A huge thanks to Cory for taking note of our work – we couldn’t be more thrilled.
And welcome, BoingBoing readers! We hope you enjoy what you see here and spread the word about our project.
Somewhere out there, we just know there’s a music lover who needs a handbuilt xylophone, Xylovan rides and a personal Xylovan appearance or two – Take a gander at our perks and give us a hand!
Please jump in, check out our video and give as much as you can to help XyloVan get back on the road and all gussied up with new lights, sound and instruments.
Please share this link with your friends and help us bring more music to the people. What’s in it for you? Aside from keeping one of the world’s weirdest, most interactive art cars in action?
Well, handsome schwag, ruggedly beautiful handcrafted aluminum amulets, gorgeous musical instruments, personal appearances by XyloVan and a helluva lot more. Please come check it out and give us a hand!
a) We live on a narrow, hilly street, but most of the neighbors are cool.
b) We’re almost ready to kick off our IndieGogo campaign to give Xylovan a badly-needed new engine
c) Not all the neighbors are cool, it seems
d) We just jumpstarted it (had to use both my car and an auxiliary power pack and a lot of prayer), moved it 10 feet and posted this note on it:
A Note to Our Neighbors!
Hi:
We’re the family that built Xylovan 4 years ago, and it has delighted thousands of people who have had a chance to play on it wherever it goes.
Please know that the vehicle is not abandoned. It’s just awaiting a heart transplant that we can’t yet afford.
The engine blew a head gasket last year, so we cannot move it more than a few feet until we can raise the money to buy a new engine.
As it turns out – just as we were preparing an online fundraising campaign this month at IndieGogo.com to raise the $5,000 we need – one of you complained to the Parking Authority, and we got a ticket and narrowly avoided having it towed from the street today at even greater cost.
It seems we owe you an apology for not having moved it sooner – and perhaps for not talking with you directly about our handmade musical instrument.
All of our direct neighbors have told us they are comfortable with its parking place and they enjoy having it around. But we did not reach you – and for that, we are sorry.
Please do feel comfortable contacting us directly – we don’t bite – and let us understand your concerns so we can work to address them directly.
Xylovan *is* here to stay – it’s part of our lives and the lives of more of your other neighbors than you may realize – and we hope that we can work with you to make you feel more at ease with it as part of our neighborhood together.
Here’s the good news – We expect to raise the money within about 30 days and repair the engine soon thereafter. and we will be working all spring to get the van cleaned up, repainted and ready to bring music to more people. So while Xylovan will always be big and a little weird-looking, at least it will look more attractive and move a lot more often.
In the meantime, we will try to keep the van parked closer to the neighbors who appreciate it (and farther from your door) – and we hope you will take a little time to learn more about us, and about our musical art car.
Yours,
The Reeds | 310.722.3392
Xylovan.com (and) Facebook.com/Xylovan
We really hope they contact us so we can do right by them. We can’t keep paying tickets, and we really can’t park it anywhere substantially different.
The Light Fandango parked at Swing CityLike XyloVan’s other mutation (Janus), The Light Fandango took shape over many weeks of building, sewing and all-round hackery.
And like Janus, the final product was disassembled for transport (via its own bad self) to the playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where we then built everything back onto XyloVan to achieve its full mutation as The Light Fandango. (Here’s the complete build log).
Last time, the crew was, um, me. I had some excellent help on teardown, but building Janus took me 2-1/2 18-hour days.
Sam the indomitable
Sam the enthused
Sam and me hanging the halo
Sam and Anna sleeving fabric onto the halo segments
Base camp, base vehicle.
Hitgirl helps reattach the keyboards
Framework built atop the passenger cage, Halo sleeved and hung
This year, we had an excellent on-playa crew: Sam Hiatt, Julie Demsey, Lindsay VanVoorhis, Dave Ayers and Jeremiah Peisert all kicked in (as did son Biomass and daughter Hitgirl). We didn’t take a ton of photos because – hey, we were busy!
We rebuilt the framework out of pre-cut 1-inch EMT tubing and bolted it to the already-in-place passenger cage with U-clamps.
We then assembled the three sections of pre-cut, pre-bent (thanks, Bender!) tubing, and sleeved the pre-sewn lighting-scrim fabric onto the halo, and then hoisted the sections one at a time up on top of the framework – a series of struts sticking out horizontally from the passenger cage.
Then we let down the fabric and anchored it around the van, and attached the 10 fabric panels that hug the Ford ClubWagon XLT’s endearingly brutish 1985 body work – skinning the entire thing in about 10-1/2 hours till it looked like the photo at the top.
We hung all 14 chandeliers from the tips of the struts (thanks, Kristina, Christo and Lee!)
I plugged in the LED light strips, only to discover that a power-supply problem was preventing things from working correctly, but Spencer Hochberg, our genius Arduino engineer crawled around underneath and got it running again pretty quickly (thanks, Spencer and Rina!).
More pictures and videos to follow in the next post. Meantime – thank you SO MUCH to Sam, Julie, Lindsay, Dave and Jeremiah (and everyone else who lent a hand) for helping us realize this lunatic dream.
We were gonna drive up there, set up XyloVan for all the Swing City visitors to play, get re-married on Tuesday, volunteer at Gate and Cafe again – just have a total ball.
Xylovan suffered a mysterious overheating problem en route to the playa. After toiling 12 hours to replace the thermostat and water pump in a gas station in one of the sketchier parts of Pacoima, we were heartbroken to discover that the problem still wasn’t cured, so we made the best decision we could.
Xylovan is being towed home to Silver Lake, and we’re offloading everything to a rental van for the big drive to Black Rock City.
We have important business there – renewing our wedding vows after 19 marvelous years together!
Lucidity Festival was a much needed calm in the storm of our lives. Lately, it’s seemed like the plates we’re spinning are spinning us, and someone keeps adding more plates! At some point, your realize your life is living you, and you need to re-center, to find peace and solidity among solid souls with good intent.
So you came to the Lucidity Festival (again) , and you lose yourself in play and art and noise, and embrace old friends and make new ones and then you remember what it was you were up to before you got too busy to smile.
And then you smile.
We were so glad to bring the van out again and invite you all to play. Thank you all for the lovely sounds you made with us. We hope you found your peace, too. Maybe we’ll see you on the playa, if not sooner.
We built Seraphim, a 24-foot-high multi-ton wooden sculpture, in the desert last weekend near Joshua Tree, for BEquinox, the inaugural spring gathering of the Los Angeles Burning Man community.
Four artists adorned the flame vortex with angels representing the four largest cultures of modern L.A. – Latino, African, European and Asian – and participants wrote and painted their dreams, fears, desires and wishes onto salvaged pallet slats that we then screwed and nailed to the outsides of the vortex.
When the structure was almost complete, we secreted “The Human Spirit” – an angel sculpted in steel – inside and then finished walling her up. This weekend, we gathered for BEquinox – nearly 1,000 of us – and enjoyed each others’ art, music, libations and company.
Then we fueled the structure with gasoline, kerosene and lamp oil, lit road flares and put it to the torch.
Flames roared into the gentle desert night, warming and exciting us all, burning away the structure and revealing the surprise – the scorched, warped steel angel twisting inside the howling, wind-driven blaze.
Just a hunch – I think this is the start of a long and marvelous tradition for those around L.A. who burn brightest – in art and spirit as in life.
Huge hugs and thanks to everyone who welcomed me to the crew and made this the best, hardest, most rewarding thing I’ve ever helped build.
The L.A. Burning Man Decompression Arts Festival grew in scope and beauty this year. We were really staggered and touched by all of you gorgeous people who came by to play and chat with us – and we wish we had met even more of you, but Decom beckoned, so we left XyloVan in your busy hands and went off to explore. Here are a few of our clumsy snaps (we were “experimenting” with motion blur and grain … okay, we really need to invest in a new camera) and some more thoughts.
We took the Saucer Squadron out on a few sorties and danced through the crowds, we noshed (banana and nutella crepes … oooooohhh mama). And we hung out under XyloVan’s rooftop canopy and listened to you all play – so many styles of drumming, plinking and symphonic syncopation that we basically emptied the adjective jar trying to find new ways to describe what you all bring to the van.
This year we were also fortunate to join the crew that built Seraphim, the first communal sculpture created by L.A. burners. We helped visitors write their hopes, dreams, fears prayers and grief onto flame-colored pallet slats that we then attached to the sculpture for later burning.
Hats off to Split, Widget, Michael, Igor and all the engineers, artists and hardcore just-keep-making-till-it’s-done volunteers who built that gorgeous work over the past month, set it up last week and then pulled it down and loaded it into a van for storage on Sunday. We can’t wait to see it meet its intended fate – a glorious bonfire – at a place still to be determined.
We scraped ourselves up Sunday morning (after going to sleep at 3:30 a.m.) to break down XyloVan and rejoin the Seraphim crew for a few hours – still marveling.
L.A. Decom went big this year – in the best fashion possible. Kudos to all of you. Stand by for a few videos.
