David Patrick reported, DIFFA: Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, launched its 2008 dining by Design National Tour at Skylight on 275 Hudson Street in NYC. This is the 11th National Tour of Dining by Design. Conde’ Nast Media Group has joined the 2008 tour as national media partner. DIFFA brought together a talented and intriguing cast of designers, artists and personalities to put a spotlight on stylish and outlandish trends in design. Following New York, Dining by Design will tour seven cities nationwide including Kansas City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. Apparently, the designers were not impressed with décor and presentation. The dinner party had all the makings of frump, if not for the company at hand. I am sure it was a wonderful dinner party, however, Conde' Nast has a reputation of being associated with only the best design presentations. The dinner party looks as if it were put together by a child. It certainly doesn’t appear that the designers and artists sitting around that table were pleased. Although, a dinner party is about connecting with friends through good conversation, good food, good wine and good humor, the culinary experience has a visual and esthetic aspect which artists have particular sensitivity. Not to worry, they will get over it; maybe the dinner parties in Chicago or San Francisco will meet their standards, and possibly warrant a picture in a Conde’ Nast publication.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
DIFFA Dining by Design
David Patrick reported, DIFFA: Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, launched its 2008 dining by Design National Tour at Skylight on 275 Hudson Street in NYC. This is the 11th National Tour of Dining by Design. Conde’ Nast Media Group has joined the 2008 tour as national media partner. DIFFA brought together a talented and intriguing cast of designers, artists and personalities to put a spotlight on stylish and outlandish trends in design. Following New York, Dining by Design will tour seven cities nationwide including Kansas City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. Apparently, the designers were not impressed with décor and presentation. The dinner party had all the makings of frump, if not for the company at hand. I am sure it was a wonderful dinner party, however, Conde' Nast has a reputation of being associated with only the best design presentations. The dinner party looks as if it were put together by a child. It certainly doesn’t appear that the designers and artists sitting around that table were pleased. Although, a dinner party is about connecting with friends through good conversation, good food, good wine and good humor, the culinary experience has a visual and esthetic aspect which artists have particular sensitivity. Not to worry, they will get over it; maybe the dinner parties in Chicago or San Francisco will meet their standards, and possibly warrant a picture in a Conde’ Nast publication.
Friday, April 4, 2008
On April 4, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis TN
Double click bottom arrow to remember Dr. King's humanity & sacrifice.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Whopper Bars could be the Starbucks of Burgers
Burger King has re-invented itself, with the Whopper Bars. Oh Dear, what is this world coming too? This presents a really serious problem for me, because I already should attend cheeseburgers anonymous. This will only further feed my addiction to cheeseburgers. For years, I have tried to kick the habit, but keep relapsing. There are 36 addictive carcinogenics in beef, I am almost positive that must be the reason I keep going back to cheeseburgers. I am now on a diet. After a year of being cheeseburger free, as a result of stress, six months ago I begrudgingly but eagerly picked up a double cheeseburger at McDonalds. Hence, 20+ lbs later, those burgers are still calling my name. Therefore, I am trying to reduce my intake, detox and exercise. Frankly, it’s incredibly frustrating. The BK is changing its décor and adding a new experience. If I’m walking through the airport I may not be able to resist the Whopper Bar. Thankfully, they won’t be in malls or open urban venues like a Cosi’s where one could pop in to check email and pick up a burger, because I would be doomed. The Wallstreet Journal announced Burger King Holdings Inc. plans to start building a new version of its restaurants this year called the Whopper Bar that will sell a wider variety of its signature hamburger in a hipper setting. See Wallstreet Journal for complete article.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Playing the Changes, Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photophraphs
Remarkable! I saw the award winning documentary of Keeping Time: The Life, Music and Photographs of Milt Hinton, on PBS. I absolutely must get this new book, Playing the Changes. I will sit it on my coffee table next to my Gordon Parks book "Half Past Autum". I think both books are great coffe books because they capture american culture in in it's actuality; which evokes moving conversation. Jazz is the only American art form originating in the United States. As a cultural tradition, I collect jazz prints, jazz music and am trying to learn more about the history and tradition of Jazz. Milt Hinton is the most accomplished and influential base player in the history Jazz, and has become the historian of traditional Jazz. Thankfully his documentation of the artform exists for the Museums, as it is a pivotal part of American history. Thankfully David Berger helped put Milt's massive collection of pictures together and published the work. As it might be the only historical document of the history of jazz, candidly, as it really was. Interestingly, after viewing the documentary, Keeping Time, I realized I have one of Milts pieces; Billy Holiday; the Last recording session. I bought the print in New Orleans 14 years ago. It's framed on my living room wall, but I didn't know the story behind the picture. If you can hear me heaven, thanks Mr. Hinton for describing the story behind that powerful picture; it now has even more meaning to me. I can not waite to get Playing the Changes.
The Words, Images, and Music of One of the Greats In American Jazz New book and cd chronicle the artistic and personal journey of extraordinary bassist Milt Hinton
The life story of Milt Hinton is rooted in hard times, rising from segregated backwater clubs to elegant concert halls, offering a perspective on the African American experience that is unique in its mix of humor and wisdom.
The publication of PLAYING THE CHANGES: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs (Vanderbilt University Press, January 2008) not only tells Milt's compelling story, in his own inimitable style, but also exquisitely reproduces 260 of his incredible photographs. He began taking pictures in the 1920s and continued documenting the world that he knew, in and away from the spotlight, up to his death in 2000 at age 90.
These photographs, more than 140 of which are published here for the first time, burst with life--and some would swear sound--revealing candid and often intimate moments of both the famous (Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington) and the not so famous who played alongside them, such as 400-pound arranger/bandleader/organist “Tiny" Parham.
Included with the book is a CD of music and interviews with Milt Hinton, along with a discography and a filmography.
This remarkable book reveals as well that Hinton possessed a gift of narrative. Blessed with a storyteller's facility, he leads the reader back to his first memories as a child in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and even beyond, to his father's African birth and elements of that legacy that lingered in his grandmother's cooking. Through his recollections we feel these times and places, down to the lynching he witnessed at age seven and, nearly as horrible, the surreal stillness of the town the morning after.
Interweaving photos and prose, the book traces Milt's path from Mississippi to Chicago, where he polished his music through the famous Wendell Phillips High School program and earned money running errands for the Al Capone organization. Committing full time to music, Hinton crossed paths with people who seem cut from a mold that was broken long ago. Many have left vivid marks on history, from the legendary boxer Jack Johnson to the incomparable Cab Calloway, with whose band Hinton traveled for many years. Others have been forgotten or died too young, like the tough-talking and brilliantly gifted singer Ann Robinson, whose rise toward fame ended suddenly one night in a Harlem alley.
Combining an acute observational eye with an ear sensitive to music and conversation, Hinton casts these characters in revealing light. He was there to witness a legendary and nearly fatal encounter between Calloway and a knife-wielding Dizzy Gillespie, to help remove the great Charlie Parker, passed out on heroin, from under a table in a bar, and to see the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, playing pinball alone in a Broadway arcade. Whether huddling in the basement of a backwater club as a race riot raged overhead or shaking hands with President John F. Kennedy at a swank soiree, Hinton registers these moments and summons them back to life on every page of Playing the Changes - and in so doing, preserves an important part of America's culture and history for posterity.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: In 1955, when he was 14, David G. Berger asked Milt Hinton for bass lessons -- thus beginning a friendship and professional partnership that would last more than 40 years. Berger, though, did not follow in his friend's footsteps to become a professional musician; instead he completed a doctorate in sociology and taught at Temple University for 30 years. In 1979, Holly Maxson began organizing Milt's photographs for Hinton and Berger's first book, Bass Line. Maxson and Berger co-direct the Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection, and in 2002 they completed their award-winning documentary about Milt's life, Keeping Time: The Life, Music and Photographs of Milt Hinton. (Photograph courtesy of The Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection)
BOOK INFORMATION
PLAYING THE CHANGES: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs
By Milt Hinton, David G. Berger, and Holly Maxson
Foreword by Clint Eastwood; Preface by Dan Morgenstern
384 pages, 11 x 9.5 inches, 260 black & white photos, with a CD of interviews and music, discography, filmography
Trade cloth w/CD $75.00 (ISBN 978-0-8265-1574-2)
To be published January 2008 by VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Visit the Milt Hiton website
Milt Hinton at All About Jazz.
The Words, Images, and Music of One of the Greats In American Jazz New book and cd chronicle the artistic and personal journey of extraordinary bassist Milt Hinton
The life story of Milt Hinton is rooted in hard times, rising from segregated backwater clubs to elegant concert halls, offering a perspective on the African American experience that is unique in its mix of humor and wisdom.
The publication of PLAYING THE CHANGES: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs (Vanderbilt University Press, January 2008) not only tells Milt's compelling story, in his own inimitable style, but also exquisitely reproduces 260 of his incredible photographs. He began taking pictures in the 1920s and continued documenting the world that he knew, in and away from the spotlight, up to his death in 2000 at age 90.
These photographs, more than 140 of which are published here for the first time, burst with life--and some would swear sound--revealing candid and often intimate moments of both the famous (Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington) and the not so famous who played alongside them, such as 400-pound arranger/bandleader/organist “Tiny" Parham.
Included with the book is a CD of music and interviews with Milt Hinton, along with a discography and a filmography.
This remarkable book reveals as well that Hinton possessed a gift of narrative. Blessed with a storyteller's facility, he leads the reader back to his first memories as a child in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and even beyond, to his father's African birth and elements of that legacy that lingered in his grandmother's cooking. Through his recollections we feel these times and places, down to the lynching he witnessed at age seven and, nearly as horrible, the surreal stillness of the town the morning after.
Interweaving photos and prose, the book traces Milt's path from Mississippi to Chicago, where he polished his music through the famous Wendell Phillips High School program and earned money running errands for the Al Capone organization. Committing full time to music, Hinton crossed paths with people who seem cut from a mold that was broken long ago. Many have left vivid marks on history, from the legendary boxer Jack Johnson to the incomparable Cab Calloway, with whose band Hinton traveled for many years. Others have been forgotten or died too young, like the tough-talking and brilliantly gifted singer Ann Robinson, whose rise toward fame ended suddenly one night in a Harlem alley.
Combining an acute observational eye with an ear sensitive to music and conversation, Hinton casts these characters in revealing light. He was there to witness a legendary and nearly fatal encounter between Calloway and a knife-wielding Dizzy Gillespie, to help remove the great Charlie Parker, passed out on heroin, from under a table in a bar, and to see the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, playing pinball alone in a Broadway arcade. Whether huddling in the basement of a backwater club as a race riot raged overhead or shaking hands with President John F. Kennedy at a swank soiree, Hinton registers these moments and summons them back to life on every page of Playing the Changes - and in so doing, preserves an important part of America's culture and history for posterity.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: In 1955, when he was 14, David G. Berger asked Milt Hinton for bass lessons -- thus beginning a friendship and professional partnership that would last more than 40 years. Berger, though, did not follow in his friend's footsteps to become a professional musician; instead he completed a doctorate in sociology and taught at Temple University for 30 years. In 1979, Holly Maxson began organizing Milt's photographs for Hinton and Berger's first book, Bass Line. Maxson and Berger co-direct the Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection, and in 2002 they completed their award-winning documentary about Milt's life, Keeping Time: The Life, Music and Photographs of Milt Hinton. (Photograph courtesy of The Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection)
BOOK INFORMATION
PLAYING THE CHANGES: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs
By Milt Hinton, David G. Berger, and Holly Maxson
Foreword by Clint Eastwood; Preface by Dan Morgenstern
384 pages, 11 x 9.5 inches, 260 black & white photos, with a CD of interviews and music, discography, filmography
Trade cloth w/CD $75.00 (ISBN 978-0-8265-1574-2)
To be published January 2008 by VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Visit the Milt Hiton website
Milt Hinton at All About Jazz.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings on Letterman
Etta James, Patti Labelle, James Brown, Mahalia Jackson and Sharon Brown!
Thank you Sharon Brown for keeping that Funking Soulful fealing in music that moves spirit and touches the depths of our hearts.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Starbucks to Buy Clover
Wow, such synergy. I just read on Conde Nasts Portfolio.com that Starbucks reported in their Annual Shareholders meeting that Starbucks plans to buy the company that makes the Clover. The clover is the rose royce of coffee machines at a price of $11,000. I guess that justifies Starbucks $6 per cut cup of coffee.
Here is what Liz Gunnison reported on Portfolio.com:
Live-Blogging the Starbucks Annual Meeting: Starbucks Buys the Clover
We should have seen it coming with the Pike Place Roast announcement . Not only is Starbucks directing its attentions towards a super-premium coffee blend, but the newest super-premium way to brew it.
Starbucks closed the annual meeting by announcing it would be acquiring The Coffee Equipment Company, the makers of the Clover Brewing System.
What is the Clover? It's a coffee machine - for lack of a more sophisticated term - that is all the rage in the coffee community these days (check out the New York Times article from earlier this year).
Up until now the astronomically expensive machines - which provide a commercial way to produce coffee akin to what's made at home in a french press - have only been in use in only a handful of coffee shops, which charge a large premium for the brew that they make.
Coffee wonks go nuts over this machine, as the brewed coffee it creates is supposedly leaps and bounds above all else in terms of flavor. No specifics out of Starbucks in terms of when and how widely these babies will be rolled out in stores.
Here is what Liz Gunnison reported on Portfolio.com:
Live-Blogging the Starbucks Annual Meeting: Starbucks Buys the Clover
We should have seen it coming with the Pike Place Roast announcement . Not only is Starbucks directing its attentions towards a super-premium coffee blend, but the newest super-premium way to brew it.
Starbucks closed the annual meeting by announcing it would be acquiring The Coffee Equipment Company, the makers of the Clover Brewing System.
What is the Clover? It's a coffee machine - for lack of a more sophisticated term - that is all the rage in the coffee community these days (check out the New York Times article from earlier this year).
Up until now the astronomically expensive machines - which provide a commercial way to produce coffee akin to what's made at home in a french press - have only been in use in only a handful of coffee shops, which charge a large premium for the brew that they make.
Coffee wonks go nuts over this machine, as the brewed coffee it creates is supposedly leaps and bounds above all else in terms of flavor. No specifics out of Starbucks in terms of when and how widely these babies will be rolled out in stores.
Monday, March 10, 2008
The DC Metro Urbanistas Have Claimed The Cork Wine Bar in Logan Circle
Would one be considered a “wino” if one preferred wine to mixed drinks or liquor all the time. If so then call me “willie the wino”, because I prefer Kendall Jackson chardonnay over an apple martini any day. A new wine bar popped up in Logan circle; the Cork Wine Bar. Interestingly, it is very much like the Cork Wine Bar in Ohio. Nevertheless, the DC urbanotic scene seems to love it.
The food is delicious, small plates only, simple foods, and lots of flavor. The wine list is extensive, more than 100 wines by the bottle, focusing on Old World selections, including many organic and sustainable produced wines. Prices range from $6 to $14 by the glass. Tasting wines by the glass can add up, flights are more economical and the bottle could be an even better value. The service is great as well, and staff is well versed in the very wide range of French and Spanish wines available.
The Cork Wine Bar’s crowd consists of the laid back 30something urban dwellers packing in the place with a New York/East Village ambiance. . Hence, Cork wine bar is a cool place to chill out with friends and catch up. It’s extremely crowded which makes it more fun to have “sex in the city” moments with friends. Like Arnold says, “I’ll be back”. Absolutely.
The food is delicious, small plates only, simple foods, and lots of flavor. The wine list is extensive, more than 100 wines by the bottle, focusing on Old World selections, including many organic and sustainable produced wines. Prices range from $6 to $14 by the glass. Tasting wines by the glass can add up, flights are more economical and the bottle could be an even better value. The service is great as well, and staff is well versed in the very wide range of French and Spanish wines available.
The Cork Wine Bar’s crowd consists of the laid back 30something urban dwellers packing in the place with a New York/East Village ambiance. . Hence, Cork wine bar is a cool place to chill out with friends and catch up. It’s extremely crowded which makes it more fun to have “sex in the city” moments with friends. Like Arnold says, “I’ll be back”. Absolutely.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Ben Afflect on Obamawood
Obama + Hollywood = Obamawood
Ben Affleck articulated, Obama's approach to leadership is to address the issues in a very measured, deliberate, thoughtful and diplomatic way. Obama is a listener who is altruistic to the people, and is willing to admit fault and mistakes, which reflects strong character. In effect, Obama's approach might help to heal the country socially, economically and patriotically. Finally, his integrity will build trust internationally.
Ben Affleck articulated, Obama's approach to leadership is to address the issues in a very measured, deliberate, thoughtful and diplomatic way. Obama is a listener who is altruistic to the people, and is willing to admit fault and mistakes, which reflects strong character. In effect, Obama's approach might help to heal the country socially, economically and patriotically. Finally, his integrity will build trust internationally.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Funky Feeling Wes Felton
I Love Wes Felton’s Funky Feeling. Wes Felton is without question, one the coolest alternative neosoul Artists to come out of DC. I’ve often wondered, what is it that keeps him trapped on the underground scene? Does he lack the tenacity of Common or booking power of the Roots to build a following outside of DC? I haven’t a clue. Like Raheem Devahn, Meshell Ndegeocello, Mya and JC Chauvez, he should climb from the obscurity of the underground to a nationally recognized musician. For more than 15 years Wes Felton has been on the DC indie neo soul underground scene making great music, opening for neo soul artists whose tours stop in DC like Eryka Badu, the Roots and Omar at the 9:30 Club. Yet there has been little traction. With the use of a creative college PR team Wes Felton could be as well known as the Black eye peas, however, the lack of national media buzz has trapped him on the DC underground scene. When he ever take that Leap? Only time will tell. Until then, check out that Funky Feeling below.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
BRAIN WAVE:COMMON SENSES
Bravo and Kudos! Must see! To preview, click Brainwave.
EXIT ART CHALLENGES ARTISTS TO MAKE CONSCIOUSNESS VISIBLE
IN EXHIBITION AT CENTER OF CITY-WIDE FESTIVAL
New York, NY - One of New York City's leading outposts for vanguard art showcases an array of artworks inspired by recent advances in the understanding of the brain beginning Saturday, February 16, 2008. On view at Exit Art at Tenth Avenue and 36th Street through April 19, BrainWave: Common Senses is part of the city-wide festival BRAINWAVE, which explores how art, music, and meditation affect the brain.
In organizing Common Senses, Exit Art co-directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo looked for artists who are creating powerful visualizations of the activities of the mind. Works run the gamut from mechanical objects-including a roving robot-to videos, multiple-screen slide projections, sculpture, and painting.
"In sending out an open call to artists, we hoped to find works of art that captured the mystery of the mind, rather than works that merely illustrate scientific insights. We have succeeded in this, I believe, by gathering artworks that are of the moment-innovative as art, current as science," says Ingberman.
Visitors to Common Senses will spy a 15" tall robot navigating Exit Art in directions determined by data derived from artist Fernando Orellana's REM-sleep brainwave activity. Sleep Waking (2007), created by the Troy, New York-based Orellana in collaboration with Brendan Burns, of Schenectady, New York, is one of a number of ambulatory and interactive works in the exhibition. Another is Swarm (2008), by David Bowen of Duluth, Minnesota, a roaming device shaped like a broomstick, capped by a bulbous plastic chamber filled with 500 buzzing houseflies. Digitally, the motion of the flies determines Swarm's direction and momentum. As well, New Yorker Jamie O'Shea contributes his mad machine, the Alvin sonic incubator (2005), wherein a visitor can set an electronic neural-like network in motion by connecting his or her forehead to Alvin's hardware.
Brilliantly colored images evocative of a dense forest are conjured from the layering of light projections in Andrew Carnie's Magic Forest (2002). The result of the artist's collaboration with Dr. Richard Wingate of the Medical Research Council Centre for Developmental Neurology, Kings College, London, the 15-minute-long installation piece takes as its subject the process of data collecting in an ever-growing cluster of neurons in a developing brain. The beauty of the images derives in part from the fluorescence used in staining of individual neurons, which in turn produces the images under a microscope.
The New York-based artist Suzanne Anker also is represented by beautiful, lyrical imagery arising from careful extrapolation of neurological processes. Here, three-dimensional Rorschach tests resemble fossils from a lost world and brain scans and images of butterfly wings suggest the organic complexity of the brain and archetypes from the natural world.
Windows of the Soul (2008), a video by New York artist Phil Buehler, invites the question of whether or not one can read madness in another's eyes. Three hundred close-up black and white photographs of the eyes of actual mental patients, taken in the '50s and recently recovered from an archive, speed by in a riveting five-minute-long montage.
For BrainWave: Common Senses, New Yorker Devorah Sperber constructs what will appear to be a random arrangement of 875 spools of colored thread in the Exit Art gallery. Remarkably, the spools coalesce into a seemingly sharp focus replica of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" when viewed through a small sphere that mimics the functioning of the human eye.
Other works on view include a sculptural installation by George Jenne of Brooklyn, New York, that incorporates a variety of objects that the artist calls "tokens," which are designed to trigger associations with adolescence; two sculptures created by casting the brain cavities of whales into brass by Dustin Wenzel of Ottawa, Canada; a single-channel video by Naho Taruishi (New York, New York) meant to be seen "blindly" with eyelids closed (functioning as a pair of internal projection screens); a mural-size painting by Steve Budington of Burlington, Vermont, depicts the dangers of a political candidate favoring one sense over another; a video by Daniel Margulies (New York) and Chris Sharp (Milan, Italy) coupling Kant's Third Critique of Judgment and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with brain scans; and Reodorant (2008), a multisensory installation by the four-member artist collective, SERU.
BrainWave: Common Senses is the second in Exit Art's Unknown Territories series exploring the impact of scientific advances on contemporary culture. It follows Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, a landmark exhibition of art and biotechnology that brought art and science audiences together at Exit Art in 2000. Opening December 6, 2008 will be the third presentation, of biotechnology based artworks. Organized by Boryana Rossa, Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) will assemble work by many of the major artists working in this medium, including Adam Zaretsky, Stelarc, Bioteknica, Kathy High, Dmitry Bulatov and SymbioticA Research Group, an Australia-based collective that will produce a wet laboratory in collaboration with scientists for the exhibition. Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) will travel to Russia in 2009.
PUBLIC EVENTS / BrainWave: Common Senses
Joseph Ledoux
The Amygdaloids
Friday, February 29, 2008, 6-8 pm
Pioneering researcher Joseph LeDoux, the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU's Center for Neural Science and the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety conducts a walk-through of BrainWave: Common Senses, discussing brain-related issues along the way. His band The Amygdaloids plays afterwards. Free.
A Night of Trance Music
Friday, March 14, 7-10 pm
Exit Art presents a night of "trance" music with Zach Layton's real-time sound manipulation of an electroencephalograph (EEG), Wind-Up Bird's quadraphonic drone rotations, and Raphael Lyon's hypnotic "cinema-in-the-dark," Psicklops. Free.
Matt Mullican
Wednesday, March 19, 7-9 pm
*Date Change - TBA
Artist Matt Mullican screens a video of his performances made while under hypnosis and discusses his work in relation to perception, the subconscious, and his personal cosmology of symbols. Concurrent with the artist's presentation in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Free.
Kent and Kevin Young present
'A Monozygotic Experiment Using Telepathic Conveyance'
Friday, April 11, 2008, 6:30-8 pm
Los Angeles-based artists Kent and Kevin Young will make a 'painting' by trying to solve a crossword puzzle from clues telepathically sent from one twin brother to the other. Free
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Brainwave: Common Senses is supported by a grant from the Greenwall Foundation. Additional exhibition support provided by Carnegie Corporation, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Starry Night Fund at The Tides Foundation, Exit Art's Board of Trustees, our members, Union College and the Albany Regional Sleep Disorders Center. Public programs support provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
ABOUT EXIT ART
Exit Art is an independent center for contemporary culture that aims to react immediately to important issues of the day. The center mounts experimental, historical and unique presentations of aesthetic, social, political and environmental issues from the perspective a multiple disciplines. Founded 25 years ago by directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo, Exit Art has grown from a pioneering alternative art space into a model artistic center for the 21st century committed to supporting artists whose quality of work reflects the transformations of our culture.
Exit Art is located at 475 Tenth Avenue, corner of 36th Street. Exit Art is open each Tuesday through Thursday, 10 am - 6 pm; Friday, 10 am - 8 pm; Saturday, noon - 8 pm. Closed Sunday and Monday. There is a suggested donation of $5. For more information please call 212-966-7745 or visit www.exitart.org.
EXIT ART CHALLENGES ARTISTS TO MAKE CONSCIOUSNESS VISIBLE
IN EXHIBITION AT CENTER OF CITY-WIDE FESTIVAL
New York, NY - One of New York City's leading outposts for vanguard art showcases an array of artworks inspired by recent advances in the understanding of the brain beginning Saturday, February 16, 2008. On view at Exit Art at Tenth Avenue and 36th Street through April 19, BrainWave: Common Senses is part of the city-wide festival BRAINWAVE, which explores how art, music, and meditation affect the brain.
In organizing Common Senses, Exit Art co-directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo looked for artists who are creating powerful visualizations of the activities of the mind. Works run the gamut from mechanical objects-including a roving robot-to videos, multiple-screen slide projections, sculpture, and painting.
"In sending out an open call to artists, we hoped to find works of art that captured the mystery of the mind, rather than works that merely illustrate scientific insights. We have succeeded in this, I believe, by gathering artworks that are of the moment-innovative as art, current as science," says Ingberman.
Visitors to Common Senses will spy a 15" tall robot navigating Exit Art in directions determined by data derived from artist Fernando Orellana's REM-sleep brainwave activity. Sleep Waking (2007), created by the Troy, New York-based Orellana in collaboration with Brendan Burns, of Schenectady, New York, is one of a number of ambulatory and interactive works in the exhibition. Another is Swarm (2008), by David Bowen of Duluth, Minnesota, a roaming device shaped like a broomstick, capped by a bulbous plastic chamber filled with 500 buzzing houseflies. Digitally, the motion of the flies determines Swarm's direction and momentum. As well, New Yorker Jamie O'Shea contributes his mad machine, the Alvin sonic incubator (2005), wherein a visitor can set an electronic neural-like network in motion by connecting his or her forehead to Alvin's hardware.
Brilliantly colored images evocative of a dense forest are conjured from the layering of light projections in Andrew Carnie's Magic Forest (2002). The result of the artist's collaboration with Dr. Richard Wingate of the Medical Research Council Centre for Developmental Neurology, Kings College, London, the 15-minute-long installation piece takes as its subject the process of data collecting in an ever-growing cluster of neurons in a developing brain. The beauty of the images derives in part from the fluorescence used in staining of individual neurons, which in turn produces the images under a microscope.
The New York-based artist Suzanne Anker also is represented by beautiful, lyrical imagery arising from careful extrapolation of neurological processes. Here, three-dimensional Rorschach tests resemble fossils from a lost world and brain scans and images of butterfly wings suggest the organic complexity of the brain and archetypes from the natural world.
Windows of the Soul (2008), a video by New York artist Phil Buehler, invites the question of whether or not one can read madness in another's eyes. Three hundred close-up black and white photographs of the eyes of actual mental patients, taken in the '50s and recently recovered from an archive, speed by in a riveting five-minute-long montage.
For BrainWave: Common Senses, New Yorker Devorah Sperber constructs what will appear to be a random arrangement of 875 spools of colored thread in the Exit Art gallery. Remarkably, the spools coalesce into a seemingly sharp focus replica of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" when viewed through a small sphere that mimics the functioning of the human eye.
Other works on view include a sculptural installation by George Jenne of Brooklyn, New York, that incorporates a variety of objects that the artist calls "tokens," which are designed to trigger associations with adolescence; two sculptures created by casting the brain cavities of whales into brass by Dustin Wenzel of Ottawa, Canada; a single-channel video by Naho Taruishi (New York, New York) meant to be seen "blindly" with eyelids closed (functioning as a pair of internal projection screens); a mural-size painting by Steve Budington of Burlington, Vermont, depicts the dangers of a political candidate favoring one sense over another; a video by Daniel Margulies (New York) and Chris Sharp (Milan, Italy) coupling Kant's Third Critique of Judgment and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring with brain scans; and Reodorant (2008), a multisensory installation by the four-member artist collective, SERU.
BrainWave: Common Senses is the second in Exit Art's Unknown Territories series exploring the impact of scientific advances on contemporary culture. It follows Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, a landmark exhibition of art and biotechnology that brought art and science audiences together at Exit Art in 2000. Opening December 6, 2008 will be the third presentation, of biotechnology based artworks. Organized by Boryana Rossa, Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) will assemble work by many of the major artists working in this medium, including Adam Zaretsky, Stelarc, Bioteknica, Kathy High, Dmitry Bulatov and SymbioticA Research Group, an Australia-based collective that will produce a wet laboratory in collaboration with scientists for the exhibition. Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) will travel to Russia in 2009.
PUBLIC EVENTS / BrainWave: Common Senses
Joseph Ledoux
The Amygdaloids
Friday, February 29, 2008, 6-8 pm
Pioneering researcher Joseph LeDoux, the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU's Center for Neural Science and the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety conducts a walk-through of BrainWave: Common Senses, discussing brain-related issues along the way. His band The Amygdaloids plays afterwards. Free.
A Night of Trance Music
Friday, March 14, 7-10 pm
Exit Art presents a night of "trance" music with Zach Layton's real-time sound manipulation of an electroencephalograph (EEG), Wind-Up Bird's quadraphonic drone rotations, and Raphael Lyon's hypnotic "cinema-in-the-dark," Psicklops. Free.
Matt Mullican
Wednesday, March 19, 7-9 pm
*Date Change - TBA
Artist Matt Mullican screens a video of his performances made while under hypnosis and discusses his work in relation to perception, the subconscious, and his personal cosmology of symbols. Concurrent with the artist's presentation in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Free.
Kent and Kevin Young present
'A Monozygotic Experiment Using Telepathic Conveyance'
Friday, April 11, 2008, 6:30-8 pm
Los Angeles-based artists Kent and Kevin Young will make a 'painting' by trying to solve a crossword puzzle from clues telepathically sent from one twin brother to the other. Free
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Brainwave: Common Senses is supported by a grant from the Greenwall Foundation. Additional exhibition support provided by Carnegie Corporation, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Starry Night Fund at The Tides Foundation, Exit Art's Board of Trustees, our members, Union College and the Albany Regional Sleep Disorders Center. Public programs support provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
ABOUT EXIT ART
Exit Art is an independent center for contemporary culture that aims to react immediately to important issues of the day. The center mounts experimental, historical and unique presentations of aesthetic, social, political and environmental issues from the perspective a multiple disciplines. Founded 25 years ago by directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo, Exit Art has grown from a pioneering alternative art space into a model artistic center for the 21st century committed to supporting artists whose quality of work reflects the transformations of our culture.
Exit Art is located at 475 Tenth Avenue, corner of 36th Street. Exit Art is open each Tuesday through Thursday, 10 am - 6 pm; Friday, 10 am - 8 pm; Saturday, noon - 8 pm. Closed Sunday and Monday. There is a suggested donation of $5. For more information please call 212-966-7745 or visit www.exitart.org.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
LOVE /WAR/SEX
LOVE / WAR / SEX
December 1, 2007- Janurary 26, 2008
Opened Saturday December 1, 7-10pm with The Rude Mechanical Orchestra a click to view 5 minute video of the Gallery opening of LOVE/WAR/SEX
Exit Art tell you the war stories through the vision of 9 international artists. Love/War/Sex considers memory, history, weapons and personal stories. As a cultural center, it is Exit Art's mission to reflect what is going on in our society. The installation reveals how war images are so common that it makes us immune to death. This art work is a chapter of the history of power. The present exhibitions deal with the current global conflicts and the countries fascination and addition to war. The title demonstrates the paradox of what war really is and it contradictions of emotions, passions, idealisms and convictions. The installation of Love/War/Sex includes real weapons of war in the show, while telling the stories of the relationship between love, war and sex and its brutality and insensitivity to humanity. It provokes surprise and shock with the realization of war. Click her to view LOV/WAR/SEX at Exit Art.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Zadie Smith
Thus far, Zadie Smith is one of the great writers of my generation. I read White Teeth and On Beauty. I love that she envelops who she is in the story line. The dysfunction and inadequacies which permeate through her family structure are often woven into the character she creates. Hence, the perils of the human experience make for good fiction. I am amused at her amazing comparative cultural antitheticals which seamlessly convey the symbiotic mural of life(one planet, one people, with cultural differences). Her British dry wit, clever sarcasm, illusive charm, and exhaustive imagery makes for great humor and a well develop plot leaving the reader wanting more. Zadie definitely exemplifies the typical Impetuous 30Something Cosmopolitan.JANICE SIMPSON wrote in April 2006 TIME magazine wrote Zadie Smith's books. They arm wrestle, get in one another's faces and climb into one another's beds. Smith's precocious debut novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, just three years after she graduated from Cambridge, centers on two World War II buddies—a white working-class Brit married to a Jamaican Jehovah's Witness and a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh who imports what he thinks will be a traditional wife from the old country. But it's also the story of their children, who grow up, as Smith did, in a post-postcolonial London where the old gentlemen's agreements about class and race are being shredded. The book earned lavish critical praise, was turned into a TV mini-series and established a model for how to make sense—and art—out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century.
Smith, 30, likes to work big. Her narratives sprawl with Dickensian swagger. Her cultural references leap the high-low divide from John Milton to Eminem. Plus she's funny. Refugees from the era of political correctness and others who are easily offended probably should stay clear. Last year Smith published On Beauty, a novel set in the hothouse of American academia and scheduled to be made into a movie produced by Scott Rudin, who has adapted such provocative works as The Hours and Closer for the screen. Like White Teeth and her second novel, The Autograph Man it is simultaneously intellectual and visceral, a panoramic view of the way we live now.
Interview with Zadie in Stockholm 2006
Double click bottom arrow to view an interview with Zadie Smith in Stockholm the summer of 2006 when her book On Beauty had been translated into Swedish.
James Lasdun's review on the Novel "On Beauty" (Source: The Gaudian UK)
I completely agree with the James Lasdun's review of Zadie Smith’s newest novel On Beauty.
He wrote: among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives .
White Teeth had a similarly heterogenous cast, but whereas in that novel Smith kept it together by keeping it light, with a knockabout comic style (Dickens, by way of Rushdie and Martin Amis), here the intent is to live more inwardly with her characters, and the model, alluded to throughout, is EM Forster.
Forster's style, which looks simultaneously backward to the epigrammatic polish of Jane Austen and forward to the looser, more discursive amplitude we favour today, resonates strongly in the leisured cadences and playful figuration of the many beautiful descriptions and gently ironic authorial interjections that frame and connect the bright pieces of Smith's mosaic. You can hear it in everything from the stately scene-setting passages (particularly where rooms or houses are being evoked) to the most incidental moments, for example where the lovelorn elder Belsey boy joins his mother and her middle-aged friends at an outdoor festival: "Jerome, in all his gloomy Jeromeity, had joined them. The ill-pitched greetings that compassionate age sings to mysterious youth rang out; hair was almost tousled then wisely not ... "
More specifically, the plot of Forster's Howards End, ingeniously re-engineered, underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty. The unruly Belseys, like Forster's Schlegels, become embroiled with another family whose conventional household seems the stolid opposite of their own. In both cases the wives form a surprising friendship that leads to a valuable legacy being bequeathed by one woman to the other. And in both cases the family of the deceased woman conceals the legacy from her surviving friend.
Orbiting in this capacity around the Belseys are the Kippses, presided over by Sir Monty Kipps, an orotund West Indian intellectual who delights in provoking liberals with his ultra-conservative views on homosexuality, affirmative action and so on. Sir Monty has written a popular appreciation of Rembrandt which Howard Belsey, himself an art historian, though of a more highbrow bent, has denounced for its retrogressive stance. Unfortunately his attack was marred by a factual error which Sir Monty has wasted no time in exploiting to maximum humiliating effect, and vague dislike on Howard's part has turned to boiling resentment, exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to complete his own book, Against Rembrandt. To this self-inflicted injury the opening chapters add two choice insults: first Howard's elder son falls in love with Sir Monty's daughter Vee, and then Sir Monty is offered a visiting celebrity appointment at Wellington, the very college at which Howard himself teaches.
With the self-righteous Kippses thus plumped down on the doorstep of the self-sabotaging Belseys, the situation has the makings of a small-scale campus comedy with scope for all the familiar farcical posturings so dear to the heart of academe. But while Smith does indeed deliver a superbly wicked example of that genre, this is only a small part of her achievement. Large, Forsterian themes of friendship, marriage (the Belseys' is in crisis following Kiki Belsey's discovery that Howard has been unfaithful), social tension, artistic expression (from Rembrandt to Tupac) are meditated on with an unguarded seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, and to some extent the book could be seen as a rather heroic attempt to dignify contemporary life with a mirror held up in the grandly burnishing Bloomsbury manner.
But that isn't quite it either. The word "liminality", which a student of Howard's has to look up at one point (she would have found that it has to do with thresholds and boundaries), perhaps best expresses the driving idea of the novel and the source of its most powerful passages. These occur some way along, after the plot has been laid and the book begins coasting on its own momentum. They consist of a series of encounters in which the discrete worlds incarnated in these highly diverse characters start colliding and breaking each other open. At its most basic, the illumination that results is simply that of the surprise perspective - Levi Belsey applying his hip-hop worldview to a casual thought about Richard Branson: "Levi liked the way the mythical British guy who owned the brand was like a graffiti artist, tagging the world ... " But in its more sustained form this collision principle becomes a way of taking apart and investigating elemental human configurations: parent and child, teacher and student (some of the most sensitive writing I've read on what actually goes on in this particular relationship), black and white, employer and employee.
A degree of psychological violence is always implicit in such mutual broachings: Kiki Belsey's gravitation toward Carlene Kipps is a betrayal of her own husband; minor, but forceful enough to set off a cascade of reappraisals of both Howard and herself in her own mind. Sometimes the impact sets off a whole ricocheting chain of further encounters. Howard Belsey, usually armoured with a sneer (or a snore) against anything overtly "sublime" in art, becomes unexpectedly overwhelmed when a choir breaks into Mozart's Ave Verum at Carlene Kipps's funeral in London. He reels out of the church, the shock of mortality reverberating in his head, and finds himself wandering toward his childhood home in Cricklewood, where his father, whom he hasn't seen for years, still lives. Here, as the conciliatory impulse gives way to ancient antagonisms, a still more devastating confrontation takes place, and Howard careens off again, first to a pub, then to Carlene's wake where, drunk and dazed, he allows himself to be seduced in an upstairs room by ... well, by about the last person on earth he should be allowing himself to be seduced by.
A further pleasure of these charged encounters is the extraordinary vividness with which they have been imagined. Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life.
There are flaws, of course (and not just the portentous title). The beginning feels awkward: remnants of an older style full of grabby italics and wisecracking dialogue sit uncomfortably alongside the richer, more complex tone that takes over. Fussily choreographed bits of physical action (such as Howard showing off hip-hop moves to the gleeful horror of his kids) give some of the early family scenes a sitcom feeling - not so much visualised as televisualised. The plot clunks a bit at first, too: a laboriously contrived trip to London premised on some unconvincing business about a lost address book; the convenient coincidence of Sir Monty being offered a job at Howard's college. More seriously, some of the characters appear blurry or under-drawn - especially Kiki Belsey, who seems intended to embody a kind of feelingful alternative to Howard's hyper-intellectuality but never quite comes out from behind the enormous bosom with which her creator has a little too symbolically endowed her. Also Sir Monty, who's fun, but too cartoonish for his inevitable exposure as a hypocrite to pack much of a punch.
But with so much done so extremely well, it seems ungrateful to dwell on imperfections. Numerous virtues more than make up for them: characters such as Claire Malcolm, an east coast poet/intellectual portrayed with a stunningly accurate feeling for the type. Or Carl, a sharp, touching study of a ghetto teenager making good, done with all the volatile political and sexual currents set in motion by such a progress. Or Howard Belsey himself, who starts out like an escapee from a Malcolm Bradbury novel but whose limitless capacity for folly keeps deepening and strangely sweetening his character. Above all, just the sheer novelistic intelligence - expansive, witty and magnanimous - that irradiates the whole enterprise.
James Lasdun's The Horned Man is published by Vintage
=======>About the Author======>(Source: Wikapedia)
Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith (she changed her name when she was 14) in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne McLean, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and immigrated to England in 1969. It was her father's second marriage. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper Doc Brown. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.
As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist. Literature, however, came to be her principal interest.
Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.[1] In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, Smith was keen to correct a recent newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing (see Short stories) called the May Anthologies. These attracted the attention of a publisher who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by the Wylie Agency on the basis of little more than a first chapter.
White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial script an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards (see Novels).
In interviews she reported that the hype surrounding her first novel had caused her to suffer a short spell of writer's block. Nevertheless, her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as unanimously positive as it had been to White Teeth.
After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a 2002–2003 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. [1] She started work on a book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, in which she considers a selection of 20th century writers through the lens of moral philosophy.
Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College. Smith dedicated On Beauty "for my dear Laird." Laird has published a collection of poems, To a Fault, and a novel, Utterly Monkey, early in 2005. The couple lives in North London, UK.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Tom Byrne Paintings in Paris
Tom Byrne is an Ireland born Parisian painter with 20 years of painting of his belt. Tom's day job is as a freelance illustrator who specializes in creating award winning illustrations for media campaigns, outdoor advertising campaigns, web communication, packaging, large posters, point of sale and F.M.C.G promotion, corporate portraits. Tom's work exudes a spirit that speaks to viewer, with impeccable creative expression. Tom's work will be on display in a NYC galary in beginning of 2008. More of his work can be viewed Tom J.Byrnes Studio
Contact: tj@tjbyrne.com and view updates on Living Painting
Erns 2
The Erns is a beautiful portrait with details the angles of his chiseled face. Many painters focus on the eyes to display a moving subject. I believe an artist must have depth to their soul to be able capture the essence of a subject and project an image that moves the viewer. So delicately achieved in the nape of the subject’s neck.
Title: Erns 2Media: Oils and Tempera
Location: Paris
Size:H 24 inches (61cm) x W 19 inches
©T.J.Byrne
The Cry of the Earth
Tom Byrnes describes this surreal piece…. "This image came to my mind several years ago and I made a drawing. It has continued to come to my mind as the terrible effects of man made climate change wreck havoc on the world. The planet will survive ultimately but as it attempts to cleanse itself of the cause of the damage a lot of ecosystems and species will be destroyed. Something to ponder. Tempera and oils on board."
Title: Earths CryMedia: Tempera and Oils
Location: Paris
Size:
© T.J.Byrne
Title: Amelie with GreenMedia: tempera and Oil
Location: Paris
Size:
© T.J.Byrne
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
NYC's uber-groovy APT Lounge is 8 years old
Why does acid jazz, disco house and trance music sound so much better, and feel so better when one listens to it in an aesthetically exquisite surrounding, with reasonably priced drinks and small prortioned treats? Is it just me, or does the thought of going to a lounge that plays the music you like, no matter how esoteric, bring you immense joy also? If so, check out the APT lounge located in NYC meat packing area.
The apartment has been a staple in New York since the 2000. When the APT lounge opened, there was nothing else in the neighborhood, but the meat packing industry meat lockers. APT has maintained its low key identity as a haven of high quality, diverse music in a superbly designed setting with phenomenal sound system. The club has played host to everyone from Luke Vibert to Grandmaster Flash, Nicky Siano and Laurent Garnier and held residence with Bobbito Garcia, Rick Medina, Theo Parrish, Dirtybird, Jazzy Jeff and many others.
When APT first opened, the address was anonymous. People would walk up and down W. 13th Street for any signs of this nightlife location. It was an interesting idea, if you found the secret buzzer. Once in, one can go to the upstairs restaurant or the downstairs which was a quintessential New York bar with its DJ’s and beautiful people. It looks like a trendy furnished apartment. It’s been there for eight years, the secret is out, a nd it’s still uber-groovy.
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