schlugliminal
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After-show debrief for feb 23
🕑 Added 2024-03-07 00:45:26 +0000 UTCLink to the instagram reel of camcorder footage from the show: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3wX0EgL1an/
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Psychic Spychick played a show in Anchorage a couple of weekends ago. February 23rd. We were invited by Adam from Turbo Hell, who we had up for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Twin Peaks Halloween party last October. It was one of those events that went so smoothly and was exactly what it needed to be. I ate good food and danced with friends I so rarely get to spend time with, and because we padded the trip with a solid day on either side, we had time to relax and be present. It feels more and more like a luxury to not have to rush from one moment or task into the next one.
The weekend before we left was an exciting collective effort to screen print 25 shirts and 11 patches. Sara had been collecting abandoned clothing from the transfer station and the thrift stores in town for a few months, and we still had quite a bit of extra material we dyed from the tapestries, so we had plenty of stuff to print on. I worked pretty diligently, a little every day, on a 3-color print design. I knew that’s what I wanted it to be going into it, with the added grace of knowing I could drop it to a 2-color design if it was feeling too intense. I kept a pinterest board with images that gave me a kind of “psychic spychick” vibe, and visuals to use as drawing reference. I ended up pulling inspiration for the final design mostly from vintage posters for carnival psychics, pulp novel covers, and 70s mod sexy-spy-lady aesthetics. I drew the design in Krita, and after spending a couple of days attempting to draw bezier curves and mask shapes out of each layer, Sara showed me another open source program for vector graphics called Inkscape. I bounced pieces of the image between the two programs as I dug into the nuances of their digital workspaces. Masking the 3 print color layers out of each other was a frustrating and satisfying puzzle. It’s easy to get lost learning and playing with all that the software is capable of.
I managed to keep the project on deadline: graphics done and printed at the local print shop, screens coated with emulsion, images exposed, shirts washed and ironed, etc, with enough wiggle room to clean up one of the final screens that didn’t turn out like I wanted it to and burn it again. We printed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with a rotating group of friends, all focused for ~2 hours at a time around the printing process. I had to buy the last screen online, and it was a bit smaller than the other two. We had everything all set up to do the final print, ink dropped on the screen, breath baited, when I realized that the squeegee we’d been using was too wide for the smaller frame. Forrest had a multi-tool with a saw in his pocket, and we all took a break while he sawed a rough ¾” off the end. It totally worked.
After the last layer was dry, I took them home and heat-set the designs, then washed all of the shirts. We still had a couple of days, and our set was feeling good, so I spent that time cutting the shirts apart and sewing lace and patterned fabric onto them. I felt like a little haute couture goblin, making fashion out of trash in the basement.
We packed everything up and left early on Thursday morning. Figuring out how to fly with all of the gear was a bit of a puzzle. We decided that it’s probably time get real gig bags for things. My friend Kiplin picked us up from the airport in Anchorage around noon and we spent a quiet day in her house. I wrote & edited photos. Sara put some music on and sewed one of the patches onto her jacket. That evening we went out for pizza and then set up the drums and sound system at the venue. The next day my friend Torah flew in. Sara and I picked her up and had another quiet morning. We went out for coffee at Cafecito Bonito and spent a few hours browsing an antique store called Lazy Dog. We wanted to get a gift for Sara’s mom to say thank you for buying us plane tickets. We found a cute little bicycle-shaped planter for her garden, and I found a vintage Jimmy Carter campaign button that says “We did it before, we’ll do it again!” We stopped by a vintage clothing store with $40 t-shirts for 10 minutes or so before picking Adam up from work.
A couple of hours before the gig, Torah went out to see our mutual friend who lives in Anchorage now, Kiplin went out with some friends for German food, and the rest of us went to Fred Meyer to look for earplugs. Adam found out it was close to my birthday, so we also got cake and balloons. And discount roses. For vibe. We didn’t find the earplugs, so we decided to try Costco. My first time in a Costco, if you can believe it. Adam let me flash the card at the bouncers. They gave me the access nod, and for a moment it felt like we’d succeeded at an infiltration mission. The Costco in Anchorage has brutalist architecture. Big concrete thoroughfares and high concrete pillars. You enter through a garage door into a warehouse where everything looks like backstock. Is that what all Costco’s are like? They didn’t have earplugs either.
Adam dropped us off at the venue to set up our gear and went out one more time to find earplugs. People showed up early. There was a technical 40-person capacity, so I am guessing people wanted to make sure they’d make it in, though the enforcement of that rule was pretty..relaxed. I ran through my pedal chain and made sure all of my tones were balanced on Adam’s amp and felt good about that. I laid merch out on the table and Bryson brought a blacklight to make it look goooood. I didn’t really feel like standing around the merch table all night, so I put sticky notes with prices, “feel free to look through stuff,” and the venmo on the walls and told people we use the honor system and to find me and my gold fanny pack if they wanted to use cash (the room was very small so that was easy). We did really well on merch sales. I’m glad people liked the stickers, and the shirts.
I got some good pictures of the first two bands. Saint Mood was really good. I hadn’t seen them before. They’re, like, raucous yelling lady heavy distortion stops and starts and ripping guitar licks. Turbo Hell was also great. Adam’s dual pedal boards were cracking me up. They have a little Oingo Boingo/Gary Numan edge to them. I fought the feeling of being so out of my league. We also rocked.
We went third, and wouldn’t you know there was no signal coming from my pedal board (again..this happens weirdly often). Adam and Josh helped me pull every pedal off of my chain, then put every pedal back on, and then it worked just fine. Most people didn’t really notice, but the few who were watching told me it was like watching one of those tv shows where somebody has to solve a puzzle under pressure for big money. Everyone was really patient, took the time for bathroom and smoke breaks, grabbing another drink, etc, and we got the set rolling pretty quickly once sound was a go. I don’t even think anybody left.
We played a pretty tight set. We ran the whole thing with transitions at least 4 times before the gig, so there weren’t any awkward lagging moments. We played 3 original songs and 5 covers. We revisited the cover we did of Shout with Forrest for the Halloween show, only this time I totally nailed the solo. First live performance of the newest song, we’ve been calling “Coagula.”
Sara DJ’d until the end of the night, and people stayed and danced until we had to call it. Then some people went to ~another mysterious location~ to dance MORE. (I bore witness)
Adam brought his camcorder and we got a lot of fun footage of the whole event. He put together a compilation video on the Turbo Hell instagram. Here’s a link if you want to get an audio/visual picture: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3wX0EgL1an/
I also have some of the raw footage on my laptop I might upload to Patreon here soon for those of you who don’t use the ~insta~, with a few of the pictures I took of Saint Mood and Turbo Hell.
Thanks for all of your support, my friends. <3
Comments
Amelia Cooper
lol I don't understand many of the trappings of our society and costco is now both less esoteric to me and firmly on the list of ~weird~ stuff
J Brig
The cost co and bouncer piece made me laugh! Never thought of it that way as a “Cost Co Infiltrator”! Lol
