Moments.Memoires @ NY

the gates of eden

2012-02-02T19:26:00.000Z

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden

The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden

With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden

The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what's real and what is not
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

Bob Dylan - Gates of Eden

Reverse Television

2012-01-31T18:11:00.000Z

"Reverse Television" was created in the mid-1980's by video artist Bill Viola. The 30-second portraits were about portraiture and the idea of a person staring at the viewer (as the viewer stares at the TV screen). Conceived of as a "micro-series," the work features 42 30-second portraits of television viewers in their living rooms. The portraits appear very formally composed, with attention paid to composition, lighting, and color. The viewers sit quietly, only occasionally making a slight shift in position. No external sound score has been added, so that the only sounds heard are sync sounds that have been heightened. These sounds include viewers' clothing when they move, swallowing, and background noises, such as traffic outside the viewer's home or a dog barking in the distance.

The portraits were all of people from around the Boston area; all were shot in their own living room (or TV room). It was intended that these portraits would appear during programming breaks one at a time with no indication to the viewer of what they were. They were to appear often, so that a viewer who might not recognize what he or she saw once would gradually see more than one and become intrigued.

Series The New Television Workshop originated at WGBH, a public broadcasting station in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1974 to support the creation and development of experimental video art. This experimental programming included dance, drama, music, performance and visual arts on video and film. As early as 1968, WGBH was committed to the development of video art through residency programs, with artists such as Nam June Paik, and the "Rockefeller Artists-in-Television" project. Many of these early works (pre-1974) were broadcast both locally and nationally.

As an umbrella for arts related programming, the Workshop included "Artist's Showcase, " "Frames of Reference, " "Dance for Camera, " "Poetry Breaks," and "New Television," as well as acquired arts programming. Individual works were created for "Visions," a series produced by WNET (New York), and "Alive From Off Center," a series produced by KTCA (St. Paul - Minneapolis). The Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund was co-founded by the Workshop and Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in the 1980's, to commission works by video artists. In 1993 the Workshop ceased production at WGBH.

floating world

2012-01-31T17:40:00.000Z

Photo by Darien Bates | Preston Martin, left, and Black-Eyed Susan in John Jesurun’s “Stopped Bridge of Dreams.”

If Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams and William Gibson had gotten together, maybe become a little drunk, and decided to pull a literary all-nighter, the resulting collaboration might have had something of the flavor of John Jesurun’s “Stopped Bridge of Dreams.”

Read More | By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO (Published: January 30, 2012) - NYTimes

mood

2012-01-31T12:58:00.000Z

Arash Ashkar

melancholic america

2012-01-31T12:46:00.000Z

Norman Rockwell’s rosy illustrations of small town American life looked so photographic because his method was to copy photographs that he conceived and meticulously directed, working with various photographers and using friends and neighbors as his models.

just starting and being 'covered' already!!!

2012-01-30T18:35:00.001Z

east village boys

2012-01-30T18:12:00.001Z

BIG ART GROUP, GENERALLY TAKING OVER

out there: 'no mona lisa'

2012-01-30T18:08:00.001Z

I am magnum mouthed
honey snatched
my flavor changes constantly
No Mona Lisa
I stroll like a sailor
bullets pass thru me and I keep moving.
No Mona Lisa
I don't hang around
but if I have it for you
you are lucky
you can take it to the track
you can take it to the bank
you can deposit it
No Mona Lisa
No sidelong glance
no rolling eye
supposition, preposition
have no place in my communication.
When I talk
you know exactly what I mean.
Mona Lisa has no mouth,
no cunt,
she stops at the waist.
I hate that bitch!
My head turns from side to side
My brain, mouth and cunt all work.
No Mona Lisa
I can't be displayed, restored
or evaluated.
No Mona Lisa
I read the writing on the wall behind me.
No Mona Lisa
I don't preview.
No Mona Lisa.
No auction.
No rebate.
No Mona Lisa
I don't discount, price down or go on sale.
No Mona Lisa
When I'm in love I stay wet all the time!
Mona Lisa has no mouth, no cunt, she stops at the waist.
I hate that bitch!
No Mona Lisa
No side long manipulation.
I never had a father.
I never learned how to be that kind of whore.
You need a daddy to practice that kind of stalking.
You need a daddy.
I never apprenticed to my mother.
I wasn't well for that center of attention and protection.
I was nobody’s angel.
nobody’s princess.
nobody's baby.
I grew wild, uncultivated, ungroomed, unprotected,
To a position of power
I'm a loner. You are lucky.
I know what you want, when you want it, how you want it.
I deliver without a sermon.
My religion has no pope, no choir, no hope
I'm a loner. You are lucky.
No Mona Lisa
I never learned how to simmer contentedly.
I boil over continuously.
Hot sweet syrup between my legs
When I am in love I stay wet all the time!
No Mona Lisa
I cannot be catalogued or dissertated
I cannot be viewed from a different angle,
a different perspective.
I cannot be seen in a different light.
Mona Lisa has no mouth! No cunt! She stops at the waist!
I hate that bitch!
Mona Lisa sits.
I stand
two lightening bolts in my fists
a crescent moon over my cunt.
No Mona Lisa
I cannot be swayed, rehung or framed.
I don't need special lights, special glass
or a smoke free environment.
No Mona Lisa
No refracted light, no insurance.
I am no collector's item.
no curators pet.
I am no one's voyeur, no one's witness.
I cannot be replicated, calendared
or placed on coffee mugs.
No Mona Lisa
I am 3D
You can touch me.
I touch back.
I bite back, spit back, talk back.
No Mona Lisa
No Gioconda smile
No Mona Lisa
I tell you the truth.
I am ruthless.
You are lucky.

acquaintances

2012-01-30T17:52:00.000Z

Black-Eyed Susan

is telepresence a "hole in space"?

2012-01-24T22:15:00.000Z

In 1980, artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz created a “Hole in Space” by linking bigger-than-life displays in New York and LA with a satellite feed. It was the mother of all video chats — they showed that size and bandwidth matter in communicating presence and emotion. For three days, the installation brought together people from across the country in a way they had heretofore never experienced.

"I am none of the above." (Lynn Hershman Leeson)

2012-01-24T18:46:00.000Z

DEEP CONTACT (1984-9), interactive video still

Hershman Leeson has recently noted: ‘According to a national [US] database, there are several people in the United States named Lynn Hershman. For example, Lynn Hershman was born November 14, 1949, in Connecticut and died February 19, 1976. Lynn Hershman also lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California; Manteca, California; and Phoenix, Arizona. I am none of the above.’ It might be said that the artist’s project has been in part aimed at unhinging our tendency (in the art world and beyond) to think we know who an artist/individual is and what kind of expression is properly connected to her through the shorthand of her name.

Enacting a perpetual process of virtual becoming, Hershman stages the self as both simulacral and embodied. LH←→RB: they exist as the interrelated sides of one Möbius strip of selfhood.

perfume genius - preview

2012-01-24T17:37:00.002Z

Meredith Monk - Interdisciplinary since the 60's

2012-01-24T17:36:00.000Z

Meredith Monk, '16mm Earrings', 1966, performance, still. Courtesy the artist.

The first work to interrogate this style was her solo performance 16mm Earrings, made when Monk was 23 years old. Describing it as a personal breakthrough in terms of how it shaped her later work, 16mm Earrings is a matrix for Monk's practice: a heady collision of sound, film, dance and voice. Working with various fragments and fictional scenarios - including a reading of Wilhelm Reich's text 'The Function of Orgasm' (1940); a series of 16mm films projected onto Monk's body and onto customised screens; a rendition of 'Greensleeves', slowed, looped and expanded; and a paper effigy of Monk that burns at the climax of the performance - 16mm Earrings comprises of an eccentric and personal syntax of gesture and image, where the former attempts to physicalise the latter.

Last night at LaMaMa, Monk talked about her career and how that career became so close to the LaMaMa Theatre and together, amongst other movements and artists (Monk being one of those avant-garde generation of artists at the time), helped shape the world of Performance Art as we know it. She talked about the needs and the impulses that led her to make such a different range of works, since thinking how to abolish the usual and common place of the spectator, to re-thinking the use of the voice as a tool and mean to achieve other results such as sculpture, installations, performances, choreographies, happenings... New York was the place where "painters were making sculptures, sculptors were writing poems, poets began to write plays, musicians were making movies, etc..."; everything was happening at the same time and it was a matter of life or death, things had to be done.
Amongst many other things a revisiting some of her early works the talk ended with the news of a new generation of artists wanting to "save" and "revisit" Monk's vocal's pieces in a new work that contains remixes and re-interpretations of some of her famous works. Is this a prelude to what contemporary art is turning into? Make it commercial, make it big, revisit the abstract and misunderstood work of the past and turn it into new-hype-avant-garde masterpieces?

'No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.'
From 'No Manifesto', 1965, reprinted in Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2006, p.263.

RIP | Etta James

2012-01-20T19:21:00.002Z

stopped bridge of dreams

2012-01-20T05:08:00.001Z

Stopped Bridge of Dreams - DIR. JOHN JESURUN
@ LA MAMA - ELLEN STEWART THEATRE

the future fights... web on strike!

2012-01-18T17:11:00.002Z

FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

the parade ends

2012-01-16T23:34:00.001Z

Passing through the exploding streets,
since the pipes are ready to give out
passing around the buildings, we need to dodge,
since they are falling onto us,
between the hostile faces scrutinizing and sentencing us,
between the closed establishments,
closed markets,
closed movie theaters,
closed parks,
closed cafés.
Exhibiting already dusty signs (justifications) occasionally,
CLOSED FOR REFORMS,
CLOSED FOR REPARATION.
What kind of reparation?
When will this alleged reparation, alleged reform end?
When at least
will it begin?
Closed... closed... closed...
everything closed...
I arrive and open the innumerable locks, run up the improvised stairwell.
There she is waiting for me.
I discover her, remove the canvas and contemplate her dusty and cold
dimensions.
I get rid of the dust and caress her.
With the slightest brushes from my palms, I clean her back, her base, her
sides.
I feel desperate, happy, at her side, before her,
I run my hands over her keys, and rapidly, everything is set in motion.
The ta ta, the jingling, the music starts, little by little, already much
faster,
now, at the greatest velocity.
Walls, trees, streets,
cathedrals, faces and beaches,
cells, mini-cells,
giant cells,
starry night, naked
feet, pine groves, clouds
hundreds, thousands,
a million parrots
piano stools and a vine.
Everything shows up, everything arrives, everyone comes.
The walls expand, the ceiling disappears and, naturally, you float,
you float, float ripped apart, swept along,
elevated,
taken, transported, eternalized,
saved, for the sake of, and
for this miniscule and constant cadence,
for this music,
for this incessant jingling.

Reinaldo Arenas

opening this week

2012-01-16T23:25:00.001Z

[Daily: 2012-01-13]

La MaMa E.T.C. presents STOPPED BRIDGE OF DREAMS by John Jesurun

running for the oscar - again - Tilda Swinton

2012-01-16T23:19:00.002Z

finally Melancholia

2012-01-16T23:17:00.000Z

Photo by Christian Geisnaes

Still playing in Angelika Film Center down in West Houston the new Lars Von Trier movie. Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg (+ Charlotte Rampling) are the women locked in his vision of the end of the world.

The whole movie runs in a very slowly pace - caution: not to watch if you're tired -, a pace that is not as full of tension as in some of his other movies (remembering Dogville and Antichrist), but a pace that lacks tension, a pace that makes the minutes grow into hours, and the whole movie into an endless wait for the the 'end of the world'.

Once again women are taken as the main responsible for catharsis... women and children, the signs of innocence once again turned into signs of a devilish fever that is present in the world.

The title is pretty much the feeling of the movie, and for that matter is probably - once again - well thought and structured, even though you might want to have patience to watch or not.

Comparing to all different 'ends of the world' that everyone has already seen, Melancholia approaches it in a way where Charlotte Gainsbourg has not left at all her character in the previous movie and on the second part of the movie she keeps fighting an inner feeling of fear. A fear that turns out to become true in a very poetic and melancholic way. A feeling that sets around ten minutes after the movie starts and that grows until the end. Peacefully.

brooklyn in the 80's

2012-01-16T22:58:00.001Z

Directed by Noah Baumbach (2005)

Under the Radar Festival, Alexis - A greek tragedy

2012-01-16T22:46:00.004Z

The dialogues keep multiplying and echoing, contracting and expanding, blurring and zooming into focus. In the raw and resonant “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy,” one of the opening works in the Under the Radar festival of experimental theater, conversation is hardly limited to the words exchanged by the actors on the stage of the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa.

read more here

MOTUS
Devised and directed by Enrico Casagrande & Daniela Nicolò
with Silvia Calderoni, Vladimir Aleksic, Benno Steinegger, Alexandra Sarantopoulou
with the collaboration of Michalis Traitsis, Giorgina Pilozzi, assistant director Nicolas Lehnebach

starting the goodbyes

2012-01-05T18:35:00.002Z

BODY PRESSURE

2012-01-05T18:33:00.000Z

Doing Bruce Nauman's 'Body Pressure' on New Year's Eve

Body Pressure

Press as much of the front surface of
your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek)
against the wall as possible.
Press very hard and concentrate.
Form an image of yourself (suppose you
had just stepped forward) on the
opposite side of the wall pressing
back against the wall very hard.
Press very hard and concentrate on the image pressing very hard.
(the image of pressing very hard)
press your front surface and back surface
toward each other and begin to ignore or
block the thickness of the wall. (remove the wall)
Think how various parts of your body
press against the wall; which parts
touch and which do not.
Consider the parts of your back which
press against the wall; press hard and
feel how the front and back of your
body press together.
Concentrate on the tension in the muscles,
pain where bones meet, fleshy deformations that occur under pressure; consider
body hair, perspiration, odors (smells).
This may become a very erotic exercise.

Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974, (c) 2002 Bruce Nauman /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

still from last year!

2012-01-04T21:44:00.001Z

January... i hope!

2012-01-02T21:46:00.001Z

On January 26 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Antony Hegarty and Antony and the Johnsons will debut a "large-scale concert and performance event" titled "Swanlights". Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, "Swanlights" will feature music from all of Antony's albums performed by a 60-piece orchestra, with symphonic arrangement by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Maxim Moston. The performance is "envisioned as a meditation on light, nature, and femininity," according to a press release.

common people

2012-01-02T21:44:00.001Z

happy new year

2012-01-01T00:31:00.000Z

revealing life from the past...

2011-12-28T21:49:00.000Z

Do you remember your first email????

Written by a "scully666@compuserve.com" and addressed to a "makincopeez@prodigy.net," the writer expresses the ancient equivalent of boredom, asks the receiver about his or her status in their primeval office environment, then refers to the act of sending the e-mail itself.

"Nothing going on," begins the e-mail. "What's up with you? Are you going to Mike's b-day thing on Friday? I'm thinking about it. I might go, but I'm not sure yet."

The e-mail continues, "Let me know if you get this e-mail twice. I'm still trying to learn the system. I think the managers know when we're on the Net, so I'll stay away from the web surfing and check my e-mail only once a day."

The e-mail is signed only "K." It contains no subject line.

"It shows that these forgotten people of the '90s had many of the same concerns as modern man, such as b-days, and slow periods at work," Caspari said. "The presence of the archaic slang verbalization 'what's up' appears to indicate that they cared about the immediate welfare of others in their closely knit community, much as we do today."

read here

not very seasonal but yet...

2011-12-28T05:06:00.000Z

Gem Club - 252 from Gem Club on Vimeo.

greetings from CultureHub

2011-12-27T21:50:00.000Z

culturehub.org

la noche que nos separa, la noche que nos une

2011-12-27T21:39:00.000Z

Mi muchacha salvaje, hemos tenido
que recobrar el tiempo
y marchar hacia atrás, en la distancia
de nuestras vidas, beso a beso,
recogiendo de un sitio lo que dimos
sin alegría, descubriendo en otro
el camino secreto
que iba acercando tus pies a los míos,
y así bajo mi boca
vuelves a ver la planta insatisfecha
de tu vida alargando sus raíces
hacia mi corazón que te esperaba.
Y una a una las noches
entre nuestras ciudades separadas
se agregan a la noche que nos une.
La luz de cada día,
su llama o su reposo
nos entregan, sacándolos del tiempo,
y así se desentierra
en la sombra o la luz nuestro tesoro,
y así besan la vida nuestros besos:
todo el amor en nuestro amor se encierra:
toda la sed termina en nuestro abrazo.
Aquí estamos al fin frente a frente,
nos hemos encontrado,
no hemos perdido nada.
Nos hemos recorrido labio a labio,
hemos cambiado mil veces
entre nosotros la muerte y la vida,
todo lo que traíamos
como muertas medallas
lo echamos al fondo del mar,
todo lo que aprendimos
no nos sirvió de nada:
comenzamos de nuevo,
terminamos de nuevo
muerte y vida.
Y aquí sobrevivimos,
puros, con la pureza que nosotros creamos,
más anchos que la tierra que no pudo extraviarnos,
eternos como el fuego que arderá
cuanto dure la vida.

Pablo Neruda

Xmas in Miami

2011-12-26T08:32:00.003Z

far and close... on the road...

2011-12-24T20:36:00.003Z

...And one by one the nights
between our separated cities
are joined to the night that unites us.
The light of each day,
its flame or its repose,
they deliver to us, taking them from time,
and so our treasure
is disinterred in shadow or light,
and so our kisses kiss life:
all love is enclosed in our love:
all thirst ends in our embrace.
Here we are at last...

Pablo Neruda

Somebody's House Always Burns At Christmas

2011-12-23T07:07:00.001Z

DATALORE

2011-12-19T21:38:00.002Z

Long, too long America...

2011-12-19T16:56:00.002Z

Foster Owego, NY - 2011 ©BarbaraAnastacio

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and
peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish,
advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children
en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse
really are?)

W. Whitman

I'm not here

2011-12-16T22:35:00.000Z

You know how when sometimes you have that feeling that something is just not right? How things can change from one seconde to the other without even having awareness that something is changing? Sometimes I wish I could read minds... or at least how to read my own fucking mind.

It's an absurd to have this feeling that something is wrong when you've tried so hard to do things right and at some level you feel like you haven't done enough. Like to feel that because you did all the things you thought that would be right then something actually, along the way, might have become the wrong thing to do. And you don't even took it as a bad thing, you look back and you don't even think that it was really a bad thing, you don't even actually know what it was that you did, that transformed people's eyes. That on some level of uncounciessness you feel like the eyes lay on you with a slight feeling of regret or - I would say prejudice but it's not that - with a slight feeling of unsatisfaction or, even worse, of disbelief... New York is a big city, and I have often this feeling of living outside of something and I don't even know what brought me to this place and question everything again, question my own capacities, my own trust, my own awareness, my own value. In this city which I've immersed in the last few months I have felt a whole range of different feelings and emotions that made me think of an own absense - as when one is absent from himself, from being away and not being able to put out its roots - that one knows that will be due soon.

People often say that it's better to do whatever you want to do so you don't regret not having done them, but how can one regret something that he doesn't know that he was supposed to do? Or not?

Three months later this is a feeling of half being part and an incomplete part, an unkown part of something that is missing somewhere within or outside myself. I wish I knew better, I wish I could keep track of all the things I do and stop being so uptight about blaming myself for something that I just wonder about, that I fantasize, that I've created around my own existence and that does not let me count for the things that I've actually done.

[start - over]

live stream

2011-12-14T07:54:00.000Z

tune in to watch at 2.30pm EST or watch the recorded stream of Digital Dialogues

rehearsals | Digital Dialogues @ CultureHub

2011-12-13T05:56:00.001Z

actors (David and Sarah) and artistic director (Baba Israel) in Manchester, UK

actor, artistic director and media technician in New York

actors (Charlotte L. Brathwaite and Daniel Pinheiro) and CultureHub's artistic director (Billy Clark) in New York

Photos by Lindsey Medeiros

Rehearsing for Verbally Challenged | Digital Dialogues (a collaboration between CultureHub, NY and Contact Theatre, Manchester, UK) happening on December 14th.

Body of Work | Karol Radziszewski

2011-12-13T05:46:00.000Z

SPLATTERPOOL ARTSPACE in Brooklyn NY.
BODY OF WORK is the first solo exhibition in the United States by the Polish artist Karol Radziszewski.

Manipulating and driving the viewer’s gaze into the analysis of performance and body art of the 70s, by a strong conceptual attitude Radziszewski questions the idea of masculinity in the contemporary society. Radziszewski’s work comes out in a society where traces of homophobia, phallocentrism, racism and sexism, all issues that have characterized the modernism age, are back. The idea of masculinity comes together with the idea of metrosexuality, that outbreaks also in the United States in the 90’s: the idea of Sport and the Athlete-body as the only way to save the weak male from the effeminate attitude (so as it was in the Fascist era in Italy): the idea of Military, War and Fight (see at this point “Fag-Fighters”, Karol Radziszewski 2007).

Born in Bialystok (Poland) in 1980, Karol lives in Warsaw where he works as non-media-specific artist (he works with video, performance, installation, painting, photography), as curator and author of interdisciplinary projects and, last but not least, he is Editor-in-chief of “DIK Fagazine”.

Edited by Nicola Ruben Montini in Posi+tive Magazine

famous people I've see/met in NY

2011-12-13T05:18:00.000Z

Amanda Lepore
Cazwell
Michael Stipe
Terry Richardson
Alec Baldwin
John Cameron Mitchell
Justin Bond
Julia Stiles
Diane Lane

found objects

2011-12-13T04:15:00.001Z

gifts from overseas

2011-12-13T04:11:00.001Z

America

2011-12-07T18:35:00.001Z

Many of Del Rey's songs express a powerful desire to be submissive to powerful men. In most cases, it's framed as fantasy, but in the case of her internet hit "Video Games," she's singing about feeling disappointed by a guy who's too distracted, lazy and passive to give her the drama and intensity she's craving. It's easy to see why a lot of people, particularly young women, are relating to this music – she's clearly not the only lady out there wondering why they're among a generation of dudes who have more in common with shlubby, sensitive characters from Judd Apatow movies than brooding alpha males like Don Draper. At her best, Del Rey spins this frustration into sexy pop that practically dares her male listeners to man up and meet her halfway in living out a vintage Hollywood dream.

found projects

2011-12-02T18:59:00.001Z

road trip

2011-11-29T06:27:00.001Z

Motel Reflection (somewhere in the Niagara Falls - 2011)

Gas Girl (on the road to the Niagara Falls - 2011)

I AM: A REAL ARTIST

2011-11-28T21:01:00.001Z

Born in 1930, Keith Arnatt's life as an artist falls into two distinct parts. In the late l960s his iconoclastic and witty performances, sculptures and texts, challenging the tenet of 'art', established him as an influential Conceptual artist.

But then in the mid 1970s, in an act defying the prevailing values of the art world, Arnatt chose to become a photographer instead. Over the following 28 years he immersed himself in the history of photography, making progressive photo series in the immediate vicinity of his home in South Wales.

Happy Thanks Giving

2011-11-26T04:32:00.001Z

It's a wonderful life in NY

2011-11-22T21:00:00.001Z

www.myblocknyc.com

On composing

2011-11-22T06:48:00.001Z

"There is always so much in a work that we are unaware of having put there. (...) It seems to me that when these elements, known and unknown, counscious and unconsious, mesh perfectly an overtune is produced, a synchronicity created, that sings off the page and becomes a 'work of art' rather than simply 'authorship.' "

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.

I AM THE HOLIDAY WINDOW

2011-11-21T22:33:00.001Z

Window at French Connection, USA - SoHo, NY (2011)

1st series of an Identity Project

2011-11-21T21:04:00.001Z

last week's top of performa: Liz Magic Laser

2011-11-21T20:40:00.000Z

Scene from Liz Magic Laser's "I Feel Your Pain." Photo credit: Yola Monakhov

For Performa 11, Liz Magic Laser ~~will present~~ presented a new mixed-media performance, I Feel Your Pain, that will restage America’s recent political contests as a romantic drama. Drawing on a variety of agitprop theater tactics, particularly the Russian Constructivist idea of a “living newspaper,” the performance will examine how emotion is used to establish authenticity on America’s political stage. Staged in a movie theater, the performance will take place in the midst of the audience and on the cinema’s screen. Eight actors will perform a sequence of scenes that will trace the progression of a romantic relationship in adapted dialogues from political interviews and press conferences. Borrowing elements from historic “living newspaper” productions, the performance will feature live voice-overs, pantomime fight scenes, and mute commentaries by a clown. As the actors perform, footage from two cinematographers will be projected onto the screen as a continuous live-feed, and Laser will act as a real time editor, choosing which camera angles the audience will see.

For me it felt just like being in some of the John Cassavetes's movies, like in 'Opening Night'. The seats of the SVA Theatre were almost full with a huge audience that followed on and off the screen Liz's parody of America's own love story. Just that was by itself overwhelming, bringing theatre into the cinema and making bringing it to its own level by playing around with the language of meta-cinema, building up a story where you could either choose to be a part of it or just go through your pop-corn inside the movie theatre. As an example of the Performa festival (which meets its end today) this piece can somewhat be related to what live-performance is turning into, a hybrid between languages and expressions but somehow mediated and blurring the limitations between all of them. In this three-live camera shoot of a theatre play being turned into a live movie, all that it missed was probably the fact that it wasn't going into a live-stream; by live-streaming it, which nowadays becomes easier everyday, the art piece could have a been a full-length movie online free for everyone to watch and still bring an internet audience to think that probably it would be better if they were there seating and being part of the live experience!

...Similar to her recent, warmly-received performances Flight at PS1, in which references to violent movie scenes enacted on a staircase, and Chase, a staging of Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play Man Equals Man around ATM vestibules, actors reframe bits of political interviews amongst the audience in I Feel Your Pain. Performers – Lynn Berg, Audrey Crabtree, Ray Field, Annie Fox, Kathryn Grody, Rafael Jordan, Liz Micek, and Ryan Shams – are surrounded by a throng of black-clad cameramen and projected on a screen, while Laser selects camera angles from a projection room. more

141 Wooster Street

2011-11-21T20:26:00.001Z

[no pictures allowed] video taken from here

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. Long-term installation at
141 Wooster Street, New York City. Photo: John Cliett. Copyright Dia Art Foundation.

The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist, the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist.

The New York Earth Room has been on long-term view to the public since 1980. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.

Walter De Maria was born in 1935 in Albany, California, and studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960 he moved to New York City, where he continues to live and work. With Robert Whitman, De Maria cofounded a gallery at 9 Great Jones Street, Manhattan, in 1963, and held a show of his sculptures there that year. His work was included in the "Primary Structures" exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966. De Maria has had numerous international shows, at venues including the Kunsthaus Zürich (1999), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1991), the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1987), and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1984).

Benetton is Back!

2011-11-18T17:31:00.001Z

Liberty Plaza [empty]

2011-11-17T20:30:00.001Z

Lonesome Cowboys or the story of Ramona and Julian

2011-11-15T07:52:00.000Z

(Andy Warhol) 1968

Lonesome Cowboys was shot at the end of January 1968 in Tucson Arizona - on location in Old Tucson and at the Rancho Linda Vista Dude ranch 20 miles outside the city where some John Wayne movies had been filmed. (L&D285)

It was edited by Andy while he was recuperating from the gunshot wounds inflicted by Valerie Solanas on June 3, 1968 and won Best Film at the San Francisco Film Festival in November.

Yvonne Rainer vs. Marina Abramovic

2011-11-15T07:08:00.001Z

After being present and having her own life and death staged, Abramovic's was building a new performance for the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art where naked bodies and rotating heads were the center pieces of an on-going dinner where the audience played the rules of the performance... in the artist's words: "... and I want this to feel as though we're observing and being observed."

Last Friday, after having attended a rehearsal of the performance, Yvonne Rainer sent a letter in opposition to this, in her words, “exploitative” performance.

“I hope the performance itself will bring some kind of dignity, serenity, and concentration to the normal situation of a gala, and actually change the energy of the space. … “All these accusations, you can’t have them before you actually experience the situation and see how I can change the atmosphere, that’s my main purpose.”

Ms. Abramovic statement on Artinfo

NAKED AS THEY CAME: EATING WITH NUDES AT Marina Abramovic's LA MOCA GALA-PERFORMANCE

... As the crowd moved in to find their seats—among them artists like Shepard Fairey, John Baldessari, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha; arts supporters Maria Bell, Dasha Zhukova; actresses Rosanna Arquette and Kirsten Dunst; and dealers like Honor Fraser (co-chair Larry Gagosian didn’t make it, having already left for an art fair in Abu Dhabi)—we found ourselves face to face, or in some cases, face to crotch, with Ms. Abramovic’s centerpieces, aka the aforementioned supposedly economically exploited actors. Yes, Ms. Abramovic continued on her performance art trajectory of 2010 and caused us all a bit of initial shock. Here’s how it went: At each of the round tables, a nude woman was stretched out, draped with a skeleton. As in Ms. Abramovic’s own performance with a skeleton, these women were instructed to show no emotion and remain immobile. At the rectangular tables, things were a little different—heads popped out of the middle of each rectangular table, and rotating slowly, the actors seated, below the table,on lazy Susans. Since the event was 3 hours plus, and these centerpieces were not allowed to leave their respective posts, they were all wearing Depends, a source told The Observer, on condition on anonymity. We thought we knew the head at our table but, respecting the dictate of ‘no touching, feeding, or communication (other than the non-verbal kind) we were unable to say, “Don’t I know you?” (read the full article here)

family friends

2011-11-15T06:58:00.001Z

I heard this when watching a live concert somewhere around Lower East Side. I was with a group of recently acquired friends here in NY. This was said as portrait of New York while the singer was dedicating his song to his 'family friends' - meaning that in this city, where most of the people aren't from here they find a new family within the new friends they make. Friends from work, friends from social groups, friends derived from strange acquaintances, friends of different friends... that get together in gatherings (sometimes all of them, sometimes in small parts of a whole). This made me think about my own friends (which as a consequence/circumstance of growing up have diminished into this small group of really close persons whose I don't consider myself as a person if I'm not near (or feel far near) from them; and also made me think about this new additions that due to the new environment I've been (as every social being) 'forced' to interact with and the thought continued to become a conclusion that even though almost every breathing existence is capable of co-existing with similar or different specimens of all different creatures we tend to find our different families wherever we are. Here in NY I've met some people some Friends from work, friends from social groups, friends derived from strange acquaintances, friends of different friends that have become after this two months my family, fortunately people that I relate with and that made me feel at home from the very beginning even if almost anyone is actually from here. I've felt alone in this situation of 'home disembodiment', and home is where the hear is so like a new friend of mine said today, I'll wear my heart in a sleeve so everyone can see it and feeling at home becomes easier wherever I go. I thought about similar experiences and I've found family friends across the places I've been and although sometimes time isn't enough and I feel unfulfilled for not being able to get everyone together, that's what family is. Even if the family concept sometimes feels to tiny, full of limitations, this larger family that we're able to build throughout our lives is a process that becomes silent and unconscious which I've been aware during the last few months because I feel at home. Away from the one's I love, but close to people that make it worth it. It's not only about wine and good laughs, but it's about road trips, sharing beds, splitting costs, trusting each other, and having a few laughs in the end... with a good wine.

last week's top of performa: Boris Charmatz

2011-11-11T22:49:00.001Z

Manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre.

Boris Charmatz performs at the Musée de la Danse. Photograph: Adeline Keil

To not cut the matter short, ten commandments:

a micro-museum
but a real one. It fully embraces its museum tasks and maintains a balance between its
various functions of conservation, creation, research, exhibition, diffusion, raising of public
awareness, mediation, without neglecting any of them. Such interdependence is what justifies
the creation of a museal structure.
(...)
an immediate museum
it exists as soon as the first gesture has been performed.

Boris Charmatz
Written in Leipzig, Berlin, Vienne, Rennes, Vanves, Bruxelles,
Montreuil, in the space of a few obstinate nights.

read more about the Performa11

terry vs. terry

2011-11-11T22:36:00.001Z

The opening reception for my new show Mom Dad is this Friday from 6-8 at the Half Gallery, located at 208 Forsyth Street in NYC… come check it out!
Terry Richardson

material (art) girl

2011-11-11T22:26:00.001Z

BRUCE LABRUCE: Gay Culture is Dead

2011-11-10T21:59:00.001Z

La Bruce: “Gay Culture is Dead.” (We say, “Finally, now can we get back to what we do best?”)

Bruce LaBruce writes: “Gay culture is dead. I guess the idea of gay culture was always an oxymoron, but lately I find myself declaring to it more definitively, “You’re dead to me,” as you might say to a former lover. Now, the gay movement is a zombie movement. It vaguely looks like its former self, operating remotely like it used to, going through the motions. But there’s no real life to it, no purpose, beyond bland consumerism.

The engine of the gay movement used to be an idea of adventurous and extreme sexuality. Gay culture itself was regarded by the status quo as something pornographic and sexually radical. Today, with the emergence of the gay conservatism, pornography appears to be the last bastion of sexual radicalism. That’s why I always express solidarity with gay pornographers. They’re the last glimmer of glamour in the gay movement.”

tomorrow

2011-11-10T18:10:00.003Z

On 11 November 2011 the time will have arrived: in 11 European cities, more than 60 artists with some 300 more aiders & abettors – will initiate moments of encounter and confrontation in the heart of everyday life. Together, they will make time stand still.

Pause

What is being exchanged?

>> 11moments.org

performa festival

2011-11-10T18:02:00.001Z

the bath

2011-11-05T21:45:00.001Z

The Bath by Paul Cadmus, 1951

The Bath by Bill Costa (Homage to Paul Cadmus), 1985

[contains spoilers] the skin i live in

2011-11-04T18:51:00.002Z

La Piel Que Habito is a psychological thriller very different from anyother Almodóvar's movies. It's set in 2012 resembling a science fiction movie by the subject is dealing with. Antonio Banderas plays the Frankstein dream of building a human skin free of diseases and injuries after his wife died burned up. Almost the whole movie runs in a flashback kind of way to let us know what is already perceived in the beggining of the movie. Transgender, Identity, Plastic Surgery are the objects of study in this new movie where Elena Anaya acts in a magnificient way.

After his incursions in the queer, travesti and transgender issues, Almodóvar takes a ride inside Thierry Jonquet's book "Mygale" builiding up a plot where the main character's identity gets trans-gendered having him (Vicente Piñeiro) starting this journey of being kidnappend until becoming Vera Cruz the skin clone version of Robert Ledgard (Banderas) diseased wife.

The movie ends at the point where one wonders where this new person is, in a point of no return, where it has nothing more than the memory of what he was and has lived with nothing else than trying to learn how to live in this this new skin. "Soy Vicente..." is the last line of the movie and at the moment it fades to a Jean Paul Gautier's credits roll the question remains... "Eres Vicente... pero eres Vera Cruz, y ahora?"

Enlightened

2011-11-02T17:18:00.000Z

The new HBO tv show stars Laura Dern. Going for it's 5th episode next week Enlightened shows Amy (Laura Dern) going through a state of change, a woman who is struggling to put herself together after a life of misbehaviour... It brings up some similiarities to the inner struggle of Julia Roberts playing Erin Brockovich in a light David Lynch set of this America (aka World) where retreats of enlightenenment have the price of gold. But just as Ghandi used to say... “Be the change you want to see in the world.” even if that means you have to fake it and take a deep breathe everytime you curse someone or feel like jumping on top of them and KILLING them just because you feel like it, and the world doesn't suit you at all...

jersey girls

2011-11-02T16:22:00.002Z

Jersey Girls by Jenny&Lee

missing home

2011-11-02T15:57:00.001Z

Electronic Propinquity

2011-10-31T15:44:00.000Z

Electronic propinquity refers then to electronic proximity, or electronic nearness, or electronic presence. Here it should be noted that electronic propinquity is not synonymous with

communication although it may appear as such. One can have a WATS Line and a potential set of relationships and still not communicate. Electronic propinquity allows for the possibility of communication, but isn't communication itself.

Propinquity is, of course, a variable: one can be more or less far or near somebody else. One can be close in voice, and far in image. One can be close in image and voice, and far in touch and smell (and taste if you will). Respectively, these values of propinquity would correspond roughly and not exhaustively to, for example, the following media: the telephone and video-phone.

>> read more

happy halloween...

2011-10-31T15:41:00.001Z

on gender issues

2011-10-31T05:14:00.001Z

All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.
-- Derek Jarman

nearly 90

2011-10-27T23:07:00.000+01:00

one of the set designers: Annie Kwon las night ARTALKed at Culturehub

duck sauce

2011-10-27T16:24:00.000+01:00

LOST - Online Project

2011-10-21T18:00:00.001+01:00

LOST - Online Project (a collaboration project between Flávio Rodrigues & Daniel Pinheiro)

Jarman ONLINE

2011-10-21T17:53:00.002+01:00

Things have got awfully tidy recently. There is a lot of finish on things. Clingfilm gloss and the neatest of hospital corners. The formula merchants are out in force. They are in the market for guaranteed product. They go out looking for film-makers with the nous of one who might consider employing halogen spotlights in the hopes of attracting wild cats into a suburban garden. They are missing the point. Don’t they know the roulette wheel is fixed? That the croupier is a cardsharp? Do these people not watch old movies? It’s the spirited that hold the hands in the long run, it always was – the low-key for the long term, the irreverent, the cheats, the undaunted and inspired rule-breakers, not the goody-goody industrial types with their bedside manners and managerial know-how…

I have always wholeheartedly treasured in your work the whiff of the school play. It tickles me still and I miss it terribly. The antidote it offers to the mirror ball of the marketable – the artful without the art, the meaningful devoid of meaning – is meat and drink to so many of us looking for that dodgy wig, that moment of awkward zing, that loose corner where we might prise up the carpet and uncover the rich slates of something we might recognise as spirit underneath. Something raw and dusty and inarticulate, for heaven’s sake.

- From “Letter to an Angel,” a remembrance by Tilda Swinton at The Guardian

Derek Jarman @ Fandor

mic checking since 1967

2011-10-20T04:41:00.002+01:00

WALL STREET IS WAR STREET

The traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers—but the coffins return to the Bronx and Harlem. Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange of death. Profits rise to the ticker tape of your dead sons. Poison gas RAINS on Vietnam. You cannot plead “WE DID NOT KNOW.” Television brings the flaming villages into the safety of your home. You commit genocide in the name of freedom.

BUT YOU TOO ARE THE VICTIMS!

If unemployment rises, you are given work, murderous work. If education is inferior, you are taught to kill. If the blacks get restless, they are sent to die. This is Wall Street’s formula for the great society!

human condition

2011-10-20T04:25:00.000+01:00

Angels of Swedenborg

2011-10-19T19:16:00.000+01:00

(Footage: Lindsey Medeiros | Video Editing: Daniel Pinheiro | Supervisor: Billy Clark)

Angels of Swedenborg | A dance theatre work by Ping Chong - Performed by LaMaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company

Gala @ LAMAMA

2011-10-19T19:08:00.000+01:00

Justin Vivian Bond

Ping Chong & Mia Yoo

Diane Lane

LaMAMA 50th Anniversary Gala - October 17

The downtown experimental theatre company La Mama etc honors Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard with the first-ever Ellen Stewart Award, named in honor of the late La MaMa founder, Oct. 17 in the Ellen Stewart Theatre.

Shepard, whose early works were nurtured by Stewart at La MaMa, is being celebrated during the company's 6:30 PM gala. As part of the recognition, Shepard will also select a young theatre artist to create a new work to be presented and produced at La MaMa.

The honor is presented "to an artist who embodies the courage and pioneering spirit that Ms. Stewart encouraged at La MaMa, an artist who carries on her ideal of challenging conventional theatrical boundaries and expanding our understanding of human potential." Stewart died Jan. 13 at age 91.

The gala promises entertainment from actors and writers with ties to La MaMa, including Wallace Shawn, Estelle Parsons, John Kelly, Justin Bond, Scott Wittman, Taylor Mac and Elizabeth Swados. (read more)

new music

2011-10-14T23:01:00.000+01:00

An Open Letter to Heterosexual Americans

2011-10-14T22:59:00.000+01:00

On Sunday, September 18, 2011, Jamey Rodemeyer took his own life at the age of fourteen. Earlier this year he had participated in the It Gets Better Project, but just a week before the suicide, he wrote “I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens. What do I have to do so people will listen to me?” It didn’t get better for Jamey, and he’s not alone. While the focus of many anti-bullying campaigns has been to empower LGBTQ youth and create community around them, I think it’s time for ALL Americans to make it better.

In my early teens, much before I became comfortable with my gender and sexual identity, I found myself being bullied. Because I was young, confused, and vulnerable, I found it very difficult to defend myself, so I know the important role courageous peers and responsible adults play when facing down bullies. When we are reminded of the vicious behavior of some children toward those considered different, we “different” adults see it as our responsibility to respond with education, therapy, hotlines, and activism. But what is needed to create real change is real action on the part of our heterosexual citizenry. After all, these are your children who are driving other kids to suicide. Where are they learning that it’s “okay to hate”? In part, young people are learning that it's "okay to hate" by pushing boundaries and getting away with it. Isn't that what young people do —test boundaries? Why are they forbidden to chew gum in class yet they are allowed to torture their LGBTQ classmates? We've come to an understanding that smoking should not be allowed and have given teachers the moral authority to stop it; we’ve made it illegal to sell cigarettes to minors because we recognize that it’s harmful to their health. But the number of deaths from LGBTQ bullying is mounting. When will the deaths of these children be recognized as an imperative to make change now?

Parents and educators are allowed, even forced sometimes, to be passive in the face of shameful and outrageous behavior on the part of their charges because they have had their own hands tied by legislators and a "moral" minority who claim to represent "our” values. But remember, the civil rights movement would not have been nearly as effective if white people hadn’t joined with African Americans to create the necessary changes to end institutionalized racism. It should not only be the responsibility of the LGBTQ community to protect certain youth. It is time for YOU to stand up for and be accountable to all America's children. Not only LGBTQ children, but all the children who are forced to live in a world of unnecessary cruelty and also—maybe even more importantly— to the bullies who are being allowed to destroy their own chances at happiness by passive adult bystanders. It is time for all Americans to come together and end homophobic and transphobic language, and to take action to protect the childhoods of ALL of our children, not just some.

Yours truly,

Justin Vivian Bond

author of Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

neverendingstory @ The Performing Garage

2011-10-13T22:36:00.000+01:00

Cuqui Jerez - The Rehearsal as part of the Fiction & Non Fiction

"The curtain rises and we see the fiction within the fiction within the fiction within the fiction. The curtain falls."
—Cuqui Jerez

Cuqui Jerez, presented last night her new work Cuqui Jerez - The Rehearsal. A dress rehearsal for a story that never develops into nothing more than just what we foresee at the first surprise. Sometimes remembering my previous work “PERFIL ADEQUADO”, Jerez&Co. talk about the creative process as this neverending loop of ideas that sometimes the Artist doesn’t know how to put an end to it creating a messed up process of creation that sometimes leads to a never ending, or never starting point. Although during the whole process there’s an attempt to denie theater by covering it with the “contemporary performance techniques” well know since the 60’s and 70’s this collaboration project is a showcase of the adequate profile some of this performers have in terms of acting and that’s valid if they were actually accepting it as it was shown and not just a justified unconscious act of non-acting which brings the audience to laugh as if it was a stand-up comedy show with jokes that are not – in my opinion – the questions that are raised. The ‘neverending’ is understandable, and not having an answer to define where and when the end begins is also pertinent, but is this loop of actions continuously leading the creative process towards an infinitude of other roads and paths (that will, due to time, lead to possible ends) that are, as sometimes is shown in this piece, so boring that one has nothing more to do than just make it even more boring by yawning at it. In the overall the show took almost two hours to reach somekind of end (that kind when the audience leaves the room) and during that amount of time I just wished that the road had been a little bit more insecure, that the improvisation took a determinant role on having the performers ‘naked’ in front of an audience actually fighting to get to that unknown END.

Cuqui Jerez stays until next Saturday, Oct,15 at The Performing Garage - Wooster St. (7.30PM)

But the berkshires are where my heart is...

2011-10-13T20:36:00.000+01:00

Sit here on the stairs and listen to the nighttime as the daylight fades away
Such a haunting and familiar tune, when I hear it in the distance i can say that I'm home

Massachusetts
Where my daughters and my wife, they wait for me all alone
But the truth is it's where I always am, it's where I long to be
Because I am home

The north shore is where my father lives, I wear my red sox hat around the world with pride
But the berkshires are where my heart is and when i see them in the distance i could cry because I'm home

Massachusetts
Where my daughters and my wife, they wait for me all alone
But the truth is it's where I always am, it's where I long to be
Because I'm home
Massachusetts
Where my hero teaches classes everyday and where my friends don't treat me different
It's where my family is, it's where I'll always stay
Because I'm home

Aaron Lewis - Massachusetts

those were the days

2011-10-13T20:30:00.003+01:00

“It's the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, "In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous."”

Andy Warhol's Exposures (1979) commenting on the nightclub "Studio 54", and his world famous quote.

looink into old NY

2011-10-13T20:27:00.001+01:00

STUDIO 54

Shane O’Shea:

I knew the real escape was right across the river, but I didn’t had a car… Even though New York was 3 miles away, it seemed like another world.

A guy named Steve Rubell had a dream: To throw the best damned party the world had ever seen and to make it last forever. He built a world where fantasy was put up as reality and where an 80-year-old disco queen could dance till dawn. Where models mingled with mechanics, plumbers danced with princes. It was a place where all labels were left behind. A place where there were no rules.

254 West 54th Street

In those days New York was the place to be. Studio 54 was the hottest place in town, everybody wanted to be seen there.

Being here I feel a ghostly feeling that it still can be that place to be. People come here because they want it to be here. People leave their countries, families to follow the dream of living in New York. Watching the “concrete jungle” as a temporary visitor there’s something, a magnetic field of energy that impels you to want to be here. The thrive of the people, the rush, the traffic, the never-ending range of possibilities, the feeling that “If you make it here, you’ll make it anywhere”… What if you don’t? What if because of all of this global togetherness this is no longer the place to be? We no longer pay attention to the star system as is used to be… They were untouchable; they existed in a place where it was almost impossible to be near one of them. They were part of a dream that has been brought down by so many other conquests, that numbed the society to a point where there’s no place ‘far across the bridge’ that is so impossible to reach, that is in fact so unattainable specially with all of that we want to build to allow that interconnectivity in a world wide range. Of course this is not for everyone, of course that utopic dream that everyone is in fact connected and can have access to everything at the same time it’s not going to happen… What intrigues me more about this city is that ghostly presence of a past that still lives on, and that is nurtured by the whole world that makes this city what it is. And sometimes I feel they don’t value that they are the one’s making it as it is and instead they look for something else that some of them are already doing. The whole world is here. There is no time. Things change. But you always have New York.

pop culture: countdown

2011-10-11T20:36:00.000+01:00

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker press declaration:

Like so many people, I was extremely surprised when I got a message through Facebook about the special appearance of my two choreographies – Rosas danst Rosas (1983) and Achterland (1990) in Beyoncé’s new videoclip Countdown. I was asked if I were now selling out Rosas into the commercial circuit...

When I saw the actual video, I was struck by the resemblance of Beyoncé’s clip not only with the movements from Rosas danst Rosas, but also with the costumes, the set and even the shots from the film by Thierry De Mey. Obviously, Beyoncé, or the video clip director Adria Petty, plundered many bits of the integral scenes in the film, which the videoclip made by Studio Brussel by juxtaposing Beyoncé‘s video and the Rosas danst Rosas film gives a taste of. But this videoclip is far from showing all materials that Beyoncé took from Rosas in Countdown. There are many movements taken from Achterland, but it is less visible because of the difference in aesthetics.

People asked me if I'm angry or honored. Neither, on the one hand, I am glad that Rosas danst Rosas can perhaps reach a mass audience which such a dance performance could never achieve, despite its popurality in the dance world since 1980s. And, Beyoncé is not the worst copycat, she sings and dances very well, and she has a good taste! On the other hand, there are protocols and consequences to such actions, and I can't imagine she and her team are not aware of it.

To conclude, this event didn't make me angry, on the contrary, it made me think a few things.

Like, why does it take popular culture thirty years to recognize an experimental work of dance? A few months ago, I saw on Youtube a clip where schoolgirls in Flanders are dancing Rosas danst Rosas to the music of Like a Virgin by Madonna. And that was touching to see. But with global pop culture it is different, does this mean that thirty years is the time that it takes to recycle non-mainstream experimental performance?

And, what does it say about the work of Rosas danst Rosas? In the 1980s, this was seen as a statement of girl power, based on assuming a feminine stance on sexual expression. I was often asked then if it was feminist. Now that I see Beyoncé dancing it, I find it pleasant but I don't see any edge to it. It’s seductive in an entertaining consumerist way.

Beyond resemblance there is also one funny coincidence. Everyone told me, she is dancing and she is four months pregnant. In 1996, when De Mey‘s film was made, I was also pregnant with my second child. So, today, I can only wish her the same joy that my daughter brought me.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker October 10th, 2011

2011-10-11T18:36:00.001+01:00

you'll always have something written in your forehead

2011-10-11T02:21:00.001+01:00

VIDEO ART MANUAL

2011-10-10T17:27:00.001+01:00

Keren Cytter, Video Art Manual (still), 2011. HD video. 14 minutes 42 seconds.

As in Keren Cytter’s previous work, “Video Art Manual” strings together clichéd, Freudian-tinged narratives with a bad case of ADHD. Comprising four videos and a series of peripheral drawings, “Video Art Manual” is the stuff masochistic art critics live for: as soon as one eye rolling-worthy moment passes, such as a misogynistic character announcing his unprecedented hatred of both ducks and women (they way the talk, the way they walk!), Cytter blasts off with another libidinal oddity, laboring her viewers to glean any sense of comprehension from her work. (Read More)

by Karen Archey

Manhattan, Chapter One.

2011-10-10T09:44:00.001+01:00

Chapter One. He was scared of New York City. He felt it all out of his proportion. (--) He-he… was diminished by the proportion of it. Now… to him… for the time being this town existed in frames and pulsated to the great tunes of New Pop and Gershwin’s. (--) Chapter One. He started to feel ~~romantic~~ thrived in Manhattan – sometimes – between the hustle… bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful people who seemed to know all the angles. (--)

Chapter One. He was, in New York City. To him, the city, was a metaphor for the decay of the contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out, “I hate my life” I would hear constantly, turning the town of his dreams in… (--)

Chapter One. He was in New York City, although to him, it could be a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage… (--)

Chapter one. He was in New York. Behind the scared look on his face, which was fading slowly into a more confident and pleasurable one, was the coiled power of a jungle cat. New York was his town. And from then on it would always be.

declare interdependence

2011-10-10T07:28:00.002+01:00

Rooftops

2011-10-09T17:44:00.000+01:00

East Village Rooftops, January 26, 2011 - Terry Richardson's Diary

back to WALL ST

2011-10-08T22:49:00.000+01:00

news | occupyeverything.org

at the Bethesda Fountain…

2011-10-08T22:41:00.000+01:00

related to this

RIP Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)

2011-10-08T20:43:00.000+01:00

@ Soho Apple Store

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Accumulation at Dancer Crush by Brandi Norton

2011-10-07T09:33:00.000+01:00

Dance cannot exist without the dance design: choreography.
But dance is the dancer. – Susan Sontag

DANCER CRUSH @ New York Live Arts
(Curated by Carla Peterson with Annie B-Parson)

Featuring:
Steven Recker and People Get Ready
Nikki Zialcita
Arturo Vidich
Ishmael Houston-Jones
Jodi Melnick
Brandi Norton
Heather Olson
Holley Farmer
Leah Coc
David Newman

NY always wanted to fly to Paris...

2011-10-05T09:27:00.000+01:00