I don't think I'd ever seen the verb wisecracks split into cracks wise ... until recently. I read it sometime in the last week or two in the Times and didn't think much of it. Then, in today's paper, there was another occurrence, in the continuation of the article on the Oscars. Just so you've got some context: "... in which the M.C., usually a comedian, cracks wise to keep generally unremarkable acceptance speeches consisting of shout-outs to families and agents from driving audiences away."
But don't worry about the death of the conflated word. This headline appeared on page A12: Rename Law? No Wisecrack Is Left Behind.
23 February 2009
13 February 2009
just two shows and a million things to think about
"A relationship left for dead on the Lower East Side" at Cuchifritos Gallery/Project Space builds from a photo album found "a few years back" on a curb on the Lower East Side. The album shows two men at home, on the beach, goofing off, staring into the camera, being people. The album was given to independent curator Bill Previdi by his friend Patrick Cunningham. Previdi looked at the album and then set it aside. When revisiting it, it occurred to him that the two men in the album were never in the same picture and it led to the show at Cuchifritos in which ten artists make works that build off the album: some directly such as a painting by Cunningham of one of the photos but mostly indirectly in dealing with "its surrounding themes such as duality, isolation, love, longing and desire." There's an appropriate opening on Valentine's Day.
I have an album with similar leaves (pasteboard with plastic oversheets and a sticky surface to hold the pictures in place). My album has pictures from the late 1960s and early 1970s so there are pictures of Dorothy and me, alone and together. The album style is quite particular so looking at the album in the show evokes images and times from that era of my life. The gay couple, naturally, evoked other times in my life.
Overall, the album was rather more compelling than the derivative works though it was probably the idea that was most riveting.
I went to Cuchifritos after witnessing Robert Stacy's signature and lunch with Robert at Cafe Colonial on East Houston Street at Elizabeth. Cuchifritos is located in the Essex Street Market and we walked home along Delancey Street with talk of memories of when that neighborhood was not yet hip.
After being home for a while, the bright clear day called me out for a walk. I thought I'd go over past 113 West 13th Street where Edith Gregor Halpert had her Downtown Gallery. I'm reading The girl with the gallery about Halpert and her advocacy for modern American art. I started out by walking over to the Hudson River (a favorite walk) and then started toward 13th Street. I decided to stop at White Columns on the way over and got very distracted.
White Columns has a show entitled "40 years/40 projects" tracing their history as an alternative art space. What a trip. I know that I visited White Columns once when it was on Spring Street but probably not way back when it was at 21 Greene Street (and had the name 21 Greene Street Gallery). I can't remember what show that was. In the current show, there were pictures and names that still resonate. There was a picture of Willoughby Sharp who died late last year. Harmony Hammond, a friend and colleague from the Queer Caucus for Art, was the coordinator of "The lesbian show." I sat and listened to all 17+ minutes of William Wegman's "World history." He put together a tape (now on disc, playing on a Discman) of several people describing what they remembered from World History class in junior high school. There was one voice in the left ear and a different one in the right, most of the time, and occasionally just one voice in one ear. Some had very vague memories and some went way back to early man. No creation stories though. Some mentioned great figures and tried to be multi-cultural. Others talked about Nixon and how John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the only father-son pair of presidents. History has changed that, of course. Some tried to recreate the historical sequence from Cro Magnon man on; others were more scattershot. The sequence was always a bit more linear but maybe that's how it was in junior high school history. I tried to imagine how I would have answered Wegman's question.
Other pieces in the "40 years" show that I rather liked were Tom Burr's "The Rambles" which were two small topographic models of the space within Central Park known for gay cruising. Like much of Burr's works, the subtlety is compelling. Another project traced the contemporary artists who appeared in the gay porn magazine Honcho in the mid-1990s. The conjunction of art and porn is always a ticklish one, in a variety of ways.
Sometimes you see oodles of galleries and find some compelling work ... or not. Other times, you only visit a couple galleries and have oodles to think about.
I have an album with similar leaves (pasteboard with plastic oversheets and a sticky surface to hold the pictures in place). My album has pictures from the late 1960s and early 1970s so there are pictures of Dorothy and me, alone and together. The album style is quite particular so looking at the album in the show evokes images and times from that era of my life. The gay couple, naturally, evoked other times in my life.
Overall, the album was rather more compelling than the derivative works though it was probably the idea that was most riveting.
I went to Cuchifritos after witnessing Robert Stacy's signature and lunch with Robert at Cafe Colonial on East Houston Street at Elizabeth. Cuchifritos is located in the Essex Street Market and we walked home along Delancey Street with talk of memories of when that neighborhood was not yet hip.
After being home for a while, the bright clear day called me out for a walk. I thought I'd go over past 113 West 13th Street where Edith Gregor Halpert had her Downtown Gallery. I'm reading The girl with the gallery about Halpert and her advocacy for modern American art. I started out by walking over to the Hudson River (a favorite walk) and then started toward 13th Street. I decided to stop at White Columns on the way over and got very distracted.
White Columns has a show entitled "40 years/40 projects" tracing their history as an alternative art space. What a trip. I know that I visited White Columns once when it was on Spring Street but probably not way back when it was at 21 Greene Street (and had the name 21 Greene Street Gallery). I can't remember what show that was. In the current show, there were pictures and names that still resonate. There was a picture of Willoughby Sharp who died late last year. Harmony Hammond, a friend and colleague from the Queer Caucus for Art, was the coordinator of "The lesbian show." I sat and listened to all 17+ minutes of William Wegman's "World history." He put together a tape (now on disc, playing on a Discman) of several people describing what they remembered from World History class in junior high school. There was one voice in the left ear and a different one in the right, most of the time, and occasionally just one voice in one ear. Some had very vague memories and some went way back to early man. No creation stories though. Some mentioned great figures and tried to be multi-cultural. Others talked about Nixon and how John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the only father-son pair of presidents. History has changed that, of course. Some tried to recreate the historical sequence from Cro Magnon man on; others were more scattershot. The sequence was always a bit more linear but maybe that's how it was in junior high school history. I tried to imagine how I would have answered Wegman's question.
Other pieces in the "40 years" show that I rather liked were Tom Burr's "The Rambles" which were two small topographic models of the space within Central Park known for gay cruising. Like much of Burr's works, the subtlety is compelling. Another project traced the contemporary artists who appeared in the gay porn magazine Honcho in the mid-1990s. The conjunction of art and porn is always a ticklish one, in a variety of ways.
Sometimes you see oodles of galleries and find some compelling work ... or not. Other times, you only visit a couple galleries and have oodles to think about.
06 February 2009
... unadorned except for a few Benozzo Gozzoli reproductions ...
Benozzo Gozzoli is in the air, or at least in my air. I'm reading The Indian Clerk and am enjoying it very much. More of the Indian feeling that swept over me with the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." Still, after suffering from the weird LC/NACO heading for Benozzo a few days ago, I was rather amused to now read this description of the Neville's home in Cambridge:
"Earlier in the week, when she [Alice Neville] was preparing this room for Ramanujan, she found herself wondering what he would make of the stiff, high bed, the varnished bureau, the walls unadorned except for a few Benozzo Gozzoli reproductions, picked up on their honeymoon trip to Italy. Back in Madras, she knows, Ramanujan had no bed. Like most Indians, he and the other members of his family slept on mattress rolls that could be folded up and put away during the day. Any spare part of floor would serve as a bedroom. And now here he is in England where the trees are just coming into bud and, in order to sleep, he must climb up onto a bed. What must he make of it all? Does the strangeness terrify him? Will he curl into himself? Hide from it? Or will he find, in this strange, high bed, that a new Ramanujan -- a version of himself that can only be born abroad, as some new version of Alice was born in India -- is, like the trees, just coming into bud?"
-- The Indian clerk by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 142.
"Earlier in the week, when she [Alice Neville] was preparing this room for Ramanujan, she found herself wondering what he would make of the stiff, high bed, the varnished bureau, the walls unadorned except for a few Benozzo Gozzoli reproductions, picked up on their honeymoon trip to Italy. Back in Madras, she knows, Ramanujan had no bed. Like most Indians, he and the other members of his family slept on mattress rolls that could be folded up and put away during the day. Any spare part of floor would serve as a bedroom. And now here he is in England where the trees are just coming into bud and, in order to sleep, he must climb up onto a bed. What must he make of it all? Does the strangeness terrify him? Will he curl into himself? Hide from it? Or will he find, in this strange, high bed, that a new Ramanujan -- a version of himself that can only be born abroad, as some new version of Alice was born in India -- is, like the trees, just coming into bud?"
-- The Indian clerk by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 142.
04 February 2009
mo(nu)menta finally
The L train wasn't running on Sunday so my trip to Williamsburg to go to Momenta turned into a trip to the Whitney. On the second floor was "Synthetic" which included the plastic surgery nose piece by Andy Warhol that I'd just mentioned in my "25 Things" thing on Facebook. They also had the Lynda Benglis floor pour with a Morris Louis flow painting on the wall nearby. Nice juxtaposition. Upstairs on the mezzanine was "Artists make photographs" with a nice Rauschenberg photo of chairs at Black Mountain, another Rauschenberg of "Cy and relics, Rome" (1952), and some images from Samaras's "photo transformations." All thoughtful and aesthetic. In the wall text for a Sol LeWitt piece on the 5th floor were the words "The idea makes the art." Not for everything but I love Sol LeWitt, partly because he's such a good example for "what is the work?"
Monday was looking good so I checked the Momenta website and they said they were open on Monday. Yea, let's go. I had sent a note to Holly Wilson about a couple "black" sightings: Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian and the Rauschenberg four-panel collage-painting that was with the photographs at the Whitney. Her husband Vincent Como uses a lot of black in his art and Holly mentioned that he was also in the show at Momenta. Holly also mentioned that she really liked the Seher Shah works. And the reason that I had originally wanted to see the "Infinite Possibilities" show was that I got a notice from Carrie Moyer that she was in it. Quite a stack of expectations.
Seher Shah's drawings are delicate and finely crafted, not very big and almost icon-like. I liked the single one near the office best. I can imagine Holly responding to the pieces. Vince had three creased-paper works and a collection of nine panels on the wall 90 degrees to the creased paper. I especially liked the creased-paper work that looked like it was constructed of two pieces of paper, the one on the left. I thought about Ad Reinhardt and his black paintings. Perhaps the idea of Vince's nine panels was that they were JUST black, not varieties of blue-blacks and purple-blacks like Reinhardt.
There was also a work by Nathan Bennett in which he dangled some fluorescent light boxes from the ceiling, in homage to Dan Flavin and as he found the lights at the Ithaca Gun factory building. Since I'd walked by the Ithaca Gun factory many times when we lived on Falls Street in Ithaca, that work resonated in a number of ways. The tribute to Flavin was also interesting. Again, of this art moment rather than Flavin's, like Vince and Reinhardt.
Momenta used to be on Berry Street, near North 8th or 9th. Now they're down Bedford between South 3rd and 4th. I hadn't been that far South in Williamsburg for quite a while and the changes are significant. While I hate to see some of the gentrificational displacement, it was lovely to sit on the bench at Oslo Coffee Company with my really good latte and absorb some street life and some sun on a warm winter day. Somewhere else, Punxatawney Phil was checking for his shadow ... but I can never remember if we want him to see it or not.
Monday was looking good so I checked the Momenta website and they said they were open on Monday. Yea, let's go. I had sent a note to Holly Wilson about a couple "black" sightings: Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian and the Rauschenberg four-panel collage-painting that was with the photographs at the Whitney. Her husband Vincent Como uses a lot of black in his art and Holly mentioned that he was also in the show at Momenta. Holly also mentioned that she really liked the Seher Shah works. And the reason that I had originally wanted to see the "Infinite Possibilities" show was that I got a notice from Carrie Moyer that she was in it. Quite a stack of expectations.
Seher Shah's drawings are delicate and finely crafted, not very big and almost icon-like. I liked the single one near the office best. I can imagine Holly responding to the pieces. Vince had three creased-paper works and a collection of nine panels on the wall 90 degrees to the creased paper. I especially liked the creased-paper work that looked like it was constructed of two pieces of paper, the one on the left. I thought about Ad Reinhardt and his black paintings. Perhaps the idea of Vince's nine panels was that they were JUST black, not varieties of blue-blacks and purple-blacks like Reinhardt.
There was also a work by Nathan Bennett in which he dangled some fluorescent light boxes from the ceiling, in homage to Dan Flavin and as he found the lights at the Ithaca Gun factory building. Since I'd walked by the Ithaca Gun factory many times when we lived on Falls Street in Ithaca, that work resonated in a number of ways. The tribute to Flavin was also interesting. Again, of this art moment rather than Flavin's, like Vince and Reinhardt.
Momenta used to be on Berry Street, near North 8th or 9th. Now they're down Bedford between South 3rd and 4th. I hadn't been that far South in Williamsburg for quite a while and the changes are significant. While I hate to see some of the gentrificational displacement, it was lovely to sit on the bench at Oslo Coffee Company with my really good latte and absorb some street life and some sun on a warm winter day. Somewhere else, Punxatawney Phil was checking for his shadow ... but I can never remember if we want him to see it or not.
Vasari's form not used
Can I tell you how disappointed I am that the heading for Benozzo Gozzoli is not "Gozzoli, Benozzo" but "Benozzo, di Lese"? And it's all because the surname didn't appear in conjunction with the forename until Vasari. Or so says the LC/NACO authority record, based on the Encic. ital.
010 __ |a n 50059011
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |d OCoLC
100 0_ |a Benozzo, |c di Lese, |d 1420-1497
670 __ |a Encic. ital. |b (Benozzo di Lese (detto Benozzo Gozzoli); nowhere (neither in documents, epigraphs, nor signatures of the artist on paintings) does the surname Gozzoli appear with the forename Benozzo; it is used for the first time in the Vite of Vasari)
[not all fields included]
The Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze catalog uses "Benozzo Gozzoli" as the heading.
010 __ |a n 50059011
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |d OCoLC
100 0_ |a Benozzo, |c di Lese, |d 1420-1497
670 __ |a Encic. ital. |b (Benozzo di Lese (detto Benozzo Gozzoli); nowhere (neither in documents, epigraphs, nor signatures of the artist on paintings) does the surname Gozzoli appear with the forename Benozzo; it is used for the first time in the Vite of Vasari)
[not all fields included]
The Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze catalog uses "Benozzo Gozzoli" as the heading.
31 January 2009
NACO stop frustrated so it's off to the galleries
Sam Duncan of the Amon Carter asked me about the Park Place Gallery which is the theme of a recent show at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. I don't think I'd heard of it but it is where John Gibson and Paula Cooper started before they opened their own eponymous galleries in Soho and later Chelsea. Park Place Gallery started out on Park Place near the City Hall of NYC. According to BobCat (the opac that NYU shares with several other schools), the catalog was supposed to be on the shelf at Gimbel Library at Parsons the New School for Design. I left home before 11 and found that Gimbel doesn't open until noon on Saturdays.
Off to the galleries: Daneyal Mahmood Gallery's "Darkrooms -- homme made" was the only Chelsea gallery on the list for this weekend. I got to Tenth Avenue at 20th Street so decided to stop in at Jack Shainman Gallery. They've got a show of soundsuits and other sculptures by Nick Cave. I had seen a show of the soundsuits a couple years ago. The first gallery as you enter was a parade of sculptures with lawn jockeys holding up other objects on bent metal: model ships, braided rug as emblem, porcelain birds in a tree, flowers wreathed about in a tree, porcelain birds in a bush (with seated jockey). One of the jockeys was painted whiteface. The metal frames are more visible than the frames of the soundsuits but evoke them. There were also a couple wallpieces with Aunt Jemimas and a male counterpart: one on a box with the caption "Holy, holy, holy" and the other a cross. Another one of the wallpieces was a bootblack with the caption "Boo!" The back gallery had about a dozen soundsuits. I really like the way that Cave plays with humor, race, gender stereotypes. He had a show up in Alfred at the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art last fall but I missed it. I think it was on during one of my visits but I just didn't get up to the museum. The fellow at Shainman said that the Alfred show was five soundsuits.
Next stop was the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at Gagosian on 21st Street. The first room was six of the subtle sea images on one wall of the white and light room. There were guides to help you into the second room which was as dark as the first was light. Again, six images but the inner gallery was only illuminated by the spotlights on the images. The entrances were a U-turn light trap and after you'd been in the inner sanctum for a while, your eyes adjusted. On one hand, the subtlety is powerful and turns one meditative; on the other, it was perhaps insignificant. From the busyness of the Cave to the minimal Sugimoto, quite a jump.
On to Paula Cooper with "Every revolution is a roll of the dice," curated by Bob Nickas. I was really drawn by the title but the show didn't do much for me. I did like the Louise Lawler wall piece: Once there was a little boy and everything turned out alright. THE END.
On the way from 21st up to 25th for Mahmood, I stopped at Printed Matter and found some things I really liked but resisted. I will have to go back to work full time if I don't get my book buying under control. Near the cash register was Fifteen pornography companies by Louisa Van Leer, done Ed Ruscha style (credited thereto). Really fine and only $16. I tagged it "wannaread" in my del.icio.us tags though it's really more "wannabuy." Back in the alphabetical section was S(h)elf portrait by Leandro Katz. I tagged that "books_as_art" and "artists_book." And then in the back room was a lovely little catalog from the Casey Kaplan Gallery entitled Not so subtle subtitle. More play on library words, and the show started on my birthday last year. Gosh, sometimes I wish I DID have collection-development responsibilities for a library. I could be the one they pick on for overspending his budget.
OK, now the 511 West 25th Street building, home of several favorite galleries. I checked the posters on the outside of the building and figured I might as well just take the elevator to the top and walk down.
"A winter's bounty" at Alan Klotz Gallery included this wonderful Brett Weston "White Sands, New Mexico" from 1946 (my birth year, so more birthday stuff). I love the way the landscape and sky are ambiguous and reflective of each other.
Deborah Bell is on the same floor and she was showing "Figure studies." As I circled the room, I happened on the woman dressed as Queen Victoria. I knew I'd seen it but couldn't think who the photographer was. Peter Hujar. Further along was a piece and my mind said "John O'Reilly" but it was by a Dutch photographer named Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924-2009). Very nice, with two images of the artist naked. The second Fieret piece was of a woman's upper body and that reminded me that one may see things in art that weren't intended. The self-portrait set off my gaydar and looked like O'Reilly who is unabashedly homoerotic, mixing naked male bodies with bits of old masters and stage sets. At the Queer Caucus show in Atlanta, I bought a picture of a young man that looks a lot like David Wojnarowicz as a young man. The photographer of that picture was a woman. Now she was in the queer show but her queer aesthetics might not match mine.
I did stop at a few other galleries before getting to "Darkrooms -- homme made" curated by Avi Feldman at Daneyal Mahmood on the third floor. The first piece as you enter is a video monitor with films by Amir Fattal addressing issues of gay male sexuality. Pretty direct. No back room approach to the show here. Some of the pieces were pretty interesting but as often happens when galleryhopping, the one on the list isn't necessarily the lasting experience of the day. Nick Cave and the Brett Weston will probably stick with me. I did like the Dean Sameshima photos at Mahmood too though.
Leaving Chelsea, I went back to the Gimbel Library to check on the Reimagining spaces catalog. It wasn't on the shelf, it wasn't on the new book truck, it wasn't on the overflow and shelving shelves. I looked at the staff display of the record and it was handled by a Bobst staff member on January 29th so I suspect it's still in processing rather than on the shelf. I'll just have to go back to Gimbel in a few days and read some more magazines and see if the catalog has appeared. No problem, I've got time.
Off to the galleries: Daneyal Mahmood Gallery's "Darkrooms -- homme made" was the only Chelsea gallery on the list for this weekend. I got to Tenth Avenue at 20th Street so decided to stop in at Jack Shainman Gallery. They've got a show of soundsuits and other sculptures by Nick Cave. I had seen a show of the soundsuits a couple years ago. The first gallery as you enter was a parade of sculptures with lawn jockeys holding up other objects on bent metal: model ships, braided rug as emblem, porcelain birds in a tree, flowers wreathed about in a tree, porcelain birds in a bush (with seated jockey). One of the jockeys was painted whiteface. The metal frames are more visible than the frames of the soundsuits but evoke them. There were also a couple wallpieces with Aunt Jemimas and a male counterpart: one on a box with the caption "Holy, holy, holy" and the other a cross. Another one of the wallpieces was a bootblack with the caption "Boo!" The back gallery had about a dozen soundsuits. I really like the way that Cave plays with humor, race, gender stereotypes. He had a show up in Alfred at the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art last fall but I missed it. I think it was on during one of my visits but I just didn't get up to the museum. The fellow at Shainman said that the Alfred show was five soundsuits.
Next stop was the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at Gagosian on 21st Street. The first room was six of the subtle sea images on one wall of the white and light room. There were guides to help you into the second room which was as dark as the first was light. Again, six images but the inner gallery was only illuminated by the spotlights on the images. The entrances were a U-turn light trap and after you'd been in the inner sanctum for a while, your eyes adjusted. On one hand, the subtlety is powerful and turns one meditative; on the other, it was perhaps insignificant. From the busyness of the Cave to the minimal Sugimoto, quite a jump.
On to Paula Cooper with "Every revolution is a roll of the dice," curated by Bob Nickas. I was really drawn by the title but the show didn't do much for me. I did like the Louise Lawler wall piece: Once there was a little boy and everything turned out alright. THE END.
On the way from 21st up to 25th for Mahmood, I stopped at Printed Matter and found some things I really liked but resisted. I will have to go back to work full time if I don't get my book buying under control. Near the cash register was Fifteen pornography companies by Louisa Van Leer, done Ed Ruscha style (credited thereto). Really fine and only $16. I tagged it "wannaread" in my del.icio.us tags though it's really more "wannabuy." Back in the alphabetical section was S(h)elf portrait by Leandro Katz. I tagged that "books_as_art" and "artists_book." And then in the back room was a lovely little catalog from the Casey Kaplan Gallery entitled Not so subtle subtitle. More play on library words, and the show started on my birthday last year. Gosh, sometimes I wish I DID have collection-development responsibilities for a library. I could be the one they pick on for overspending his budget.
OK, now the 511 West 25th Street building, home of several favorite galleries. I checked the posters on the outside of the building and figured I might as well just take the elevator to the top and walk down.
"A winter's bounty" at Alan Klotz Gallery included this wonderful Brett Weston "White Sands, New Mexico" from 1946 (my birth year, so more birthday stuff). I love the way the landscape and sky are ambiguous and reflective of each other.
Deborah Bell is on the same floor and she was showing "Figure studies." As I circled the room, I happened on the woman dressed as Queen Victoria. I knew I'd seen it but couldn't think who the photographer was. Peter Hujar. Further along was a piece and my mind said "John O'Reilly" but it was by a Dutch photographer named Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924-2009). Very nice, with two images of the artist naked. The second Fieret piece was of a woman's upper body and that reminded me that one may see things in art that weren't intended. The self-portrait set off my gaydar and looked like O'Reilly who is unabashedly homoerotic, mixing naked male bodies with bits of old masters and stage sets. At the Queer Caucus show in Atlanta, I bought a picture of a young man that looks a lot like David Wojnarowicz as a young man. The photographer of that picture was a woman. Now she was in the queer show but her queer aesthetics might not match mine.
I did stop at a few other galleries before getting to "Darkrooms -- homme made" curated by Avi Feldman at Daneyal Mahmood on the third floor. The first piece as you enter is a video monitor with films by Amir Fattal addressing issues of gay male sexuality. Pretty direct. No back room approach to the show here. Some of the pieces were pretty interesting but as often happens when galleryhopping, the one on the list isn't necessarily the lasting experience of the day. Nick Cave and the Brett Weston will probably stick with me. I did like the Dean Sameshima photos at Mahmood too though.
Leaving Chelsea, I went back to the Gimbel Library to check on the Reimagining spaces catalog. It wasn't on the shelf, it wasn't on the new book truck, it wasn't on the overflow and shelving shelves. I looked at the staff display of the record and it was handled by a Bobst staff member on January 29th so I suspect it's still in processing rather than on the shelf. I'll just have to go back to Gimbel in a few days and read some more magazines and see if the catalog has appeared. No problem, I've got time.
29 January 2009
lurking
Laurie Anderson just said "you should lurk" in one of her low low voices. I've been worried about lurking around about a couple artists whose work I really enjoy. And of course Facebook seems a bit lurky sometimes.
carnegie hall tonight
We don't often get drama mixed with our music at Carnegie Hall. At tonight's "Making Music: Peter Eötvös" concert, we got some drama. Before the second piece started, a cellphone sounded and someone said "I don't believe it." Another chirped and the same voice groaned. Someone else said "shut up." That's kind of low drama. Then in the middle of the last section of the third piece, a woman clomped down the side aisle to the front row. As she started clomping, I thought it was part of the percussion but then she came into view. Since the piece was based on Samuel Beckett's radio play Embers, it was vaguely possible that it was part of the work. As the applause started, the woman stood up, put on her coat, and started taking bows. The musicians were professionally oblivious of her shenanigans. I went out into the lobby for intermission and when I returned to my seat, the woman was in a heated argument with several of the ushers and house managers. They finally led her out, and speculation and disbelief reigned up in the balcony of Zankel Hall. The second half of the concert went on without interruption ... except for the trains.
Oh, the concert. It was very interesting. I was not familiar with Eötvös's music but I really liked some of it. And Tara Helen O'Connor played flute and piccolo in a couple pieces; I've heard her four or five times this season and I really like her playing. This wasn't my favorite but it was good. "Shadows" is a wonderful play of reflection, as the title suggests. The instruments talked to each other: snare drums to tympani, solo flute and clarinet to the ensemble. Eötvös conducted three of the six works and played piano in another. My favorite work was probably the second: "Encore," a string quartet. Neo-romantic, it wasn't especially challenging but it was beautifully played. The last piece "Snatches of a Conversation" included text spoken/sung by Barbara Hannigan and solo double-bell trumpet by Brandon Ridenour.
"Derwischtanz" was pretty wonderful pictorially as well as musically. Three clarinetists stood in circles of light and turned as they played. The sound changed as they turned. As they left the stage, I noticed that the three women, all dressed in black, had three different necklines: circle, square, triangle. Bauhaus perhaps. Each also carried her clarinet in a different way from the others. I didn't determine if the shapes and the positions were related.
The text of "Snatches" reminded me a bit of Laurie Anderson but Eötvös uses the text as color more than to tell a story as Laurie Anderson would. When Elaine and I were talking in Boulder about her and her husband's trips to Central America, Elaine said "huipiles" and that reminded me of a narrative piece that Anderson does about being in Mexico. I wanted to share it with Elaine and was lucky enough to find "The Ugly One with the Jewels" at Bart's used CD/record shop on the Pearl Street Mall. I'm not absolutely sure that that's the CD with the "huipile" song but it's good. It's now on the stereo so I'll know in a while.
Oh, the concert. It was very interesting. I was not familiar with Eötvös's music but I really liked some of it. And Tara Helen O'Connor played flute and piccolo in a couple pieces; I've heard her four or five times this season and I really like her playing. This wasn't my favorite but it was good. "Shadows" is a wonderful play of reflection, as the title suggests. The instruments talked to each other: snare drums to tympani, solo flute and clarinet to the ensemble. Eötvös conducted three of the six works and played piano in another. My favorite work was probably the second: "Encore," a string quartet. Neo-romantic, it wasn't especially challenging but it was beautifully played. The last piece "Snatches of a Conversation" included text spoken/sung by Barbara Hannigan and solo double-bell trumpet by Brandon Ridenour.
"Derwischtanz" was pretty wonderful pictorially as well as musically. Three clarinetists stood in circles of light and turned as they played. The sound changed as they turned. As they left the stage, I noticed that the three women, all dressed in black, had three different necklines: circle, square, triangle. Bauhaus perhaps. Each also carried her clarinet in a different way from the others. I didn't determine if the shapes and the positions were related.
The text of "Snatches" reminded me a bit of Laurie Anderson but Eötvös uses the text as color more than to tell a story as Laurie Anderson would. When Elaine and I were talking in Boulder about her and her husband's trips to Central America, Elaine said "huipiles" and that reminded me of a narrative piece that Anderson does about being in Mexico. I wanted to share it with Elaine and was lucky enough to find "The Ugly One with the Jewels" at Bart's used CD/record shop on the Pearl Street Mall. I'm not absolutely sure that that's the CD with the "huipile" song but it's good. It's now on the stereo so I'll know in a while.
22 January 2009
world's collide: but not books by color
The Visual Resources Collection at the University of Colorado has recordings of artist lectures and various artist interviews. As Elaine was giving me the tour, I noted that she had a lecture by and interview with Nina Katchadourian, done on 30 March 2004. In the artist lecture, Nina talks about the book projects and then "Carpark" done in San Diego in 1994 with Mark Tribe, Steven Matheson, and thousands of others.
The big joke in classification and cataloging is arranging the books by color. Well, that and how many catalogers does it take to screw in a light bulb? It's interesting to me that Nina has played with arranging books by title and cars by color.
The big joke in classification and cataloging is arranging the books by color. Well, that and how many catalogers does it take to screw in a light bulb? It's interesting to me that Nina has played with arranging books by title and cars by color.
New Vista High School, aka Baseline Junior High School
How could I have failed to mention that I also walked past Baseline Junior High School on my "reliving my youth" expedition yesterday? Perhaps it's that I have passed the school a number of times since it is on path from Elaine's to the CU campus or elsewhere. I was amazed to see the shape of the gymnasium but can't find a picture to add. Yes, I do hope to get a digital camera so that I can add to the glut of pictures in this e-world.
The school building was probably built in the early-mid 1950s. The gym roof is a wide and shallow round vault. Perhaps my love of roundtops and vaults is not based at all on my Palladiophilia but rather on my junior high school experience. I don't really think so but it was very amusing to see the shape from my youth that is now rather a theme in my architectural ramblings.
Baseline is now the New Vista High School. I didn't try to get into the building to see if the interiors resonated. I can picture the classrooms and particularly remember when we were told by the languages teacher that we should take Spanish in 9th grade because it wasn't a dead language like Latin. Spanish is the language of the future, she said. I did take Spanish in 9th grade, as advised, and didn't get Latin until a catch-up accelerated term in grad school. We moved, however, from Boulder after my 9th grade and North Loup-Scotia Schools (in central Nebraska) only had a German teacher so I switched. But that teacher was very enthusiastic and we even read Romulus der Grosse by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
The school building was probably built in the early-mid 1950s. The gym roof is a wide and shallow round vault. Perhaps my love of roundtops and vaults is not based at all on my Palladiophilia but rather on my junior high school experience. I don't really think so but it was very amusing to see the shape from my youth that is now rather a theme in my architectural ramblings.
Baseline is now the New Vista High School. I didn't try to get into the building to see if the interiors resonated. I can picture the classrooms and particularly remember when we were told by the languages teacher that we should take Spanish in 9th grade because it wasn't a dead language like Latin. Spanish is the language of the future, she said. I did take Spanish in 9th grade, as advised, and didn't get Latin until a catch-up accelerated term in grad school. We moved, however, from Boulder after my 9th grade and North Loup-Scotia Schools (in central Nebraska) only had a German teacher so I switched. But that teacher was very enthusiastic and we even read Romulus der Grosse by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
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