OMF 6/12 review & Flag Day dilemna: hear music, taste wine, grow food, or make art? Part 1

Such is the dilemna of the Art Predator this Sunday June 14. Do I fly my Art Predator flag high as I am stimulated by the exciting music at Libbey Bowl at the Ojai Music Festival? or taste area wines at Lake Casitas? or get dirt under my fingernails and learn more about permaculture with Devin Salvin and the Grow Food Party Crew? or silk screen shirts for the Ventura Bicycle Union?

Let me just say, first and foremost, that last night’s show by Tin Hat and eighth blackbird at Libbey Bowl was spectacular. All gussied up in a fancy black dress and high heeled sandals, I rode my bike over there from our friend’s house, by-passing all the traffic and parking confusion.

I was there as a member of the blogging press and was looking forward to live blogging the event using the promised wifi. However, no luck getting on from my seat, and the last thing I really wanted to do was wander the venue looking for an open seat that also had wifi.

So I scribbled some notes during the opener by Tin Hat and just let myself get swept away from the operatic excursion into sound and sight offered by eighth blackbird, supplemented by the smells of the oaks, the creek, the sycamores and the sounds of the crickets. The audience was almost spooky–they were so still and quiet and concentrated.

Truly Tin Hat was well worth the evening.  One of my notes: “Very cool,” says the guy behind me. Tin Hat announced the program from the stage which leaves me with very little to pass on to you save the third piece was perhaps my favorite and was a reworking of “mystral leaving”  or “landing” ? or maybe “Minstral Heaving”??  (? my 3:15am experiments are easier to read!). I think he said it was by Sean Onesean? And I think it’s from their first album. (Someone must know this piece of music! Please help!)

Then they played some new compositions, all crowd pleaseers. The first featured very pregnant violinist Carla Kihlstedt who can sing as well as whe can play and that’s saying something. The second piece “The Last Cowboy” was written for one of them member’s grandfathers, a real rodeo Hall of Fame cowboy who had a ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley nearby. The third, a very playful piece, featured trumpet player making a series of “bump, bump” sounds with his hand on his horn.

Tin Hat’s performance left me craving more, and during the intermission, I looked briefly at the cds but the bathroom line didn’t leave me much time, and when I went back the next morning, the booth selling their music was completely SOLD OUT! On a recommendation, I did pick up a CD that includes Carla.

And what about headline eighth blackbird? Well…whew! Well! “Slide” was amazing. And unexpected. And unforgettable. It was operatic, with Rinde Eckert doing the honors and the falsetto and the dancing which might give Matt Harding a run for his money. It was visual, in that the musicians did not just stay put and play–and “slides” were shown to elucidate, illustrate, complicate. And of course it was musical. They call it a “song cycle.”

It was performed from memory. No score. No conductor. Just intimacy, immediacy. (lunacy?)

The conceit of the show is related to research that Rinde Eckert came across years ago where subjects are shown out of focus slides which are snapped into focus and identified. Second, the subject names the out of focus pobeject and names it when it is in focus; the time it takes to recognize that object took longer. The experiment was then complicated by a shill disagreeing with the out of focus guess of the subject; when the subject saw the object, it took even longer to name it.

According to Rinde Eckert,

The results are as one might expect: The slight delay in recognition in the first phase becomes exaggerated in the second and greatly exaggerated in the third–when the subject feels called to defend his/her guesses. The experiment is a cogent illustration  of our all-too-human nature. As Renard, our principle character, states: “So a lifelong conservative will tend to see only the evidence that confirms his or her beliefs; a lifelong liberal will tend to see only the evidence that confirms his or her beliefs.”

Slide

warns us of the traps of prejudice, the comfort of the unfocused slide, the half-truth, the inchoate shape that may be imagined as a fullfillment of whatever is desired. As long as the shape is nebulous, amorphous, the picture is, arguable, what we say it is.

Another huge hit of the Ojai Music Festival is the musical art installations–a solar powered “player piano” (pictured) and another utilizing children’s musical instruments both by the same artist.

The big hits of the after party at the Ojai Art Center? Various Belgian beers from the 3300 square foot Ojai Beverage company, white chocolate covered strawberries, and portabello stuffed raviolis with sage butter….yummy!

That night, after I road back to our friends house in Ojai and climbed into our new Westy’s bed and I relayed my experiences, the Big Monkey says, “Next time, you better score me a ticket!”

So as you can imagine, it is very tempting to hightail it back up there for more music! For details on tonight’s program and Sunday’s, go here: Ojai Music Festival Opens Tonight in Libbey Bowl

Next up: wine tasting, permaculture workshop or silk screening brunch?