I, Haruko Nishimura and Mandy Greer and Ian Lucero started our film sketches in Portland last weekend at Ian and Kamala’s lovely place. It was a VERY PERFECT PLACE to start out miniature scale sketches with our loose story board of what we wanted to try out, experiment, and a perfect place to gather and start to bounce our ideas off of each other, desires for the film and share each other’s resources. The meaty part of our dance film is going to be finalized and filmed, edited in this fall of september. Ian and Kamala has a lovely garden full of earthly PHOTOGENIC things like moist mudd, bright green cute clover patches, tall grasses and dwarfy trees, a bright orange cottage, HAPPY FARMER FENCE and lots of birds, squirrels,sometimes white sky, and warm 70’s sunlight. LOTS of earthworms.We had a monsoon-like violent thunder rain after our long day’s meeting and the next day we were able to start shooting for the images.I got into white makeup and laid in the wet cold grass.Mandy and I got our hands entangled in her crochet madness.Ian worked hard working meticuluosly with his camera, taking shots over and over until he got what he needed. I also got to GORGE AND CHOMP on DIRT-MARINATED CABBAGES for few takesunder their crawl space in the basement and enjoyed it very much.What I enjoyed most was a lot of our shootings were us going by our intuitions and strong visions… It is a good little start full of promises…

Portland

Mandy, Ian and Haruko are meeting in the Ian/Kamala Portland house for their first big summit on the film they are collaborating on to be shot in September. Portland is sunny. Perfect. They sit under Japanese Maple tree and iron out their ideas while humming birds feed above - Mandy’s boys are digging holes in the garden for kamala. Basically a perfect Portland day. This work will go on for two days, the goal to get things rolling on the project. Mandy’s son Hazel has been tricked into wearing a tassely gold-lamet dress to do his digging in. The film chronicles the life of a “Slug Princess”. There will be much footage taken in all of our gardens. Mandy brought samples of her crochet slug slime.

Seattle

Yeah. Getting Started. A lot of new projects rolling out. Yesterday Robb, Jeff and I got together to brainstorm the tactics for getting started on this new album. We will be recording demos for half of June and then jump into the actual album in the 2nd half of june. We are searching like mad for good recording locations. Just visited Pol at “TUBS” aka Soak and Poke, an old closed out hot tub joint. Its a mad place and Pol has generously made it an option for recording madness. Of course Robb, like the old man he is needs “natural light”… so Tubs seems like it will be the standby for the time being.

Haruko and I are spending crazy people time in our house working on writing songs and developing some new work for our next dance show. Playing on pots and pans, instruments strewn about our living room. Recording coffee percolation sounds and cracking eggs.

Thinking deeply about our next big stage show in March of ‘09. It seems a long ways off, but it will go fast for sure. Right now assembling the creative team. Juicy!

-Joshua