ONE-NIGHT WORLD'S FAIR:

A Brief & True History of The Super Ball

(with original lyrics from the SuperBall CD Sonic Collective)' --"The Reign of SuperBall" by Ramona Silver & Danny Horrid--"Call to Action" by George Meyer--"Bounce" by Barbara Cohen & Mark Fite--"You Are Here" by The Allison MacLeod Band--"The Official SuperBall Theme Song" by The Supergroup''

'

there once was a garden party

the ice cream van did show

 

 

In the beginning, they say, it was just a party. These two brothers from Wisconsin tossed up some lights in the backyard of a rented house in Burbank and called it SuperBall. There was nothing grand or portentous in the air, people say--nothing to indicate all that would follow over the next seven years... Just a party.

That July night in Burbank, California, 1996, neighbors cocked their ears to a strange sound: electric guitar, it sounded like, emitting from a smallish, possibly battery-operated hi-fi. Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold," sounded like, and they turned up the TV. Over the fence or a few doors down, the SuperBall had begun.

How many came that first time? Sixty? Seventy? No one was counting, it was just a party. An old Weber grill smoked away in a corner of the yard; some kid's playhouse, tricked out with lights and a "BOOZE SHACK" sign, kept the spirits flowing. There was chatter and merriment and patio dancing, naturally...but if you wandered into the garage there was also this: small cubes of wood, painted and stacked in galvanized frames hung on white walls with the lighting just so. It looked like art. It looked like some kind of art gallery or something. Back outside, you had another look at that light thing suspended over the yard, that floating sculpture of light and shadow up there... You made another trip to the BOOZE SHACK and you were not surprised, around midnight, when the ice cream van pulled up, easily overpowering the stereo with its kiddy tune.

from now on every song must be at least a B+

both lyrically and danceabilityistically

 

 

Two summers later, the brothers moved the SuperBall a few miles north to their workspace in Sun Valley, but otherwise little changed: there was music as before--though now it thumped mightily from the dark recesses of the discothèque, while outside it rained down live and hard from the open-air bandstand. The solitary Weber grill made the leap as well, in spirit, in the form of a knock-down all-out feast-fight, with over 50 entries and the Champ's Belt of Gastrosuperiority at stake. BOOZE SHACK survived under the banner of the Booze Pavilion, and for a taste of art, guests beheld the enormous revolving gallery wall featuring 20-minute exhibitions by local artists.

I got some chip dip

from a Viking ship

 

 

Over the next four years SuperBall played host to such headliners as the Naked Trucker & T-Bones Show, Mister Mysto the Magician, Dr. Evan Croix, Chief Joseph, Two-Headed Dog (featuring Sashay), and the Hillbilly Hip-Hop Fashion show. Other artists, answering the call of the SuperBall CD, produced original tracks of astonishing beauty and funk--songs and anthems, overtures and rhapsodies, a bouncing sonic collective of SuperBallads--while back in the discothèque, dancers got it on amidst a series of light-and-shadow creations, direct descendents of that first floating sculpture from SuperBall 1. Savvy SuperBallers came early and filled their bellies at 2001's A Taste Odyssey and the Gastronaut Training Facility of SuperBall 7, while the fashionably late headed straight for Booze-Lab 2020, The Booze Viking, and Boozleton, CA.

And everywhere you turned, there was more art: sculpture and print work and photography, as well as self-contained audio-visual sites like Inflate-a-Vision and Brian's Cosmic Experience. Interactive sculptures such as Skeeball and Spooky Pookyland One-Hole Golf Course turned arcade games into non-stop performance pieces, while The World's Biggest Smallest Picture Show admitted two at a time for a two-minute film. There was the World's Largest Novel and the Yo-Yo Champion and the armature from the original King Kong; there was Ed Quirk's Handmade Telescope and The Identical Twins Art Piece and the Tiki-T Dune Buggy... Summer after summer, dozens of spirited artists, musicians, inventors, cooks, diehard volunteers and devotees, converged to produce a one-night World's Fair, a bursting galleria of the unusual and unforeseen, a grand annual shape-shifting expo of art and music and dance and food and gifts and humanity. Word got out.

Seven are the rings I wish I possessed

I'd wave 'em in the face of every SuperBall guest

 

 

And as SuperBall grew (the guest list swelled to over 1,000; special "invitation-passes"--artwork in themselves--were sent out), the wildly creative artvibe of the event merged with the demands of overhead to produce Ball-Mart, a modest little kiosk for which local artisans crafted all manner of boutique apparel, commemorative SuperBall-wear, curios and treasure. Other SuperBall enthusiasts gave their support through private donations, but all comers--patrons, volunteers, artisans, friends, family--all were rewarded with what came to be the hallmark prize of every SuperBall: The SuperBall Ring. Hand-crafted and hand-delivered by an out-of-state jeweler, each year's designer ring was more anticipated, more coveted, more greedily snatched up than the year before. Veteran SuperBallers wore theirs with the pride of Mason's, knowing that no one who hadn't been there, who didn't have one of these rings, couldn't possibly understand what a SuperBall was.

A spherical gem of ballicular funk

You can think what you like but its not what you thunk it would be

This ball is bigger than you and me

 

 

Not that anybody really does understand, however many rings they've got. It was just a party that began in the backyard of a rented house in Burbank and became this Event, this Superparty, this annual creative collaborative in the Valley that drew gifted, industrious people from all over Los Angeles and far beyond, people who just wanted to be a part of it, year after year. Flickr Babes

link,back,linkback,backlink,rank

 Create your own free wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS