The Aeneid

For Christmas my brother and sister-in-law got me the new Robert Fagles translation of the Aeneid. I couldn't wait to dive into it. A few points. 1. It's sad to say I've never read the Aeneid. Not only have I never studied Latin, I never cracked the many translations existing. It will good to correct this situation (the translation part, not studying Latin). 2. It's better than I even thought. Sure, it's imperialist propaganda, a potboiler for Empire, but the story reads great -- it dumps you into the Perfect Storm, then gets Aeneas and the guys settled and goes back to pick up the Trojan War right at the climax, with the horse is outside the gates. It looks like there's interesting things going on with the point of view of observation throughout, things like Aeneas and Achates observing a bit of action hidden in a mist, and the different powers of men and gods. 3. The Fagles translation has gotten rave reviews everywhere, and sure enough, the lines read great. I don't know if I can pick a snippet to give a sense of it, but let me try this:

Now Juno made this plea to the Lord of Winds:
"Aeolus, the Father of Gods and King of Men gave you
the power to calm the waves or rouse them with your gales.
A race I loathe is crossing the Tuscan sea, transporting
Troy to Italy, bearing their conquered household gods--
thrash your winds to fury, sink their warships, overwhelm them
or break them apart, scatter their crews, drown them all!

To my ear, Fagles keeps a steady enough foot going to give the lines lots of forward momentum which I find is sucking me right in.

Today's DC jaunt: Hirshhorn

Got down to the Hirshhorn today, along with a brief trip to the Sackler to see Samrin Gill and a stop at the Phillips to admire their new wing and get a look at the Société Anonyme.

The main thing at the Hirshhorn was The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas, a show of contemporary sculpture by 9 artists. Most of it was messy in one way or the other, and papier machié and Styrofoam were the most common materials. I guess that’s pretty much in keeping with the biennials I see, or a walk in Chelsea. One of the big messy pieces I liked best was Black Hole (Schwarzes Loch) by Björn Dahlem. It’s a huge start burst made up of long wooden boards. Stuck in between the boards and impaled on them are every manner of common object: fluorescent light units, traffic cones, a bass drum, a chain saw, a pet carrying case, chairs, trikes and bikes, strollers, crutches. On one level it’s just a big, cool thing, exciting in a rudimentary way, simply by virtue of its spiky shape. It also keeps to its Black Hole namesake, drawing into itself seemingly the entire physical culture of contemporary life, all jumbled together and condensed.

They also had three of the artists select sculptures from the collection, and there were some pieces there that were not in regular view when I went all the time as a teenager and college student. A Lee Bontecou piece called Cocoon, yellow silk stretched over a balsa frame hanging in a steel cage. Stephan von Huene’s Totem Tone V, two wooden organ pipes that sound off in loud, sonorous tones; it seemed like a random pattern and that it produced more than two notes. Several pieces by Mary Bauermesiter, spheres in and outside vitrines covered with drawing and interspersed with lens. And not part of that show, they had one of Roxy Paine’s artificial fungus fields that got me thinking about the Material Terrain show coming up at Cheekwood which includes her.

One thing that struck me today, something I took for granted when I saw the collection back in the 70s, was that this is a remarkably comprehensive collection of post-war American art and it was basically assembled by one guy. There's one of about everything and multiples of important figures like Clifford Still. It's hard to imagine how much money he must have had.

SAAM

I finally got to the newly renovated and remodeled Smithsonian American Art Museum (aka the National Collection of Fine Arts) and the National Portrait Gallery. The building looks great, with lots of the old Patent Office’s original features. Details like the visible conservation labs are a great touch. Having grown up in the DC area, it was nice to see things I remember as a kid like the marble statue of Dying Tecumseh (an American take on the Greco-Roman Dying Gaul), or James Hampton’s tin foil-covered garage-built altar.

One of the temporary exhibits is an exhaustive (but not too large) show on Joseph Cornell that includes plenty of the boxes (many from the Lehrman Art Trust), but also less familiar things like portfolios of collages and materials he put together around specific personalities, films he mostly collaborated with other artists on, and stuff collected from his apartment, labeled boxes and envelopes filled with his raw material like cork balls, clay bubble pipes, magazine clippings, and some of his books and the records he listened to. I always enjoyed the boxes in isolation, as small idealized spaces, but this show gives a way to see them with much more context and connected to an artistic milieu.

There’s also work by William Christenberry that shows everything he does – color photos, sculptures, paintings, drawings. In a lot of cases he will take one vernacular building form and show it in a photo, a sculpture and a painting. The photos still work best for me, but there’s value in seeing the form expressed each of the three ways.

My favorite aspect of the show was seeing photographs together that he took of the same buildings and scenes over time. There’s a barbeque joint in Greensboro that undergoes a name change, subtle architectural changes, then starts to decay and ends up an empty lot. Or the Klan bar in one photo that has been replaced by another business in another. And two shots of the same pear tree, one in winter, one in summer loaded with fruit. An abandoned palmist’s shop that gets overtaken by kudzu, then by other vegetation, some of which finally gets cleared away. There’s also a series of photos of a green warehouse that doesn’t change that much over time, obviously still in use.

The photos show all sorts of time and change. Social time, seasonal time, environmental time. There’s decay, cyclicality, and even progress (the Klan watering hole replaced by something more benign).

Tomorrow I may write about one or a couple of the pieces in a portraiture contest at the museum. We'll see.

More yearend recapping

I did a year-end piece for the Scene and found myself gravitating towards things that I didn’t actually review in the paper. The piece in this week’s paper ended up with a mix of stuff I did and did not review, but at one point I set myself up to see what I would come up with if I did 10 items that I hadn’t reviewed. Here’s the other five that didn’t make it into the article this week.

• Clear Box Project, Ruby Green. For a fundraising auction, the gallery got a really impressive group of local and out of town artists to contribute pieces, all of which somehow used a clear acrylic box. In some cases it was just a case for a work, but a lot of the pieces were pretty interesting. A bunch used it as the setting for a diorama, which worked great for say Emily Holt, who is going for something like that in many of her pieces all the time. Andrew Kaufman used the box in a completely integrated way for a quasi-electrical apparatus—it seems a natural material for him. Terry Glispin might have gone the furthest, embedding the box in a bunch of colored foam. showed what could be done in and with a clear acrylic box. For many, the format revealed new dimensions of their work. I hope they do this auction again next year. It’s the kind of thing that could catch on if they can give it some time to build.
• Valerie Lueth and Paul Roden, TAG. Two printmakers (husband and wife) new to town and to TAG—Lueth makes finely detailed, vaguely obsessive etchings and Roden does accomplished woodcuts with political themes.
• Hamlett Dobbins, Frist. I reviewed some of Hamlett’s work at Zeitgeist, although I don’t think I’m doing justice to his stuff. He also had an exhibit this Spring in the Frist project gallery (check the Early Morning series here). The best thing about that is that they were running their show of African art from Seattle at the same time, and the patterns and some of the colors in Dobbins’ paintings have a surprising resemblance to the geometric forms of African textiles like some of those in the exhibit. The coding of Ashanti cloth tells you something about Hamlett’s patterns, which usually have associations with people but the average viewer can’t really make it out – like a non-Ashanti viewer and those patterns in the Kente cloth.
• Wes Sherman, Arts Company. Sherman is an abstract painter, but his method involves letting famous paintings lead him into his compositions. This exhibit set his pieces next to reproductions of the masterworks that inspires them, showing how he picks up colors or general massing and turns them into abstract forms. It was a great reminder of the value of abstraction as a kind of painting essentialism, and of the way a life of viewing seeps into every artist’s vision.
• Cynthia Reynolds, Samantha Callahan, and Rusty Johnson, Dangenart. One of my favorite Dangenart shows included these three artists (although with the permutations of shows this year, they overlapped to different degrees. Reynolds made these exquisite sculptures of packing peanuts cast in metal or glass, set up on high small pedestals, and dramatically lit, taking the disposal stuff meant to protect precious contents and turning it into the precious stuff. Callahan took an old idea – flowers as symbols or tropes on female genitalia, and pushed it further by giving big colorful flowers genital piercings. That addition made the association undeniable and just a little more fleshy and sexual. Johnson’s paintings have crusty surfaces made of odd materials like baking soda that change and even self-destruct over time. Some of the paintings sluff off some of the surface, scattering particles on the ground below.

Susan Alcorn, LaDonna Smith and Misha Feigin tomorrow night

It's been so long since I've posted, who knows if anyone reads this, but I've got a few things I need to post over the next few days. The first is to plug this concert at Ruby Green tomorrow (Thursday) night. Susan is a friend of mine who does amazing things with the pedal steel guitar. I've posted on her previously at length (a long piece, shorter piece, and link to an article she wrote), and Jonathan Marx did a nice piece in the Tennessean about this show.

This show also features LaDonna Smith, who has created a nexus for improvisation in Birmingham and improvises on violin, viola, and voice. Some of her stuff has a strong theatrical element, others stays more in an area of musical abstraction. She's playing with Misha Feigin, a Russian guitar player now based in Louisville.

Last I heard the plan was I was going to play some with Susan. The show will start at 8:30 or 9, at Ruby Green on 5th Avenue.

One Night Drawing show tonight

Kristi Hargrove is doing a show at her studio of work by her drawing students. The work I've seen looks really good, especially a bunch of pieces by Iwonka Waskowski. It's just tonight, Friday night, at the studio on Hawkins, which is a street between 8th and 12th just after you cross I40 heading out of town. Mapquest it. It's not hard to find.

Here's a writeup on the show that didn't make it into the Scene this week:

“FLATLINE”/HARGROVE-YONTZ STUDIOS The meticulous drawing of Kristi Hargrove is one of the delights and wonders of the Nashville art scene, and she also teaches drawing at the Watkins College of Art and Design. This one-night show at her studio displays the work of seven people studying with her, 6 current Watkins students (Jonathan Abarquez, Adam Bennett, Kelly Bonadies, Janet Heilbronn, Myrna Talbot and John Whitten) and one recent graduate, Iwonka Waskowski. Waskowski in particular seems to have come up with very strong stuff—vivid, fleshy compositions that slip subtle bits of representational figures into abstract shapes. As a group, her drawings also show a confident logic in their formal progressions from image to image. The exhibit will be for one night only, 6-9 PM on Fri., Nov. 17, at 911 Hawkins Street. –DAVID MADDOX

Playing out this weekend

Brady Sharp and I (aka Bluff) are playing out two nights in a row this weekend, first at Buzz and Click on Saturday at the End with a bunch of other groups, lots of electronic stuff (hence buzzes and clicks, some beats), and then Sunday a Ruby Green show that features a group from Louisville, Ut Gret. I don’t know their music, but it looks to be an acoustic group that draws on a lot of world music. I do know that the reeds player in the group, Steve Good, is excellent. He played with Sapat at Dino’s a while back. So I trust that this will be good, and not too prissy world-musicy. Taiwan Deth is playing this show too.

Here’s the Buzz and Click lineup.

3kStatic (from St Petersburg, FL) (computers & electronics)
Circuit Breakers (Chattanooga) (computers & electronics)
Anemone (Murfreesboro) (computers & electronics)
aTHeNa BLue (electronic keyboards)
The Potato Battery Experiment (sax, potato battery & more). Deanna Varragona—very interesting stuff.
Taiwan Deth (guitar, sax and electronics)
Bluff Duo (winds & prepared guitar)
Let's Say Baltimore (drums, bass, guitars & electronics)
Matt Hamilton (guitar & effects)
Logickal (computers and electronics)

Buzz and Click is at the End, 8 on Saturday. Ruby Green show is Sunday at 9

Erin Anfinson Writ Large

Erin Anfinson is having her moment in the Nashville Airport sun, with a couple of big landscape paintings overlooking the Southwest Airlines checkin area. Erin is known for her camouflage paintings, where she takes a scene and reduces it to patches of tones within one color group, which has the effect of making the underlying image hard to pick out. Your eye switches between that kind of translating activity and taking the shapes in as abstractions. She has starting breaking away from this, with more color range in the camouflage paintings (which tends to make them read a little more directly) and another series that’s completely different (little scenes in encaustic, part of it masked by one or several big circles in single color of thick paint). The paintings at the airport are more along the lines of the camy stuff, scenes of birds flying up from what seem like late Fall or winter fields. The colors are reduced to blue, brown, white, and grey, and the shapes reduced to essences. It sure looks like Iowa (she grew up there).

Boiling the birds down to these irregular pointy shapes makes it possible to imagine them as a bunch of leaves blowing around – which gives the shapes, whether you think of them as birds or something else, the sense of being nearly weightless and vulnerable to the elements, or susceptible to recording the slightest disruptions in the invisible world. It reminds me of one of Paul Chan’s videos (I don’t have the name with me, but it was in the PS1 New York region show), where birds are displaced by trash in a desolate environment. Anfinson’s paintings don’t have the apocalyptic overtones of Chan’s piece, but I think she gets in a hint of the same chaotic forces.

This reductive technique of hers continues to make for subtle and tricky viewing effects. And it works well at large scale, seen from a distance and up close. I wouldn’t necessarily have assumed that would be the case.

Review #2: NSO and Anu Tali Play Sibelius, Tower, Mozart

I finally made it to the Schermerhorn Hall last Saturday, to hear Anu Tali conduct the orchestra in Sibelius' Symphony #2, Mozart's Violin Concerto #5, and a Joan Tower piece ("Chamber Dance"). To get one blinding insight out of the way right off—the hall sounds very nice. You have the sensation of being in a small room with the group. The soft sounds were very impressive. Soovin Kim was able to tease out the notes in his cadenzas with what seemed like the slightest pressure on the bow and you were right with him.

I was interested in this program because of the Estonian conductor doing a Sibelius Symphony. I’ve never paid much attention to Sibelius, so I figured I would learn something. I mainly learned that there’s probably a reason for not knowing his work too well. It struck me as sappy stuff given over to grand gestures. Borodin came to mind.

The best music was the second movement, which started with a pizzicato bass line that was handed over to the cellos and provided the basis for a bassoon duet. All these delicious low sounds. Several sections featured a trio oboe, flute and clarinet with the clarinet in the low range, and the oboe in the lead voice but still low enough to be very reedy. The low sounds throughout the symphony were the best thing about the Sibelius. The orchestra sounded great making these sounds—enhanced by the hall, no doubt.

The Mozart was fine, Kim played loosely and languidly. Tower’s music does not excite me very much, but it is admirable in its balance. This piece, a dance-inspired work written recently for the conductor-less Orpheus chamber orchestra, has a rondo form that shifts between solo and duet passages and the ensemble. In many cases one instrument started as a solo and then was joined by another instrument—flute and then clarinet, oboe and then viola, 1st violin then second. The combinations had a sense of logic without being overly predictable. And the simple counterpoint in these passages was the nicest writing.

Now that the NSO is in the new hall, you have to ask how good they are and in what ways would they would want to improve. It’s unreasonable to think that another Chicago or Philadelphia has been hiding all these years under the TPAC acoustics, and unreasonable to think the group can just wake up and by will play at the highest international level. I heard and saw two things that made me think about the future, especially once a music director comes on full time (not sure how much of this orchestra-building Slatkin has signed on to do). The winds were generally very strong, although there seemed to be uncertainty in the horns in a few places. Also, while the hall sounds great soft, it never felt like we were hearing it played loud, and there were certainly passages in the Sibelius intended to have a heavy majesty. One possible way the sound got blunted looked to be in the violins, where the bows did not move with preternatural uniformity. You would see two players on the same stand with their hands moving in opposite directions at points—I suppose it’s possible I was looking at divisi sections, and I don’t know enough about string playing to know if it would be typical to divide the parts on each stand. There was also a visible delay in bow action from the front of the section to the back in places like the end of notes.

Review #1: Purbayan Chatterjee and Subhankar Banerjee

I guess it served as Nashville’s consolation prize for having the Ravi Shankar concert cancelled, but Purbayan Chatterjee’s concert, with Subhankar Banerjee on tablas, could not have been better. A thoroughly satisfying and thorough performance.

Chatterjee seems very interested in contrasts. In the alap on his first piece, the evening raga Malgunji, there were many sections where he would strike a note followed by the same note with a different attack and whatever else was required to generate different combinations of harmonics to surround the pitch. These sections seemed much more concerned with the combination of timbral contrasts than in melody. In the faster sections, he and Banerjee took real delight in breaking off very vigorous, fast passages and joining together to parse out a delicate 3-note figure: the contrast between loud and soft, fast and slow, takes great technical mastery.

The ascendancy of sounds over notes came out also in the climaxes of sections, the most intense of which ended with a nearly dissonant, metallic crunch.

When Chatterjee came on stage, one noticed his very stylish glasses. He’s a young man, only 29, and although he plays this very traditional music, and seemed well-attuned to the religious dynamics of performance, one cannot believe that a young Indian engaged in a cultural field in this day and age would not be completely plugged into the breadth of global culture. You wondered what was on his iPod. And it was easy to see a linkage between his use of sounds and practices in organization of sound found in sophisticated popular music.

You Are Being Watched

The weekend before last I rushed over to the Arcade to catch the tail end of the openings on Saturday night. Just I was leaving Ali Bellos stopped me and in addition to catching up a little, she gave me a sheet for ARTGO. Ali is always coming up with ideas for game art/art games, most of which never quite seem to crystallize into a full-fledged game with rules, which is part of the charm of it, watching the pieces start to form but maybe never get there. When she was in the book show in the Library she had everyone write down questions on a piece of paper which she collected. I think that was it. Something was going to happen to them, she never said quite what, I think she explicitly said she didn’t know for sure and then I never heard about it. But that was fine.

Anyway, back to ARTGO. A combination of Bingo and a scavenger hunt. Each square contains a drawing of something you might see at an opening. You get five across, up and down or diagonal, you win. I don’t know what. Doesn’t matter. And pretty much everyone wins. The squares are great: plexiglass, “that 70s haircut,” tetanus risk (a nail) cheese tray, special glasses, DIY clothing, art show friend (with a broken heart locket saying “Best Friend”), inappropriate touching (hand with circle and diagonal crossing line), The Man, country club pinky drink (drawing of beer bottle, pinky extended). It had a trenchant quality you have to love. And it made me self-conscious. How many of the items applied to me? At any rate, it left me with the thought that people are watching – either self-awareness, paranoia, or self-importance. Not sure how you figure out which.

Elkins Lecture at Lipscomb

James Elkins, professor at the School of the Art Institute and author of a bunch of books, spoke at David Lipscomb this Monday. First of all that’s kind of a remarkable sentence. You just don’t expect to hear about someone like that speaking at Lipscomb. Vanderbilt maybe. This is part of a new lecture series in the visual arts at Lipscomb. Not sure if the rest of the people are as prominent as Elkins.

I thought Elkins might talk about religion and art, since that’s the topic of one of his books and a subject of obvious relevance to such a deeply church-affiliated institution. Maybe that would have been too obvious. Or people didn’t want to go there. Or that’s not the lecture he’s doing these days. What he did talk about was the status of visual practices within the entire range of intellectual disciplines in the university (you can find the basic ideas by going to Elkins’ website , scroll down to “Visual Practices Across the University” and check out the section “Table of content and introduction”). To grossly oversimplify, when you really look at how visual material is used as a tool for intellectual discovery and explanation of the world, and when you strip away spurious uses of visual information, visual practices have the most importance in disciplines outside the humanities, like medical research or the physical sciences. It’s in those disciplines that the details of visual information matter, such as the specific features of an image on a mammogram will that guide diagnosis of structures in the breast, or modeling of chemical processes. Much of the humanities doesn’t have any great use for visual information, and Elkins even argued that art history does not concern itself particularly with visual detail.

The prevalence of visual practices in realms outside the humanities is a valid observation, but comes as no surprise to the countless people who have those beautiful Edward Tufte volumes on visual information on their shelves. Like every budget analyst I work with. Which just confirms Elkins’ point.

One of his claims struck me as odd. He contrasted the poverty of visual practices he found with the belief that our society is one of the most visual cultures ever. We see lots of images, etc. But what about the traditional claim that the West is logocentric? Hasn’t pure sensory input always taken a back seat to information processed through words? Nowhere more so than the university. It’s no surprise that the visual is an afterthought in an academic culture where everything is oriented towards the production of words. And it is most true of the humanities, where all there is are articles and books.

The best thing about the talk was that he had the most beautiful presentation slides ever. The text was whitish grey on a dark, not-quite-black background that looked smoky, like the captions on a silent movie, or even more so like a Guy Maddin movie. He uses a clean and elegant, kinda elongated font, and there were never many words on the screen, everything perfectly boiled down to the essential cues.

Sad Day at Tower

So they’re liquidating liquidating Tower Records finally. Other than boutiques, used stores, and maybe mall stores, the record store is an outmoded economic form. Tower has seemed to be on its last legs for a long time. Whenever I went to the Opry location, there were far too few people on the floor for it to have any chance. I’ll buy a bunch of stuff over the next 9 weeks – I made my first trip today, but the discounts are only 10%. I’m betting a lot of the stuff I want no one else will want. Which is the whole problem, isn’t it.

It occurred to me that these next few weeks are going to be my last time shopping for classical music in Nashville. For rock and pop, and a bit for jazz, there’s Grimey’s, but they don’t really try to carry classical music. I wouldn’t if I were them. Sure I can get stuff on the internet, but there won’t be any bins of classical recordings worth running through. The classical section at Borders always seems crummy to me. I travel, so I can hit the classical music store in Berkeley, or Melody Records or Olsson's in DC (not sure how stable Olsson’s is). But it’s hard not to see the demise of Tower as a narrowing of classical music, with harder access when you leave major cities and university enclaves. Sure, the Nashville Symphony has opened a new hall, and it sounds like they are getting great houses. But they only need to sell 1,870 tickets to fill the hall. They don’t really need a broad audience, but a loyal audience that can afford it.

Tower is/was just a store, but its demise feels like a diminishment of cultural life.

New Herzog film this Sunday at Belcourt

The Belcourt is doing a one-night screening of Werner Herzog's new film, The Wild Blue Yonder, this Sunday at 7:00. It's in conjunction with the new video show opening at Cheekwood, a group of pieces dealing with the idea of utopia curated by Greg Pond. The Herzog is a sci-fi film! I'm guessing or hoping it will have that dreamy 70s quality of something like The Man Who Fell To Earth, which for some reason has been on my mind lately. Here's the details from the Belcourt website.

Jon Langford at TAG

Got a press release from TAG that Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers, etc.) is doing a one-night thing at the gallery from 6-8 this Thursday. A one-person media empire, apparently he's got some new paintings to show, a book of art work and "remarks on his life in music" for sale, and he's going to play some songs.

Banksy in Disneyland

Not that this dude needs any more publicity (NPR had a long piece on him this week), but this is priceless. Thanks to Scott Marshall for sending this link.

If you're in Nashville this weekend

Downtown Pres is doing another DIG art show, with an opening 7-9 Saturday night. That's this Saturday, the 16th. (DPC is at the corner of 5^th and Church, and you will enter on the 5^th Avenue side Saturday.) Based on the people involved, it should be very good. This includes current and former users of the church’s studio space like Richard Feaster, Todd Greene, and Beth Gilmore, and some friends. Heather Thompson has a piece, and the piece she did for DPC show last Spring was one of the most successful things I’ve ever encountered that integrates religious experience and contemporary aesthetics. Erika Johnson is also in the show, and I always look forward to seeing her new work—she progresses and grows before your eyes, and is engaged with important issues and experience. Rocky Horton from the Lipscomb art faculty also has a piece, and it’s good to see a connection developing between the art program there and DPC. He participated in forum at last Spring’s show.

The best thing about the show is the title, "Found Objects in Ordinary Time." Ordinary Time is the term that describes the time on the church calendar between Pentecost (the last event in the Easter season) and Adevent, when there are no major holidays in the Christian year. It's like the workplace between New Year's or MLK day and Memorial Day when most places don't have a lot of days off. You chug along, gettting work done until the summer season starts. In the church, this period between the major holidays is when you just go to church, work through the lectionary, sing hymns not associated with particular holidays. Just live. In honor of that kind of ordinariness, Beth, Tom, Geoff and the others asked for works that incorporate found objects, everyday stuff for ordinary days that are as rich as the days endowed with special pomp and ceremony.

I Wish I'd Written It

This post brings together two people I admire very much: Amy Pleasant, an artist from Birmingham, and Frederic Koeppel, who reviews art for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Amy has shown in Nashville several times and I’ve enjoyed looking at her work and writing about it. Currently she’s got a show at Rhodes College, and Frederic did a tremendous review of the show. You expect the arts writing in daily newspapers to be non-existent or severely limited in its critical dimension. That’s not true with him. This review is a good example, economical, descriptive, perceptive, and touching.

If you are in New York next weekend

Philip Gayle is playing a show at the Downtown Music Gallery on Sunday Sept 17 at 6:00. He hasn't played out much lately as far as I know. I guess you could say this performance is "in support" of his CD The Mommy Row, but that was done in the studio with layers of overdubbing. This will be him and some guitars and waterphone, or something like that. Although there's obvious differences between this sort of live deal and what he can assemble in the studio, it's definitely the same voice.

The thing about Phil, well there's many things about Phil, but about his music is that he has a remarkable ability to extrapolate a universe of music from any single sound. One noise, generated however (with him the sources are always acoustic as are most of the manipulations), immediately suggests more and more sounds to him, and quickly they explode into polyphony and counterpoint. It doesn't matter what he uses to make the sound, although the fact is he has great guitar technique, which means that some of the options open to him involve things like being able to pick notes on a stringed instrument. And his technique never, ever devolves into something hackneyed.

New Yorker cover

Check out the cover of the new issue of the New Yorker. All white, except for a little drawing of a man holding a long poll. Oh yeah. Philippe Petit. You fill in the rest of the scene that's not there.

This is on the magazine's outer cover. You turn the page and the tightrope walker is overlaid on a painting of the WTC site today, still suspended in mid-air. But the second picture is redundant. The one on the outside captures the loss -- people and buildings, but also the world that produced the WTC. The reference to Philippe Petit, who made his walk in 1974, reminds you that the WTC was a phenomenon of the 70s, and Sept 2001 maybe was the final chapter in a process through which that world was obliterated. Even though NY was falling apart in the 70s, the city still had its character as a place where everyone mixed it up. It's a point you get in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam too, nostalgia for what by all rights we should think of as good riddance. But it was a time when there seemed to be a lot more room in the culture for pleasure, for change, and for goofy stuff like Petit's stunt.

The other thing about the picture is that the figure could be falling through air.

It's a brilliant illustration, distills all this loss to one image.

You can see the cover in a flash box on the New Yorker main site, next to the box you click to subscribe.

A Wendell Berry poem

Been browsing around in some Wendell Berry poems, from A Timbered Choir, poems which arise from his practice of dedicating his Sunday mornings to walking meditation. Found this short one that struck me. I won’t grind on, but the idea of locating the loss of the great forests and grasslands inside our own bodies is powerful to me.

It is in the destruction of the world
in our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forest, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.

1988, II
A Timbered Choir, p. 98
(Counterpoint: NY, 1998)

It’s probably illegal to post this, but maybe these credits will satisfy. Oh yeah, here’s the Amazon page for the book. Maybe that will fulfill my obligation.

Leonard Slatkin in Nashville

So the Nashville Symphony is opening its new hall, which really should mark a new era for the orchestra. The group will sound better in this building. They’ll be able to hear themselves better, and presumably any weaknesses will be audible. And it may bring in larger audiences. The LA effect.
The next step is to fill the music director’s slot, a process that takes a long time in symphonies. Kenneth Schermerhorn died in April 2005, leaving the orchestra without a leader for the next season. The search continues this year, but the symphony just announced that they have signed up Leonard Slatkin as “musical adviser” for 3 years. According to Jonathan Marx’s article on it, he’s going to help with the director search and with some of the key music director duties: “programming future seasons, hiring musicians and selecting guest artists and conductors.”
Getting Slatkin involved with Nashville is a coup. They hired him for a recording, then the opening gala, and then got the idea for this extended relationship. Slatkin has a reputation for having built up St. Louis and continuing to improve the reputation of the National Symphony (that was my orchestra as a kid, and in the pre-Rostropovich days it was definitely in a tier below groups to the north).
My first thought is they are trying to pull a Gordon Gee here. Gee had only been at Brown a year or so when the people at Vanderbilt contacted him for advice. Apparently they got to talking and decided he was the man for the Vandy job, offered him a lot of money and he got here in 2000. Is the Symphony trying the same thing? Sidle up to Leonard Slatkin to ask for advice and then try to convince him Nashville is the place he needs to go next.
This seems like it would be a harder sale than getting Gee to leave Brown for Vanderbilt. Brown and Vanderbilt are much more comparable in reputation than the 2 NSOs. There are fewer orchestras and thus a more well-defined hierarchy. So I imagine it would take more work to convince Slatkin to come here permanently. Maybe after he has “assisted” in hiring some musicians and seen what the group sounds like in the new hall, he’ll see big enough possibilities here.
Or they’ll do what they say they’re doing and hire someone who's making what seems more like a parallel move or a clear step up.

Update, Sept. 4: The New York Times weighs in about Nashville's hall. The tone is a little more skeptical. The Times arts pages are funny. They'll tease kind of provocative in their titles and then turn much softer and accomodating in the body. The title on this articles makes it sound like the piece says these halls are wasteful boondoogles, but it doesn't quite go there.

Army of Shadows

This weekend is the last at the Belcourt for the Nashville run of Melville’s film Army of Shadows, a 1969 French movie that never got released in the U.S. before this. Every write-up about the movie points out that it is a bleak, anti-heroic view of the Resistance. In this film the members of the Resistance cell are mostly seen degraded by the violence around them and that they engage in. You never see the cell blowing up Nazi communications, but involved in assassinating a traitor, cruelly because of their uncertainty in doing it, escaping from Nazi custody, delivering transmitters to their contacts, getting a request for weapons turned down by the Brits.

The bleakness pervades the film visually. Many of the spaces are empty, and every room seems cold, although the cities (not just Paris) can’t help but be beautiful. The movie’s in color, but everything is so muted that you can forget and think you are looking at an older film.

I think the film still shows heroism, but it is a psychic sort. From a practical point of view the Resistance shown here is futile, but resistance is presented as an existential stance that faces the bleakness honestly, refusing to go along. That’s all you can do. It’s a requirement.

The acting is terrific. The lead is Lino Ventura, and at this point, thanks to Toby Leonard’s brilliant programming we’ve had a serial Lino Ventura festival at the Belcourt – at different times earlier this year we showed Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud and Classe Tou Risques. This film also has Paul Meurisse, who is tremendous, a fascinating looking guy. My wife’s favorite scene was where he simply eats some buttered bread, wallowing in this fleeting pleasure.

If you’re in Nashville, try to check out the movie this weekend (Sunday’s the last day). In other towns, well, it’s probably shown already.

Maynard Ferguson

Maynard Ferguson died this week (I’m doing too many RIPs here). He was the kind of jazz musician you aren’t supposed to admit you liked, but for a jazz musician of a certain age (let’s say in one’s 40s), he was unavoidable. Every geeky jazz wannabe listened to his band’s albums, went to the concerts. The problem was that he wasn’t cool or intellectual, not a musician who crafted subtle and sophisticated statements, but a flamboyant showman (Buddy Rich comes to mind as another band leader in this vein). He was the high note player – in big bands there was a tradition for the lead player to be a guy who could nail the really high notes, with someone else on the second chair who could improvise fluent solos. Maynard had an unmistakable upper range sound, he’d just charge right up in the stratosphere, a strident sound like Pavarotti in comparison to other tenors. But his improvisation was pretty pedestrian. And he left most of that to band members anyway.

In the 70s he was everywhere with crossover big band music, playing arrangements of songs like Hey Jude. He dressed in jump suits, and sort of had a William Shatner thing going (fellow Canadian). We knew it was tacky, and made fun of it, but the thing was the music really had some of rock’s energy. I remember seeing the band at Montgomery College and in Hey Jude at the end where they’re repeating the theme over and over, all of the trumpet players went out into the audience and played from behind everyone. It was a simple theatrical trick, but it worked like the action sequences in a movie.

What do they call pot, a gateway drug because it leads you inevitably to smack addiction or some such crap. Well, Maynard’s music could be a gateway. People got into it, and maybe they listened to other stuff. Hearing the stories on him this week I’ve only thought back on his music with the affection that inevitably flows to the things that were part of your growing up.

RIP Dave Schnaufer

Dulcimer player, virtuoso really, David Schnaufer died today from cancer. A lot of people I know really loved this guy. I got a chance to play with him through the Transcendental Crayon Ensemble. We played a tune of his and an arrangement he had done of I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry which gave that song a completely new character. I remember most was the ringing, clear sound he got off his amplified dulcimer. Wonderful. And he was very generous to do this show with us, considering the level he was at and the kind of people he played with.

Briggs and Scarborough at Arts Commission

The Tennessee Arts Commission gallery is opening a new show this weekend with the work of Jason Briggs and Chris Scarborough, two interesting artists. Briggs does ceramic sculptures in strange, biomorphic forms, using clay with a high level of craft but completely divorced from crafts aesthetic conventions. Scarborough's got strangeness on his side as well, in his case by manipulating people in photographs to give them the over-sized eyes of anime cartoons or using similar figures in drawings that play games with whether you are seeing a disturbing mutation or some perspective trick. The opeing reception is this Saturday from 5-7.

Tennessee ♥ Road Kill

Road kill seems to be a minor fixation in these parts, to the extent that we even have a law in Tennessee assuring our right to take anything we hit for our “personal use and consumption.” (Actually, you have to get a kill tag from a wildlife resources agent to take any bear you kill with your car.) This law actually makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you drive around in a Hummer so you don’t have to worry about the hundreds of dollars in body damage the deer left you with as it passed out of this life into the next. But it’s more fun to imagine a bunch of slack-jawed hillbilly citizen-legislators sitting around coming up with their legislative priorities for the session, and this makes it to the top of the list.

I think maybe people in this state, where you are more likely to experience a rural environment than elsewhere, may have more awareness of road kill and the death of animals in general. When I ride my bike on the roads near my house, or take a walk, at some point I am likely to pass through an area dominated by the smell of rotting animal flesh. The scenery may look pretty, but this is not a pristine pastoral setting, and that’s the way it should be. Real pastoral involves zoological and botanical churn, stuff growing and dying. It’s not all designed with pleasure in mind, or a pleasure that’s much more complicated and difficult.

In a nice addition to the annals of road kill culture, April Hale, a jeweler at the Appalachian Center for the Crafts, had two “Road Kills Rings” in an exhibit at the Renaissance Center in Dickson. Working with very simple silver rings as a base, one had a small tuft of raccoon fur stuck on top of the ring, the hairs pointing straight upwards. The other had a tiny raccoon tooth on a tiny bed of red velvet and encased in acrylic. My wife described it as a reliquary for the animal, and it had a sense of appreciation for the delicate shapes of the tooth and the range of colors and tones on the strands of hair, and respect shown in the way the remains were preserved and presented. And it’s road kill!

Current LeQuire Gallery show

A couple of artists worth checking out at LeQuire, in their summer show that’ll be up the rest of this week and maybe next.

The show was organized by John Reed, who also contributes a series of pieces that repeat a single image of a cartoonish jackass, big teeth and mouth hanging open. He repeats it at different sizes, on strips of paper, within a large panel of woven paper, on blocky wood panels. Many of the pieces break up the image, which is not stenciled or reproduced uniformly but seems drawn freehand, sometimes verging on a scrawl. The scratchiness of the iterations of the image and all the varied ways it is fragmented give it a goofy ghostly feel.

The most appealing work in the show is a series of plein air urban landscapes by Todd Gordon. He goes to scruffy parts of Brooklyn – empty lots, industrial zones, canals – and paints what he sees in a horizontal format. Many of the pieces are framed out to capture fundamental symmetries of form. I was reminded of several photographers, like Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao who had photos of some similar settings along the IRT 7 line in Queens, or people like Hiroshi Sugimoto or Dodo Jin Ming who make water a major character in their photos. The last association came to mind particularly with Gordon’s painting of New York Harbor, where the image is almost all water (it’s the main image on the LeQuire Gallery homepage right now). I find it interesting that photographers come to mind. Some of it is that Gordon includes a curvature to his perspective lines like lens fisheying, but I think it also has to do with a sense of the work being involved in framing and capturing the pieces of reality caught in the frame.

There’s also some irony in Gordon’s application of a plein air approach to these gritty settings as opposed to the idyllic countryside you associate with those fine French words. And I always find extremely urban landscape paintings refreshing, like some I can think of by Rackstraw Downes at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. And of course there’s the lineage to the NY Ashcan School.

There are four other artists in the show: Julia Martin, Kelly Williams, Art Poledno, and David Guidera. Of these, the one that interested me most was Kelly Williams, with appealing botanical groupings and landscape details.

Nice Quote from Hanna Fushihara

Saw this nice quote from Hanna Fushihara, which was in an article in the NY Times about a Southern California sportswear/surfwear company that is operating at intersection of various subcultures, mainstream business, and celebrity culture. Hanna probably comes from the freakier side of the spectrum of things this outfit is into. I have a typically east of the Rockies distrust of all of that surfer/skater/snowboarder stuff. But here's what Hanna said:

“It was Ms. Fushihara of Little Cakes gallery who pointed out in an ANP Quarterly interview the existence of little pockets of “weirdos” like herself living all over the country, “making music, touring, sleeping on each other’s floors, having weird plays, lots of costumes and masks, posters, self-released CD-R’s, records, etc.” It doesn’t matter anymore where one lives, she added last week in a telephone interview. “You could be in Idaho or Iowa and be connected,” she said. The point by now is beyond argument.”

Albany Waterfront Park

Albany is the town next door to Berkeley in the Bay Area, and among its other landmarks is a park that used to be something like a cement factory that was then abandoned and became a big squat camp for homeless people. The city or some other level of government has reclaimed the area, right on the bay, but it retains the remnants of the self-organizing culture that thrived there. The park is filled with art made from junk and cast off material, much of it elaborate. There are sculptures fabricated from twisted sheets of metal, branches, and wood scraps, including a person riding a dragon, a huge woman who seems to come out of the bay, strange giant figures sitting by the water. You find little shrines in cavities in the underbrush, a few objects arrayed on the branches of a bush, or an enclosure of concrete and metal scrap decorated with mirrors that could have been a work of art or someone’s self-fashioned living room.

My friend Paul and his son Liam took me down there today. The section of the park with the heaviest concentrationsof art is on the backside of a point of land that faces on a calm arm of the bay. In addition to a bunch of these sculptures, there is a series of paintings done on large pieces of scrap wood or other materials, propped up on impromptu easels and lined up along a path like the corridor of a museum. The paintings are heavy on images of violence and decadence, mixing elements from circuses and religion. Many seem to be from one guy, who signs himself as Sniff and makes work with strong recollections of Max Beckmann, only a little bleaker and more violent. It looks like he may still be at work.

On the immediate level, this park is a collection of interesting art works presented in a completely unexpected setting. Part of the impact comes from the density of the work, when you look for these human inventions and start seeing them everywhere. It also goes to say something about the impulse for art. A group of people, left on their own to develop some sort of society, end up naturally inclined to make art in proliferation. The urge for self-expression comes to fore, as one of the most important activities the society, in this case the homeless society of the Albany waterfront, can undertake. Art making shows itself as an essential activity.

Kaushiki Chakrabarty

Last Saturday's concert at Sri Ganesha featured Kaushiki Chakrabarty, a young singer who won a big prize from the BBC last year. I'm not a great judge of where the musicians who come to Sri Ganesha fall out in relative prestige, but I'm guessing she is one of the bigger people to perform there. She appeared with her husband, also a singer, named Parthasarathy Desikan. They both have studied with Chakrabarty's father.

She is a tremendous singer. Particularly impressive singing fast and precisely, through all sorts of patterns that seemed fresh and surprising, and she could run all over a huge range. At each point in a long phrase, the notes were perfectly distinct and perfectly placed. Listening to her makes you so aware of how this music is analogous to extremely finely detailed ornamental drawing, with complex patterns and elaborations that weave together to cover expanses of space in wonderful colors.

So acknowledging the extremely high quality of the singing, the concert was not all it could be. She was distracted by the sound system, made several comments about not being able to hear herself in the monitors. I imagine sound in the Temple hall is a challenge. It's not a concert hall, but more of an all-purpose room with a low ceiling. The result for Chakrabarty was a performance that seemed disjointed. The flights of technical brilliance were delivered in bursts that seems to stand separately, rather than building upon each other. The more sustained passages were sometimes strained, and again did not achieve the kind of spiritual intensity I have experienced with other vocalists in this room.

Desikan, for his part (the majority of the concert consisted of two separate performances by each singer, alone with the accompaniment of harmonium and tabla), sings more from power, a very strong voice. At critical points he came across with a jarring abruptness, hitting a loud, intense, and high sustained passage in a way that jumped out. His singing did not always lead up to those passages and let them grow in intensity. I think that more integrated approach produces a stronger emotional sensation.

At the end, Chakarabarty and Desikan performed a duet. At times during this section her voice was so sweet I wished it would go on for a long time. As concerts at Sri Ganesha go, this was pretty short at something like 2 hours (but non-stop).

The Fallen Idol

A very fine film at the Belcourt this week that you might overlook, The Fallen Idol, a 1948 film by Carol Reed with a screenplay by Graham Greene, starring Ralph Richardson. In short, the story takes place in the French Embassy in London, where the head butler (Richardson) is in love with a French typist on the staff but married to the head housekeeper. He's also buddies with the ambassador's young son, who ends up in the middle of this triangle, aware and unaware at the same time of what's going on. I don't think I should go into the plot details too much. The whole thing is very well done, for instance in the way several critical plot developments don't lead to the obvious places but still drive the plot. It also has this Graham Greene sourness -- things end up well inspite of bad things happening, although the twists that deliver the characters from the worst possible outcomes don't exactly deliver them free of damage. And one of the keys is the tension between whether one should tell the truth or keep one's secrets. The boy is tutored in this by the various adult characters, who push and pull him between those who tell him he must tell the truth and others who tell him he must keep secrets, and in the end he finds himself trying to tell the truth but getting ignored because the larger truth has already been established, and his little truth would actually lead people away from the truth. A very confusing place for a young boy to find himself.

Congratulations downtowners

Tonight was the twin openings of TAG's new space on 5th and Twist's new space period. TAG looks great, a nice main room that feels big, with couches that make it truly inviting, not necessarily what you always get from a white walls place. I've talked to Jerry Dale McFadden pretty regularly during the construction, and I know he's done a ton of work, and probably still has some finishing touches to go. But he must be so satisfied with what he and Susan have here. And it was great to see people hanging from the balconies of the Arcade, shuttling between Twist and Dangenart. Beth Gilmore, never exactly the most subdued person in the world, embodied pure joy. It was just what you would expect from her (and Caroline Carlisle I imagine), a three-ring circus with Tom Wills films, Todd Greene with his art on the walls but hanging out in the back playing music with Lain and Tony, and wine and Las Paletas popsicles and other food that I did not inventory. This is going to be great fun.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died

My first reaction was Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was alive? Yes, lived to be 90, died this week. She had a practically perfect voice. Listen to her recording of Strauss' 4 Last Songs. I had never looked into her personal history, just listened to the voice. It turns out she was quite the Nazi. The Times obit goes into the details. File her right after Leni Riefenstahl I guess.

Mess in Chicago

I just got wind of the mess in Chicago right now surrounding the HotHouse. This is a club that used to be in Wicker Park, in the Flat Iron building, finally got yuppied out, and moved to the South Loop. A minor miracle that it survived. I haven't been since the move, but in the early 90s it was the center of the cultural universe if you cared about avant garde jazz or politics. Michael Zerang used to tend bar, Todd Colburn would do sound, and I heard a lot of stuff, and played there a time or two although it was hard to get a show there so I was lucky for that. The show that comes to mind is a duet by David Murray and Kahil El-Zabar, but it was also a place you dropped into on the way to and from things. The HotHouse was the child of Maguerite Horberg -- she went back with all the 60s rads, was big on Cuba solidarity, had a big picture of Che on display. Well, somewhere in the move to the South Loop the place became a nonprofit org, with a board and fundraising, and a couple of weeks ago the board put her on leave. Here's a write up from the Reader. Definitely click through on the link to Carl Davidson's blog. It sounds like a big ole shit storm. What a mess. I hope they are able to save the place.

On better Chicago news, Fred Anderson has relocated the Velvet Lounge to new space on Cermak and reports from the new place are good. Here's a review by Howard Reich of the Trib.

Wise Man Thurston Moore

So often the aesthetic goal of underground music is assumed to be the pursuit of novelty or newness, an idea inherent in the word avant-garde. Then the music can be criticized when it fails a newness test, which all music does because most sounds (or any other form of expression) has existed before. Thurston Moore has a great counter to this in The Wire’s piece on Sonic Youth:

“I don’t like the idea of reaching out to do something new with [our] music, it’s kind of a living organism in a way. I talked to Evan Parker about it once, and he said, ‘We focused on certain aspects of those ESP records, because we liked the ending parts of these pieces, where they were really playing free, and we would just take those and make whole pieces out of them.’ That’s what they wanted to do, those were the moments they wanted to expound upon. I think somebody in that scene called it ‘the living music’. It’s not about any concept of newness—who cares? I have no interest in newness.”

I particularly like the formulation of the goal being to expound upon something you have experienced, therefore it follows upon something.

He’s also got this great take on the noise scene:

“I just think [that scene] has created its own identity outside of any pre-existing genre, and that’s what I’m most interested in, where genre terms become blurred. I know, like, when I get involved with playing with people in the avant garde jazz tradition, they have such a history of language development, with harmonic concepts and fairly sophisticated melodic concepts. I feel like I’m more involved with a scene that kind of explodes that.”

Seems to me this gets at what is so vital about it. It also seems to be a scene that can put down roots everywhere, unlike things like avant garde jazz which has a more of an exclusive character.

Sunset Strip paintings at Belcourt

Since I’m on the board at the Belcourt Theater, I don’t write about the art shows in theater lobby in the Scene. But everything’s fair game on a blog, no? I’m not sure how much I have to say about this, but the current show is a really appealing series of paintings by Christopher Kuhn of the Sunset Strip streetscape in LA. This of course is a tribute to Ed Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, updated to what Kuhn saw when he lived nearby recently. And of course the series are paintings, not photographs, done in a loose style in which the buildings are sketched pretty cleanly but the cars (the other primary figures in the series) come through in a blur of a few brushstrokes. The images have clean, airy light, like Wayne Thiebaud. They’re just nice to look at, and they also have the pleasures of series and the compare and contrast with their historical precedent in Ruscha. Go by and take a look. And see a movie. Lady Vengence is playing for 2 more days.

Contemporary Indian Art in Berkeley

If you are in the Bay Area between now and September 16, check out the show of contemporary Indian art at the Berkeley Art Museum, Edge of Desire. This show was at the Queens Museum last year, and now that I’ve finally seen it I’m starting to run across references to the people in it.

As you would expect, there’s fascinating stuff to look at. You run across vernacular traditions treated as an equally valid path to contemporary expression as artists from more conventional art school preparation, like pieces by Manu and Swarma Chitrakar, who are members of the Patua community in Bengal. This is a formerly nomadic group that developed a narrative style of painting and the members of this group traveled around painting to make a living. The pieces here include a poster about the war in Afghanistan and a scroll summarizing the highlights of the movie Titanic. There are some great crossovers with pop culture, like Cyrus Oshidar’s mock small-goods stand which serves as an elaborate frame for a video monitor running Indian MTV filler spots that are pretty hilarious.

What struck me was how political so much of the art is. Communal violence between Hindus and Muslims looms large, especially the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and subsequent riots (like a big piece by Vivan Sundaram that takes the figure of one dead body and builds a kind of shrine around that. You also see the figures of India and Pakistan’s founding (Nehru, M. and I. Gandhi, Jinnah) appearing as powerful mythical characters with an ambivalent legacy of violence, cruelty, and neglect in the politicians who have followed and in the political and bureaucratic structures they created. It is strange to realize that a new country, although also a very old one, creates these instant icons from a heroic era that has just occurred. In a longer established political entity the founders recede into a historical past that is safer because it is further past. India and Pakistan are roughly in a position analogous to the U.S. of Martin van Buren relative to our founding.

Stuff from Shaun Slifer in Pitttsburgh

What better way to celebrate our national holiday than with news on Shaun Slifer’s latest project in Pittsburgh. The former Nashvillian went north after he got done at Watkins. From what I’ve always heard, there’s a healthy grassroots scene there, and as one of the old industrial capitals it’s got a good institutional base of museums and universities which should help provide spaces and programs in which interesting people can operate.

So Shaun’s latest project is a stamp and ink pad set out in a gallery, where people are encouraged to stamp their $20 bills, right next to Old Hickory’s picture, with the message “Great Heroes of Real Estate: The Indian Removal Act of 1830” and then put the bills back into circulation. It seems like there have been protest actions of writing messages on money, but this puts it on a different level, meets the money on one of its natural levels as a bearer of cultural iconography and therefore of historical interpretation. You can look at money as filled with subliminal messages, or not so subliminal messages. Thus agitation about “In God We Trust.” Or trying to decode the eye on the pyramid. Or a local activist putting his stamp on the currency.

Shaun is also involved with a website, the Pittsburgh Art Review that includes open-forum art reviews. Looks like a good thing to have in place.

So on this 4^th of July, think about ... I don't know, either where you get your history from, or where to get fireworks to shoot off in your backyard.

More Chicago jazz guys in town

Lately it seems like there has been, thanks to Chris Davis, a steady trickle of the best younger jazz players from Chicago making their way through town: Keefe Jackson and Josh Berman, then Mandarin Movie with Frank Rosaly and Jason Ajemian. Now bass player Ajemian is back with the trio Dragons 1976, which also includes Aram Shelton, another one of the sax players you hear about these days, and percussionist Tim Daisy, who among other things is the drummer in the Ken Vandermark 5. This show, like Mandarin Movie, is at Ruby Green this Sunday (July 2). Starts at 9:00. Hands Off Cuba is also on the bill, and another Nashville group called the Potato Battery Experiment. I'm not sure who that is.

Back to the blog

For several weeks I’ve left the blog aside to keep the piece on Will ClenDening on the top to make sure people saw it and took the opportunity, if they wanted, to add a comment. It’s been almost a month, so I’ll get back to posting. (BTW, I think some folks are working on a memorial to Will on the Watkins website.)

The Scene announced this week that our former Managing Editor Jonathan Marx has taken a job at the Tennessean, filling Alan Bostick’s old job. For those who don’t know, as Managing Editor, Jonathan coordinated and personally edited most of the visual art coverage. Nothing against Bostick (whom I’ve never met although I have benefited from his coverage for projects I’ve been involved with), but having Jonathan at the Tennessean is a big deal for the Nashville art community. He is so well tuned in to art and artists, and so smart about it, that having him at the Tennessean will expand the range of coverage. As a daily paper, there are some things the Tennessean can and can’t do in comparison to an alt-weekly like the Scene, but there is no doubt that Jonathan will look for every opportunity to say something insightful.

Just look at his first piece for the paper, on the Frist’s Egyptian show. He covers a lot of ground. In addition to describing the material in the exhibit and the main themes, making good use of curator Mark Scala’s voice (whose presentations on the exhibit are, not surprisingly, very good), JM has also worked in observations about the curatorial process and the logistics of putting on the show. With an exhibit like this (really any exhibit), it pays to think about the institutional as well as the aesthetic dimension.

One thing to consider is that up until now, Jonathan has mostly exercised an indirect influence on visual arts coverage as the editor of other people’s writing, outside of picks (where he was able to make significant comments). Now people will read his articles on art. People in the art community are going to want to keep up with what he is writing about and what he is saying.

Will ClenDening

Will ClenDening died in a motorcycle accident last week. This is a terrible loss. For his family and anyone who knew him, it goes without saying that they are suffering, but Will’s death tears away a piece of the entire Nashville art community. He was an incredibly gifted artist, and there was never more of a case of a young man who had an entire life of living and making art stretching in front of him which was snuffed out too early. You never know where someone will go with art, but Will looked like he was going to take things to the highest levels possible.

Will’s work has been some of the most consistently stimulating stuff I have seen in Nashville in the last couple of years. He had that rare combination of a good eye and a sharp mind, making pieces that were strong formally and conceptually.

• In one Watkins show he made a column out of unwound videotape. It worked as a simple sculpture, running from ceiling to floor with a clear form and the texture of the curling videotape, forming a presence in the gallery, but there was also a subtext about looking at the unseeable.
  
• I saw several pieces from him which involved really great experiments with sound and video feed, sometimes just minimal signals. I find it very useful to think about the quality of those signals in focusing my own music.
  
• He did a series of sculptures that involved pouring molten metal into molds containing books, the metal partially burning the paper and then cooling in jagged, surreal forms (these were at a show at Ruby Green).
  
• And there were his machines, which converted signals from the worlds of sound or motion into automated mark-making activity. I wrote a post about them a year ago.

He created an impressive variety and quality of work at a young age. Anyone who looks at art has lost something with his death.

This death will be felt especially hard by everyone in the Watkins family, Will's teachers and fellow students. They have such an intense bond, I can barely imagine how they feel right now. And all of them are so important to our community, and Nashville is so small and interconnected, that none of us is unaffected by their grief. And the grieving goes way past Watkins, since Will made a lot of friends with other artists in town. This ploughs right through the middle of us.

The Secret Show has a page with a couple of Will’s pieces from Secret Shows.

Visitation and Will’s funeral are this week, Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t have more details yet. [Monday: Heather posted a comment with the details on visitation and the service.]

More updates, Monday PM: visitation is Tuesday from 4-8 at Woodlawn Funeral Home, which is in Woodlawn Cemetery on Thompson in Berry Hill. The service is 2:00 Wednesday at St. Mark's Episcopal, 3100 Murfreesboro Road in Antioch, pretty close to the intersection with Bell Road.

Finally, the family has set up a memorial scholarship fund in Will's memory at Watkins. An email from Melissa Means at Watkins said "A scholarship has been established by the family in Will's memory.Donations can be sent directly to the Development Office at Watkins College of Art and Design." Their address is Watkins College of Art and Design, 2298 Metrocenter Boulevard, Nashville 37228.

More additions: Melissa Means posted this URL for Will’s student page with images of his work:

http://students.watkins.edu/wclendening/index.html

Also, I hear that Watkins is considering creating an artwork or sculpture in his memory. I’m sure they’ll be working out details on that over some period of time.

MTSU Performance Art

Cindy Rehm had her students present performance pieces at Ruby Green tonight they developed in a three-week workshop. True to the workshop’s name, Body + Process, most of the pieces either used the performer’s body as a central element and/or established a process of actions which the piece then played out.

• Natalie Harrison set up a game piece. She sat on the floor with a laundry basket filled with shirts and then started to pull shirts out and fold and stack them. Three other members of the class stood across from her and took turns taking a shirt out of the stacks (messing up the stack in the process), putting it on, taking it off, and then throwing the crumpled shirt down. The game was Harrison trying to complete the task of folding in spite of the interruptions. The folding did proceed faster, so eventually she got ahead of it, and the piece ended with all four women facing the stacks, then one of them (I think) messing it up. On the one hand this was a piece that involved watching someone fold clothes. Tedious and annoying. But it was a bit complicated semiotically. In addition to its game logic which once started had to be followed in this obsessive manner, it mixed up shopping and household gestures, and also patterns of domination and humiliation. I was also very aware of how arbitrary the control/humiliation relations were. Any one of the four young women could have been the one folding the clothes.
• Several of the pieces focused their actions on performer’s body. Erin Piper rubbed a viscous blue liquid on her lips and kissed her body wherever her lips could reach. It reminded me of a Tim Hawkinson piece that recorded the parts of his body he could see directly as he saw them, so the proportions were distorted. Piper does something similar by marking all the places she can kiss. And the action has other overtones: masturbation, isolation, even beauty treatments (“kiss your body”). And I couldn’t help but think this piece would be a lot shorter if I did it—in my middle-aged decrepitude, I’m not exactly a yoga master, so my lips don’t get around as well. Sarah Medsker had another simple and lovely piece, rubbing dirt over all of her body. It was a reversal of cleaning, and a kind of return to Earth, with a hint of self-damage as you heard the small stones in the dirt hit the ground.
• Jeremy Braden did a complicated piece that involved a tower of stacked Crayolas that he exposed to a heat lamp, which he taped to his arm cyborg-style. He kept the lamp until enough melting occurred so it fell down. He did the exercise in a one-eyed mask and with a soundtrack of a couple of boys goofing around with a tape recorder, talking about Frankenstein and Dr. Seuss and just nonsense. Chris Davis said that the piece was about W letting the tower fall while he was just goofing around. I can see it. But I found this one kinda of tedious. It worked out that a good portion of it was sitting in the dark listening to the boys use up the tape. They were hilarious, but more so in small doses.
• Jacqueline Meeks had the shortest piece, very clear. Dressed in black, she stepped into a basin of water and poured water all over herself with her cupped hands. Then she got out and laid down in a square of sugar she had spread on the ground. First her front, then her back, then she stood up, faced the crowd, licked her fingers and held her arms out like a T. The sugar formed this messy pattern on her black clothes like some sort of forensic trace on CSI or the Shroud of Turin. There’s obviously a lot of religion in this short piece: baptism, foot washing, crucifixion. And she turns herself into food. Sugar-coated. Her impression of herself on her own clothes was the single strongest image of the night.
• Cindy Rehm also did a piece: dressed in white, kneeling on a small round table cloth, she had a stack of jelly doughnuts that she picked up one at a time, stuck her finger into, then rubbed the jelly on her lips and smeared it in a T shape across the front of her dress. She handled each successive doughnut more roughly. And after each doughnut, she lifted the back of each hand to her nose. The piece followed a rule set like many of the others, but it was less literal so it established more of an independent place for itself.

Glad to see the MTSU students doing this. Last year, Tom Thayer brought a workshop group to Angle of View, and it was very good to have some cross-pollination between them and the AOV scene.

Announcement #2: TN Arts Commission Gallery call

Nicole Pietrantoni has sent out a call for proposals for exhibits at the Tennessee Arts Commission gallery. Their exhibits have become a really fine series, and provided the occasion for artists to try out some interesting ideas. The space is compact, and seems to lend itself to coherent shows. The Commission also seems open to people developing socially significant material. The current show by Vitus Shell is a case in point. So if you've got an idea for a small show, maybe an installation or a particular body of work, and you're a legal resident of the state of TN (but not, per the instructions, a full-time student or State of TN employee other than an instructor at state-supported educational institutions), I'd encourage you to submit something here.

Here's the brief description. There's a three-page Word document with full instructions that I'm sure Nicole will send if you ask her for it. It might be on the Arts Commission website too, but I didn't see it.

Call for Works
Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery
2007-2009 Gallery Exhibition Schedule

Postmark Deadline for Applications: Friday, August 18th, 2006

-Overview-
The Tennessee Arts Commission is seeking applications for exhibitions
from Tennessee artists for the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery's
2007-2009 exhibition series.  The Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery is
dedicated to exhibiting and promoting the talents of professional
artists from across the state of Tennessee.  Located in the heart of
downtown Nashville, this unique space features rotating exhibitions on
display for 6-8 weeks.  Named the "Best Exhibition Series" in
Nashville by the Nashville Scene, the TAC Gallery is committed to
presenting diverse and challenging shows of consistently strong work.
Applications for visual art, installations, craft, media, and design
arts are welcome.

Please see attachment for more information or contact Nicole
Pietrantoni, Director of Visual Art/Craft/Media program 615-532-9798
nicole.pietrantoni@state.tn.us. 

Announcement #1: Indian Dance

Sankaran Mahadevan sent around this notice of a dance concert by a student at the Vandy Medical School. One of the remarkable things about Indian culture in Nashville is the number of people who pursue music and dance at a very high level but make their living in other ways. Mahadevan, for instance, is a really accomplished singer, but his day job is as a School of Engineering faculty member at Vandy. I suspect that Haritha Bodduluri is very good at what she does. People don't take on big public recitals like this lightly.


Indian Classical Dance (Kuchipudi) by

HARITHA BODDULURI

on Sunday, June 4th, at 3:00 pm
in Sarratt Cinema Auditorium, Vanderbilt University Campus

Suggested Donation: $ 5 (Free for children under 10)
Additional donations for Operation Smile appreciated.

Haritha Bodduluri is an accomplished Kuchipudi dancer of the Sri Nritya Art Academy in Vijayawada, India having trained under its founder Bhagavathula Venkatarama Sarma since 1992. Haritha’s dance training began in 1987 in the Bharathanatyam style with Padmini Ramachandran in New York and has since performed throughout the USA and in India. Haritha's formal debut was in 1996, to lavish praise by critics and well known senior performers, including Kuchipudi legend Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma. She has won the first place at the TANA dance competition in Los Angeles. She created an Indian Classical dance group at Duke University where she is the recipient of the Edward H. Benenson Award in the Arts. Haritha is now studying at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Operation Smile: Throughout the world, children born with facial deformities lack the resources for corrective surgery. This non-profit organization has provided over 98,000 free life-changing operations since 1982. See http://www.operationsmile.org for more information.

End of TV Season Wrapup

I don’t think I watch a lot of TV, but I’ve got a few shows I can’t resist. Two of them are American Idol and CSI and both wrapped up seasons in the last week.

Both shows are all about their own mechanics. On CSI you figure out how to make lab work visually interesting and comprehensible to audiences who know no science. So the characters natter on about what they are doing. In the real world, they would kill each other. “Now I’m going into Excel and making a copy of the second sheet in your workbook which I will place in a new workbook, then go in and do a copy/paste special/values to get rid of the cell references to other sheets.” Shut up already and do your job.

On American Idol, every week they go through the same process of announcing the low vote getter. They have to vary it somehow to keep it interesting, so they come up with new ways to lead in to the annoucnement. Three people on this side, three on the other, which one are the top three. Of these two who got the smallest or highest number of votes: Suzy, you are/are not the one. Etc.

I heard someone argue that American Idol is good for pop music, I think they were saying because the Idol singers sell a lot of records. For me the statement is true but for a different reason. Hearing the contestants struggle through the songs makes you realize how good the best pop stars are. None of the contestants, even the finalists, seem comfortable and in control. Then you hear Stevie Wonder, and you realize how he nails each pitch, with a full, confident tone, and makes it look easy. On the show Wednesday, Prince came out and everything was dead on, the pitch, phrasing, and dancing. Of course, then you have Mary J. Blige beating up on U2’s One. Seemed like she wanted to kill the song. Guess Bono gets on her nerves.

Idol struggles with racial undercurrents. In one of the first seasons I recall that Simon Cowell complained callers were voting off the black singers. On the Wednesday show they had gag awards for the worst singers. There were more blacks than whites, even though blacks seem to be a minority of the contestants. It came awfully close to “let’s laugh at these ridiculous black people.”

CSI has cruised along for years on unconsummated sexual tension between the characters: Gil and Sarah, Katherine and Warrick. Gil’s ineptitude in this area is a key part of his character. In the finale they gave in and put Gil and Sarah together in a post- or pre-coital scene. They’ve hinted at this more heavily in the last few episodes with meaningful glances between them. Usually a series goes downhill once it gives in and resolves this tension. In Western drama, coupling constitutes the end of the story. The objective has been fulfilled. And there isn’t the same tension once you put people together. Now Gil and Sarah can argue about whose turn it is to empty the cat’s litter box.

But the producers of CSI are smart about TV, and I bet they know that putting Gil and Sarah together lets a bunch of air out of the balloon. So there’s only one thing to do. Kill off one of the characters. Then the survivor can continue on, haunted by the memory. Lots of opportunities for music video sequences contemplating some object that recalls the dead one. And since William Peterson carries the show and is a producer… The only question is whether they kill off Jorja Fox in the opening episode or try to lead up to it through the season. There’s your cliffhanger.

Dixie Chicks in the desert

I caught the Dixie Chicks doing “Not Ready to Make Nice” on Letterman last night. Natalie Maines is a fine singer, and she really got into it, letting her voice fill with anger just up to the point where it would become something more radical (like what Sleater-Kinney does every day). Then I read in the Tennessean today how the group is getting no radio play for this album, especially on country stations. At first this seems like country music being boneheaded and skipping over music within the traditional and style that sells a lot of records but happens to come up through an unexpected channel. Peter Cooper compares it to O Brother Where Art Thou? But really the guys in the industry aren’t so dumb. The banishment of the Dixie Chicks shows the extent to which consumption of country music as a category is a marker of social and political allegiance. You listen to country music to place yourself within the cultural landscape in a place you feel comfortable and that seems to reflect who you think you are. The music itself hardly has anything to do it, like Christian churches where people seem more interested in politics than theology (cf the piece on NPR about the Delay crony Ed Buckham who basically fleeced his preacher).

Furthermore, when you think about it, this reduction of country music fandom to a badge of social affiliation is not in fact a unique condemnation of country music. Most musical genres that have any sort of identifiable fan base serve as cultural and social markers. Hipness (or inclusion) is accorded in different circles with an association with often very specific musical choices. I remember fearing to confess that I enjoyed KPFT’s Sound of Texas music program around some of my free jazz friends in Houston. There were all sorts of pop and rock music that would have been cool, but not the polished mix of country, rock, and whatnot that makes up that Austin sound. Willie Nelson is cool, but not Tish Hinojosa.

Now it seems inevitable that the Dixie Chicks will get picked up by a lot of people who don’t care about country music who will see them as a cultural marker in the opposite direction. Air America listeners, not today’s KDF. I imagine it will work out fine for them, they will sell a lot of albums, which they deserve to do. The sad thing is some sense that the family of country music has been sundered. The Dixie Chicks are one way of doing country music, they carry on important parts of the tradition, and one wants to see them embraced for that. And one maybe one dreams of cultural spaces where political diversity of opinion can exist. It might be easier to see it when it comes to Ricky Skaggs (prominent on stage at Nashville’s big Bush fundraiser in 2004). But does it also mean you have to listen to Lee Greenwood. Or can we agree that he just makes crappy records?

Pro-Am

I don’t always find myself agreeing with Bill Ivey’s ideas about the arts economy (he seems to put a strong insistence on markets as both the best way to support art and the judge of value, discounting the idea that there would be organizations or art forms that should receive other kinds of public support), but he and Steven Tepper from his research center at Vanderbilt have a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that includes a couple of points near and dear to me: that art-making is increasingly driven by what he (or actually Charles Leadbeater) call professional amateurs, people who take it seriously but don’t make a living at it, and that this is a “revitalization of folk culture” (a line written by Henry Jenkins in an upcoming volume Ivey and Tepper are editing).

Ivey and Tepper go from those points to argue that this sort of folk cultural experience is a matter of elite privilege, something available to people with leisure. That doesn’t match my experience so much, where it seems that the most serious people are accepting pretty marginal standard of living to pursue this, and that the socio-economic backgrounds represented are pretty broad, although most of the people I run across have had at least some college.

I'm not entirely sure, but it seems like Ivey and Tepper may be willing to take the artistic production from these sources seriously. In one sentence they credit "pro-ams" with "producing high-quality innovatice work." I'm always on guard for the tendency to dismiss as the work of hobbyists the efforts I see going on all around me.

West Wing RIP

With sadness I watched the West Wing wind down its run. Obviously it either did or did not have the ratings to make it worth it for NBC to keep airing it, and with the plot wrapping up the final term of Martin Sheen/Jed Bartlett there wasn’t much point in going on. You’d be going over most of the same ground with Jimmy Smits/Matt Santos. Hostage crises, potential scandals, etc. The soap opera stuff is what would keep you going. What will happen with Josh and Donna, that sort of thing.

The big thing West Wing did was provide an alternate reality. It was a place you could go once a week for an hour and pretend like the country was led by wise and decent leaders who wanted to make the world better for as many people as possible, surrounded by talented people who were bright and also cared about the world. The show should have been kept on not as a commercial proposition, but as a public service for the mental health benefits it bestowed, part of MBC’s FCC license requirements.

The TV West Wing was a utopia, a place that does not exist and I doubt it ever did. Maybe a brief period during FDR, but even then I imagine the staff was split by much harsher internal rivalries. I would definitely be suspicious of claims for this sort of ideal environment in the Clinton administration. I don’t think the Clinton strategy of triangulation would have been inspiring to watch..

When the show ended, it was like waking up into a cold reality and no escaping it. The sensation was like the day Bush was first inaugurated: a cold and wet scene with the parade rolling slowly down the nearly empty streets of Washington, small clutches of protesters milling around and nearly as numerous as the thin groups of people attending to celebrate. Every day of Bushworld has had the same spiritual tenor. With the TV series over, all you are left with is the bleak, dispirited reality of that day.

But at least Jack Bauer will be back to make us feel not just good, but pumped about torture.