.When Sucking Sounds Rad

Oakland artist and musician CansaFis Foote embraces a more free-form style.

Red neon lights illuminate CansaFis Foote, who’s wearing a
construction hat and yellow sunglasses inside Oakland’s ABCO Warehouse.
In front of him are two modern dancers — Amanda Stahl and Charlie
St. Clair — dressed in a sea-creature mask and a black tutu, and
in a lizard costume, respectively. As Foote plays the saxophone, the
dancers spin and clap, becoming wilder and wilder and eventually
knocking over furniture. A white dog with brown spots runs out from the
audience and into the spectacle. He wants to play, too. For the dancers
and Foote, it’s all part of the performance. “We’re making this up as
we go,” he announces.

This is Tastyville, one of Foote’s many creative experiments that
embody a free-form and fun sense of spontaneity. His rock band
Careerers, with Andrew Poyner (from Bad Paradise), Mr. Brian, and Sean
Garrison, blends a post-punk sensibility with a contagious silliness
and excitement. They’ll play Invisible Ocean, a festival to be held
over the Labor Day weekend in the redwoods by Mendocino, which will
also include film screenings, camping, swimming, and an “all night barn
dance.”

Foote, a 28-year-old artist and musician who lives in an immaculate
warehouse space in North Oakland, studied radio, TV, and film at
Northwestern University in Chicago. He moved here five years ago
because in Oakland he saw freedom and the underground energy necessary
for his many artistic, musical, and social experiments.

Growing up, Foote says he felt limited. “High school in the suburbs
of Minnesota [was] soul-crushing and creatively draining,” he said. “My
parents were paranoid because I listened to loud music and liked
drawings of violent animals and naked girls, so they took the door off
my room.” Under such scrutiny and criticism, he says, “there came a
point in my life when I didn’t feel like I was being fair to myself and
who I really was.” He needed to reinvent himself.

All around Minneapolis, he started to play what he calls
“avant-hippie-funk-noise music” in silly costumes — one of which
was a bird mask and thong underwear. “It no longer made sense to be
Nathan,” said Foote, whose birth name is Nathan Daniel Sobaski. One
day, he says, a new name was sent to him from the heavens. “Staring at
the clouds and daydreaming of a better day and night, it hit me.
CansaFis! I wasn’t sure if it was a song, or a book, or a movie, or
what. … It was just an idea. But, the more I thought about it, the
more it shouted at me, and then I finally got it. I was
CansaFis! I told some friends and quit playing football … from there
it just rolled. I think it means, ‘I like you, let’s have a good time.’
Or ‘Let’s have fun.'” This became his mantra.

From that day on, his music and art have explored that playful idea.
He realized that “maybe learning was all right and there was nothing to
fear in sucking. Maybe sucking could sound rad.” This was his
revelation. To Foote, it didn’t matter if his parents ever understood
him. He didn’t have to be what other people thought he should be. He
could be whatever he wanted, “which,” he continues, “apparently was a
crappy musician in a thong and a bird mask.” For him, enjoying himself
is more important than trying to be perfect or profound. His goals
became to have a good time and to make exciting artwork that encourages
his audience and community to shake off their seriousness and enjoy
themselves.

His visual art — made up mostly of lovingly depicted portraits
of vibrant aliens and monsters — is fresh and unexpectedly
positive. His works also include a collection devoted to politics. On
one poster, a black-and-white John McCain seems to yell with red block
letters “We cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves from
ourselves.”

Like Foote’s drawings, his musical projects challenge the sometimes
cynical and pessimistic nature of art-scene rebellion. Currently,
Careerers are working on making a video for every song from their first
record Those Who Don’t Do Don’t. In the video for the song “Come
in my Kitchen,” the band escapes from a lo-fi alien invasion, goes
swimming, jumps rope on the beach, and eats hot dogs wrapped in bacon.
“I don’t want to go to church,” Foote says, “but I do want to yell
‘hallelujah!'” Amen. 

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