March 10, 2006

40%

Last night we had the opening for Calcul*rt - which I am OH so proud of!! (http://www.canvas.uiuc.edu) - 6:55pm I answered Hank, "yes, I'm kind of nervous, are you?" and he said "Yes" and I said "why?" and he said "what if no one shows up?"

And just then I looked up and saw my good friends the Barrys and at that moment, I thought, nothing else mattered, just that the Barrys were here. I didn't care if no one else came after that.

Then about 100 other people showed up! Everyone (in charge) was very excited and proud. The CANVAS room looks beautiful with Donna Cox's pschograms or whatever she calls them; lenticular pretty red and orange lightbox thingies, and many multi-colored abstract looking shapes breathing in the CANVAS. Tons of video monitors playing videos now. A new piece that I forced out of Jonas. And this piece that Rick Powers and I are working on and my two + 1 rockstar students.

I have these two students who are helping me in the CANVAS gallery now who are like the 21st century's answer to cyber-rockstars. They are sleek and gorgeous and they are a pair and remind me of me and rick working together. I have to wonder sometimes what I look like now to people; performing on stage has become so removed from my current life that sometimes I feel like an entity without a past. I'm not Rose from Poster Children here in Champaign, anyway not here on campus.

While I say this, Camille's piano-playing of the theme from Bladerunner (which he played in the gallery last night) is going through my head. That one scene where what'shername sits down and plays the piano and finds out she can play - she's been programmed with it. I have sat down at the piano and paged through some of my old music books and come across a song that looks familiar - and just started playing it, having forgotten I'd learned it before. How many more things will I forget in the future? I'd love to see an actual graph of the things forgotten compared to the new things learned. Maybe that can be some art.

Anyway I love my rock-star students.

And I'll write more later. Gram is screaming in the other room.

Posted by rickandrose at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2006

Playing with fire

I'm still shaking and it's over an hour past the ending of the Tom Scharpling show. We had this little "war" which was supposed to be funny but ended up not being funny at all and really scaring us. I think all sides were scared. Rick sat on Tom's airwaves for what seemed like FOREVER! Tom kept asking him to apologize and the two were sort of add-libbing but it was really scary; at least, knowing Rick, I thought it was very scary. Tom probably should have hung up on him, but he obviously didn't want to do that, probably because he's a fan, or knows us. We have this persona; we're nice guys, we're the underdog, everyone loves us. We're just plain nice folk. No one hates us.

Until just recently, when this war started. But I don't think any of us were ready for the consequences of war. The kind of interesting thing is though, that it scared the hell out of a lot of people. It got really intense, like when comedy just doesn't work. But Rick likened it to when Charles Grodin would go on the Tonight Show and be really mean, or like some Andy Kaufman stuff. It was definitely VERY Andy Kaufman.

I talked to Tom on the air for a while too and he tried to get me to apologize, but I knew that I shouldn't do that. His fans had already been really attacking me and calling me horrible names, but I knew that if I backed down it would probably get worse.

Anyway it's all over now and although I still physically am shaking a bit, it is probably just my body trying to procrastinate from getting a lesson written for tomorrow. I read the friends of tom notesfile and see that people have actually recommended radiozero on there before; had also noted on the notesfile that Rick talks about TS on radiozero from time to time.

And that's about all I have to say. Time to learn about Fluxus and try to code some Richard Powers text into some nice net.art.

Posted by rickandrose at 10:36 PM | Comments (3)