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When New Orleans musicians play the old songs, what once came across as easygoing now carries a streak of bravado. Like other New Orleanians, many musicians have lost their homes, possessions and sometimes family members, and they are traveling long distances to play in their old local haunts. A song like "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" now echoes with the knowledge that some natives of the city will never return. And there are new, bleaker resonances when a Mardi Gras Indian group like the Wild Magnolias sings the traditional song "Shallow Water Oh Mama," or when a brass band picks up the bouncy "It Ain't My Fault."
Vaughan's, a club in the Upper Ninth Ward, is too small for a stage. Mr. Ruffins, a trumpeter, has returned to his regular Thursday gig there after a long hiatus imposed by the storm, and he and his band were nearly backed against the club's wall by the dancing crowd. He was playing and singing old New Orleans songs like "Mardi Gras Mambo," with a jovial Louis Armstrong growl. Yet no one, onstage or off, has forgotten that the Lower Ninth Ward, still in ruins, is only a few blocks away.
Mr. Ruffins finished one set with a pop standard once sung by Bing Crosby, "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams." Halfway through, in casual New Orleans style, he handed the microphone to an audience member, who belted the song — with a line about castles tumbling — and then held on to the microphone long enough to add, "That's for all the people that lost their houses."
Later, Mr. Ruffins agreed. "Those tunes take a whole different meaning now," he said. "At one time in the club, we would just be singing them. Now, I listen to the words."
It is the exhibition's stated ambition to reconfigure the history of sculpture since World War II (and its constant return to the example of Duchamp) that is more problematic. Leaving aside questions about what does not appear at the Wexner—the polemical exclusion of Pop and Minimalism, the limiting of the potentially far-reaching inquiry to only European and North American art—there remains the question of the historical model being implied here. Do we need more family-tree art histories, however ingeniously regrafted their branches, in which the ultimate referent of contemporary art is the work of a past master? A mental melding of Duchamp's erotic objects and his handcrafted readymade duplicates would indeed seem to license the exciting range of part-body, part-commodity creations gathered here. Yet Molesworth's emphasis on his patrimony risks implying that the condition for these objects' invention and importance rests with previous art, rather than with the way they work through the dilemmas of a half century in which people, places, and resources have been used as parts rather than valued as wholes—the dilemmas of a commercialized world where desire is routed through objects in processes that are anything but organic.
Laudable indeed is the selection of Steven Parrino (1958-2005) and Jutta Koether (b. 1958). Steven died on New Year’s Day 2005 in a motorcycle accident in Brooklyn, and seeing his work at the Whitney should bring a few tears. The power in both Steven’s and Jutta’s paintings is in the search for the absolute dead ends of creative practice, not so much to explore them further (they are, after all, dead ends) but for the visceral experience of slamming into them head on. Jutta’s way cool, and dangerously unpredictable in her art. She was the resident critic for everything that was so essential out of the whole Cologne scene, and the art she made for her husband Tom Verlaine’s record albums is equally mesmeric as the music by this formidable leader of New York’s legendary band Television.
WARHOL LICENSING MANIA
In a recent study of licensing income, Forbes magazine reported that the estate of Andy Warhol raked in $16 million in 2005, making the ‘60s art superstar the magazine’s number four "top-earning dead person," right behind Elvis Presley ($45 million), Charles M. Schultz ($35 million) and John Lennon ($22 million), and beating out Dr. Seuss ($10 million), as well as Warhol subjects Marlon Brando ($9 million) and Marilyn Monroe ($8 million). But the real news in the 2005 list is the arrival of Warhol, a new development (the other lucrative dead people were already solidly at the top of a similar 2004 Forbes round-up). So, what accounts for Andy’s sudden rise?
A Warhol licensing bonanza, that’s what. The Andy Warhol Foundation agreement with the Beanstock Group -- a marketing corporation that has masterminded licenses for the Mary Kate and Ashley Olson clothing empire, among others -- started to pay off big last year. Already in 2003, the group won the Licensing Industry Merchandiser’s Association’s "Best Corporate Brand License of the Year" award for its Andy Warhol licensing program, and now one can see why. Current or future Warhol product news includes:
* The new "Warhol Factory X Levi's collection," a collection of men’s and women’s jeans, tops, sweaters and jackets, embellished with dollar sign, Marilyn Monroe, Mao and other imagery ($190-$250 for jeans; $80-$300 for tops) -- set to debut in spring 2006 in the U.S. and Canada.
* A number of gift-shop-type products from the New York-based company Loop, including paper weights ($16 each): bags -- in tote, messenger, DJ, hobo and satchel styles -- featuring flowers, Campbell’s soup designs and more ($26.40-$55); and Elvis and Chairman Mao-themed sleep masks ($11).
* European designer Joao Tovar’s "All Is Andy Warhol" line, on sale across Europe (to see images of some of the clothes featured on an Italian TV show, click here). Tovar’s fashion house, Cultura, is also pushing a CD called Andy Warhol by Cultura, with 25 tracks from the likes of Air, Faultline, Massive Attack, Moby and Unkle.
* Wallets stamped with the Velvet Underground banana, as well as bags using early Warhol ice cream and butterfly motifs, all branded with Warhol’s signature, from Paul Frank Industries, currently available at stores in the U.S. and Europe.
* London designer Philip Treacy’s 2004 line of "Warhol Hats," assorted varieties of beanies, ball caps and fedoras, made from material that features images of famous celebrities as well as Warhol’s late-career camouflage are still available at www.philiptreacy.co.uk, along with a line of bags, including a Campbell’s soup can-shaped clutch.
* Stationary and other items from San Francisco’s Chronicle Books, including an "Andy Warhol Men" silver foil address book, with a cover featuring a silk-screened image of a male bottom ($12.95), the "Pop Box" kit offering "exact reproductions of fascinating ephemera from the Factory years and beyond" ($24.95) and the "Warhol Idea Book," a sketch pad replete with quotes and illustrations ($18.95).
* A 2004 deal with Corbis makes the company exclusive licensor of digital Warhol artwork. The Seattle-based company offers some 500 Warhol images on its website for use by publishers and advertisers -- for a minimum of about $10,000 a pop, according to a company rep.
* Finally -- not a Beanstock licensee, but nevertheless doing its part to build Warholmania -- there’s Factory Girl, the George Hickenlooper-directed movie, currently in post-production, about the relationship between Sienna Miller’s Edie Sedgewick and Guy Pearce’s Andy. The film is such a hot property that it recently prompted a lawsuit by Sony against the Weinstein Company , claiming that it had been cheated out of distribution rights.
Duchamp is invariably referred to as an "anti-artist" and an "iconoclast." This is entirely false. Duchamp was a great art adviser to collectors. He wasn't against art at all; he was against the hypocritical aura surrounding it. More importantly, Duchamp may be the first modern artist to take God's prohibition against "hewn" objects to heart. Fountain is not hewn or made in any traditional sense. In effect, it is an unbegotten work, a kind of virgin birth, a cosmic coitus of imagination and intellect. Like a megalithic stone, Fountain is merely placed on view, pointed at as the locus of something intrinsic to art and as art itself. Duchamp's work relies on a leap of faith: that new thought structures can be formed based on things already in the world. Fountain is the aesthetic equivalent of the Word made Flesh: It is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art, an object in which the distance between image and prototype is narrowed to a scintillating sliver. Just as Christians perceive Christ as the invisible made visible, Jesus said "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," so Fountain essentially says, "He that hath seen me hath also seen the idea of me."
Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to "de-deify" the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art. Fountain is what's called an "acheropoietoi," an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger. Its presence is grace.
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A c. 1916 water tower was saved from demolition yesterday after the city council of Venice, Fla., voted 5-1 against allowing the tower's owner, a local homeowners association, to tear it down.
hokum : an anthology of african-american humor
In a rare display of unanimity that cuts across partisan and geographic lines, lawmakers in virtually every statehouse across the country are advancing bills and constitutional amendments to limit use of the government's power of eminent domain to seize private property for economic development purposes.
The measures are in direct response to the United States Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision last June in a landmark property rights case from Connecticut, upholding the authority of the City of New London to condemn homes in an aging neighborhood to make way for a private development of offices, condominiums and a hotel. It was a decision that one justice, who had written for the majority, later all but apologized for.
If all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn, all American surf culture comes from Gidget, the ostensible diary of Kathy Kohner, a teensy, gutsy teenage girl who crashed the all-male scene at Malibu Beach north of L.A. in 1957 and earned, from Moondoggie and others, the nickname Gidget, which meant "Girl Midget." Her father, the German immigrant screenwriter Frederick Kohner, fascinated by the beach-shack counterculture, interviewed his perky daughter at length, eavesdropped with permission on her phone calls, fictionalized her adventures, and batted out this influential bestseller. He nailed a tiny subculture's new form of speech ("If you want to know what goes on in Loveville ... Dig Number One: being gone on a boy is more important than having a boy gone on you.") and made it a pop-culture staple. Newly reissued with the real Gidget's picture on the cover (as on the original hardback), the book is very slim (appropriately enough) and historically beguiling. You'll like her--you'll really like her! --Tim Appelothat first sentence contains double overstatements but you can see where he is going with it. gidget was a significant pop culture reference point. The real world moondoggie turns out to be west coast abstractionist bill jensen. (who is not moondog. whom some of us may remember as a ubiquitous viking garbed busker in midtown manhattan in the 1970's.)
It took a dozen years and two hundred and seventy-five million dollars to renovate the villa and surround it with a series of modernist buildings, including an entry pavilion, an amphitheatre, a parking garage, a café, an auditorium, an education center, and a shop. The project’s architects are Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, of Boston, rigorous modernists who have a love of classicism and believe that an architect best respects history not by imitating it but by teasing its spirit into new forms. Machado and Silvetti are about as far as you can get from Norman Neuerburg, who designed the original villa, and it seemed an odd match: there is nothing overtly charming about Machado and Silvetti’s work, while Neuerburg’s design was a vast, sprawling exercise in cuteness.
The campus that Machado and Silvetti have created is a bracing collage of old and new, and the villa has been nearly magically transformed. The task was surely made easier by the fact that the French furniture and Old Master paintings are gone from the villa, and its new contents have a genuine connection to ancient Rome. (In fact, some items in the collection may belong to Rome; the Getty has been accused of acquiring a significant number of looted artifacts.) But it takes more than hauling away some gilded frames to make a ponderous building into a gracious one. Instead of slavishly replicating Roman architecture (although various touches, such as new floors of bronze, mosaic, and marble, reveal a high level of scholarship), Machado and Silvetti have acknowledged the past without imitating it. They have boldly reorganized the villa, creating more logical routes through it and adding fifty-eight windows and three skylights, to bring natural light into the galleries. One of the best things in the villa now is a new main stair, of bronze, glass, and hand-carved Spanish stone; a meticulous modernist composition, it is broad, sumptuous, and serene, and a crisp counterpoint to the classical-looking environment around it. The effect is playful and knowing: in Italy, contemporary alterations to ancient Roman structures are often made in such a bluntly modern style, to make clear which elements are authentically old. Here, of course, the “original” details date from 1974.
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In recent years architects around the world have stopped using straight lines. If this trend continues at its current rate, a child drawing a house 10 years from now will not sketch a square building with a straight floor and a shingled roof, but rather one more reminiscent of a soap bubble.
The development of computer software programs used for architectural planning and for improving building technologies has produced a new architectural language - a language that creates buildings with amorphous forms known in the professional jargon as skins.
House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.
A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.
"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
It's about the shoes, says Professor Ed Galea, in New York this week from the University of Greenwich to interview people who made it out of the twin towers on 9-11. All those women's high-heels that people saw littering the stairwells were but a colorful detail in most retellings of the day. For Galea, however, the shoes scream danger—and a need for new thinking about how to protect people in high-rises.
Galea and a band of other behavioral psychologists are here, as they will be for 36 weeks in the next year, attempting to interview 2,000 survivors from World Trade Center 1 and 2 to learn the details of their trips to safety (when they started to evacuate and why, whether they traveled in groups, how large the crowds were on the stairs, and so on) in hopes of influencing building codes to make high rises safer places to work, live, and—in an emergency—leave.
A veteran of disaster studies, Galea tells the Voice that the interviews so far appear to contradict many prevailing assumptions about how people evacuate buildings—the assumptions underlying current regulations governing how those buildings are built. For example, engineers around the world think most people start to evacuate in an emergency about two minutes after they learn of the incident. In the towers, however, folks in some cases lingered at their desks or the windows for an hour. Simply put, if true, that changes everything, from the volume of people the stairwells must accept to how long the fireproofing has to last.
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live music ~ vault radio
Bill Graham and his concert promotion company, Bill Graham Presents, produced more than 35,000 concerts all over the world. His first venue, the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, was home to many of rock's greatest performers - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Prince - and the list goes on and on.
Graham taped thousands of live performances and stored the tapes in the basement of the BGP headquarters.
These tapes and the concerts they captured lay dormant until the Bill Graham archive was acquired by Wolfgang's Vault (Bill Graham's given first name was Wolfgang) in 2003.
Vault Radio is now playing selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Songs will be added to and removed from the radio show on a regular basis. We will be broadcasting unaltered live performance music from many of the greatest bands of the last 40 years. The music you hear on Vault Radio has not been sweetened or polished. You'll be listening to what the band played that night - nothing more, nothing less.
streaming for free now w/ plans to sell downloads later this year.
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