Hello, all!

We’re presently on our way to Portland, Oregon so that we can check out the Bus Project’s Trick or Vote event. We’ll be following folks around and talking with them about how the massive GOTV effort was put planned, organized, and executed.

To digest upon in the meantime, here we feature video of our talk with Gabriel Brown, a Spokane, Washington-based performance artist and Americorps volunteer. We spoke with him for a bit last night. He talked a bit his art — he panhandles, dumpster dives, and begs for high-end consumer goods — and the responses his efforts evoke. Considering talk about a generational embrace for “authenticity” gets thrown around a lot with regard to this particular age-group (applying more, so far as I can tell, to those on the elder end of the generational spectrum), Gabriel’s commentary on trying to display a modern — or “real” — value system by projecting an absurd and ironic image of a feeling of necessity onto high-end consumer goods is an amazingly apt articulation of what is talked up as a generational desire to get to the bottom of what is “real.”

We’ll have more on this, and a ton of fun stuff from Portland coming soon…

Be sure to check out the site in the meantime.