A small but potent archive of full PDF scans of late 70’s/early 80’s UK anarcho/ feminist punk zines is up now at Essential Ephemera
Like a waking dream you can’t control no matter how hard you try.
via Cyriak
I adore Meredith Monk. She has a voice like no one else. I finally got to see her live in a small recital hall in the Los Angeles Public Library six years ago. It was one of the strongest performances that I’d ever seen a single person give. She sang accompanying herself on piano or acapella. The highlight was when she did the magical Gotham Lullaby, which is probably her best known piece of music. (Bjork often performs it live; here at the Coachella Music Festival in 2002)
She also happens to stunningly beautiful, looking WAY younger than her 67 years.
Controversial director Peter Greenaway’s fantastic Meredith Monk documentary from his Four American Composers series, which also included Philip Glass, John Cage and Robert Ashley can be viewed on UbuWeb. It’s excellent. I most highly recommend it.
Below a clip from Monk’s 1988 film Book of Days. You can get a DVD at her website. There is also a new CD of her early work, including a phenomenal piece called Candy Bullets And Moon performed with Don Preston of the original Mothers of Invention out now called Meredith Monk: Beginnings
It’s Her Party: Four Decades of Meredith Monk: Underground music’s matriarch throws herself a live retrospective at the Whitney (Encore)
There’s an interesting-looking art show at the ArcLight Cinemas multiplex opening tonight that caught my eye in David Ng’s post over at the LA Time’s Culture Monster blog. L.A. artist Rachel Schmeidler takes celebrity mug shots and renders them in a Warholian style. The results are simultaneously amusing, thought-provoking and chock-full of schadenfreude!
Included in the show are mug shots of Charlie Sheen, Paris Hilton, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Jane Fonda, George Carlin and the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. Quite a (literal) rogues’ gallery.
I’m glad to see that my favorite celebrity mug shot, that of David Bowie (above), has made it into Schmeidler’s show. Have you ever seen a more elegant and sophisticated mug shot in all your life? If it were not for the intrusion of the Rochester Police Department placard he’s holding, this particular mug shot might be mistaken for an outtake from his “Station to Station” album cover art! Most mug shots, even those of big Hollywood celebrities, tend to look like Nick Nolte’s “portrait,” right? Not the Thin White Duke’s, baby!
What’s fun to consider is how these pieces will acquire greater and greater “camp” value over the years. Charlie Sheen’s mug shot (shots?) as seen on TMZ and Perez Hilton today will gain, in time, the same sort of arch, kitschy excess as, for instance, a mug shot of disgraced silent era comedian Fatty Arbuckle has.
Stated differently, a mug shot of Twiggy, say, would have a higher kitsch quotient than one of Naomi Campbell, although the Campbell mug shot might well surpass it in the camp sweepstakes at a later date. What would Susan Sontag make of this post-camp fare, I wonder?
—Richard Metzger
Cross posting this from Brand X
Newly found private press LP goodness via Tony Coulter’s wonderful fortnightly dispatch over at WMFU’s Beware of the Blog.
Via io9, check out Susan Treister’s epic map of science fiction weaponry from the dawn of the genre till now. Ms. Treister aligned the weapons on a successive series of Qabalistic trees of life (nice scheme… no, her attributions don’t look correct, but nice try!) A stunning piece of work!
In A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. These include the ‘Raytron Apparatus’, a form of aerial surveillance, which was described in ‘Beyond the Stars’ by Ray Cummings in 1928, or the ‘Control Helmet’, from ‘Easy Money’ by Edward Hamilton in 1934. The timeline starts in 1726 with the ‘Knowledge Engine’ in Gulliver’s travels and carries on up to the present day. It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic to manifest themselves into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack of Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.
(io9: The Epic History of Sci-Fi Weapons from 1726-2008)
Directed by Tamra Davis, the documentary features never-before seen footage of the prolific artist painting, talking about his art, and existing in the two years prior to his death in 1988.
The OST features music from Mike D and Ad Rock.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child was released on Feb 21st.
Thanks Manuel Hernandez!
On Sunday 7th March 2010, British artistic duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard will present their elaborate performance piece, Silent Sound, live at Middlesbrough Town Hall. From the artists’ statement:
“In 2006 we conceived and presented a project called Silent Sound. It was commissioned by A Foundation and was presented as a live performance in St. George’s Hall during the Liverpool Biennial and a 3 month long exhibition at Greenland Street. The work features an original score by J. Spaceman (from the band Spiritualized) and was introduced on the night by Dr. Ciaran O’Keeffe from Living TV’s ‘Most Haunted’
Silent Sound is conceived as an otherworldly experiment using controversial mind control technology to transmit a subliminal message during a live music performance. The new composition for the project by J. Spaceman is designed to carry the subliminal message. Silent Sound sets out to warp your perception and stage a remarkable experience loaded with potential which intensifies your experience of being in the here-and-now. Drawing on the powerful psychological set-up of 19th century Spiritualist public performances and inspired by Victorian entertainers The Davenport Brothers who were famed for attempting to contact the souls of the dead using their ‘spirit cabinet’, we will perform inside our own specially created soundproof cabinet. From the stage inside this cabinet we will repeatedly broadcast a spoken ‘message’, this signal is fed into our custom-made Silent Sound machine, which subliminally embeds the message within the music and transmits it throughout the entire duration of the performance.”
“Part classical concert and part public séance” as the AV Festival website says, the score for this, as you can tell from the video below, is absolutely gorgeous. Jason Pierce from Spiritualized will be playing live with the orchestra at the event.
Kenneth Anger will also be appearing at the AV Festival.
