May 17, 2005
Connections
Two quotes that I came across today, in quite different places, somehow link up in my mind.
A Thai police officer, in John Burdett's new novel Bangkok Tattoo (quoted in this review), offers this:
Col. Vikorn candidly reveals an even harsher view of the United States, spoken not in anger but with his characteristically urbane political realism: "The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?"
Natalia Dushkina, granddaughter of architect Aleksei Dushkin, in Nicolai Ouroussoff's feature in Sunday's Times Magazine:
"The [Rossiya] hotel is not a masterpiece of architecture. But I prefer to have a monster of the 70's than something badly built by some foreigner in a neo-historical style. ... In the same way, there is no plan to destroy the Palace of Congresses, but I think this is the dream of the general public as well. In the past 10 years, we have built up this strong feeling that life exists only in money. It is the most horrible thing that happens to people."
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Around the web #6
- An interview with Steve Martin at AlterNet (via TMN)
- Blogger Miss Representation expresses concern over the lack of debate surrounding Santiago Calatrava's design for a new PATH station at the World Trade Center Site
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
May 15, 2005
Around the web #5
- Paul Theroux's Guardian essay about traveling through the Ecuadorian jungle, following William Burroughs's path, in search of ayahuasca is quite riveting. I've been dipping into Fresh Air Fiend, his essay collection, for months; perhaps now is the time to plow through it from start to finish.
- Another Momus link, this time to his post about magazines. I am a magazine freak, and subscribe to (or buy every issue of) at least fifteen publications, so of course this appeals to me. Of the ones he selects, du and Der Freund seem most interesting. And, for what it's worth, I wrote a short piece about Sue De Beer for the issue of Issue magazine he mentions.
- The Times profiles Banks Violette in advance of his exhibition at the Whitney and, in their annual bid for Pulitzers, begins a series of articles on class
- The Lit Blog Co-Op finally picks a book: Kate Atkinson's Case Histories Now they will finally begin discussing a book instead of themselves.
- More from the Guardian: Nicole Krauss's press attention crosses the pond (an interview) and Thomas Friedman's book does the same (a review).
- Jill at Inhabitant posts a short profile of designer Tord Boontje and describes some of his new projects.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
Michael Kimmelman, rhetorician
Michael Kimmelman, lamenting the sale (to Alice Walton) of Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits (1849), comes up with a few powerful lines, italicized below:
When a policewoman was out of sight, Mr. Gambacurta took me up 40 feet of fresh scaffolding to show off a fresco of St. Francis blessing the birds, with medieval Montefalco painted rising above Assisi. Benozzo signed the picture with an inscription in Latin: "For what I am as an artist take a look for yourself."
"Benozzo is what we are," the mayor said.
Durand is who we were as New Yorkers. The sale is what we have become as Americans. From time to time, American museum directors talk about following the lead of other countries by drawing up lists of objects so important to the nation that they should never be sold. But the idea never goes anywhere. We're a rich country. We're capitalists. Our museums are stuffed with treasures bought and plundered from elsewhere. We benefit from a free market. Our museums are our argument for the values of dispersing global riches, for spreading multiculturalism.
It's nice to hear a little passion in his voice.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 14, 2005
The Village Voice voice
Some New Yorkers may be unaware that The Village Voice is not only our favorite weekly but also the flagship publication of Village Voice Media, Inc., which puts out similar papers in Los Angeles, Orange County, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Nashville. I’ve recently noticed that the critics for these various papers—most frequently pop music and film reviewers—often have what I’ve come to call “The Village Voice voice.” I’ll use MP3s as an analogy: wary of word counts, these writers try to compress large amounts of data into smaller spaces without losing “sound quality.” This leads to a style in which cultural references pile up quickly and it takes a knowledgeable reader to pick everything apart. A representative sentence, pulled from Nate Patrin’s Prefuse 73 review I linked to earlier this week: “On Prefuse 73's fourth album, Herren, who also records as Savath vs. Savalas [sic], uses his guests in much the same airy, window-dressing manner he uses his ‘Windowlicker’-lite vocal samples; e.g., Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino's turn on ‘We Go Our Own Way’ and the A Day at the Races stateroom-scene claustrophobia of ‘Am I Gone’ (featuring Piano Overlord, Broadcast, and Cafe Tacuba, pitted ‘vs.’ each other in the album credits like the song was a sort of indie-mellow Hell in a Cell).”
With references to electronic music acts, Mexican rock stars, a Marx Brothers film, and pro wrestling, it wouldn’t make much sense to anyone not invested in pop culture. Yet I’m unexpectedly attracted to this writing style when it concerns film, music, or literature, perhaps because it encourages a certain pride when I catch all the casual nods. But does it translate to discussion of visual art? Because many of the above references are to songs or films, which are much more easily disseminated than individual artworks (or even images of them), I suspect this shorthand-for-the-cognoscenti would be harder to pull off when reviewing or commenting upon exhibitions. Can anyone provide me with good examples? I just glanced through two dozen of my Artforum.com “Critics’ Picks” and found few examples. (One is a parenthetical aside, in this review of Valerie Hegarty’s recent New York solo debut: “Picture what Adriana Varejão might make after reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden.”)
Here are links to site search results for some of my favorite writers in this style. Dennis Lim at the Voice, who writes about film and books; Patrin at the Seattle Weekly, who writes about music; and Matthew Wilder at CityPages, who writes about film, music, and books. (Why are they all men? Where are the shorthand-slinging women?)
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 13, 2005
Around the web #4
- Momus on supermarkets and style, focusing especially on a market I shopped at in Berlin in January
- The San Francisco Chronicle reports (via Bookslut) that socialite Dede Wilsey is considering filing a lawsuit against the Penguin Group if they publish her stepson Sean Wilsey's memoir. It was excerpted last month in The New Yorker (though I can't find the excerpt online), and I've skimmed an advance copy of the book, Oh the Glory of It All, which is very entertaining and which I hope to read in full. Wilsey also wrote a funny piece for the LRB in mid-March that was (nominally) a review of Robert Sullivan's Rats. Lastly, an online-only interview with Wilsey about writing his book.
- Today the Guardian runs a profile of Nicholas Serota and a piece by Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and Matthew Collings on Art Since 1900
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
Joseph Leo Koerner
Courtauld Institute art historian Joseph Leo Koerner writes, in the introduction to The Reformation of the Image:
"Everything must be submitted to an ever more radical critique, including the critique itself in infinite regression. Yet although preceded and succeeded by iconoclasm, we generally feel ourselves not actively engaged in a scandalized, scandalous blow but stalled in image-breaking's interminable aftermath....From the long history of iconoclasm, we learn that there never were, nor will there ever be, idols, since these are artefacts of the iconoclast's conviction, the imaginary Other of all critical campaigns. It is iconoclasm itself that never goes away, but haunts us as if forever newly with its fictive foe."
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
Around the web #3
- A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargies are blogging for the Times from Cannes. (via GreenCine)
- Jess Harvill writes a concise, smart review-essay on the reissue of Gang of Four's Entertainment! LP at Pitchfork.
- PEN has made available audio and pictures from last month's World Voices festival.
- A candid exit interview with outgoing NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent at the Guardian (via FishBowlNY)
- British papers are picking up on the publication of Philip Larkin's Early Poems and Juvenalia, and so far it seems the book is going to be widely panned. For example, the TLS posts an excerpt of this week's review by Adam Kirsch; back in late March, Blake Morrison began his review in the Guardian with the line: "Is there no end to Larkinania?" Similar thoughts in The Spectator and The Telegraph. Click here to listen to Auden read "Aubade," a late masterpiece.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
May 12, 2005
Field Notes: Dean Moss and Laylah Ali
A week ago I attended the premiere performance of Figures on a Field, choreographer Dean Moss’s adaptation of Laylah Ali’s paintings, at The Kitchen. In January I had the pleasure of attending a preview of the piece, and at the time I wrote: “He's animating Ali's works to great effect, occasionally freeze-framing the movement to offer the audience tableaux vivants that maintain fidelity to her compositions as well as to the sense of malevolence and pain that pervades the paintings.” The excerpt I saw then was about one-third of the total performance, which keeps the intensity switched on from start to finish, despite occasional slow patches meant (I think) to temper the charged atmosphere. The seven dancers—Kacie Chang, Keila Cordova, Pedro Jimenez, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Okwui Okopokwasili, David Thompson, all of whose previous work is unknown to me, plus Moss himself—make much of the fragmented, halting narratives; they change roles (and, by association, their relationships with each other) seamlessly. I lack the critical vocabulary necessary to speak with any authority about dance, so I’ll simply say that the evening encouraged me to seek out other contemporary dance performances, which is the highest compliment a neophyte can offer.
There are three performances left, at 8pm tonight, Friday, and Saturday.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
If you are having a bad day, click this link
Click here for a direct link (.MOV file) to the Wormseye Films video for Kidz Bop's cover of Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone." This video makes my day! I found the link via Fluxblog, who lists twenty reasons why it's great. Says Matthew: "I can barely contain my enthusiasm for this video. It's beautiful, clever, cute, inspiring and joyous...the directors seem to have no shame about what they are doing. I think that a lot of people wouldn't fully commit to making a good video for a recording liket his, but they seem to genuinely appreciate the song." Bless them for it! Paired with Ted Leo's acoustic cover version, Clarkson's song is receiving (deservedly) royal treatment.
UPDATE 12:10PM: It appears that Wormseye has taken the file off their site, perhaps from too much traffic. I'll keep my eye on it. Sorry to be a tease!
UPDATE 12:53PM: Matthew Perpetua has now posted the file to his own server. Click here to watch the video. So best!
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
The MIT Press sale
Hey bibliophiles and art lovers, The MIT Press--which is to my mind the best university press in the country--is having a sale. Most hardcovers are less than twenty dollars and most paperbacks less than ten. Here are a few selections to whet your appetite (and mine): Alex Alberro's Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity; The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle, Paris, 1981-1998; Ann Reynolds's Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere;Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics;Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology; Douglas Crimp's Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics;Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents;Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa;Ed Ruscha's Leave Any Information at the Signal;and Anthony Vidler's Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. There are many more.
I can personally vouch for The Glass State, Reynolds's Smithson book, the Situationist anthology, and Vidler's text; I am buying the Alberro, Crimp, and Ruscha volumes.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
The best press releases of 2004-05
Now that the exhibition season is coming to a close, I thought I'd share a selection of excerpts from press releases I received between September 2004 and May 2005. Names are redacted to protect the innocent.
01. "These two projects pivot on the double in a way that is reminiscent of the split infinitive—an ungrammatical proposition. Both projects renegotiate allusion, body, continuity, diptych, discontinuity, fashion, figure, frame, genre, geometry, gesture, history, hybrid, index, landscape, making, monochrome, the new, oeuvre, palette, self-portraiture, and still life—among other characteristics and operations—according to disparate logics. The dissolution of "to be" that obtains becomes the occasion for embarkation."
02. "[The artist]'s first solo show is both an homage to and catharsis of the modal valence that connects identity and location, performed against the setting of metropolitan Los Angeles. From the minute to the grandiose, the work reflects the phenomenological becoming of identity as it is stratified throughout one's environment; there is a sense of 'when' one is in relation to where one is. Thus, there is a specific type of temporality at play in the pieces, one that corresponds between the past and the present in hopes of marking the becoming of a fluid process of identification, one in which each tense communicates freely with the next, in any possible direction, in order to effect a new way of engaging with place."
03. "In contrast, the distribution of energy in the full-throttle pudendathon of her black and white 'Self Portrait' video is dramatically polarized by a close up of the artist's crotch."
04. "[The artist] is an LA-based, self-diagnosed agoraphobic. Since 1983, [last name] has found it difficult to leave her house, let alone take a trip. Recently, however, she has pondered what items she would bring if she were to leave. Currently, the list includes her new journal, running shoe, 3 bras, shampoo, a pillow, cute shoes, underwear and a hair dryer."
05. "For almost thirty years [the artist], at times single-handedly, has kept the tradition of abstract painting vital and renewed. Employing a vocabulary of horizontal and vertical forms that is deceptively reductive, the artist both humanizes and sanctifies the formal language of painting."
06. "[The artist's] highly lyrical work in video has been termed 'video drawing' which goes some way toward conveying its spontaneity and expressive power. After working for a number of years as a buyer for a fashion house, the artist began to produce her own video and digital animation works, many of which feature the artist herself, or an unidentified teenage girl that stands for her, as it does for all of us."
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
May 11, 2005
Around the web #2
- James Wood's review of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (at/via The Elegant Variation)
- Nate Patrin on new albums from Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and Caribou at the Seattle Weekly
- A Los Angeles Times article on the current proliferation of food writing
- Continuing the NYRB theme, the new issue of Boldtype contains an interview with Jonathan Lethem that discusses his experience preparing an introduction for Malcolm Braly's On the Yard.
- National flags as infographics (via DesignObserver)
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
BrianSholis.com updated
BrianSholis.com now includes a review of a group show at Maureen Paley Interim Art (Artforum link here; BS.com link here) and a diary entry about a panel discussion held at the Guggenheim (Artforum link here; BS.com link here), the two most recent pieces I've written for Artforum.com.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
May 10, 2005
Around the web #1
- According to the Austrian Cultural Forum's newsletter, Frederic Morton, author of A Nervous Splendor and Thunder at Twilight, two highly entertaining books about Vienna, will soon publish Runaway Waltz, a memoir of leaving that city for New York.
- Mark Sarvas offers a peek at J.M. Coetzee's novel-in-progress
- My friend Michael Ned Holte publishes a smart review of Barry Le Va's recent exhibition in the current issue of Frieze.
- Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli and recent recipient of the NYPL's Young Lions Fiction Award, recommends The Pilgrim Hawk, a new book out from NYRB, at Moorishgirl.
- Pitchfork weighs in on Spoon's Gimme Fiction, which I'm listening to (yet again) as I compose this post: "Gimme Fiction is actually a wildly diverse album, almost schizophrenic in its composition, vacillating between acoustic ballads, a bubbly, synth-tinged number ('They Never Got You'), handclaps, strings, and a whole lot of blue-eyed soul .... A smart band could build a career on the sound just tossed away in 'I Turn My Camera On'; in this case, I'd have settled for just one more song, but even if the alternative is business-as-usual for Spoon, that's still pretty great."
- Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne pens an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times calling on the city to support SCI-Arc in its property battles with developer Richard Meruelo: "I implore our planning department, officials, neighbors and local businesses to support SCI-Arc's desire to buy its parcel, without being coerced into unconditional support of development that may harm the future of the area. L.A. depends on institutions such as SCI-Arc." (Via Archinect)
- I woke up this morning to twenty-eight new posts on Arianna Huffington's blog. Starting at the top, I quickly realized that keeping up is actually quite easy: read the headline or topic, compare it with the author's name (clicking on the "Author Bio" link if you have to), realize there is no notable correlation between what the author does and what he or she is pontificating on, skip post. FishBowlNY paid a little more attention.
- MARTa Herford, a new museum run by Jan Hoet and designed by Frank Gehry, opened this past weekend in Germany. Here are a few pictures AFP story.
- See video from The Futureheads's live performance at the SPIN office on the magazine's website. (Via BrooklynVegan)
- Totally random: the penthouse apartment in a building I used to look at nearly every day as I walked from Union Square to my job at 10th Ave. and 22nd St. is for sale. (Via Curbed)
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
A blow for Paris
According to a report by Paris-based Alan Riding in today's Times, François Pinault's plan to build a museum to house his contemporary art collection on an island in the Seine just outside Paris is (no pun intended) dead in the water. The nut grafs:
François Pinault, a billionaire who is France's wealthiest art lover, announced Monday that he was abandoning plans to build a $195 million contemporary art museum on the outskirts of Paris and would instead present part of his vast collection in the Palazzo Grassi, an elegant exhibition space on the Grand Canal in Venice that he recently acquired.
In recent months, French newspapers have reported that elected officials in Boulogne-Billancourt were indifferent to the proposed museum, prompting speculation that senior French politicians were less than enthusiastic about the idea of a private citizen's entering a museum world long monopolized here by the government.
Writing in Le Monde, Mr. Pinault said he would present a selection of works from his collection there later this year and he was also making plans to build an extension that would double the palazzo's exhibition space. Further, he said he was looking for space in other European cities to create an international circuit for his art. In Le Monde he mentioned Berlin and Lille in northern France as possibilities.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 9, 2005
"In Search...": Now with pictures!
I frequently carry my digital camera and often use it to snap pictures of art, friends, street scenes, and crowds at openings. I've just signed up for a Flickr account, which means I can share some of these with you. First up, a batch of photos showing the Guggenheim's current Daniel Buren installation; another batch showing what Kutlug Ataman's Küba installation looks like in London; photos taken last year at the Kai Althoff survey's second stop, the MCA Chicago; two photos taken last August during a New Humans performance; and miscellaneous pictures from my recent trips to Berlin and London. I will periodically link to new pictures and sets as I continue to travel and see exhibitions, performances, and other events.
(Obviously, some of these pictures were taken surreptitiously. I share them out of a desire to increase the exposure for the artworks, exhibitions, and projects depicted. If for any reason you need me to remove the pictures, please contact me at the e-mail address listed in the "About This Site" category.)
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Dia's digs
Carol Vogel reports in today's Times that the Dia Art Foundation is planning a move from Chelsea to the Meatpacking District. Felix Salmon responds. Unfortunately, he dilutes the power of an otherwise strong point by charging the organization with snobbery:
Admission at Dia: Chelsea, as I recall, was $6. If all of the 60,000 visitors paid $6 to get in — which many of them didn't — Dia was grossing $360,000 a year in admissions revenues . . . If Dia wants a $20 million endowment to run Dia: Meatpacking, I reckon it should be able to find a few hundred thousand per year to replace whatever amount of money it might intend to make on admissions.
If there was a real will to make Dia: Meatpacking an integral part of the Highline experience, as opposed to a museum leveraging the foot traffic that the Highline will generate, I'm sure it could make itself free without too much difficulty.
But I suspect that it's not going to happen, and that the main reason it's not going to happen is entirely due to snobbishness. Dia likes being in out-of-the-way places. It moved to Chelsea when there was relatively little going on there; the De Maria pieces in Soho are hard to find and were even more so when they were built; and Beacon, of course, is a long schlep up the Hudson from Manhattan. And all of those are positively easy to get to when compared to De Maria's Lightning Field. The end result is a series of quiet and solemn places which exist to serve the art above all — certainly above the public.
Michael Govan et al. may very well be snobbish—and we can debate the merits of that stance—but it’s almost certain that Dia had little to do with the conception of projects like the Lightning Field. I seriously doubt that De Maria said, “I want to put 400 steel poles in the ground, but I simply don’t know where,” in conversation with Heiner Friedrich.
I am also of the mindset that places that “exist to serve the art above all” are not always bad, especially given some of the exhibitions and public programming I have experienced at New York museums during the past few years. And anyway, I heard fairly credible rumors last year that Dia was looking at buildings along the Brooklyn waterfront and in Harlem, so choosing the Meatpacking District, even with an entrance fee, isn’t as disdainful of the public as it could have been.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
The DAP Spring/Summer 2005 catalog, digested
Consider this batch of links to new books a timesaver for you and a wishlist from me. I went through the current DAP catalog from cover to cover, and here are the books I imagine would be the most rewarding and the publishing ventures I find most intriguing. In no particular order:
Michigan University sponsored the Michigan Debates on Urbanism, which became a series of three books featuring "one-on-one debates designed to explore...self-conscious, disparate schools of urbanism that have emerged in the last decade"; NAi Publishers' "Reflect" series is also on its third publication, with The Capsular Civilization: The City in the Age of Fear. That press also publishes Open magazine: the seventh issue, titled "(No) Memory," seems particularly intriguing.
The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design's press has relaunched and has brought back into print several titles from its '70s and '80s heyday: Artists Talk, 1969-1977, Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers and, of course, Donald Judd's Complete Writings, 1959-1975.
There is always a slew of monographs and exhibition catalogs worth checking out, and this season is no exception. Some examples: Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va from the ICA Philadelphia; Santiago Sierra: 300 Tons and Other Works from the Kunsthaus Bregenz (who published what is, to my mind, the best-designed catalog of 2004 to accompany their Hans Schabus exhibition); the English edition of the Neue Galerie Graz's Peter Wiebel: the open work, 1964-1979, which comes out in September; the Michael Borrëmans: Drawings catalog I mentioned previously on this site; The Art of Richard Tuttle, which comes out in July; Jim Lambie's Voidoid, which I purchased late last week and which is filled with glorious full-bleed illustrations of his installations; When the Night Calls it a Day by Anri Sala, which accompanies the exhibition by that name the artist held in Paris last spring; the first Eva Rothschild monograph, which accompanied her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich; and Schabus's own new book, Transport, which is published by the hands-off onestar press.
A few others worth noting: Maurice Berger has shepherded another online symposium sponsored by the Georgia O'Keeffe museum into book form; the San Francisco Cinematheque has published The Slivers and Fresh Kills: The Films of Gordon Matta-Clark; and The Courage to Be Alone, a collection of essays by François Lyotard.
All are, of course, available from DAP. My mailing address is available upon request.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
May 8, 2005
One sentence reviews of new and upcoming records
Spoon: Gimme Fiction (Merge Records)
This is T. Rex set loose in the American heartland: taut, slightly funky songs with ultra-simple two- and three-note melodies (“I Turn My Camera On,” “Was It You”) contrast with ramblers replete with slide guitar and anchored by percussive piano (“The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine,” “Sister Jack”).
Animal Collective: Prospect Hummer EP (Fat Cat Records)
More like cascading tides than songs, this is the collective’s Campfire Songs alter ego brought to bear on their own work, as gossamer, harp-like clouds of guitar surround ‘70s icon Vashti Bunyan’s delicate tremolo.
Jesu: Jesu (Hydra Head) (Link to band site)
Add heavy, crisply recorded drums to the epic guitar feedback, keyboard washes, and the—surprise!—melodies of Slowdive and you get seventy-four minutes of Justin K. Broadrick’s most recent project, the name of which might as well translate to “emotional and aural oblivion.”
Sufjan Stevens: Illinois (Ashmatic Kitty/Sounds Familyre) (Link to band site)
From "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," to "Casimir Pulaski Day," album two of Stevens’s fifty-release portrait of our union is too long by a third—even the peppy, beautifully orchestrated pop gems interspersed among filler tracks rarely clock in at less than six minutes—but a little fast-forward editing makes this one of the strongest pop releases so far this year.
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
May 4, 2005
Current enthusiasms
- Dundas, Ontario-based producer and DJ Koushik Ghoush's Be With CD, which adds four new tracks to two earlier EPs. The title track and the earlier "Battle Rhymes for Battle Times" are stupendous. If I had a porch, I would put these songs on repeat, buy a rocking chair, make lemonade, and enjoy. The disc is out on Stones Throw Records, and it's a perfect blend of the label's blunted hip-hop beats and the warmer, live instrumentation of fellow Canadian Dan Snaith (a.k.a. Manitoba a.k.a. Caribou), who has his own new record out. Be sure to check out Koushik's DJ mix on the Stones Throw site.
- Toffee waffles ("Stoopwafflen"). Thanks Alex!
- This interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude (via Greg.org)
- The Times Literary Supplement, to which I've just subscribed, and which in its current issue (dated April 29) runs a letter from Glenn Lowry disputing claims made by James Hall in his February 25 review of the new building and the collection's installation.
- Fra Angelico's Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven, 1423-24. I saw this at the National Gallery in London three weeks ago today and cannot stop thinking about it. The picture on the website does not do any justice to its radiance.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Odd questions
Do any film directors consistently work in a format akin to the novella? Is there anyone regularly producing 45-75 minute movies? Would releasing two such movies together ever work commercially? Or even on the art house/film festival circuit? (Question prompted by this post on Jean Eustache's lengthy The Mother and the Whore at Waggish.)
Posted in Film. Found always via this permanent link.
May 3, 2005
Lehmann on literary "Best Of" collections
Today Maud Newton posted a review by Chris Lehmann, originally slated for The New York Times Book Review, about literary "Best Of" collections. It is, in the words of an office colleague, "a very clearheaded critique of middle-class literary malaise." What Lehmann neglects to mention, as he points out a number of selections that very well could have made Louis Menand's Best American Essays, is his own work. I was especially enthralled with "Picturing The Passion," which was posted to The Revealer, "a daily review of religion & the press," last March. It is one of the best analyses of Mel Gibson's film and surely worthy of inclusion in Menand's volume.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Where I'm Likely to Find It: On the Shore
"Where I'm Likely to Find It," Haruki Murakmi's newest short story translated into English, was published in last week's New Yorker. It bears resemblance to Kafka on the Shore, his newest novel (published in January; excerpt here, reviews here, here, and here). In the story, the well-to-do wife of a Merrill Lynch stockbroker hires an unnamed narrator to find her husband, who went missing one morning after checking on his mother, who lives two floors below them in an apartment tower. It's a noir setup, with the dark alley transposed to the building's uncommonly spacious stairwell, which the stockbroker, with his claustrophobic fear of elevators, climbs to their twenty-sixth floor apartment. The narrator-investigator promptly sets up shop in the stairwell, meditates on pancakes, and interviews a motley assortment of characters who regularly move through this alternate passage. (One could add to the noir theme by calling it a "shadow" passage.)
The narrator calls to mind Nakata, one of Kafka's two protagonists, an elderly simpleton who possesses an ability to speak with cats. Both search primarily by not searching, instead giving themselves up "to the sands of time and [letting] the flow take [them] wherever it wanted," and it's this being out-of-time that facilitates the unexpected meetings and conversations that drive both stories. The talks, whether with people or felines, are suitably filled with digressions on life's large themes: "I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either," says an old man in the stairwell.
I enjoyed reading the book and the story—and admit I haven't read any of Murakami's other books—but I felt oddly underwhelmed at the conclusion of both. His workmanlike prose capably pushes the story along, and I'm impressed his ability to make the rather outrageous tale of Nakata and Kafka Tamura believable, but, to slip into a jazz metaphor, the story and book are all rhythm section, no solos. Perhaps the problem is on my end: at the moment I'm looking for inspiration for my own writing, and it's much easier to draw fuel from Updike's or Nabakov's glittering sentences than it is to transpose Murakami's obvious gift for storytelling to non-fiction.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 1, 2005
Field Notes: Aïda Ruilova and Graham Gussin
In the main room at Greenberg Van Doren, Aïda Ruilova has more or less recreated her installation at last year’s Whitney Biennial. Four monitors are grouped at one end of the room and face down a fifth at the other. The screens alternate playing their single-channel videos, titled Uh-Oh, OK, Umm, Oh No, and Let’s Go, after the phrases uttered repeatedly by each work’s zombielike protagonist. With half-minute run times, the works are comprised of her signature airtight editing and uncomfortable close-ups of the five staccato mumblers, each shot from unexpected angles. Unfortunately the room works against the art, with an abundance of natural light pouring in to (at times literally) wash out the on-screen creepiness.
Better is Countdowns (2004), a two-channel projected work sandwiched in a corner at the gallery entrance. To a disjointed, percussive soundtrack, a rapid-fire series of micro-vignettes alternate between the screens. Ruilova weds her B-movie horror chops to a kind of undergrad/underground absurdism: in one shot a woman in overly large underwear stands in the distance on a rock inscribed with the number nine; in others, young women hold lit birthday number candles; in yet another, a man pointlessly and repeatedly climbs a pile of sand—toward letters spelling out “Hee hee hee”--in which the number “five” is inscribed. Numbers are at the center of each shot, enacting the titular countdown ad nauseam as the camera rapidly zooms out, turning viewer into voyeur.
Zooming is key to Graham Gussin’s Beginning and Ending at the Same Time (Horizontal Movie) (2001), the highlight of “OK / Okay” at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery (also at the Swiss Institute). It too is a two-channel work, projected onto opposing walls, that runs together a sequence of banal fifteen-second shots: office towers, cars on the interstate, and parking garages all feature prominently. The two walls feature the same shot at the same time, but in reverse. Look left, and the lens pushes closer and closer toward the banister on an outdoor terrace. Look right, and the camera is receding from that same point. Its simplicity is striking, and yields innumerable pleasures, not least of which is the fact that Gussin plays his conceptual game with a straight face. Unlike a meta-Conceptualist like Jonathan Monk, who almost always reminds the viewer of his relationship to artistic forebears, Gussin is direct: pay attention to the everyday, and be aware of the constitutive nature of looking.
(More on Gussin: IKON Gallery, Birmingham; New Museum, New York; Lisson New Space, London)