Gary Panter blog

LIGHTSHOW NOTES

The shows went really well. We did nine shows in four days. Almost all of the shows sold out.

Thanks, first of all, to the folks at the Anthology Film Archive.

Thanks to the bands and light crew:

Yo La Tengo
Alan Licht
Plate Tektonics
Balloon Knot
Fay Ryu
for providing the music.

Fay Ryu
musical director

Lance Harkins
technical and stage direction

Devin Flynn
sound technician

Sakura Maku
Matthew Barnett
John Rocker
Fay Ryu
Bonnie Lemon
for stage assistance

Douglas Pope
for production design

Paul La Cotta
for customised plastic lenses
Thanks to Alice and Helene and Olive for letting Josh and me out of the house

The light show week was fantastic!

A good time was had by Joshua and me . We did it. We thought we could do it and we could and it is a portent of even neater things to come.

I got experience with a vastly bigger show than I had done before. We learned many things. I learned many things. I think this is all familiar to Josh and has struck a very positive chord in his sense that we are on the right track. And with old established tools and new tools that didn't exist in the 60s and especially modified tools.

The show was our first time out as a team and it went real cool. It was a thrill blasting a big rear projection screen with a jumbo light zapper!!!!

Joshua handled the liquid lights for the most part with guest work from Bonnie Lemon. This summer as we rehearsed the liquid lights in my living room on a big piece of rear projection material, I saw the central driving stuff that became the PSYCHEDELIC POSTER and the clothing and even the sound of the 60s. What it was that was revealed to Martin Sharp that caused the cover of CREAM'S DISREALI GEARS AND WHEELS OF FIRE, what drove Victor Moscoso to dissect and abuse the color theory he mastered under Albers. It was the vivid liquid immersion in the projected liquid light's amneotic comforts.

I did a lot of the reflected and distorted hand effects with the close help of John Rocker and Lance and Bonnie who hit me with the light blasters so I could bounce it back at the screen and that is one of the simple rules of the light show: to not aim a light right at the screen but aim the light away from the screen and bounce it back, filter, distort, color, shatter it back at the screen. Then it doesn't look like a flashlight inside a pup tent, but a fracturing cosmos or a flexing spectral caterpillar; an iridescent columnar rythmic life form. It is hard to describe the pleasures of the lightshow in words. Crashing color clouds, angular color harmonic sprites, eyeball shadow. The world in a drop of James Brown's sweat, a glistening eyeball harmonica.

Josh is a remarkable fountain of ideas! We must help unleash Joshua's vision to see what happens.

We were only able to demonstrate a few of the ideas that we made on my living room walls owing to time space and financial and rehearsal limitations, so I trust that the show is only going to get neater and neater.

Anthology asked us back next year.
We have been approached by many folks who want us to do the light show. Most of them don't realize that it is not just a suitcase full of lights, but a lot of equipment and a team of lightshow performers, sound equipment, engineers and more.


Joshua and I are less interested in taking it on the road than finding a theater where we can have time and space to get more hallucinations on the screen.