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Quick take: Listened to Gary Wilson's Mary Had Brown Hair again last night, and am in awe of his music and art. I mean to do a proper review eventually, and posted some other people's thoughts here. I don't think he is "just a weirdo," I think his "loser mooning over old girlfriends" is a carefully thought out persona and his music as tight and smart as any I've heard. I would compare MHBH to the Mothers' We're Only In It for the Money, partly, obviously, because Wilson disguises his vocals by speeding them up the way Zappa did, but also for its intriguing combination of humor, poignancy, and Cagean noise aesthetics. Sped up or not, I love what the Dusted reviewer calls Wilson's "white soul bro" voice--the way he lapses from singing into just talking,or rambling, about those (fantasy?) femmes who won't stop circling around inside his brain.
Jack Masters: "Yes, with only MS paint, a lousy gif animator, and something to generate random numbers, you too can make this seething mass of pixelated fractally horror."
Rotating smile emoticon html-enlarged by cosmic_disciple (Travis Hallenbeck).
Donald Rumsfeld: Loser
From Reuters (this is already a month old but still relevant):
Asked during the briefing "are we winning" the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not directly respond.Rumsfeld knows how to start a fight but not how to finish it.
"The United States and the coalition forces, in my personal view, will not be the thing that will defeat the insurgency," Rumsfeld said.
"So, therefore, winning or losing is not the issue for 'we,' in my view, in the traditional, conventional context of using the word 'winning' and 'losing' in a war. The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis."
[...]
After Rumsfeld finished, [Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Richard] Myers interjected, "I'm going to say this: I think we are winning, OK? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."
Before The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou*, before Sealab 2021 (or even Sealab 2020), there was:
From the Onion's Films That Time Forgot: "Is it really better down where it's wetter, as animated crabs suggest? That's what Tony Randall intends to find out when he signs his family up to live in his experimental underwater house, in an attempt to convince his skeptical boss Jim Backus that the model is feasible. Randall's wife Janet Leigh is terrified of water (which, after Psycho, is understandable), but concedes anyway. So do the shaggy ruffians in Harold And The Hang-Ups, an anonymous, faintly hippie-ish pop-rock outfit that includes Randall and Leigh's fresh-faced progeny, plus a young Richard Dreyfuss. The gang soon learns that the life aquatic can also be la vida loca, thanks to sharks, technical malfunctions, professional competition, dancing sea creatures, cheap animated sequences, and a wacky comic-relief seal. Even worse, a hurricane threatens to end Randall's experiment prematurely. But everything works out in time for the band's big closing underwater performance on The Merv Griffin Show." More from the Onion review of this terrible Ivan Tors film from 1969:
Can easily be distinguished by:
It's virtually alone in the underwater-house rock 'n' roll family-comedy subgenre.
Timeless message:
Placing one's family in mortal danger is a great way to cultivate teamwork and togetherness.
Memorable quotes:
Griffin introduces Harold And The Hang-Ups by assuring the audience that the band's manager is "stoned on these shouters," finding them to be "mellow yellow, turned-on, and groovy!"
*Zissou: tied for best film of 2004 with I Heart Huckabees, Oscars notwithstanding. From imdb's memorable quotes: Steve Zissou: "Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?" Anne-Marie Sakowitz: "No, they have to share one."
"Reggae Scratchin'" (Swedish Deathmetal Version) [mp3 removed]. As threatened, an (incredibly distorted) "lead" has been added and the scratching pared back to accommodate the new chops. Somewhat inspired by Faust, my musical gods from the '70s, except scratching wasn't invented then.
Some good photos from the ART@><*WORK show* taken by Chris Ashley, who was in town from the West Coast to be on the Blogging & the Arts Panel at the New Museum. Top to bottom: (1) dude working hard in foreground cubicle with details from Erika Somogyi/Evan Greenfield cube behind, (2) Elana Langer's work area, (3) Douglas Repetto/LoVid's cube, (4) Langer deals with falling Irene Moons, (5) Brian Alfred--the whole array including the tools is made out of Color Aid paper, (6) Cat Mazza's cube. I like the way Ashley just plunged in there with his digital camera, nailed the spirit of the show, and had it all up on his weblog the next day (with accompanying text). This should be the model for art writing/reportage: artist with camera and clue documents on the fly as opposed to waiting around for some old-media wizard to dignify your show in print months after the fact. (A concomitant aspect being that you would then link to said reportage on your "hompy"--what they call homepages in Korea--as opposed to whining that you never get ink, which would have the side benefit of increasing the standing of the artist/documenter and eventuallly breaking the deadly cult of stultified expertise that ruled art in the last century.)
*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/
Rhizome.org's Net Art News has a nice writeup on the ART@><*WORK show. Lauren Cornell begins her piece with the following hackle-raising anecdote:
A New York gallerist once took the wind out of my sails by telling me "If you're not trying to make it to the top in this town, then GET OUT OF THE WAY!" Umm, what top? What way?Let's briefly answer those questions. The top: Gagosian, Matthew Marks, PaceWildenstein. The way: art school with influential 70s/80s figure on faculty, show with Connelly or Reich, inclusion in the Whitney, move to the Boesky/Rosen stratum and if you survive midcareer hell thence to canonization and high-level commerce at the aforementioned "top" galleries. That's it, folks!
Speaking of alternatives, Joy Garnett has a report on the second Blogging & the Arts panel here. Fun event but too sparsely attended! I guess everyone was busy making it to the top. Thanks to Francis Hwang for organizing these events (there'll be more), also under the auspices of Rhizome.org at the New Museum.
Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/
Lucas Samaras' Hands, animated GIF, 2005. I posted this animated .GIF a couple of weeks ago and am reposting it with the explanation that it's not a piece by Lucas Samaras, it's a piece by me--a "remix" of one of his quicktime movies. I had shot a bunch of stills in the gallery trying to get "the single shot where his hands looked the strangest" for the blog, then realized the "proof shots" could be cropped, animated, and scrunched down to 16 colors to make this animation. It's meant a bit as a criticism--it is more dynamic than his current work and the pallette is in the spirit of his *very* dynamic early work. A friend thought this GIF was his piece and others may have thought that too, hence the repost and gaseous explanation.