Spider Moccasin is a musician, poet, comics artist, and animator whose multi-media event “Echoes of the Grunge Age” screens at Portland’s Clinton Street Theater on Thursday April 17th. Spider is an enrolled Wasco / Warm Springs tribal member who has brought his poetry and music to venues all over the Pacific Northwest and who was profiled in the New York Times story “Return of the Post-Modern Medicine Man.”
Sharing the studio with Spider is Mike Lastra, founder of Smegma Studios and the director of multiple music documentaries, among them Northwest Passage and Satyricon: Madness & Glory. Mike's footage of the experimental jazz composer Sun Ra is sought after by PBS and other media outlets, and his footage of Kurt Cobain will be exhibited at the new Unplugged Museum in Nirvana's hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. Mike's collection of animated shorts, “Brain Follies,” is scheduled to play at the Clinton Street Theater along with “Echoes of the Grunge Age.”
Spider and Mike share stories with Bill Dodge and S.W. Conser about Portland's indie music scene, underground comics, jazz age literature, and the anarchic genius of cable access television.
- KBOO