Emergency Casserole

Like so many Austinites, I have been finding the scattered trinkets, collages, and toys left by Science Bear Arcade for years now. The bulk of their work is an exercise in randomness, from rescripted Garfied comics in which the hero dawns a mustache and spouts seemingly random insanities, to homemade meat/doll combos. Many of us are familiar with Science Bear Arcade and its larger artistic community Palfloat. It is with this prior knowledge of their antics that I gleefully anticipated seeing their variety show, Emergency Casserole.

What I found was a delightfully cacauphonous mixture of music, sketch, and performance.  The show itself, like the the discarded trinkets littered arond town for which palfloat is already known, was an ecclectic and almost nonsensical affair injected with humor. Often I found myself laughing at the non-sequiter monologues and dialogues even when I did not know why. Lines like: "I'm ready for some new bagel flavors," and "My first job out of college was analyzing ZZ-Top lyrics," kept the show feeling whimsical.

The patchwork performances were tied together by the weird humor of the River Boat Captain, who hosted a quiz show in which the audience could win prizes for answering unusual bits of trivia. In fact, there were prizes given away throughout the entire performance, ranging from the usual Science Bear Arcade knick-knacks like Nerf Margaritas and Arby-Dolls, to Palfloat DVD's and Top Gun on VHS.

Some of the highlights of the show included Community Lotion performing a clever song about the chestburster scene in the film Alien and a hilarous sketch in which a man endures the worst job interview in history. Also noteworthy was an interesting performance piece in which the artist painted while using her limbs to cast shadows to grinding musical score. The show was backdropped by bizzarre projections by miss Lori 16mm Varga and the music was handled by the fake mustasched DJ Trail Mix, a cowboy Burt Reynolds look-alike.

Also, the food at Cherrywood Cafe was excellent. After the show I learned that they were giving away paintings, so I grabbed this one:

It was a ton of fun. They do shows with some frequency, and I definitely recommend checking the next one out.
Check out the blogs of some of the artists:
http://amandahbjones.wordpress.com/
http://www.palfloat.com/b/

and here is a link to some slides by Lory 16mm Varga:
http://www.mnae.org/gallery/lori-surfer-varga-FILM-and-SLIDE-installations