working on your day off

There is an upside to working on your day off, especially when no one else is at the office. At home, I have approximately 150 square feet of space in which to dance to my favorite music, much of which is taken up by a bed, a chair, bookshelves, and other items. Here at the gallery, there is more than twenty times that amount of space and only a few paintings on the wall to watch out for. No one else is here, the cleaning guy is finished, and I have an hour to dance by myself to too-loud music before I have to meet a friend for our weekly lunch/study date. A pre-lunch workout of the best kind.Last year, everyone who listened to the micro/click-house type of electronic music that I like so much proclaimed their love for Akufen's "My Way" album and "Deck the House" single. I missed the boat so much on that one, and only now, a year later, do I get it. Such beautiful collages.

Philip Glass at Society Hall

Last night I saw Philip Glass perform several of his pieces for solo piano. He played Mad Rush (1980) and five of the Metamorphoses (1989). After an intermission, Dennis Russel Davies performed six of the sixteen Etudes Glass composed between 1994 and 1999, showcasing his amazing dexterity. It was apparent that Davies is the more accomplished performer, and it was quite interesting to see how they both approached Glass' works. Davies approached the work with gusto, allowing his face to register emotional reaction to the pieces played, the technical ability of his fingerwork not interrupting a certain performative gusto. Glass, not as strong a player as composer, kept a straight face and bowed head while working his way through his two selections. The selection of pieces was wise. Glass' plain performance style was enhanced by the emotional tenor of the selections he performed. Davies played to his strengths, for in his short works the repetitive phrases were more complicated and shorter in duration, allowing for relatively wild (in comparison to Glass) fingerwork that wowed the audience. The man in front of me, obviously familiar with the Etudes, let out a "Yeah!" as Davies hit the last notes of the sixth piece. It was a stirring introduction to the live performance of Glass' works, and experienced for the meager sum of $10. Can't beat that.Update: I was glad to read that the New York Times critic who reviewed the concert had almost exactly the same response as I did. It kind of validates my critical response.. sort of! If you believe in that kind of thing! Here's a link to his review.

A short guide to my interests list..

Many people have unique items on their LJ interest list. Perhaps no one else thought to include them, perhaps those interests are genuinely specific to the individual. Here is an attempt to write a brief introduction to some of my interests that did not show up as anyone else's selection:"Damaged Goods"I was horribly late in discovering Gang of Four, and am entirely indebted to a former girlfriend who now lives in Oakland for forcing me to listen closely. "Damaged Goods" is my favorite song from the Entertainment! LP, and was in heavy rotation at my house this summer.Romantic ConceptualismI found a link to the article I described in an earlier post that coins the term "Romantic Conceptualism" to describe the art of many of my favorite artists.Benjamin H.D. BuchlochProfessor of Modern Art at Columbia University and also the subject of an earlier post. His Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry</i>, a collection of essays on American art of the period 1955 to 1975, is a critically important book in my collection. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys tackling difficult ideas (both in presentation and subject matter) in modern and contemporary art.Eduardo Souto de Moura (Link 2)A Portuguese architect who is difficult to find information about on the web. His works are often compared with Alvaro Siza, who is much more well known and with whom he collaborated on the Portuguese pavilion at the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. If you find yourself in a library with a good collection of architecture books, I recommend browsing through a monograph. Beautiful, simple forms.Homemade bikesI built my bike with spare parts at a place called Bikes Not Bombs near my old house in Boston, MA. I highly recommend that other people patronize places similar to this one, either to build their bikes themselves or to have them custom-built from salvaged parts. Bikes Not Bombs also organizes bike rides and activist interventions, rides with Critical Mass, provides job-training for neighborhood teenagers, and donates bikes to persons in poorer countries. Several great reasons to support them.Labyrinth BooksAlthough new books are generally beyond my price range, this store - on 112th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam - has all the ones I could possibly want. An academic and independent press specialty bookstore, it's the place to go when you want that new critical anthology of texts about _____ (insert subject here.) Conveniently located about two blocks from the Hungarian Pastry Shop, many of my Sunday afternoons have been spent buying a book at the store and then devouring it - and some cookies - at the Shop.Michel and PatriciaThe two main characters in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, which is perhaps my favorite movie. I have the enthusiasm for French New Wave films of another ex-girlfriend to thank for getting me to watch this one for the first time. I came this close (insert fingers-just-barely-parted gesture) to writing a paper for the graduate seminar I'm attending about Godard's treatment of the urban environment in this film. Simply gorgeous (for example, the scene when Patricia kisses the journalist while Michel looks on, and after they drive away there is a shot of Michel against a Boulevard's traffic right at the moment when the streetlamps turn on for the night. A lovely detail that evokes a specifically Parisian moment.)Neil LeachAn architectural theorist from Britain whose writing I like. Especially his essay "The Aesthetic Cocoon," though I can't quite find the book its in right now. I remember reading it while sitting in one of the comfortable chairs at Labyrinth Books, though. They all weave together.Steffen Basho JunghansA German guitarist who became obsessed with Robbie Basho, adopted his last name as a middle name, and began playing gorgeous Minimalist composer-inspired works on the steel-string guitar with no accompaniment. I've only come across a handful of songs, but if others are anything like "Inside the Rain," I'm sure I'll like them all.SANAA ArchitectsAn architecture firm run by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. Some of my favorite works include the M-House, Apartment House in Gifu, O-Museum, and their multiple pachinko parlors.Stephan MathieuA German improv drummer and electronic musician. Some of my favorite releases of his are the Sad Mac Studies limited edition 12", the Gigue live 3" CD, and the Touch mp3ep. He also records as Full Swing (with a series of 12" remixes on Orthlong Musork) and Stol. His production on Ekkehard Ehler's (also on my interest list) "Plays John Cassavetes 2" makes it one of my favorite Ehlers tracks.Vegetarian Dim Sum HouseCheap and plentiful. On Pell St. in New York's Chinatown. I've gone there with my friend Jonathan so many times that when I show up alone, or with other people, the waitresses ask where he is. We also get free food. I can never have too many steamed sesame paste buns. I wish I could end every meal with them.

Good news..

It appears that my review of the Nick Relph and Oliver Payne exhibition (see below) will be published. January will see the simultaneous publication of my first article and my first review. Quite exciting. Maybe this freelance writing thing will start working out after all.

(Auto)biography

"As we are now aware that great men no longer make history and that history shapes the individuals who satisfy its needs, we tell our stories to make our lives comprehensible as those of real people. History is comprised of layered events that are linked in some way, and the bond between memories and the contents of other containers is cemented by the telling. The transformation of an individual's life into a museum exhibit influences the future course of that life when it provides encouragement to continue the story, in other words, to live life in such a way that there is something to tell. Living solely to create a biography is in any case more productive than a life lived in unconscious repetition of the life itself." - Bozon Brock, "God and Garbage - Museums as Creators of Time" in The Discursive Museum, MAK, Vienna, 2001, p. 25, emphasis mineThis quote is meant to illustrate the influence a museum has in the career of an artist, specifically with regard to the mid-career survey. However, it struck me for two reasons, one in relationship to the Derrida documentary I saw two weekends ago and the other in regard to my own thoughts on (auto)biography.In the film, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Derrida was consistent in his probe of the artifice of biography. He was especially fervent in his denial of biography as relevant to the lives of philosophers, though when asked what he wished earlier philosophers had written about but didn't, his answer was "Their sex lives." A biography immediately distances the life lived from the life described, and a battle between the two - assuming the person in question is still alive, as in Derrida's case - begins almost immediately. He explained that elements of his biography had slipped into his texts throughout the years, an assertion we can readily believe given the intensely personal nature of some of his published reflections (Circumfession, Memories for Paul de Man.) He seems to refute the idea of a life lived in the service of a biography, working instead from the assumption that the life/work and reflection upon it are necessarily intertwined. Yet for me consciousness of the making of a biography (whether by oneself or by others) automatically separates the two. I have noticed a disturbing trend in my own mind of late: my concern with the creation of a unified 'line of thought' that can be understood as a red thread running through my writing. The relief I felt the other week when discovering links between Jorg Heiser's article on "Romantic Conceptualists" and music I listened to at age sixteen perhaps only half stemmed from the excitement of my discovery. The rest came from my happiness at being able to link seemingly disparate parts of my life, thereby implying a certain coherence will eventually come of my future thought and writing. Is this consciousness of 'the big picture,' so to speak, common? Does anyone else think about this kind of thing? I was alternately energized and afraid of my responses to the last line in the above quote. On the one hand there is the idea of subsuming your life's work to a greater arc in the hope that a comprehension of the whole corpus can impart greater meaning than the individual parts. On the other is the fear of abstracting a life still unfolding. Can a balance be struck? What do you think? I'm sure it's something I'll continually grapple with, and no doubt this problematic relationship to (auto)biography will become a central aspect of my own.PS - I hope this line of thinking doesn't come off as pretense, especially in so blatantly juxtaposing Derrida's thoughts with my own. I am in no way making direct comparisons between the two, it's just that his words in the film are fresh in my mind and relevant to what the above quote made me think about.

Midtown Mondays

I finally made it to the Austrian Cultural Forum to visit the Erwin Redl/Christian Fennesz exhibition. It is a collaborative project in the loosest sense; two site-specific light installations by Redl have been paired with Fennesz's Gustav Mahler Project, a series of audio recordings made at an earlier time and presented this past spring at the ACF. The two projects are quite different: Redl's grids of L.E.D. lights suspended on thin cables and presented in dimmed rooms evoke Minimalist art while Fennesz's source material is utterly Romantic. The two meet in the realm of the digital: Redl's lights evoke computer motherboards and the power indicators on the ubiquitous machinery of contemporary life while Fennesz dutifully layers his symphonic works with static, hiss, clicks, and other remnants of digital processing. But I don't want this to be a review. I just wish to somehow convey the beauty inherent in the incongruity between these two projects. They play off of each other wonderfully. The perfect symmetry of the lights begins to waver under the influence of the music. The music itself feels structured in some way, as if the architecture of the physical installation extended outward to the sound that fills the room. The exhibition is only up for two more days - 10am to 6pm Tuesday and Wednesday - so if anyone is in midtown and has half an hour, I definitely suggest stopping by.

Wanderlust

london, paris, vienna, oslo, buenos aires, brussels, montreal, hong kong, helsinki, berlin, budapest, dublin, milan, fukuoka, tokyo, (2), seoul, amsterdam, moscow (2), barcelona, zurich, san francisco.I am a virtual tourist. Right now, I cannot visit these places, yet often find myself staring at their beauty, watching people halfway around the world scurry across plazas from work to home to the restaurant to the barber shop to the grocery store. As perverse as this may seem, it is nice to be reminded (in relatively real time) that all of these other places exist, that people inhabit them, and that one day I may also be there, with them. It also serves as a reminder to appreciate what I have in my immediate environment, for it too has its own beauty and value.

A review from last month

Nick Relph & Oliver PayneMixtapeGavin Brown's EnterpriseMost of the mixtapes I've made and received over the years are thematically constructed, collaging disparate elements under rubrics of love, summertime, quiet nights, long drives. Nick Relph and Oliver Payne follow this model with Mixtape (2002), a video that evokes youth through the carpe diem reappropriation of situations and objects.The visuals are accompanied by Terry Riley's 1968 woozy, multitracked remix of Harvey Averne's "You're No Good." The soundtrack structures the video, determining its length (22 1/2 minutes is the length of one side of a vinyl LP at 33rpm) and editing style. Two singers intone "you're no good, you're no good, you're no good" on repeat, hypnotically overlapping while ever more images pass by, mostly pegged to the incantations. However, in defiance of these assertions from the narrative voice, an underage rock band enthusiastically rehearses, a woman breakdances on a sidewalk chalk rendering of Botticelli's "Venus," the artists' "Besht Mate" kisses a statue at the center of a park fountain, another quintessentially British youth leans against a building wearing rainbow-colored pants and walking a rhinestone-studded turtle on a leash. All have discovered unique forms of self expression, as have the artists.Relph and Payne often zoom in on details, emphasizing the songlike rhythm underlying daily life; the repeated rhythms of the teenager's drumstick beating the ride cymbal, the tapping of the old man's cane against the sidewalk, the all-white trainers of the breakdancer swishing back and forth above the pavement. But not all is happiness and spontaneous creativity. Several scenes in Mixtape remind us of the underside to all this dancing and celebration; most direct are images of hunters and their prey, tied to the sexual tension of the scene that introduces them. Yet this knowledge is to be taken in stride, never fully derailing the sense of euphoria imparted by this mixtape. "You're no good" begins to sound like "you look good" as these actors celebrate life's little moments and their own idiosyncracies. Relph and Payne stress that there is beauty and value in youth (mis)spent.(October 2002)

Miscellaneous roundup

Has anyone read any writing by Masao Miyoshi? Specifically The Afterlives of Area Studies? If so, any comments?- - -Susan, I had a nice talk with Jonathan at dinner tonight about many of the things we were discussing on one of my earlier posts. Did I also mention that Morgan said I should get to know you?- - -It was almost too foggy to make out, but at the stroke of midnight, I watched them switch off the lights at the top of the Empire State Building. It's becoming a ritual, no matter where in the city I am.- - -I'm at a point where I am making a lot of difficult but exciting decisions for myself. I am glad that I started a journal again, and already have enjoyed the dialogue that has resulted from my few short posts.

Another long one..

As I write this, I'm eating around the mold on my pita in an attempt to use up all the hummus before it goes bad. Some dinner. Maybe I'll blame this rambling, even worse than yesterday's, on malnutrition. This one might be a little opaque, but I really hope to get some feedback.- - -I have spent a lot of time thinking about the structurally-created omissions in capitalist systems, both the unacknowledged and the repressed. A message recently posted to a mailing list that I subscribe to crystallized a number of these thoughts. It seems to be the tail end of a discussion that I missed, but the basic gesture involved was an attempt to broaden the concept of capitalism's "residue" to include not only labor and laborers, but "everything that is unnameable within a capitalist symbolic." This residue, both material and representative, lies just on the other side of what the poster calls a "limit of intelligibility."The e-mail then defines the concept of "progress" (however simplifying that term is) as a device that allows those inside the capitalist system to render intelligible all of these unintelligible things. Now to quote a larger part of the e-mail before going on: "However, the progress narrative is obviously a massive simplification, covering over the unintelligibility of certain modes of existence with the certainty that in time they will become more like us."What becomes interesting is that not only are non-standard (often read: non-western) modes of thought and production rendered unintelligible by this system, but also certain things that can be considered within the system (even caused directly by it): feelings of hopelessness in people who are otherwise not 'victims' of capitalist culture, any problem on its own terms ("depression without cures"), anomalies like people 'going postal.' To oversimplify, large parts of the emotional sphere are within the system yet unexplained by it.While the e-mail seems to be discussing this issue on a largely social or political level, it gains added significance for me in relationship to a text I read in the current issue of Frieze magazine (a contemporary art journal based in London.) Titled "Emotional Rescue," it attempts to carve out from within the field of late 1960s and early 1970s conceptual art a space for what the author, Jorg Heiser, calls "Romantic Conceptualism." Artists like Bas Jan Ader and Robert Smithson and contemporary descendants like Jan Timme and Didier Courbot fuse the conceptual with the emotional tenor of Romanticism, thereby connecting what Heiser calls the two endpoints of 'modern artistic subjectivity.'For me, the article was like suddenly turning on a bright light in a semidark room. All of the artists my tastes had me groping toward were suddenly presented before me in contrast to their contemporaries, wrapped up with a neat rhetorical bow that elucidated many of my own thoughts on their artistic production. I was slightly frustrated that Heiser had beaten me to the punch - I was clumsily drafting my own text on several of these artists (is it worth noting that both Ader and Smithson are on my livejournal 'interest' list? Not for nothing, as they say here in New York.) - but nonetheless relieved that I wasn't alone in my thoughts.Then - that's right, there's more! - after reading this, I happened to put on the sole LP of a mid-1990s band called Portraits of Past (record label link). I bought the record for its cover without having any idea who they were or what kind of music they made. At the time, I had been listening to pop punk alone. When the first notes rang out from my speakers - sixteen low throbs from the bass before an explosion of guitars and screaming - I realized that I was in for something incredibly different from anything I was familiar with. It was filled with such emotion, charged with such a dramatic flair, that it refused to be ignored. It ignited in me a search for that particular quality in music that I have not yet stopped. Now, I mainly listen to quiet, experimental electronic music, but nonetheless what registers is that which fuses concept with emotion (for example, Herbert's "Around the House" album, or Autopoiesis' "La Vie a Noir" [both label links].)I gravitate toward the emotional, that which is potentially unintelligible when viewed through its structuring system, when looking at art and listening to music. To return to the e-mail from the mailing list: "The significance of all this is that [by exploring this 'unintelligible' content] we are gesturing toward the outside of 'common' sense, toward things whose exclusion is desirable for a certain framework of meaning to continue, toward things which, if they were allowed to pour into the center would transform it considerably."- - -Is anyone familiar with books I might begin reading that explore the structural limitations/omissions of capitalist systems? I think that this is an issue I'd love to explore from within the realm of artistic production.

Critical Mass and my relationship to my past

Forgive me, this one's a rambler.Yesterday, I read two essays from a book on Critical Mass published by AK Press. Credit goes to my professor for including anything published by AK in the course syllabus. However, there is a maxim that states we are most critical of what we hold dearest, and this proved to be the case: after twelve weeks of being assigned rigorously researched and grammatically sound academic articles, I found myself disappointed by the two texts. I feel that Critical Mass, as a phenomenon, should be examined intellectually in conjunction with the largely anecdotal and instinctive essays collected in this book. Is this just a symptom of me not thinking something is legitimate until it has been academically analyzed? That could be part of it, and, if so, the disappointment I felt could be a problem with my expectations. However, I'd like to think that I'm still a bit more open-minded than that, however much time and energy I spend with things related to the academy and academic writing.Would an academic analysis drain the movement - as represented to a wider public - of its sense of spontaneity? Worse for me, would it remove the fun I have in monthly participation? I'd be afraid of fixing the levity referred to by both authors in the structured nature of an analysis, of missing 'the point' in an attempt to research the point. However, there is a whole network of relationships (to other social and activist movements, to other critiques) that I feel should be explicated so that proper context can be given to the movement for those who might approach it in this way.Anyway, while I wrestle with the idea of undertaking this project - if I'm even able to complete it - I am reminded of numerous other issues I have thought about lately. The short version is that I feel a conflict within me concerning what I will overly simplify as a "punk rock" past and a "bourgeois-leaning academic/salaried employee" present. Twenty-three years of age is not particularly old, but the past year has brought about a wholesale change in my life. I'm no longer in school. I'm no longer a "dependent." The cycles of my everyday life in New York are quite different from everyday life in either Boston or Chicago.In a way, this spring, I suffered a little identity crisis. This manifested itself in a "punk rock summer" filled with hardcore shows, hanging out with friends that I hadn't seen in four or five years, a road trip, getting tattooed, attending protests, etc. I wanted to reassure myself that, despite the fact that I draw a salary and have a "career path," I hadn't lost touch with the elements of my life that sustained me over the past few years. To what extent does participation in a specific subculture condition the later reactions to/against it? Do hip-hop kids or goth kids later grow up to face similar dilemmas? I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel this way, but I'm curious as to when and how it comes to the foreground of other people's lives. By the end of the summer, I felt that I had reconciled the two. Now, as the cold weather settles upon the city, I feel the pendulum swinging back in the other direction, and these thoughts come to mind again.

Early mornings

Waking up at 7AM on one of my few days off never seems like a good idea at the time. I need to think ahead to all of the things I will accomplish today! It seems that I'm going to be really dependent on the E train this morning. Let us all hope that it doesn't let me down.

Derrida and book shopping

I say the documentary biography of Derrida at Film Forum this afternoon, by myself because I couldn't think who to ask to join me (If you're into this kind of thing, contact me!). He acted the part well; recalcitrant about the details of his personal life, always pointing out the artificiality of the documentary/biography setup, rambling at length on minute topics and grand themes. It was quite entertaining, but of greatest interest to me, it turned out, was my own viewing; there is a schism during parts of film between word and image that I could not reconcile. In between direct interview and lecture footage during which Derrida is speaking, a woman's voice quotes passages from his published texts. She speaks in English, and the image on screen is not accompanied by subtitles, as is other dialogue. I was unable to focus on the audio soundtrack of her reciting his words, unable to process their meaning because my eye was instead seduced by the image on screen. It was usually a tracking shot of Paris streets and my interest in the beauty of that city consistently won out over my desire to understand what the narrator was saying. It is rare that I am able to dole out my attention in full, but rather can devote gradations to multiple objects/fascinations simultaneously. When there was text on the screen to read, I could simultaneously read and understand it while also processing what was happening visually in the background. Both cognitive processes were visual. When the text disappeared into the ethereal realm of the spoken word, that cognition was much more difficult. This is interesting to me, because it opposes the experience I had on Thursday night (see below post), when Buchloch's spoken words, accompanied by slide projections, made so much more sense to me than when I have previously attempted to read his essays. Do I learn better visually or aurally? If it's the former, was I somehow visualizing Buchloch's words as he spoke them? If it's the latter, was I 'speaking' the subtitles via an inner voice? I'm sure there are texts (audiotapes? ha.) about this kind of stuff, but for now I'm content to simply have the questions suspended before me.- - -After the film, I walked up to 12th Street Books for my monthly bulk purchase. Nine books, one of which I've already given to a friend. Of the remaining eight, The Problems of Modernity, a reader on Adorno and Benjamin, and Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath seem the most promising. Both were published by Routledge, which, although last night a friend claimed the house is "past its prime," remains one of my favorite publishers. Perhaps I'll intern for them once I finish my current internship?