one modest proposal

2008-07-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

It all started for me with a swift kick the head. I'm not talking metaphorically, but I really had a decent enough soccer related head trauma to tear and detach the retina in my right eye. An emergency surgery later, I was forced to reevaluate my life that was characterized by the daytime as a watch designer and at the night time creating new works of art to collect dust on the shelves in my suburban room. Sure, I had other ideas and stories rolling around in my head, but there is an immediacy to drawing, painting, and sculpture that you don't have with other processes. Plus, you don't have to explain yourself to someone else for the art to come to fruition unless you really don't understand yourself, which is a different problem entirely. This feeling was partially a cop out for me. I had grander visions and wanted to collaborate with others to bring those works into life. Having the distorted vision forced me refocus on what I would love to do and take more risks than the status quo I have been dancing with post collegiate life.

Right before this interesting adjustment period I met Adam Claxon through our mutual friend Emily. We immediately jumped into a great conversation about music and our mutual love of Beirut, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, and Neutral Milk Hotel while we drank at a coffee shop/bar where our friend Michael works every friday night. The next night of drinking in honor of Emily's birthday turned into witnessing Adam playing rifts on his guitar late at night and I was amazed by the complexity of his so-called experiments in his lubricated state. I casually mentioned that I was a production designer on a Finnish film last summer and they were looking for music for the film. I figured he would be like so many flighty creative people before, I wouldn't hear from him about his music as we artist tend to have a well hidden or not so hidden self-destructive side. He emailed me when I was off in San Francisco at the Noise Pop Festival and the friendship turned into me asking, "Would you be interested on collaborating on something? I have this verse story that I would like to turn into music." A week later after reading the story, he sent me back two increadible ideas of the pacing and musical styling. It was as if he composed the music that was playing in my noggin. Not to be outdone, I applied to an artist in residency in Australia on whim to work on the visual aspects of the story and happily heard after my surgery that I was accepted with a grant.

I'm still in shock that Adam would want to do take this musical and art journey with me (geez, I sound a bit cheesy). I thought he was going to think I was crazy girl with rose colored dreams, but he seems to be indulging me in the possibilities of what can be in the collaboration between us. Perhaps, he is just as crazy as I am or he just wants more from his life as I do. I hope this blog becomes the place that we can document the process and see where it takes us.

-BS-

all this has happened before and will happen again

2008-06-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

After some time deliberating on a band name, we settled into A Modest Proposal. We had some great possible names like, "Black Tees, White Assholes," "No Swimming: Bitch is Closed," and my personal favorite fake white hip hop band name, "Three Dead Bodies in a Trunk." Sadly our first choice, "Bongwater" was taken. What is this world coming to anyways?

So A Modest Proposal, it is. It came to Adam and I through a great conversation with our mutual friend Emily when we were discussing George Orwell. I wrongly thought that he had written the satirical short story about selling babies born into poor families to wealthy couples to eat to save Ireland from poverty. It was actually written by Jonathan Swift and the title is A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.

I should also say that the story itself is more the origins of our band name and not how we feel politically. We don't advocate eating babies in any capacity. We do advocate satire and its ability to create a political dialog with the public. If you are interested in taking a gander at the story, download it for free from Project Guttenberg.