Freestyle Session 2008!

After party!

spare the air festival.

We here at Whisper are interested in random, seemingly unrelated things. It is a rare occasion when two or more of our interests converge into one magical moment and thankfully, I am the one lucky enough to write about it. On August 30, 2008, the South Coast Air Quality Management District combines our love for public and alternative transportation with our love of music in their Spare The Air Festival. Spare The Air is an all-ages outdoor music festival created to raise awareness of clean air issues, public transportation options, alternative fuels and energies, and global warming. Musical acts are diverse and include The Used, Lit, and Saosin as well as Whisper faves Peanut Butter Wolf, Free the Robots, and DJ Pubes of Dance Right fame manning the appropriately named Ozone Dance Tent.

The event will be held at the Fullerton Transportation Center (aka the Santa Fe Depot Parking Lot) on Commonwealth and Harbor. Tickets are only ten bucks and some change.

Random Fact: I Like To Whisper Too... Founder Kim worked at the Knowlwood Burger on the very same block where the festival will be held. Nice place to get a good shake, malt, or burger. Oh yeah, they serve beer.

Flyer designed by Ryan Bubion of Cal State Fullerton.

siteLA.

To commemorate its new women's collection, iconic surf label Quicksilver has selected six young women to be their "Visionaries in Residence" at siteLA, their multi-purpose creative space on the corner of Sunset and Rampart in Silver Lake. The ladies practice disparate disciplines, with their interests ranging from art to fashion to music to transportation design. The space has events that are free and open to the public.


One particular event/project that sounds fun and interesting is resident Sarah Anderson's collaborative mural for her drawing collective, Sumi Ink Club. The group is decorating siteLA's facade during rush hour in an effort to encourage passing commuters a chance to park their cars, grab a brush, and dream up their ideal method of transportation for the future. The project started on August 19th and will continue until August 27th. More info and exact times of when you can drop by and paint can be seen here.

SK8OLOGY!

This Saturday, the ISM Gallery (Koos Art Center) in Long Beach will be hosting the opening night of Sk8ology. Sk8ology will showcase over 150 individually designed skateboard decks created by a broad range of the most talented and creative professional artists and skaters. The skateboards will then be auctioned off (online) and all proceeds will be given to two very good non-profit organizations: ISM: A Community Project and Now That You Know.

The exhibition is free, will begin at 7 o'clock and continue until 10. The Show will then travel to San Diego, September 4th-6th for the Action Sports Retailer Trade Show and then to Florida, September 12th-14th for the Surf Expo.

Saying that this night is going to be cool is a lot like saying that Superman was just an all right guy... Clearly, he was much more than that. So if you're in the neighborhood, come check it out before it's too late. If you're not, come anyway.

For more info or to RSVP check out: http://www.ismcommunity.org/

passengers.

Lou Reed's voice seems to get better as he ages. With this in mind, it was a major coup for Dutch composer, Stephen Emmer, to get Reed to participate in his upcoming album, Recitement. A breathtakingly fresh project, Emmer hand-picked a variety of literary material and basically composed a score of each. The kicker is that each track uses a reading of the text as a voiceover of sorts. As described on the official website for the album:

A kind of rap 2.0 but then created the other way around: first the text, then the music. You could also call it Spoken Word Goes Pop where poetry becomes a film- soundtrack, classic prose rap & rock and travelstories become jazz-noir or chamberpop.It's in fact the Music of Words.

This beautiful and melancholy video, directed by Paul Faas, is for the track, "Passengers". Lou Reed provides the voice for Paul Theroux's text and the results are nothing short of magical. The full album will include the work of Borges, Ginsberg, and Samuel Beckett. Sounds like a great pick-up for fans of literature, spoken word, music, and film.

proust was a neuroscientist.

I just wanted to take the time to inform you that Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist, one of the most interesting reads I've has in quite a while, is now available in paperback. The book argues that Proust, as well as other creative folk like Walt Whitman and Cezanne, made discoveries about the brain and its processes decades ahead of science. The book weaves the two together gracefully, convincing you by the end that the separate studies are closer to each other than what is widely believed.

For those that want to try before they buy, I recommend heading over to the author's blog, The Frontal Cortex. His daily writings are very close to how it is in the book, with most posts combining art and culture with science in an easy to read manner. Also, make sure to check out his lecture at Google around the time of his book's publication. There's a short bit at the end regarding the musical genius of Kanye West (my words, not his).

guerilla gardening.

Why shoot the breeze about it when you can be about it? -Nas

Guerilla gardening is defined as "the cultivation of someone else's land without permission". In practice, it is an act that traces back to the 1970s wherein Green Guerillas cultivated abandoned lots in the Lower East Side of New York. The current figurehead of the movement is Richard Reynolds, who has been getting some press lately because of his cultivation campaign and the recent publication of his book, On Guerilla Gardening. You can now join in on the movement by spreading DIY seed bombs. A how-to video can be viewed here.

Be a rebel by making your city and neighborhood more beautiful. Perfect for all of those that still secretly like wheatpasting, but missed out on the ground floor of it being hip and edgy.