DUMBO

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...

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!

...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

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...

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.

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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

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

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!")