This will be exciting: Saccharine Surreality

Do you know about Saccharine Surreality?

It’s an exciting art show opening at Pehrspace this Saturday, January 12. Curated by Sarah Cisco, it features approximately 10,000 amazing artists who have created work in celebration of mankind’s “most innocent vice” (tell that to Lil’ Wayne!), candy. There will be lots of free candy and there will also be amazing candy-inspired cocktails.

The show will be up at Pehr until March. But there are special reasons for you to attend the opening. First, there will be a wonder-tent. Don’t ask me what it is, but know that it is a “one night only” thing and AWESOME. Second, I’ll be performing a few candy-themed cover songs at certain points during the night. I’ll never be playing these again, so if you want to hear me do a slowed-down, reverb-drenched, synth-heavy cover of Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy,” this is your only chance. Hint: you do want to hear that!

Anyhoo, feel free to RSVP on Facebook so that everybody knows you’ll be there. The 100th RSVP gets free candy (just kidding, everybody gets free candy).

Here’s Ms. Cisco working on the tent:

Filed under: Events, geoff geis, Human Interest, candy, pehrspace, saccharine surreality, sarah cisco

Patches in the museum

On Saturday, Sarah (aka Disco Cisco) was part of a group show at Pehrspace. She made miniatureMUSEUM for PAIR, a diorama show with the theme of “parallel worlds.”

The girl’s got a unique artistic vision and a knack for turning her aesthetic into reality. For this project, she made a seven-story dollhouse full of theme rooms and curated a miniature art show to go inside of it. I got to see her go through the different stages of developing the piece slowly over a little more than a month and I was really impressed with the final piece. I’m excited for the next project she undertakes!

Sarah’s miniatureMUSEUM will be on display until August 31; if you want to see it online, there are pictures at her website, Intergalactic Fantastic.

I actually participated in the piece as well. I contributed a video, which we displayed in one of the rooms. Here’s the video that I made, entitled “Travels of Patches:”

I wanted to do something sweet and simple while experimenting with techniques I’d not previously used. I had fun making this little video collage. I filmed all of the stuff with Patches, and the backgrounds were sourced from Youtube.

Here’s what the movie looks like in the museum. Photo by Adrian Zaw.

In addition to contributing the video, I wrote about Sarah’s museum and several of her fellow dioramists’ works for seancarnage.com. Here’s that article.

Filed under: geoff geis, ipod touch, Video, disco cisco, intergalactic fantastic, miniaturemuseum, pehrspace, sarah cisco, travels of patches

Cover song: “Rockin’ Around with You” (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)

Download “Rockin’ Around with You” (Tom Petty cover, featuring Sarah Cisco)

Boy, do I ever love Tom Petty. During the summer between fifth and sixth grade, it was a chance encounter with the “Into the Great Wide Open” that first inspired me to start paying attention to pop music. That led to a blossoming over the summer of ’94 and my discovery of groups like Nirvana, R.E.M., Beck, and Green Day. But while I loved “alternative music,” Tom Petty was my favorite. I had three of his albums before I had any albums by anyone else.

One of my earliest vinyl LPs was the band’s self-titled debut from 1976 — the one that’s got a picture of Tom smirking and wearing a bullet belt over his shoulder. That album, along with a story I read in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock N Roll about how the band withheld the masters of the Hard Promises LP in a game of high-stakes brinksmanship with MCA over sticker price, was the proof that I used when my friends who liked Green Day and the Offspring called me a “poser” for liking Tom Petty so much. Bullets and a smirk are pretty punk, and so are the rockabilly grooves and odes to teenaged abandon on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “Into the Great Wide Open” may have introduced me to Tom Petty, but it was this album that made the long-term impact on my taste.

So, here’s a cover of “Rockin’ Around with You,” the first song from that album. I recorded it a couple of weeks ago with the indescribably fabulous Sarah Cisco, my love and a damned fine musician who will hopefully continue to share her talents with the world. Sarah sang with me, and I did the drum machines, guitars, bass, and synth parts. It’s a pretty straightforward, shuffling jam that doesn’t stray too far from the original.

Filed under: geoff geis, mp3, sarah cisco, tom petty and the heartbreakers

“Just Look at What He’s Doing!”

I’m very excited to present an art exhibition, entitled Just Look at What He’s Doing!, at Echo Curio from October 21-24. I was asked to do a “solo show,” but in reality it’s been a collaborative effort that I’ve done with the extraordinary help of Sarah Cisco, Caitlin Craggs, and Kitty Dexter. We’ve been working hard on it, and it’s coming together quite nicely. I’d love it if you attended. Here is a link so that you can RSVP to the opening on Facebook. Echo Curio is located at 1519 Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, and the opening event begins at 9pm.

Filed under: Art, Events, barack obama, caitlin craggs, echo curio, echo park, geoff geis, just look at what he's doing, obama, obama porn, sarah cisco, the audacity of blood