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In case you were wondering what Daniel Mendelsohn looks like, here he is. Who is Daniel Mendelsohn? He's the writer who so burns with jealousy over Jonathan Franzen's success that he wrote a memorably hateful hatchet job on him in the New York Times. Several people I talked to, including ones who'd never read Franzen, read that piece and were appalled by how harsh and personal it was. (Also badly written.) Mendelsohn is the subject of a lengthy interview on Salon today, discussing his just-released, "Proustian" book about the Holocaust. Yes, that's how it's described. We already know everything we need to know about Mendelsohn, though, from his Franzen review, and that publicity photo, which I think you will agree is very...smooth. Oh, and one more detail--he lives in an upper West side apartment that Salon describes as "elegantly furnished."
Some funny responses to the photo from the comments, after the jump.
Party with Design*Sponge and the other design bloggers! (Everyone in this picture looks miserable.) From Curbed.
vertexList gallery is having a benefit raffle tonight: photos of the donated artwork are posted on its blog. The event lasts from 7-10 pm; raffle starts at 8.30 pm; tickets are $200--details here. jenghizkhan (aka John Parker) will perform a couple of new music pieces live at 7:30 pm; other attractions include limited edition t-shirts by Eteam, limited edition pins by Sakurako Shimizu and a sign-up sheet to reserve a copy of vertexChips, a compilation CD in a micro-edition of 50 that will be released next week, featuring Covox, Bubblyfish, Role Model, Herbert Weixelbaum, Receptors, Bit Shifter, jengizkhan, Nullsleep, Treewave, David Kristian, Glomag, Huoratron, and yours truly.
Be there, aloha. It would be nice if New York landlords would support the art community here but that's not what they do--they raise rent so they can live like Lords and say FU to the rest of us!
Updated with new info about the CD.
Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects, in the gallery's shipping container at the DiVa (Digital and Video Art) Fair this year in Miami. In the background is my DVD OptiDisc.
Update: The photo above is by Paddy Johnson, using Namenwirth's camera. Aron has posted more photos here.
"Hacker Fashion" [mp3 removed]
A kind of ongoing duet between a "warm, fluid" analog synth and a "cold, brittle" digital synth, mirrored underneath by the allotment of analog percussion to one channel and sampled digital beats to the other. I'm interested in similar oppositions and symmetries in visual art--a balance of "grains" and their accompanying "philosophies." Not to mention the binary use of scare quotes.
Update: I dropped the digital synth parts a semitone, muted some high notes, and raised the filter cutoff frequency so those parts are a tad more mellifluous.
Large Mill, 1995, acrylic, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 90" X 88" (Stage One)
Stage Two
Final Version
never exhibited--done right before I moved to NY and started working with a computer. the piece got more difficult to look at as it was completed--by the end it was impossible for very long without retinal strain and headaches--the early stages appear tasteful in the polaroid scans but the colors are pretty artificial and obnoxious in person--I contemplated stopping the process and calling it done at many stages but pressed on out of some innate sense of responsibility to the initial premise. the "disc" design was originally based on paintings of rolled-up silk seen end-on in a Russian constructivist-influenced painting, I think by Liubov Popova.
The vertexList blog has a report on the DiVa (Digital Art and Video) art fair in Miami and some pictures of the shipping container on the beach where my and some other New Yorkers' work was showing. One gathers from that blog and Paddy Johnson's that the event was...underpromoted. Fairs suck, and a few posts back I offered showing in a shipping container as one of the few things helping to prop up my self-image as an aloof avant gardist. A reader then jumped in and proceeded to demolish the very idea of showing in a container in a couple of unstinting, scorched earth comments. These went a long way towards knocking out my last strut of personal dignity. Seeing the vertexList pictures helped revive it, though--in that the images of the white metal boxes on the sand with palm trees in the background seemed kind of romantic to me. As I said in that comment thread, I am proud to have shown in Miami and appreciate my shot at the big time.
93 kilobytes of RAM (ha ha).