CougarHorse & 5733 – piedmont ave’s cool factor soars

A couple additions to Piedmont Avenue have me thinking that this little stretch of Oaktown has gotten way cooler…

The first is the funky little vintage & artisan clothing store CougarHorse. The name alone gives insight into what you can expect to find here… items that are interesting, beautiful, and even hilarious.

cougarhorse piedmont ave, cougar horse oakland

A tiny storefront, barely visible from street (I only noticed it because it’s close to the cemetery I like to walk in), makes way to a tiny shop consisting of three even tinier rooms. Despite its limited size, however, a ton of style is packed in by its owners – brother sister duo Dana & Reed. Oakland natives, in fact their family goes back 4 generations in Oaktown, it seemed the logical place to set up shop.

trucker caps, cougarhorse oakland

Brother Reed is the artist in the family… self-taught, he finds his inspiration in the daily experiences he takes in. All the designs are his and there’s a collection of custom hand-dyed and screen-printed T’s prominently displayed amidst all the other eclectic offerings… vintage shoes and scarves, interesting accessories, wonderful jewelry (both new and old), and a crazy cool record collection, all at really reasonable prices.

cougarhorse oakland, cougarhorse vintage

Everything is displayed in creative and artful ways… items pour out of old suitcases… or drape from ladders… or are framed by funky cowboy paintings. It’s like a supercool garage sale where every single thing is a real treasure.

hipster clothing, plaid shirts, cougarhorse oakland

I asked how they source their vintage finds… Here’s what they had to say:

The vintage pieces are a labor of love. We really enjoy the hunt – taking a day and driving to out of the way places in search of treasures is fantastic. Saturday morning estate sales are tons of fun too. Honestly, we do not have the time to be fully in the vintage game, like the ladies at Mercy Vintage (also on Piedmont Avenue)… they are fantastic curators. The artwork and vintage is just another small piece of what is inspiring to us and something we want to share with others.

Guess I’ll have to do another post on Mercy Vintage!

vintage clothing oakland, custom T's oakland, cougarhorse oakland

Next up is 5733… You know ’em right? Street artist Eddie Colla‘s clothing company – they make just about the coolest T-shirts around. And they’re made right here in Oaktown with eco-ink, no sweatshop labor, and a tag-line you gotta love… “We hope our clothing makes you look good, feel good, get laid… Whatever makes you happy.”

5733 is opening a new retail store and gallery space on Piedmont Ave and the Grand Opening is this Saturday May 1st.  Here’s their plug…

To celebrate our new opening, and as a way to say thanks to all of our supporters, 5733 will be giving away a brand-new, event-exclusive colorway of a new t-shirt in addition to various prints, posters, and stickers to the first fifty guests, additionally, all apparel will be marked down 25% for our grand opening.

Hear that? First fifty guests get a FREE t-shirt. Better get there early!

5733 Apparel and Art – Grand Opening
May 1st – International Worker’s Day
4125 Piedmont Ave, Oakland CA.
Store opens at noon, party begins at 7PM.
Beats by Tibbs and Lankston
Food and drink compliments of Chez Simone and friends

5733 gallery, 5733 clothing store, 5733 retail opening

photo courtesy of 5733

Ave Maria ~ Hail Mary

Here’s another one of those incredible giant wheat pastes… spotted just around the corner from the last one (abandoned building on San Pablo near 35th street freeway overpass).  This is the biggest one yet, spanning at least 15 feet wide, and fashioned out of more than six 3-foot wide strips of paper.

hail mary, giant wheat paste, east bay street art

hail mary wheatpaste, ave maria wheatpaste, bison wheatpaste

“Ave Maria” is latin for “Hail Mary,” a traditional Catholic prayer asking for the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Interesting…

giant wheatpaste, bison wheatpaste, east bay graffiti

Similar to the others, a bison is depicted with some type of bomber plane encasing (or replacing) its head.  But unlike the others, this one has more than four legs.  Hmmm….

Others:

Pinhole Photography!!!

For those who are unfamiliar with pinhole photography, or those who are, but still find themselves wondering (in this day and age of instant digital gratification) Why?, I’ll tell you… but I’m going to use someone else’s words. There’s a wonderful short essay titled “Why Pinhole? Why Indeed!” and the crux of it is this…

Pinhole is photography at its most basic. I love the freedom it affords any and all who take it up. As a means of expression it frees us from the bonds of the camera salesmen and the companies who seek to create ever fancier cameras that take the intuition out of making photographs.

I couldn’t agree more.  And that’s one of the wonderful things about Looking Glass Photo… in addition to the latest and greatest in digital, they’ve got all kinds of fun “toy” cameras (I bought my Holga there) and they’ll talk your ears off about film.  Yes, FILM.  I don’t know about you guys, but I actually miss film. The folks at Looking Glass encourage me to pick it up again, experiment with it, and remember what it was I found so captivating about photography in the first place.

Here’s my most successful image from last sunday’s Pinhole Photography Workshop…

pinhole photo, negative print film

As you can see, this is a negative print. We used negative paper because it has more “latitude” than positive print paper (meaning it’s more forgiving when you screw up). Which is easy to do with pinhole photography because there’s no light meter and no built-in computer determining the perfect exposure for you. Below is the inverted image, which you can see is slightly overexposed (at 30 seconds)…

I tried to create a ghosted image of myself by standing in the photo frame for about half that time, but all you can see is my ankles and calves (between tree and stop sign). Not exactly the effect I was going for. But that’s half the fun… it’s a bit of a mystery.

pinhole photography, negative print paper

We started out the workshop by building our own pinhole cameras. Boxes were provided, or you could bring your own, and the helpful folks from Looking Glass instructed us to:

  • paint the interiors and any see thru parts black
  • drill a pinhole into a tiny super thin sheet of metal (this would be our lens)
  • drill a larger hole into our box
  • mount the tiny sheet of metal with hole behind the larger hole (tape in place)
  • create “shutter” with piece of gaffer’s tape
  • and VOILA, one camera created!

Here are some pics of us building our cameras…

pinhole camera workshop, looking glass photo

pinhole camera workshop, looking glass photo

pinhole camera workshop, looking glass photo

Next we went into the darkroom to load film into our boxes. As I mentioned above we started with negative print film to work on getting our exposure right. We were instructed to try various lengths of time, develop each one, and see which one worked best. The exposure times really varied depending on the size of the hole drilled, and the lighting conditions (full sun, shade, etc.)

Probably the most fun for me was developing the sheets of paper in the darkroom. There’s nothing quite like watching an image unfold, almost magically, as your paper sways back and forth in a small sea of liquid, dimly lit by a single amber bulb. It’s pretty cool.

Here are a couple shots of the darkroom…

pinhole workshop at looking glass photo

looking glass berkeley, photo darkroom berkeley

The Looking Glass is in the process of scanning all the images from Sunday’s workshop and will have one from each participant online.  They should be up by Friday, you can check these links…

True TrustoCorp.

What a weekend! Wow. I hope you all had as much fun as I did. I pretty much did it all, and I’ll be sharing some of the details throughout the week, but right now I want to share this very cool piece of street art. It’s a true TrustoCorp.

trustocorp, trustocorp street sign, trustocorp graffiti

A friend wrote in after my No Killing Anytime post to say that the series looked like the work of TrustoCorp. They certainly did, but they actually weren’t. They were wheatpastes that had been applied over existing real street signs. The way TrustoCorp does it is they manufacture real metal signs.

When this one caught my eye initially, I thought it was a real city sign. Woah, I thought, Berkeley really is progressive! (Sign was spotted right outside Looking Glass Photo on Telegraph Ave where the Pinhole Workshop was held yesterday… great fun… more on that later.) But as I got closer I spotted the TrustoCorp logo (the T inside the “wings”) and then this on the back…

trustocorp sign, trustocorp berkeley, real men use fists

I was particularly excited to see this piece of street art because the whole blogittersphere was abuzz last week with the sightings of possibly Banksy pieces in San Fran, and I was feeling a little left out…
http://spotsunknown.com/new-banksy-in-chinatown/
http://missionlocal.org/2010/04/famed-unseen-street-artist-banksy-marks-the-mission/

Folks aren’t sure if these are the real deal (they look pretty authentic to me) or the work of a copycat artist, but either way, it’s certainly great P.R. for the recent release of the new street art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film had a sneak preview showing in S.F. on the 15th, and is now playing Bay-wide at a few select locations…

Exit Through the Gift Shop Showtimes

In any case, I think Mr. Banksy and the folks from TrustoCorp should make their way over to Oaktown! C’mon y’all, show us what you got…