The Preakness

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Fictional newspaper by teenage Jack Kerouac, part of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. More info

Hometown Homage

I thought I would start where I began, The City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. Technically I was born in Bloomington, Indiana but I have so few memories from my first 4 years there, I'm going with Philly. We just got back from a long weekend there and I thought I would share some images (click to enlarge) that stuck, along with some keywords from the trip, preferably provided by Dice Raw or Malik B:

Fishtown, Rittenhouse/
Old City, Hoagies/
William Penn, Felt Whale, The Barbary, Geno’s/
Conshohocken Rolls/
Kung Fu Necktie/
Shirt Corner, King of Jeans/
Tony Luke’s, Manayunk/
Cheesesteak, Johnny Brenda’s/
Jelly Krimpets, Chubbies/
Osage Avenue/
Rowhouse, Shorties/

And finally a Schoolly D .mp3 (whats the time?)

Schoolly D Gucci Time mp3

A Bullet and a Target

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The last couple of years that we lived in New York my office was just two blocks away from MoMA, and I took advantage of the proximity by signing up for art history classes that met in the museum galleries after hours. It was a great way to escape the stress of my job, and wandering around the deserted museum at night remains among my favorite NYC memories. Anyway, I had an instructor there who introduced me to UbuWeb, an online treasure trove of avant-garde and outsider art, including music, video, performance, and documentaries. It's easy to get lost and spend hours on the site...in fact, that's exactly what I did yesterday, and I'm back to share a few souvenirs.

The images above are street posters from the site's outsider art section (click to enlarge).

Here is the Cars' NSFW "Hello Again" video, directed by Andy Warhol:



And here's film footage of William Burroughs making his "shotgun paintings" somewhere in Kansas. After the film turns upside down at about 2 minutes it gets distinctly less interesting but the first couple of minutes are worth a look (could the outfit be any better?):



An excerpt from an interview with Burroughs about the paintings can also be found here.

There's lots more interesting and/or weird stuff to dig up on the site – documentaries on John Baldessari and James Turrell; Fluxus films by the likes of Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, and Nam June Paik; videos by Ryan Trecartin; Shipwreck Radio, a record created by Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter while intentionally marooned on an island north of Norway; and Images du Monde Visionnaire ("an educational film by Henri Michaux and Eric Duvivier which was produced in 1963 by the film department of Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz (best known for synthesizing LSD in 1938) in order to demonstrate the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish") are just the tip of the iceberg.

It can all be found at ubu.com (and New York readers can browse and register for MoMA courses here).

Kick It to the Curb

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I love this idea – tomorrow, Saturday May 16th, is Curb Day, wherein everyone in the entire country is invited to put their unwanted goods on the curb for others to peruse and hopefully pick up for free. (In order for it to not get disgusting I guess everyone should also plan to remove whatever of their stuff remains at the end of the day.)

So... there you have it –
let loose with your junk, America.

More Avedon

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"Avedon took Munkacsi’s use of motion and literally ran with it…[His models] dance, leap or lope past, often completely obscured by flowing garments. Movement could also be disintegration: in a 1994 photograph, Stephanie Seymour is shown crumpling like a marionette whose strings have been cut."

Roberta Smith reviews Avedon Fashion 1944–2000 in today's paper:

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

As with these painters Avedon’s work represents an important turning point and a new kind of self-consciousness of his medium. He makes us aware of its process on different levels, while also questioning its values and deflating its pretensions. His images have a new tautness; you see them as energy-producing wholes in which every detail and bit of surface is articulated. Like Abstract Expressionist painting, they show us an art form learning from and then moving beyond European conventions.

Read the rest of Roberta Smith's review here.

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The New Yorker also has a slideshow online featuring 15 images from the show (Avedon was a staff photographer there in the last years of his life).

Dovima with Sacha, cloche and suit by Balenciaga, Café des Deux Magots, Paris, August 1955. Photography Richard Avedon. Cathy Horyn, paraphrasing part of a 1958 New Yorker article on Avedon and his frequent subject: "Dovima was a devout Catholic and a homebody who traveled on shoots with her husband and a suitcase full of comic books. She was Dorothy Horan. Dovima was a blend of “Do” for Dorothy, “vi” for victory, and “ma” for her ma."

Your Weekly Mr. Littlejeans

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Jeans seems to like lounging on the floor and listening to records – we think he likes the bass. Also, lest anyone think he's some kind of freak, the reason he has less hair on his belly is that the vet shaved it for an ultrasound… it's growing back nicely though and he's obviously not embarrassed of it anymore.

Visionary Visuals

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Donyale Luna (the first black model ever to appear on the cover of British Vogue) in Paco Rabanne, 1966. Photography Richard Avedon

In an extended multimedia slideshow on the New York Times website, co-curators Vince Aletti and Carol Squires speak about Avedon Fashion 1944–2000, which opens tomorrow at the International Center of Photography, and runs through September 6th. Click here to listen.

Also a must: highly esteemed fashion writer Cathy Horyn reviews the show in today's paper.

Simply put, Richard Avedon was a national treasure – someone who explored a multitude of directions in photography, and through his work made the world a better place to be on so many levels. I am dying to see the show as soon as I can make the trip.

In Between Days

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A quick follow-up to this post on the current show at Maya Stendhal - the Chelsea gallery is currently offering four original hand-pulled 14" x 19" screenprints by Jonas Mekas, each in an edition of 300, each hand-signed, numbered, and dated, and printed on 2-ply museum board. Each print in the Summer Manifesto Portfolio, as it's called, is $4000.

It's a reasonable price, sure, but just a little much for my blood at this juncture. Still, I thought I'd post about it, because it gives me the opportunity to feature the above image, which I find very beautiful. Essentially the statement is neutral – both unsettling and calming at the same time. It's a statement of flux.


Make contact through mayastendhalgallery.com or jonasmekas.com to get more info if you want to spring for one of these babies.

Send Him Some Lovin'

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Stevie Wonder, 1974. Photo by Al Satterwhite

Tonight there's a special Soul Nite going down in celebration of Stevie Wonder's birthday.

8pm
Northwest Film Forum
More info

A lil' bitty bit:

Oceanbound

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As previously hollered-about, Emily and I took our first camping trip of the year this past weekend. Even having grown up here and being very familiar with the ferry system and various waterways of this great state, it's still a novelty to me that you can catch a boat from downtown Seattle and easily head out across the water.

Seattle to Bremerton takes about an hour, and when the weather's good, the views of downtown Seattle, Alki, other islands, and the Olympic Mountains in the distance are amazing. (I am tired of the word "amazing" but that's what it is.) It's often said that a Washington State ferry is the poor man's cruise ship.

The boats themselves are old workhorses, beautiful in their industrial simplicity. You can't help feeling a little like Richie on the Cote d'Ivoire.

From Bremerton we drove just south, and then north along the length of Hood Canal (which I mentioned in that long-ass New York Times post from last week). Lots of cool stuff to see.

Our final destination was Olympic National Park – we camped at Mora, near Rialto Beach, just north of the Quillayute Indian Reservation.

The Quillayute used the largest of the rocks which dot the coast (James Island, right across from the town of La Push) as a fortress when neighboring tribes would come south on slaving missions.

Even though we stayed in the national park, it's very remote out there, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves (which, long time readers will remember, is how we like it).

The next morning we hiked through the woods down to Beach 3.

Sometimes I like it when place names are just numbers (though obviously there are Quillayute names that we don't know).

The national park has 60 miles of waterfront, and I'm pretty sure you could hike all of it, following the trail in and out of the woods and small beaches.

Later in the day we headed south, to the Hoh Rainforest. The tree Emily is standing under is estimated to be 575 years old.

Everything in the rainforest is covered with moss.

There's a ton to explore – we kind of thought of this as a scouting mission, just getting the feel of it so as to plan better for longer trips.

We got rained on pretty heavily Sunday. Of course you'd rather have good weather, but drinking beers and eating chili and tamales under the tarp is good times no matter what.

That night in the dark, we walked out to this perch on the bank of the Quillayute River. Just as we got there a big bald eagle took off, floating out over the water. We heard a hooting noise and looked up to see a great blue heron in a tree high above us; below in the river, a group of otters were swimming around, feasting on salmon. You could hear the lighthouse and the waves in the distance. It was one of the cooler moments in recent memory and the perfect end to our first trip of the season.

[See more riveting family slideshow action at Flickr.]
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Fairytale Future

Kostas Murkudis A/W 09

While my taste in fashion often runs toward more hard-edged, severe designs (e.g., Hussein Chalayan; recent collections by Ricardo Tisci for Givenchy and Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga), for me there's a fine line separating the best of those pieces from clothing that has ventured into territory that feels too chilly, dark, and sterile to be much fun. For this reason I love the two most recent A/W collections from Berlin-based designer Kostas Murkudis, a former first assistant to Helmut Lang. Murkudis's designs manage to be tough and supremely modern-looking while still retaining a captivating lightness. Think Blade Runner meets a quantum-leapt Sleeping Beauty and you're partway there. Click to enlarge selected pieces from the collections above and below.

Kostas Murkudis A/W 09

Kostas Murkudis A/W 08

Murkudis's designs can be found at Project No. 8 in NYC.

In the Mix

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Consider the following an apt intro to what will hopefully be an extensive series of posts from our good friend Matthew McDonald.

But first, by way of introduction: Matthew has lived all over the place (Philly, D.C., Brattleboro…Scranton) and went to school for printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. After that he did a bunch of other stuff including co-founding the Brooklyn record label Sound-Ink and producing tracks for MF Doom (aka Viktor Vaughn – Vaudeville Villain, pick it up). After that he worked for venerable furniture/design purveyors Moss and Cassina. Matthew would not like it that I'm listing all this stuff but since it's the first post I feel like it's good to provide an intro. Matthew is a great DJ and producer (if you're familiar with Visionaire SOUND you know him as Max Billions) and a truly unique individual. Matthew and his wife Lily moved from Brooklyn to Seattle at the same time as us and he now runs the business side of her fashion label Sunshine & Shadow. Am I allowed to say that Sunshine & Shadow is working on a capsule collection for Urban Outfitters? Lily and Matthew have a studio in an old metal foundry in Georgetown and they're about to move to Beacon Hill with their dogs Fittybucks and Carmine.

Is that enough of an intro? That's pretty good.

I couldn't be happier to have Matthew do some blogging up in here.
So, with all of that out of the way, an appropriate first post:


Matt’s in the Market Bloody Mary recipe

In the interest of passing along a tasty drink recipe from one lush to another; as a public service announcement; here is the recipe for Robbie McGrath's signature Bloody Mary:

Served in a pint glass with bar ice:

1.5 ounces Aquavit, preferably Linie Aquavit as it is not too anise-y. This brand of aquavit supposedly has to cross the equator line twice before the liquor is ready to drink, giving it enough time in its oak casks, with temperature fluctuation and rough seas slosh to impart the desired flavor.

A healthy dose of Sacramento Tomato juice (don’t be a fool and use an inferior brand)

A dash of Worcester sauce

A healthy dose of Melindas Habanero Pepper Sauce, XXXtra reserve (don’t skimp)

Salt and Pepper

A pickled green bean

Shake well and serve with a sidecar of beer, otherwise known as a snit.

You could probably get away with substituting a celery stalk for the pickled green bean but you have to have one or the other. Attached are supplemental pictures.

M.

Closing and Opening

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Two things on the radar tonight:

Sarah Kavage The Long Road West, 2008

1. Closing party at Vermillion for the Headwaters of Industry show featuring Sarah Kavage & Erin Morrison.

2. Opening party for Ghost of Plants, featuring new work from Heidi Anderson, at Cairo.

Also, some Rainier tall boys. And then after that: sleep, because we're getting up early to go on our first camping trip of the season to Rialto Beach. That's near Forks, for all you Twilight fans out there (don't lie! it was kinda good).

In Other News

Speaking of the pleasures of print, the new issue of Artforum arrived this week, and it's a great one: Tim Griffin offers an interesting introduction to the issue that discusses the conundrum facing contemporary art as the assumptions and underpinnings of the 20th century suddenly seem to be up for grabs; Amy Taubin interviews Jim Jarmusch about his new film, The Limits of Control...


Mark Godfrey writes about Italian conceptualist Alighiero Boetti...

Alighiero Boetti, Aerei, 1978

...interesting reviews and previews of a slew of shows, including the 2009 Tate Triennial, Paul Graham at MoMA, Katharina Fritsch, Bruce Nauman's contribution to the United States pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale this summer, and the Seattle Art Museum's upcoming show, Target Practice, which will present works by post-WWII artists who used various means – knives, bullets, fire – to physically violate the sanctity of the canvas...

Katharina Fritsch, Rat King, 1993
[you can't see it, but the rats' tails are tied]

...and last but not least, a top-ten list from our friend Byron Kalet, a Seattle native whose Journal of Popular Noise imprint released a Flexions EP last month. (Strath art directed the photographs, shot by Kyle Johnson, and wrote about it here...get more info and buy the EP here.) We're really bummed we'll be missing the band's release party – and Byron – this weekend. It's at 8 p.m. Saturday (5/9) at The Holy Mountain in Seattle. Be sure to check it out if you're in town.

Your Weekly Mr. Littlejeans

SMILE FACE 12 + 7 x 23
Jeans has loved hanging out in this cardboard box ever since we lived in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn – I got it from a Chinese restaurant on Smith Street in 2001 or 2002.

Sister Europe

This coming Saturday, May 9th, is Europe Day, which commemorates the day in 1950 on which the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, presented his proposal for the creation of an organized Europe. The proposal, known as the Schuman Declaration, is considered to be the beginning of the creation of what is now the European Union.


Each May in New York, Ambassador Fernando M. Valenzuela, head of the delegation of the European Union to the United Nations, hosts a Europe Day party. I had the pleasure of designing the party invitation for the 50th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration in 2007, and for this year's party as well (the front cover is shown above – letterpressed blue stripes and yellow stars). If you're in New York look up at the Empire State Building and it will be lit up in blue and gold, the colors of the EU flag.

Whiskey in the Van

New Triumph of Lethargy video:



"RC & Whiskey" from the new 5-song EP Old Jail (Order it from Luckyhorse Industries)

[see also]

Destroy All Art

I am, as my friend Head would say, SFP* that I'm not in New York to see this show. Seattle is great, lots of cool stuff going on, etc., but I am bummed to miss this, the follow-up of sorts to last April's show in the same gallery, From Fluxus to Media Art. If you, dear reader, find yourself in New York between now and July 25th, please go see this and report back:

D.I.Y.
A group exhibition featuring works on paper, film posters, diagrams, maps, charts, and documents by George Maciunas, Jonas Mekas, George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Yoko Ono, Paul Sharits, Shigeko Kubota, Chieko Shiomi, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, La Monte Young, and Paula Scher.

Opening reception tonight, 6-8pm

Maya Stendhal Gallery
545 West 20th Street
11am – 6pm Tuesday–Saturday

Ben Vautier Total Art Match-box, 1966

*Super Fuckin' Pissed

Muses in the Museum

"To deal with the crowds following Twiggy during her first shoot in New York, in 1967, the photographer Melvin Sokolsky had hand masks made of her image for the fans to hold up on cue. It was a way both to acknowledge Twiggy’s celebrity and avoid seeing other faces."

In today's New York Times (nope, haven't canceled yet) Cathy Horyn has a thought-provoking review of the Met's new exhibition Model As Muse: Embodying Fashion. The show, which opened Monday night with the Costume Institute's behemoth annual fashion binge known as The Met Ball, explores models' roles in "projecting, and sometimes inspiring, the fashion of their respective eras."

A section of the exhibition. Photography Sara Krulwich/NYT

While the premise of the exhibition is valid and even overdue, and I look forward to checking it out for myself, from the outset it was clear that even the slightest missteps in curation could collapse the show into extreme vapidity (same goes for this blog, I should add).

Met Ball partygoers

Leave it to Cathy Horyn to smash it apart and pick up the pieces. Her review is full of great one-liners and bits of information, but one of the most interesting points comes toward the end, when she notes that "What goes unaddressed is the change from film to digital photography, and how that affected sittings and the dynamics of the photographer-model relationship."

Jean Shrimpton. Photography Richard Avedon.

I am not one of those people who thinks of the film-to-digital evolution as inherently "bad" or "good" – I think it's just "different" – but Horyn's point is a good one, and previously overlooked as far as I can tell (or at least overshadowed by the more common complaint about digital photography: that you can never believe what you see). With film, it was possible for a shoot consisting of only a photographer, a model, a stylist and an art director to produce iconic results; with digital that is also true, but in my experience, digital shoots for magazines or campaigns often come with large teams of technicians, and there tends to be a lot of stopping and starting and reviewing on-set. The process is different and that has fundamentally changed the interaction between photographer and model. Horyn had the presence of mind during the mayhem of the Met Ball to discuss this with veterans such as Marisa Berenson, Lauren Hutton, Twiggy, and Carmen Dell'Orefice, and you can listen in here.

I don't read much about fashion, or at least not much that is very interesting, but I always learn something new from Cathy Horyn. She's extremely sharp and witty in her own way, and as fashion critic for the Old Gray Lady, she is both in the mix and above it all. Read her review of Model as Muse here.

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Related, from a recent issue of WWWWD, which New York magazine is calling the fashion version of The Onion:

Authoritative Cathy Horyn Blog Impossible To Disagree With, No Matter How Hard You Try

By Ruth-Ann Horsen

Cambridge, MA. — “What Cathy says, goes,” said Job Korby Jr. “We’ve always known this, but only now have we begun to understand it.” Over the next three months, Mr. Korby, 33, a senior research analyst at MIT, will lead a team of 30 graduate students in an effort to investigate the phenomenon called “The Horyn Factor.” Cathy Horyn’s infamous New York Times blog, “On the Runway,” a compulsive read for fashion professionals, is known for its ability to make—or, more often, break—decade-long careers. It is rumored that after a recent post dismissing the entire premise of Ralph Lauren as “outdated and out of touch,” a single tear struggled down one of the designer’s cheeks. Research, however, has been slow. “Control groups that haven’t read the blog seem to adopt Cathy’s opinion as soon as a laptop is introduced within a 500-yard radius. We’re finding it difficult to even engage researchers in scientific debate, so absolute is the power of our subject matter, that is, her blog.”

Read WWWWD's May 5th Met Ball Special here.