Clover

Moss of Aura at the Stone NY

2011-12-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

I have finally decided that real estate is really everything ( or a big part of what defines the current era.. it is a terrible market model) and that the reason Manhattan is so important it not that it is itself an important place but that it is easy to get to everything from there. It isn't where you are but were you can go, though that can come to define where you are. Manhattan is the empty center.
A couple of years ago I curated an event which dealt with this idea of the empty center. It was highly influenced by
the concept of the Mandala which is a a narrative or a bunch of narratives around an empty center. I think that sometimes
indigenous music can be a type of empty center. I did that event for personal reasons and I don't like to talk about ( though here I am ). Gerrit Whelmers of Baltimore's awesome " Future
Islands" did something which conceptually had a lot of closeness to what I did. There was a big gamelan called the Gamelan Kusuma Laras Invocation and then Mr. Whelmers played some stuff from his new solo project, which was really good, and danceable though people didn't really dance. This performance made my effort feel worthwhile. I really love " The Stone" as a venue, it so stark and still sort of feels in the mddle of nowhere. Even if that middle of nowhere sense if a like all of the East Village a bit contrived it doesn't matter, when you reach the center of the narrative there is nowhere to go the center of nowhere can become true anywhere.

Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India 1100-1900

2011-11-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

This exhibit was so interesting and so comprehensive. The art of India itself is so influenced from many different directions. Buddhist, Muslim, Mongol and animism The ample secondary sex characteristics of the various Buddhist deities in the first room were eye catching and memorable. I like my green Tara's with breasts that could belong in the Macy's Day Parade. But that is really just the beginning. There are also these. I am always impressed by the amount of narrative the Indian miniature painters manage to pack into a little canvas. There is a fantastic scene of a tiger hunt covering a hillside.

To a Great City: Arvo Part and Snohetta

2011-09-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

The collaboration between the artist Arvo Part and Snohetta in lower Manhattan make for a compelling break from the bustle of the city. It argues that even in the city where you are constantly connecting to the small to your neighbor , you can also connect to the large, to the all.

The idea was that you would go to different sites in lower Manhattan and experience something in the city other than bustle. That you would experience a type of quiet in the middle of the bustling city, a type of quiet but also a type of music. Maybe a different type of music to the bustle that you normally hear. Maybe a music that compresses the experience the essence of the bustle of the city to something quieter.

You can wander through grass blown down in a cyclone fence on the battery listening to the performance. You can spend time in a office space abandoned by workers but still in possession of a view.

One of the sites takes you on a ferry ride to governor's island. You have to wander to the center of the island into the magazine.
In the magazine in the battery there are two balloons and music playing. The placement of a balloon within the vaults of the
battery is incongrous and strange. But one can argue that it is the incongrous and strange which can take us to something bigger than ourselves.

Stalker

2011-09-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of interests in the movie Stalker.

It deals a lot with the unseen, the unknown, the fear in the human heart. It is simple and visually beautiful. It is terrifying yet in so many aspects a truly brave horror movie, where not only the scenes depicted in it are frightening but also the making of the film itself was courageous act, just as looking at our own humanity is.

It is scary because it is so realistic, and things happen in it that are just a bit strange, but still somehow realistic.

Seth Price 9/11: New York Sadness

2011-09-11T09:03:00.001-07:00

So I read about Seth Price in a class and then I googled his stuff. I actually really like NY Sorrow. Sometimes I think there can be something so pornographic about violence. And so much on the news is more about being titillated in the name of being informed. Blood and guts and explosions are not realism, unless you work in a meat processing plant or as a fireworks inspector. War is never as exciting as the news. When society is functioning relatively well and there is enough freedom and food, death itself is relatively boring. Grandma dies, everyone is sad, you look at photos of her life but there is relatively little blood and guts,maybe cake. And thats a good thing, it is a sign that things are ok in society. So in a way I like this tribute better than the crumbling buildings because if the towers still stood this footage would never make its way out of a personal video library, it is so mundane.

Jeu de Paume : Cahun and Mofokeng

2011-08-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

The two photography exhibits currently at the musee of the Jeu de Paume deal with issues of memory and
identity.

Mofokeng claims to be looking for that which can not really be photographed, to be trying to photograph a shadow.
The first room delves into his beginning photographing workers on mass transit in South Africa. The shadow here is
perhaps what the commuters really want or are thinking. Perhaps they are the larger shadow in South African society as
well.
In the second room he photographs sacred places in Africa and other places in the world. The devote gather around
a cave to be blessed by water or smoke. There is a reflection on one side upon the equality between man and landscape.
On the other side of the room there are a photographs of landscape and caves which have been formed and damaged by
mining.
The new age lady and writer
( all of which are perhaps disqualifications for being a thinker) Marianne Williamson says that the most
sacred places on earth are those where a great evil has taken place but where that evil has turned into something positive. According to this logic a killing field made into a church would be especially sacred. In the third room of the exhibition Mofokeng doesnt make any new monuments, but he takes some nice picture of former mass graves in Namibia. The last room frankly left me a little unconvinced and uncomfortable, photos of Autchwitz torture chambers in an art gallery. Some wounds are perhaps best left raw for a bit longer. But maybe that is where the discussion is. Or maybe not. I dont know.

Cahun's major subject is herself and her refusal to accept the established norms for women in inter war Europe.
Cahun was a major part of the surrealist group in Paris after the first world war.
Starting with chopping off her hair and dressing as a man, she goes onto image herself as all of the images of exoticism
and the other which were rattling around and being oppressed in the collective imagination and society of early twentieth
century europe. She lays in a jungle/ garden like setting with leopard print. She creates human fingers out of misplaced objects, news paper papier mache. In the end she plays with the unnoticed corners of her own neighborhood photographing walls.

The Tragedy of the Commons at the Palais de Tokyo

2011-08-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

A bunch of leaf cutter ants are going about their business in a plexiglass structure, which
is adapted to the ant colony as a home and to people as a work of art. The sound of the ants is amplified in the four corners of the room.

The tragedy of the commons itself is the idea that a bunch of people working together, even with the best of intentions will eventually deplete their resources.

There is a video of an animal behavior expert talking about the behavior of the ants.
It is very fascinating to watch the ants going about their business. The leaf cutter ants are offered various things to cut on various stands. They seem to enjoy the leaves and bits of flowers they are offered, however they ignore the book which has so thoughtfully been placed on the stand. At the far end of the room through a tunnel of plexiglass is the site where all the construction materials take form into a hive or common living space.

JR in the Bronx and the Centre Pompidou

2011-08-10T11:56:00.001-07:00

The french graffiti artist JR recently won the 100,000 dollar TED prize.
He has undertaken art projects all around the world designed to give the faceless a face, for instance in a poor village in Kenya he has placed the faces of the women that live there on the roofs of the houses. Thus what was once a shanty town is turned into a work of art. This project was called *Women are Heros*.

One thing he is doing this summer is posting the images of people that live in Hunts Point Bronx on the walls of this area.
I like the idea making people you know, instead of like Kate Moss (nothing against Kate Moss), huge posters in the neighborhood... so you can aspire to be your teacher or your person at the post office... I am conflicted about graffiti and also think it is sort of site specific like this project might never fly in suburban NJ where i grew up ....
but then on the other hand the urban enviroment is shaped much more by advertising than the suburban environment, so using tools of large scale advertising to humanise the environment might be a good way to go as long as community groups have a hand in it.

Another thing he has done in Paris is set up a huge photo booth open to the public in the Center Pompidou tourist and regular people from all over the world can take pictures of themeselves, which come out as huge posters. So you dont have be famous or an actor to get a huge picture of yourself, you can just be you. Which is a nice thought.

Vodun, African Vodoo at Center Cartier

2011-08-06T03:14:00.000-07:00

The architecture of the Center Cartier is very messy and ordered at the same time. The walls are glass and they open into a graden which is not manicured but is wild in not even a very wild way, but in more of an urban way, like weeds and wilflowers growing in a vacant lot. I like how all the objects have their own meaing and power. The most powerful objects are fittingly put in the basement. They are darkened with something which is frequently perhaps goat blood There is a video of a ceremony where a goat is sacrificed and pour on an idol. Many are tied to fertility because in Africa fertility is key.

In a way by putting these ancient things from a culture which has been around as long as humanity in a city that in some ways tries to so seperate itself from nature, there is a type of magical act too...

Waayaha Cusub

2011-08-01T11:12:00.001-07:00

Waayaha Cusub is a Somalian hip hop group living Kenya.They have been making really cool music since 2006. They are huge in Somalia , but havent been able to perform a concert in their native country because of the political unstability there Their first major release is called a hees jacayl which translates as love song. As they got recognition for their great music, their style started to evolve. The album they put out in 2008 had a lot of MIA influence, the singers werent wearing headscarves and they danced around in disco like environments.

They sing about stability for Somalia but also all the normal things that you are insterested in when you are in your twenties; boys girls, relationships, not always getting what you want but hoping for it none the less. Their last album released in 2011 shows a mix of the older more traditional style and the experimental phase of 2006. They seem to have ironed out many of the kinks associated with trying to fit into the bigger global scene and seem confortable with their identity as a band... plus one of their last videos, idaaya falis, has speedwalkers in it. How cool is that?

Future Islands on a Boat

2011-07-12T12:18:00.001-07:00

Future Islands is a Baltimore Band which utilizes the keyboard, a crazy voiced singer and a bass guitar. My favorite song was a bluesy crazy ballad. The concert I saw was on a boat in th Seine so the symphonic throb of the concert was augmented by a the gentle rocking of the boat. They come off as something of a surprise because in some ways they are quite tied to Dan Deacon, who I havent always been the biggest fan of; this might be because I have always seen him in NY where the hipsterness is always so deep you can cut it with a knife. The audience in Paris was much more appreciative, maybe because being from Maryland is exotic here but also because I dont know... people stop and listen more... maybe? The end meaning of the band is feeling, the Samuel T. Herring obviously puts a lot of emotion into the words of the song and he states in interview that he wants to force the listener to fee. The huge amplifier they carry around creates wall of sound that similarly forces you to hear if not only always melody then at least sound. "Walking through the door" for example creates a song where you are moving on according to the songs lyrics but also some the sound and insistence of the music are keeping you, and giving you the attention you need but are too afraid to ask for.

Cy Twombly

2011-07-07T15:10:00.001-07:00

I usually dont get too sad when artists die. After they pass the fragile age of 27 they tend to be a fairly long lived profession, especially when successful. However, Cy Twombly's passing did make me stop to think. I have known about his work for almost a decade but it has taken me a long time to come around to it, and that long apprehensive approach has blossomed, I must admit, into full blown love. He reacts to the question also raised by Rene Magritte in his "This is not a Pipe" that the image is not the same thing as the actual image and that the written word can have just as much power as the image, not only as a word but as an image. Why create an image of a mythical Venus when you can just scribble Venus and all the feelings that Venus brings. Why look for myth of the gods of antiquity in the Elgin marbles, why not look for it on the scribbles on the wall, written by the forgetten. There seems to be a link to graffiti, more to direct creativity, the desire to tell the story through the agitation of line.

Second Burial at Le Blanc

2011-06-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

In her exhibit at the Project Arts Center in Dublin Ireland,Sarah Browne has a curious way of refering to currencies as indigenous.
One small town in France has continued to the accept the franc for goods
and services although it is no longer legal tender and will continue to do
so until 2012. Diversity tends to complicate things but it also give stability.
Or it wastes energy so much in little transactions that people don't aspire for more.
Holding onto to old ways can work with everything except money.
The Euro seems in some ways to be taking on the role once held by the dollar. Right now the Euro is stronger than the dollar and in
many ways Americans visiting Europe probably feel more european than before.
There is a curious type of role reversal in play. Where will it all go.
Money is based so much on people's emotions. Types of emotional battles between countries come up just on the basis of money. If my currency is stronger than yours then my country must be better than yours. The major quote with the exhibit is the apocalyptic "if the euro fails we all fail". The euro doesn't seem to be failing. Everyone adopting same currency seems to have the promise of equality, but does it just mean a new type of colonialism by a euro elite. Yet at the same time the concept of Europeanism evolved as counter to both extremes nationalism and socialism, so in spite the fears, given the unavoidable facts that history presents us with the Euro seems like the best solution. These are some of the issues this piece addresses.

How to Build a Forest. the Kitchen. Pearl Damour

2011-06-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

Art like fashion is by nature impermanent, but it can be difficult for art to contemplate the nature of its own
impermanence. The installation at the Kitchen by Pearl Damour does both. The artists were inspired by Katrina and the destruction that was wrought not just on communities but on nature. During the storm more than a hundred trees were uprooted on Damour's property, Both last weekend and this upcoming weekend, the
artist collective Pearl Damour will construct a forest in the Kitchen gallery space, between the hours of 2 and 10.
The forest only reaches full growth for a brief window of thirty minutes, at 8 pm each day. During this time the artists stop building and interact, trying make the forest move, before taking it down. This piece strikes me because it seems like the impossible and useless, valueless play of children and devalued craft.

Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire and Shadow, Museum of the Native America NY

2011-06-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Preston Singletary is on view at Museum of the Native American. The San Francisco born Tlingit artist creates native motifs in glass. The art wants to create something which is contemporary and has universal appeal, and
yet at the same time has a specific ethnicity. The artist believes that his work gets much of it's power from the
ethnic rootedness of it. I think that the artist's work would be very effective in conventional gallery venues but it is
especially effective in the Heyes center were there is so much older native art on view as well. Singletary creates a continuity with the older historic native art on display. The medium of glass is both modern and ancient requiring handcrafting yet lending itself to futuristic renderings. Rather than being carved into wood which can rot ( perhaps a preferable natural process) Singletary's art
lives in glass, which can only shatter. The trickster raven stealing the moon is sleek and the rattle that sings to itself is glassy. Impossible to use every day encased in glass without even having to be put in a museum, yet all the more valuable perhaps due to their state of suspended animation.

Friends with You

2011-06-10T04:59:00.001-07:00

The Friends with You Show in the Hole on the Bowery explores issues of cuteness, or perhaps it is just cute, and play. There are slick bright surfaces filling a big white space. A large inflated balloon like toy fills a room. Slick colorful pattern lollipop-like objects whirr on walls and inflated cartoon figures venture off into the night, literally walking into the street. The website and accompanying catalogues tell more about the general agenda:friends with you . I like the Moomin trollish large dark spiritual creature.

There seems to be a lot of prevalence of and anxiety about, virtual worlds lately. Like the fairy realms of older stories it seems like the cyberspace and commercial space are filled with realms into which you can wander and never come back. Everyone in the future is going to have an avatar and go dancing in Second Life instead of the real world.

But at the same time, the tendency toward playfulness seems to be sincere. It's good for adults to have a playground. I like
bouncy mushrooms...

The Rainbow City is a huge playground of colorful inflated balloons, for adults and children, which is making an appearance near the High Line this summer (now). It is supposed to promote "magic, luck and friendship" ( according to the creators ) around New York City. Its first manifestation was in art Basel Miami. It seems like it might function as a site of interaction of the public of the relatively elevated, natural High Line, the now commercial but once and perhaps still edgy (much edgier than the Eatontown Mall in NJ for example) Meatpacking/ Chelsea arts district, and still undeveloped regions near the port authority/lincoln tunnel.

The world and particularly the art world is based increasingly on who you know. At the same time people succeed in groups. Maybe a space like this will promote new types of collaboration. Hopefully a collaboration which isn't strictly commercial, but perhaps playful and random and like an unmoored balloon veering off in unexpected directions.

Ryoji Ikeda.The Transfinite. Armory

2011-06-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

There is something very meditative in images or even bands of color that start and stop in given patterns.. In Brion Gysin's cutup which he pioneered with William S. Burroughs,and which was on view at the New Museum last summer,you are stopped from following a visual narrative because the image cuts out before you have chance to make a story about it.

In Ikeda's work, there is a similar cutting up of reality. Stripes of varying thicknesses of light and dark move up a huge screen and floor, while electronified music plays. However, in my opinion, while the visual narrative is missing, the entire sound becomes a narrative at one minute the sound was very celestial and soothing at another, it became disturbing.Ikeda claims to be dealing with the concepts of beauty and the sublime in his work. From my studies of the term sublime in 19th century painting, I know there is a haunted quality to the sublime.When my friend and I were looking at the piece when it turned to static, we found ourselves suddenly talking about older scary movies like "Poltergeist" and " The Ring". Our conversation was almost a part of the piece.

Behind the big screen stretching to the nineteenth century vaulted ceiling the back of the screen was a "The Matrix"- like pattern of numbers, not in binary but individual numbers. In addition to evoking a giant suduko puzzle it seems to raise the question whether beauty and the sublime can be quantified. The number pattern screens continued in a number of boxes behind the screen. Or perhaps beauty was the numbers and the patterns of stripes in
the front were the sublime. It is interesting to think about.

Sean Maung

2011-05-04T06:26:00.001-07:00

How long have you been taking photographs?

I have been taking photos in an inspired, motivated manner since 2006.

Where did you start taking photographs?

I think I first started in Olympia, WA. i had spent the summer working in Alaska, catching salmon.
I got back to washington and used that money to buy a fine Dobbs hat and a used olympus om1 film camera.

What inspires you?

People and place inspire me. The random character of people. The camera is a tool to help me facilitate that passion. The camera gives me an opportunity to see new places and talk to people on the street.
When I was living in L.A., I would hop on the bus to downtown. Then maybe drink some whiskey and smoke. Then just walk around, taking pictures, talking to random people off of Broadway, or Los Angeles St. or Main.

Your pictures tend to fixate on places that and people that are in off
moments. What draws you to this?

I guess when I take pictures, I want to showcase aspects of life that are not always mainstream; that don't fit into America's manufactured image of itself.

What do you think this other reality says about more normalized
pictures of life you see in the media?

There is a big facination with "reality" and reality media, but alot of that shit is so fake.
I think as a society, we have gotten so insulated, and have a hard time with confrontation and compromise. People want to know, and connect, but they do it in a very sterile, convienant manner; like watching reality t.v. or texting.

What do you think about concepts of freedom? You seem to like to take
pictures at moments when society is a little broken down, when people
are just hanging out and being themselves but that self might be a
little aimless.

Yeah, and in a way they might be free becuase they are not conforming to certain ideals and values that society has made. And I respect that and i notice that. Maybe it's very simple and a dude wants to wear latex because it feels good, and that gangster is tatted up because it's what you have to do to represent.
so in a way they are so free, and in a way they are so oppressed because mainstream society doesn't accept them. i guess out of that rejection and conflict between freedom and oppression there is intense expression.

see more at: carbonmade

Sweet Toof at Factory Fresh

2011-04-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

I like Factory Fresh a lot as an arts venue especially when the weather gets nicer.The space is just really cool.
In addition to the two galleries in front there is a courtyard in the back where whatever graffiti artist is being represented can paint their vision on the wall. In this case that vision was a huge wrap around gummy smile culminating in
a 3-D sculpture of a tube of toothpaste.

At this opening the starring act in the courtyard were a couple of cats that put on a trapeze show for everyone walking around the perimeter of the courtyard and looking down at us. And getting these strange little beers for a dollar is nice. Other cool somewhat gimmicky things about the show were a bunch of plastic fedoras placed out on
a bench for people to wear and probably take pictures with, and fake tooth masks.

Sweet Toof is cool. I had a lot of fun at the opening. But I have some problems with the art, all of the problems that I have with Williamsburg in general.The social conditions which created graffiti art no longer exist, or if they do exist the people
that they most affect can't afford to fight any more, because laws of incarceration and deportation are getting stricter. There is much less wiggle room. Or maybe we really live in a utopian society where the social ills brought up aren't valid. Being in a gallery serves to legimatize the art, and maybe this art was always bound for the gallery. Also there is the trend of making art which isn't about yourself. The artist says he's never been to Mexico but he uses dia del morto figuresappropriated in a weird way to use teeth and gums in a way that resembles caricature .Or maybe it is not caricature. Everything is broken down to the bones. Still there is a lack of a sense of desperation. There is a sense that the artist, and all the spectators could
easily leave the art if they wanted.

It would be nice if graffiti art ( or this gallery version of it) could go somewhere other than unsettling
narratives, but at this moment they seem to be in full force. Maybe soon they won't be. Fingers crossed.

Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art at Japan Society

2011-04-21T08:02:00.001-07:00

I have long harbored the fantasy of living in Japan . My main reason for this is that I am really disorganized, and messy and for me Japanese culture with its emphasis on simplicity is the opposite of these things.I always thought that if I lived in Japan, I would magically become organized. Organization would seep into me like the air. I don't know if this would have actually worked, and I have seen some messy Japanese people, but there does seem to be a thoroughness of design. The thing I like about this show is that you can't lob the common criticism of modern art at it. Your five year old sister,son or cousin could not have made any of this art.

The first room was devoted to photographs of grandmothers of the future, by Miwa Anagi. There were grandmother Geishas. I liked these photos somewhat.I wasn't sure about them, too. I don't know if really old people doing things that very young
people normally do was really so subversive, maybe it is.

In the second room there were works on paper. The miniaturization of Japanese art is especially striking. There are protrayals of all the activities within an airporttaking place inside the planes themselves, with Yamaguchi Akira. Maneka Ikeda's huge trees which contain hidden teeming but somehow harmonious life.

There was a student of Marina Abramovich who has lived in Berlin for the past decade who made a clothing specific work of
art with tubes, like blood going in and out of a wedding dress.

A huge paper cut out called the vortex dominates the center of the next room, it's the first thing you see after you pass a Kohei Nawa's deer covered with crystal balls.Deers are sacred to the Japanese. Does a deer covered in crystal balls say something about the future? It's pretty in any case.Haruka Kojin's hanging fractal flower patterns adorn a wall.
And a film plays in the last room along with a photo showing the Kittys themselves presiding
over a tombstone in a pet cemetary.

The Roses on Park Ave.

2011-04-19T11:28:00.001-07:00

For the past couple of weeks after my classes at the end of the week, I have been admiring the huge iron roses blooming on Park Ave. I like flowers. I like the Macy's flower show. I like Georgia O'Keefe and Robert Mapplethrope. I like the Bronx and the Brooklyn Botanical gardens. I also like that the artist, Will Ryman, was a playwright before he came back to sculpture, but personal histories aside, big iron flowers are cool.
I am not so fond of the big plush bear by the Seagram building, maybe this just means I like flowers better than bears. There is something really appropriate about them on so many levels. Roses are classy flowers and Park Ave. is a classy street for starters. Maybe there is something about them like they were some giant 1950's ( or J Crew or Kate Spade copies of) brooches fallen off some well dressed springy giant women. The metal and the ornamental flower combination give something between an organic quality and the quality of jewelry. Also, somehow I think that somewhere buried deep in Park Avenue's memory is the fact that once upon a time around the beginning of the last century the now busy street was actally a park.The well heeled of New York paid top dollar because they wanted a bit of respite from the bustle of the city outside their doors not a couple lanes of traffic. Somehow, the flowers make the traffic a little less central to the street.

e-flux reading room

2011-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I trekked all the way out to Essex St.
because I was bored,and nostalgic for a New York
that my parents were too strict to let their
teenage daughter experience in the late 80's (actually
I would have been 8) rightly so, and that I was
too busy trying to graduate college in the late
90s early aughts to see gentrify,
and I found this reading room by e-flux. They have a
reading room with books from
different collectives. A couple of years ago they also had
show which showcased the Lee Rosler archive.

I guess they are meant to be an old school type
of open space.Maybe? Or something new. The fact
that you have to read all these books which
often have essays related to site specific art
in an old store front which is in a formerly
bad area of New York is interesting. I am very used
to reading books in bookstores, and also in libraries
but the fact that you can't take the books home or buy
the books is interesting.

Also interesting is the fact that you have to trek
out so far to get there... the nearest coffee shop
is two blocks away!! It's really desolate. In order
to read these books you have really want do so.Which
given the pleasant surroundings you probably really do.

The reading room came from Berlin and from people all
over the world donating their libraries.

Glenn Ligon at the Whitney

2011-04-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

Glenn Ligon takes appropriated materials of slave posters and Mapplethrope's Black Book, and tries insert his own narrative into it.

I liked the show, and I didn't. I think identity is good and you should try to work with your identity and actually keeping a fixed identity makes everyone way more comfortable, but at the same time I feel like it boxes you in. Who does the boxing in? Do I? Probably.
I felt like I wanted to have discussion with every black gallery guard and be like, are you gay? How does this work make you feel? I felt a type of discomfort, I hadn't felt since high school when I went past gay sex shops on Christopher Street. Now, to me at least, gayness doesn't feel especially threatening, but blackness still does, just because there is still so much inequality in this country and in the world, so much of it is tied to skin color and for those of us that have climbed onto more even ground all that disconnect is still yawning like black hole waiting swallow individuals up into proscribed roles of oppressed and oppressor.Looking at people flitting through the gallery, at least I didn't feel like I was the only one.

I said in a later discussion that I thought that the writing in Mapplethrope's Black Book
was like putting articles into Playboy, making you read things when you didn't really
want to read, you just wanted to be stimulated. I guess the end point of Ligon's work would be that it still matters but not in a threatening way. I wonder what society will look like then. Anyway, it's exciting to think about.

Double Rainbow!!

2011-04-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

My first appropriated movie, I'm so clever:

Rirkrit Tiravanija at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

2011-04-01T20:54:00.001-07:00

Fear eats the soul is written on the walls of the gallery and
the doors have been taken off the gallery exposing the gallery
space to the outside. This seems to speak to Ranciere's idea of
shattering walls between specialists. I personally like the whole
meditation on fear. It influences some of my own work as well.

At the opening apparently soup was made, and eaten by artistic people
see here

Soup would have been nice on the rainy day that I stopped by,
but all that was offered was the chance to see some T-shirts
being made.It seemed like some of the tshirts were being printed over
and over to the point of illegibility.In the room next to the t-shirt production
were cast of objects bronzed like baby shoes, only here Brillo Boxes
and blankets, space heaters and TVs.

I am not sure what the artist is trying to say, except you can do
this too, and if you did things would be better..There is something
very Angelina Jolie giving birth in Namibia to giving out soup in a
gallery. The t-shirts that Rikrit designed were sold at the Gap a
couple of years ago, in 2007 that company was accused of sweatshop
labor, here student interns who have paid maybe 100,000 dollars for
the priviledge of a MFA print on sustainably
made American Apparel t-shirts. Yet, maybe there is an aknowledgement of
all of this within the show, and while aknowledging it, a movement to change.

Missy Rogina New Works

2011-03-27T18:51:00.001-07:00

An exhibit of new works by artist Missy Rogina features
a series of small jewel-like collages all centering around
photographs from the life a woman who was young at the beginning
of this century. The photographs were found
in an old suitcase by the artist.

The suitcase belonged to a woman named Anna.

She was well traveled and elegant but apparently never married.
She loved the beach and tea and her friends. They evoke another
era. The photos are surrounded by pieces of fabric and embroidered
and written words. Many are adorned with flying birds made of metal.
There are also medallions of Buddhist deities, which reflect the
artist's own belief system. The artist also was inspired by her
childhood sacred place of Marion Massachusets, which a century ago,
perhaps saw many people like Anna.

The works of Ms. Rogina are evocative objects which try to navigate
the line between the artist's memories and experiences and those of a
distant unknown stranger, recorded only in pictures.

The Critiques

2011-03-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

The Critiques were an art criticism salon of sorts started at the 628
months studio.In this incarnation they moved to Soho on Greene Street
which was a nice new venue and very classic in many ways.

Yeni Mao made manipulated photographs based on Kung-Fu movies.
They seem haunted, ghostly and from something not for mass media
consumption. Or if for mass consumption then for horror movies and
avant-garde documentaries.One wonders if the artist
was trying to overcome the commercialism of kung-fu and put it back
to a deeper more spiritual place.

He also had an interesting sculpture of a gun boat.

Sarah Kurz had paintings of women which are stills from famous movies, nudes are half clad mostly. Some are the artist's friends and others are stills from famous classic movies. There is also a painting taking out of a plane window and a tea kettle from Butterfield 8.The painter is an assistant to a painter and her mother was a professor of French Literature so she was influenced by Brigit Bardot and many of the other actresses she portrayed growing up.

Edward Hopper at the Whitney

2011-03-07T07:09:00.000-08:00

The Hopper show is small and accompanied by many pieces by contemporary
artists and photographers.

Sometimes, however the context can get to be too much. Walking into the exhibit the viewer
sees a film of New York Harbor from the twenties. We went on a Friday night and there
was a sizable crowd watching the film of ships coming into New York Harbor. You see photos
by Steiglitz of people in steerage arriving into New York Harbor.

The non condescending portraits of women are good. I especially
like Guy Pene de Bois who did a life size- statue of his wife
a large woman who presides happily over the space of the second
gallery. And then there is the last portrait by Hopper where a beautiful
middle aged woman stand naked staring out a window. Some portrayals of
women are not so flattering, for example Sailors and Floosies,
which my friend and I spent several minutes in front of going what the....?
Evening Wind in the first gallery shows a woman in front of a window, nude,
staring through billowing curtains to the outside. A contemporary( to Hopper) sketch
from the second gallery shows flappers the pleats of their silk dresses lit from
behind is stunning.

Many of the classic paintings by Hopper are there. His store fronts continue to mesmerize
all the different levels of window shades and shut down store fronts by inviting the
viewer in and keeping them at a distance with their appealing beauty.

The third gallery shows more industrial landscapes. Pictures of the canals around the
industrial plants of Detroit stand out.

In the second to last room of the show are my favorite pictures. The best pictures are
of the suburbs.I love a small water color of the outside of a church. One of the best things
about landscapes in general is the way they can be a window into another time. These bring
us to afternoons long ago, which even though they were decades ago are perhaps surprisingly
close to the present. The picture reminded me of being at some social event as a child where
there were mostly adults and feeling cast out playing outside on the lawn.

Enter the Void

2010-11-25T16:05:00.001-08:00

The movie pulses with sex longing and exploitation.
It is also an interesting portrayal of the theories of
reincarnation.

The primary longing is that of the soul to be reborn,
coupled with the boys somewhat incestuous overprotective
love for his sister.

It takes place in a seedy pulsing Tokyo ( somewhat out of a
foreigner dream because I felt it had littler resemblence to the
work a day Tokyo I experienced). A brother and a sister, Oscar and
Linda struggle to survive in a seedy messy apartment in Tokyo where
Oscar has slid into a life of dealing drugs and Linda into a life of
exotic dancing, at a club run by her exploititve boyfriend Mario.
At the beginning of the film Oscar is reading the Tibetan book of the dead, and
Linda who hates that her brother is going hanging out with drug dealer
is going to work as a dancer.

After Linda leaves, Oscar tries to overcome the seedy reality of his living
situation by taking mushrooms and the film viewer sees him enter a
trance. He get a call from his friend who want some drugs, at a nearby
bar. At the bar it turns out that in fact it was a set up and Oscar is shot
by the Tokyo police. Oscar dies in a seedy bathroom and that is were the
movie begins as Oscar hovers around Tokyo waiting to be reborn. His primary
concern is for his sister, but it isn't clear if it is out of brotherly love of
something else. The bother and sister lost their parents in a car crash as children.
Oscar wanted to protect to help his sister but he continually fails. First as a child
when she is taken away to foster care and then later when in Tokyo he tries to
take care of her and instead she falls into stripping and he himself
gets killed, and reincarnates as his sisters son with lots of sex and drugs
and memories of the past along the way.

The last film made by Gaspar Noe was Irreversiable which contemplates the uselessness
of revenge, and features highly sexualized violence. In some moments both seem more
tender than movies where neither happen. But maybe both are fever dreams,
in both women become increasingly powerless, because of their own nature.

Rusted Root

2010-11-13T18:04:00.001-08:00

I remember Rusted Root being a really popular band back in
Highschool so I was interested in seeing them with my friend
at the Nokia Center a couple of days ago. Many times in Highschool,
I could remember driving around and listening to "Send me on my way".
I ran with more of the goths or the punk ( or myself really
but the music I listened to was pretty mopey) but I still liked it.

I never really got into a lot of the neo hippy bands and successors to
the Grateful Dead because I felt like a lot of the potential of the 1960s
has vanished. If anything the rapes and debacle of the really corporate
Woodstock 2 should indicate that. But getting older I also find that not
being jaded is also a form of bravery. Still trying to access the idealism
and innocence of the sixties is something really just a relevant and
powerful as the late seventies swagger of the Strokes for example. Granola
can be crunchy but if you eat some you life longer and probably happier too.
They might be a little cheesy but they scare me a little less
than Lightening Bolt.

I think a lot of their appeal is the way in which their music takes you
on a journey. They also seem to embody a lot of the innocence and optimism
of the 1990s. Which was so post modern so end of history, the Berlin wall
down, the market strong it seemed totally possible that you could tour
around the country with you crazy dance band,and live the hippy dream forever.

I had a really good time at the concert.... two block from Times Square is
probably as far as you can get from the woods, but still, but still there
was an innocence. Of all the dreams to hold onto, despite the somewhat Bro-sh connotations, it doesn't seem like a bad one.

The Walking Dead on AMC

2010-11-02T07:48:00.001-07:00

Around this time last year I wrote a post about vampire movies
and how they scared me because they eroticized evil, and that
zombies are a much better reality to look at. Now it seems
that we are finally in the zombie moment I had hoped for and
I feel like maybe one needs to be careful what they wish for.

Zombies are the other, and as such they are easier to kill than
vampires.In order to not become a zombie you must kill the other.
Granted being a walking cadaver is definitely a bad thing, but
maybe the cadaver doesn't feel that way and maybe the cadaver is
happy with its zombie life. This probably isn't true actually.It
seems like the Zombie forgets who it is and only want to make
other people like itself.Zombies are very metaphysical... what if
anything goes on in their minds.

The Walking Dead has the typical zombie movie premise. A man falls
into a coma( he's a policeman, he gets shot) and on waking up he
finds the world changed, littered by dead bodies and overrun with
zombies (there is the especially compelling half a corpse zombie
woman holding onto a bicycle) Finally the
policeman makes it to a house where a father and son are living
out a hidden existence, with nightly appearances of their ghostly
mother/wife who has turned into a zombie. After leaving the mother
and father the policeman moves through the country, finds a horse,
rides it into the city.The premiere of the series ends with the
horse consumed by zombies (after the policeman assures the horse
that everything will be fine). There is another group of people
living somewhere in the country . The policeman goes into a tank,
and contacts life on the ham radio as the zombies howl outside.

The reason I guess I prefer zombie movies to vampire movies is because they
don't glamorize or sexualize death, but on some thought maybe glamorizing
death( or undeath) makes it more of a relatable human issue. To kill a
vampire is difficult because it might become your lover. To kill a zombie
is easier, as it is already obviously dead.This isn't a profound thought really
but somehow I think whether we watch zombie movies versus vampire movies says
a lot about the character of society in general. I guess it says we are more
blase about seeing the bad guys and also that there are more of them.

The series is based on a popular comic strip and the premise is pseudo scientific.
The people have contracted something known as Walker's disease, which eats away
their flesh and makes them want to eat flesh as well. As the series progresses
you begin to see the derivation from the comic book.

Inside Job

2010-10-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

So for Halloween I just saw a little bit of the parade and instead I
saw the movie "Inside Job" directed by Charles Ferguson.The movie started with
a depiction of Iceland and a discussion of the economic meltdown there.
A few bankers started borrowing from the central bank of Iceland to
do things like buy stock in Harrods and also to buy planes and boats
for themselves. As a result Iceland's economy was bankrupted within a couple of
years.

Betting on mortgages and credit card debt was made into this weird toxic super
stock and then sold directly to investors as credit default swaps. Suddenly banks
started making loans that were completely irrational, because they could make
money selling the stocks.

They talk about Brooksly Born the head of the Commidities Future Trading Commission from 1996-1999. She tried to regulate the use of derivatives during this time, but was shot down. There is definitely a question of compensation. Paul Volker is interviewed
and talks about how he used to earn 40,000 a year on the Federal Reserve.

There are all sorts of example of how the banks turned into near pyramid scheme.
Instead of making money when investors made money, they started to make
money when investors lost money. Banks that were formerly small and answerable to their
investors became huge monolithic structures selling futures and kinda imaginary credit.

There is a lot of talk about how wall street was largely a boys club.Lots of cocaine was consumed and lots of prostitutes were put on retainer for wall street firms. An interview with a former madam Kristin Davis reveals that there were up to 10,000 influential people using the services of prostitutes. Elliot Spitzer is interviewed frequently throughout the film.

There are lots of creepy shots of soaring sky scrapers, all of which presumably house
banks.There are lots of great lines like about a Bond Trader who became really rich
and he thought it was because he was smart rather than that just being how the
system worked.We see pictures of tent cities and interviews with families who lost their homes after they bought a house with predatory lender.

There is a discussion about the fall of Lehman brothers, and how most of the big firm were receiving triple AAA ratings until just before the collapse.

The end is a little overly patriotic calling us to fight for reforms as Americans at the end of the movie, but overall I think it makes good points and shows some complex concepts in understandable ways.

The Gross Clinic and Eakins's women at the Philadelphia Art Museum

2010-10-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

Eakins is a very Philadelphia artist, and in a way I guess American.
There is a lot that has been written about Eakins but still a lot I like about him, and maybe some things that remain to be said.Maybe not by me, but in any case he seems to be vast subject.

I feel like he is very American in a way that David Lynch,William Burroughs and Roman Polanski are American, he looks at the armature/what's underneath. Lynch looks under the surface of American society, Burroughs looks at the subconcious, and Polanski looks at what is going on in urban or political or international society compared to the law (I guess?). Eakins looked at the armature the muscles of the body,the actualities of movement the actualities of being human and in looking closely at the
the gloss of class and gender and racial differentiation became irrelevant in the face the reality of the individual.

Eakin's depictions of women are especially memorable. In a time (like any time actually, including today) when women tended to be idealized, Eakins portrays his women as individuals. Addie sheds a tear if you look closely enough. Only in his latest paintings only maybe one, "The Old Fashioned Dress", are women really idealized. There it is not a flattering idealization. Portraying people as individuals rather than ideals seems to be tied up in a some of the ideals of equality that Eakins was exposed to in his time in Central Highschool. I think its significant that Eakins wasn't drafted into the Civil War ( his Dad brought him out of the draft). There is something endlessly innocent about Eakins's art despite the obsession with nudity and the accusations of indecency and molestation.

A lot of Eakins's work has bounced around the country, but lately it seems Philadelphia has come to appreciate what may be the city's most famous
artist more.A lot of people decided that Eakin's major works belong in
Philadelphia.Money was raised for the Philadelphia museum to acquire the
Gross Clinic,and so the newly cleaned painting is being showcased with much
pomp. It has been newly cleaned, removing a reddish light which his widow
Susan Eakins had complained about.

It's interesting to think about Eakins as a scandalous artist. Somehow when
things are more than a hundred years old they are expected to make you yawn.
Things become first scandalous and then irrelevant,or they are very popular,
without scandal but then also irrelevant, as time goes by. Arguably the only
eternal things are Greek vases or something.

The new emphasis on Eakins has a whole two walls gallery in the main building
of the Philadelphia art museum devoted to the artist, as well as sketches. His
other better known works are in a gallery which is set up like a 19th century
parlor, where you can see his Concert Singer.

I also loved seeing Eakin's student Tanner's painting next to some of the
Eakins's especially Tanner's "Annunciation" which I have really liked since
I was a kid. If the Virgin Mary were a historical person I do actually think
the whole Immaculate conception would look like how Tanner pictures it. It is interesting to see the direction some of Thomas Eakins's students took.

*by saying I like some Polanski movies doesn't mean I approve of raping a little girl, Eakins had a set of related issues in this regard too,and Burroughs shot his wife, not condoning any of it.

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum : Why Design Now

2010-10-24T09:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I went to the Cooper-Hewitt design museum . It was something I had been
wanting to see for a long time and so I was glad to have to opportunity to finally do so.

One of thing I loved about the museum maybe even more then the stuff on exhibit was the design of the museum itself. It is located in the former home of Andrew Carnegie which is a beautiful beaux-art mansion. It has all sorts of cool stained glass windows and carved wooden rooms and interestingly patterned wall paper and a lovely glass conservatory.

The furniture has been emptied out of the museum and it is currently filled with examples of design. The top floor was full of industrial and day to practical design.
A really cool thing was a desk which allowed children to fidget, apparently based on studies which found that fidgeting was actually conducive to children studying.
I was shocked by the amount of things that were made from recycled sewage or sheep's poo. Actually it was just two things but still. There were bricks made from 30% processed sewage, which were then used to make weird hobbit like domed houses. And there was paper made from radiated sheep's poo.

Some of my other favorites included the bio coffin, and eye glasses which cost only 19 dollars (and were aimed at the third world were people have a hard time affording eyeglasses) and were the strength of perscription was adjusted by injecting a syringe of saline into
the glasses. A side room was full of architectural models my favorite being something called a loblolly house, which was a prefabricated house on stilts.

The ground floor leaned a little bit more toward the decorative arts starting with crocheted coral reef by the entrance, where all the seperate strands of coral were individually crocheted. There were some pieces of clothing that weren't all that practical to wear. Then there was the gift shop which was a museum in itself only a more tantalizing one maybe because you could buy what you saw ranging from a 20 dollar japanese pocket knife to a 4,000 one of a kind scone lamp made from a igloo cooler and sculpy.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Lightening Bolt

2010-10-16T14:38:00.001-07:00

My friend Signe loves Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and I really miss going to live shows so when I saw on the Todd P list that Casiotone for the Painfully Alone was playing ,I brought tickets for myself and for my friend Signe. I really like the song they have on NPR, about having a mess of cash in duffel bags with every penny hot.

I got the tickets about three weeks before at Desert Island Books in Williamsburg. It's a really cute bookstore.

Going to the show we saw flock of people in skinny jeans and like mickey mouse t shirts crossing broadway . It was odd in a neighborhood which while it has hipsters normally doesn't have such an influx of them, running across the road like deer.

The line for beer was shockingly long. It almost reached the stage.

After we got our beer we went and stood by the stage, elbowing aside people from the beer line. Casiotone played a good set. They didn't play the Bonnie and Clyde like
Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm (When the Saints Go Marching In), but they played other stuff. It was good.

I also feel a little sad when there are shows in places like Lithuanian Hall or
the Masonic Temple. It makes me feel like the Masons or the Lithuanians are a failure.
That they have to prostitute themselves on the altar of rock and roll.

The second act was Dan Deacon and since neither of us wanted to see him really, we went to Goodbye Blue Mondays,which Signe was familiar with, where we had a beer and listened to some dude ( bros really but in a good way I guess, I like bros) play guitar.

The second time we came in to see the show the entire venue was just steaming. The beer line continued to stretch to the stage. We went up to the balcony of the Masonic temple where I opened a window, which became a popular spot to cool off in from the damp and heat of the venue.

I had wanted to see Lightening Bolt for a long time, but they kinda scared me. I was in the balcony of the masonic temple with my friend and so I could see how the crowd started moshing to Lightening Bolt. The drummer put on one of those Mexican wrestlers masks. And it was sorta kinda scary. We didn't stay super long.

Hannah Meyers

2010-10-07T07:17:00.001-07:00

.
Hannah Meyers amazing music video.

Dregs of the Universe.

On the Bowery Movie

2010-09-27T20:45:00.001-07:00

Drinking has always been a big part of New York culture.
My own personal interest in New York drinking culture
comes from my Dad's involvement in it. My Dad is last
one standing of his many drinking buddies of the lower
East Side.

Still somehow, it never lost it's mystique.

Today the Bowery is a place for trendiness the closest stop to the
Whole Foods.

In the fifties it was the place where dreams came to die.
Young men would drink their nights away in the bars and then
look for work in the day. Mostly manual labor.The Bowery of
this movie isn't the celebrity studded place of which my dad
talks about.It is a place full of people spending their meager
earnings of some cheap wine,and then trying to scrap together
enough to do the whole thing over again, and over again until they die,
which considering the state of their liver will be sooner rather
than later.

In a way I see this movie as something of a propaganda movie, something
of a warning against drinking in general. The warning is right on
in many ways. Yet at the same time it seems to be tied to the more restrictive
and traditional culture of the nineteen fifties where churches still
reigned strong and gender and class roles were firmly fixed.

You see the scenes of a charitable house set up on the Bowery where the
men have to check in at 6 and are forced to stay clean(not go into any
bars) for the evening in order to stay there.One thing that is striking is
the lonely communal quality which marks the men you see in the bars.
There are hardly any women shown in the movie(though you would imagine)
their inclusion might make it a much harsher and even more moralizing movie
as many of the women would likely be engaged in some form of prostitution.

The movie tracks the progress of a young man who has found his way
to the Bowery drinking his way through his last paycheck. He is
taken under the wing of an older man who is dying slowly
of cirrhosis of the liver. The older man buys the young man some new
clothes and gives him some money and gives him some money.At the end
of the movie the old man assure his fellow drinkers that he will be
alright. The drinkers remark that he will be back. It is likely.
But to me it isn't a complete image of despair. Meters from this economic
and life ferment artists started thinking things which would change
the nature of modern life. In some ways I feel like the two are tied.

Garotas Suecas

2010-09-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

On Friday night I went to see the Brazilian Band Garotas Suecas (which means Swedish Girls in Portuguese) play at the Cakeshop. I got there late and as a result I got in free. I didn't see a lot of the set, but it was fun. Carrie Brownstein ( from NPR and Sleater Kinney) had been all about this band and I kept seeing posters in the Upper
East Village about how this was a band which had to be experienced, not just
heard.
Sometimes it can be hard for a band to live up to all the hype, however underground
and NPRish it is.
I honestly can't say what I though about Garotas Suecas. They played a kinda music known as tropicalia. It's really fun. It's in portuguese. I like the energy, the whole band is also very adorable. The guitar was really twangy, there is some amplified instrument that sounds like an organ. The crowd at the Cakeshop kinda bopped around to it, but mostly looked askance at anything which proposed they lose their sense of cool and ironic detachment.. It reminded me a little of a dance party at the Metropolitan Lounge, where noone really dances, just poses more. Still I liked it.

Garotas Suecas - "Bugalu" from AAM on Vimeo.

Vampire Weekend

2010-09-15T22:40:00.001-07:00

Last night unexpectedly, I got to go see Vampire Weekend.
The Dum Dum Girls and Beach House opened for them.
Going into the show I felt like some model casting call
from the J Crew on Rockfeller Center had spilled over
into Radio City but it was fine.

I love Beach House they are really soothing and they
seem to talk of a slight quiet sadness,
never attaches itself and never becomes personal, as is
in contrast, the case with Bon Iver which kinda lodges
itself in your gut and makes you relive all your
complicated breakups in graphic detail.It's sort of more
like an atmospheric sadness. In many ways I
was more excited to see them than Vampire Weekend, who
though I have been extremely aware of for awhile now, I
haven't really listened to, because maybe I felt the
conciousness they promoted didn't serve me well at a time
in my life when I was underemployed and too poor to be hip
in Brooklyn.

Just like some music is said to make you more
prone to doing drugs and being violent, I was afraid that
listening to Vampire Weekend would make me prone to
spending too much time at J Crew(where I recently saw a 700
hundred dollar leather jacket) and Zachary's Smile and
squandering whatever savings I had on argyle(socks, sweaters).
It's not that I don't like these things, it's just that
pursuing them wasn't useful to me at the time, I had an
expensive coffee habit to fund.

In a way I am really glad because it is maybe better to
see a band, especially one that is so popular, fresh
without having really heard them before.I guess the optimal place
to do this would be a small smoky bar, but baring that
Radio City is nice.When Vampire Weekend went on everyone in
the audience got up and danced and the level of audience
enthusiasm can only be described as adorable.

They have kind of bright guitar screech.I was recently listening
to Elvis and it sounded a little Elvis like to me. They covered
Bruce Springsteen and made lots of references to New Jersey( which
the audience heavily from New Jersey, liked). The
audience danced a lot, and they instructed people how to dance
(hold your hands up for a certain song), move more for the second
half. The fact that people were moving in Radio City Music Hall was
cool. I saw Radiohead there in the late nineties and we all just
sat in our seats (there were more drugs though, not me but around me)
and I may have fallen asleep.

I guess the biggest beef that people have with VW(other than the
fact that their initials are the same as Volkswagon) is that
they are, like their alma-mater Columbia, possibly guilty of
eminent domain abuse.They sing about African music from the 1960s.
People from Senegal living on 120th St should be singing this music
and making it famous.There are the comparisons to Paul Simon.But mostly
its just good pop music. I guess it's better to take your musical
influences from the African Market place in Harlem than from a bust of
Bach at the Manhattan School of Music. And the influences maybe aren't
that evident. Anyway, the show was really fun and I'm glad I went.
Any more serious discussion misses the point of good and layered pop
music, which it was.

The Bardo in the Rubin Museum

2010-09-15T05:45:00.000-07:00

I went with a friend to see the exhibition on the Bardo at the Rubin Museum of Art.

In Buddhist Art the religious symbols are not so much decorative as indicative of what may be encountered in the afterworld. There are kinds of flashcards which show you which entities you can expect to encounter in the afterworld and what to follow and not follow. In a sort of traffic directions of the afterlife there are descriptions of the types of lights you should follow when you encounter them in the Bardo and those you shouldn't And there are statues of deities which have both a peaceful and a wrathful face. There are depictions of the realms, the bardos. There are headphones you can wear and listen to the descriptions of the journey of the soul after death.
Art was apparently art was not considered to exist as we see it, but rather only to exist as a ceremonial object which interpreted the nature of reality.

The deities themselves represent aspects of your nature. Rather than having to deal with a terrible aspect of your nature alone, instead you call upon this deity to help you and project all of your problems upon it as well.

They also employ someone, whose jobs it is simply to start conversations with the visitors to the galleries. My friend and I ended up spending a lot of time talking to this lady about the art there.

I am not sure what I really make of the concept of the bardo. On one hand so much in Tibetan Buddhism, especially its relation to symbols, makes sense to me and I would like to have the afterlife be comparably sensible.It doesn't seem that far from the Catholic fear of hell. In some ways though, eternity scared me even more , than if not hell( because hell sounds pretty scary) then the concept of any form of suffering in the afterlife. I'm never sure how seriously to take it or how much to think it is just a symbol of this life we live now, which is really all we have.

Brion Gysin at the New Museum

2010-08-31T08:01:00.000-07:00

Brion Gysin at the New Museum is amazing.I have been very
disappointed in shows in the past at the New Museum,
sometimes it seems like New just automatically has to equal
annoying and abrasive but this isn't the case here.

Gysin was one of the formative individuals of the beat
generation.He was one of the first people to win a
Fullbright fellowship, and rather than coming up with
some ill conceived plan to save the world, he seems to have
lived his entire life concerned with ideas.

After a stint in Paris(somewhat Fullbright funded),
he spent a lot of time in Morocco with William S.
Burroughs, listening to the spiritual music of the
mystic Sufi master musicians of Joujuokas.His Dream
Machine is inspired by this music of these people.
A rotating cylinder with a lightbulb inside is placed
in the center of a room where you are expected to lounge
around on pillows. It is the only work of art that you are
expected to view with your eyes closed. When you close your
eyes and view it you are supposed to experience visions.

Gysins interest in visions, which are generally in my
understanding narrative experiences, is interesting
given the fact that the art form which he invented seems
in many ways to be completely antithetical to narrative.
With William S. Burroughs Gysin pioneered the cutup in 1959.
What is really notable about the cutup format is its focus on
the moment, the image, rather than the narrative. Watching a
movie which was a companion to Gysin's cutups requires whatever
little meditation training I have acquired in my time of Buddhist
meditation. The film itself is a type of meditation.Each clip
is just short enough to toss you off of various ledges of thought
and story and perception without ever giving you enough material
to form a cohesive narrative.Gysin references a third mind,which
seems to a mind without concrete identity or narrative,it seems to
be a mind of simply perception, of images, of seeing the real.

Curses were something which Burroughs and Gysin experimented
with together. They didn't like a certain magazine seller across
from them in Paris and they uttered a curse which
cause her magazine stand to burn down. She was described as evil,
mostly because I guess she was kinda surly about delivering the
Herald Tribune.After this story is recounted you can hear a
recording of Gysin uttering a curse.

There seemed to be something of a nonchalance about death
running through the beats. Burroughs is famous for shooting and
killing his wife, Joan, in a botched reenactment of William Tell.
The central figure of the beats, Lucien Carr, went to jail for
stabbing his annoying gay friend who made one too many moves on him.
Using magic to destroy or kill someone seems to continue the theme
of death by accident or circumstance rather than in some ways
premeditation. It seems a continuation of the cut up and in a way
lends a sinister yet meaningful underpinning to
the entire show. Speaking of curses Gysin had himself been expelled
from the surrealist group by Andre Breton and had described it as
having "the effect of a curse"; it gave rise to a belief in Gyson, of
conspiracy theories about the art world.

Maybe this experience lead to interest in the tangible.One of the more
tangible things is the written word. Gysin studied calligraphy in the
Japanese and Arabic traditions, and the final or first work on paper in
the exhibition(depending on how you go in) is an extremely long long mural
in canary yellow brush strokes, which seems to be telling some ecstatic
story in a language everyone forgot to read and loves all the more for.

Whitney Biennial

2010-05-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

It's probably been said more times than I know that the worst thing about
post-modernism is that nothing is shocking, that feeling of having your
breath taken away, so valued in human experience stops happening pretty
fast if you allow yourself to get jaded enough.

The only thing that really grabbed was the gospel music and the end of the show.
The esoteric spiritual universe of the monks was situated out in the courtyard,
from the south

Maybe the work a day sense of the show was an attempt to get back to the
the ethics that shaped the early abstract expressionist and other hallmarks
of American art. It seems that as the art world has become more centered around
grad schools, there seems to be a real nostalgia and a desire to recreate
the more working class reality that the sign painting Abstract Expressionists
and share cropping Beats were part of less by choice than necessity. Though
with debt and unemployment soaring the question of choice seems once
again as always a luxury rather than a given. This internal struggle seems to be
the theme of the show. Whether that makes for good art is another question.

Minotaur which was this representation of the ultimate macho man was done
by a self trained artist.Another type of macho was Nina Berman's depictions of the Iraq war veteran, a memorable photo collection of a young soldier horribly disfigured by the war trying to hold together his marriage and life back home.
There was a fun red foam thing that you wanted to climb under by Robert Grosvernor. A performance artist who clawed her way out of a box.

There was a lot of gestural abstraction, this is especially showcased on the website.

And maybe if the Biennial Art didn't grab me I don't remember ever being as
happy at a Biennial. Somehow, I saw a million friends at the show, running into
them unplanned.

Winona Returns...the Lois Wilson Story

2010-04-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

As a young teenager I was a big fan of Winona Ryder. She was the greatest.
Almost everyone in my small circle of friends was hypnotised by articles about
her, and I think I saw every major movie she was in the early 1990 some of them
in the theaters. I remember an issue of seventeen with with her on the cover.
She has fame, fortune, and Johnny, it said. Who didn't want that?

I guess lately her stars have changed but I still really like her. I know maybe her
downfall was her own fault what with shop lifting and all. Still didn't Johnny Depp
destroy hotel room and go on to be fine. I keep hoping
she will show up to my Buddhist center to meditate. I mean stranger things have
happened.

Anyway, so my Edward Scissorhand cravings were a little satisfied last Sunday night
when my roommate and I turned on the TV, and saw Winona featured on the Lois
Wilson Story. Lois Wilson, the wife of the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Married to
Bill W. in the 1920s she enjoyed a nice art deco existence in Brooklyn and Upper
Manhattan in the boom years of the 1920s, where her stock broker husband encouraged
people to to invest on a margin. Everything a middle class girl from the beginning of the
century could want seemed to be in her reach.

Then the stockmarket crashed, Lois had a couple of miscarriages that ended in a hysterectomy,
and Bill W. wouldn't stop drinking. Left out is the fact that Bill W. was a huge womanizer, the
Wilson's were really into new age and the occult ( being fond of seances and Ouija boards)

Is this the best way for an iconic actress from the mid nineties to relaunch her career? Or does she
want to relaunch anything? It seems a bit off. It seems like Winona has now firmly moved from
some who's presence on the marquee was reason enough to see a movie, to a working actress
who is just taking on work to keep membership in actor's equity. But then again maybe that isn't
a bad place to start from. I guess Winona has been sort of assigned to mailroom and needs to work
her way up again. Which seems unfair. Maybe that's the point.

Shoot the Moon: Mikael Kennedy at the Chelsea Hotel

2010-04-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I went to super great show at the Chelsea Hotel ( Suite 524).
The Chelsea Hotel itself is fantastic as a venue for art show. It has so much
history. It doesn't take too much to make me happy. Give me a historical
landmark where a couple of poets died and I am pretty ecstatic. Plus
did you know that right after the Civil War, the Chelsea Hotel was the
tallest building in New York? I bet you didn't. But isn't that exciting?

There are definitely other people who are more jaded and not thrilled by all the
history. The guy that was in the elevator with me seemed as if another
mention of Sid Vicious would make him projectile vomit. I sympathize ( and had
a similar reaction to mentions of graffiti and street art at the recent Whitney Biennial)
but my take is generally that all the cultural life in New York is itself such a priviledge
that you are almost compelled to be psyched. So, a packed opening at the Chelsea Hotel
which was completely out of wine by the time I got there still makes me excited.

The show itself was showcase of 500 polariods by Mikael Kennedy:
http://www.mikaelkennedy.com/odysseus.html.
Other than the great historical location the show had many other things going for it.

First is the fact that polariods can be such a fantastic and intimate medium. My personal
connection is that all of the polariods in my family were taken by my grandmother, who was
too artheritic to push down the button of a regular camera. Polaroids will forever bring back memories
of my grandmother's back porch, the toad that lived under it and the treehouse my dad built in my
grandma's yard. For many people I think polaroids harken back the late seventies and early 80's
when things were simpler, people wore more corduroy and more time was spent sitting outdoors
thinking about world peace or at least about the next very awesome episode of Thundercats.

Polariods have such an intimate scale they never get blown up into huge wall size prints. Like extremely
limited edition prints ( with a run of one, heh) or maybe paintings, each polariod is unique. The intimate
scale makes you get really close to each polariod and really look at it. The small scale, also, paradoxically
makes you take in the whole before you take in the details.

And then there is the fact the Mr. Kennedy is a creator of pleasant images in many scales and mediums.
His series advertising work for L.L. Bean makes it seem like the label of choice for apple cheeked creative
young people that spend their time off camera composing edgy ballads and raising basil. That isn't to
imply that these images are saccharine. Someone in the guest book said that the images made them think
of dreams from another time, forgotten dreams from their childhood, to this I might add forgotten dreams
of the mid-nineties like that episode of " My So Called Life" where Angela Chase is just riding her bicycle ( actually
Brian Krakow's) at the end and is just happy to be herself. If Angela had just kept riding that bicycle into her own
reality the world she rode into might look something like the world Mr. Kennedy takes pictures of.

The subject matter of the photos are ephemera of the cities and country, the forgotten moments of life, the moment
before a beautiful young person pauses in the woods and takes in the cool autumn air, or the hung over aspiring
musician sees a bit of garbage on the street which by the light of the too early morning is the most beautiful thing
they have every seen.

Gathering of the Tribes in a Yoga Studio

2009-10-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

So last night, my friend and I went to this sort of a pow wow at a yoga studio. It was in a way a spiritual memorial as well.

My friend is planning on becoming a yoga instructor and she is taking her certification at this studio in Nolita.

The thing last night was kinda of post Columbus day memorial to the genocide of the native peoples of the Americas.

A man told us about how his queer identity saved him on September 11th.

We recited Michel Jackson's and all danced to it. It was fun.

DIA Beacon

2009-10-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

This Sunday my friends and I were supposed to go apple picking.
The weather, however, did not cooperate. With mounting dread as the
weekend approached we realized that the forecast for rain on Sunday
was,in fact, inescapable. On top of that, apparently another friend's boss,
upon hearing she was going to do something fun for Sunday, made
sure she came into work, instead of "goofing off".I agree that this
is evil behavior. So in the end it was just my friend Signe and me.
We decided that it would be easier to take Metro North. Luckily Metro
North has an amazing deal where for $27.50, you get a round trip ticket
to Beacon and a discounted ticket to the museum.

I love leaving from Grand Central Station.It makes me feel like I should be wearing a
hobble skirt,heels,a silk blouse,a wide picture hat,and clutching a morroco leather carrying case, from which I extract a hankerchief after I kiss a man in a tailored wool suit goodbye. Signe and I made the best of the ride with card games. We played crazy eights, egyptian rat screw and speed, with Signe making up for my sadly deficient card game knowledge.There was a strange family on the train with us who we kept bumping into.It consisted of an Austrian or possibly Scandanavian accented older man, a little girl and an older teenage girl. The little girl was a super live wire, the older man was kindly, but weird, and not exactly in touch with reality. He seemed very invested in convincing the little girl that we were not taking out a pack of playing cards, but that rather it was a pack of cigarettes. I think we might have interrupted a conversation in which the little girl was trying to convince the older man that cigarettes are bad for you.

Most of the train was apparently going to Beacon as a well. We moved away from the strange family and found a group of two cute guys, who were unfortunately attached
to two cute girls who were going as well. We eyed them and wondered if they knew any card games.

When we got out of the train we were greated by a rainy farmer's market and pumpkin festival. We went into a old stone boat house for pumpkin squash soup and chili.

The first thing we really engaged with a simple examination of sculpture and
art which consisted of yarn stretched in different locales and corners of the
the museum's cavernous rooms. The artist was Fred Sandback.

In the DIA Beacon cafe we chatted with an art student from Columbia University.
We all found each other attractive and he promised to write our e-mails on a dollar
bill which he promised not to spend. I am afraid that he did not keep his promise,
and that I am going to get an e-mail from random employee at Seven-Eleven telling me
that they just found my e-mail on a dollar bill.

Aside from Bruce Nauman's " Body Pressure"the basement of DIA beacon is the realm of ghosts and haunts.

Bruce Nauman's "Body Pressure" now hangs in the entrance to my apartment
right behind the door. I have yet to invite visitors to practicipate,in "what they
might find to be quite an erotic exercise"but I am looking forward to the
opportunity. I took quite a chunk of Body Pressures in fact, so if anyone want to set up an "erotic exercise" please let me know.

Interview with Lisa Linhardt

2009-10-08T09:33:00.001-07:00

Linhardt Design
156 First Ave., New York, NY 10009
nr. 9th St.

Lisa Linhardt is a jewelry designer living and working in New York. She focuses on ethically made jewelry
with interesting materials like tagua seed. Her work has been featured in the New York Magazine, and and has been worn by many celebrities including the beautiful Amber Rose. Success and acclaim,
however, don't make her unapproachable. I walked into her shop a month after it opened and had a lovely and
stimulating conversation about Scandinavian jewelry design. A year later, the conversation continues. You should
stop by her store and strike up a conversation of your own, and perhaps pick up some nice jewelry in the process.

My mother got started in jewelry making because her high school offered it.

How did you get started as a jewelry maker? Who were your early mentors?
Do you think there could be a realistic way of incorporating jewelry design into public school art curriculums?

More often than not, it takes the right combination of exposure to the subject with an inspirational teacher to help discover your element. In college I interned with David Didur who was a former jeweler for Van Cleef and Arpel in Tokyo, Bulgari in Italy, and an established artist in his own right. Oddly enough he was using metals on a larger industrial scale when we worked together. Although at the time he didn’t teach me jewelry fabrication, I learned so much from him about design. He was and continues to be a mentor to this day. It wasn’t until after graduation that I took a class with a ceramic sculptor named Vera Lightstone who helped me discover the beauty of sculpting metal objects from silver clay. I continued on to traditional jewelry-making techniques at the School of Visual Arts, and then on to the Fashion Institute of Technology - where I met Steven Parker (formerly of Oscar Heymen Jewelers), Karen Bachmann (formerly of Tiffany’s) among other professors in the industry who have been very influential to me and my work. My time studying jewelry in Taos and Santa Fe also helped me see jewelry as an art rather than a fashion accessory.

I’m almost positive I would have found metal as an artistic medium earlier if classes were offered in my public school while growing up. I remember we had a shortage of classrooms that were already overflowing at sometimes 35 kids per class, so I am unsure how realistic it would be to find the room or budget for the project, but anything is possible. I can say your mom was very lucky!

You are from Queens. Did any of the arts and studios in Long Island City inspire you? What about in New York?

Yes, I am from Jamaica Queens - and from what I remember about Long Island City, it was the place we went to watch the fireworks and eat good Greek food. LIC did not have the art studios back then that it has now... If anything I was more inspired by the “bamboo earrings” my fellow LL-Jamaica-Queens-native rapped about in “Round-the-way Girl”... I was very inspired by the large graphic jewelry of the 80s and is probably the reason why my two-finger rings are so significant in my collections. I also remember cutting 7th and 8th grade to ride the F train into the city to hang out in the Village to just people-watch (sorry, Mom). It was a place for punks, preppies, rappers, you name it – you would catch the most interestingly-dressed people. I would always hang out on 8th street where my FAVORITE boutique was – Patricia Field’s. She had the best statement jewelry ever, and I would go catch a glimpse of it before it was worn on one of my fashion icon-idols Lady Miss Kier from the group Dee-Lite. I remember saving up money for all the huge jewelry that would match my favorite Pucci-inspired leggings. I learned if you’re going to wear it, wear it big or go home. So, yes, New York City was so influential to me at an early age as far as fashion was concerned. My parents were also big on taking my sister and I upstate New York on the weekends, specifically to Woodstock, where I spent all my time oogling over handmade silver jewelry in quaint little galleries. I’d like to think the streets of New York City influenced the bold quality, and the galleries helped me gain an eye for sophistication.

What do you think about really high end jewelry institutions like Tiffany's, how do you see them working with smaller independent designers such as yourself?

I highly respect what companies like Tiffany’s has built – Tiffany’s specifically started on Broadway as a team of two who had a dream to open a shop in NYC. It is amazing to see what they have built in the past almost 170 years or so, and I especially like the fact that they are currently thinking about ethically-sourced stones. Many of these high end jewelry institutions set standards for the industry as a whole and its great to see that sustainability is being considered. It would be a mutually beneficial collaboration if these institutions would allow local independent designers to showcase their work.

How long have you been making jewlery?

I used to make jewelry for my Barbies a very long time ago... Does that count? I started working with the combination of fire and precious metals back in 2000 and never seemed to let go of it... There were many times where I was without the facilities to create in the traditional jewelry medium, but every time I was away I seemed to come back to it more intensely than before.

What are your thoughts about using ethically produced and recycled materials in your jewelry designs?

First and foremost my goal is to design unique and beautiful signature pieces of jewelry. Incorporating ethically-sourced stones and recycled metals is something that comes about more in the process of making the piece.

Sourcing has probably been the most challenging aspect of incorporating ethically produced and recycled materials in my jewelry designs because a lot of suppliers don’t bother to trace the origin and labor. If all the jewelry designers in the world demand this information when sourcing materials, the industry will respond. Until then I think it will continue to be a challenge.

What made you decide to use an interior designer for your store who used recycled materials and plastic planters as lamp shades?

I used to work with Linda Wary (of Wary Meyers Decorative Arts) - we were both art directors for a publishing firm and promised each other that one day we would leave the world of graphic design and explore our love for working with our hands. A few years later Linda opened an interior company with husband and former Anthropologie Display-Director, John Meyers, where they scouted flea markets and repurposed the old into new for their interiors. I was going to open a jewelry boutique to be filled with materials based on a similar concept, so thought it would be a perfect partnership. I remember calling Linda and asking her to design the interior and she responded “I always thought we would be working together again.” I couldn’t be more happy with the results of the Wary Meyers team and their creative solutions to repurposing different materials for the store interior. They recently came out with a book called “Tossed and Found” which was based on their former column for Time Out New York Magazine about repurposing the old into new.

What does wearable mean to you? What about enhancing? Do you think the role of jewelry is to enhance something about a person, or to be a precious object in and of itself?

Jewelry has had so many functions throughout history as far as wearability and enhancement is concerned – utilitarian function (as with the ancient Romans who fastened their garb with fancified pins); status element (as with the Egyptian pharaohs who adorned themselves with jewels to exhibit their place in society); symbolic value (as with the heroic Purple Heart given to wounded and heroic soldiers); even magical significance (as with amulets, talismans and charms during the time of Charlemagne)... Today it seems most people wear my jewelry as an expression of who they are. I get so many requests for custom one-of-a-kind commissioned pieces that sometimes combine all those elements outlined above, or none at all. It seems there is more and more of a demand these days of pieces that capture the essence of their personality, energy and what is important to them as far as functionality/form is concerned. Figuring all that out from a complete stranger is always a challenge, but probably the best and most enjoyable part of what I do.

You showcase the work of other designers besides yourself. What makes you want to collaborate with or sell the work of a particular designer?

There is so much out there in the jewelry world. I love showcasing designers who stand out from the rest first and foremost - and also have work that I admire aesthetically and/or technically. Often times I’ll get a walk-in from a designer who has a good energy and needs an opportunity and I’ll show their work... It’s one of those things where I know it when I see it...

Are there any technical aspects about jewelry design that you really enjoy?

There are many technical aspects involved in designing a successful piece of jewelry. As with architecture, the fabrication needs to be considered, which can sometimes dictate material for example. Other times the design of the piece speaks from the material, and so the process starts from the other end. As a designer, you really have to explore and understand your medium. With jewelry there are so many variables – gold, platinum, silver, steel, wood, seeds, resin... The whole process requires getting to know your material and how it works. This makes each piece fresh and exciting from a both a technical and an aesthetic standpoint – and hopefully in the end, successful.

You make many ethically produced wedding rings. How is making something as symbolically laden as a wedding ring different form making other types of jewelry.
Anything insights that designing wedding jewelry has brought?

I recently attended a wedding for close friends whose engagement ring and wedding rings I made. Someone asked me that same question and before the ceremony I told them that I put the same amount of love in everything that I design, and that every piece is all wearable art... I always knew how special it is to somehow be a part of the physical representation of two people’s love for each other, but it was really during the ceremony of the rings that it really HIT me – this “wearable art” were tangible symbols of this amazing intangible bond between two people who truly were in love - they were about to solidify that love with these pieces I was a part of. It made me think how this was far beyond making any other custom jewelry! I thought about how the couple worked together to come up with something that represented them, all the times we met and the stories they shared in order to incorporate them into the ring that they were going to adorn for the rest of their lives - and how INCREDIBLE it was to be a part of their journey to the aisle and to what I was witnessing... It took what I do to a whole different spiritual level for me. I am so blessed to have designed one-of-a-kind rings that reflected their one-of-a-kind love for each other!

You have lived and studied in many places around the world.Any particularly memorable places or experiences that effect your work as a designer?

Living in Norway has significantly impacted my personal design aesthetic – I love the clean lines of Scandinavian design, and it was also a time in my life when I was incredibly in love and feeling inspired. Italy has also been influential, because everywhere I turned there was art and inspiration, but perhaps the most influential place hands down has been New York City, because of its diverse and ever-changing personality that serves as a constant muse. I love this city – its in my blood and in my heart, I don’t think that will ever change!

Clothes Make the Woman, Women make the Clothes

2009-10-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Lohan designed with house of Ungano, and she began the fall
of that fashion house.She wasn't the first woman to try to inspire
bad fashion trends however.Marie Antionette is famous for putting
the aristocracy into bankruptcy with her elaborate hairstyles.

Before the real advent of the Industrial revolution all women
designed their own clothes, except for the elite. They perhaps
followed norms of their class and their culture. Currently there
is a movie which depicts this time.It's called "Bright Star", and it
is about Keats and his lover, Fanny.

Fanny and Keats meet when he is living nearby, writing poetry.
The men's world of sitting around talking about their feelings seems
contrasted to the industry of the world of women you see portrayed.

In "Bright Star" Fanny the lover of Keats makes her own clothes and
a common criticism is that she wears more outfits in the film than is
possible to sew in the short time they two are together. whom he calls
minxtress. It makes me money, she says to her poet lover. In Bright Star
Fanny, despite her talent in making clothing, it is a skill which is
strictly restricted to Fanny herself. Fanny is idealized in her self creation,
but Fanny and Keats never consummate their love. In his "Ode to Fanny"
Keats talks a lot about gazing upon Fanny and how he is happy
to have her around. We see this in the movie as well.

"Coco before Chanel" is another movie which is showing right now,where a woman
has invented herself through clothing. She makes her way in the world
first as a cabaret singer, then as a mistress and then as a clothing
designer who invents the notion of a modern woman. She wears pants, she
crops off ties to suit a woman. And men, and women love her for it. Her
love is actualized in that she has sex, a lot of it actually (and she uses
it as currency).

Neither Fanny nor Coco really realize love, with the object of their desire.
Coco never marries and is a way she doesn't trust maybe. Fanny does go on to marry however, and have children, she has a "normal" life.

In another more problematic way there is an emphasis on women only writing about or being interested in fashion. In Keat's time it would be unacceptable perhaps for a woman to write poetry, but it would be alright for her to make clothes and also
to be engaged in the work of being a muse. For Chanel, clothing became a type of poetry.And where does Lindsay Lohan fit into all of this? Well the Ungano collection seemed to emphasize a type of
child woman aesthetic.In our culture still, after all these year still and perhaps
forever infantilizing someone to keep them from power seems to be a norm.

Vampires and Zombies of the Undead

2009-09-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

Losing friends on facebook is always traumatic. I, myself try not to block anyone. Other than being a controlling helicopter relative, trying to recruit me into white slavery or causing people extreme suffering, there are very few reasons I would defriend you. Recently however, someone defriended me for a much fluffier reasons; I said that in my opinion, the vampires and goth movement of today isn't really revolutionary or interesting, and that the last time that Goths/vampires were culturally relevant was the eighties. The horror right?

I can understand how saying this to someone who currently identifies very strongly with whole doom and gloom Twilight/True Blood franchise( actually makes part of their living promoting it), might be offensive or threatening. It might be taken as saying you are not original. If said person took it that way it is unfortunate. The thing is though, I have some claim to the Goth thing, and I would imagine that someone who is into promoting mainstream Goth might want to talk shop a bit.

I wasn't a Goth exactly in highschool but I knew people who were, real goths, before the coming of Hot Topic and just as Marilyn Manson made an appearence. Or rather, my old best friend( who by the way is number 6 on my list of people I don't friend on facebook) took me with her into the periphery of whatever goth scene there was in super conservative Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Like Orpheus following Euridice into Hades, I saw some strange specters. Not ghosts, so much as the cruelties of human behavior. In addition to dressing arty and listening to way too much of The Cure, my best friend was in love with the alpha male of the Manasquan Goth clique, a "dark folk" musician, as were apparently many, many girls. He dated my neighbor's granddaughter, herself a total Goth/punk princess with bleached white hair; who being without a driver's liscence ( we were all 16, 15, 14 years old and bored to pieces in the "Desperate Housewives" perfection of a quiet Jersey Shore hamlet) would make memorable walks from Manasquan to Spring Lake along Route 18 . My friend, like lots of other girls apparently, decided that despite the fact that Mr. Dark-Folk Musician had a girl friend, he was her dark soul mate. I never got that, I only saw that he was the alpha male of a group that she and others wanted to be part of. He broke up with her in part because he didn't want other girls to use her to get to him. Eventually, my neighbors granddaughter would die in an accident where she walked in front of a train. I don't know that many people who accidently walk in front of trains, but ours was a very Catholic town with medieval sensibilities. In any case, it's a longer story but I always felt like in someways, by enabling the groupiedom for Mr. Dark Folk Musician, I also enabled the devaluing and death of Goth Princess.

I don't think being Goth itself was to blame for her death. I mean, Dave Matthews Band listening frat boys kill themselves too. Much about the Goth culture, which like a pagan living under the Spanish Inquisition, I delved into very secretly, is actually very positive. It is one of the few subcultures where politics didn't matter but a certain code of ethics and aesthetics did. This was perfect for kids looking for a rebellious outlet in a largely Republican area of New Jersey without completely alienating their parents by becoming hippie liberals.

I read and loved Sandman comics in 1996. I am one of the few people I know who can say that. I loved Vivianne Westwood. I did my best to dress in something unique inspired by these people through an amalgem of my mother's sixties gear, and a minimum of stuff from the Monmouth Mall.Walking in my new romantic gear on Manhattan's the Upper East Side trying to do my best Kate Moss imitation, " Alors, une prostitute!" exclaimed a French tourist much to my dismay. Music had a lot to do with it; since I wasn't really hardcore it was the Cure and Joy Division and Tori Amos, who had credibility because she was Delirium from Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Being even slightly into goth in the mid nineties was mostly just trouble. My best friend got grounded for sneaking off to a Cure concert.My mom grilled me to reveal who my friend's accomplices were, but I wouldn't tell. Even though I was a good kid that would never sneak off without permission, I also wasn't a snitch. Not being a snitch would eventually bite me. I felt that I was pursecuted as a Goth or for Goth associations. I felt that I was paying for others luxuries. I was the good girl and the cover. My school accused me of doing drugs.My high school guidance counselor would harrass me for not smiling at things like Honor Society inductions,she would later harrass my family to put me on anti-depressants. Cutting oneself was part of it for sure. My best friend cut herself. She was never harassed by her school, and eventually grew out of it without any stigma. Since I wasn't really goth, I think it being close to people who were
acting self destructively showed on me more. People in my school and parents harrassed me about the unknown group I was on the edge of, attributing all responsibility to me.

We left Goth, and eventually each other behind.We moved onto Belle and Sebastian. And Ida. And eventually we moved away from each other, because the grappling and jockeying for position in that strange scene in the disfunctional conservatism of New Jersey took too many causualities. I started going to more rave-ish things hanging out with more neo hippies. Who are all doing fine now, since they were kinda neo-hippies in a great school.

People say that the current obsession with Goth has lots to do with class, kinda of an alternative to Gossip Girl. You get fangs when you can't get Prada. I am not sure about that, but I think there may be some truth to the theory. Most of the Goths I knew haunted the edges of an affluent beach town. I have met a surprising number of Goths from minorities. Junot Diaz' s latest book has a Dominican Goth. To get an idea of just how seriously people take vampires, consider a similar example with zombies.Imagine someone getting into a tiff about your saying that you think that Romero did Zombies better than Shaun of the Dead. I mean seriously?

People do take their vampires seriously. A vampire is sexual. A zombie is just silly and gross. What if the zombie's tongue falls off when it kisses you... ewww.. But in some ways I think zombies are more the reality. War and all the conflict that is going on the world, the anxiety which Goth sublimates, it isn't sexy. It is gross. The realities we are anxious about, people getting blown up in Afghanistan, drugs and abuse, rape and murder aren't sexy. There are no perpetually undead creatures that can make them sexy. And in the end, ultimately, it is best to face the emotion which all of these entertainment archtypes channel: sadness.

House of Organic Fashion Show

2009-09-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

Looking at some of the clothes on display at fashion week
and in recent fashion magazines, a friend of mine was disturbed
by the tendency to make women look like little girls or dolls.
I personally like the childlike playfulness that comes from dressing
women like animals ; Bjork's swam dress was an amazingly
gutsy move which made me love her even more,
not a fashion don't . I had a ton of fun at the New York Couture
show at Webster Hall, it was like some 1980’s New York club dream.
I am even OK with the bunny ears recently sported by the likes
of Madonna and an Olson twin. However, as much as I love my
gold lame, I could see where my friend was coming from with a
desire for beautiful,ungimmicky clothing.

To this end, I was very happy and excited to have the opportunity
to see the Ekovaruhuset show as part of Green Fashion Week. It
managed to balance a serious interest in ethical clothing production
with a serious interest in beauty.

The brief but beautiful show of fair trade and fairly made
clothing was at the aptly named King of Greene St. (Greene St. for
Green Fashion Week….get it?). Various eco-bloggers, fashion editors,
and designers gathered around the plywood stage sipping on bottled
water which supports sustainable water projects in Africa. The
audience was shown how sustainable can be beautiful and elegant.
The clothes were mostly dresses.They were fluid and wearable.

Wearable can be a subject of debate in a world of super skinny
fashions models, so let me tell you that though the models were
certainly tall and lanky, they looked like they ate. One sported a set
of ripped abs to enhance a nice cropped shirt ensemble. The music was
also fairly (and well!) made, with a live band headed by TV on the
Radio’s Jaleel Bunton on guitar; which together with a drum kit beat
out the rhythms of the models strutting.

Lots of things about the green movement are synonymous with old
fashioned, and old fashioned was in appearance here in a good way.
In the new House of Organic collection, hemp, linen and wool
see heavy use and these fabrics are coaxed into modern pleating
and intricate seersucker details. Much of the saturated brilliance of
resort wear comes from bleaches and harsh dyes. This clothing line
uses more natural methods of coloring the clothes as well. As a result,
the colors tend on more of a grey pallet (a good thing) and are saturated
and jewel-like.

The line House of Organic ( or Ekovaruhuset in Swedish) is
headed by Johanna Hofring, a Swedish designer, and former Lower
East Side rocker, who started the House of Organic in Sweden in 2004.
The lines other designers (including the innovative threeASFOUR
group) come from a diverse range of places including Taiwan,
Peru, Japan,Israel,Palestine,Russia, and Manhattan. Green fashion;
as illustrated by Ekovaruhuset’s international swath of stores in
Paris, Sweden and New York, is a global concern.

Another Cool Russian Art Opening and SAT handouts

2009-03-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to an art opening at the Russian Art Gallery in Soho
for ALEXANDER ZAKHAROV show of new paintings of creepy little
Carebears on airplane wings and teeny tiny barbies and dinosaurs
hiding out in logs. It was like the flotsam of an educated well rounded
western childhood was haunting the Russian landscape in cutesy pie
yet sinister ways with monkeys ready to push their stuffed bretheren
into vats of glowing algae and sweatshirt puffy paint taking over
the taiga.

I had a handout from my after school program. It's pretty fun.

You can try it if you want:

For this exercise, I would like you to choose words starting with
the same letters as your name and then write a paragraph/story using these words.
So Sara would be Substantiate Abstruse Rampant and Arcane.

You can chose words from below or use your own, but they need to be difficult SAT words.

Alleviate bombastic copious deleterious
Arcane belie concord debacle
Assimilate banal concur debilitate
Autonomy brevity conspicuous dilatory
Abstruse bolster contentious dirge

Equivocal flagrant grandiose homogenous
Epitome felicitous generous hackneyed
Ebullience fabricate generate hubris
Exorbitant fallacy genre heinous
Exuberant flag genealogy heterogeneous

Ingenious jaded kiln loquacious
Impetuous jocular knell languid
Impetus juxtapose knack largess
Inundate jaundiced kindred lavish
Impugn jovial kindle lugubrious

Multiplicity nefarious ornate paucity
Multifarious nimble opulent proliferate
Mar naïve opaque portent
Magnanimous narcissistic onerous prescience
Mendacious nag obsequious prodigious

Quiescent Rampant Substantiate Therapeutic
Quell Rhetoric Scrupulous Tenuous
Quintessential Rudimentary Sophistry Temperate
Quandary Reticent Substantiate Tenacity
Qualitative Reclusive Sanctimonious Tumultous

Ubiquitous Veracity Woebegone Xenophobia
Undulate Venal Wary Xerox
Untenable Vociferous Wily Xanthippe
Upbraid Variegated wraith Xhosa
Unassuming Vigilant wrath Xyloid

Yawp Zaftig
Yore Zealous
Yar Zest
Ydrad Zenith
Yield Zephyr

After my friend Andrea and I got dinner to celebrate her new job.
We went to a really nice restaurant called bread and ate bread, pasta
and wine.

It was lovely.

Estonian and Russian Art in Soho and the East Village

2009-03-07T20:13:00.001-08:00

Tonight, it's a general consensus that nothing is going on.
I think the weather can be blamed. It has been so arctic, even
anarctic for the past few months that people have thrown
themselves into a tizzy of socializing over beer and coffee,
and random dating, but now all that seems to have calmed
a bit.

I'm just sitting at home drinking water and listening to electronic
music. I'd like to do something creative like writing or drawing,
but maybe blogging is the closest I can come.

But last night was fun. Rene who is a curator at the oldest russian
avant garde gallery in Soho, and who is good friends with my
beloved old roomate Victor, gave a talk on Russian avant garde art.
His gallery has a show up by Nikolai Makarov, his white and black
paintings.Makarov is also having a show at the State Treyakov
Gallery in Moscow, next week March 19th.

I took a bunch of my girlfriends to the talk, which was cool, because
they all rock and I like to roll five deep. After the talk, we went to eat fish
tacos before joining some other people drinking, and suddenly
low and behold I hear Estonian, coming out of the mouth of a not
bad looking guy.

" No way...Estlane..." I gesticulate to my girlfriends.... " Look they
do exist, I don't just come from an imaginary country."

" Come talk to us," I say to the good looking Estonian " I know about
art."

So Martin meets Laila, Missy and Alesha...I talk him into letting us see
his work as well.

And suddenly we are confronted with images of the blonde Estonian
and Heidi Klum and Seal.

"Wow," say my friends... "we are all going to fly to Tallinn stat, because
Estonian guys are alright."

I just love it when the infinite improbability drive is in gear.

The Post - Apocalyptic Buddhists

2009-03-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

So last night I went to Dharma gathering for the first time in six
weeks, because I was taking a women's weight lifting class at
the Y before. It was nice. The speech was about the concept of
Dhrala, which is the coincidences of life. Like how do you know
you are going to get a job, meet your best friend, find something
to eat? It's all dhrala.Alesha was there, I hadn't seen her for a while,
that was nice. After, I helped put away cushions and talked to Andrea
about her visions of a post apocalyptic world. I'm going to be a
bee-keeper on the post-apocalyptic farm. I gave Andrea my copy of
Women in Buddhism which is like my favorite book.

I've decided for now that I'm not going to get a roommate so I moved
out of my living room back into my bedroom. I have a little altar set up
in the living room with some Thai gold goddess that my friend Victor
brought back from Thailand, and left in my closet along with some of
the rest of his stuff, while he visits a dying aunt in New Orleans. I think
it's ok to have the thai goddess on my altar, where I can burn incense
for her and increase Dhrala, rather than in the closet.
Andrea thinks it's ok too.

I don't know if we will have any Thai goddesses on the post-apocalyptic farm.

Rap by the Aphids that ate my parsly

2009-01-11T19:23:00.000-08:00

Yo, I'm the notorious H.A. G. ( Hungry Aphid Guy)

I like the lovely lady bugs and I like parsley

And when I eat the parsley I'm a sight to see

All the pretty ladybugs wanna get down with me

I keep it real in the planter

Hanging onto the window ledge aphid life

Even though sometimes the spray can hurts

You gotta keep eating the parsley through the strife

Even the Roman Chamomile feats the notorious H.A.G.

And the cockroaches they want to copulate with me

I just keep it real chewing the parsley

I'll see you on the Tuscan Oregano next time I M.C.