B u r n l o g

Coilhouse has a critical post about Hollis Hawthorne, a bicycle dance troupe member of The Derailleurs (which is related to The Sprockettes I happened to see last year).

Please visit Friends of Hollis to read more and help.

Hollis suffered a serious hit-and-run accident in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India. Luckily, she was riding a scooter slowly and wearing a helmet at the time but has suffered critical injury to the stem of her brain.

The current hospital in India is inadequate and she needs sophisticated help AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

The good news is there’s an avenue of help for anyone who cares, but it must be now! Stanford Medical has offered to help free of charge. However, Hollis’ family and friends must raise the sum for medical transport from India to California.

Like so many of us, she is without health insurance. We can get her to Stanford for the critical help she needs now.

Please visit Friends of Hollis to read more and click the Donate button in the right sidebar.

Please give anything you can. The friends and family of Hollis are so close to getting her home and to the medical help she needs. Any help is essential.

Great News! Our Hennepin Crawler is featured in the March 10th, Make Magazine, Vol. 17 edition titled, “Rediscover Lost Knowledge”.

Make dispatched a local colleague and DIY enthusiast named Dave Sims to interview us about the Crawler. We were, of course, overjoyed as Make folks are our heros!

See more of our kinetic conveyances of whimsy at our patinated new Web site: Krank-Boom-Clank.

Upcoming Appearances
We’re planning on attending the The 115th Annual Luther Burbank Rose Parade in Santa Rosa, CA, this May 16th, 2009, and at the Kinetic Art Cruz in Santa Cruz, CA, on the following day.

Join us!

This just in from Will Chase at BManUpdate:

Slightly better, if longer, video at Online Adventure.

Krank-Boom-Clank is a new industrial alternative arts collective in Santa Rosa, building “Kinetic Conveyances of Whimsy”. The four builders, David Farish, Dan Kirby, Skye Barnett, and Clifford Hill, just completed their gorgeous new site.

K-B-C have been seen about lately with their large, 4-wheeled “Hennepin Crawler” at Burning Man 2008 and The Great Handcar Regatta 2008, among other local events.

GALLERY
Plenty of photos of their creations and attended events are recounted in the Gallery.

AVAILABLE FOR HIRE
They’re looking to release their kinetic creations to more public and private events.

WORKSHOP
A collaboration with the well-known Fou Fou Ha! burlesque clown dance troupe out of San Francisco is in the works too.

My good pal Mark Nichols (who is an amazing musician and composer heard lately with Choklit’s band Baby Seal Club) is co-producing with Erik Davis a live theater production of their insane “A Burning Opera — How to Survive the Apocalypse“!

Here’s a juicy 15 minute sample featuring a number of musicians including the infamous Mark Growden:

Come experience “How to Survive the Apocalypse” - Premiering Jan. 16 & 17 at Stage Werx (533 Sutter, San Francisco.) Shows Fri 1/16 @ 8:00pm and 10:30 pm; Sat. 1/17 @ 8:00 pm. Tickets are $15 in advance from Brown Paper tickets beginning 12/15; $20 at the door. The event is all-volunteer. All proceeds for the event will be donated to Intersection for the Arts.

“How to Survive the Apocalypse” is a Burning Man-inspired theatrical freak-out that combines rock opera, vaudeville, and a Dionysian revival show that is just as inspired and terrified by current events as you are. Part mutant mystery play, part crash-course in proactive future culture, the evening combines millennialist rants and sexy burlesque with select scenes and songs from the “Burning Opera,” an ambitious and ferociously inventive rock musical scored by Mark Nichols, with libretto by counterculture writer Erik Davis.

Firebird Festival
As the sunlight wanes and we approach the shortest day of the year, this festive evening in Phoenixville, PA will spark light as it brings the community together for stories, music, artistic expression, and celebration.

On Saturday, Dec. 13, 2008 The Phoenix will burst into flame once again at the 5th Annual Firebird Festival. Starting at 4 PM Phoenixville’s Downtown District will be transformed into a performance art venue with storytellers, choruses, dancers and musicians; all performing and relating stories of Winter and of the Phoenix – the mythical bird and namesake of Phoenixville.

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to receive an in-depth comment from an organizer named Paul Jorgensen of the Afrika Burns regional in South Africa.

After reading the comment and returning to browse the site, I’m impressed by the scale and enthusiastic participation of these dedicated fellow burners near Cape Town.

This got me to thinking about how fun it would be to make a world tour of the various burns there are now. We’ve seen the documentaries on Burning Man in Nevada, how about a comprehensive look at the variations of the event in other venues and countries!?

Just a few places of note besides South Africa are: New Zealand’s Kiwi Burn, Nowhere in Zargoza, Spain, many in Canada and Europe, as well as burner friendly places in Asia too. I recently posted a regionals long list I swiped from a Tribe user and of course there’s the master list at Burning Man Regionals site.

Then this sprawling worldwide regionals idea collided with the notion of bringing the Hennepin Crawler to these far-flung events. How amazing to bring something born and bred for the Playa to another burn far removed.

Or, better yet, RIDE the Crawler across the globe in one of those crazy projects to circumnavigate the earth in some jalopy of one’s own devising! Then, innocent peoples along the route are subjected to this ridiculous human-powered kinetic contraption on its slow and merry way to distant Burning Man festivals on other continents, all the while filming the process as a documentary (in matching oddball costumes of course).

It would surely bludgeon an unsuspecting world public with the ideas of strange ingenuity, rampant creative silliness running amuck for the sake of art, and the notion of community and giving beyond the commercial marketplace, spreading a certain dusty goodness of heady Playa fun throughout our fellow earthly denizens.

Alright then, who wants to fund Krank-Boom-Clank on our world Crawler tour of regional burns…?

This heartfelt music video just in from MC Yogi and Ursaminor, a group of new media Burners and all around good folks I’ve met in passing here and there around the North Bay.

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope

I cannot say I’ve got the highest of hopes (who could have predicted the “vote” in 2000 and then AGAIN in 2004!?), but I am at last hoping again for some real Hope this year in Obama’s election for President of the United States.

A close friend Eric “Buzzn” (and father to pretty much the cutest lit’l Burner around named Sophie) was a volunteer on the lovely Basura Sagrada project this year.

He’s a great photog too. Check out his excellent photoset: Basura Sagrada

Oh yeah, Eric was a major helper and all around do-it-all / sanity life preserver on our very own Ice-Flo art car project from 2007 too! See his photos in the Gallery Hop.