In case you hadn’t heard … Exit Clov is in the throes of fundraising to get our next full-length album out the door. We put together a little 5min video on Kickstarter where you can donate any amount – $1 to …
If you’re not familiar with how Kickstarter works, each donation amount corresponds with a fun little “reward” that you will receive from the band, as a token of our infinite gratitude (see the righthand column on our Kickstarter project page for the list of rewards).
1. Watch our video!
2. If you like what you see(!), decide how much you’d like to donate.
3. Enter your credit card info when prompted. The amount will be pending on your credit card until the END of the 35 days of fundraising (Dec. 20). If we reach our target goal of $3,000 by Dec. 20, our project will be successfully funded and your credit card will be charged at that point.
Things have been kind of hectic at Mousybabe HQ, with travels to Mexico and LA, a DC Clov show, Crafty Bastards, and also some serious movin’ and packin’. Sometimes this forces us to streamline our basic daily requirements, such as the always-joyful, always-scintillating Food Question… What ever shall I eat today?
At Whole Foods the other week, avocados were 4 for $5 (!!!). I mused gleefully that there must be a huge, delightful glut of avocados somewhere in the world which has led to this bargain price for omega-3 fats, as me & Chops gathered 8-10 avocados into our knapsack. Since then I’ve discovered what a wonderful and luxurious dish the simple combination of avocados and rice is : ) Just chop the avocado into little cubes, sprinkle over rice, and add any kind of seasoning your tummy desires. We even embellished with things we had in the fridge – no cooking involved, except for the rice!
-2 avocados
-handful of grape tomatoes
-minced red onions
-handful of black beans
-bowl of hot rice
-optional seasonings: sea salt, black pepper, furikake, nori tsukudani (seaweed in a jar, mm!), hot sesame oil, garlic olive oil
Oh, and I made lentil soup for the first time. Chops was out and like a good little homemaker, I surmised that he would be hungry when he got back. I found a bag of lentils that’s been intimidating me in my kitchen cabinet ever since I bought it, and whipped up a hot peppery delicious okra and lentil soup!
-onions chopped lengthwise
-thinly sliced garlic
-chopped okra bought fresh from the local market(!)
-frozen little shrimp
-a bit of chicken bouillon, salt and pepper
-1/2 baggie of lentils
It’s a really great feeling when you get to witness a fellow artist’s hard work, sweat, blood & tears come to fruition! Over the last two weeks, we’ve watched two such projects evolve in their little art cocoons and finally be released. The first was Mad Sole‘s “DC State of Mind” video release, and now Bluebrain, who have released their Central Park app, called “Listen to the Light.” (sigh) … ain’t we a proud couple of twins, hehe.
Check out this cool short documentary by Chase Heavener on the making of Listen to the Light:
The Holladay brothers (Hays and Ryan) have been crafting this “album” over the last year plus. It was in August that Em and I visited Bluebrain’s studio to crank out layers upon layers of their dizzyingly beautiful orchestral arrangements.
Working with these guys is great because they know exactly how to run an incredibly efficient string session. We all’s bizzy people y’know? And our bony elbows and fingers start to ache after the first 30 min. Ryan and Hays print out their scores on staff sheets, we read and play them while they man the boards in the other room (and Ryan keeps us hydrated with club soda). After playing each passage, we’ll repeat it again. and again. and again. And each time, they’ll play back the previously recorded tracks in our ears so that all of a sudden, we’re just two little violin players in an entire massive string section of, well, ourselves. It’s an enthralling sound of infinity, if that makes any sense, and it’s easy to just get lost in it.
Anyhow, as far as the actual concept of the Central Park album, leave it to these guys to keep on delivering the latest mind-, technology-, experience-bending project that completely reinvents and challenges our traditional way of experiencing music.
To sum it up, it’s a location-aware album that’s only available on iphone. You plug in your earbuds and take a stroll through Central Park, and instead of an album that’s static and identical to what anyone else would hear when they hit “play,” the album takes its course based on where in the park you decide to walk.
If you’re intrigued, they’re planning a group excursion by bus to Central Park to try out the app! Click here for the event details.
WTF. The food porn industry has zero shame. This glistening squash soup in a perfectly adorable pumpkin bowl showed up on my Facebook news feed yesterday. Recipe for this bowl of temptation is here, compliments of the Food Network. Ah, pumpkin. The one redeeming factor of the end of summer.
Ladies and gents, Chops‘s latest music video, called “A DC State of Mind”
If you saw his Metro Status video last year, get excited for this one : ) bboys, Ben’s Chili Bowl, tributes to Duke Ellington, 100% local, all DC. So what’s not to love? plus! I get cinematography credits in it (for the fish eye lens shot from under a table), and a split second cameo!
Must say, I was lucky to be a witness to the whole process of producing the song and filming the vid over the last year. Kudos to the Charlie & his crew, and Onbeat.org, for all their hard work! Here are some of “the making of” pix from the shoot for your entertainment.
Testing the waters on the counters but they were on the wobbly side
Selecting some old skool jams to dance to
Mopping the grease, I mean the floor, for the bboys + bgirl…(IMO i think the dancers did the better part of the mopping that day, with their backs)
And finally, for those who like to party, like art and like to dance, the official video screening is being held at “The Funky Formal” 9pm Oct. 15, at Load of Fun Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD!
Song Production/Scratching: Charlie Michael (mad-sole.com)
Mixing/Mastering: Cam One (reverbnation.com/djcamone)
Vocals: Seez Mics (educatedconsumers.com) and Ardamus (ardamus.com)
Video Editing: Greg Baylon (vimeo.com/user4857049)
Cinematography: Greg Baylon and Susan Hsu (mousybabe.com)
Video Direction: Charlie Michael (mad-sole.com)
Crafty Bastards 2011 has come and gone. It was a wet one this year, but thanks to plastic sheeting and duct tape, we still had an amazing time! And special thanks to Kim + Sara of the Crafty Bastards crew for continuing to outdo themselves every year. Please note: We’re working on migrating all of our listings to mousybabe etsy page. In the meantime, please visit our imom etsy page.
Since it was our first year selling these necklaces, we weren’t sure how well they would do. But we were so glad to see people’s enthusiasm and excitement over them! We hope you’re enjoying your new piece of jewelry or art.
A few shareworthy text bytes from an Aug. 10 New York Times article on mainland Chinese tourists and their heavily chaperoned visits to Taiwan:
“Beyond local business owners pleased by the surge in tourist spending, many Taiwanese openly complain about the mainlanders’ seeming unfamiliarity with the notion of the indoor voice, a collective disdain for the single-file line and their insistence on asking complete strangers their incomes.”
<MB commentary: And we believed that loud jabbering was the sole domain of the Cantonese! LOL. Further reinforcement — Elliott made a recent business trip to Beijing. His first text msg to us from the airport: Why do Chinese people talk so loud?”>
“’It’s hard to compare any place to Beijing, the home of emperors,’ Li Guihong, 69, a retired Chinese government employee, said smugly after taking in the Taiwanese capital’s urban landscape, much of it dating from the 1970s and ’80s. ‘Our buildings are more modern and even their stinky tofu isn’t as good as ours.’”
<MB commentary: Ok jeepers, you got us there. Fellow dwellers of our sacred Earth, you heard it here first: China wins. They have, hands down, better stinky tofu.>
“Shih Wen-cheng, 46, a construction worker in a yellow vest bearing Falun Gong’s central tenets, ‘truthfulness, compassion and forbearance,’ said most mainlanders recoiled when he approached. A few, however, look both ways and stuff a pamphlet in their pockets. ‘Our goal is to make them realize the propaganda they’ve heard their whole lives is just that,’ he said. ‘If we can convince one of them not to betray to the police a neighbor who practices Falun Gong, then we have achieved something.’”
“Kao Hui-Ch’iao, 60, a volunteer at Taroko National Park, said she spent much of her time picking up the touring mainlanders’ cigarette butts or shouting at those who heeded nature’s call in full public view. ‘They think they know better and just don’t like following the rules,’ she said with exasperation. ‘They just aren’t very civilized.’”
“One” country, two worlds. China must be just like Chinatown in New York, but, like, everywhere.
The scintillating trailer for BlueBrain‘s new location-aware iPhone app for Central Park in NYC. Congrats to DC’s amazing band of innovative brothers and mad aural scientists!
My sewing teacher mentioned during class tonight that she was waffling about whether to take a tough trip up to New York for the Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” exhibit at the Met.
The name rang a bell… how could it not – what a name. But I realized it was because I’d recently read about McQueen while editing reams of copy for a new start-up fashion mag called Meets Obsession (the inaugural issue is out very soon! maybe this week : ) it’s run by a couple friends of ours.)
Anyhow when I got home from class, the natural light in the house was a little gray colored, like it gets when it’s dusk and it’s still too bright out to turn on a lamp. But I was unprepared for what a perfect backdrop it would be for viewing photos of this exhibit (watch video footage here, narrated by the curator) … gallery after gallery, McQueen’s lavishly macabre pieces were draped on mannequins and it was positively eerie … spine-tingling. Delicious. Romantic Gothic. Even borderline exoticized cyberpunk.
The surface treatments on the gallery structures included rusty metal, aged mirrors and marquetry, which lent some of the exhibits a cold, pirate feel. But then the luxuriousness of McQueen’s fabrics, and the expression of everything from culture to violence to beauty to personal rage and emotion in his designs, more than compensated for any absence of warmth. The resulting effect was a feeling of absolute prickly awe. Like footsteps echoing in a hall. Sort of the feeling of coming across abandoned ruins from a civilization of exoticized antiquity.
Speaking of antiquity, McQueen is quoted:
“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”
Amen. It’s an artistic principle that appears to hold across disciplines and among philosophical greats. Case in point, Bruce Lee and Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings.
Maybe the best way to describe the exhibit is that scene from Pan’s Labyrinth where the girl goes into the cave of that scary monster with eyes in its hands. (Ok not as scary as that, but it still reminded me of it!)
… Exit Clov is in the throes of fundraising to get our next full-length album out the door. We put together a little 5min video on Kickstarter where you can donate any amount – $1 to … 
… Now go!!
