Culture is Not Dead

there must be something in the air

2008-03-26T01:21:00.015-05:00

So far, I have not been able to write about Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century," the inaugural exhibit at the New Museum on the Bowery that inspired my recent homage to collage and that closes on March 30. It's been overwhelming not because I'm not interested in teasing out my response to the show, in general, and certain pieces, specifically, but because every time thus far that I have turned to focus on Unmonumental, I've not been able to get past my newly-identified obsession with collage as a form.
Incidentally, I'm not alone. In grappling with his thoughts about the Whitney Biennial in the March 24, 2008 issue of New York magazine, Jerry Saltz describes the show's "resultant assemblage-collage aesthetic" as "the style du jour right now." He writes: "Huldisch and Momin [the youthful curators] assert that current art is exploring what Samuel Beckett called “lessness,” and that it’s in a “do-over” phase. ... artists are working in modes of “anti-spectacle” and “ephemerality,” and employing “modest, found, or scavenged materials.” ... artists are working together and off one another, and that they’re making use of the open-source systems, self-replicating strategies, and decentralized networks of our YouTube-MySpace world."
Yes, yes, yes! To cite that candy-colored sign announcing the New Museum's presence on the Bowery: Hell yes!

What Saltz fails to mention—or maybe doesn't agree with—is the whimsy, often surreality, of this mode of art. Collage is playful. A sumptuous full moon adorned in chains of faux pearls, fur pelts, foam-stuffed fishnet stockings, fringe, curling horns shaped out of silver, shiny aluminum foil, a pair of long johns, plastic tubular hose and gourds, among other miscellany, is the focal point of Wangechi Mutu's wall-size mural (50x25 feet, I'm guessing) titled, "Perhaps the Moon Will Save Us." Small pink blossoms blown from a crooked, wind-bent tree drift toward the moon. Except, look closer: They aren't blossoms. Look closer: They are small, pink, (presumably) dead pigs, affixed with a tuft of animal fur. Light as a feather, (they are tiny), they drift on the breeze. The realization doesn't shake one from one's dreamlike reverie—at least it didn't me. Any more than Madame moon's tacky-trashy accoutrements.
Artists who work in collage generally do not shy away from the grotesque, the grit and grime of life—literally, when working with found objects. What they create is all the more soulful for it.

Thanks to Wooster Collective for the photo of the New Museum. Street arts aren't unrelated to collage: juxtaposition of textures, colors, surfaces. layers of meaning. irreplicable process. surprising results. the transformation of a wall, a lamppost, into something ... else.

these eyes ain't ever seen a party like this

2008-03-20T16:33:00.027-05:00

Yes, I made it inside Salon Aleman, Eduardo Sarabia's tequila bar at the Park Avenue Armory, on the 14th. Yes, the same night of "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black." And yes, that shit was hoppin'.
If I could, I would have lived at the armory these last few weeks, dance-danceathoning with Gang Gang Dance, modeling for Ellen Harvey ("100 Biennial Visitors Immortalized"), asking astute questions about Scarface (which I still have never seen) during Mario Ybarra Jr.'s tour of "The Scarface Museum," flitting about the looped braids and prayers of Mk Guth's "Ties of Protection and Safekeeping," umm sleeping over at Walead Beshty's 24-hour sleepover in the hugest space in manhattan just because... and so on, and so forth.
Essentially, the installations at the armory—an annex of the Whitney Biennial only open March 6-23— just blew my mind.
Why? Because of the creative unknown of each of these pieces. Much (most?) of what was on display at the armory was incomplete. A call, in solicitation of a response. The tentative putting of oneself out there, an act of hope, the nudging of the meatball. The x-factor being whoever the hell shows up.
The success of many of the pieces at the armory was derivative of the response of people. Which turned out en masse. Which made me very, very happy.
So free tequila, si! Voluptuous horrific stage show, latex body paint, pretty shiny things (devious smiley faces bouncing off all interior surfaces of an airport hangar in the middle of Manhattan). Easy sells, right.

Yet, the Park Avenue Armory is such a place that one cannot make it a destination unless it is part of the adventure—at least, that was the spirit that haunted these old halls on the night I was there.
The Field and Staff Room (the last room to the right, if you hang a left down the grand central corridor of the ground floor of the Armory)—was temporarily redubbed "Salon Alena," an oasis serving cerveza and "Tequila Sarabia," or so promised a pair of pink neon signs bracketing Sarabia's tiled Babylon Bar.
Folding aluminum tables topped with a checkerboard aplique, short stools in the shape of elephant feet, loud brassa, tequila, the cast of the neon glow, gave that room a warmth, that glow of life, in utter juxtaposition to the stoic, solid nature of the heavy, dark wood, the glassy-eyed trophies (a moose, two deer, an eagle, a buffalo) and the meticulously-painted oil portraits of wars, men and pride.
To hear these stately halls echo with the brassy tapestry of Latin culture—a DJ set mixed by sir Sarabia himself—it was the site of two great prides meeting.

what collage means to me

2008-03-10T01:18:00.002-05:00

Collage is:
The collective unconsciousness of a subway car, or an airplane cabin.
A waking dream.
Leaves leftover from last season tangled in spring.
Simultaneous tabbed web browsing, emailing and IMing.
Spontaneous decisions.
Mismatched sheets.
May involve paper, scissors and glue.
However, any source material will do. (rhyme!)
— Always pieced together to make one new thing.
There is an eye which sees,
Like how a photographer frames X for desired effect (only with more imprecise edges).
There's a thought there, to tease out. Call it inspiration, idea, inquiry.
It's a nudge. of Life's pieces. Some make sense. Others don't (until you tilt your head). (And then still maybe not).
A shattered mirror's fragmented views is still always a reflection.
An different perception, perhaps?
Always a labor of love, inherent opinion.
Perceived as a Frankenstein to some,
A celebration of living, in the best case scenario.
Always a public record. And art, entangled.

(pushed over the edge by Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century at the New Museum)

Post script: From where, oh where, did I get my love of collage?
Junking (garage sale scavenging) with Grandma. Loosing oneself in the layers of beats and vocals, looped—hallmarks of the music defining my generation. A result of living amid the ebb and flow of city life. Three instances of how collage inspires life—this one, at least.

Judith Supine

2007-12-10T01:48:00.000-05:00

okay it's not that I haven't been busy. Here's a link to my profile of Judith Supine, the NYC-based street artist whose universe I want to live in: Judith Supine, Brooklyn Rail (December 2007/January 2008).
By the by, this image is courtesy of Supine's flickr site.

my 50K love affair (it's a piece of art, people)

2007-12-05T01:09:00.003-05:00

So the man burned early under a bright (red) eclipsed moon. Dust storms and barreling winds couldn't keep the double rainbows away. I was in awe, and inspired, by the Burning Man community this year. And, in particular, with one Brooklyite's (+ team) amazing-fantastic sculpture, about which I will continue to harp about to anyone who will listen: "If I do not see that thing permanently installed in its own atrium in a modern art museum in 20, 40 years, then there is something wrong with our curatorial system, and how we determine what is art." This gorgeous, shining, hulk of a piece is called Big Rig Jig, and it is one of the finest modern sculptural works I have ever seen — period. I interviewed Mike Ross, and SF Weekly loved it so much they picked it up for their art blog: Burning Man's 'Big Rig Jig' Artist Nails It on 1st Try — A Q&A.
And by the way, this 360/vertical panorama plus from the Las Vegas Sun is absolutely worth playing around with. Do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about -- glance up, see an enormous couplea trucks -- that's what it's all about. Ding!

street haunting

2007-10-21T00:57:00.000-05:00

Couples coupling, hands groping, bodies in various states of undress. On benches, behind bushes, tangled and horizontal on the grass. I would have believed it on blind faith, sure, but Kohei Yoshiyuki's etheral black-and-whites certainly remove any doubt about the lively night scene of various Tokyo parks in the 1970s. Allegedly, after a gallery show in 1979, Yoshiyuki destroyed most of the photos and disappeared. (The plot thickens: supposedly Kohei Yoshiyuki is a pseudonym.) A first-rate sleuth at Yossi Milo gallery in Chelsea managed to track down the elusive artist and convince him to make a new set of prints. It's the first time these photographs have been publicly shown since disco died.

Bemused, dreamy-eyed, nostalgic for a decade in the way only someone who's never lived through it can be. Walking East on W. 25th Street, another instance of an unreal reality. Framed within the rolled-up gate of a corrugated steel facade, there's a man in an off-white lounge lizard's suit, playing a candy-apple red electric guitar, crooning that part of a song that isn't quite words but always builds up to something... He is standing on dirt, on a narrow lot, underneath a rusted section of the future-fab highline park, accompanied by a mic and an amp, a spotlight, and a theatrical grouping of forlorn-looking leafless tree props. A small sign says that he's an Icelandic performance artist, and he's going to play the same riffs in the same spotlight for six straight hours a day, ten days in a row. It's a project by CCS Bard, Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies (and Art in Contemporary Culture).

English Lit classes brainwashed me forever: I see forest, actual or allegorical, any shape or size—hell, you could say I see trees and I have flashbacks to scenes from King Lear, Walden, the Scarlet Letter. But there is something to it, the forest being a place apart from a society of likeness, apart from conventional rules, apart from judging, peering eyes. To find two such escapes in the middle of Manhattan yesterday felt good because I, for one, need to disappear sometimes and it's not easy here.

Post Script: I confess, I procrastinate. Meaning that the Yoshiyuki exhibit has closed and Kjartansson's sun has set. I wound down my day at a screening of Helvetica. It's an amazing documentary with the premise of being about a font but is really about the arc of graphic design ideology over the last fifty years (that I also blogged about in March). If you runrushgo!, you'll probably still be able to catch Helvetica at the IFC Center—although it's been there long enough that it's due to disappear any day.

DUMBO

2007-09-30T01:45:00.000-05:00

Cabbages on lightposts.The hunt for an elephant that paints (really). Stacks and stacks of iron stairs to climb, chasing abstract arrows to an artist’s open studio. A net, strung with glittering decoupage. The smell of Barbosal; $2 PBR. At least a half-dozen wedding parties—layers of ruffles; aqua, pink, chocolate brown, bobby pins and smiles—oblivious until they arrived. This was DUMBO’s Under the Bridge art festival, Saturday afternoon.

I adore festivals unconditionally; art, beer, books are among my favorite excuses. I particularly love festivals that I leave, inspired. The day is warm, sunny. Jeans, layered tanks, sunglasses, Converse. It’s not winter yet—yet. I hoard information in my satchel, constantly scanning, constantly scouring the flyers, the upcoming shows. It’s the hopefulness. I hoard the feelings of the day, determined to catalogue, so that in February I can remember it.

[I love this photo. It's a chicken (get it?) fashioned out of entirely consumed/entirely recycable materials (mostly). This cluck of chickens is so fucking cute.]

You can also see this rambling at www.artsreporting.blogspot.com.

mail...

2007-09-30T01:26:00.000-05:00

Also reported on: http://artsreporting.blogspot.com

So I saw something tonight that’s in development (am I allowed to be blogging about this? I will be judicious.) And it was awesome, even in its un-doneness. Writer-director-guru Aya Ogawa and tech-arts-guru Irwin Chen workshopped an early (and very unfinished) version of a theater show tentatively titled “Artifact” as a part of CUNY’s Prelude Festival. I will disclose few relative details—what do they matter anyway when they are subject to change—but this show did inspire me to think about email communication in the present age.

It’s funny. Email is generally perceived as the most off-hand, causal of forms, and yet, with its cursory computer-based text format, it’s more prone to revision than say… a handwritten letter. Maybe this just hit home for me tonight because I’m presently keeping a (handwritten) journal that will be reviewed by someone not myself, and I’m actually fretting about the spelling of those stupid words I can never spell correctly, but it was incredibly impactful to watch someone who you don’t even know (and can’t even see, really, their back is to you) to struggle to type out a letter that is… important to them.

In the way of salutations, in the way of how letters expressed real sentiment. But typed. They wrote, spontaneously. They paused, and reread. They deleated, by highlight. Other times, it was by cursor backspace.  
We’ve all had those emails that are important, (emails that are letters?), where you edit yourself, because you can. That scene left me wondering, where do those feelings/ that initial sentiment/ go? It can’t just disappear. Energy expended only changes forms. What if… all of that energy we put into our super-composed emails… that form that is supposed to be so freehand… what if those original feelings are still, somehow, imbedded in the spaces in between?

Jane! Jane! Jane!

2007-09-27T11:29:00.000-05:00

...And then there was Jane. New Yorker's conduit de jour to talk about their general freak-out at the progressive gentrification/ homogenization/ corporatization of their nabes is none other than Jane Jacobs, that champion of neighborhoods feeling like, well, neighborhoods. (Her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) outlines her ideas much more eloquently.)

First, the Jane Jacobs show evaluating New York City nabes based on her criteria opened at the Municipal Art Society of New York. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Astoria, Queens come out looking pretty good, curator Christopher Klemek told the New York Observer. A Time Out cover story, Has Manhattan Lost It’s Soul? (Sept. 20-26) followed en suite, using a Jacobs-inspired rubric to rate Manhattan neighborhoods. Alphabet City topped their list. And this weekend (Sept. 29-30), the Center for the Living City is leading ambitious free "Jane's Walk New York" tours through a dozen or so neighborhoods including the South Bronx, the Atlantic Yards, Manhattanville, the UWS, and more. (There are more walking tours and a series of panel discussions scheduled through November in conjunction with the MAS exhibit.)

While I love the celebration of the many varied identities of the many varied New York neighborhoods—and the excuse for us to get out of our own neighborhood bubble—I can't let go of the suspicion that these sinking ship declarations are New York snobbery in disguise, aka "New York pride." They're another way of declaring "New York is nothing like it was back ..." or "I remember when..." Statements that essentially are stated to remind you, the recipient, that the speaker remembers the good/old New York because they were here then. ...And all that's left today is crumbs.

New York was, is, and always will be — different. But it will always be New York. And I can only think that when people lament the New York that was, they're missing something about the New York that is. I'm not championing the opening of another megachainstore in your neighborhood, or the closure of a nabe institution because of rent disputes. All I'm saying is that if that's all you see then you're not looking close enough. And as for gentrification? It happens. I like what Jan Lee, a furniture designer and Chinatown store owner, tells TONY in the same cover story (Chinatown ranked #2): "Chinatown hasn't resisted gentrification. Chinatown was gentrified 100 years ago by the Chinese. I know—my grandfather was one of the people who participated. There's a Chinese bank on every corner. There's a multimillion-dollar gold and diamond business. But because it's been done by an ethnic group, it's not considered gentrified."

plastic bags: the new low-carb diet

2007-07-19T22:41:00.000-05:00

Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une Pipe" has become latently popular, an anthem for the cool tastemakers of the early 21st century. The painter's latest copycat—in his day he was a peer to such surrealists as Dali and Ernst—is British couture designer Anya Hindmarch. Her $15-dollar canvas totes, (read: nothing else in her store has ever cost so little), read, "I'm not a plastic bag." The anti-plastic totes have caused such a fuss among the eager eco-consumers in Manhattan that they lined up 600 deep outside the new Whole Foods at Bowery and Houston this last Tuesday to buy the latest "limited edition" of Hindmarch's canvas tote.

On the subject of plastic bags--you know, the sort they usually double-bag at your local grocer--I recently heard that plastic bags cost 2-cents to make and 8-cents to recycle. Which is why you have to take them, stuffed inside eachother again and again, to that specific deposit site at your local grocer. And they're still not making money. (Don't know the drop? Just ask a clerk.)

Wouldn't the man behind the pipe have gagged at the idea of his playful masterwork being co-opted by a 21st century promotional campaign, stripped entirely devoid of its original intent? Eh, maybe not. "This is not a..." is ever receiving new meaning, guaranteeing Magritte's name in the art history analogues just a little longer.

All of this makes me feel *slightly* less bad about posting on Laura Bush's "Feed the Children of the World" burlap shoulder bag campaign--a la Spring Fashion Week NYC 2007. Sort of, but not really. That posting came from a period in my blog before I gave perimiters to my blogging form. (Which, for the record, will henceforth only on rare occassion link to a post that is not entirely my original thoughts.) !

this is not a(nother) post...

2007-07-14T21:49:00.000-05:00

a.) I've been on a sabbatical of the soul. b.) I've been on vacation. c.) I've been in locations without internet connection. d.) I was overwhelmed. A-D above are all valid reasons **yes, excuses** for not having blogged for the last couple of months. But the point is, I love this burgeoning, creative forum, where I have virtually complete editorial control, even if no one is reading. Still satisfying (and non-navel gazing).

I had my first response to an earlier post just two days ago--that's roughly seven months after I started this blog--but damn, it was a good one. I encourage anybody who's read this far to check out the response to the off-the-cuff essay, which launched this blog back in January 2007, "Culture Is Not Dead." It's well thought out and intelligent, albeit contrary. And I have absolutely nothing wrong with that.

---

I'm really excited about a lot that's going on in my personal culturesphere right now. LA graf, the escalating debate over "authenticity", increased Burning Man prep, sightings and musings on riffs of Magritte's "ceci n'est pas une pipe", the heat-inspired fragrance of the New York summer. Stay tuned.

history a la carte: Gold earns Pulitzer for food criticism

2007-04-18T20:13:00.000-05:00

I don't remember when I picked up Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles . I think I bought it as a gift, and doubled back to the bookstore a few weeks later to pick one up for myself. Or maybe I gave away my first copy, edges slightly tattered from months (years?) of riding in the passenger's door pocket of my Honda Civic (truly, the only book I've ever granted permanent status in my vehicle), to a new friend, who also happened to be a new Angeleno. Revise that. Not the permanent status part. Same new friend, who was new. I drove to three different bookstores between La Cienega and Third Street Promenade to track down a fresh, new copy of Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles to give to her for a gift exchange around the holidays. Several years after it was first published, Gold's book was sold out at two of three Border's locations.

I'm not even sure how I found Gold: book or column (of the same name), and which inspired a devoted allegiance to the other? But as two visual memories stand out sharply against the rest, I'm hedging my bests that I first saw, and bought, Counter Intelligence, the book, in the UCLA bookstore, shortly after it was published because I can remember what it looked like on display there. And I'll hedge my bets that I first read Gold (at least, with any association of him being Gold), when I first opened the book to the first page of the introduction, because the second starkly visual image I can see now in my mind is of Pico Boulevard, that vast Los Angeles artery, stretching from the Westside towards downtown, neighborhoods changing, languages changing, and a few things remaining essentially the same: the sense of community, and the food.

In the introduction, Gold looks back to his pre-Weekly days, when he was a young copywriter (editor?) at a downtown newspaper. He describes driving down Pico Boulevard, his wonder at the many varied cultures. And he describes the monumentous task he set for himself: I decided I was going to eat my way down Pico Boulevard.

And so he did. Little did Gold know where Pico Boulevard would take him. He transferred to a job at the L.A. Weekly, and, a couple of years later, the debut of his weekly food column, “Counter Intelligence.” Now, twenty years later, the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded a food critic. And with good reason. To pull from two examples the Pulitzer committee has posted of his ’06 columns, Gold is equally at home chasing down his favorite taco truck for the ephermial ecstasy of a couple of tacos al carbon as he is a $120 kobe steak at Wolfgang Puck’s white-on-white-on-white minimalist venture at The Regent Beverly Wilshire (yes, the Pretty Woman hotel). The brilliance of his writing is, yes, he always gets around to talking about the food in critic-terms—and it’s some of the most spot-on food writing you’ll ever read—but his columns are woven with stories of cultures and traditions and Los Angeles nostalgia and travel, all within the one address on Pico Boulevard.

I always knew you were good.

pixel this

2007-04-05T00:11:00.000-05:00

I love when two completely divergent signals from the universe converge and make a connection in front of my very own eyes. The topic of the day is: Pixelation. Within in 48 hours (albiet several days ago at this point. I'm a confessed latent blogger), I discovered both Anti-Advertising Agency's culture jamming project, Pixelator, and Montage-a-Google, courtesy blog.FABRICA.

Now I open up the forum to you, dear reader: convergence or not? What, if any, is the connection between the two? Why are completely separate minds thinking alike?

Spoiler Alert: Read on only if you want to know the author's opinion. Since quantifications such as "digital," "megapixel" and "resolution" have crept into our laymen's vocabulary, and since virtually every camera is now a camera phone, artists and thinking creative sorts have been toying with the aesthetic qualities of pixelation. Grainy, blurry, early video game-esque, and generally distasteful, blow-up that low-res image to the point that the original form is flattened and obscured, and what you get is pleasing, patterned squares, seemingly random, but with an inherent connection to the next. A la geometric, modernist art of the early-mid twentieth century. (I might do some research and throw in a couple of links, but I'm essentially referring to the movement that, given a protractor, a ruler, and some shades of paint, the intial response is "I could do that!")

starring

2007-03-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

I have a soft spot in my heart for typography. We can "feel the difference when sommething is set in one typeface," rather an another, says says Ina Saltz, a professor in Electronic Design and Multimedia at City College NYC. "There's a visual distinction that sends a visual message." Saltz was one of more than a dozen interviews that I spent more than a month on (just prior to starting this blog), for a story exploring the rising trend of typographical/word tattoos. I interviewed several "words" in Shellly Jackson's Skin project, a typeface designer in Las Vegas whose whole torso is covered in Latin tattoos in antique typefaces, Saltz, editor of Body Type, the first photographic book of word/typographic tattoos, among others.
So I was thrilled to read unBeige's blog report on the world premiere of the feature-length documentary film, Helvetica, held at SXSW last week. The film "just might be the best history of graphic design we've ever seen," reports unBeige. Helvetica, that [in]famous font, turns 50 this year.

Festival organizers had to turn away more than 150 people at the SXSW premiere. I think that's going to be the precident as the film begins touring the international film fest circut. It's coming to New York for a screening at the New School on April 6, and guess what? Yep, sold out. The film's website has the complete—and oft updated— tour schedule. In the meantime, I'm gonna try to get into the screening, guerrila-style.

TB's ANTM [trademark symbol] in the SFV

2007-03-12T22:06:00.000-05:00

The realization that the second episode, cleverly named "the girl who went to prom", of the new cycle [why cycle and not season, I've never figured out] of Tyra Banks' America's Next Top Model was filmed at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys--the alma matter of several very close friends of mine--inspired a flurry of internet searches on models, the San Fernando Valley, America's Next Top Model, and so on. Here are a handful of pleasing, albiet quick, reads on Birmingham High's fifteen minutes:

Blog entry on said episode from Media Bistro's Fishbowl LA blog

Find the images from the on-site photo shoot, in all their pop-up window glory on this Phoenix (?!) newspaper blog

Or, find the images from the on-site photo shoot here, at the show's ubiquitous site,although the PHX blog is more fun

An oldie but goodie, faux Tyra Mail, courtesy McSweeny's

ANOTHER model show! NYT on The Agency

fierce!

on the mic

2007-03-10T12:42:00.000-05:00

I've long said that if I were ever going to karaoke, it would have to be a hip-hop song. [Or something by Sublime. For every rule there is that exception.] Why? Because it's less singing and more akin to fast-paced, badass spoken word. Sort of. This disclaimer has gotten me off the hook among my karaoke-ing friends, because how often are songbooks updated? Never. Who sings anything newer than 1995? No one.
Enter hip-hop karaoke. It's a monthly gig at the Knitting Factory downtown, that's been turning over the mic to hip-hop fans of all stripes for a couple of years now. It's a fantastic scene, entertaining and open-minded, as in, you don't have to ooze hip-hop flava or attitude to be embraced by the audience. Your heart has to be in it, and the rest is what it is. Let me put it this way, the highlight of the night was three 17-year-old boys, super nerdy and gawky in that mid-adolescent way—the cherub-faced Asian kid wearing the Abercrombie hoodie was at least a foot shorter than his two friends—belting out Biz Markie's "Just a Friend." The song came out in 1989, meaning that these boys were, at best, conceived. I relate—I am anything but the picture of a hip-hop fan, and yet there I was, growing up in a small swath of land between suburbia and a military base and I was constantly adjusting the tuner on my boombox to try and get reception of Power 106 FM, an L.A. based hip-hop radio station based almost 100 miles away. It was occasionally interrupted by the local police scanner, but otherwise, the signal was strong, if you could get the dial just... so.
So, what song would I do/might be doing under the courage of a couple of drinks? It would have to be Salt n' Peppa's "Shoop." But I need a Salt. Or Peppa. Any volunteers?

farmer's tans...

2007-03-08T21:26:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Paper Magazine's esteemed co-editor-in-chief, Kim Hastreiter, for spotting what was clearly the best photo-op of Milan's recent fashion week. Image courtesy Hastreiter's blog column, Fashion Schmashion. Check it out.

the little Bush that could

2007-02-21T23:51:00.000-05:00

Fashion Week Daily reports that Laura Bush, neice to Señor Presidente, has "an organic concept of lifestyle branding" in the works. Presently, though, she's focused on the "Feed the Children of the World" burlap shoulder bags campaig coming to amazon.com near you on April 1. Good Magazine did a nice little spotlight on the "Feed" bags in December.

you let sublet?

2007-02-13T15:00:00.000-05:00

I've been traipsing about with The Sublet Experiment theater crew a lot in the last week. The gig is this: Kindly friends and family have lent the group their living spaces to put on a theater show in their apartment/loft. Relinquish keys, anxieties, etc. Leave while anywhere between a 12 and 30 strangers arrive at your apartment for the show, except on the night(s) you stay to watch yourself. And in that case, pretend you don't live there, prepare to be surprised when the actors drink from your glasses, brush their teeth in your bathroom sink, etc., and restrain from jumping to answer the front door buzzer when it rings.

One of the oddest aspects of the experience is that it really feels like an intimate gathering, a dinner party or a night of charades, rather than public theater. Afterwards, the guests stand around and chat in small groups, gathering coats, scarves and gloves. A cluster of empty beer bottles sits on the kitchen counter, ready to be taken to the recyling crate that sits on the landing outside the door. The home stereo plays softly, and the water runs steadily as someone washes a few dirty glasses—props, and, I wonder, possibly a remnant dish from the host? Would you leave a dirty dish(es) in your sink if the show was coming over?

Next up, after wandering nomadically for nearly six months, changing venues every week, playwright Ethan Youngerman and director Michelle Tatenbaum have found an as-of-yet-undisclosed, semi-stationary venue for The Sublet Experiment for the month of March. After March, who knows? The natives may get restless...

va-va voom

2007-01-31T21:43:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my week-long burlesque indulgence. (Don't say I didn't tell you so!) I am casing the Slipper Room in LES this week, allegedly home to NYC's longest-continuously-running burlesque show. But that's not until Saturday night. In the meantime, the Slipper Room is host to an amalgam of shows (Paco Doubledown Variety Hour, The Choke’s! Exploding Punk Inevitable Review) that include a "burlesque element." I'll be there, too.

Burlesque is making a comeback, and I suspect higher-profile burlesque clubs and dancers (i.e. the Pussycat Dolls; Dita von Teese), modern pin-up culture (i.e. the Suicide Girls), and the hip factor of all things vintage within a certain coveted demographic are among the reasons why. I'm locking myself in the library and to my computer until I find the facts from reputable sources tomorrow.

All in the name of great journalism, and further justification that cultureisnotdead.

***

culture is dead.

2007-01-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

That's a bit of hyperbole on my part. But I did recently hear someone whom I think knows a thing or two about the subject issue a not-unlike indictment of the state of cultural affairs. Culture has been in a headlong tailspin since the mid-twentieth century, she lamented, and she's sorry that this is what we've been left to work with.

I beg to differ. If only because of the sheer volume of information that’s available to us—literally at our fingertips—we are living in the most diverse, dynamic cultural period yet.

Granted, it's nearly impossible to compartmentalize the cultural sphere in a postmodern world, particularly after the explosion of digital technologies in the last decade. That wasn’t a death knell, but a signal of evolution.

Culture today is a kaleidoscopic vision, fragmented into a thousand pieces, constantly shifting, expanding outwards, various forms spontaneously intersecting and collaborating before evolving again, all within a decentralized power structure.

In short, it's a minor revolution.

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The purpose of this blog is to document in that evolution/revolution as manifested in New York City, my home turf. This blog is my breadcrumb trail tracing my discoveries, my encounters, my revelations. It is also an entirely subjective catalogue of the best references I can find for information on goings-ons within NYC's fringe culture—the locus of my interest.

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I realize that this all sounds very high-flautin’ and I hope you’ll bear with me. A majority of my future entries are going to be very grounded in actual events and experiences, informative and hopefully entertaining. But that doesn’t mean the occasional waxing poetic won’t slip in… every once and a while.