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October Exhibition Diary 5. As I've been mentioning, I'm doing an installation in a freight elevator in D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn, as part of The Freight Elevator Project 2, curated by Ombretta Agrņ. The elevator project is under the auspices of the D.U.M.B.O. "Art Under the Bridge" festival, a three-day event of gallery openings, open studios, and performances. Here's how the curator describes my piece: "In Molecular Dispersion (Elevator Kit), Tom Moody has assembled a 70-foot-square lattice of molecular spheres and struts drawn and printed on his home PC. This 'kit' consists of several hundred individual pieces, put together improvisationally within the elevator site."
See http://www.dumboartscenter.org/festival/ for more information and a DUMBO map. The Elevator Project is described under "open studios." The Festival's (and elevator's) hours are: October 18-20, 2002, Fri 6-9 pm and Sat/Sun 12-6 pm. Below is a map showing how to get to my elevator. I hope you can stop by over the weekend.
Just jotting down some things I've been looking at and listening to lately:
MUSIC. Swayzak's newest, Dirty Dancing, is, I'm sorry to say as a fan, the pits. Awful cover--what were they thinking?; too many tracks with guest vocalists; too many self-conscious attempts to capitalize on the '80s revival. The only track I really like is the last one, "Ping Pong." Adrien Capozzi aka Adrien75 has a new one on Worm Interface under a new alias, 757. The CD title is also 757. Really interesting musician. Fans of To Rococo Rot, Richard D. James, Kit Watkins/Coco Roussel, Alan Gowen/Hugh Hopper take note! (Listen to the track "Two Cats" here; also good is "Dusseldorf," which is like Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights" set to a raga beat.) Two old-school tracks from Clay's Pounding System show on WFMU caught my ear (check out the stream for 9/25/02 on his archive): Eazy E's "Nobody Move" and Coldcut's "That Greedy Beat." The late 80s/early 90s were truly a golden age.
ANIME. Two '80s classics set in WWII have recently come out on DVD: Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies. The former depicts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a boy who survived, and has much nightmarish imagery. The latter may be the saddest movie ever made. It's the story of a kid trying to keep himself and his 5-year sister alive after their parents die in the war. Despite his determination and resourcefulness--living on dried frogs and stolen vegetables in an abandoned air raid shelter, after their cold-blooded aunt makes it clear they're not welcome--over the course of 2 hours we gradually watch them starve to death. Both films are beautifully drawn and animated, and are routinely shown to elementary school kids in Japan. Maybe if we did that here people might not be so ready to jump on the war train.
BOOKS. I'm re-reading a lot of stuff at the moment. Laughing my way through VS Naipaul's Mystic Masseur, which I made a note to reread after seeing Ismail Merchant's pretty good film adaptation. Like Woody Allen, Naipaul's earlier, funnier material is his best. I'm also revisiting some science fiction I hadn't looked at in a while, such as Frederick Pohl's intense absolute power fantasy Demon in the Skull (1965-1984), A. A. Attanasio's completely overlooked In Other Worlds (1985), and William Gibson's very amusing Virtual Light, which no one knew in '93 would be the first of a trilogy. "Rydell drove past an In-and-Out Burger place and [Chevette] remembered how this boy she knew called Franklin, up in Oregon, had taken a pellet-gun over to an In-and-Out and shot out the B and the R, so it just said IN-AND-OUT URGE." Now that's funny!
October Exhibition Diary 4. The Jersey City studio tour came and went and now I'm gearing up for the elevator installation in D.U.M.B.O. this weekend. I'll post a building map and directions tomorrow. I was a bit disappointed in the turnout from the five boroughs for the JC tour, but it was fun. I probably had a couple hundred visitors through my studio in two days, and got some interesting responses. Casual viewers don't seem as put off by the use of the computer as typical "sophisticated" collectors who shop in Chelsea; most seemed comfortable with my hybrid of the machine and the hand. A lot of viewers thought the new molecular wall-pieces were painted frescos, to which I can only say: yay! Someone commented that they resemble the interconnected spheres and struts of the Atomium in Belgium. Big difference between my work and '50s atomic art: with mine the pseudoscience is right up front.
Thanks to everyone who came or emailed. I greatly appreciate your support!