secretly-important.com

blast off!

Last Friday I mentioned that there was some big news coming, and now I am delivering on that news.  We are moving!  Yes, we are moving to Wordpress.com.  Blogspot was a great place to start, especially for someone like me who knew very little about blogging.  As the blog grew and my desires to expand the blog were realized, I began to understand the limits of what blogspot could do for me.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend blogspot to anyone just starting out.  But having investigated the capabilities and the customizations possible within wordpress they looked to be the best fit for the blog.

So what is changing?  Well, two major things; the first is the web address, you can now find us at www.secretlyimportant.wordpress.com.  The second major change is the general direction of the blog.

The old format was a Free-for-all of posts that could literally cover any topic that came to mind.  As we added more contributors I narrowed the range of topics a bit.  With the move comes a more specific topic range.  Here is a listing of topics that will be listed on the new blog.  Each section will have it’s own drop down menu a the top which you can navigate to and select from.

art:  visual arts, music, dance, theater, books, movies, television, comedy, etc.

community: events, restaurants, shows, sights, gardening, shopping, politics, sports, etc.

callings: articles concerning the struggle to reach the point in life where you can earn a living doing what you’re passionate about.

interviews: interviews with secretly important people.

contributor secrets: these posts can cover a broader range of topics that couldn’t be categorized but still fit with the themes of secretly important.

garden project: readers will be familiar with my documentation of my first gardening experiment.  all future posts on the topic will be found here.

We have a new mission statement as well:

Imagine there is a band you love, a book you read, a restaurant you frequent, or an opinion you have on a current event.  You may not think of these as important but here, they are.  They are secretly important.

What will set us apart from  the vast number of blogs already out there that cover the same ground as us?

What makes us different from your standard blog that reviews and informs on community events, options, people, and the arts, is that each post is written from the contributors distinct point of view.  How the topic effects the writer, how the writer relates to the topic, and what they mean to the writer are the most important factors to each post.

Even now as the new secretly important begins to take shape I am already looking ahead to the future and what we will be able to do. I have a laundry list of ideas but 

first and foremost will be another eventual shift to our first self hosted blog.

So for now please check out the new blog and all the great contributors, myself, eric, jaime, and jeanne, and stay turned for our shift into the world of self hosting.

Lastly please tell your friends about us, like us on facebook, repost our links... we could really use the help... i don’t mean to sound desperate.  I honestly appreciate all our readers.

5...4...3...2...1... ignition... blastoff!!!!!

posted by brian snider

folk my life

It's been some time since I last contributed, but hopefully you've enjoyed the wonderful posts by our new contributors Jaime and Jeanne.  I promise that there is some really big news coming this weekend.  But in the meantime I wanted to get a post up on a community event that is occurring.

If you had told me four years ago that I would ever even dream of attending the Folklife festival in Seattle I would have called you a liar.  Having taken a look at the list of 2007 performers there is a reason why.  Well it's four years later and here I am preparing to attend my very first Folklife festival.

Why?  Well, it's free which in this day and age is a true novelty though considering that this is essentially the epicenter of aging and neo-hippie movement I really shouldn't expect anything other than free.

There is another reason for my attendance and that is an appearance by LAKE.  Readers of the blog will know that LAKE is my favorite band and I find it hard to pass up an opportunity to see them live for free.  I hadn't really thought of them as folk until now, I'm still not sure I do as I've also heard them described as indie pop, indie jazz rock, pop-folk-jazz-rock!  I suppose I don't really care how you describe them, indie folk is just fine.

When I saw that LAKE was playing I took a closer look at other bands playing this weekend and found that actually there were a few who I would be interested in seeing.  Angelo Spencer, Karl Blau, and the Curious Mystery are all good bands.

I began to rethink of Folklife not just as a gathering of free loving dirty hippies who have liberated themselves from the constraints of day jobs, deodorant, and shampoo, and I began to think of folklife as a rather hip place to be.

As I write that last paragraph something hits me; I no longer have a day job, in the past two weeks I have forgot deodorant on more than one occasion, and I have loathed taking a shower.  Perhaps I belong at Folklife more than I originally thought.  Perhaps the festival will be just as I expected, and I will not feel like the outsider who has just come to watch his favorite band.  Instead I will completely fit in and be mistaken as one of them.


Every day on the radio I hear stories about how the economy has effected people and that they will not be taking extravagant vacations for, if any at all for Memorial Day.  Well, here is something free, something fun, something hippie, yuppie, emo, hipster, and family friendly.  I suggest that at the very least you look through the schedule of events to see if anything strikes your fancy.

The festival starts today 5/27 and runs through Monday evening.  My personal opinion is that Saturday is their strongest day, but go ahead embrace your inner hippie and stop by.

posted by: brian snider

bitches be crazy

One evening in September of 2009 a group of actors, directors and writers came together in Manhattan to create a series of 10-minute one-act plays for AWE Creative Group’s 24Hour PlayFun. The teams were chosen at random, and each play shared the same opening line, same random line, and use of the same prop. This was the birthplace of Crazy Bitches! , a story of Momma and her two haggard daughters, Cantina Marie and Lisa Marie, and the men they entertain/abduct. I had the good fortune of being drawn from a hat to work with the writer, David Slate, and I’ve been performing it ever since.

The story is an absurd comedy, one that involves sex, serpents, cannibalism, donkeys, Mexican jail, tattoos and sausage. There are many reasons we each keep coming back to perform again. It has, over the last two years, been one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences of my career. In a city of individuals, where everyone is busy and set out to succeed on their own, the bitches have surpassed stereotype and found loyalty to one another. Against all odds, the majority of us have come back and made the time to play with each other. If I had known when I first moved to New York eight years ago that I would have the opportunity to continue to perform a play that was written specifically for me, with people I loved and cherished, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m still pinching myself.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this play is the audience reviews we receive. After a dear friend of mine watched our recent performance, he told me it reminded him of why he got into theatre in the first place: because it was fun! What a concept. I have been acting since I was a child, and certainly was first interested in this career because it was fun. I want to play, to enjoy, to create characters and relationships on stage. Since that time has passed there have been moments when it was easy to lose sight of what first intrigued me. Somewhere along the line a different kind of pressure is exposed and one can forget about the pleasure of acting. I am a trained actor and I take my work seriously, and I also perform in a variety of styles. No matter how dramatic or silly the play may be, I believe it is important to put in the table work. However, when the joy in sharing the story of the play is lost, the audience stops caring to watch. There is nothing worse than watching an actor uncomfortable or disenchanted on stage. It has been a gift to rediscover the amount of fun I can have while acting, and I am convinced that is why our audiences keep coming back. Crazy Bitches! encourages the actors to be as ridiculous as possible, and the audience and actors alike get to reap the benefits.

The excitement of this play stimulates ideas from the entire team. The writer has plans to extend the play further, we have talks of taking it on an East Coast tour, filming it for webisodes or a short film, etc. It is extremely thrilling to be part of such a twisted, perverse package. Right now we seem to have found our home in gay bars, namely the Stonewall Inn, the perfect place to try new things and play to a quirky and receptive audience. We have performances coming up May 30, 31, June 6 and 7, and assuredly more on the way, if not at Stonewall then at other venues.

What I have learned from the success of Crazy Bitches! is that audiences want to watch people act like fools on stage, and that I am honored to oblige. I will continue to play Lisa Marie, the badass Southerner who spent months in a Mexican jail for smuggling heroin across the border, for as long as the people will let me. I look forward to the future adaptations of this infectious tale, and can’t wait to play with my friends again on the 30th.

posted by jeanne lauren smith

the most pretentious thing i do

showing that I know what a record is

I grow a beard, I have been known to wear skinny jeans, I enjoy indie music that no one else has heard of, and I listen to jazz.  Despite this list of pretentious things that could drive most people to judge me severely, the most pretentious thing I do is buying and listening to vinyl records.

Listening to records is not inherently pretentious (unless you’re under thirty five years of age) however there is a contingent of people who believe that those under thirty five listening to records are pretentious.  There has never been a need for my generation to buy a vinyl LP.  With the advent of CD’s and now MP3’s all the music we could ever want is right at our fingertips, more accessible and portable than ever before.

In my early teens I had a brief obsession with vinyl.  I didn’t have a record player in my room so if I wanted to listen to them I would have to bother the entire family.  They weren’t exactly thrilled by the musical stylings of Big Black, the Lemonheads, Bikini Kill, or the Melvins.  I rarely listened to them and they were bought mostly because I liked the idea of owning records.

It had been years since I bought a record but last November I inherited an Audio Technica turntable and decided that I wanted to start listening to LP’s again.  I raided my parents collection and began scouring used record and bookstores for my favorite classic albums; Lou Reed, Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder, Charles Mingus, and Patti Smith.

The prime time for used record buying was about ten to fifteen years ago.  The nostalgia of the vinyl era had not yet kicked in and the baby boomers were busily selling off their record collection and replacing them with CD’s.  Now that they come back en vogue, good used records are hard to find.  You need to rely on luck and good timing to snatch up a well priced classic.

Part of the fund of record collecting is in the hunt for your favorites.  Many have been reissued and range in price from $12 to $40.  This is a spread that makes most baby boomers cringe.

I didn’t start buying records because of their supposed higher sound quality.  I didn’t start because it’s what the hipsters are doing (Though I will not deny that when you spin a record on a turn table you do feel a little more cool).  I started because listening to a vinyl LP is a far different experience from what we have now.

Two sides, a brief intermission as you flip the record, no playlists, just one album all the way through.  I began to hear songs in ways I never had before, like each one was a  piece to a puzzle that I only begin to see when the the needle lifts and the arm retracts.

Where this really becomes pretentious on my part is that I also buy new LP’s by my favorite indie bands; LAKE, Chain and the Gang, Christmas, Thao & Mirah.  There is no logical reason for buying these, although often you will get a code for downloading the MP3’s with the record.  I get the same listening experience from these as I do the classics.  I found that I appreciate them as an actual song enjoyed by itself not just as something to occupy myself while doing other things.

Vinyl has a special quality to it, a testament to a time of well built goods.  It proves that sometimes they get it right the first time.  No one is clamoring to get a hold of videotapes because of their superior quality to Blu-Ray, and most people would prefer to drive a Ford Focus over a Model-T.  Vinyl stands the true test of time as the pinnacle of music quality.

Those who don’t understand what makes vinyl special just see pretentious people who refuse to change with the time or want only to go against the grain.  They look at us the way some see handlebar mustaches, bow ties, and typewriters.  They are the devices of those who prefer to live ironically, this was cemented when Urban Outfitters began selling turn tables and only hipster records.

My new found love for records is neither ironic or novelty, I honestly enjoy buying and listening to them.  I’m not anti MP3 or technology, I just prefer the vinyl record.  It’s such simple technology that also happens to be the best.  This still makes the entire act of buying and listening pretentious, but honestly I don’t give a shit.

By the way if you come across a copy of Lou Reed’s Transformer, let me know.

posted by: brian snider

a sold artist

When I was little I wanted to be an artist.  I was pretty good, I even had the drive necessary to make that career happen.

I had no vision for what my life as an artist should look like.  I had no vision of myself or how I would live or act.  I didn’t imagine myself living in New York attending my latest art opening wearing a beret and a black turtle neck.  I knew only that my love for making art was pure and that I was happy while doing it.

In elementary school I was always the best artist in class and I milked my role as such, acting humble sometime rejecting compliments with “No, I’m not that good.”  When I got to high school I began to notice that in terms of artistic growth my peers were surpassing me.

I’d become lazy and impatient with the process.  I knew the basics, that everything in its most pure form is just simple geometric shapes, how to place light and create proper shadows, and how to use perspective to create depth.  I knew how to implement these concepts I just didn’t have the patience to take the necessary steps.  It was apparent that if I could make those essentials work for me I could be good, without them my work was off.  Out of embarrassment I stopped making art.

I replaced my desire for visual art with the desire  to be a rock star.  I could fully envision 

what my life as a hard edged tortured rock star would look like; ripped jeans, flannel shirts, a sweaty audience begging me to play my hit song before I smash my guitar into a thousand splinters expressing my anguish.  Eventually this died too as again I grew impatient with the guitar and refused to practice chords or scales.

After my dream of being a rock star faded I put my efforts into being an actor.  Again I fully envisioned my life on stage; speaking the words of Shakespeare, Chekov, Pinter, and Albee.  I eventually went to college to continue to pursue this ambition only to realize as a junior that I was too lazy to practice my skills necessary to grow.  Not only that but the day to day life of an actor seemed severely disappointing.  After turning down a role to hold a spear in a production of Hamlet I officially retired.

I have always loved writing but before college I had never thought of it as a legitimate career choice.  After I stopped acting I put all my efforts into writing.  For the first time I found that I enjoyed the process just as much as I reveled in the product.

Like my visual art aspirations, I had no idea what my life as a writer should look like.  I knew only that I was happy while doing it from start to finish.  I found that no matter how great the struggles, no matter how disappointing the rejection I still wanted to write.  

This was why I found what happened last October to be rather ironic.

My senior year of college I copied a picture of Audrey Hepburn that I’d seen at IKEA for Jaime.  This awakened a desire in me to begin painting again, not for a living but just for fun.  In the next few years I amassed more paintings than I could fit on my limited wall space so quite canvases a few ended up in the back of a closet. 

Last October as we prepared to move from Los Angeles to Seattle we held a yard sale.  It was more like a Fire Sale, as we were selling off just about everything but the essentials.  This included four paintings I’d done that I was ready to get rid of rather then haul back north.  My expectations were that someone looking for a cheap canvas to paint over would buy them.

When one woman picked up a black and white painting and asked how much, I was about to say $2 when Jaime grabbed my arm and spoke up.  “$5!” She said, the girl looked enthused and bought it.  Later I watched as a car made a sudden stop in the middle of the road, reversed and then a woman got out of the car to buy a specific pastel drawing.  Once again I sold this one for just $5 and she was thrilled with the new canvas she had to hang in her home.

By the end of the day I’d sold all but one painting.  Drunk with success I insisted the last canvas go for $5 and no less, the little Mexican man offered me $2 but I turned him down.  I can’t go around selling Brian Snider originals for $2, it would destroy the market.

It was then that I realized that I had done it.  My childhood goal was complete, I’d become a sold artist.  There were three of my paintings hanging in three separate southern LA homes.  I imagined that they would invite guests over for dinner and while sitting on the couch they would ask their hosts, “I love that painting.  Where did you get it?”  With pride they would reply “Oh, thats just a little thing I picked up at a garage sale in Los Feliz.”

this painting is unfinished

I did some mental math and taking in the cost of the canvas and supplies I figured that I’d made a negative $60 profit.  Not much but it was a start.  Now if only I could get someone to pay me, even if just $5, for my writing.

posted by: brian snider

another year gone...

On Monday I said good-bye to my 26th year, and hello to the big 2-7. This is not a milestone, but it gets me one step closer to the age that is. I’m officially now in my late twenties, a status I find means many things. One-I’m now officially “past my prime” and should start making babies immediately. Two-I officially would love to start making babies immediately (joking B...sort of)

Seriously though, as my twenties draw to an end, I think back to how much shit I managed to get done on my pathway to becomingan adult. I met Brian, got my first place, graduated college, worked my first full-time job, did seriousdamage to my liver, moved to L.A., got married, began to watch most of my friends get married, changed my career, spent time confused as to what my new career should be, moved back to Seattle and now...turned 27! Not too shabby and I still have 3 years left!

In a culture obsessed with youth, I’m weirdly turned on by the idea of getting older. I’m excited to begin this next chapter that will contain many new experiences; such as not over-drafting on my checking account each month, a trip to Europe and babies...oh wait, what?

Whatever is in store for me, I like the idea of moving forward, toward something knew. Fingers crossed my reoccurring dream of realizing that I never showed up for 12th grade History class doesn’t come true, and I now I have to redo my senior year of high school. Age ain’t nothing but a number, but I’m pretty stoked to tell people mine. I’m 27 and I currently,(the key word here), don’t live with my parents, not a bad place to be!

So here’s to a new year, if you read the blog I’ll let you know how it goes!

posted by jaime navarro