The Daily Daren Podcast

Episode 27: Irrational Fears (Part Three)

Follow Daren Todd on all things social at: https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links [https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links] I developed an irrational fear of balloons sometime in my childhood. Honestly I don't like any unexpectedly loud noises – I get this clenched up feeling in my back and shoulders whenever motorcycles speed by making a bunch of noise, or when I’m in a club where the music is so loud you can’t think.  But balloons sort of developed into a bigger dislike, I don't even like holding a balloon or being around it, because when it inevitably pops, it's going to be loud, and I’m going to clench up, and I just really hate it. I’m not sure if it was all the games we played as kids where you split in two teams and try to pop a balloon before the other team does, or if I like had a balloon popped in my face as a kid and it scarred me subconsciously, but I really hate balloons. When I was in school and we’d have to pop a balloon for some reason or another, I’d always always find a way to avoid being in the room, and eventually I used to just start leaving whenever someone brought a balloon around. The other day I was at my gallery shop here in Portland, preparing for an event, and one of the other gallery owners of another space offered me some of the balloons from a party he’d had there the night before. It was such a nice thing to do! And I also wanted people to be able to find my event since we’re a little tucked away, but when I took the balloons from him I got that same feeling, the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up, and my stomach did a little flip, and I realized that I’ve been scared of balloons for my entire life, and I really don’t know why.  But, I guess everyone has something, right?

Episode 26: Irrational Fears (Part Two)

Follow Daren Todd on all things social at https://artlargerthanme.com/links [https://artlargerthanme.com/links] The second thing that produces a very odd physical response when I discover it unexpectedly, even as an adult, are things growing unexpectedly, like potatoes in the fruit bowl, or mold, or finding a mushroom in a house plant. The feeling is just like when you see a particularly creepy spider, or earwigs come scattering out from underneath a potted plant, or cockroaches.  Except no one I’ve ever met feels this way when they discover something growing –it doesn’t really make sense when I think about it rationally, but when it happens I still feel my stomach flip all the same.  When I was a kid, my parents bought my little sibling and I a bright red, crab shaped sandbox. Each of the arms was a pincher of the crab that you could sit on and dig around in the box.  I played in it all the time, and we had it for years even when we got a little older and moved across town.  At some point, I had a bean bag that I would kick around, and a few of the beans slipped out of it and fell into the sandbox. I definitely saw them drop in there, but I couldn’t see a reason to pick them up, they’d just become part of the sand and they were pretty dried out anyways. A week later I was playing in the back yard and to my utter horror, the beans had sprouted in the sand box and were growing up little green stalks out of the sand.  I had thought the beans were dead, and it never occurred to me that they would ever grow.  I can’t really explain why this upset me or surprised me, except that I was a little kid and I didn’t understand it and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and my stomach do that little flip. It's definitely irrational. But I guess on the list of things that are irrationally upsetting to all sorts of people, it's not that odd.

Episode 25: Irrational Fears (Part One)

Follow Daren Todd on all things social at: https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links [https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links]. Episode 23: Irrational Fears (Part One) One time my Dad took my sibling and I down to the beach for the afternoon to go fishing.  I remember we were a little older, I was probably like 13 which would have made my younger sibling like 10, and we went to the same beach we grew up next to, called Surf Beach. Surf Beach is about ten minutes outside of Lompoc, on the central coast of California, and it’s right next to some government owned land and an air force base called Vandenburg.  Sometimes, they launch rockets from Vandenburg Air Force Base, and when you drive out to Surf Beach you see lines of people camping out waiting to watch the rockets fly into space. Today though, the roads were clear and the sun was overcast, and the only goal I really had for the day was to play in the sand and try to make a really nice sand castle.  I was kind of obsessed with sand castles and had recently discovered there were sand castle competitions where people made castles taller than a kid and carved all sorts of interesting shapes out of them – I wanted to make a sculpture. My sibling and I had shovels and buckets and hand trowels and popsicle sticks, we were ready.  We started by digging a giant hole in the sand, and about a foot and a half into the hole, which was starting to fill with water, I saw something I’d never seen before. I’d been coming to Surf Beach consistently for 13 years before that – I’d always dug in the sand every single time, looking for sand crabs to hook on the end of fishing lines to catch fish with, or to hold and watch them move around with their dozens of tiny arms.  But today what I saw in the sand completely horrified me – I felt a flip in the bottom of my stomach that made my heart thud in my chest.  All the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood up on end. “Get out of the sand!” I yelled at my sibling who was likely knee deep in the puddle that was forming at the bottom of our hole.  “There’s… BLOOD WORMS!”  My sibling hopped up out of the hole and we started quickly on a new one, convinced that the blood red wriggling worm with thousands of tiny bright red legs and probably, we thought, teeth, was just a one-time occurrence.  There was no way the monsters had always been there, beneath the sand that we had dug into and play in and buried each other up to the neck in for a decade. But there were worms in the next whole, and the next, until finally I gave up my dream of becoming pro level sand castle builders because I just couldn’t stop the urge to shudder and be sick that the thought of blood worms gives me, even to this day.  The only things I have ever encountered that produce the same uncontrollable irrational physical response that makes my skin crawl are plants growing in unexpected places, and balloons. Surf beach was never the same after the blood worms, it just seemed kind of dirty, and scary now, and I guess the feeling of my skin crawling is a lot like the feeling when you realize that as you grow up, things change, and there’s not really much you can do about it.

Episode 24: The Water Tower

Follow Daren Todd on all things social at: https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links [https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links]. Episode 24: The Water Tower Every once and a while I sit down and try to imagine what the biggest most important, life changing, exciting, inspiring art project I can think of would be, and how I would do it.  I think it’s good to dream, and I always dream big so I have something wild to reach for each year.   When I was doing music full time, this dream was always about opening for a famous rapper like Kendrick Lamar or J Cole, and being on stage in front of thousands of people, with dancers and flashing lights and a crazy outfit that looked like a yellow space suit. Now though, as an artist, when I think about what my Dream Art Project is right now, its painting a water tower.  When I first moved to Portland I was fortunate enough to have met a friend who invited me to come and live with him, in his house. Down on the corner and across the street from the house there’s a giant park – and the biggest water tower I have ever seen up close.  I love this park – last winter when it snowed my partner and I bundled ourselves up in our thickest sweatpants and sweaters, tied up our boots and grabbed a giant cardboard box that we’d taped all across the bottom to help it slide, and went sledding down the tiniest hill ever, at this park, in the middle of the night.  The water tower was dripping  from a dozen places with all the water of the melted snow, and for a minute it really seemed like the entire tower was leaking. You can stand underneath the water tower and kids play between all its legs, and ride their bikes or roll in the grass beneath it.  It’s the scariest thing in the world though to stand across the street and peer up at it and be able to just visualize how much water would come crashing out of it if it ever cracked – but it probably never will. Anyways. It would be amazing to paint this water tower.  And not just paint it a giant blob of green color, like it is now, but to paint it like a dozen different colors in that classic swirl pattern  I’ve been painting for years now… it would probably take a month! Or I would get a giant spray gun and do a lot of taping? Hard to say. But that’s my current big, big dream.

Episode 23: Pianos

Follow Daren Todd on all things social at: https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links [https://www.artlargerthanme.com/links]. Episode 23: Pianos Pianos have always been one of my favorite instruments.  There’s something about the weight of each key when you press it down, about how much sound can fill an entire room when you play them strongly, how different combinations of notes and chords can send different emotions and colors swirling around in the air, and inside my mind.   When I was in seventh grade I remember deciding I wanted to play the piano and I asked my parents to get me into piano lessons.  They did, and for a few weeks I would go to the music shop on Ocean Avenue, and sit with a pianist in the back room who taught me the basics of reading music, and playing with both hands.  I didn’t have very much patience though, and quickly taught myself some basic chords and scales and never took the time to learn more. Now, I can still noodle around on a piano or follow along by ear to most things, although not well.  I wish I had put more time into my lessons – I guess it’s never too late. When I first moved to Portland, one of the first projects I was exposed to around art and creativity was called Piano.Push.Play – its a music and community driven project that rescues pianos that are destined for the dump, fixes them up and then commissions artists to paint them or customize them in fun and beautiful ways, and then sets the piano in a public space around Portland during the summer, for anyone to come up and get an opportunity to play a piano.    It had never occurred to me before being exposed to Piano Push Play that there are probably millions of people who simply never get the opportunity to hear how a piano sounds in person, or feel the weight of the keys beneath their fingers. I’ve gotten the opportunity to collaborate with Piano Push Play for a few years now and it’s one of my very favorite projects to work on.  Each piano seems to be different, each style or make or model has its own ornamentation and decoration, and it seems like each one has a personality that I have the honor of updating with paint. It’s magic.  Pianos are amazing.