We as humans all feel the need to express ourselves in some fashion. Some have an obvious talent for creative expression, and they articulate this passion in the form of a painting, an original poem, a beautiful song, maybe an emotional dance piece. Some creative types are lucky enough to be good enough at their chosen form of expression to make a living creating their art. Others eek out a living that allows them to create the art they are driven to make.

Most big cities that one might visit have a plethora of public art displays. A quick visit to Missoula’s city webpage reveals a list of almost fifty examples of known sanctioned public art. Some of my favorite art in cities that I’ve visited has been public art, from Oldenburg and van Bruggen’sFree Stamp in Cleveland to Anish Kapoor’s CLOUD GATE in Chicago’s Millenium Park.

Another form of art that is more controversial and less recognized that can be found in all big cities across the world is graffiti. Some argue that graffiti is not art at all, but vandalism — a crime.

I actually had an argument with a good friend of mine about this. She was born and raised in Missoula and says that she does not want outsiders coming into “her town” to “ugly it up” with their graffiti. I argued that it’s likely many of the graffiti artists (”they aren’t artists”, she says) were also born and raised Missoulians. And I pointed out that most people who do graffiti try to do so in a responsible way because they want their work to remain up as long as possible. So they avoid painting or writing on obvious private property, they do not write obscenities or hateful things, they try to express themselves honestly in a public forum that might cause a discussion, might cause someone to think. They are exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

In the end, she became upset and we had to agree to disagree. I personally think that Missoula has some beautiful graffiti and that it needs to be documented before the horrid Gray Cancer overtakes it, one stencil and tag at a time.

There are others who would disagree, and there is a very interesting (though slightly outdated) discussion about this over at Patia Stevens’ site. The folks who spread the Gray Cancer in Missoula are volunteers, and I wonder what motivates them. I wonder how they feel when they paint over a piece of graffiti that they personally enjoy. I wonder if there is a person like Fahrenheit 451’s Montag among them, who before he “burns the book”, or in this case, paints over the art, secretly takes a digital photo of it. If there is no Montag, and we have to assume that there isn’t, we need to be documenting this fast fading art form in Missoula. And we need to be contributing to it.

If you are visiting Missoula, please, enjoy all of the natural beauty it and its surrounding areas have to offer. As you return to your hotel at the end of the day, leave the car in the parkinglot. Walk downtown if that’s possible. Notice some of the street art that’s available to you. ADD TO IT IF YOU WANT. Hell, you won’t be here to deal with any consequences later, right? But definitely take it in, photograph it, share it with those folks at home when you get back there, so that they know Missoula is not just beautiful rivers and mountains, but also alive with underground art out on the streets.

Finally, if you are going to be around this Friday, June 1st, a friend of mine, Marlo Crosifisso, who I’ve never known to paint in the streets of Missoula, will be presenting a collection of stencil artwork entitled “Legs, Stags, and Things that Fly.” Local music sensation Freewood will be serving up a scrumptious acoustic set. And… There will be two screenings (6:30 & 7:30) of Montana Canvas, a three part PBS series that profiles independent female artists throughout Montana: figurative narrative painter Stephanie Frostad, singer-songwriter Sonya Lacava, and clothing designer Emily Kurth. Each short film outlines the roots, challenges and processes of the artist, combining to give voice to Montana’s emerging collective of female artists. Directed by Valerie Krex, Emily Craword, David Macasaet and Toni Matlock. Total Running time: 22 minutes. As per usual, there will be cookies, and vino. Betty’s Divine is located @ 521 S Higgins in Missoula.

See also Street Art In Missoula, a photoset on Flickr.

Still playing with some “How To” footage. Still hate iMovie. I don’t want you all to think I’m just sitting on my ass, so I’ll provide an update and then share some open mic love with you that I stumbled across in my experimentations. But first, let me give you the rundown on progress headaches in the editing world. Amy with the Boom and the Pow after the jump.

As my many two regular readers know, I’m trying to work with film editing. I ran into some issues with iMovie a while back, but I skipped telling you about one detail in that process. The biggest problem I’m having across the board is that my iMac G5 won’t recognize my analogue Sony digi 8 camera. Macs “just work” right out of the box, right? Right. So.

The workaround is to boot into XP and use the proprietary Sony app to import the footage onto my machine. The problem here is that I made the Windows partition pretty small when I created it, so I need to be able to access my external FW drives, which are Mac formatted. Because they are Mac formatted, Windows won’t see them. So I go and find MacDrive, and use that until the free trial expires. I got a lot of footage imported that way, but it’s in the shitty .AVI format.

Which my Mac can’t deal with.

Seriously, when I merely click on an AVI file, if I don’t attempt to open it right away, Finder crashes. WTF? So I install 3ivx as instructed. Still no love. Quicktime won’t play them, VLC will, but that still doesn’t help me with editing. iMovie won’t recognize them either. I keep getting a “wrong file type” error or something. So I need to convert the AVI files to a format my Mac can digest. I found iSquint, a free program that does just that. Works pretty good. Just takes a long time.

The biggest problem I have with this process, though, is that the quality of the footage is being degraded every time I treat it in some fashion. I want to be able to just pull it right from the camera an play with the original footage. To give you an example, the AVI clip that I used for the YouTube video you’ll see here in a bit was 642MB. The .mp4 clip was 47.4MB after conversion from AVI. I know that if I were working with footage streamed directly from the camera, I’d be up into the gigabyte range, so I’m a little pissed that I’m expending large amounts of time on what inevitably will be a film with less than perfect image quality.

So, I gained access to a professional quality film editing program. Granted, it’s an old version, but even when running FCP, the program won’t recognize my camera. I might be doing something wrong, too, and I have a call in to a director friend of mine that left me two voicemails explaining the less-than-intuitive way to capture footage into FCP. (Set four scratch discs, File–>Log and Capture. Log and Capture? But there’s an IMPORT option there too, why not just name it IMPORT and call it good? Sheesh.)

Until I get a little bit more guidance, I’m leaving it sit for a time while I work on other projects, which I’ll talk about later this week. If anyone has any guidance they can offer me, I’d love hearing about it. Let me know in the comments.

Now, though, it’s time to watch a little bit of open mic night. This footage was shot at Red’s Blue Goose Saloon in Gardiner, MT, 1999. The guy running sound was known as Shifty Brian, and Amy was dubbed Amy with the Boom and the Pow. I don’t remember her last name. She does a killer rendition of Hattie McDaneil’s 1929 song “Any Kind of Man Would be Better Than You”

…

“The sign at Hellgate Conoco in Missoula on Wednesday”
Photo by TOM BAUER/Missoulian

Read the story here if you want.

Home Resource had their annual spring cleaning recently, in which they give away house paint, doors, windows and all other sorts of DIY fix-it goodness. I picked up several gallons of latex house paint with the intention of experimenting in a new medium. It was a rainy day, so I threw all of the paint into the trunk of my car and forgot about it for a few days.

The sun comes out, and I head to my garage to stretch some canvas. Then I remember the paint, so I pull my car around to the garage to unload it. A partially full gallon of “Bistro Yellow” had leaked onto a tarp I have in the back.

No paint got in the car itself, so that’s good.Then it struck me to use the wet paint to paint print on a canvas. I pushed it onto the canvas in random patterns, then left it to dry, as I had other places to be.

I had placed the can on top of some cut glass that was sitting on an old chair. I thought the paint had just spilled from a not-tightly-sealed lid. When I went out into the garage a couple of days later, I discovered that this was not the case, and that there was a hole in the bottom of the can, because it leaked all over the glass and the chair.

Of course, I decided to make impressions on the canvas using the glass with the wet paint on it.

I also peeled away the paint itself, and found that it too was wet underneath, so I used the paint itself as a way to make prints of the wet paint.

I started two different canvases, and neither are finished. It’s fun experimenting an playing, and I’ve needed to do something different for a while, so this could turn into something cool.

With the above canvas, because it’s not treated with Gesso, I’m thinking I’ll soak it with water before applying a wash to it, so that the yellow stands out from the wash and is not covered by it.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with this one, but I know that it isn’t finished.

Yesterday, I settled in, and told myself that I was going to calmly work through the edit again. The video is 15 minutes long, and all I want to do is cut out the sections that have extreme camera shake, and a few sections that run longer than they should. I should be able to get the video down to around 8 minutes. Should be a simple task, right?So I’m going along, adding bookmarks and splitting the video clip at playhead, removing sections just fine, until around the 7 minute mark, a section I had just edited about 2 minutes ago shows up again not in sequence. I haven’t done ANY pasting, yet this clip is showing up? Why?

Google offered no love as to troubleshooting this, and no one else seems to be having this issue I decided as I trolled the Mac forums. So I must be doing something wrong, right? Or not, maybe iMove is just a piece of shite. I wish I could afford Final Cut.

I found a free editing program, AvidFree DV. I haven’t played with it yet, but will in coming days.

All told, I wasted about 5 hours on a task that should be simple. Anyone else have any similar problems with iMovie? Let me know in comments.

(isn’t Web 2.0 great?)

My whole morning was borked. I definitely need more RAM in this machine, iMovie was behaving very strangely, inserting clips at the end of the project when I hadn’t even instructed a “paste”, and the sound was all effed up. I wasted a little over an hour trying to edit a movie from 15 minutes down to 9 when I gave into the temptation of sunshine and 75º.I went out exploring. Found some fun graffiti.

(click to view more photos)

Then I found a park with a dogwood tree. I smelled the blossoms. I took off my shirt and lay underneath the tree and read a book until I finished it. About two dozen silkworms floated in the air, some landing on me and being whisked away when I blew them into the breeze. A steady low hum of bees buzzing droned above me. I listened to the random call of the raven, the rush of the river, and breathed in summer.

I’ve got some good stuff for you this week if I can keep my patience with iMovie. Stay tuned.