Art All Night 2014

Art All Night has been in the same place for the last few years; two blocks from my house. So, there's no excuse for me to not rouse myself and head over to soak up some ART.

The building is practically under the George Washington Crossing bridge, about 100' away from the shore of the Allegheny River. Sounds perfect until yo.u realize there's no immediate parking. Our little block was packed with cars all night! We had a steady stream of traffic all day during drop-off and all night as people came and went to see the show or listen to music. Or both. The building is part of what used to be a steel mill. It's huge, which is great because the crowds the event draws is pretty spectacular.

Since this is an open-hang, the work spans the range from amateur to practiced artist. It's also hung very quickly, with intake ending at 2pm and the event beginning at 5pm. The only delineations made are between adult content and everything else. So, the show is mounted by filling the boards as it arrives. You're apt to see a drawing by a middle-school student sharing space with a veteran artist.

It's fun to wander around, looking for familiar work, finding some work that is pretty spectacular, or something that was submitted by one of your neighbors. Which is exactly what happened last night. What was also surprising was that the quality of the work was actually pretty good, and so many local, practicing artists participate.

There were lots of opportunities for hands-on activities for everyone. One that I liked was a series of windows mounted on stands. You were invited to write all over them, and when they got to covered up, a volunteer came through and cleared the window. There were a couple of pop-tents and canopies that the kids were wandering through. I'm sure they had fun, but it was obviously too small for me!

The volunteers did an amazing job, putting this event together. All of the work was clearly labeled, which is a monumental task in itself! Getting the show installed must have been pretty wild. I know that the screens go up over a couple of days, and will take as long to come down. All of those that helped out are just the best art brigade! Congratulations to all of you on yet another successful edition of Art All Night.

The below gallery contains descriptions, in case you want to hear more!

Shots From This Year's NY Halloween Parade: Why Doesn't Pittsburgh Do This?

Sorry this post is so late, I'm still getting stuff off my camera from more than a month ago.

The Halloween Parade, now is close to being one of it's biggest single, one day events in NYC. The Parade itself must draw about 2-3 million onlookers and perhaps 50-100 thousand participants. This alone, might not make it that unusual in a very dense, transit oriented city where several parades draw huge crowds, but it's only part of a vast night of reveling and madness that overtakes almost all of downtown Manhattan. My guess is that 5 million people or so may be partaking in some way.

I stopped taking pictures pretty early and many are blurry, but I think they capture the spirit. We also didn't stay out late, when some of the more extreme insanity happens.









Unlike most, this parade lacks single large sponsors or much of a formal organizing committee. Started sometime in the late 70's or early 80's, it originally went through the narrow streets of The West Village, graduating to 6th ave around 1989.

As near as we can tell, anyone in a costume can march, but procession is semi organised in a staging area, and the major floats, large scale puppets and dance groups have an assigned sequence.

I wonder, why Pittsburgh has never gotten together a free form Halloween Parade like this? Bloomfield's does look like something just for small kids.

Great Cleveland Idea: Lottery League 2010

Draft Night 2010







OK, it would have been a pretty extreme stretch for me but I was sorely tempted to try to get up to see the 2010 Lottery League performance @ The Beachland Ballroom.

"I’ll rehash the League comp CD liner notes for the uninitiated (though you should of course buy the CD for the full story, nudge nudge): the Cleveland Lottery League started in late 2007, when six CLE indie-scene habitués bemoaned the tribal tendencies of rock recidivists, and hit upon the notion of a lottery as a way to reshuffle things and force collaborations between strangers. The Lottery took place on February 2, 2008 (Groundhog Day has a weird significance to this crew, which I’ll maybe cover in a later post), and resulted in 33 new bands from 144 musicians. All these new bands had 10 weeks to concoct a 10-minute set with at least one original group composition. (As it turned out, every group did all originals, the sole possible exception being mighty debatable — the band Boris Karloff's version of "Monster Mash" was entirely too fucked-with to properly count as a cover.)

At the end of the 10 weeks, on April 12, 2008, all 33 bands played one giant show with three stages. Nobody flat-out sucked it, and some went completely all-out. Homelesssexual performed with an accompanying narrative film. Semper Fi staged a fake war-on-terror battle (I’m pretty sure Iraq won, but honestly, I’d had a few drinks by then, so who knows?). Rad Bathhouse performed in ancient Roman costumes. Stimulus Package, Mohammed Cartoon, Free Moments and Hapsburg Lip were so completely fucking excellent it strained belief to think that their members had only been introduced a couple of months beforehand. It was one of the single greatest days in CLEmusic history, and we’re doing it again this year. Big Show Mk. II is on April 10 at the Beachland Temple of Rockawesome. Watch this space."

Gets back to why cities exist in the first place as a place to mix shit up. Seems it all started as an outgrowth of a Cleveland band opening up it's practice and recording studio. (Ever wonder how many of those were once in a place like The Lower Hill? Ever wonder what was lost, or never born?)

"In the summer of 2006, Jae Kristoff, Nate Scheible and Mike Wilkinson, all members of the experimental band Self Destruct Button at one time or another (another disclosure: this writer is currently on the inside of the SDB revolving door), opened the doors of Zombie Proof studio in midtown Cleveland free of charge and one hour at a time for three full days. Musicians were invited to each record one hour of music, sound, stuff breaking, whatever. More than 40 people took them up on the offer, and the results were edited together into songs, collaborations of a sort between people who may have never even been in the same room together."

The Lottery League: The Big Show.

When: 5 p.m. Saturday.(This Past Saturday)

Where: Beachland Ballroom & Tavern, 15711 Waterloo Road, Cleveland.

Suppose we had an Art Lottery league?

Do you know a lot about the Cleveland art or music scene and want to tell people in a wider area your perspective? Shoot me an email: diggingpitt@gmail.com. We have enough hyper local media.