I’ll have a gigantic winter tree series up soon. In the meantime, here’s a conceptual piece from the 14th Street subway station and the Life Underground series. I posted a few photos from here before. It’s funny how sometimes people post this stuff and just say “crazy.”
I am thankful for a year of mostly no work and having a lot of time to think and read and watch movies, but now I really need some work. My health is great thanks to a mostly vegan diet. I very much enjoyed the PeTA ad that got rejected by NBC. The heavy-handedness is getting a lighter touch. I don’t believe humans will ever be all vegetarians but I think we can maybe go for a more humane and healthy approach to food.
I added a couple more hundred CDs to the pile at Amazon.
Everyone knows how to win the mid-term elections except for Democrats.
I really like this photo. Even though the composition is completely split in half, both halves are satisfying and normally, you’d see the top half with a sunset over it. Hmmm.
I got booked to DJ a party at SiP for a bunch of jazz musicians this Saturday night. DJing for musicians is sort of like compiling a slide show for photographers. It’s curating a museum show for artists! I’m flattered and nervous.
Sometimes I am here to make sure my blog hasn’t been compromised and then realize: well, I should publish something since my blog is fine and I am now logged in. Posting something will help me sleep. The twitter thing below will fill you in on the rest of tonight. Look over there. People are talking about Kandinsky.
At Lincoln Center yesterday, there was a graduation ceremony for Juilliard students. I found it odd they couldn’t turn the fountain on as part of the festivities — all those snapshots of parents and new graduates in their fine clothes and lint-free graduation gowns made lacklustre by some cost-cutting bureaucrat.
The refurbishing of Alice Tully Hall across the street is magnificently successful. Looking a little dangerous, right on the corner, a public bleacher with glass edges juts out of the sidewalk at a knife-like angle. Presumably, there will be pleasant jazz trios (avoiding hard bop and free jazz) performing at the base for lunchtime enjoyment. The roof that parallels over the outdoor bleacher now houses the new balcony area of the hall inside.
The glassed-in public lobby dovetails nicely with a Slavoj Zizek talk I heard recently. Zizek argues that new architecture for public performance spaces is a bonafide outreaching to different classes for dialogs in high-brow and low-brow culture. They have by necessity become these goofy institutional public/private spaces made special by good architects and well-meaning underwriters for the arts. Unfortunately, the café counter in this lobby only seems to be serving drinks and food directly before performances. (I could be mistaken.)
The hall itself is generally more woodsy than before and the acoustics are superior. I don’t like that the new seats lack a spring to make the seats raise by themselves when letting fellow patrons get to their own seats although the burgundy color works with the wood.
“One day I climbed up as fast as I could to the olive grove where I had carried out all these experiments, but I had brought neither my liquid machine gun nor the live rhinoceros that I would have liked for the prints, nor even some half-dead octopus. It was the only time when, as it did not happen to Louis XIV either, “I would have to wait.” –Diaries, 1960
The Chanel Mobile Art thing in Central Park deserves the Cool Prize.
(How many Obama trucks are cruising the streets of Manhattan today?)
The Brothers Quay remind me somehow: always be blogging.
I saw a series of BQ movies around the time they came out and they had a profound influence on me. I feel funny recommending them to people for fear they won’t get it. Their films felt out of place in the 80s and today I feel I would have to KNOW that someone was at least into puppet animation before I would recommend the BQ to them. I’m disappointed they haven’t been very active lately but then, in my eyes, they are completely self-fulfilled artists and who would blame them having already achieved artistic nirvana.
Stairs, shadows at SFMOMA
One of the must-do fun things to do in NYC this summer is visit the Battery Maritime Building where David Byrne has installed an organ that plays the different pieces of an old building. New York Times has a write up with video today.
This reminded me of an episode: My senior year at UCSB, I took part in an “Armory Show” at the SB Armory. I was taking a free-form art class with painter/pianist Dick Dunlap who is probably the sweetest and most soft-spoken professors I ever had. Anyway, he and some friends had invented/built some instruments out of found and new materials and he invited members of this class to play the instruments at a show at the Santa Barbara Armory which is similar to the building where Byrne has his organ in that it’s mostly a giant old room.
I only remember two instruments. The first was the Stringed Tongue Coffin which was a vertical tongue-shaped box with a taut cable strung from the top to a flat sheet of plywood that was attached to the bottom at an angle. By stepping on the plywood you could control the pitch somewhat and play the string by plucking it or with a giant bow made of plumbing hose and wire. I played this instrument as I seemed best at making it loud. (I’m a bass player after all.) The other instrument was the Piano Harp which was stringed guts of a piano bolted to a flat wooden crate. You could either play the strings with mallets or by strumming it like a harp. This was played by my housemate, Craig Dunham. Damn, I wish there was video or even photos of this event. The video of David Byrne’s piece almost brought me all the way back… I just need to remember those other instruments. (Senior moment.)
Unfortunately, I’m going to miss it but this Saturday night to Sunday morning is the Bang on a Can marathon at the World Financial Center. Highly recommended for anyone with even a remote interest in new music.
SFMOMA catwalk installation by Olafur Eliasson
Judging from other photos I’ve seen of this catwalk with nothing on it, Eliasson accomplished something unexpected in removing all sense of vertigo I usually feel when traipsing around in high places. I’ll have to see his show at P.S. 1.
I had a nice birthday yesterday. I have good friends.
I’ve been looking at Survival Acres and it’s all a bit fantastical. As a business selling survival gear, the fear-mongering is no less shameless than the posturing against Iran that’s in vogue. (See also Iraq WMD.) From the “About Me” page, “I am expecting a collapse of society and particularily [sic], the United States, someday, hopefully soon.” If it really all comes down to roving gangs smashing doors down for the last cans of Campbell’s Soup®, ShopRite Oatmeal, and freeze-dried stroganoff, a lot of us might justifiably off ourselves, thank you very much. Even if you’re out in some rural fenced-in compound with your own farmland and biosphere, will it be worth it? Maybe I’ll become an Eco-Geek.
Update: I heard about this the other night as it was happening. What the hell is going on in Harlem?
Riding a fish is funner than birthing one.
Feminism isn’t a topic I’ll post about much but I find the idea of Orgasmic Birth fascinating. Any wedge that puts a dent in the conventional Biblican wisdom, here specifically Genesis 3:16 –(“…I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…”) — now that’s a good kick in the pants. Further irony lies in OB’s strong foundation in new age type spirituality and things like water birth, yoga, meditation, the “spiritual diet,” and ye, even Robert Bly stylee Male Energy. Contrast that with the criticism of Islamic attitudes towards women (not uncalled for) and you can see a clear modern-day evolutionary arc of human spirituality. Any anthropologists out there wanna discuss this?
I’ll almost be surprised if ABC follows through with broadcasting a special about this on 20/20 on May 16. If they do, it’s because of the sexy title and you know they’re going to have a C-section specialist crowing that a C-section is the safest, most pain-free way to have a baby and how could there be anything better than Modern American Medicine? Snort.
On a tangential note, just now, Martha Nussbaum was on Bill Moyers’ show talking about “Freedom of Conscience” and how the right doesn’t get it. This OB thing is going to be heavily ridiculed by the establishment thought police.
(Full disclosure: My upstairs neighbor, who I respect very much, is a doula specializing in water birth and also a talented birth photographer. And I read Feministing once in a while. I suppose that makes me a sensitive new age terrorist.)
Celebrity Endorsements
Obama sports a much vaster and cooler list of celebrity endorsements than Clinton does. Huffpo rightly puts this stuff in their Entertainment section but why not also list McCain’s celeb endorsements? Maybe because he’s only got four although I’d wager conservatives consume more celebrity gossip than others do.
