Category: Arts

Art news from all over (not including film arts and music arts)

Exhibition of invisible art

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Homage to Robert Rauschenberg Redux
Homage to Robert Rauschenberg Redux

 

  Inevitable jokes aside, this sounds interesting. I’d go if I could.

London’s Hayward Gallery will gather together 50 ”invisible” works by leading figures such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Yoko Ono for its display of works you cannot actually see. It is thought to be the first such exhibition staged at a major institution in the UK. Gallery bosses say the £8 a head exhibition demonstrates how art is about ”firing the imagination”, rather than simply viewing objects.

Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957 – 2012 opens on June 12 and includes an empty plinth, a canvas of invisible ink and an unseen labyrinth. It includes work and documents from French artist Klein who pioneered invisible works in the late 1950s with his concept of the ”architecture of air”.

Also in the exhibition will be Warhol’s work Invisible Sculpture – dating from 1985 – which consists of an empty plinth, on which he had once briefly stepped, one of many explorations of the nature of celebrity.

(click here to continue reading Empty plinth and blank piece of paper to feature in exhibition of invisible art – Telegraph.)

John Cage 4 33
John Cage 4’33”.PNG

I assume someone will play John Cage’s famous piece, 4’33″

4′33″ (pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”) is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements (which, for the first performance, were divided into thirty seconds for the first, two minutes and twenty-three seconds for the second, and one minute and forty seconds for the third). The piece purports to consist of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as “four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence”

or some of his precursors:

Cage was not the first composer to conceive of a piece consisting solely of silence. Precedents and prior examples include:

  • Alphonse Allais’s 1897 Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, consisting of nine blank measures. Allais’s composition is arguably closer in spirit to Cage’s work; Allais was an associate of Erik Satie, and given Cage’s profound admiration for Satie, the possibility that Cage was inspired by the Funeral March is tempting. However, according to Cage himself, he was unaware of Allais’s composition at the time (though he had heard of a nineteenth century book that was completely blank). 
  • Erwin Schulhoff’s 1919 “In futurum”, a movement from the Fünf Pittoresken for piano. The Czech composer’s meticulously notated composition is made up entirely of rests. 
  • In Harold Acton’s 1928 book Cornelium a musician conducts “performances consisting largely of silence”. 
  • Yves Klein’s 1949 Monotone-Silence Symphony (informally The Monotone Symphony, conceived 1947–1948), an orchestral forty minute piece whose second and last movement is a twenty minute silence (the first movement being an unvarying twenty minute drone).

American Visa Rules Frustrate Foreign Performers

Seth Anderson0 comment

Fela - Oriental Theatre
Fela – Oriental Theatre

We are deprived of culture because of the morons in Washington, and their intricate, bureaucratic ballet supporting terrorism theatre. Many artists don’t even bother trying to come here anymore, it’s too costly, and too much of a hassle.

In the decade since the attacks on the twin towers, American visa procedures for foreign artists and performers have grown increasingly labyrinthine, expensive and arbitrary, arts presenters and immigration lawyers say, making the system a serious impediment to cultural exchanges with the rest of the world.

Some foreign performers and ensembles, like the Hallé orchestra from Britain, have decided that it is no longer worth their while to play in the United States. Others have been turned down flat, including a pair of bands invited to perform at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., last month, or have ended up canceling performances because of processing delays, as was the case last month with the Tantehorse theater troupe from the Czech Republic, which was booked to perform in suburban Washington.

Overall, according to Homeland Security Department records, requests for the standard foreign performer’s visa declined by almost 25 percent between 2006 and 2010, the most recent fiscal year for which statistics are available. During the same period the number of these visa petitions rejected, though small in absolute numbers, rose by more than two-thirds.

“Everything is much more difficult,” said Palma R. Yanni, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association who also handles artists’ visas. “I didn’t think it could get worse than it was after 9/11, but the last couple of years have been terrible. It just seems like you have to fight for everything across the board, even for artists of renown. The standards have not changed, but the agency just keeps narrowing the criteria, raising the bar without notice or comment, reinterpreting things and just making everything more restrictive. We call it the culture of no.”

(click here to continue reading U.S. Visa Rules Frustrate Foreign Performers – NYTimes.com.)

Chicago At Large
Chicago At Large

It isn’t a new problem:

For example, earlier this year [2010] the agency held up three applications for visiting musicians with the Chicago Opera Theater, requesting an unusual amount of evidence to corroborate the visa requirement that the artists have achieved sufficient renown. The company eventually went over its budget to hire an immigration lawyer, who got two of the musicians into the country at the 11th hour; the third had to be replaced, said Roger Weitz, the company’s general manager.

Many arts groups say that under Mr. Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant who was sworn in last August, their sometimes frosty relationship with Citizenship and Immigration Services has begun to thaw. Agency officials met with arts groups in April, and have recently begun soliciting comments about egregious experiences with the visa process.

Although the agency’s policies have not changed, some have been clarified for the benefit of visa applicants, and Mr. Mayorkas insisted that the commitment is genuine.

“When I make a commitment,” he said, “it is a benchmark that I am setting for our agency upon which the public should be able to rely.”

Artist representatives say that more work needs to be done to streamline the process. “This is a great start but not where we would like to see things end up,” said Tom Windish, a booking agent for independent rock bands.

And for fans, the bad news about cancellations is not likely to end anytime soon. On Thursday, for example, the reunited British ska band the Specials canceled its appearance next month at Central Park SummerStage. The reason: “visa issues.”

(click here to continue reading U.S. Seeks to Reassure Arts Groups About Visas – NYTimes.com.)

Street Musician circa 1996
Street Musician circa 1996

Even international icon Ibrahim Ferrer was denied travel to the US to accept accolades from the Grammys, a travesty especially since Mr. Ferrer died soon after…

2004, HAVANA – The United States refused to grant visas to world-renowned Cuban musicians who were invited to Sunday’s Grammy music awards, Cuban officials said.

Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club, seen here in 2003, was denied a visa by the US authorities. (AFP/DDP/File) Ibrahim Ferrer, the 76-year-old singer from the Grammy-nominated Buena Vista Social Club, was dumbfounded to learn that, according to the Cuban Music Institute, the United States invoked a law that applies to terrorists, drug dealers and dangerous criminals to deny him a visa.

“I don’t understand because I don’t feel I’m a terrorist. I am not, I can’t be,” he said at a news conference.

Ferrer has won three Grammys in recent years and has traveled to the United States in the past.

The other celebrated musicians who were denied visas were guitarist Manuel Galvan, pianist Guillermo Rubalcaba, percussionist Amadito Valdes, lute player Barbarito Torres and singer Eugenio Rodriguez.

(click here to continue reading US Denies Travel Visas to Grammy-Nominated Cuban Musicians.)

The pavement was alive with the sound of music
The pavement was alive with the sound of music

There really is no excuse the US Government can make, other than an increase in jingoism…

The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles had to cancel scheduled performances last year of an Argentine music group because California immigration officials challenged whether its fusion of Jewish klezmer music and tango met the requirement to be “culturally unique.”

In other cases, California officials also challenged visa petitions in the last year that aimed to bring in an Indian group to perform at a California festival honoring the Hindu goddess Durga, a Chicago opera company seeking to bring in a Spanish singer and an African musical group.

“In the past year and a half, what we’ve seen is petitions that previously and typically were approved are being denied,” said Heather Noonan of the League of American Orchestras. “It impacts the whole range of arts disciplines. The cumulative effect makes the process of engaging international talent very challenging.”

…

Slow processing times had been a major concern. Chad Smith, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s vice president of artistic planning, said the delays began after the 9/11 terrorist attacks but had worsened in recent years, forcing his organization to pay an extra $1,000 per case for expedited visa processing.

“The need for premium processing greatly impacted our bottom line,” he said.

Immigration experts also questioned whether California officials were sufficiently trained to competently evaluate their visa petitions.

Barnett, for instance, said immigration officials have challenged visa petitions from his world-renowned organization by asking for proof that Scripps is an educational nonprofit organization.

“Twenty seconds on the Internet could have shown you that,” Barnett said. “Is this just ignorance?”

Immigration attorneys have also complained that they have been repeatedly asked to provide evidence to meet standards that are not required by law.

For example, California officials asked for proof that an Indian dance group had been together for at least a year and that an African musical group would perform only at “culturally unique” venues that did not include its scheduled appearances at universities, said Andi Floyd, a legal assistant who worked on the petitions for Virginia immigration attorney Jonathan Ginsburg. Attorneys had to point out that neither requirement was in the visa law; officials eventually approved the African petition but have not yet acted on the Indian one, Floyd said.

 

(click here to continue reading Immigration agency working to fix visa denials to artists, others – Los Angeles Times.)

Francis Ford Coppola: Artists Might Not Get Paid In the Future

Seth Anderson0 comment

DaVinci Wine (or Whine, depending)
DaVinci Wine

Francis Ford Coppola is simply repeating what he has said before, Francis Ford Coppola Sees the Future For Artists, and Francis Ford Coppola Finances His Movie With Wine because it seems like the truth. Mick Jagger and David Bryne concur, btw: Mick Jagger and Internet Piracy and Death of the Music Industry, Rolling Stones Edition

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce? We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

(click here to continue reading Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration :: Articles :: The 99 Percent.)

 

Virginia Woolf Visits the Daily Mail

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Creative Review - Wardour Street
Creative Review – Wardour Street

Virginia Woolf may have had a delicate appearance, but she was stronger than she looked.

The New Yorker recalls:

as Evelyn Irons recalled in an essay published in our pages in 1963, three members of the Bloomsbury Group requested a tour of the Daily Mail’s printing presses in 1932. “Look here, Virginia wants to see your paper being printed,” Vita Sackville-West had told Irons at the time. “Do you think you could arrange it?”

Irons, who later became a war correspondent and was the first woman journalist to reach Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, was then the editor of the Mail’s women’s page. (She would later be fired for “looking unfashionable.”) In that capacity, she had, the previous year, interviewed Sackville-West and the two women had begun an affair. According to Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Sackville-West, Irons was the subject of a number of Sackville-West’s 1931 love poems. “It seemed very odd to me that Virginia Woolf should want to see the mass-circulation Daily Mail being put to bed, but it could be arranged, and easily,” wrote Irons.

At nine o’clock one night the following week, Sackville-West, Woolf, and Woolf’s husband, Leonard, arrived at the Mail’s offices for their tour. “The whole evening had an unreal quality,” Irons recalled, and continued:

There they were, perched around the room like unfamiliar night birds: Vita Sackville-West, tall, intensely handsome, wearing her usual long, dangling earrings and smoking through a paper cigarette holder; Leonard Woolf, a dark, brooding man with aggressive eyebrows; and Virginia Woolf, recalling the moon in the daytime sky—ethereal, bone-pale, the eyes set deep in the skull. She was fifty, but age had nothing to do with her appearance; she must have looked like that forever. You might as well show those clattering presses to a ghost, I thought.

…

However, her guests were not there to hear anecdotes. Despite her ethereal appearance, Virginia Woolf had more than a passing interest in the working of the newspaper’s presses. To Irons’s surprise, Woolf engaged in lengthy and detailed discussions with the printers, handling their tools and often shouting to be heard over the noise of the presses. At one point Woolf even displayed her ability to read set type upside down. “We don’t often get ladies coming in from outside who can do that,” said one of the printers. The experience changed Irons’s view of Woolf:

There seemed to be little that was wan or mothlike, delicate or remote, about her now. Her long, slender fingers were smudged with black ink, and her behavior was that of a mechanically minded man.

(click here to continue reading Back Issues: Virginia Woolf Visits the Daily Mail : The New Yorker.)

 

Emanuel is a locavore when it comes to the artwork his City Hall office

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Take Your Stand
Take Your Stand

I realize this is PR, but still is smart, and a welcome change from the Daley old school style

A few months after his May inauguration, Emanuel said, he decided that he would work out of the mayor’s so-called ceremonial office — and not the relatively plain office in the back that he has turned into “kids study hall” for his children after school — and he would make it a showcase for Chicago art and furniture. He said he especially liked the idea of promoting Chicago artists, given the dignitaries who pass through his doors regularly, including foreign leaders such as President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, China Investment Corp. Chairman Lou Jiwei and various ambassadors and mayors.

So Emanuel talked to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and local furniture designers about contributing works, and now the room boasts a series of conversation pieces that reflect the city.

“The goal was, A, we could showcase things about Chicago that people don’t expect, and, B, it had to be free,” he said. “People had to donate them.”

…

The School of the Art Institute also provided students’ photos that line the small hallway through which office visitors pass: color portraits of workers at the Palmer House Hilton across from evocative black-and-white shots of the hotel’s spaces.

“I thought these were a stunning capture of Chicago,” Emanuel said.

The mayor went with more established (and no longer living) Chicago artists for the office walls. From the Art Institute, Emanuel selected Seymour Rosofsky’s late-’50s oil painting “Unemployment Agency,” a grim, striking work that hangs on the wall behind his desk, and from the MCA’s collection came Miyoko Ito’s relatively bright “Chiffonier” (1971) and Leon Golub’s foreboding “Head II” (1959).

“I have a particular love for Golub,” Emanuel said, noting that he is displaying only works that the museums had in storage. “I didn’t take anything off the wall in any of the museums. I’m not going to do that.”

“We just think it’s super-cool that he wants real art in his office and he wanted to talk to us about borrowing pieces from our collection,” MCA chief curator Michael Darling said. “It’s sort of a win-win, from our side of things.”

He added that he was intrigued by what the mayor chose to display.

“Especially the Leon Golub piece is one that I’d say is still an edgy piece, and also from one of the leading historical artists of Chicago,” Darling said. “So it sends a message about the legacy of art in Chicago, but it’s also not just a pretty picture. … That just shows how progressive and open-minded he is and culturally oriented he is, the fact that he’s picking contemporary artists from Chicago as opposed to any kind of bland landscapes or old-fashioned portraits.”

 

(click here to continue reading Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a locavore when it comes to the artwork hanging in his City Hall office – chicagotribune.com.)

In fact, I wonder who curates these things: maybe there is something I could donate…

Jewels of Olmsted’s Unspoiled Midwest – Jackson Park

Seth Anderson0 comment

Lagoon in jackson park with bird
Lagoon in jackson park with bird

Coincidentally, we are planning on visiting this park on Labor Day…

FEW people can claim to know America as deeply as Frederick Law Olmsted did. During a long, full and peripatetic life (1822-1903), he crisscrossed the country by rail, stagecoach, horseback and on foot. “I was born for a traveler,” he once said.

…

Ever the reformer, he was also drawn to the notion that landscape architecture could serve various social engineering purposes, providing respite from teeming cities, say, or forcing people of varied backgrounds to mix and mingle. He once described his park work as a “democratic development of the highest significance.”

Here, then, is a look at some of his work in the Midwest — lesser-known than his most famous projects, but still life-changing for millions of Americans.

Jackson Park, Chicago

Recognizing that the pomp of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago had the potential to overwhelm visitors, Olmsted1 was intent on creating a landscape that would act as a soothing naturalistic counterpoint. First, he selected the fair’s site, singling out a parcel on the city’s South Side. Years earlier, Olmsted and Calvert Vaux — his collaborator on early works like Central Park — had designed a park for this very spot, but little of their plan had been executed.

Working solo, Olmsted set out to complete the park, which was by then chosen for fairgrounds. He created an intricate network of lagoons, so that visitors could travel through the fair on small boats. He also repurposed muck that was dredged to create the lagoons in order to bulk up a lonely little hillock into the 16-acre Wooded Island, which he planted with hemlock and other trees.

During the fair, Teddy Roosevelt thought it was the ideal spot to set up his Boone and Crockett hunting club, but Olmsted said no to the future president and other exhibitors who wanted a piece of his island. He intended it, he wrote in a letter, as “a place of relief from all the splendor and glory and noise and human multitudinousness of the great surrounding Babylon.”

The famous White City — a collection of neo-Classical buildings lined with electric lights, a dazzling new invention at the time — is mostly long gone. But Olmsted’s fairgrounds, now known as Jackson Park, remain. Within its 600 acres, you can still find stretches of the original lagoons. The Wooded Island is still there, too, and it’s my favorite part of the park: an oasis of calm smack in the center of hectic Chicago.

 

(click here to continue reading Jewels of Olmsted’s Unspoiled Midwest – NYTimes.com.)

Footnotes:
  1. Frederick Law Olmsted’s Wikipedia entry [↩]

Brooklyn Museum Cancels Graffiti Show

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Plate F

Cowards. Controversial art is still art, right?

The Brooklyn Museum has canceled plans to show “Art in the Streets,” the popular but controversial graffiti exhibition originated by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In both a terse press release and an e-mail that, according to L.A. Weekly was sent to an artist in the show, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, blamed tight finances for the cancellation. In the email quoted by L.A. Weekly, Mr. Lehman said: “With no major funding in place, we cannot move ahead.”

The show has drawn criticism in Los Angeles, both from people who accuse it of glorifying vandalism and from others who question the role of Roger Gastman, an associate curator of the show who also has a commercial interest in street art. The first issue was of most concern to The Daily News of New York, which editorialized in April that, if the show comes to Brooklyn, “museum mavens will be sticking their thumbs in the eyes of every bodega owner and restaurant manager who struggles to keep his or her property graffiti-free, not to mention the eyes of all New Yorkers who cringe recalling the days of graffiti-covered subway cars.”

(click here to continue reading Brooklyn Museum Cancels Graffiti Show – NYTimes.com.)

There’s a difference between spray painting gang symbols and street art, as we’ve discussed previously.

Facts Are Pliable Too

Woody Graffiti - CLS

Understand

New pavilion for the Chicago zoo

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Pavilion, Nature Boardwalk

Played hooky this afternoon, and walked over in Lincoln Park to see the new Urban Oasis, as the prairie restoration and redesign of the south of the Lincoln Park Zoo is being called. So pretty, even though a lot of the plants haven’t filled in yet.  Studio Gang did the work, with Chicago architect Jeanne Gang the leading force.

Enter Studio Gang, the local firm that has built many of the city’s recent landmarks, including the Aqua condo tower and the new media center at Columbia College. With a mission to turn the 19th-century urban park from a city-tap fed water source into a natural habitat boasting a vibrant “pond life”, the firm set out to recreate the landscape, through accessible pathways embedded with educational pavilions and exhibit design. In essence, the holistic scheme combines the natural habitat with captivating (but not overwhelming) architecture.

First came the ecological considerations. The firm deepened the pond for better oxygenation, building a surrounding watershed and integrating plant shelves for filtering runoff. Then came the built aspect of the project: Studio Gang devised a winding boardwalk made of recycled plastic milk bottles and featuring educational kiosks. This is a place, after all, where elementary school kids will perform pH tests on the soil and test water quality.

It’s also a place that bicyclists, yogis and the general public will enjoy thanks to *the brilliant pavilion on the boardwalk. The tortoise shell–inspired structure is made of prefab wooden parts, milled and assembled in a self-supporting arch that eschews columns. Uplit by the boardwalk’s recessed ground lights, the structure glows at night like honeycomb lanterns.

(click here to continue reading Azure :: Jeanne Gang’s brilliant pavilion for a Chicago zoo.)

I took some photos with my Nikon, but haven’t processed them yet, so iPhone photos1 will have to suffice for now.

Urban Oasis in Lincoln Park

De Zeen Design Magazine has more details of the structure, if you are interested.

Footnotes:
  1. Hipstamatic, natch [↩]

Chicago Museums To Charge Out-of-Staters on Free Days

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Art Institute Lions with Blackhawks Helmets

Not surprised, really. Tourists are often easy targets for revenue generating ideas (special taxes on hotels, car rentals, etc.). No matter the price, visiting the museums of Chicago is still worth the expense.

The Big Squeeze confronts every facet of the economy and will soon hit culture-craving visitors to Chicago from places like Des Moines, Berlin and Buenos Aires.

A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of Chicago and the surrounding area for The New York Times. More From the Chicago News Cooperative » Their free ride on free days is about to end. As it does, we can wonder how else we might monetize the city’s 40 million annual visitors.

Very quietly, a consortium of museums has persuaded the Illinois legislature to allow them to charge entry fees to out-of-staters on the 52 free museum days each year mandated by the General Assembly.

The bill, approved unanimously,  is on the desk of the Hamlet of Springfield, Gov. Pat Quinn, who presumably will need less time to mull whether to sign this one than he took agonizing over abolition of the death penalty.

Gary Johnson, president of the Chicago History Museum, led the charge as head of Museums in the Parks. That group comprises the Adler Planetarium, Art Institute of Chicago, DuSable Museum of African American History, Field Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Science and Industry, National Museum of Mexican Art, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, John G. Shedd Aquarium and Johnson’s home base in Lincoln Park.

The legislature’s jurisdiction originally involved museums on public parkland, back in an era in which the state gave them operating money. It no longer does, but some still get local help, like the aid Chicago’s museums get from the Park District.

Currently, Chicago’s museums must have 52 days when admission is free even to out-of-staters. They’ve argued for years that they labor under a de facto unfunded state mandate and, with budgets tight, need help.

(click here to continue reading Chicago Museums To Charge Out-of-Staters on Free Days – NYTimes.com.)

and because of this:

Nationally, Chicago appears to offer more freebies than any big city, with the exception of Washington, where so many museums are subsidized by all of us. “We’re off the charts,” another Chicago museum leader told me.

Ex Parte

On a personal note, I moved to Chicago because the first time I visited here, as a broke-ass college student, with a vanload of friends hepped up on something or other, I went to the Art Institute when admission was whatever you wanted to pay1, and was so impressed that suddenly Chicago jumped to the top of the list of cities I wanted to live in. But I understand that in the 21st Century, art is not a priority, and has to pay its own way.

Queue Up

Footnotes:
  1. I paid a dollar [↩]

Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase

Seth Anderson0 comment

I am an official backer of this project, mostly because Glass Eye was one of my favorite bands when I lived in Austin1. Seems like they often came to the Magnolia Cafe too, which happened to be the place that, indirectly, paid my tuition, but that might have been more because the drummer was dating a fellow employee there. Memories fade over time, what I do remember is seeing Glass Eye perform live multiple times, over a multi-year span, and always enjoying it.

Anyway, not the point.

Here’s what Brian Beattle says about his project:

I’ve written a musical called “Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase”. It’s an epic surreal musical audio drama, a low tech extravaganza whose story is told complete with tunes, dialogue, sound effects and incidental music, packaged inside a beautiful 31 page fully illustrated book, not unlike the old Disney gatefold Buena Vista records. My wife, Valerie Fowler, drew the book, and I’m making the record.

The story is based in Austin, Tx., in 1938. The first day of summer vacation. Hidden away down in her favorite creek, 10 year old Ivy Wire sits with her battered guitar singing to the birds and the trees. Suddenly the sky darkens and she follows a mockingbird into a nearby cave. She hears a monstrous roar and sees a tumbling wall of muddy water rushing towards her. “FLASH FLOOD!!”. She barely escapes by scampering into a hole, but she immediately starts plunging into darkness. Thus begins her descent into the Underworld.

About 2 years ago, when the bottom really dropped out and the economy tanked, I got the spark of the idea. I started, much to the chagrin of my family, to watch depression era musicals every single night. By late summer 2009, my “spark” was named “Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase”. I’ve been working on it on and off since then, and I’ve been lucky enough to enlist my “Dream Cast”.

Daniel Johnston plays “the Big Boss”, the Lord of the Underworld.

Bill Callahan Plays “Everything”, a supreme deity.

Will Sheff is “Mister Kirby”, the Chief Admissions Officer of the Eternal Incarceration System.

K. McCarty plays “Celia Wire”, Ivy’s momma.

James Hand plays “Cosmo Wire”, Ivy’s daddy.

Brian Beattie plays the “Omniscient Serenader”, and also “Org”, an employee of the Eternal Incarceration System.

Grace London plays “Ivy Wire”, the hero. She’s 11. I met her at the Zilker Elementary talent show, where she turned a bunch of dozing parents into a standing ovation.

The record also features performances by Amy Annelle, Matt the Electrician, and my daughter, Ramona Beattie.

As of right now, 14 and a half of the 16 songs are recorded. The artwork is almost completely finished as well. If we meet our kickstarter goal, you will have financed the finishing of the project, which includes the composition and recording of the incidental music, finishing the dialogue/ foley work (the elements which make this an “ear movie”),  paying musicians, the finalization and scanning of the drawings, and the mixing and mastering of the record. Mostly, it will involve a good 3 months of straight work for me, and I need to finish or I will tear out my remaining hair. All of the composition and most of the playing is done by me all by my lonesome, so it’s mostly just a matter of me slugging away at it for a little longer here in my home studio.

If we exceed our goals, the money could go towards making videos based on Valerie’s drawings, and supporting the book and record store tours Valerie and I will be going on to support the record. We are soon going to look for a wonderful, savvy label to release the actual product, but if it seems appropriate, and if our kickstarter is very successful, we could release it ourselves.

Thanks for your curiosity. Please tell someone about “Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase”.

Project location: Austin, TX

If you’ve got a buck or two extra, throw it his way. What were you going to do with anyway? Piss it away on beer? Oh, that’s just me…

Footnotes:
  1. from 1981-1994, for the record [↩]

Demolition of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital Scheduled

Seth Anderson0 comment

Any Porthole in a Storm

I had thought the Bertrand Goldberg designed Prentice Women’s Hospital was already demolished years ago, but apparently not.

As Rahm Emanuel prepares to takes office May 16, the first big historic preservation battle of his mayoralty is taking shape: Northwestern University is gearing up to tear down the old Prentice Women’s Hospital, designed by Bertrand Goldberg, the architect of Marina City, and replace it with a new medical research building.

If the university wins city permission for demolition, it could be wrecking the boldly sculptural, brilliantly engineered high-rise at the very time the Art Institute of Chicago is celebrating it as part of a major exhibition of Goldberg’s work. “Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention,” opens September 10 and runs through Jan. 8, 2012.

Such a glaring juxtaposition, with creativity displayed on the museum’s walls and ransacked outside them, would reveal to the world anew that Chicago destroys architectural landmarks as fast as the city builds them. And it would demonstrate just how hard it can be to save leading examples of mid-20th Century modernism. Although widely admired by architects, old Prentice is by no means beloved by the broader public. Some liken it to a prison.

Located at 333 E. Superior St., the 36-year-old high-rise is unquestionably a major work in Goldberg’s career.

…

Preservationists have already laid the groundwork for a fight, meeting on old Prentice with downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd). “He’s one of the people who said you need to show how it can be reused,” said Jim Peters, president of Landmarks Illinois. Reilly didn’t return phone calls asking for comment. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the preservationists have taken a cue from his emphasis on finding a new use for the building.

Three Chicago architectural firms worked pro bono for Landmarks Illinois to prepare a study which looks at whether old Prentice could be re-used for offices, apartments or a research lab. The study makes a compelling case for the latter, arguing that the four quadrants of the former maternity floors could be sub-divided into research team areas and that the common space once occupied by nursing stations and nurseries could work well as a central breakout space.

(click here to continue reading Cityscapes: Northwestern wants to tear down Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital; preservationists have other ideas.)

I’d be pleased if the city found a way to preserve this building somehow, but I wouldn’t expect it to happen.

Chicago Graffiti Among World’s Best

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Speaking to U.S.

I have a certain fondness for graffiti, because if it is done well, if it is more than just someone’s scribbled moniker, it becomes Art. In fact, there is quite a lot of graffiti in Chicago that is just simply Art. I call it Street Art to distinguish graffiti I like from what is just juvenilia.1 The lack of permanence is part of the energy of the work, but apparently, Richard Daley contributed to Chicago’s cultural life in this instance without realizing it. I’ve visited a lot of cities, and Chicago has some of the best guerilla artists anywhere.

Remember When Art Asked More than buy me?

For nearly 20 years, Chicago and Cook County have waged war on graffiti.

The city estimates it will spend $5.5 million to remove graffiti this year, and despite a $487 million budget deficit, the Cook County board renewed its commitment to the cleanup by rejecting Sheriff Thomas J. Dart’s proposal to scrap a suburban graffiti-removal unit costing $600,000 a year.

But the anti-graffiti strategy — deploying crews called graffiti blasters to quickly erase or blot out painted surfaces — has imposed a kind of natural-selection process in the graffiti subculture. By discouraging all but the shrewdest and most determined practitioners, the city and county have inadvertently contributed to making Chicago a vibrant hub of graffiti activity, according to experts.

“It made Chicago graffiti an aggressive and competitive sport,” said Sebastian Napoli, 32, who began writing graffiti around the city in the 1990s when writers called Chicago “the chocolate city” after the brown paint used to cover their work. The enforcement efforts “weeded out guys that get up once or twice and tried to call themselves writers,” Mr. Napoli said.

Roger Gastman, co-author of “The History of American Graffiti” (HarperCollins), said Chicago was “the biggest scene in the U.S. that is the most undocumented.” The book, to be published next month, explores graffiti in several cities and devotes two chapters to Chicago. It will be the first look into the city’s elusive subculture since William Upski Wimsatt’s self-published “Bomb the Suburbs” in 1994.

According to Mr. Gastman and his co-author, Caleb Neelon, the rise of Chicago’s new breed of graffiti writers dates to Mayor Richard M. Daley’s campaign to eradicate graffiti as part of preparations for the 1994 World Cup games at Soldier Field and the 1996 Democratic National Convention.

(click here to continue reading Crackdown Feeds a Flourishing World of Graffiti / Chicago News Cooperative.)

Blago Jogging on May Street

I Love You Set One - Goose Island Train

I have a bunch of photos of Chicago street art, if you want to see some examples I’ve encountered. Click here, or here for instance. Or use the Lightbox slideshow (click the triangle to start the show)

She Wandered Alone

Footnotes:
  1. What is Street Art? By my loosy-goosey definition, simply art I’ve discovered that isn’t in a gallery. Most of it is graffiti art, and semi-permanent as well, but that isn’t a requirement. [↩]

Prime Suspect Remake

Seth Anderson0 comment

I agree completely with Matt Zoller Seitz:

“Prime Suspect” wasn’t burdened by such pressures. It wasn’t an American-style network TV show; it was a series of movies, or miniseries, or movie-miniseries. (That I’m having trouble just labeling it says a lot.) Created and overseen by Lynda LaPlante, it debuted in 1991 with a 200-minute, two-part drama. The next 200-minute two-parter aired 17 months later, in December 1992. Another aired in December 1993.  The fourth “Prime Suspect” departed from the template, offering three self-contained 100-minute stories that aired three weeks apart. The final three installments returned to the 200-minute, two-part model, airing in 1996, 2003 and 2006. It is hard to imagine any broadcast network indulging that kind of “whatever works” production schedule — and that’s the first warning sign that this project has an excellent chance of being flat-out bad, or else competent but compromised, like ABC’s short-lived American version of the ITV series “Cracker.”

If an Americanized “Prime Suspect” ends up on the NBC grid, it will likely debut at midseason with a six-episode limited run. If it gets picked up, its producers will have to make 22 episodes a year, each running about 42 minutes. The drama will be stuffed into ad-friendly five- to seven-minute chunks like Spam packed in cans. And although there might be some content that’s considered “edgy” by network standards, I doubt we’ll see anything like the opening act of “Prime Suspect 1,” which showed a group of male cops and a male coroner examining the naked, pasty, hideously hacked-up corpse of a female rape-and-murder victim. Far from being gratuitous, the scene was integral to the program’s unflinching attitude toward the vilest human behavior. It looked at savagery through a cop’s eyes. And the sexualized brutality showcased in that first scene connected to the professional and personal struggle of DCI Tennison, a great detective whose male colleagues treated her as, at best, a female interloper, at worst a piece of meat.

An NBC version of “Prime Suspect” can’t match the first 20 minutes of the first British show, or spend 200 minutes (five regular-length American broadcast TV episodes!) on a story as racially and sexually charged as the one that drove “Prime Suspect 2,” or attempt a muckraking urban epic along the lines of “Prime Suspect 3,” which dealt bluntly with prostitution, child pornography and the death of a “rent boy” without seeming exploitative. Nearly 20 years after the debut of “NYPD Blue,” NBC and its broadcast brethren still aren’t tough enough or wise enough to handle that sort of thing. Commercial cable is only slightly better-equipped. There’s violence galore on FX and AMC and other commercial cable channels, but it’s mostly stylized genre violence (action thriller mayhem, sci-fi gore). They’re still oddly shy about sex, shooting around naughty bits when they show the act at all. And they won’t let characters say “fuck”; when John Slattery’s character said it on “Mad Men” — a series aimed squarely at adults — AMC bleeped him. (And since I mentioned “Cracker,” let’s note that on the original British series, Robbie Coltrane’s Fitz was a chain smoker. ABC didn’t want to air a show with a hero who smoked, so on the U.S. remake starring the late Robert Pastorelli, the hero was an ex-smoker who kept a cigarette tucked behind one ear.)

More important, American TV is averse to letting race, class, politics and other touchy elements drive stories because it might make viewers and sponsors skittish. That’s why the American crime show’s favorite bad guy is the serial killer, a mythologically exaggerated monster whose existence lets filmmakers titillate and terrify while declining to engage with society at large.

Jane Tennison never dealt with effete, wisecracking, Hannibal Lecter-type bogeymen. She lived in reality. Over 15 years,”Prime Suspect” dealt frankly with sex, sexism, race, class and the intrusion of politics into police work. It did so subtly, prizing plausibility and never delivering a jolt without reason. And it treated time as an ally instead of an enemy. One of the pleasures of “Prime Suspect” was the opportunity to re-engage with it after a long break and discover that Tennison had risen in rank or settled into a new job or a new relationship. The gaps between installments enhanced the sense that you were seeing excerpts from a life in progress.

You can’t do any of that on NBC. You can’t re-create or even approximate “Prime Suspect” in a commercial broadcast network series that airs 22 episodes a year. The material can’t breathe in the same way. And forget about being unflinching. What passes for unflinching on NBC is “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” an entertaining but mostly absurd procedural that bears about as much qualitative relation to “Prime Suspect” as “Training Day” does to “Serpico.” And don’t even get me started on TNT’s “The Closer,” a fitfully entertaining series that has wrongheadedly been described as an American answer to “Prime Suspect,” presumably because its main character is a strong-willed female detective. (It’s not a subtle psychological drama, it’s a suck-up-to-the-star spectacle about a mercurial Southern belle following her muse and dazzling the nonbelievers. “Prime Suspect” writes in plain script, “The Closer” in big block letters.) Not many American cop shows, broadcast or cable, have engaged with reality as directly as “Prime Suspect” — and the best of those were produced not in Hollywood, but in Baltimore:  “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Corner,” and “The Wire.”

(click here to continue reading The problem with American remakes of British shows – Prime Suspect – Salon.com.)

Coincidentally, Netflixed the entire 7 seasons of Prime Suspect recently, and enjoyed them immensely. I doubt very seriously it will translate into American-style television drama. Maybe if it was on HBO, maybe, but certainly not on NBC. The remake may turn out to be ok, but it will not be anything like the Helen Mirren classic, which you should watch if you haven’t. Or re-watch if it has been a while…

Helen Mirren’s Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, the only female DCI on an old boy’s club London homicide squad, is like a phantom lurking around the edges of the action while the men rush through their latest murder case, joshing and winking in the kind of male camaraderie the cop genre has celebrated for decades. When DCI Shefford dies of a sudden heart attack, Tennison demands to take over. Despite her superintendent’s resistance (“Give her this case and she’ll start expecting more.”), she becomes the squad’s first woman to head a murder investigation. Scrutinized at every moment by her superior officers, Tennison is faced with a case that spirals out from a single murder to a serial spree, a second-in-command who undermines her authority and her investigation at every turn, a team resistant to taking orders from a woman, and a private life unraveling due to her professional diligence. Lynda La Plant’s script is a compelling thriller riddled with ambiguity that turns dead ends, blind alleys, and the mundane legwork of real-life cops into fascinating details. Mirren commands the role of Tennison with authority, intelligence, and a touch of overachieving desperation. Superb performances, excellent writing, and understated direction make this BBC miniseries one of the most involving mysteries in years. Look for future British stars Ralph Fiennes and Tom Wilkinson in supporting roles.

links for 2011-02-03

swanksalot0 comment


“Little Milton – Greatest Hits (Chess 50th Anniversary Collection)” (Little Milton)

  • Mona Lisa model was a male, say Italian researchers
    Italian researchers who specialize in resolving art mysteries said Wednesday they have discovered the disputed identity of the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa — and claimed he was a man. Silvano Vinceti, chairman of the Italian national committee for cultural heritage, said the Florence-born Renaissance artist’s male apprentice and possible lover Salai was the main inspiration for the picture.
    (tags: arts Italy)
    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DaaJ4EPYwI