Using the View-Master as her medium, Portland-based artist Vladimir weaves intriguing “28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties, and overly adventurous cockroaches.” She crafts each scene using teeny toys, objects, and random paraphernalia.  When set to music and narration, a Vladmaster performance has more potential for magic than any movie theater. Instead of staring at a screen, audience members click through the story as one, each using their very own View-Master.

Vladimir is not currently touring, but you can experience the whimsy at home. Visit her website for information on how to buy reels of her Franz Kafka parables and other thoughtful tales.

(Thanks, NUVO.) 

Source: Vladmaster.

Images courtesy of  Vladimir .

It’s hard to imagine music  that’s much happier than juju, the Nigerian-born style with peppy, repeating guitar lines, honeyed vocals, and an army of talking drums inviting—OK, imploring—you to dance. King Sunny Ade is its primary exponent, and back in the late ’80s he was my entry point into African music. Vaguely interested in African sounds from my Talking Heads records (what can I say, I was a white kid from the Midwest), I picked up the Ade album Live Live Juju and was swept up in the cascading drums and sweetly unfurling melodies. My ears took me further and further into African sounds and eventually led me to the legendary Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo Kuti, also a Nigerian but a much more complex, controversial character with darker, denser music and strongly political lyrics. In a sense they were the bookends to my aural African sojourn: the easy and the hard, the gentle and the ferocious.

I never saw Fela perform before his death from AIDS in 1997, and I never caught Ade on tour—until last week, when I caught both the King and Fela’s banner-carrying son, Femi Kuti, on an amazing double bill at the Minnesota Zoo. The concert was everything I expected and more, with Ade’s juju as vibrant as ever and Kuti’s music just as intense and forceful as his father’s.

Ade’s set came first. As the sun sank low in the summer sky, his band members, more than a dozen strong, took the stage in their brown patterned African dress, and then Ade entered, his sparkling blue gown and regal comportment announcing his arrival. (My 5-year-old son said, “I can tell which one is the king by his uniform.”) The band let its full force be known immediately, with the drummers—entirely half of the band—constructing a wall of rhythm that within minutes had rib cages shuddering and feet fidgeting. If there were any doubts about the health and humor of the 60-something bandleader, Ade soon displayed that the King is alive and very well, deftly dancing and stepping to the beat and commanding his band with a mere wave of his finger. Singing in Yoruba, Ade led the band through a blissful series of songs that reminded me just how powerfully his music had grabbed me 20 years earlier.

A small segment of the crowd were Yoruba speakers, standing out not just for their African dress but for their hearty responses to Ade’s call-and-response lyrics and their inspired dancing. Their enthusiasm was infectious and helped the somewhat staid Minnesota crowd get their Africa on. By the end of the set, after a particularly hearty sing-along, Ade himself seemed thrilled by the response: “I love you all,” he said, and the crowd responded in kind.

After a short break, Femi Kuti’s band Positive Force took the stage, distinguishing itself with far fewer drums, a five-man horn section, and three rump-shaking dancers. (Ade briefly had two dancers onstage.) Kuti appeared at the forefront with a serious, calm but piercing gaze that would seldom leave his face, and he established set the tenor of his set by leading off with “Stop AIDS” from his Fight to Win album. The song’s edgy horn bursts, driving rhythms, and blunt English lyrics announced that things were getting heavier—though, as the dancers proved, there was still a lot of shaking going on.

A couple of songs into his set, Kuti popped a quiz on the crowd. “Do you know Dizzy Gillespie? Do you know Miles Davis? … Do you know John Coltrane? Do you know Duke Ellington? Do you know Billie Holiday?” The crowd’s affirmative answers set up his own: “Then we won’t have any problem tonight.”

After several jazz-informed solos, he had one more question: “Do you know Fela Anikulapo Kuti?” The roaring response left no doubt that his father’s legacy was hovering in the cooling night air.

Jazz indeed proved to be one of the magic components in Kuti’s music, as he switched between vocals, saxophone, trumpet, and keyboards, always pushing the band toward raw and emotive sounds with an improvisatory edge. But there was also some house, hip-hop, and techno in the mix, adding a modern, sexy shine to the Afrobeat sound. Throughout it all, social messages leapt out from the lyrics: “Why all this fighting? Why all this suffering?” “The African man and the African woman find it very difficult to succeed.” “All in the name of peace we fight and kill to find justice.” The overall impression was that of a party whose host had an awful lot of his mind.

Kuti’s last number mixed up all these contradictions in one big mishmash. Singing “Beng Beng Beng” from his album Shoki Shoki, he gave a long mid-song lesson in sexual restraint—“don’t come too fast,” goes the song’s refrain—that took on an almost scolding tenor. But after he delivered his message, the band kicked in again, the big beat started up—and hips resumed swaying.

It’s not that it hasn’t been said before, it’s that it bears repeating: It’s not about the photograph. In an essay that bears that title, written for Matrix, Ian Orti laments the intrusion of Flickr culture into the live music experience, and indeed, into life on the whole:

For some reason these days it’s not enough to get onstage and rock out with your favourite band; instead this experience has to be documented at the expense of the experience itself. Strike a pose. Of course there was the stretched arm snap of his face in the foreground while the band played on in the background. And then came the snaps with his girlfriends who stopped their dancing to pose for that perfectly candid shot, followed by the painful few seconds of waiting for the photo to load on the viewfinder so he could show them and then maybe pose for another one just in case that one perfectly candid shot wasn’t candid enough.

Souce: Matrix

Image by Byflickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

Of all the “curious undertakings” of performance artists, none have been as striking as Tehching Hsieh’s lifeworks, observes the Chronicle Review, in a review of Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, newly available from MIT Press. In 1986, the artist dropped out of the public eye to begin his final performance piece, “Thirteen Year Plan,” a period during which he would make art but not show it publicly. He emerged in 1999 with a ransom note bearing a simple message: “I kept myself alive.”

In addition to “Thirteen Year Plan,” the dedicated Hsieh did a series of one-year pieces, which included spending a year in communication blackout (no reading or writing, either), a year spent in a room punching a worker’s clock on the hour, repeatedly, and a year of total artistic abstention. “Although [Hsieh’s works] attracted a cult following in New York and Taiwanese performance-art circles, they took place out of view of the art world, which barely mentioned them,” reports the Chronicle. But the mainstream art world has “finally clocked in,” with Hsieh’s works earning exhibits at the Guggenheim and MoMA.

Source: Chronicle Review (article not available online).

Driving to Louisiana for the Baton Rouge Blues Festival, music writer Sean Michaels learns that his beloved Percy Sledge is a regular in Baton Rouge car dealership commercials. When he hears this, he writes at the MP3 blog Said the Gramophone, a small corner of an imaginary world turns to ash. “The Percy Sledge in my mind,” Michaels writes, “the one who sings ‘When A Man Loves A Woman,’ is too distracted by love to ever do something so commercial. He is always staring out the window, or across the street, or over the butcher counter at a pretty girl. He stumbles on the sidewalk, neglects his chores, forgets to call his mum—all because of a passing woman's perfume, her smile, her lovely knees.”

It’s a beautiful snapshot on its own, but the up-from-the-ashes moment at the end of Michaels’ tale—when Sledge appears on stage in a royal blue suit, sunglasses, and a Hawaiian shirt—is even better.

Michaels marvels: “The gap-toothed singer glows. He is grinning wider than I have ever grinned in my life. He is grinning so wide that his grin cannot possibly be fake." Sledge, he writes, brings “the self-confidence of a man who was once at the top of the world, and who has decided to never leave. Like all the best soul singers, Percy Sledge's greatest talent is the vitality of his mind's eye.”

Friends, there’s only one place to go from here:

Source: Said the Gramophone 

Kristina Wong’s performance art blends a biting wit with moments of disarming vulnerability, holding a mirror to both self and audience. The Los Angeles-based performer’s new one-woman show, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tackles the problem of high suicide rates and depression among Asian American women, exposing the charred underbelly of issues such as race, identity, and mental health with refreshing candor and yes, humor.   

Creating the show was not an easy process, and she swears she wouldn’t do it again.

Read the full interview, “Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Back Again.”

Watch an excerpt from Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Image by Diana Toshiko, courtesy of Kristina Wong.

Schools across the country are cutting back on arts funding. Many have focused resources on standardized test taking, and with the current budget crisis looming, the trend away from the arts shows no sign of changing direction.

To make the case for more arts funding, some experts argue that music, dance, theater, and visual arts can help out in other academic areas. They cite studies like the “Mozart Effect” saying that listening to classical music can boost people’s intelligence.

This is the wrong tactic, according to experts quoted in Greater Good magazine. If the results of these studies are called into question, as they were in the case of the “Mozart Effect,” the argument for arts funding is diminished. Even if scientists question whether or not the arts improve other academic achievement, that doesn’t make the arts any less important.

Leave the science to the scientists, say the critics. Instead of citing studies, the case for the arts is strongest in areas that are hardest to quantify. Ideally, the arts allow students to connect with emotions and to look at something they produce as a piece of art (no small achievement). The arts also provide a chance at connecting with children who aren’t engaged by other areas of academia. None of that, however, is likely to show up in test results from a lab.

Image by Beth Kanter, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Greater Good