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The plan was not to post anything too serious today, but here are some rhetorical questions addressed to future Memorial Days:
Did the cold war end because of Reagan's budget-busting military buildup or because the Soviet Union rotted from within?
With America's superpower rival gone, are "rogue states" and Islamic terrorists enough justification to maintain 700-plus military bases all over the world, and thousands of nukes?
Is the Dick Cheney goal of "imposing a fearful peace"1 on the world the right course for Americans?
Is "Islamic terrorism" about taking over America or getting America to leave Islamic countries?
1. Cheney didn't actually phrase it this way--it's what John Perry Barlow thinks his fellow libertarian Wyoming mountain man is trying to accomplish in Washington. Cheney a libertarian--what a joke: he's a creature of corporate and government bureaucracy.
It's a holiday (or post-holiday) so I'm posting stupid stuff today (or more stupid than usual). Like the homestar-ish End of the World (link may be dead because site exceeded bandwidth). This may be old news but I just discovered it. No disrespect meant to the war dead, but if we don't [fill in cautionary statement here].
Guy Colwell is a Bay Area underground comix artist turned mural painter who recently went back to explicit political work, to disastrous effect. As described in this Steve Gillliard post (and original story), Colwell tackled the Abu Ghraib prison torture story and his painting was so effective it got his art dealer literally punched in the face, and spat on, by angry yahoos. The gallery--in the bohemian North Beach area of San Francisco, of all places--was also vandalized, and the dealer closed her business yesterday. The painting is explicit, illustrational agitprop in the Sue Coe tradition, depicting subhuman GIs with American flag patches on their uniforms, screaming in rage at a row of naked figures, hooded, wired up and standing on buckets. All the emotions are right up on the surface, and this is a time when emotions matter.
Colwell has taken the Abu Ghraib photos, which were already starting to lose some shock value through endless media repetition, and dared to nationalize them by making ugly, monstrous caricatures out of "the troops." We aren't supposed to regard our soldiers as bad or suspect, even though the war was launched for fraudulent reasons and no one knew how the "liberated" Iraqis were being treated. (For the record, I support the troops but wish they could be put to work by the Pentagon protecting us from our real enemies.) The people who assaulted Colwell's dealer are still in whipped up "war mode"--which is hard to come down from after all the Fox News and New York Times/Judith Miller propaganda. The dark side of America is an ugly beast and with blood in the air, it's not so easy to calm. When the Japanese attack you, you put all your energy into attacking the Japanese; when an "invisible network of terror cells" attacks you, it's hard to know where the energy's supposed to go. So you hit "sitting duck" countries. And art dealers.
Fortunately there's some counter-energy in the form of concerned artists who fear fascism at home more than randomly-striking terrorists. In this sense Guy Colwell is a sort of anti-Mumford, referring here to Steve Mumford's rapidly-dating "Parisian flaneur in Iraq" sketchbook drawings of American soldiers at work and rest in an exotic foreign land. Those bland, tastefully smeared, courtroom style drawings, purporting to be some kind of art vérité, managed to hide the hatefulness and essential wrongness of the US invasion of a country that never threatened us except with words--a classic colonial adventure fused with misdirected payback. Mumford even got interviewed by CNN, the official voice and supporter of the war. Colwell's art is simplistic, not tasteful in the least, but it cuts right to the subjugating core of the BushCo enterprise. Not that a punch in the face validates art or is anything other than repugnant, but no one will ever be punched over Mumford's drawings.
[UPDATE: Capobianco gallery's "Guy Colwell page," which had a clearer view of the Abu Ghraib painting, was removed a few hours after I posted this (that's the gallery where the dealer was attacked). Its website is now also closed, but has a phone number to view a video of the gallery closing memorial.]
Details from an installation by John Parker at The Front Room, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The compacted, obsessively joined household materials somewhat recall Sarah Sze's early work but with more of a playful, Digimon vibe. I actually prefer Parker's sense of geometric pattern and general all-around oddness using twisty ties, wire, tape, wood screws, electrical hardware, light bulbs, plastic bags, etc. Other artists working in the "geometric assemblage" vein include Lucky de Bellevue and the British artist Daniel Coombs, excellently documented on James Hyde's site. Last day for the Parker show is tomorrow, Sunday, May 30. Gallery info is here. More of my installation pics are here. Parker is also a musician; my review of a recent show of his playing with The Man From Planet Risk is here.
Lynn Cazabon at Schroeder Romero, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This very painterly looking image is actually a photograph, and the subject of the photo is a film. What you are looking at is a long strip of film that has been unspooled from its canister and arranged in looping, floral patterns, then photographed edge-on. The large digital photoprint is mounted as if it were a projector screen. Other works in the show are done similarly; all are (16mm?) films recently discarded or de-accessioned from a public collection (the Pratt Library in Baltimore). I kind of hate Cazabon's implication that "pretty, formal work" is what you do with a dead or rapidly-becoming-obsolete medium--in other words, make intricate filigrees for what she calls film's "casket" or "memento mori." Pretty patterns can also be vital, as we shall see in the next post. Another thing this work perversely brought to mind was the old Echoplex analog tape delay, which had a similar (if not as baroque) looping of tape inside its guts, to make cool spaced-out sounds back in the 60s and 70s. That's obsolete, too, but fondly remembered, as this google search page shows. [hat tip to bloggy for reminding me to see the Cazabon show]
This post by the Blogger Formerly Known as Calpundit links to a video of US soldiers in a helicopter machine-gunning three Iraqis into bloody piles of meat. You can't see the meat because it's a pixelated black and white image--looks just like a cool video game, or a Tom Clancy movie. Two of the Iraqis are killed instantly. Another crawls out from under a truck and starts a kind of agonized, flopping roll across the ground--obviously he's wounded and unable to stand. One of the soldiers calmly says "hit him," and we see him also splattered by gunfire from the helicopter.
I'm not sure which is more disgusting, the video or the fact that Kevin Drum and the majority of commenters on his blog
can't make up their minds if what we're seeing is bad or good. Since the US invaded Iraq without cause, thus making an insurgency against foreign occupiers justified in the eyes of most of the world, it's hard to understand how Drum's obviously well-educated, center-left commenters can say things like "it's war" or "they're just kids" about this cold blooded killing, especially of
the wounded man. Those pilots did have another option: it's called flying back to base and saying "I don't want to do this shit anymore." Call me naive, but there it is.
work in progress
"Oh boy...Lugia. Quite possibly the cheapest Pokémon since the Amnesia Mewtwo of the RBY days, Lugia is capable of taking out 2/3 of a rival trainer's team before they have time to realize what is happening. With a 358 Defense, a 406 Special Defense and the ability to Recover at will, Lugia is quite simply VERY hard to kill. Does it really matter what your offensive stats look like if you have all the time in the world to whittle your opponent down whilst they fruitlessly whale away at your well nigh impenetrable defenses?" Illus: Lugia Flies High, by Krystal Ishida.
Just a couple of quick observations on the Susan Sontag New York Times Magazine essay on the Abu Ghraib photos. She talks as if the photos were exclusively private pics that soldiers were passing around, and relates the activity to webcams, internet p0rn, school hazings, etc. Some of that's valid pop-sociological speculation, but it's also been reported that the picture-taking was officially encouraged, used to humiliate and blackmail the sexually prim Iraqis. ("What do you want from me?" "Ve vant...ze information. Do you want ze family to see zese pictures?") Her "soldiers running amuck with cameras" argument plays into the government propaganda that a few unsupervised crazies were behind the prison torture. Also, she talks about our "quite justified" invasion of Afghanistan, something lefties love to throw as a sop to the right to make complaints about Iraq seem reasonable. Justifed how? By not catching Bin Laden? By jumpstarting the heroin trade over there again? Killing and bombing for women's rights? That war wasn't the right response to 9/11 any more than Iraq was. It was just to make the majority of Americans feel better after the government failed them on 9/11, by bombing some Muslims.
[UPDATE - this post has been completely rewritten since its original appearance.]
In his May 21, 2004 column, the New York Times' Frank Rich mentions the "Let Them Eat Cake" quote of our time--Barbara Bush's statement in a "Good Morning America" interview given a few days before the commencement of Iraq War (March 18, 2003). She and the first President Bush discussed the invasion from the armchair perspective of two old folks sittin' around the house:
DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: (OC) You said that, that Mrs. Bush at one point had said to the two of you, don't watch too much TV. You may be watching too much TV.The "him" she's apparently talking about in that last sentence is Bush Junior, who doesnt seem to be suffering much in a clip from Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11, as Rich noted--it's the much linked-to video where he clowns around as he is being made up for his televised announcement of the Iraq invasion. When I first read the Barbara Bush quote months ago, I didn't realize she was talking about her son, though. She uses "he" a couple of times, referring to her husband, and it seemed weird for her to be talking about "watching him suffer" with Bush the Elder sitting right next to her. (Maybe if I wasted my own beautiful mind watching more TV, I wouldn't have to parse these nuances from internet transcripts.) At any rate, my initial reaction to Rich's column was that he'd read it wrong, which I unfortunately blurted out in the first published version of this post. But I guess she is fussing over her poor suffering son, so lonely at the top. Privately she probably wants to knock him upside the head for embarrassing the family.FORMER FIRST LADY BARBARA BUSH, UNITED STATES: No question.
DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: (OC) You do watch?
FORMER FIRST LADY BARBARA BUSH, UNITED STATES: I watch none. He sits and listens and I read books, because I know perfectly well that, don't take offense, that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition, when we're talking about the news. And he's not, not as understanding of my pettiness about that. But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that. And watch him suffer.
Two good shows glimpsed at the Chelsea Concrete Outlet Mall yesterday: Tony Feher at D'Amelio Terras and Tal R at LFL. One is sculpture, the other painting; both are relatively unmediated, primal, happy work. But here, let's let the NY Times' Ken Johnson deaden Feher's show for us:
Tony Feher makes wryly poetic and visually enchanting sculptures from the least promising of materials. His palette includes plastic and glass bottles and bottle caps, foam packing material, bent wire, fruit baskets, soda stacking crates, Windex and other colored liquids, marbles, colored string, crushed aluminum foil and stones. What he does with these and other materials requires no manual skill. He puts disparate things together or performs simple operations that produce something surprisingly more than the sum of its mundane parts.To put it a bit more casually, Feher has a super-light touch and an eye for putting together cast-off, post-consumer items so that they "pop."1 This show is less precious and more humorous than others I've seen by him. As for Tal R's work, the "mundane parts" are his influences, which are all right up front: Emil Nolde, Matisse cutouts, Art Brut. But there's something fairly "Chelsea Hotel ca. 1979" (i.e., punk) in the slashing, childlike way the paint is applied. Not visible in the jpegs is all the collaging with fabric, sticky-notes, magazine cutouts, etc. This is the type of work Donald Baechler might have done 20 years ago if he didn't have so much finesse. Here's an image:
1. I shouldn't pick on Johnson; his heart seems to be in the right place and he gave me a good review once. It's just that too often you feel in his prose the crushing weight of all the shows he has to write up. I couldn't handle that pace, even if I did want to give up my creative career to be a full-time critic, which I don't.
Outside the New York metro area people think ex-mayor Rudolph Giuliani is some kind of 9/11 hero because he looked better on TV than George Bush did, but take it from someone who lives here: he's a prick. Apparently the 9/11 commission asked him a bunch of softball questions about his performance that day, and were surprised when New Yorkers started screaming from the galleries. Jimmy Breslin best expresses the anger many people here feel about this (now very rich) man's unjustified reputation:
Giuliani wanted a high security bunker, placed 23 stories high in a building at 7 World Trade Center. Anybody with the least bit of common sense knew that the bunker in the sky was insane and the price, $15.1 million, a scandal. But he said it would house "My Police Commissioner" and "My Fire Commissioner." In Giuliani's world, everything was "mine."Steve Gilliard, another New Yorker, has more here (scroll down).And on the morning of Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani's bunker went out into the air like a Frisbee.
The first thing he did, he was telling the 9/11 Commission yesterday, was to go out and search for a new command post. He walked away from the trade center and headed for the command post that made his career: the nearest television camera.
The Man from Planet Risk debuted last night at the The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg. Their CD Escaping Chixalub is what might be called "downtempo horrorcore" (or The Music Formerly Known As Triphop--more on this below) but the live set, substituting drums for old skool hip hop beat machines, changed the feel of the sound quite a bit. Live, drummer Cave Precise seems to be imitating a beatbox or drum instruction cassette, except he's trying as hard as he can to destroy the drums. His manic rigidity and intensity tipped the sound over from the hiphop column to rock-and-roll, a kind of minimalist psychedelic metal. "Minimalist" because each "song" is basically just a really cool metalloid riff--a big ungainly slab of doomstruck sound--played long enough for the audience to get the point and then ended.
For all its echo-y horror soundtrack atmospherics and Black Sab-like bass riffs, the CD is much lighter: the beats are spryer, with turntable twists & jazzy piano riffs livening up the doom and gloom. I mentioned triphop because the sound is truly trippy: keyboardist/laptopper Jenghizkhan approaches music like a painter (and is in fact a visual artist, exhibiting under his real name John Parker), taking advantage of all the filtering and timestretching capabilities of modern keyboard tech to make layers of artfully mangled sound. Imagine Ennio Morricone eclectism shot through with the kind of dreamy, smeared psychedelia of San Francisco post-punkers Chrome, or the European hardcore tech of The Mover set to a hiphop beat. But also none of the above. You can check out samples of the CD here.
Below: a couple more screen grabs from A Beautiful Mind, previously discussed here. Ronny Howard's art installation(s) are at once exotic, invoking the crazed outsider look of Thomas Hirschhorn's work, and familiar, amplifying the hoary Hollywood cliche of the "clipping filled shrine" from a hundred serial killer films. I wonder if anyone ever photographed the real John Nash's "codebreaking rooms" and if they looked anything like this? According to critic tedg (who took a class from Nash after the mathematician was first hospitalized), "Nash's madness was almost certainly caused by his 'breaking' his mind by straying too far from reality to get outside th[e] large problem he was working [on]. The conspiracies came not from cold war silliness but something far deeper: Phil Dick science fiction and Kabbalah. Not stupid numbers but topologies (forms). Not codes but manifold patterns in higher spaces. Literally extraterrestrial voices."
On the subject of extrinsic connections, you might recognize the male actors above as the "student newspaper nerds" from Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, a film about random but meaningful collisions (as was Linklater's Slacker), and of course the lovely, wholesome but somewhat cypherish Jennifer Connelly, who has served as the emotional constant in a topological maelstrom of quirky films. Quite a career she's had, from eclipsing Elizabeth McGovern as McGovern's younger self in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time In America, to sliding into a pool of maggots in Dario Argento's Phenomena, to besting Goblin King David Bowie in Labyrinth, to famously skinnydipping in Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot, to wrecking Nick Nolte's marriage in Mulholland Falls, to recoiling from a mutant poodle in The Hulk, to doing heroin and a "double dildo dance" in Requiem for a Dream, to competing with Russell Crowe's imaginary friends in this film. What explains such a rich filmography? Is it just because she's "purdy"?
DEVELOPMENTAL VALLEY SCHOOL DISTRICT LUNCH MENUS FOR THIS WEEK
Copyright 2003 by Phil Austin
Plain Elementary School
Mon: Paper Stack; Boneless Burrito; Paste; Kitten on a Stick; Milkaroni
Tue: White Bread on Toast; Glass of Sugar; See-Through Lettuce; Liquid Milk
Wed: Sponge; Sugar Sandwich; Butter Plate; Cloth Pudding; Milk
Thu: Simple Pie; Banana Splat; Sugar Mound; Blanched Cookie; Milk
Fri: Diaper Surprise; Clear Peaches; Steamed Cereal Boxes; Sugar; Milk
Mystery Island School for Girls
Mon: Soft Eggs on a Mirror; Hard-boiled Hollow Birds; Handful of Tacos; Milk
Tue: Rack of Clever Hans; Whisked Apple Fly; Coronation Ham; Nylon Bunnies; Big Carton
Wed: Mystery Potato; Curd; Slippery Tart; Milk Pie; Leg Salad Sandwich; Clear Liquid
Thurs: Oysters Frightened by Chickens; Liver Mounds; Nest of Interesting Spiders; Mai Tai; Pack of Camels
Fri: Breast of Clam ala "Eddie"; Wieners in a Basket Under a Blanket; Teacher's Surprise; Milk
Earnest Boys Academy
Mon; Beef Throats; Smoked Leg; Hind Quarters; Gros Livers; Old-Fashioned Milk; Cigars
Tue: Flat Motor Pies; Fisherman's Regret; Loin of Fat; Stunned Ducks in Alcohol Sauce; Milk
Wed; Tart Bottoms; Slick Fritters; Breasts of Toast; Sweetbreads in Hand; Cuckoo Punch; Cigars; Milk
Thurs: Roast Puffins; Revenge Pudding; Pancakes in Water; Baked Salad; Ring of Fire; Milk
Fri; Ducklings ala Moron; Smothered Rodents; Closet Pie; Turbo Skeletons; Champagne; Brandies; Cigars; Milk
Willy Loman Public High School
Mon: Horse Butter Sandwiches; Hot Jello Salad; French Kisses; Curb Cake; Milk
Tue: Toads in Blanket in a Hole; Complicated Salad; Ice Bread; Lomax Pie; Milk Cocktail
Wed: Hat with Cheese; Insurance Salad; V6 Bread; Field Surprise; Milk
Thurs: Battered Vegetables; Wax Wrappers; Wallet and Raisin Salad; Adult Milkshake
Fri: Fried Chuck; Paper Salad; Responsibility Pie; White Dessert; Retirement Milk
Alternate Current Magnet School
Mon: Eco-Veggie Bar; Rainbow Krazy Krunch; Twig Sticks; Turkey Straws; Cow Milk
Tue: Helpless Nuggets with Sour Sauce; Gator Tots; Trial Mix; White Milk
Wed: False Rabbit Wedges; Farm Dip; Sloppy Joans; French Acid; Goat Milk
Thurs: Meatless Hot Creatures; Sweetened Cherries; Meltdown on a bun; Squares; Mother's Milk
Fri: Refried Fries; Early Dismissal Cup; Hemp Wheels; Party on a Bun; Dip; Sheep Milk
Past as Prologue: Meat Space Curating
About ten years ago I solo-juried a show at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, an annual "open to all comers" event called The Big Show. Artists bring work to the gallery and it's selected (or not) on the spot; everything not picked is moved out of sight to a large storage room. This is much better than judging from slides because you have more control over the outcome. The fee was decent so I hung around and designed and supervised the installation, in effect turning it into a curated rather than just juried show. The event got mixed reviews; one writer suggested I was using the art as fodder for my own work as an artist; this was incredibly flattering and not 100% wrong (theory omitted for now). I'm posting these installation shots because I'm thinking now about how the web gives us the opportunity to "curate" others' work and have it be "ours" at the same time. As usual, DJs were years ahead of the art world on this issue. 1 For an example of a web-based "mix" of artist's images, see this roughly chronological assortment; not all but most have appeared on this weblog. Some earlier thoughts on DIY web curating are here.
1. [UPDATE] The issue got an airing in the art world in the '80s with arguments about Christian Leigh's and Collins & Milazzo's "curating as art." But it's been on the back burner, as if everyone collectively decided that having quasi-objective "scholarly" curation was a necessary evil in the all-important personal validation process. DJs didn't have this kind of discussion--in that realm, assembling work you like sidesteps issues of "expert status" and will likely be recognized as an art in itself without a lot of neurotic hand-wringing.
Here's what some of us are saying about [that movie with LA being destroyed by tornadoes and NY being destroyed by a tidal wave]. My first reaction on seeing a trailer in the theatre months ago was "Hey, I thought after 9/11 we didn't do that self-hating Independence Day shit any more." Corporate America has mobilized all forces of modern communication to let us know that it's OK to self-hate again, with saturation TV coverage, print ads, internet streams, tie-in programs on the Discovery Channel (even though the science is dubious), an endless loop on the video billboard at the Holland Tunnel--everywhere you turn there's some sign that this is an unmissable (pseudo) event. The "money shots" do look intriguing but you have to be suspicious when that's what all they show in the ads. Also, let's face it, Roland Emmerich's previous movies--Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla--blew chunks.
If you hate the mainstream news media, you'll like the Daily Howler. Bob Somerby is very good at showing how the major newspapers and TV networks distract us with trivia ("Kerry has a personal valet," "Kerry threw ribbons, not medals") while the Republican Party, which controls all three branches of the government, robs the store. As our army (and Treasury) are slowly chewed to pieces in Iraq, Maureen Dowd talks about Kerry having peanut butter sandwiches made for him. But let's let Somerby tell it:
While they clowned about Gary Condit, Osama’s men were tooling those planes. And now, as they clown about peanut butter, Osama’s men are still at work. And what will happen to your country because [Jodi] Wilgoren and Dowd set the tone? Let us finally tell you your future: Osama’s men will come with a bomb [...] and they’ll destroy an American city. American society will end on that day. And when it does, you can think of Wilgoren and Dowd—and you can think of the “letters editor” who laughed in your face with that letter today.1 They’ve made a joke of your discourse for years—while your enemies hunt for a bomb.In his most recent screed, Somerby catches the New York Times subtly pushing the Republican script that Kerry voted against certain weapons systems. The paper tells you Bush's ads on the subject are "cynical" but doesn't tell you why. You have to search NEXIS to find that out Dick Cheney opposed the same weapons systems during Bush I. Now, it's hard to defend Kerry on any level, but he's our only reasonable hope of getting rid of Bush, and unfortunately the Times is still pluggin' away for old George, using the same tactics they used to bring down Gore. Somerby shows how the journalists advance the Republican meme du jour with everything from subtle word choices to the numbing repetition of long disproven canards such as "Gore says he invented the Internet." His parsing of the propaganda is invaluable.
1. The Times printed a letter stating that Kerry had “only fingernail scrapes to show for his three Purple Hearts.” In the case of his first Purple Heart wound, Kerry had shrapnel dug out of his arm by a medic. There were no stitches, apparently, just ointment applied, but "fingernail scrape" simply isn't true. The other Purple Heart wounds--shrapnel in the legs and butt--were unquestionably more serious. Maybe the Times editor thinks having jagged pieces of metal penetrating your flesh is no big deal.
Some really good signs and slogans over at the freewayblogger: "Impeach Cheney First," "Quagmire Accomplished," "Real Soldiers Are Dying in their Hummers So You Can Play Soldier in Yours" (good one--I hate Hummers), "32,000 Dead and I'm Still Paying $2.29 for Unleaded," and more--all printed large, hung on freeway overpasses and billboards (until someone takes them down), and photographed. Great! Maybe even Kerry'll get the message that Americans don't want this war.
Three Hour Friends
Yesterday, May 12, WFMU's Kenny G played the final episode of Friends on his radio show. One catch: his program lasts three hours so the episode was stretched to fit. If you'd like to hear this epic moment in television slowed down to one-third normal speed (theme song, commercials and all), a page with links to streams, as well as a complete transcript, is here. The voices are all completely intelligible, except for the fact that everyone sounds severely medicated. And of course, there are no visuals. (The concept of Friends 3x was suggested by 'FMU program director Brian Turner, who says he didn't think Kenny "was crazy enough to do it.")
In case you haven't heard, curator Larry Rinder is leaving the Whitney Museum, not for another power-position in the art world but to return to the school from whence he came in California. Wow, can we have the last three years back? "BitStreams," "The 2002 Biennial," "The American Effect"--critically panned, enervating shows (or reportedly enervating; the picture of the superheroes in wheelchairs with IV drips, etc., did not inspire a $1.50 card-swipe for a trip uptown to see the last of the three).
The "whoops--never mind" of the Rinder years happened because of the Backlash Effect. Former director David Ross's supposedly "wild" programming (e.g. "Black Male") scared some trustees, so they hired "dapper fuddy duddy" Maxwell Anderson, as Slate.com described him (also now departed), as director. Anderson hired Rinder, who had served on the curatorial team for the bland 2000 Biennial. Despite a near-universally acknowledged mediocre eye, Rinder received much adoring press from non-critic journos, for reasons that remain mysterious. All that publicity, so little to publicize.
The art-jazz-electronic duo Plasmodium has a CD out titled Clairaudience, blending fusion, sampladelia, grunge, and twisted Southern humor. At the music's core are jazzy grooves performed by Jim Thomson (drums, vocals) and Bob Miller (trumpet and keyboards), augmented with loops, samples, and electronic treatments a la the "labfunk" of Recloose or Atjazz. Miller's nimble trumpet is a versatile lead instrument, moving from traditional muted phrasing to wah wah-ed electric guitar shrieks.
Veterans of the Virginia music scene centered around Richmond and Charlottesville, the pair has an interesting provenance: Miller gigs with the salsa group Bio Ritmo, while Thomson drummed in the 80s for the nuclear mutant hardcore outfit GWAR. Although mainly jazzy, Clairaudience spins a dazzling range of musical fictions, from "Tristay"'s reverbed rockabilly lament to the paranoid psychedelic dirge rock of "Space Eye" (think Alice in Chains meets Air, if that's possible). The daily indignities of hapless convenience store clerk "Clive Buckledown," recited in a deadpan, detective-story monotone over sensuous electric piano loops, recall the white psycho jazz rap of Kentuckyan-by-way-of-Dallas MC 900 Ft. Jesus.
In a more Cagean mode, the sound collage "Rethinking the Raven" presents echo-treated field recordings of a suburban smart guy spouting increasingly ridiculous, palsied nonsense syllables into fast-food driveup intercoms. ("Sir, can you drive to the window so we can take your order, we can't understand you.") The track is funny on a mean spirited Jerky Boys level, but also seductive, with the sound manipulations turning the baffled or bored utterances of the franchise employees into quasi-world music. One clerk's digitally twinned "I don't know/I don't know (I don't understand what you're saying)" becomes poignantly melodic through repetition, resembling an eerie call-and-response chant. In "Dr. Octobongopus" a bored lounge MC introduces the stage act of a polyrhythmic, multi-armed, but basically lame bongo player in a routine that is pure deadpan surrealism.
You can stream a few .mp3s at the Dry County Records site ("Space Eye" is especially good), or purchase the CD at CD BABY. Highly recommended.
Sexy fighting babes are the rage in the secondary school art set. Are these images (Saranety's "Crystal Shards" series, from theOtaku.com) sexist or empowering? It's an inane dichotomy, really. You have the infantile large eyes and the sexual come-on of the costumes but also strong, confident, dynamic figures in fighting poses with weapons. The contrast makes the drawings interesting.
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five by wenstrom
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I meant to post this pixel art assortment about a year ago. Many of the .gifs aren't still at the original links.
Is there a name for chickenhawks of the left? Josh Marshall needs one:
For someone who considers himself in many ways a hawk and who did and does believe in American power as a force for good in the world (most recently in the Balkans)1 it is difficult to describe the depth of the chagrin over watching the unfolding of a story [the Abu Ghraib torture] which reads in many ways like a parody of Chomskian screeds against American villainy.Uh, Josh, how about saying it this way?
[I]t is difficult to describe the depth of the chagrin over watching the unfolding of a story which proves Noam Chomsky absolutely correct.Does a country with two million people in prison and incarceration facilities that inflict great physical and psychological cruelty (23 hour days in solitary, uncontrolled rape, murder, etc etc) have any business appointing itself "policeman of the world"? I don't think so. One doesn't have to "hate America" to think bombing and torturing "for peace" is just crazy.
1. Not everyone agrees that bombing Belgrade and helping to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of Serbs was the right way to handle the situation in the Balkans. Also, it's been known for some time that our "contractors" in Bosnia and other hot spots do morally enlightened things like lease girls for six months at a time.
Lots of people have been doing search requests for "Army Pfc. Lynndie England," the woman holding a leash around a naked man's neck in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. What is this fascination with evil women? A guy in Fresno shoots 9 of his children and it's a local story after the first week, but Andrea Yates drowns her 5 and it's a national cause. People, Lynndie England is a distraction from the real issue. The government and a compliant media say that the naked men tied up and arranged in dogpiles were the work of a few bad (or "overstressed") eggs. That's not true. Military intelligence dreamed up all the simulated homoerotic activity and picture-taking to break down the sexually squeamish Iraqis and get them to "confess." Our government has crossed the line and they're handing you Lynddie England. Wake up and smell the coffee, folks.
Watch war criminal Donald Rumsfeld being heckled by protesters during today's Congressional hearing. Pretty gratifying.
Opie - Our Greatest Installation Artist
Screen grabs from Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind. In the depths of paranoid schizophrenia, mathematician Russell Crowe sees patterns in newspaper and magazine clippings and sets out to "break the code." Twice (that we see) he fills a room with printed matter and scrawls numbers and diagrams all over everything--above is the second episode, in the tool shed. Of course, the art world is full of people doing this kind of thing, from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg to Thomas Hirschhorn (see below). Director Howard hired some pretty good people to channel this activity as simulated madness. Instead of the Modernist paradigm of "artists taking inspiration from the insane" this is the reverse process, sort of, bringing the visual vocabulary of the art elite (Hirschhorn at Barbara Gladstone) to a mass audience. Hence, the title of this post.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Plan Moi
From ionarts:
Twice in [Kill Bill: Vol. 2] characters use the phrase "coup de grâce" but pronounce it without the final S sound ("coup de gra"): in French, that would give you the phrase "coup de gras" (S not pronounced), which I guess is the heart attack one would get from eating too much triple-cream St. André (a "blow of fat").I also learned that Tarantino thinks Gibson's Passion "is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I've seen since the talkies—as far as telling a story via pictures." I agree with ionarts' Charles T. Downey that Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was better than 2 (except for that turgid anime), but it's a moot point because they now begin their life as a single film. Will they be watchable in one sitting as a DVD? Or will all the yacking in Vol. 2 grow tedious, as the spectacular Crazy 88 sequence recedes in memory? I went to see Vol. 1 twice (mostly for the densely-layered music) but haven't felt the urge with Vol. 2, much as I enjoyed it.
(From the Washington Post today) In this cropped photograph, Army Pfc. Lynndie England of the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md., holds a leash tied around a naked man’s neck in an Iraqi prison.(From Yahoo News yesterday) President Bush addressed the Arab world on television, but stopped short of saying he was sorry. He said the abuses were "abhorrent" and do not represent "the America that I know."
Midland, Texas, 1950, kitchen of a ranch style home. It's very hot and dusty outside.
Barbara Bush: George Junior, you spilled milk on the table. What do you say?
George Junior: Nothin'! I didn't spill it!
Barbara Bush: Yes, you did, and I'm asking you nicely now, Georgie. What do you say to Mommy when you do something bad?
George: Nothin'!
Barbara Bush: [reaches across the table and raps 4 year old George's head with her knuckles.] Talk to Mommy! What do you say?
George: (crying) Nothin'! Nothin'! Nothin'!
Barbara Bush: [Slaps George on the side of the head.] Little man, you're making me very ashamed! Say you're sorry to Mommy! Now!
[George silently sobs. Barbara begins shaking him violently, slapping his face and shoulders.] Say you're sorry! Say you're ashamed! Do it!
[George Bush Senior walks in.]
George Bush Sr.: Hon, have you seen my golf shoes?
UPDATE: Faced with ongoing, near-catastrophic bad press, the President finally, belatedly apologized today--or says he did. The man still can't say the words "I'm sorry," because of all his Mommy issues. Also, the "apology" is worthless since he still voices support for the creepy Rumsfeld and hasn't fired anyone.
UPDATE 2: An Aussie paper interviewed some folks from Lynddie England's hometown (choice quotes are in the comments). This may not have been the most balanced reporting, but still, one man thinks "we went to Iraq to help the jackasses" and can't understand why they're shooting at us. That should be Exhibit A in the case of how the major media failed to educate the public about our unprovoked invasion of Iraq. More thoughts on Ms. England here.
"Windows Noises" is a short Flash movie by Clown Staples (click here--it loads pretty quickly). It's made using the little .wav (sound file) editor called sndrec32.exe, found in the Windows/system32 folder right next to the viruses and spyware. Windows XP still includes this fun device, although it's usually overridden by RealPlayer or the like. The source material for "Windows Noises" consists solely of four sounds: chimes, ding, chord, and the "Microsoft Sound" (a pre-XP string sample). These have been chopped up, accelerated, reversed, looped, and mixed into a single synchronized file. In the video, an unseen mouse-clicker plays up to six editors like a mini-orchestra. The piece is at once hellishly clever, dumb, resourceful, "deconstructive," and musically very catchy. As explained in the Winnoise FAQ, the Flash film isn't a record of an actual performance but rather a re-enactment of the processes by which the tune was made. All the sound was done with sndrec32.exe but the visuals are animated from cut-and-pasted screen shots of the cursor flitting about the "orchestra," triggering drop down menus and starting and stopping loops. It was actually a relief to learn the piece wasn't done in real time--nobody could be that good. Could they? I still don't believe synch-ing up the parts was as easy as Clown Staples says it was. [via cuechamp, where I also got the screenshot]
Three "work in progress" performances by artists from the 2004 Whitney Biennial debuted at the Kitchen last night. Tracy + The Plastics, a one-woman (virtual) band, consisted of Wynne Greenwood seated at a keyboard, playing and conversing with two prerecorded Wynne Greenwoods on DVD. The three are ostensibly sitting around their "band house" performing snippets of songs and having mock-lame arguments about the direction of their music. While frequently funny, Greenwood's passive aggressive slacker-chick persona wore thin after a while: I know this year's Whitney was about the "quest for the adolescent" but her self-absorbed conversation with the video mirror seemed trivial next to the mid-to-late 90s electro-femme performance work it somewhat resembled (e.g. Kristin Lucas, Monotrona). Alex Bag also inevitably came to mind.
Golan Levin's work was tech-intensive and nerdy (maybe it was the lab coat) but also fun and playful. He and his fellow performer Zachary Lieberman each used a combination of overhead and digital video projectors to make semi-abstract shadow-outlines (basically Rayograms) of their hands and other objects, with the overlap of the respective projector arrays creating dramatic color separation effects. The shadows in turn interacted with custom software to synesthetically translate shapes into sounds. A silhouette of a balled fist opening into a two-finger V caused a sequence of chiming musical notes to alter in mid-cascade; three fingers changed the sequence again, and so on. Clunky cut paper objects dropped onto the projector beds had their own unique audio signatures. Manning their opaque projectors like gamers at battle stations, the performers held a back & forth dialogue-cum-duel of changing silhouettes, which was exquisitely timed and quite charming.
Framing the other two performers was Cory Arcangel's "Pizza Party"--a demonstration of how to hack into the Dom1no's website and order pizza using only command line instructions. These green-on-black text-only options, which Arcangel accessed with a Perl script, lurk below Dom1no's (and every other business's) GUI, or graphic user interface, and consist of filling in "y" or "n" next to mushrooms, anchovies, thin crust, etc. and specifying a delivery address. As he walked the audience through the process on a large screen, Arcangel commented drily (but enthusiastically) on the essential uselessness of online commerce, and even greater uselessness of hacking into it, when a simple local phone call would suffice. And although he warned that failure was a possibility in his performance, his confident demeanor when he came back after the other acts told us that our pizzas had arrived.
UPDATE: "Pizza Party, a free text based software package for ordering pizza, or for throwing pizza parties" is available online here.
UPDATE 2: Somebody posted an article about security vulnerabilities in "Pizza Party," the software. No one seems to know if it was satire or not.
Why Do They Hate Us?
Apparently Fox News and the other major media aren't giving the US torture of Iraqi prisoners as much play as it's getting abroad, but please read Seymour Hersh's report in the New Yorker and look at the screen captures from 60 Minutes at the Memory Hole. The clowning of the "guards" around the naked, humiliated prisoners is truly sickening. The government is of course trying to spin this as a "few isolated instances" but the torture was widespread and systemic, according to the military's own reports. Also, our old friends the "contractors" (mercenaries) are once again involved--apparently they dreamed up the "interrogation methods" of sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners. The 60 Minutes photos were pixelated so you couldn't clearly see that the men are being made to masturbate in some of them, while the "guards" jeered. Such activity is much more taboo in the Muslim world than here, and you better you believe this is being discussed all over the globe right now. "Why do they hate us?", you asked after 9/11--look at the pictures. And it wasn't just forced nakedness and "mock orgies." According to a government report cited by Hersh, activities also included:
[b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.And these weren't just hardened criminals, but people picked up at random stops and torn from their families. So who's accountable? Hersh asks. How about Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, the whole decadent, power-mad crew. "The fish rots from the head," as they say.