Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death "The Dirty Street" from Some Of Us Are In This Together (Don't Stop Believin', 2011). Video by Clyde Peterson. Triumph of Lethargy plays tomorrow night at the Rendezvous in Seattle with Blood Red Dancers and John Atkins (764-HERO, The Can't See, etc.)
"If you create a place where everyone could be the best at what they make, then it is a perfect world." Malthus would grumble, but it's a succinct and useful idea for a small group of people working to establish something interesting.
. This just looks to me like February in the West.
Masao Yamamoto, #1508 (silver gelatin print). [click to enlarge] Yamamoto's 5th exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery, Kawa, opens on February 24. See more of Yamamoto's work at his website.
. Shabazz Palaces "4 Shadows" from Shabazz Palaces (2010) The snare in that song is an entire world unto itself and combined with the other things going on I find the production mind-blowing, especially when I listen to it in the Jeep.
. Another cool collaboration from Ohne Titel – last season they worked with Tauba Auerbach, and the SS2011 campaign features Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat. When I worked in Soho I used to see this woman walking around – sometimes alone, sometimes with her family – and I wondered who she was. I was already a fan of her work so it was funny when I realized she was the great Shirin Neshat.
... I just noticed that the New York Times posted a short video of Neshat discussing her shoot for Ohne Titel and her feelings on fashion meeting art, among other things – watch at nytimes.com. (which reminds me, the Times' featured Neshat's Soho loft in the Home section awhile back – click here to see).
. Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you could do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization.
. The romantic and impulsive side of me really wants to jump on a plane to New York tomorrow to catch this while I still can: Christian Marclay's The Clock at Paula Cooper Gallery, which closes this weekend. The work is a 24-hour film, composed entirely of cinematic excerpts depicting varying encounters with time. It also unfolds in real time, Warhol-Empire-style, so that the depiction of time on screen tracks that in real life, and vice versa.
I've always had kind of an obsession with the concept of time – its elasticity and elusiveness, and the stubborn mystery it creates for our understanding of the universe and our place in it. So the idea of experiencing time in the way that Marclay's piece presents seems exciting and potentially revelatory. I also love the idea of mining disparate moments from the past to tell a story that exists completely in the here and now. From a viewer's perspective, it seems to offer the possibility of simultaneously perceiving presence in both the physical world and the one that is unfolding onscreen.
While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.
And while we're at it, on this Valentine's Day:
Culture Club, Time (Clock of the Heart) (1982) (Solid Gold #1!)
Bill Cunningham New York trailer. More info here and check out Cunningham's "On the Street" column in the Sunday New York Times (with weekly audio slideshows online at nytimes.com). More stuff I've posted about Bill Cunningham here.
Pacific Standard issue no.1 covers: top, Abby Brothers by Michael Donovan; bottom, Alexis Schuster by Charlie Schuck. Select image above for more information.