"I invented lighting matches at concerts. Sorry, I did."
-
Kim Fowley
Wilson A. Bently [1865 - 1931] Vermont farmer
photographed
snowflakes in the field on pieces of velvet
Invasive emigrants displace natives in metro area.
plants
The new issue of
Cinefex (#85) is out. The
feature article is on the making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Oddysey. Author (and Cinefex senior editor) Don Shay began the article 24 years ago by interviewing many of the film's technicians (some of whom are no longer living) but until now could never seem to get around to finishing it.
Loads of rare color stills and some even rarer production shots make this one of the most beautiful publications I have ever seen on the subject.
As the title implies, Cinefex is dedicated to the subject of special effects. These days of course it mostly focuses on digital effects. It's nice to see 42 pages of text and photo's devoted to the purely analogue mechanics of one of the greatest technical achievments in human history.
$9.50, find it at Barnes and Noble or any comic book shop.
Old friend Laura Nash is in a photography show. Let's see if I've got it straight: the show is through one gallery, but actually at another one; it's already up, but the opening is this Friday 4/27. The
gallery page displays poorly on my system, but if you work at it, you can see some nice images from the intersection of nature and culture.
section : aRTiFaX
subseciton :
PoRnAdO
I'm realy hoping pornado takes off. Maybe Samoa would guest dj.
I find this perverted little mag by young canadian junkies for free @ OM.
vice
For futrue reference: I'm thinking the next two Thursdays will be slightly more important (or is that boring?) than usual. I want to use this time to start explaining my thoughts on the new system (at least during the opening hours of the night.) I'm at the point of really needing some feedback, so please help if you are able. This week maybe Local again (nice to all sit around a table - we can go for dinner afterwards somewhere) and then on the 5/3 I'd like to host something at Rivington. Also this is my birthday, which I insist on celebrating in strict Hobbit fashion.
Also, the larger gathering is really taking shape now, so I'd like to throw out a tentative date of Saturday June 2nd. I won't consider silence a commitment to attend, but does anyone have any unavoidable conflicts with this date? Shaping up to be quite an interesting event.
Setting up Tom's archive led me to discover that this system was fairly broken. Apparently no one could access any individual days through the archive for any date in 2001. Accessing whole months at a time was still working. Did anyone tell me about this before? Please speak up. It's fixed now. I think I got everyone's page, but let me know if I missed someone.
Possible
meteor shower tonight.
i will never be a rock star but i felt important the other night at Vong after dinner with an Alsacian winemaker, we had an excellent tasting menu with an extra course adding without asking and they also sent us out an amazing (and very expensive) dessert wine, we had ordered some great wines and were very very pleased over all but when they brought me the bill they said "here's the bill for the wine and water the dinner is on us"--did this ever happen to jerry garcia??
had a truely yummy meal in
Boston couple nights ago, clean pure and well flavored, fresh and vibrant
filming for
wasp 2001 in my office building this week. sightings thus far are tea leoni and george hamilton.
SUPERFLAT
1/14 - 5/6 2001
"Contemporary Japanese art often makes graphics, sculptures, and even pornographic animation look 2-D. 19 artists-including Hitoshi Tomizawa, whose
Milk Closet animates flat squares into girl's faces - reveal that flat doesn't mean dull."
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
Looks like it's Thursday again. How time flies. Anyone interested in keeping the streak of socializing alive? Maybe back to the Local? Anyone? Maybe it will be a small turnout due to the poor planning, in which case our options for venues will increase slightly. So let us know if you're on the bus or...
Veritas. 4? east 20th street (5th/broadway.) How was the food? Doesn't matter. How was the wine? Better find someone with an expense account to take you.
Oh my god.
I'm only mentioning it in case some rich friend offers to take you anywhere you want to go. This might be where you want to go.
I would be scared to walk into this place with the wheel.
Sandy Bull, a Master of Musical Fusion With Open Ears, Dies at 60
By JON PARELES 4/14/01 for NYT
"Sandy Bull, a guitarist, composer and improviser whose extended fantasias merged American
folk styles with jazz, classical and world music, died on Wednesday at his home in Franklin,
Tenn. He was 60.
The cause was cancer, said a friend, Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Mr. Bull came out of the folk revival of the 1950's and the early 60's. But while many of his
contemporaries were trying to recreate backwoods American styles, Mr. Bull turned his ear to
the wider world. During his career he performed not only on acoustic and electric guitars, but
also on electric bass, piano, banjo, oud, sarod and pedal steel guitar. His instincts, and his
fondness for the drone at the basis of many music styles, led him to what would later be
called fusion or world music.
Mr. Bull was born in New York City and grew up in Florida, living with his father after his
parents separated. He briefly studied drums and got his first guitar when he was 8. His
mother, Daphne Hellman, is a harpist whose repertory spans jazz and classical music, and he
began living with her in New York when he was 11.
He listened to Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger, and as a teenager he took banjo
lessons from Erik Darling of the Weavers.
By the late 1950's, Mr. Bull had begun a peripatetic career as a performer. In 1959 he played
on the streets in Paris, where he first heard Algerian music.
While studying music at Boston University in the late 1950's, he performed at Boston and
Cambridge clubs, sitting in with singers including Joan Baez. In New York in the early
1960's he worked around Greenwich Village at the Gaslight, Folk City and the Bitter End.
His music was constantly broadening. He heard Lebanese music in a friend's jewelry shop on
Macdougal Street in the Village and the Indian sarod on an album by Ravi Shankar and Ali
Akbar Khan.
Mr. Bull recorded his first album, "Fantasias," for Vanguard Records in 1962. It included
arrangements of classical pieces by Carl Orff and William Byrd, gospel and Appalachian
tunes and an extended piece based on Indian tunings; the band featured the drummer Billy
Higgins, who had been working with Ornette Coleman. Mr. Bull's next album, "Inventions,"
included Bach, Brazilian tunes and Chuck Berry's "Memphis." Mr. Bull also became a disc
jockey for a radio program called "Music of Man" on WNCN-FM in New York.
Mr. Bull moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963 and shared an apartment with Hamza
El Din, the Nubian oud master. In the late 1960's Mr. Bull spent time in London and in
Egypt, where he performed on Radio Cairo. But by the end of the 60's he had become
addicted to heroin, a habit he finally broke in 1974. He re- emerged playing oud at shows in
Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, and he studied sarod with Mr. Khan in 1976.
But from 1972 to 1987 he could not get a recording contract. "Some label people wanted me
to play the way I'd done on my first two albums," he said in an interview with Folk Roots
magazine. "But I was always trying to do something a little different, change, try different
approaches. I didn't want to repeat myself."
He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980's. His 1988 album, "Jukebox School of Music"
(ROM), included salsa-flavored tunes and programmed keyboard parts. His "Vehicles" in
1991 featured the Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng.
Mr. Bull moved to the Nashville area in 1992 and in 1996 started his own label, Timeless
Recording Society, which released "Steel Tears," the first album to feature his singing. He
had surgery for lung cancer in 1996. In 1998 Vanguard released a compilation album, "The
Vanguard Sessions." Mr. Bull had been working on an album of instrumentals, including
solos for oud, sarod and electric guitar and a piece with percussionists from the Tito Puente
Orchestra.
He is survived by his wife, Candy; a daughter, K. C.; two sons, Jesse and Jackson; a sister,
Daisy Paradis; a brother, Digger St. John; and his mother."
Golden door closed.
The new
Ellis Island Records site opened yesterday, but I haven't been able to get in yet. May try changing my name to Vilsonsku.
How those internet rumors get started.
(I was looking for a quote from Sheridan, honest.)
In local news,
Steve Parrino opens at Team Gallery on Thursday 4/19, and Lisa Beck is in a group show currently at Feature (no link yet).