Vermont Picture Post

Currently reporting from Southern Vermont...it is like a (highly stressful) vacation/Summer Camp! Send any and all leads on film, art, music related events via e-mail so I can start a little culture map of the Greater New England Area! This is my goal at least..ok...to the swimming hole!

Was That Robot Dyeing His Hair?

So guys. I saw Prometheus. Leading up to this decision of course was a pattern of extreme boredom, a heat wave, a few days of isolation, more boredom- you get the picture. But, oddly, the thing that really got me to face my irrational fear of driving and my rational fear of our nearly abandoned local mall (At the mall there is a big cardboard box, grease stains soaking the outside of it from days of the seeping, hardening donut holes contained within. It sits at the "Mall Info Center/Lottery Ticket/Mylar Balloon" desk with a hand scrawled note that says "Free" on a wooden stick jammed into the mound of lard. Someone is always poking into this box.) was the internet. The internet made me see this movie. The amount of hilarious, engaging and interesting (nearly completely negative) reviews and insights into this movie made me want to see it. This marks the first time that intensely harsh web-buzz led me into a theater seat with the idea "It can't really be that bad, can it?" The answer is: Yes. Yes, it can be that bad. But that's besides the point. The fact that blogs moved me so got me to thinking about the rise of web criticism in general, of the platforms that have only really recently become everyday things that we read and check and comment on, that we look to for guidance, meaning, culture and style.

Full disclosure: something about really cut girls really clunks up the screen, and the same goes for really cut boys. Most of the budget for Prometheus went for weight-training; even a gazelle like Charlize Theron looks like she was up on a treadmill all day between takes wearing a do-rag while like, field recordings of Sean Penn yelling played on her iPod....The last five dollars of the secret Prometheus slush fund went to hire Edith Head’s puke to design the costumes. - "Prometheus, Placentae, Flip—Flops, And You," tumblr Hearing Carry Over

This article on twitter, Please RT, well not on on twitter being that twitter doesn't exactly support articles but more snippets of ego-centric axioms, but about twitter that appeared through n+1 got me thinking about the rise of the blog voice. It discusses the illusion of a passive, personal voice that we as bloggers have cultivated; yes, even though blogs are mostly places where we talk of personal experience we do edit and think about the way we present our words some. Maybe even a lot.  Blogs have flooded a modern readership with seemingly personal accounts: everyone has an opinion on Prometheus crafted in a very very particular way. The article also goes on to expound on the need for twitter, reviving a literary culture of epigrams (think Oscar Wilde) that, despite their individually wrapped candy (or donut hole!)-like nature, are pulling us out of this long winded and windy road of personal narrative that blogs and literature have taken us down these days, exploring the need for a multifaceted ways of written expression...and then, I found this other article, Why We Don't Write, over on Electric Literature's blog that kind of questions our motives for choosing not to write in regular formats nowadays and encourages writers to take their words beyond the written word.

Imagined Early Script Meeting
Ridley “Brilliant! But why? No, just brilliant! As long as it has lots of snappy informative dialogue.”
Damon Lindelof ”I don’t really do that. I tend to just go with a baffling sequence of potentially interconnected events that looks as though it might be going somewhere, but isn’t. That way everybody on the internet can argue about it for ages. That’s the bit I like. People on the internet arguing about stuff for ages. I also love it when they say things like ‘don’t condemn it so quickly – this is maybe the first part of something bigger’. It makes me think ‘oh yeah. that could be it. Maybe I’ll write another one’ and then people will argue about that on the internet too. For ages. Because I like that.”
Ridley ”People argue on the internet?”
Damon Lindelof “They do. But there’s one thing I don’t think they’ve argued about on the internet yet?”
Ridley “What?”
Damon Lindelof “Intelligent Design vs Evolution. I don’t think that’s come up at all.”
Ridley “Brilliant! Cut! Haha no! I mean. . . Action?” - "Prometheus, An Archeological Perspective (sort of)," website Digital Digging.Net by Henry Rothwell

Scott McClanahan a (former?) writer from West Virginia has turned to making short films of him reciting his words sitting on a couch, sitting in front of a tv that's bursting with the horrors they often contain, sometimes there's even karate. He's decided that, however facetiously, he should be doing something more immediate with his words and something that can speak, show, and express the person behind them. I guess it is sort of like experimental video blogging or taped monologue poetry or something but, at the heart is the need for a new kind of multi-sensory writing experience that the current stronghold of fiction that is all wrapped up in itself needs to break away from. If writing is going to be personalized feeling fiction than let's make it seem really personal, let's (as McClanahan does) let Sesame Street unfold behind us as we talk about the sadness of the world, let's not only experience the written word through distant typed words by some dude whose name starts with a J wearing thick glasses in Brooklyn somewhere. McClanahan has decided to turn to video creating compact, well written stories in movement, and hell, film began as a storytelling outlet and it remains one whether we realize it or not as we gaze through the hazy, clunky 3D glasses sitting in air conditioned soundstorms. And this is the main reason Prometheus sucked.




I always come back to this joke I saw on a tv where a writer looks at a movie poster that proudly advertises "Written By: No-One" and it is true...The action of Prometheus was a nonsensical blur of events. The efforts at crafting a deeper meaning were terrifyingly thoughtless. There was a chasm of cold distance and zero emotion. Even the attempts at being personal or humanizing characters got caught in a trap of unwarranted cliches or plot devices (hopefully?) relevant only to the money dripping sequels or prequels that we can no doubt expect. What I am trying to get at is, if writers are exploring new ways of expression- through creative criticism, twittering, blogging, tumblr-ing, short film making, etc.- finding ways to produce their ideas as human individuals, does this mean the other genres, the genres we are criticizing or blogging about (like film, art, novels, tv), need to suffer? NO! No They don't! Why are we all so hung up on format innovation when the mainstays- like cinematic storytelling and novels- are a bit lacking lately?


Outlets like n+1 and Electric Literature, both literary journals of sorts, and even witty tv shows that mock the lack of writing are proof positive that writing can still be something more than 140 characters or a tale about the time I went to the movies (ha!). And, also, the world of experimental filmmaking- narrative, documentary and otherwise- create rich expressions of the written word that are just as full of life, importance and human spirit.  If all of the critics of Prometheus had gotten together and written Prometheus I am sure we would have been left with something far, far better! So...how do we as an internet writing community go about getting the $130 million it took to make this scriptless wonder..? Because this is obviously the next step in propping up the importance of the written word...in whatever format it manifests itself. (Vomits at box of leaky donut holes as if being awoken from a cryogenically frozen sleep.)

Music for Future Audiences

So when Brent returns from The Emerald Isle he'll be heading back up to EMPAC (Whew! I was afraid we were done with you!) to start mixing the live recording, video & audio, that we did for our Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then residency a few months back. Between dropping off the HDCam tape at MoMA last week and now putting the finishing touches on this release I feel like this film/labor of love will most definitely have some kind of future audience! Which is so exciting being that it could have so easily not! In celebration of the possibility of Gravity not disappearing into the ether of film releases & lost caverns of art and remaining, in some sense, as an artifact of a time and a place here is a small snippet of sound recording from our most recent EMPAC recording! (Note: Please keep in mind that it was recorded on my digital camera so...I WAS standing near the drum when the drum gets louder, apologies in advance! The band includes Brent Green on guitar & vocals, Drew Henkels on theramin, Brendan Canty on drums, Alan Scalpone on trumpet, Mike McGinley on fiddle and Todd Chandler on upright bass )

Cellar Door. Bitches.

When I don't have a lot of time to look at art in Chelsea I tend to hit up the big guns- Pace, Gagosian, Boone. I know this is wrong of me. I really should see the hard workings of younger galleries and artists but there is something about these cavernous spaces that exude a classicism and money that is like another planet to me. Kind of like the feeling I get in high end New York department stores too: a mix of trend, timelessness and beauty all dripping with high price tags and carried home by the towering deep pockets of a pearl clad world I will never understand! In fact, even the New York Times feels the same about a particular artist and his odd, giant show I recently saw over at Pace on W 25th St: "The French artist Loris Gréaud is young, handsome and exceedingly charming. He dates a model, he dresses in designer suits, and his production values would give any luxury brand a run for its money." See, the big galleries are just another Bloomies folks! Despite this kind of vapid outlook....Gréaud's show was a spectacle, a veneer of showyness but possibly with more than meets the eye....and nose.

Anyway...when walking into PACE the first thing you encounter is the imperceptible show title, Unplayed Notes, written in clear lettering on the wall above a set of sculptures of cracked, stone looking books...a bit much for an introduction! Then, you open a set of glass doors revealing a low humming, black room with chalky, gooey black walls and light fixtures that dangle from the ceiling with a mixture of what looks like meteors and tiny lights and metal lamp arms one would buy at Ikea. Then you enter some sort of glowing portal into a room that seems to buzz and hum like a good Sonic Youth song, or the ever-running Dreamhouse sound installation down in Tribeca, the sound a combination of a recorded soundtrack, a perceptible silence and the loud, clanking workings of a gorgeous GIANT film reel looper! The image the looper projects is one of smoke billowing underwater in a mirrored Rorschach/enantiomorphic chamber way...images that a filmmaker I was there with pointed out were  digitally manipulated, the edges showing an unsightly pixel quality (a thing that started to distract me given the insistence of the elegant, bombastic, costly loop machine and the general knowledge about the cost of printing film vs the quality of  the transfer....I know, I know, picky, picky, but hell, the coats in those department stores are weighted so as to make them sit in the most perfect shape as the fine example of craftmenship their prices suggest! Maybe it was an aesthetic choice though..?). The next room had a few rows of these pretty, large shrouded figures set atop pedestals...and it also smelled awful! Just awful! The walls had abstract images in blurry forms framed in grids from floor to ceiling, a nasty yellow glow emanated from the walls and the lights, the towering eerie figures seemed as if they were ready to pounce at any moment- a very physical immersion and eerie emotional response that I have felt very few times when encountering art...and usually only very good art. So, what does all this mean? I read what little I could find about the exhibit in attempts to decipher the meaning of all of this and I think I got there? A little?

The black chamber you first encounter behind PACE's pristine glass doors is made entirely out of burnt art and artists' proofs belonging to the artist. The creation of a unknown planetary landscape out of the ashes of ideas and creativity, destroying old thoughts to make way for new...neat. Next, it was Sonic Youth! Well, sort of...I am not actually sure because it seems Lee Renaldo recorded "the most beautiful guitar solo he could think of" while inside of an anechoic chamber which seems like it would produce a multi-layered silence? A chamber that acts as some sort of noise vacuum? Either way...the deep silence that was palpable mixed with the clanking loop machine mixed with whomever made the pulsating room sounds (that sounded a lot like Lee Renaldo) all made a soundscape that felt so whole and real you wanted to grab the sound from the air! Gréaud succeeded in making sound feel like it had tangible form- CRAZY!


The video...I don't know on this one...something about endless creation of ideas? Like Rorschach, a projection of what we want to see? Or our inner dialogue creating a pattern of endless expectation as the lush, stark image loops and loops on the wall? It was an excerpt from a longer film titled One Thousand Ways to Enter from a previous exhibition titled Cellar Door soo...maybe my hunch on the projection of our own endless desires is right? Regardless...it was a breathtaking display of experimental filmmaking! (Image at top & clip at bottom!) And that is what I personally saw in this work. The next room...the shrouded figures are ambiguous statues frozen in time...for me they seemed like a historic museum display whose pasts and mysteries are withheld, eerily towering down to avoid judgement or scrutiny, simple shrouds putting to rest the past but in such a tense display you feel like it will always haunt you- which it will! I liked this a lot. And the smell...an olfactory component/putrid odor that smelled like a cat urine drenched rug which, only upon deeper internet research, revealed to be a part of the artwork that was produced, along with scientists, to simulate what Mars probably smells like...? As the artist says "This year, it’s a bit of lemon and sulfur," ...so, this is what Mars would smell like? How strange...moving on....Then it turns out that the yellowish images on the wall were made by putting photosensitive material in museums in front of great works of art in attempts to capture "the aura" of the work. For those unfamiliar, the aura is loosely the emotional sense "the realm beyond the art" that an artwork can evoke: the thing that makes something art as opposed to just a thing...or just nothing. Reducing this idea to a physical state/form is also a pretty neat idea. And, I don't know whether Gréaud did capture the auras (tongue in cheek of course) or if he is an impeccable installation artist but...that room scared the hell out me! Seriously. Scary.



Ok, so, Loris Gréaud is some kind of art celebrity so it seems, meaning he'll keep making these huge displays of sexy money sexy art...usually I think I get bummed out about this kind of thing but, for once, I liked it! This work is fulfilling a role, it is making huge dark circus environments (often in collaboration with people of many disciplines, a thing that the artist seems to pride himself on/looks for validation in) that are meant to philosophically ask questions about the world and our minds. Usually art that is both showy and ambiguous- art that I need to spend time to research to win a bet over whether the foul smell was intentional- is a thing that I worry about not immediately engaging on a thought provoking level. But, this show left enough open ends and did so with enough sensory stimulation to force me to fill in the blanks both with my own mind and by seeking out answers...a thing that any good artist/philosopher should be doing! I didn't think they let empiricists into department stores...maybe the comparison was unfair? (wink) I snatched all of these images from the web not wanting to disrupt an engaged group of European tourists in the gallery by taking pictures- imagine an old rickety Italian man coming up to you with a thick accent going "It is beautiful, BEAUTIFUL!" as he gazed up with awestruck glassy eyes at the flowing liquid clouds ballooning into an infinite endless wonder of moving image and time engulfed in a deep, deep silence...and you know what, it most definitely was beautiful! (Note: Does this possibly justify overspending money on an impeccable piece of department store clothing? Or a piece of lavish yet thought provoking art?..if only!)

Disney, Engineers and Contemporary Art

Just a little reminder that Brent Green's show, To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given, is up in New York for one more week! We've gotten a few really nice write ups about the sculpture and even a really strange video someone made as they pawed around it trying to figure out what exactly was going on...? One thing that a lot of people seem to think about the piece is that the layered screen effect is a projection...and it's not! I am only bringing it up because of all of the hard work that went into making the layered effect (think live action animating on glass? <--Walt Disney instructional video!!!)...all of the tedious, raw fingers scraping glue, broken glass, brain storming work I should say! So I thought maybe I should give a little run down of how this thing works exactly...!

First off, the main components of the piece are lcd monitors, that's right, simple flat screen tvs! The way these monitors work (in an oversimplified/I-am-not-an-engineer/thank-you-engineers-who-helped-construct-this-project explanation) is that a grid of little electrical pulses of information beam around a liquid crystal solution, twisting them to let light through, turning pixels on and off. This configuration is sandwiched between two paper thin sheets of glass and then sandwiched again between two sheets of polarized film (like sunglasses!), film that, along with a light source (a backlight/the glow of your screen) helps make the crystal patterns visible. Think of it this way, the resolution of a screen is the number of pixels across and down that are being turned on and off through little electrical switches moving liquid crystals to let light through everytime you use an lcd monitor. The data in an image or video is just manipulating (turning on or off, bending, structuring) the tiny building blocks of information arranged in simple grids, patterning into every imaginable shape and size! Or something like that (if I am understanding any of this correctly!)? For this piece we took apart the lcd screens in a way that made information visible on two staggered screens  at once (like if you had a computer in front of your computer and could see the information on both screens at the same time) a see through technology that they are now in fact manufacturing!

So, the back "screen" is made up of 6 smaller lcd monitors set up in a grid while the front is one large lcd monitor. By removing the polarizer on one side of the rear screens and removing both layers of polarizer, in addition to the light source, on the front screen we were able to make the little pulses of information on the screens appear invisible- without the light passing through the layers of the polarizer we removed you can't see anything! It looks like a big old light beaming box at first glance! We then took the  missing polarizer and stationed it throughout the gallery- on a pedestal like stand (with machine milled wooden phonograph horns!), in a pair of laser cut glasses, in a large welded viewing screen. When looking behind the distanced polarizer it compliments the remaining polarizer on the back screens and renders both sets of images, on the front & back screen, visible at the same time! The front screen also relies on the lightsource of the back to complete the visibility making the front mechanism nearly transparent- a free floating piece of glass whose video is only revealed when stepping behind the polarized film!

Now let's just say that the polarizer is not meant to come off of these here lcd screens causing hours of nerve wracking work peeling the glued surface up, applying enough pressure to not break the paper thin glass display, trying not to tear the polarized layer into sharp little shards of sticky plastic it so wants to become...! And then there is also the task of dividing the image on the back screen so it is displayed across 6 screens as one image (we couldn't afford a huge screen for the back at the time but they have since come down in price so we might change this at some point!), using a combination of tripleheads & qlab to synch the video on the 7 total screens, and also the TONS of time it took to adjust the contrast since some images will just disappear from lack of light caused by our hacked polarizer set-up, all this without even mentioning the hand drawn & stop motion animation (2 separate layers deep &, for some of the scenes, layered in production as well!)! O, and the beautiful, heart wrenching story (which you can hear a demo of here!) that kind of mimics the very elements that make the sculptural form, waxing on the seeming intangibility of truth and the way we control our fate...A very complicated contraption for sure! Well, I hope my little tutorial helped out a little in terms of understanding the way this thing works?! And for those of you unable to make it to New York: we're coming to San Francisco in the Fall of 2012 as part of the San Francisco Film Society's Kinotek series where we will unleash the wonders of hacked LCD technology on the many makers of this fine town- cannot wait!

On Sushi and Film

It seems like I haven't written about film or been to the movies in ages..maybe it is because I haven't! And I LOVE going to the movies! So, in the absence of Brent (I forgot to mention, Brent is in Ireland! For a month! Teaching on writing and visual art through the Penn State program "Representing the Irish Landscape: Literature and Visual Art"), I decided to test my (awful, awful) driving skills and head over to a little film theater in Reading, PA! And I made it there in one piece...(but I am obviously stalling on the return drive as I write! cough cough...eats sandwich to further prolong drive home! Ooo, capers! More stalling...so dislike driving)!

The film I saw was Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary about an 85 year old (!!!) sushi master in Japan whose little restaurant nestled in an underground train station is applauded as one of the best in the world and whose work ethic, love, discipline and craft all make him applause worthy even without tasting his creations! The film itself wasn't any kind of supreme documentary filmmaking (so so many overly-emotional musical swells and the use of slow motion and sped up shots was overdone some too) but the characters in the film (Jiro, his sons and the many people working in the artful sushi business) were so intriguing, and the scenes of otherwordly Japan (octopus scaling/sucking a merchant's arm, the peaceful obelisks of a country cemetery), let a lot of the boilerplate artsy doc stuff disappear often enough to make for a good film going experience. Like most Japanese subjects on film, there is an undercurrent of melancholic disapproval (guilt? honor? shame?) that cuts into all memories or stories: someone or something is never quite good enough and they must thoughtfully work to improve for the betterment of themselves in the name of their culture. The weird thing about this film was that this theme was played out on a personal level between Jiro and his family, both past and present, but by the filmmakers as well inserting mild anecdotes by Jiro that hinted at larger problems of a cultural legacy-- the state of overfishing, the problems with the globalization of sushi, a skepticism of big business-- a sentence here or an image there suggesting the weight of the world and a need to try better.  Overall a nicely made film, especially for a debut feature! I'm sure, as Jiro insists, painstakingly working at your craft is the only way to live a meaningful life... And maybe that is something filmmakers everywhere are striving for, even if it means destroying the tiny theaters like the one I saw this film in....have you all heard about this?

So film is literally going to be a thing of the past as major distributors phase out film projection for digital projection, forcing a lot of little moviehouses to close. Which is completely lame. And even spurred a sort-of-local indie theater of mine to send out a (very nice, eloquent) e-mail urging people to go to the movies in order to approach backers to raise the quarter of a million dollars(!!!) it is going to take to remain digitally relevant. But, a weird twist in this current tale is that a few major major Hollywood directors have begun to take their craft to another Jiro-like level shooting at frame rates that aren't supported by even most digital projections! It is kind of crazy! I am all for technological advancement and craft but how fast (frame rate pun intended) things move now is a little disturbing in terms of history and preservation...are tiny theaters obsolete? Are films only available on film relics, like the sagging giant tuna population mourned by Jiro? I know I am one for nostalgia but I don't think it is that in this case...I think it is a respect for a community, and future communities, to try and find ways to make all of these ways of artistic expression/life possible, or at least a way of respecting them for future generations (remember how we realized only recently that all of our film was disintegrating and we should maybe do something about it?)...either way, we should all go to the movies more to sustain this art and the arthouses that we have grown to love & respect...and, in the same vein, we should all eat sushi responsibly (<---that link has an Eco-sushi app!!!) to sustain the oceans that we too should love & respect!

A Master in Self Portraiture

I finally made it to the Cindy Sherman exhibit! Both of them actually! The huge MoMA show that features an overview of her entire career in self portraiture (which closes tomorrow!) and the gallery exhibit over at Metropictures (which, sadly, closed yesterday!) featuring a new series of large scale work!

First off, if you don't know about Cindy Sherman let me tell you a little story...when I was a teenager my friends and I escaped to NY and went to MoMA for the first time in our lives, which was then in its old building and which was also at a time during a museum workers strike (which marked my first interaction with the inflatable rat [Scabby the Rat!] that is a NYC icon)! This trip also marked my first introduction to Cindy Sherman, the beginning of a life long love!

On that day in MoMA I happened into a room of photography where these horribly creepy photos of masks and anatomy and sort of porn and what looked like meat (?) were sprawled out in still lives of grotesqueness. My immediate reaction was to gag some. Yet, there was something in the gag reflex that made me respect the ability of someone to invoke it through a simple still photograph? Also, growing up in the ghetto, I was completely unaware that art could be this. That these downright nasty yet well composed photos could be allowed to hang in a museum, a whole new world of content exploded in front of me!

Then, in the next room, there were two stark black & white photos of a woman, one standing in front of a backdrop of a towering blurry city building facade (at top) skeptically pouting into the shadows, the other photo of a woman positioned on the side of a hazy highway road looking forlorn, waiting, in the middle of some story or action. Now, keeping in mind I was a foggy headed teen, it took me many minutes before my brain would allow for the connection that the same woman produced both the creepy meat-tastic, vomitous displays and the stunning Untitled Film Stills (as they have come to be called), both effecting in entirely different ways and both sticking with me for the rest of my life. Soon after this experience I went home, during the early days of the internet, and searched the name that I had scribbled down on some paper. This is when I realized that Sherman was the woman in those photographs. That she skillfully takes neverending portraits of herself portraying the neverending ways we live, poking at cultural conventions and questioning a woman's place around a camera and in the world-- all ideas that readjusted what I thought art, and women, could do! 

The retrospective over at MoMA had a beautiful overview of her work (the [Creepy] Clown Series of Sherman dressed as menacing clowns, her History Portraits of herself posing as subjects from famous classical works of art, the Film Stills, the Centerfolds [a print of the orange one pictured above recently selling at auction for a record photo  price of $3.9million], the Vomit, her newer Society Portraits of aging rich & powerful female figures [one at very bottom] et al) but it did feel a little on the stifling side mostly due to the mild crowd encroaching in on the images and the sheer amount of work in the show...and the choice of having those (damn) clowns scattered throughout the exhibit distracting me from enjoying the range of her work too, making a blip in my engagement, a creepy universe slip (which I think could have been a nice effect if the show wasn't stuffed with images...) ! But, I did really love the Metropolitan Museum of Art like installation of the History portraits and the inclusion of her very early cut out work too, a wide ranging career that I am sure was extremely hard to edit...! The show over at  Metropictures had a bit more space and air to let the images breathe for themselves and allow you to take in the full effect of what was in front of you as opposed to the sort of un-contemplative space that the crowded museum lent itself to...

Watch Transformation on PBS. See more from ART:21.

The gallery show was of a new series of the artist clad as women growing older, looming, depressive, not quite fitting right into the process of aging, dressed in odd character, almost pioneer-seeming get ups (photo above video). These women were also positioned in front of various landscapes (think doctors office mountainscape as rendered by an oil painting photoshop brush filter tool) that felt odd and unnatural too, adding to the discomfort of their get ups and presumed states of mind. The characters created for this show seem false in a new way for Sherman, maybe a comment on our own masking of aging, of our constant desire to be young & our ballooning uncomfortableness in our older skins? Either way, these enormous portraits  (I have no sense of scale, maybe 12ft x 8ft? No idea!) were huge prints with plenty of breathing-space around them letting you be absorbed by the eerie, voyeuristic feeling that Sherman can create unlike any other...and making me wish the MoMA show had had a few less pictures!  Now, the question I ask after every Cindy Sherman show: who (or what?) will she be next?

ARChive: 33 and 1/3rd by 33 and 1/3rd

When a friend whom you haven't seen in a long while and you are about to see calls and says "Change of plans! We're going to a record sale!" You might be a wee bit skeptical...especially since you just recently were sated with vinyl at the magical Princeton Record Exchange...but, when it is both a friend whose judgement you trust and whose style you covet you follow her to the tiny block of 54 White Street down in Tribeca where you discover a place and people who represent exactly what you were seeking when you too were a New Yorker: a group of passionate, thoughtful artists looking to preserve and add to a meaningful cultural legacy!

 

The ARChive of Contemporary Music is too good to be true. First off, they are named after a sci-fi story written by African scientist/novelist Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala. In the story aliens descend upon earth, find value only in palm wine & Jazz and crown Sun Ra (starring in video above!) the new leader! The ARChive wants to be sure that " [Coltrane's ]'A Love Supreme' will be there when it's needed," that the aliens, or more likely future man, will find a real sense of our capabilities and joys through the preservation of what is our most joyous and most life indicative expression: pop music! Pop music isn't really seen as an artifact in a lot of archival circles (sideways glance at the Library of Congress) which is kind of crazy if you think about the tons of facts a song can tell about a time or a place- the state of technology through the production, the types of sounds we find pleasing, our concerns (however banal!) in the lyrics, the album art depicting an era or band or a target audience or style-- this org seeks to preserve all of this as the historical documents they should be seen as! Since the mid 80s their mission has been to act as a resource for pop music around the world, collecting, researching and archiving global sound recordings starting from the 50s and, judging by the size of the factory space boasting over 2million records surpassing any other US  pop music collection in size, they are staying true to what they have set out to do!

As for the sale itself, let me tell you, if you like vinyl you should go! Just go! All of it was reasonably priced and constantly being rotated as Simon & Garfunkel and The Rolling Stones and Pavement and Penderecki and soooo many other types of records flew from boxes! The ARChive also specializes in sound design for tv/film too (an extensive timeline of sound recording can be found here ) and, as a foley artist, coming upon a row of packed boxes labeled "Production Music + Sound Effects" made my pulse quicken a little! Especially when the first sound listed on the first LP I picked up was "Dog Cart (milk cans rattle + dog barking)! The sale wasn't a mob scene either as cool jazz and champagne were flowing at the inaugural day of the event, a calm atmosphere of people who just love a thing so much they are compelled to shelter it for the future in the name of the past! The people behind the project, and the legendary board, really did make me feel like I was stepping backwards to an older generation of New York where rent was cheap and people were acting not talking... talk is twitterly cheap in this hipster-tastic generation of laziness but being surrounded by ARC disciples of all ages that are guided by strong voices (of way more than 140 characters!) made me feel so great, remembering that there is a heritage here that some of us will continue to protect regardless of the changing landscape of the city! 

The ARChive of Contemporary Music annual sale ends June 17th... even if you aren't a music junkie this not-so-little time capsule is the type of place we should all cherish & support! (Listens to "Hot Frying Pan Submerged in Water #1" from Side A of Robert Hall Productions Sound Effects record, shivers to the howls of Krzysztof Penderecki and discovers a whole new world of Charles Mingus)

The Pursuit Of

Yes yes, I've said it before and I will keep saying it: Stefan Sagmeister is one of the best contemporary artists. Sagmeister blends the wonder of new technology (a machine that can detect, measure and control video projections through your smile), the best parts of interactive art (a system rigged up that you put quarters into which are then deposited into a bin outside on the sidewalk, free money for the taking!), a preternatural sense of design, the complexity (and boom) of typography, an exploration of the link between science, art and humanity (always drawing from tons of varied resources)...o, and, like a true design/ad man, he knows exactly what the people want: there is oftentimes candy! I feel like I've been slowly following his work around the country; a gallery show here, a piece in a museum in Chicago, a public art piece in Kentucky, continuously running into his hand on album covers and the like,  but I had never seen an entire museum dedicated to his work until a trip to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA this week!! The Happy Show is part museum exhibit part museum takeover as the artist (and his collaborators) seek to explore what happiness is. Or isn't. Or if it is even a thing. Can we control it? Can we become more happy? Is happiness just endorphins spinning around our brains? Or a series of cognitive behaviors we can improve upon? A manufactured state of mind? An expression?

As you walk around the ICA there are scribblings and scrawlings made by hand, by Sagmeister, everywhere. Facts, jokes, observations, drawings on elevators, over Exit signs- everything a discovery and everything dissolving the boundaries of the white walled gallery and engulfing you in a sense of someone else's mind, the mark of any true artist! The immersion aspect of this show is especially interesting to me given the fact that Sagmeister's work is all very form oriented. Highly designed contemporary art shows tend to a coldness as the form molds to something austere with little function or obvious message but, in Sagmeister's case, the form is the conveyor of all things, of information, space, states of being and even smiles-- he can connect a room to the viewer unlike any other artist! In relation to this idea, Sagmeister's advertising background is also used as a decisive conveyor of meaning here too...able to guide, manipulate and explore a concept using the tools of the ad man (color, shape, messages, leading you through a maze of desires), a real reclamation of a (potentially negative) set of guidelines but here used as a thoughtful good through art!

Sagmeister's brilliant mind really is at the heart of this exhibit, attacking a subject from every angle in such layered ways...his work is more involved in the act of thinking than conclusion- and there is something to be said regarding happiness, and the state of mankind in general, in that: we can think we are happy but no ultimate "end happy" is ever really in sight. I haven't been engaged in an art show in this way in a long, long time, so fulfilled by complexity and wonder that I feel happy! (Thanks Stefan!) But, of course, there is a chance that all of the available candy has some link to all of my current happiness!? (Thanks for the candy too Stefan!) Everyone, in whatever state of happiness, should really see this show...if nothing else it will put a smile on your face!



Exhibition Note: The Happy Show will be traveling around to various museums in the near future and the culmination is to be a feature length experimental documentary titled The Happy Film that follows Sagmeister as he develops an understanding of "happy," a twelve minute clip from the film is on view in the show, a short trailer is embedded here!