DANIEL BLUE: MEET KENNON CHRISTEL >>>

Kennon Christel sits quietly and gazes out at the world around him. He watches busy lives with mild interest as he sips his fancy coffee drinks in contentment.

Recently graduated from the Tacoma School of the Arts, Kennon is an extremely talented guitar player. His riffs are haunting and reminiscent of a better time in the music industry. A time where male three-part harmonies were normal accoutrements to complicated Lydian and diminished scales.

Kennon sits or stands in the back of the room at most concerts. He likes to close his eyes behind his dark glasses, no one knows what he is thinking, but I have a pretty good guess. This tight legged wiry sprig is dreaming of California, touching the orange steel of the golden gate bridge with his tongue and wandering about in rough spun frocks with people who just want to make music all day long.

"You can write about me as long as when people read it they think I'm some kind of weirdo", he told me as I was snapping his photo through the open window of the Black Water Cafe. OK.

Kennon is a total weirdo; I met him through another total weirdo in the music community named Kyle. They go down to the practice space and do unspeakably weird things with their six strings. Unimaginably weird. Nearly pagan. I mean weird here, beyond gonzo. Sometimes they play notes that don't even sound good together. All in a row, over and over. Whoa.

Anyway, if Kennon does not move to Portland with the leader of Team Unicorn, I hope he plays music here forever.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

STEPH DEROSA: CAN'T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS PIERCINGS >>>

As one of Tacoma's best and most raw music venues, Hell's Kitchen puts you right in the action at any live performance. There's no balcony or reserved seats in the music room¬" just a bench on the west side. Most people must stand. With the type of artists typically booked at HK¬" to sit down while a band is ripping their heart out for you would be a cryin shame. You know what? Don't even go to the show; just stay at home if your cheeky ass is going to be planted on a damn stool. There, I said it. Get up and feel the sound. You know I'm right. Those stools are for the doorman and the guy carding the bar area. Not for your lazy rear.

The KAke and I love HK for many, many reasons. Not only do they book some of this area's best local talent, but also regularly host all-ages shows. This means we can dust off our junior-sized gun range earmuffs and take our girls out for a loud night of 253 culture.

At first glance, Mr. DeRosa was a little unsure about what mysteries might be hidden inside the dark precincts of Sixth Avenue's live entertainment venue. On any given night a passerby might catch a glimpse of blue hair, mohawks, and piercings of the unmentionables. Society might consider this a symbol of anti-conformity, but I consider it culture. Tacoma culture. Nothing in a specific form dictates Tacoma culture, but the fact that everyone is individual is what makes our town special. It's narrow-minded and small-brained to judge someone based on his or her looks or actions.

Behind the clothes, makeup, and outside of a typical gritty Tacoman, lies a person¬" an individual that tells a life story. Bandito Betty and I have stood outside her downtown apartment and witnessed the individuality at its best and its worst. We've come to believe that our city's sidewalks leak blatant randomness. Out of nowhere walks a man pushing a Sears shopping cart full of oilcans. He returns shortly with an empty cart, stashing it somewhere around an unknown corner. First of all: How the HELL does one find a Sears shopping cart into downtown Tacoma? Secondly, who has that many oilcans and what did he do with them?

Within minutes we feel as though we are reliving a classic scene from the Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah movie Splash. Remember the scene when she first looses her mermaid tail and is wandering naked and confused through the streets of the city? Out of nowhere we see a woman wandering with almost the same exact amount of confusion, with the same exact look on her face. It's as if she's saying,Where the hell am I?It's 9:30 in the morning and who knows where the heck she's been, or what's happened to her.

Shortly after, we witness a gentleman pushing a huge multi-gallon plastic paint pail in a baby stroller. We wondered what the pail's name was and if the gentleman could tell us if it was a boy or a girl.

Bandito looked at me and swore she saw this kind of stuff only when she was with me. Maybe it's ME that brings out the Tacoma uniqueness in people. Maybe the streets are normal(what is normal anyway?) when I am home, and turn creative and interesting when I come out to play. It's one of life's mysteries, I suppose. Like if your refrigerator light is really off when you shut the door.

No one knows what brings these people to do such strange things. At first glance pushing a Sears cart full of oilcans in downtown Tacoma may seem odd, but what if we stopped to ask him his reasons? Do you ever ponder the meaning behind people's actions? When people speed around you off in traffic, do you stop to think that maybe it's a mom with a crying baby in the back¬" who is rushing to the hospital? You never know, do you?

LINK: Toilet Tales archive
LINK: Hell's Kitchen MySpace
LINK: Tighwad Tuesday tonight

DANIEL BLUE: MEET RON SWARNER >>>

Ron Swarner is the co-owner, publisher, editor, and master and magician of the Weekly Volcano. There are few people who work as hard in this town to achieve what they know in their hearts to be their passion. It will be hard to write about Ron without writing about his paper, but seeing as that would seem like shameless self advertising, I will try to write about the man's character instead.

Raised by hippies in the mountains of Zimbabwe, Ron was a special child from the very start. He could speak all seven dialects of the Swahili people by the age of 5 and began a sort of word of mouth news network from village to village that included advertisements for local goats milk for which he received a pig's bladder full every month. His fondest memories are of helping his mother churn the fresh goat milk into cheese. He would take half the cheese to the capitol city of Harare where he quickly learned English from a wealthy safari hunting man named (no shit) Volcano Joe.

Murky details surround Ron's youth, rumor has it that Volcano Joe's dying wish put him on a boat to America, a boat that sailed into our very own Commencement Bay.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

DANIEL BLUE: MEET TAREK JORDAN >>>

Tarek Jordan is a multicultural icon.

Recently obsessed with contacting the future, I actually met Jordan in the past. Our first conversation was several years ago during a ride back from his parent's house in North Tacoma, he struck me then as a clever minded youth with a propensity to seek out the fantastic. Psychedelia has been kind to Tarek.

During a brief encounter with his artistic side in the basement of a now defunct Paris Spleen domicile, I discovered his ability to channel nearly every dominant strain of 70's rock demon as we painted rhythmically in the black light. The backbone of many bands, including the ever-present Drug Purse, this leather clad young townie knows only the limits of his own sardonic soul.

"How has it come to this? I've been trying to get to the future for days," he tells me outside of The Helm gallery as a discount bottle of cough syrup is passed between our hands, "I've been the future, were fucked, man. Jesus never comes back." 

This is the wisdom of our age. This is the brilliance of the hive mind that was created in the basements of an anti-bohemian resistance.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

DANIEL BLUE: MEET SARA ROUGEAU >>>

Sara Rougeau's first bike was a yellow tiger that we found on the side of the road. Tires were flat, the brakes were squeaky but the shifters worked and it had this badass scratching action tiger crest on the headstock.  That was a salad summer, wherein most of the day was spent rolling around with the gang looking for ingredients to the ridiculous salad/gouache that we would eat with everyone that afternoon.

She lived with her father on a golf course at the time and would crash at the warehouse four to five nights a week. Now she belongs here, has her own apartment downtown and a newer, better, faster red 10-speed.   

There is something elegant and yet very childlike about the way that Sara carries herself and the way in which she expresses that self in her explosive marker drawings.  Complex patterns swirl and cope about simple symbolic shapes.  An inordinate amount of color goes into the production, but it always blends as well as one could ask and moves the lens around the communication in question. 

Her wish is for all to be comforted and feel well loved. She is a ruby set in a topaz hand.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

DANIEL BLUE: MEET CHILTON AGRESON >>>

Chilton Agreson stands at attention.

Chilton is an art collector, by day and a black market art distributor by night.  Some people call that stealing. Chilton calls it the redistribution of public treasure. Art is magic, you know, pure magic.  Rich people don't pay gobs of money for spectacular works of art because they are stupid.  They pay so much money for it because they feed off of the magic that the artist put into it.  This magic helps them to be spiritually and emotionally healthy and in turn helps them make more money.  Chilton knows this, and without art, he knows that the common man is suffering.  He weeps as the masses gather in front of their televisions to get a dose of what they know they need. He sobs at the idea that "entertainment" is more attractive than "enlightenment." Chilton knows that the longer you sit and contemplate a great work of art, the more time it has to effect your psyche and bring you to a place of understanding about life and your role in the fabric of it.  He believes that the happiness of that person depends on their ability to find their place in the great weaving of souls that has become our everyday lives. 

"True art rends us under the veil between the physical and the emotional (or spiritual) planes of existence.  It is a physical object, that has the power to effect spiritual space," explains Chilton. 

He wants you to encounter that magic, and is "rescuing" art every day from the hidden places of the greedy elite.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

DANIEL BLUE: MEET SEAN ALEXANDER >>>

Sean Alexander is the co-founder of The Helm gallery on Broadway in Downtown Tacoma.  I trust him when he tells me why my art works, and why it does not.  He is not afraid to pull any punches, and he is never just trying to be nice.   

Long ago, he showed me some dreamland paintings that were hanging in his hallway.  His roomie at the time wanted them gone, and I wanted them on my wall.  I took them for free, and a couple of years later Sean asked for them back.  He said his mom wanted them; she had taken a sudden interest in him as an artist.  I told him that he was S.O.L.  and that his mom could pay him to paint something else.  This may have harmed our relationship, but I own two matching early Alexanders, do you? 

Recently he has begun preparations for the first ever Austin-style Tacoma music festival that will premiere in October in correspondence with the opening of the New Frontier.  This is the future of our town.

Oh, Sean Alexander is also continually inspired by the whales. 

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive
LINK: Natasha waxes New Frontier
LINK: More New Frontier (that didn't open in April)

DANIEL BLUE: MEET JOEL MYERS >>>

Joel Myers was trained in classical dance and modern dance entirely on scholarship in a studio in Auburn.  Kinetically gifted from an early age, Joel was first attracted to martial arts as a means of disciplining his body to function at higher levels of majesty and grace. Now somewhat of a pacifist, his training hardened abdomen was brought into its manhood by the lifting of ballerinas as apposed to the absorption of karate kicks. 

Currently Joel is living in Hilltop Tacoma and dancing in Seattle for Spectrum Dance Theater, but having recently hosted and authored his third feature length show, his career as a choreographer is beginning to show definite promise. Joel has found out how to take what he loves and shape it in a way that not only promotes his own talent, but also cultivates the talents of young dancers who, as he introduced them after the show, are taking jobs in the dance industry all over America. 
Outside of dancing for professional companies and creating his own choreography, Joel teaches all types of dance; one on one, and classes of all ages, skills, and sizes.  You can find him biking his way up and down the hills of our city to and from the bus stop that allows him passage to the north metropolis of Seattle.

LINK: More about Joel in today�s Weekly Volcano
LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

DANIEL BLUE: MEET JASON HEMINGER >>>

Jason Heminger knows how to make things out of wood.  His dream is to live in the forest, cleave his own home from the arms of the mighty fir, and raise his son August to be a mountain man. 

He and his wife Sayde, currently live in the Stadium district near the Parkway Tavern in a Victorian home that they have been carefully restoring for the past few years. Having moved to the city several years ago in an attempt to discover a community different from the one they knew in the suburbs, The Heminger family has had a rough go in luring the people of their city out of their own homes and yards. 

For the first several years that I knew him, Jason worked as a baggage handler for Alaska Airlines. This afforded him the opportunity to travel most anywhere at the drop of a hat. He has been to many places, and celebrated many traditions. His well rounded world view and hardworking nature have brought him to a good place in life, but the uncertainties of the times have given him pause.   

He is currently working on the Port of Tacoma and attempting to sell his house while he and his family decide where to invest their souls next.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive

DANIEL BLUE: MEET LINDA DESANTIS-LAPPING >>>

Linda DeSantis-Lapping is addicted to tea. This is good since her best friend and compatriot, Maureen, co-owns the Mad Hat Tea Company.

Pictured here at Art on the Ave, Linda is wearing a fancy hat that she found.

A ploy-entrepreneur, Linda owns both a graphic design firm and a yoga studio. 

I met Linda at the 100th Monkey party that took place in Claudia's tile factory. She is kind and remembered my name far faster than I could remember hers. I must have asked her for it every time we met for at least a few years. I hate it when people do that to me, it makes me feel unimportant. Linda, however, didn't seem to mind.

She is mild mannered and patient, and an artist in most every sense of the word. Having been a founding member of Hogbot, an arts collective with greats such as Dave Davidson and Mary Kay Johnson, Linda is accustomed to working in tandem with other artists. Collaboration can be a tricky game to play when artists become emotionally attached to their work. Recently she has helped Maureen with two shows at the tea shop: The Crow Show, which was her idea anyway, and a psychedelic show, which was I'm sure born out of some late night girls only belly dance body paint wine binge after hours.

LINK: The Tacoma Files archive