniform. That’s their work clothes.
What were you doing before opening Oak?
My degree is actually in art direction. Jeff and I have know each other for six or seven years now. He was designing. I was styling. We started working on a line together. We found a small storefront and started selling other people’s goods, and that took off.
Did you have a customer in mind when you opened?
We’ve been in Williamsburg for ten years. Those are our friends. Those are our people, the people who sort of started up this neighborhood. We were trying to really give voice to the way we felt men and women were dressing. Then it became an international movement and still is. You go to Paris and everyone talks about Williamsburg.
How has style in the neighborhood changed in that decade?
The Williamsburg look has always been design driven, but it’s slowly getting more and more sophisticated. We started out selling vintage. That’s we we wore, that’s what our friends wore, but as we grew up as a community we all got a bit more money, and our tastes got a bit more sophisticated.
What are you buying for next season?
It’s really about exaggerated proportions in contrast with each other.
Things are going to get tighter or looser, and you’ll have the conflict between the two. Tight dresses with giant oversize coats. High waists and crop tops.
You also have your own in-house line. What were you trying to create that you couldn’t find elsewhere?
The line is actually the opposite of things we weren’t finding. It’s things we were finding. We wanted to cover the basics in the store so we could free up money to support designers who were innovating with new ideas. We’ve always been really interested in New York talent and make an effort to support it as much as possible.
We’ve talked a lot about Williamsburg, but you also have a store in Park Slope. How are the two stores different?
The neighborhoods started out similar and have taken their own trajectories. Brooklyn is a city; every neighborhood shouldn’t be the same. Park slope is a little more conservative. It’s families and more young professionals. The classic clothing we do well with over there.
How would you characterize Williamsburg outside of fashion?
You can’t talk about Williamsburg without fashion. Williamsburg is fashion incarnate right now. Everything, down to what grocery store you shop at, is fashion oriented, but fashion in it’s largest sense. It’s about new ideas. It’s about design. It’s about finding quality.
You’re from Queens, right? I feel like it’s almost rare to find people in this neighborhood who are from New York.
I always say I know more people not from New York than from New York.
How does that inform what you do at Oak?
I am 100 percent informed by the New York aesthetic, and how New York always retains its grit. And I mean, it’s a cliché, but New York really is the city that never sleeps. It’s the only city I’ve ever been to that’s full on 24 hours. Like us. Our clothes can go for days.
Tha Pumpsta
“I don’t know any other rapper-painters that are doing styling for Ralph Lauren,” says Jeremy Parker, a Southern white boy whose perhaps unfortunately named “Kill Whitie” dance parties led one of America’s largest newspapers, The Washington Post, to call him a racist. The Brooklyn resident is currently finishing a new album under the name Tha Pumpsta in between making art and creating looks for a preppy design icon.
Tell me about the new record.
It’s called “Bass Black Treble White.” It’s kind of abstract, dancy, noisy, Southern hip-hop.
What does the title mean?
It’s from a speech that Martin Luther King gave. He’s been a role model from an early age. He said that “every man from a bass-black to a treble-white is significant on God’s keyboard” I felt like that was really beautiful and really musical and really colorful. I just found it really inspiring. After all that shit happened with the Washington Post I felt a responsibility to return with something as sincere as it could possibly be. It’s about my experiences, and the contradictions I felt, while growing up.
What’s one of the stories on the album?
The first track on the album is called “1987.” It’s about the first car I got, which was a 1987 Ford Tempo, and me asserting my independence.
Where did your car take you?
My car took me downtown. It took me to Freaknik, the black college spring break, where everyone came down and partied in the streets of Atlanta. It’s this insane spring break party. It’s booty bass, Atlanta hip-hop, Dirty South stuff. People fucking in their cars. Leaving Marietta, Georgia, this really hyper conservative Republican neighborhood that I grew up in as a punk rock white kid who was also gay as hell , and going to this very expressive, very free, liberated party, that really stuck with me.
I assume that was a big influence on the “Kill Whitie” parties you threw several years back. Those got you a lot of media attention, and people called you racist. How did that feel? Was any of the criticism legit?
Well, it’s funny because when we did the interview with The Washington Post, I sat down with Shannon Funchess, who was the black, lesbian co-founder, but when they published the article she received no mentioned whatsoever. So they painted this picture that there was this hip-hop party going on in Brooklyn that was thrown by a white person who is making fun of hip-hop culture and adapting to this culture in an ironic fashion, which people naturally were offended by. I would be, too, if I had just read that article. But that’s not at how things went down, and I deal with that a lot in the album. I think I try to paint a clearer picture of what it was, which was a local neighborhood party that was full of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and lesbians.
People are very entranced by the stereotype of the ironic Williamsburg hipster.
I think that we’re a bunch of young people trying to find an identity, and I think that can easily get misconstrued as hipster or ironic, but we’re doing stuff. We’re challenging things. My favorite thing about Brooklyn right now is this kind of collective conscious thing that’s happening artistically and musically. I feel like there are a lot of exciting projects in the works.
I think it’s interesting that you say your car brought you out of conservative white America into these black parties so influenced you growing up, and now that part of you, that liberated creativity, brought you to Ralph Lauren, who in some ways is the epitome of conservative white suburban America.
It is interesting.
New York is a place that values those contradictions.
Yeah, but to be completely honest with you, I separate myself from the identity of Ralph Lauren. I look at it as a means to fund my creativity. And it’s also another thing that challenges me to rethink my ideas and values and personal style.
What do you do for Ralph Lauren?
I started there doing freelance window design and interiors, and now I’m basically putting together looks to be photographed. It is Ralph Lauren, and it does have a huge corporate identity and it’s hard to escape that, but obviously I’m going to bring what I see in my day to day life into that environment.
Do you think that identity has influenced you?
I think it influences me in a good way. I’m kind of doing this very punk rock Brooklyn thing today, wearing my tight, acid washed jeans, but with a gingham button down and a Ralph Lauren sweater that somebody else would also be wearing with a pair of pleated khakis and boat shoes. I think that’s exciting. It comes back to the idea of the album, the paradoxes I talk about on the album. It’s acknowledging everything, not necessarily as good or bad, but as significant.
kill-whitie.com
milkthebeef.blogspot.com
Dedicated ass shakers used to head into Manhattan for a good dance party. Lately though, the best sweaty, attitude-free dance floors are in Brooklyn. In the past year, Justice, the Klaxons, Simian Mobile Disco and Chromeo have all packed Studio B, a massive venue in the heart of Brooklyn’s up-and-coming Greenpoint neighborhood. And over in Park Slope, DJ collective The Rub has thrown the city’s best club night for years. These boys helped pioneer the mashup genre, and every first Saturday at Southpaw you can hear them mix jams from Sade next to Daft Punk and Lil Wayne. Check out their mixtapes, including the big selling series “It’s The Motherfucking Remix,” until you can make it to one of their gigs. For a glitzier setting try Sugarland, a former jock and pizza bar that’s been newly redubbed a gay bar. The scene there is still growing, but it’s one of the few places in Brooklyn you’ll see tall queens in homemade alien costumes dancing with hot-panted boys on a Tuesday.
www.clubstudiob.com
www.itstherub.com
www.myspace.com/sugarlandbklyn
Cinders Gallery was birthed in fire. Three years ago founder Kellie Bowman’s apartment burned to the ground, pushing Bowman and co-founder Sto (one name) to follow through on their dream of providing an artist-run antidote to the sterile, ofttimes intimidating gallery setting. The tiny space is homey and inviting, both in atmosphere and in the work it shows. Expect to see playful art that blurs the line between fantasy and reality, humans and nature, dreams and nightmares. The work you’ll find owes a debt to illustrative artists like Marcel Dzama, to teenage notebook doodles and to groups like the legendary Fort Thunder collective, whose co-founder, Brian Chippendale of noise punk duo Lightening Bolt, currently has art on the walls. Don’t to forget to check out the back room, where you can pick up crafts and zines from gallery artists and DIYers from all over the world.
www.cindersgallery.com
Brooklyn summers are stuck in perpetual childhood. At the borough’s McCarren Park, twentysomethings take on playground games like dodgeball and kickball, beefed up by adult-size competition. Those who don’t play, watch, cheer and heckle, egged on by beers from local brewer Brooklyn Brewery or neighborhood bar the Turkey’s Nest. Up until this year, however, Brooklynites lost their fun when winter hit. No longer. The owners of Barcade, another teenage throwback bar that combines booze and arcade games, have brought bowling to town. Gutter, a new bowling alley mere blocks from McCarren Park, is outfitted in vintage bowling alley fixtures and has a distinct, 1970s middle America vibe. The retro equipment sometimes hiccups, slowing the game, but that just gives you more time to enjoy one of the killer microbrews on tap.
www.thegutterbrooklyn.com
Go to any basement, loft, church, abandoned schoolhouse or warehouse indie rock show in Brooklyn, and you’ll more than likely run into Todd Patrick, aka Todd P. DIY music impresario to Brooklyn and all of New York, he promotes shows for nearly every Brooklyn band you’ve ever or never heard of, as well as touring bands from the world over. His shows are cheap, far flung and always a surprise. Expect to see acts like local idols Matt and Kim and Japanther, my own idols Marnie Stern, BARR, and The Slits, and now-unknown but future idols of punk kids everywhere. Track down his shows — and your new favorite bands — on his sparse but descriptive website, or pick up a copy of his newest brainchild, Showpaper. The free, biweekly newspaper lists underground shows throughout the New York area. If that’s not enticement enough, Showpaper also features full-color cover art from artists like Chris Johanson, Neckface and Ben Jones of Paper Rad.
toddpnyc.com
New federal welfare law could take a toll on N.H.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Keene Sentinel
Nika Carlson
Sentinel Staff
Come October, New Hampshire must put hundreds more welfare recipients back to work, putting pressure not only on the state, but on support networks for those new workers.
Under the new requirements, part of the federal Deficit Reduction Act, half of eligible recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families must spend 30 hours a week working or training for work.
Around 32 percent of them already do, but should the other 18 percent not meet the goal, the state stands to lose around $4 million for this year alone, said Terry R. Smith, director of the Division of Family Assistance at the state Department of Health and Human Services.
With cushioning to cover for those who don’t show up for planned work or training, an estimated 600 to 1,100 additional recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) will need to enter the workforce, bring the total working group to 1,624, he said.
Half that group has a child who’s too young to go to school, and 350 have children between 1 and 2. All of them are single parents, and all are eligible for a state child care subsidy.
Currently, those 350 parents of toddlers are exempt from work requirements, but the Legislature is examining a proposal to remove that exemption, among others.
Paying for the added child care costs of more people going back to work will cost the state about $3.5 million. Of that, $1.9 million is proposed to cover the average $75 a month parents pay out-of-pocket for child care on top of the state subsidy, Smith said.
The state has already identified that money within its budget, plus it’ll be getting a $1.5 million reimbursement from the federal government and around $750,000 in ensuing years, he said.
But all that money means nothing if there’s no spaces for kids, said Janine A. Lesser, a child care specialist with the family assistance division.
“The 10,000 question is capacity versus enrollment,” she said. “How much space is left anyway?”
She’s looking at that very question, along with ways to connect people with quality care. But her study likely won’t be complete until September, she said, just one month before the state has to meet the 50 percent participation mark.
The state won’t force people to work if they can’t find quality child care, Smith said, but fewer workers make it harder to reach the mark, a powerful incentive for the state to increase child care capacity and quality.
Those initiatives have already started. In addition to Lesser’s study, the state launched a new quality rating program called Licensed Plus, which encourages providers to meet higher standards.
It’s also developing a program so TANF recipients can meet work requirements by volunteering in a child care center, with training possibilities increasing up to a college degree, Smith said.
The cost of those supports is dwarfed by what the state stands to lose if it can’t get enough people working. By year 10, penalties could hit $58.7 million.
“I call it the death spiral,” he said.
People everywhere got to have Free
The hot Freecycle Web site isn’t just a good place to find goods and services, it’s become a community of friends
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
The Oregonian
Nika Carlson
Through the Web site Freecycle, people give and take — literally, freely, liberally. People post a request or offer, hoping someone has what they want or wants what they have. Ask for a woodstove, get it for free. Have too much Splenda on your hands, give it away. Hundreds of frozen chicken necks: offered and taken.
The listserve was created in Arizona in May 2003 to help keep landfills clear, but for some the site has grown beyond its environmental mission. For them, the Internet community of Freecycle has gone from virtual to actual. Politeness and generosity reign.
“It’s an opportunity to accept something with grace,” said Kathy Cruz, who runs a Washington County Freecycle group. “It’s counter to society today. We’re not protected by the convenience of having to pay for it and not having to extend ourselves. It’s a heart-to-heart transaction.”
Freecycle has grown from one group in Arizona to hundreds worldwide. More than 6,000 people subscribe to the Portland group, the biggest Freecycle group by far, and hundreds more subscribe to groups for surrounding areas.
Not everyone has had the spiritual experience Cruz has had with Freecycle, but a special few have made connections or simply slowed down for a minute to say “thank you.”
“There comes a time where if somebody else can help, it’s OK to let them help… Freecycle has redeemed my opinion of the human race.”
-GINA GRIFFIN, WHO FOUND HELP, AND A FRIEND, THROUGH FREECYCLE
Megan Brooks and Hollie Butler are stay-at-home moms. They live three blocks away from each other in tidy Orenco Station. They both shop at New Seasons Market and wonder about the other hip-looking young parents, though they rarely approach them.
“I’ve joked before that trying to find new friends as an adult is hard because you feel like you’re dating,” said Butler, 29.
The women laugh, interrupting and finishing each other’s sentences. They act like old friends, but the met just over six months ago.
They were brought together by spice racks.
They talked three hours the first time they met, when Brooks, 27, picked up the racks Butler offered on Freecycle. They discussed politics, religion, parenting and love lives while their toddler sons played in the living room. Brooks tipped Butler off that she practiced attachment parenting, a style of parenting focusing on creating physical and emotional bonds between parent and child.
“I remember thinking I was so grateful: ‘Another one like me,’ ” Butler said.
The boys shared toast made from homemade bread, and the women made a play date.
Now, they get together several times a week.
“Our level of comfort with each other is so deep, even though our history is really small,” Brooks said.
At age 40, Gina Griffin is starting over.
Until recently, she was married, with three kids, her own business and her own home. After a nasty divorce, however, she was left with almost nothing. She and her kids took over a fly-ridden trailer in the hills above Wenatchee, Wash., before moving to Oregon to start over. After a brief stint at a friend’s home, they moved into an apartment in Hillsboro they “Goodwilled and garage saled” together. “We had practically nothing and nowhere to put what little we did have,” Griffin said.
In December, Griffin discovered Freecycle. She watched for several months to see how the site worked. She wasn’t used to asking for help. But she had no place to eat and few places to sit, and since dinner was the one of the few times the Griffins regularly gathered, she asked for a table and chairs.
Michelle Brentano, 31, responded to her post. Although Griffin asked for little, Brentano noted that Griffin was a single mom in need of help just like she once was.
She overwhelmed Griffin with boxes of kitchenware, toys, books and homey knickknacks. And while Griffin played with her dogs on the floor of Brentano’s suburban Milwaukie home and the women shared stories about their pasts, Brentano’s son dismantled the dining room table.
In one day, Griffin’s apartment was transformed from mere shelter to a home.
“I have tried to be independent and take care of what I needed and not take advantage of anybody, but there comes a time where if somebody else can help, it’s OK to let them help,” Griffin said. “After everything I’ve been through, Freecycle has redeemed my opinion of the human race.”
Livia Thompson got her dream wedding.
It was a ceremony Thompson, 30, never thought she could afford, with the love she never thought she’d meet, an experience far more important than the prom they both missed in high school.
And even though their first dance was to the radio because of a CD glitch and the ceremony had a few bumps — she had met the minister just that day — she felt like a princess.
It was all because of Freecycle. She asked for wedding decorations and advice, but got much more.
Tammy Myers, an avid Freecycler ordained through the Internet, who had never performed a ceremony before and doesn’t know if she will again, was the minister.
“I did it because she needed someone, and I love Freecycle,” Myers said.
The wedding photographer, Russelle Baltzell, is a single, stay-at-home mom exploring the business of photography. When not snapping digital photos, she tied children’s shoes and looked after Thompson during the reception.
“Between Tammy and Russelle, we probably saved $500,” said Thompson, 30.
Thompson planned the $850 ceremony in a few months. She and her fiance Larry Thompson, 27, paid for it with their tax refund, organized the theme around Freecycled decorations, and were able to afford extras like tuxedos and renting the city of Hillsboro’s River House with the money they saved.
“This is something our family is going to cherish and our grandchildren are going to cherish,” Thompson said, tearing up. “That’s the best thing I’ve gotten from Freecycle. It’s a community.”
Janice Caffey, 77, and Pam Myers, 57, are like family. They call each other Internet mom and Internet daughter, I-mom and I-daughter for short.
They met when Janice’s daughter, Kathy Allen, requested a stuffed kitten on Freecycle. She wanted something nice for her mother to cuddle with, but couldn’t bring it to her. Allen lives in Vernonia, while her mother lives about 45 miles away at Mt. St. Joseph, an assisted living center in Southeast Portland, and they don’t see each other as much as they’d like.
Myers, who lives in Southeast Portland, replied to the ad Allen posted on Freecycle and now visits Caffey every week. “We always have a big hug and a big kiss and tell each other we love each other,” Caffey said.
She brings her movies and treats like candy or doughnuts or KFC, sometimes hunting all over town for an elusive Heath candy bar. Some days she brings her husband, her daughter, her granddaughters, or even her dog, a beagle.
“I just feel she’s an angel sent to us,” Allen said.
Their chance meeting was a lucky one, they say, made even more so by the losses in their lives.
When Myers was in her 30s, her mother died, and Caffey lost a daughter nearly 40 years ago in a car wreck. That daughter would have been 57 is she were alive today, the same age as Myers.
“She calls me her daughter, her daughter’s come back,” Myers said. “She has replaced an important part of my life.”
Several months ago, Caffey was sick to the point she thought she was near death. She attributes her strong recovery in part to Myers.
“I was so lonely up her and she’s brought so much brightness to my life,” she said. “It’s kind of like a little miracle.”
***
Placement: E1, front page of Living section
