Me again. I am very happy you are here, but will not take it personally at all if you’re FED UP and/or ever need to unsubscribe for any reason. I’ve been working hard for many years at being a safe person to say no to, so you’ll actually be helping me grow as a person.

This tour leg we have done Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, a couple shows each in Vancouver and Portland, and I am currently in downtown LA, headed to an overnight load-in at Coachella before a few more California dates. After that we’ll make our way gradually east to end this leg in Baltimore in late May. I’m planning to see some (immediate and extended) family along the way and am very excited for that.

I did get to spend a week or so in and out of New York recently (including a notable day at The Late Show with Stephen J. Colbert (link to that performance later in the episode)).

Pat Steir is dead

There is a chamber of my heart that specifically holds aging artists, writers, musicians, scientists, etc. for whom I feel a particularly deep love and have been really inspired by. I check in on them regularly to make sure they are still around and see what they are up to. They are all old enough that I expect them to die sometime and when I see that one of them has actually dared do so, I add them to the above list on my phone—always with a tear in my eye and a welling-up of gratitude for their contributions to my personal/artistic growth and perspective on the many-splendored wonders of humanity and the universe.

Last week I added Pat Steir.

I discovered Pat when I visited the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC in February of 2020 and happened upon an exhibition of her work entitled Color Wheel. It was installed in a massive rotunda and consisted of 30 large-scale paintings—iterations of a solid background with a thick stripe of other-colored paint near the top that was then allowed to drip down the length of the canvas, as far and in whatever way gravity and the viscosity of the paint/water mixture would allow.

I was immediately and viscerally gripped by this series—by their size, by the color combinations (I recall hearing her explain that for each painting in the series she chose two colors she loved and gave them to each other), the composition (part intention, part aleatory)—and walked the rotunda with eyes wet and heart warm. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to see other work of hers at various places and always relish the opportunity to be in their presence.

After my Hirshhorn visit I wanted to know more about Pat and the way she worked and what her life was like, and came across a beautiful documentary made by Veronica Gonzales Pena, called Pat Steir: Artist, that you can watch for free on Vimeo if you’re interested. A couple years later Pat started an Instagram account that she curated herself for a while and is a charming look at her later years through the lens of a curious, but technology-inept grandmother (more recently it seems to have been taken over by someone more publicity-prioritizing, but the good stuff is still back there if you scroll a bit).

Goodbye, Pat. Thanks. I love you.

Punkt!

Who among you is great at digital art? Or maybe that’s not what I’m looking for. Like digital image restoration? Maybe? I’m not sure.

Anyway, Roman Signer is in the waiting room that Pat Steir just left. He’s a Swiss multi-media artist whose video performances are among my favorites. They are often simple, playful, clever, irreverent interactions with humans, everyday objects, technology, and the natural world—though sometimes they are carefully engineered Rube-Goldberg-adjacent happenings. I strongly recommend a Roman Signer rabbit-hole, but I’m bringing him up today because I want some help. My favorite Roman Signer performance is called Punkt and I really think you should watch it. 

Did you watch it? The resultant brush-stroke at the end (“punkt” is German for “dot” or “point”) is something that I’ve wanted as a tattoo for a long time, but I haven’t been able to find a high-enough resolution scan or photo of that image anywhere that I could take to a tattoo artist for them to use. 

So I need your help! I’m very eager to pay money to a Human Person™ who could take this grainy, low-res screen shot and somehow upscale, enhance, restore, re-build it so it looks like the detailed, smooth brushstroke that it obviously is. I think I want it to measure about 1-1.5” across.

If you are or know that Human Person™ would you kindly let me know?!

This is the image:

And I want to put it on my wrist, like this:

Oh! I promised you Colbert and Colbert you shall have

In the end of March, I spent a long day in the coldest theater in NYC (the Ed Sullivan) with the David Byrne crew. We shot a song from the new album for the broadcast that night, as well as a bonus Talking Heads song that I think will be released in a month or so. It’s a nice little look into what our show is like, and you can see a lot of instruments and attachments that I built (as well as a giant close-up of my mouth if you can pick  me out 😅).

The audio mix for the broadcast is spot on, and I particularly like that my little “Naive Orchestrette” gets a nice little feature throughout the song.

Ok, here’s the video link to the performance on the show.