These groups of artists, many of them men, live together and play music night and day. Easily identified by their patchwork clothes and the instruments they carry, they live as outsiders, rejecting social hierarchies in favor of a collective mindset.

No, I’m not talking about an anarchist folk-punk band in Seattle, but the Baul musicians of Bengal, their more spiritually minded Eastern kin. Musician and writer Valentine Harding writes in the September-October issue of Resurgence about visiting a group of Bauls in West Bengal, India, who carry on this centuries-old folk tradition. A musician named Ananda welcomes her to his ashram, or “place of spiritual practice,” a small communal group where the Bauls live in harmony with nature:

Every morning and evening, Ananda and others play kirtan and bhajan devotional songs, their music greeting the dawn or fading into the night sky. All Baul music is intimately connected with Nature’s rhythms. Ananda says, “The birds, trees and animals listen to our music, and when we sing, we connect with their inner being.”

One of the Bauls’ biggest fans, Harding writes, was the Bengali poet, writer, philosopher, and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore, who became entranced by their music and their ideals and incorporated Baul themes into his poetry, music, and drama:

Tagore’s praise of Bauls and his adoption of their themes in his work enhanced their reputation, because in spite of being regarded as saintly musician-mystics, they nonetheless had a low status and lived on the fringes of society. Fortunately, today in West Bengal and Bangladesh, Bauls are becoming more respected by many people for their way of life, their spirituality and their music, and are often seen as representing ideals for a more equal and just society.

Baul music’s higher profile has put in onstage at the World Sacred Music Festival, the Morocco-based event that now has touring offshoots around the world, and the Fireflies Festival of Sacred Music in Bangalore, Bangladesh. Singer Kartick Das Baul (pictured), one of the form’s better-known exponents, has even sung in many Bengali films and has performed with the Kolkata-based jazz band Just Us at Fireflies, according to the Indian arts and entertainment website Buzz18.com.

Kartick Das Baul’s main gig, though, is with the Baul folk band Oikyotaan, which according to its website “aims at reaching a space where folk and contemporary music complement each other.” The band has made a film titled Notun Projonmer Baul (New Generation Baul) and hopes to establish a Baul foundation to promote and preserve Baul culture.

Listen to samples of Baul music at the Resurgence website; listen to samples of Oikyotaan’s music at the band’s website; and see the New Generation Baul trailer here:

Sources: Resurgence, Buzz18.com, Oikyotaan

Image by mdemon, licensed under Creative Commons.

Even if you haven’t read the books or seen the movie (soon to be movies), it’s been impossible to ignore the cultural phenomenon of Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular Twilight series. A mind-blowing statistic cited in the new American Prospect caught my eye: “In the first quarter of 2009, Twilight novels composed 16 percent of all book sales,” writes Sady Doyle. “Four out of every 25 books sold were part of the series.”

(Think about that for a minute. A series of books that began publishing in 2005 and ended in August 2008 accounted for 16 percent of all book sales in the first three months of 2009.)

Doyle demonstrates that the Twilight books and films—and their fans, who are visibly, overwhelmingly teenage girls—have been “marginalized and mocked” by a wide range of media: MTV, Time magazine, The New York Times, and other outlets favor adjectives like “shrieking” and “squealing” to describe these enthusiastic droves of readers. “Yes,” Doyle writes, “Twi-Hards can be loud. But is it really necessary to describe them all by the pitch of their voices? It propagates the stereotype of teen girls as hysterical, empty-headed, and ridiculous.”

Feminists, too, have widely criticized the books, and for good reason. They offer a humorless, stalkerish, absurdly overprotective Prince Charming in the vampire-protagonist of Edward Cullen, for whom Bella, the angsty teen-girl narrator, is willing to do anything (including—spoiler alert!—becoming a vampire herself). I’ll admit that when I finished reading the four-book series, the first thing I did was call my Edward Cullen–obsessed teenage sister, who did not appreciate my ensuing lecture about why the characters’ 19th century–style relationship was not something to aspire to.

Doyle concedes that the books are “silly,” what with their unlikely chastity and the characters’ sappy, unconditional, and constantly verbalized mutual adoration, but, she argues, these fantasies do offer teen girls much-needed “shelter from the terrors of puberty.” On the other hand, “male escapist fantasies—which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking—tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it’s about the fact that those fans are young women.”

Even phenomena on the nerdier side of the pop-culture spectrum—Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, and Harry Potter—escape the severe criticism that's heaped upon the Twi-Hards. How are Twilight and its fandom so different from these films, or even Marvel comics? Doyle asks. “The answer is fairly obvious, and it’s not—as geeks and feminists might hope—the quality of the books or movies,” she writes. “It’s the number of boys in the fan base.”

That’s why, no matter how drippy and problematic feminists may perceive the series to be, they should care about the Twilight backlash, Doyle argues. I’d like to interpret that as, let’s keep discussing our Twilight qualms with teen-girl allies—but let’s also try to understand why it appeals to them, and consider what that tells us about teenage girl-hood today.

(And let's definitely watch, and encourage Twilight fans to watch, the hilarious, sexism-busting video "Buffy vs. Edward (Twilight Remixed).")

Source: The American Prospect (excerpt only available online)

We featured the mud stencils of Milwaukee artist Jesse Graves in the November-December 2009 issue of Utne Reader:

There are no laws against playing in the dirt, the messages are no less powerful than those from a can of paint, and if the neighbors don’t like it—well, they can just apply water. The technique is also non­toxic, an eco-advantage those hauling aerosol cans down alleys or atop buildings can’t claim.

Graves was generous enough to let us share a few photos of his work and the group stenciling he's done on issues of environmental plunder and the criminal justice system. Enjoy!

Americans are peculiar. We like ethnic food, as long as it’s not too ethnic. We like foreign films, as long as they’re not too foreign. But we draw the line more starkly at non-English pop music. We don’t widely embrace music that is not sung in our tongue.

What is it about non-English lyrics that so repels us? Elyse Franko proposes on the travel website World Hum that we’re driven by overblown fears:

We English speakers are terrified of not understanding. We’ve gotten so used to speaking the coveted lingua franca that we’ve neglected to give other languages a chance—even if doing so would somehow benefit us. At this point, neglect has turned to fear: fear of miscommunication; fear of traveling outside the realm of English-language tours; fear of ordering the wrong dish from a non-English menu; and fear of misunderstanding the non-English lyrics to an otherwise excellent song.

Franko notes that many artists seeking a large audience are pressured to learn English, and that 19 of last year’s 25 Eurovision song contest finalists sang in English. But she also holds out hope that the tide is turning. After all, she notes, the Swedish “swing-rap-jazz combo” Movits recently performed on The Colbert Report—in Swedish!

OK, so maybe it wasn’t a cultural watershed, but Franko’s central point is well taken: “In this, the Age of the Internet, new music can travel over continents in seconds—why should we ignore good tunes just because they’re not performed in a language we can understand?”

To do our part, we’ve included two songs with non-English lyrics on our downloadable October Utne Reader music sampler: “Culpa de la Luna” by Rupa and the April Fishes, which is in Spanish, and “Surprise Hotel” by Fool’s Gold, which takes the multicultural prize: It’s African-style music played by non-African Los Angelenos and sung in Hebrew by the Israeli-born son of parents from Iraq and Russia. Touché!

Source: World Hum

Image by pocuswhiteface, licensed under Creative Commons.

The legendary Nigerian musician and dissident Fela made big, powerful music that celebrated a reborn Africanism and made funky fun of colonial powers. But he also had plenty of rough edges, and they are on display right away—along with his caustic, critical sense of humor—in the 1982 authorized biography Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore, which has been out of print but has been newly republished by Lawrence Hill Books. Here is how it starts:

After three years of waiting, my mother and father really wanted a baby. But it wasn’t me they wanted. No, man! No! They wanted any fucking baby.

You know, the meek, quiet type. Well-mannered. Yes-Sir this. Yes-Sir that. They didn’t want a motherfucker like me, man! Well, here I am now. I came. In spite of them. . . .

When I was born my father wanted to imitate his own father. They were both Protestant reverends. So to make some white man happy, my father asked this German missionary to . . . name me. Can you imagine that, man? A white man naming an African child! . . .

You know what that motherfucker named me? Hildegart! Yes, man. Hildegart! Oooooooooh, man! That’s how much I wasn’t wanted. Me, who was supposed to come and talk about Blackism and Africanism, the plight of my people. Me, who was supposed to try and do something to change that. Oh, man. I felt that name like a wound.

Fela’s sense of destiny, along with his arrogance and aggrieved psyche, continues to drive the narrative throughout This Bitch of a Life. It’s a riveting read as Fela describes the police-state brutality that only solidified his political opposition and drove him to ever-more intense personal and political extremes—and eventually wore him down.

One disturbing undercurrent is Fela’s over-the-top sexism and patriarchy. Sam Baldwin at Mother Jones notes that “Sexism, sadly, is what comes through most strongly” in the book, adding, “Well, sexism and police brutality.”

A new epilogue by Moore adds valuable perspective on Fela’s legacy, which has taken on Marley-like proportions and spawned a string of reissues such as the impending 45-album onslaught from Knitting Factory Records, tributes such as the multimedia Fela Project, and even a Bill T. Jones-directed Broadway musical, which opens November 23. As Fela’s legend grows ever larger, This Bitch of a Life reminds us that the man behind the music was full of mystery, paradox, and pain.

Sources: Fela: This Bitch of a Life, Fela Project, Mother Jones, World Music Central, Playbill

Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen are not given to extensive introspection. Ask why they created The Dude character in The Big Lebowski, and they’ll reveal that it simply amused them to envision a detective whose “mind is so befogged by dope” that he can’t put basic clues together. Ask why they set Blood Simple in West Texas, and they’ll explain that they knew people in the area who could help them make the film. Ask why the main character in Miller’s Crossing listens to a phonograph recording of “Danny Boy,” which then becomes the soundtrack for a brutal shootout, and they’ll just say, “Well, he’s Irish.”

Given this lack of self-analysis, it’s easy to understand why there were few instances of deep, sustained insight in the Coens’ two-and-a-half-hour conversation with journalist Elvis Mitchell before an audience at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where their work is being feted in a retrospective. Anyone expecting pearls of wisdom came away with pebbles of knowledge—but fascinating pebbles nonetheless, especially for fans of the Coens’ work. Here are a few of them:

Joel on their artistic inspirations: “Many people think we’re always referencing movies, but it’s the books those movies are based on that are more influential to us.”

Joel on the tortuous writing process behind O Brother Where Art Thou: “Sometimes you just figure out where to go . . . It took us a while to figure out we were writing The Odyssey.”

Ethan on their films’ tendency to have a strong regional flavor: “It’s hard to develop a story without seeing where it starts.”

Ethan on his son’s reaction to his films: “He says, ‘Is this going to be another one of your depressing movies where everyone dies at the end?’ ”

Joel on moviemaking: “One of the pleasures of movies is creating a world . . . it gives you a license to do certain things.” And: “Every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz.”

Ethan on “motormouth” characters who won’t shut up: “Whenever we write for George Clooney, he’s that guy.” Joel says that after wrapping up shooting on Burn After Reading, Clooney turned to them and said, “All right, boys, I’ve played my last idiot.”

Joel on the inspiration behind A Serious Man, which is set in a Midwestern Jewish community: “A lot of it was thinking about and reading Isaac Bashevis Singer stories.”

Joel on the operatic feel of some of their musical scenes: “It’s a direction we sometimes go even with subjects that don’t seem to call for that kind of treatment.”

Ethan on why there’s no soundtrack in No Country for Old Men: “It suffered with whatever [music] we put against it.”

Ethan on their films’ treatment of race and other sensitive topics: “We don’t give a shit about people’s sensitivities.”

Joel on movies with a message: “It wouldn’t be interesting us to make a movie to make a specific social comment.”

Joel on their early filmmaking attempts, which comprised single takes shot in linear order on a cheap movie camera: “The big advantage of that is that when you get it back from the drugstore, the movie is finished.”

Image by Wilson Webb, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

The new indie film Trash Humpers observes the lives of three fictional cretin-like outcasts who lead filthy and disgusting lives on the margins of society—lives that include, yes, sex with garbage. Is there any redeeming artistic value in this? I doubt I’ll find out, because I probably won’t go see it. (I have other plans.) But the film certainly is already doing what it apparently intended to do: generating heated discussion. In film magazines and blogs, writers are grappling with the unsettling questions that Trash Humpers raises.

Over at IndieWire, Eric Kohn writes that filmmaker Harmony Korine “challenges viewers (those willing to sit through the whole thing, anyway) to deny the movie’s mesmerizing appeal. … Only those compelled by the allure of attempting to comprehend its vulgar tongue-in-cheek appeal will access the fascinating madness beneath its juvenile surface.”

At Cinema Scope, Dennis Lim, in describing the the film’s ultra lo-fi look, proclaims, “Trash Humpers is a proudly cruddy-looking film by an aesthete who understands the power and utility of ugliness.” (Case in point: I was moved to learn about the film after being drawn in by the grotesquely engaging cover of Cinema Scope’s Fall issue.)

And at Variety, frequent Utne Reader contributor Rob Nelson writes, “The result, riveting beyond all rationality, is something like Jackass, except that here the stunts are dangerous only to standards of good taste—which, of course, is precisely the point.”

Sources: IndieWire, Cinema Scope, Variety

The state mental hospitals of the 19th and early 20th centuries—originally known as “lunatic asylums”—often operated within massive, majestic buildings, most of which are now abandoned or operating at a fraction of their former capacity. Christopher Payne spent several years meticulously photographing 70 of these architectural marvels, and his haunting images are collected in the beautiful new book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just out on MIT Press.

“For more than half the nation’s history,” Payne writes, “vast mental hospitals were prominent architectural features on the American landscape. Practically every state could claim to have at least one.”

The location of the hospitals, in the countryside, away from the city, afforded ample privacy and an abundance of land for farming and gardening, which were integral to the patients’ daily regimen of exercise. . . . The grounds provided relief from the indoor sights and sounds of the asylum and also served as a dramatic setting for the buildings, enhancing their grandeur. As visitors to the asylums never penetrated beyond the public lobbies of the administration buildings, it was these spaces and the landscapes that acted as the chief agents of propaganda to exert a positive influence on public perception.

Neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks, who worked for 25 years at Bronx State Hospital (now Bronx Psychiatric Center), pens the book’s introduction, a lively tour through the history of these asylums’ philosophies, inner workings, and patient populations as they shifted over the years.

Source: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Images copyright © Christopher Payne.

Two years ago, visual artist Collin Sekajugo established an arts center where there weren’t any before: Kigali, Rwanda. The Ivuka Arts Center (ivuka means “rebirth”) provides studio space and workshops, and helps artists “make a living from their art,” Sekajugo tells Peace Review—no easy feat in a country that doesn’t have any art supplies shops or galleries. “We mostly exhibit our art in public buildings, in hotels or in coffee shops—in places where foreigners may go,” Sekajugo says.

Perhaps most surprising is that 15 years after the genocide, Ivuka’s artists tend to avoid the subject. Here’s Sekajugo’s explanation:

Some of our artists address genocide in some works. Most of them don’t though. Some of our artists are genocide survivors, you see. Developing art about the genocide is very hard for them. It’s difficult for viewers too. It elicits bad feelings, feelings of pain, grief, or guilt. Who were the culprits? Or the victims? It creates division. Rather than representing genocide, the artists here would rather paint about reconciliation.

I suppose, if you wanted to, you could read genocide themes into their works. For instance, you could read genocide into this painting of people fleeing. Or you could relate the red color in this abstract painting to blood. Painting directly about genocide is delicate, however. It discourages people from coming to terms with the genocide, from reconciling. People here are very sensitive to these issues and emotions are very raw, especially during commemoration time.

I have a lot of ideas about the genocide that I’d like to put on canvas, but then I think of the repercussions, of how people are going to view it, of how it’s going to affect them. Some people might respond well to it, but others might become emotional, bitter, or angry. Genocide is still a very sensitive subject here, perhaps too sensitive.

The Peace Review interview is not available online, but if you’re at all interested in Rwanda, go out and buy the whole issue (July-September 2009)—it’s packed with essays and reports from that country, and Sekajugo’s interview is just one in a series of chats with artists working on amazing, inspiring projects in post-genocide Rwanda.

Source: Peace Review 

Image courtesy of Collin Sekajugo.

The new issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies has arrived in the Utne Reader library, and the work of award-winning editorial cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz graces the cover. Inside, Alcaraz, who is the creator of the syndicated comic strip La Cucaracha, talks about his efforts to create images of Obama that would resonate with the Hispanic community during the 2008 campaign:

I was angered by the mainstream/right-wing media's attempt to again divide the brown and black communities by spreading the racist talking point: "Latinos will NOT vote for a black man.  ...Obama's national field director Cuauhtemoc Figueroa, who visited forty-two states during the 2008 campaign, reported that he would inevitably find a ... Viva Obama poster in even the most remote Midwestern towns, hanging in the mercado window or an activist's living room. Viva Obama was a grassroots runaway hit. Voters wanted it. Campaign workers distributed it far and wide. Youths would snap cellphone photos of it at my signing events and email the photos to their friends.

Source: Aztlán

The latest word on the sexual cleansing of Iraq is that militias have been scanning internet chatrooms used by lesbian, gay, and transgendered Iraqis as part of a grotesque and tragic campaign of kidnapping, torture, and murder.

There was an endless parade of celebrities speaking out on behalf of Iraqis in the months leading up to the bombardment and invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nearly seven years later few raise their voices for the welfare of people in Iraq (not to mention the estimated two million who have fled the violence there).

Enter Antony Hegarty, the achingly beautiful voice of Antony and the Johnsons who posted an article about the killings, followed by a desperate declaration, written in all-caps:

ALLAH TREASURES HIS GAY AND TRANSGENDERED CHILDREN, HIS PRECIOUS HOMOSEXUAL CHILDREN.

JESUS ADORES HIS GAY CHILDREN AND RESERVES A SACRED PLACE FOR THEM IN THE FOLDS OF HIS CLOTHES.

IT IS A SIN TO HURT A GAY OR TRANSGENDERED PERSON. YOU HURT ALLAH WHEN YOU HURT ONE OF THESE MEN OR WOMEN, BOYS OR GIRLS.

Make a tshirt. Tell your friends.

love from Antony, crying

If you want to learn more about the situation for gay and transgendered Iraqis, here are a few resources:

Sexual Cleansing in Iraq (Utne Reader, May-June 2009)

The Sexual Cleansing of Iraq Intensifies (Utne.com, May 5, 2009)

Exterminating Lesbian, Gay, and Transgendered Iraqis (Utne.com, August 17, 2009)

Iraqi LGBT, an organization that publicizes hate crimes in Iraq

They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, a report published by Human Rights Watch

Source: Antony and the Johnsons 

The proverbial bird sitting on a utility wire. It’s the image that, as the story goes, inspired Leonard Cohen to begin composing the legendary song “Bird on a Wire” in the 1960s. Fast forward 40 years to our present, technology-enabled day, and the iconic avian image is still inspiring musical art. Check out this charming music video on Vimeo by film director/musician Jarbas Agnelli, who interpreted birds sitting on utility wires as “notes” on a “musical staff”—just to discover what song the resting avians were silently singing. 

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Source: Jarbas Agnelli’s Vimeo

The pedestrian reclamation of Times Square in New York City is a good start for the sake of public art, according to Benjamin R. Barber in the Nation. But it’s not enough. To transform the once traffic clogged area into something that can truly be considered “public,” the city must enlist artists, and secure adequate funding. He writes:

Public space is not merely the passive residue of a decision to ban cars or a tacit invitation to the public to step into the street. It must be actively created and self-consciously sustained against the grain of an architecture built as much for machines as people, more for commercial than common use.

Barber points to Chicago’s Millennium Park and Barcelona’s Las Ramblas (with all of its grit) as places that got public art right. New York has the same potential with Times Square, but it’s not there yet.

Source:  The Nation  

Image by  Falling Heavens , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Some people can’t see a place without wanting to sketch it out on paper. The Urban Sketchers, a group of artists founded by Gabriel Campanario, share their visions of the world on their Flickr group and on the blog. The loose affiliations of the artists create a site where pen-and-ink drawings of Madrid will sit comfortably next to watercolor drawings of rural America. Their manifesto states that all of the drawings are made on-site as a truthful representation of what they see. The group recently released a magazine on the self-publishing site Issuu.com, and the first issue is all about cars in cities around the world.  The idiosyncrasies of the artists, with their various styles, media, and subjects, make the issue a beautiful and compelling read.

Source: The Urban Sketchers 

The “Wide Right Turn” decals that grace the backs of trucks don’t actually need to be there. They’re simply a courtesy, telling people that the truck makes large turns and that people shouldn’t get too close. There is no government standard for what the signs should look like, so myriad designs will pop up on the backs of trucks around the country: Some are colored and some aren’t, some graphically depict car accidents and some simply say “Caution. Wide Turns.” According to the AIGA design blog, this lack of standardization makes the signs more charming and human, even if they aren’t particularly well designed.

Source: AIGA 

Image by  Mykl Roventine , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

A German environmental organization called Oro Verde produced this knockoff on naturalist illustrations. The message here, if you didn’t catch it when it hit you over the head, is stated explicitly

The destruction of the rainforest comes in many shapes. And there are all kinds of animal and plant species which suffer as a result. Every hour three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct. Help us to save the rainforest: www.oroverde.de

The blog No Caption Needed has posted a large image of the poster, called Diversity of Species in the Rainforest.

(Thanks Eyeteeth, No Caption Needed.)

With nothing more than a first and last name, the Personas web application creates a picture of how the internet sees you. Eerie insights sometimes flash across the page, often followed by absurd non sequiturs. The website, created as part of an MIT art installation Metropath(ologies), is meant as a critique of data mining efforts by Google, Netflix, and the U.S. Government. In a statement on the project, the authors say:

We typically are never given the chance to see the decision making process that ranks some webpage in the fourth slot for a specific Google Query, and most certainly not when money is to be made in a competitive environment. Personas is meant to expose this black box process as controlled voodoo.

The visualizations don’t have any live links in them, and you can’t copy and paste from it, which gives the impression of a data interpretation process that the user is powerless to control.

(Thanks, Apples and Owls.)

Source: Personas

For today’s coffee connoisseur steeped in the finer points of French presses and Italian espresso machines, the latest trend in coffeemaking may seem a bit déclassé: drip brewing. That’s right, the brewing method that our moms used is back, but this time it’s not Folgers in a Mr. Coffee machine: It’s of course being presented as an artisanal experience.

The August 12 Chicago Reader profiles the Asado Coffee Company, where proprietor Kevin Ashtari serves up manual-drip coffee. He roasts his own beans in-house and then practices his patient craft:

For each order of drip, he grinds half a cup of beans somewhere between fine and coarse. He then wets an unbleached, conical Melitta filter, to wash away any potential paper taste that could pollute the coffee. He inserts the filter into a porcelain dripper, set on a rack above a cup, then pours in the coffee and a dollop of hot water, just under the boiling point. Grounds bloom up in the filter and he stirs, slowly adding more water, still stirring and scraping the grounds down from the side of the filter. In about two minutes he’s made a bright, full-bodied, perfect cup of coffee, without a trace of bitterness. … Manual drip is probably most primitive and inconvenient way to make a cup of coffee, but because it allows absolute control over water temperature, proportion, and extraction, in the right hands, it can be dangerously good.

Ashtari become a drip-brew disciple after a 2005 visit to the San Francisco’s Blue Bottle Coffee Company, where baristas served up a cup of drip coffee whose body and clarity blew him away. But don’t expect the trend to spread to every java hut in the land: The Reader points out that Ashtari gets only about seven cups of coffee out of each pound of beans. Despite charging “two bucks a pop” for 12 ounces, “the only reason he makes any money is that he’s roasting his own.”

Retailers are already catering to newly reconverted drip brewers. Bee House sells Japanese-made porcelain coffee drippers, and the “liquid culture” magazine Imbibe writes in its September-October issue about the “coffee sock pot” that will make you a great cup of drip coffee—or should I say “maintain greater control over your coffee extraction”?

Sources: Chicago Reader, Imbibe (article not available online)

Image by biskuit, licensed under Creative Commons.

Idle chicken scratches left on scratch paper can have profound meaning. The doodle, Matthew Battles writes for Hilobrow, “is at once the most common and the most ignored art form.” People have been doodling for millennia, scrawling stick figures into the walls of caves and onto pieces of pottery. In post-Fruedian interpretation, these doodles can be windows into people’s unconscious minds. Though the action is sometimes conflated with “scribbling,” Battles writes: 

Scribbling is not doodling, because scribbles are marks made in haste or by an uncertain hand. Doodling, by contrast, is beyond craft and criticism; it belongs to us all; it’s impossible to do it badly—or well. It springs from that flourishing thicket, common to everyone, where mind shoots forth its florid branches from the rootstock of the animal brain. Its intent, if it has one, differs from the preliminary brainstorming of sketching and the territorial mark-making of graffiti: it is the graphic expression of ennui, an existential criticism of the world-as-such.

Source: Hilobrow 

Astronauts stuck in space need something to pass the time. Two years ago, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the website GovernmentAttic, NASA released a list of the books, movies, television shows, and music kept in the International Space Station.

The books on board include a standard canon of histories, science fiction, and action novels, but there are a few surprises. For example Michael Crichton’s anti-global warming novel State of Fear makes an appearance, and so does David Sedaris’s essay collection Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. The films include some great comedies, including Blazing Saddles, There’s Something About Mary, and National Lampoon’s Animal House, along side some truly terrible films like Rush Hour II, 50 First Dates, and the Ashton Kutcher thriller The Butterfly Effect.

In response to the list, the independent film organization The Shooting People complained to NASA, saying, “I felt that Caddyshack, Cheaper by the Dozen, and heaven forefend Beverly Hills Cop, might weaken the critical faculties of those on board, possibly even putting their lives and ours in danger.” The organization made some suggestions, including replacing Harold and Kumar with Harold and Maude and offering Man on Wire instead of Man on Fire.

NASA responded, thanking the organization for its input, and promising to pass the letter and the suggestions to the crew office “for further consideration.”

(Thanks, Scientific American.)

Source:  GovernmentAttic ,  The Shooting People ,  NASA  

I must admit, I am a big fan of the popular genre of documentary photography known as “Urban Decay.” Images of abandoned buildings or city blocks gone to seed can make for some strange and beautiful photos. And if urban decay photography has a capital city, it’s Detroit.

Vice magazine is critical of photographers and journalists who visit Detroit and come away with the same old stories and post-apocolyptic Detroit photographs in this cheeky article by Thomas Morton. He talks to Detroit photographer James Griffioen, who says he frequently fields phone calls “from outside journalists looking for someone to sherpa them to the city’s best shitholes”:

 You get worn down trying to show them all the different sides of the city, then watching them go back and write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn.

Not every story coming out of Detroit is bad news, check out Bloggers Versus Blight from our Nov.-Dec. 2008 issue, a story about the feisty newspaper Detroit News.

 (Thanks, Coudal.)         

Image by John in Mich, licensed under Creative Commons.

Copyright law? Who cares about copyright law? Just about anyone who downloads media—that is, most of us—should care. “This world in which we outlaw copyright criminals is like the Victorians, who pretended that they didn’t all masturbate,” says writer and copyright activist Cory Doctorow in the film Rip! A Remix Manifesto, a documentary that wears its free-culture position on its sleeve as it explores the current muddled state of copyright law.

Inspired by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and other “copyfighters,” as they’ve been called, the remix manifesto rests on four pillars: 1) culture always builds on the past; 2) the past always tries to control the future; 3) our future is becoming less free; and 4) to build free societies, you must limit control of the past.

To build its case, the film revisits some of the great cultural ripoffs in history, from Walt Disney appropriating ages-old fairy tales for his cartoons to Led Zeppelin riffing off an old blues song to create “Whole Lotta Love.” But Rip’s central sympathetic character is recording artist and DJ Girl Talk, who basically plunders snippets from hundreds of musicians as he builds his cut-and-paste dance-floor mashups. Putting Girl Talk at the center of the film makes for a fun ride. Footage from his mania-inducing shows allows viewers to occasionally blow off some copyrighteous anger, and his music illustrates all the complexities of the copyright debate: It’s both original and derivative, high- and low-brow, rump-shaking and thought-provoking.

True to its mission, Rip! A Remix Manifesto is available for download on a name-your-price basis, and its creator, director Brett Gaylor, has invited people to rip and remix the film. So go ahead: For once, you won’t have to look over your shoulder as you hit “download.”

Source: Rip! A Remix Manifesto

D.I.Y. pioneer cum documentary filmmaker Faythe Levine may be passing through your town screening her new film, Handmade Nation. The documentary, which began shooting in 2006, follows Levine over 19,000 miles to capture the new wave of art, craft and design happening all over the U.S. The film drops in on art spaces, punk rock craft fairs and even some crafters’ homes, in an effort to corral the recent surge in handmade wares into a powerful movement that reflects the evolving ethos behind D.I.Y. culture.

Levine created the film in conjunction with her book, Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y., Art, Craft, Design, which she co-wrote with the film’s producer, Cortney Heimerl.

Check out the trailer below and find out if there is a screening coming to your area.

Some of the best times I’ve ever had involved mercilessly pummeling my brother’s, sisters’, and father’s heads with wrapping paper tubes. So I was thrilled to catch wind of the Cardboard Tube Fighting League, where foes face off in organized duels wielding this old-school, low-impact weaponry that provides all the satisfaction of vengeance without the bodily harm.

 “The CTFL was created out of a desperate need to better train and arm citizens with cardboard tubes,” says the website of the organization, which has hosted tournaments in San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Sydney.

“Where others see storage for posters, I see the means by which I can battle my oppressors. Or a few friends,” writes author Sherman Alexie, a CTFL fan, on the “Stuff I Like” section of his website.

In a CTFL duel, the technical goal is to break your opponent’s tube without breaking your own—but of course it’s a bonus if you get in a few sweet shots at their torso or melon. (While the rules ban face shots, they don’t say anything about the head.) There’s no body slamming or stabbing, and only official CTFL tubes are allowed. You’ve got to sign the obligatory waiver, too, which covers risks that “include but are not limited to the loss of eye(s), decapitation, impalement, bloody lips, bruises, welts, paralysis and/or death,” according to SFGate.

Duel if you dare. Me, I’m going to go find a tube and hit someone.

Sources: Cardboard Tube Fighting League, Sherman Alexie, SFGate

Image by Julian Cash, courtesy of the Cardboard Tube Fighting League.

Somebody teach me Dutch now! The formula for a fabulous new Dutch internet series is simple: a visual artist is seated at a table with a work of his or her art, joined at the other end of the table by a parent. There is a brief explanation of the piece (with constant parental interruption) which leads into a sometimes rambling, sometimes heated conversation. There is just one problem: the producers of this brilliant experiment only inserted English subtitles into the first episode. Still, I keep watching. The universal language of a parent attempting to understand their spawn is universal and mostly consists of some variation of: "huh," "okay," or "nah." Enjoy!

(Thanks, What Alice Found.)

Museums aren’t just casualties of the current economic collapse, they actively fed the boom and subsequent bust, Ben Davis writes for ArtNet. Museum boards engaged in short-sited speculation, gambling huge endowments in hedge funds and other risky investments.

Now that those endowments are worth a fraction of what they once were, and with governments drastically cutting their support for the arts to stave off budget crises, the large institutions aren’t the ones hurt most.  “Everyone knows who is getting hardest hit,” Davis writes, “it is the personnel who do the unglamorous day-to-day stuff that makes these places run.”

Source: ArtNet 

Image by gomattolson, licensed under Creative Commons.

Will somebody please pay me to follow David Byrne around with a camera? Remember the video tour of his office? I do. Now we have Byrne literally playing a building, specifically the Roundhouse in London. Creative Review explains:

The installation sees Byrne convert the main space at the Roundhouse into a huge musical instrument, which can be played by visitors via an old pump organ keyboard that sits in the centre of the space. Attached to the organ are numerous pipes and strings that are linked to elements of the building’s structure to create noise. Some of the sounds are made by wind being forced through the pipes, eliciting a whistling sound, while elsewhere small strikers clang and bang the metal columns, and other machines cause the metal crossbeams in the building to vibrate, causing a humming sound. The disorganised and at times cacophonous results reveal a new way of thinking about the building, as well as about the creation of music.

Byrne's Playing the Building instillation has been around for a few years. Here's a video from its appearance in New York City. Delightful:

Source: Creative Review 

When you think of “hair art,” you probably don’t imagine the beautiful, delicate jewelry of Melanie Bilenker, who creates tiny line drawings using locks of her own hair, then casts them into brooches, pendants, and rings. The new issue of Broken Pencil hipped me to Bilenker, whose inspiration lies with the Victorians, who “kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of a lost love,” she explains on her website. “In much the same way, I secure my memories through photographic images rendered in lines of my own hair, the physical remnants.”

One of the most striking things about Bilenker’s work is what memories she chooses to capture—“quiet minutes, the mundane, the domestic, the ordinary moments.” Moments like stepping into the bathtub, rifling around in the fridge, buttoning a shirt, tending to plants. It’s moving, somehow, to see such mundane moments so lovingly rendered.

Source: Broken Pencil

Images courtesy of Melanie Bilenker.

Frustrated that her neighborhood seemed to function as little more than a “giant hotel of passing strangers,” artist Candy Chang created a public installation meant to get residents talking.  Her goal was simple: use public space effectively and engage residents.

Chang’s New York City installation featured post-its that asked for basic information about residents’ living situations.  Passersby were quick to participate, sharing the kind of information we often keep to ourselves. One 43-year resident of a Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn studio boasted of paying just $146 a month in rent.  A resident of Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood reported paying $3,720 for a four-bedroom apartment. For more results, check out Chang’s website. 

 (Thanks, Visual Culture.)

 Image courtesy of Candy Chang.

Helvetica Man is a fixture of national parks, coffee shops, and airports around the world, helpfully pointing the way to bathrooms, elevators, and wet floors. His bulbous head and shapely figure are easy to understand, no matter what language a person speaks. This innocuous, multicultural figure did not emerge by accident. He was invented by the Austrian philosopher and social scientist Otto Neurath, according to the Smart Set. Neurath believed that language wasn’t the best way to impart knowledge universally, according to the article, and “sought instead a uniform visual communication system that relied on observation and experience.” Helvetica man, as he was later dubbed, became the cornerstone of that system.

Source:  The Smart Set  

For today’s classical composer wishing to be taken seriously, writing a film score is a step in the wrong direction: Critics tend to snub those who engage in such lowbrow pursuits. Writing in the classical music magazine Listen (July-August), Damian Fowler assesses what he calls “The Fickle Genre” and points out that it can be hard for even very talented composers to shake this stigma.

One who has succeeded to some degree is John Corigliano, who created the Oscar-winning score for the 2000 film The Red Violin and then adapted it into a violin concerto that was recorded by Joshua Bell and hailed by critics. Another composer who’s still battling perceptions is Elliot Goldenthal, who scored Frida and, more recently, Public Enemies but feels he gets short shrift for his concert works, which include the Pulitzer-nominated opera Grendel. “I would like to change my name when I write orchestral pieces,” he says. Writes Fowler:

A student of both Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, Goldenthal says that people misunderstand the function of a movie composer. “It’s not as strange and different as it may seem, writing for the cinema and for the concert,” he says, pointing out that in the nineteenth century many composers wrote incidental music for plays. “Even Beethoven wrote incidental music, which he adapted for other works.”

Things may be changing. Composer wunderkind Nico Muhly, who has plenty of critical bona fides, wrote the score for the Oscar-nominated film The Reader. He harbors no preconceptions about film music: “I certainly never grew up with any thought that it wasn’t great music,” he says. “For me a culture high water mark is the score to Lawrence of Arabia.”

Source: Listen (article not available online)

In case you haven’t heard the robotic voice announcing its return, the vocoder is back in a big way. From electro-rockers like Black Moth Super Rainbow and Daft Punk to hip-hoppers like Snoop Dogg and Lil’ Wayne, it’s all the rage for singers to haul out this cheesy effect and make themselves sound like cyborgs. Will the same thing happen for the vocoder’s cousin, the talk box? The new issue of the vinyl collectors’ magazine Wax Poetics profiles an artist who helped bring the talk box to the masses in the 1970s, Zapp leader Roger Troutman.

A brief studio lesson: The vocoder and the talk box can make similar sounds, but they employ wholly different processes. The vocoder essentially makes the human voice sound like an instrument by deconstructing and reconstructing it electronically, while the talk box makes an instrument sound like the human voice by directing a note through a tube and into the singer’s mouth. The mouth then acts as a sound chamber.

“You’re shaping the sound,” Lester Troutman, bandmate and brother of Roger, tells the magazine.

If you’re familiar with the vernacular of ’70s radio, you’ve heard the talk box: Think of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way,” or Zapp’s “I Want to Be Your Man” and “More Bounce to the Ounce.”

“Talk boxes and vocoders are confused more than good and bad,” writes Wax Poetics, noting that perhaps the talk box would be better known if it had adopted some of Roger Troutman’s or Bootsy Collins’ nicknames for it.

Troutman called it the Ghetto Robot, the Electric Country Preacher, and the Nasty Straw (the drool-drenched tube could be a source of infection), while Bootsy called it the Magic Babbler, the Snake Charmer, and the Cosmic Communicator.

Check out the accompanying Analog Out column by Peter Kim, who traces talk-box history and links to several videos, including Stevie Wonder using the talk box on Sesame Street, Roger Troutman using it in the studio, and a clip about how to make a “ghetto” talk box.

Source: Wax Poetics (article not available online)

Image by daniel spils, licensed under Creative Commons.

Here’s a twist on the traditional artist residency program: Spend a week or two in the woods, camping out in a vintage trailer-turned-studio, with the sights and sounds of Oregon’s beautiful Mount Hood National Forest as your primary (only?) inspiration.

That’s how the new Signal Fire residency program works, reports The Bear Deluxe, a quirky magazine of arts and the environment published by the Portland-based nonprofit Orlo (article not available online). Husband and wife Amy Harwood and Ryan Pierce—a program director for a forest conservation group and a visual artist, respectively—dreamt up the project, and bought and refurbished a trailer to get things rolling. Thanks to her work, Harwood knows all the best spots at Mt. Hood, and "promises to place artists in a cozy room with an exceptional view of nature."

And what a cozy room it is: an "8-by-18-foot Road Ranger trailer, vintage 1975, sporting the era's requisite sun-bleached yellow and orange racing stripes." Harwood and Pierce have fixed it up, though, sprucing it up with "custom workbenches and cubbyholes to complete the feeling of a studio."

"What I'm hoping," Harwood tells the Bear Deluxe, "is that by putting the trailer as far out as we can get it into the wild places around Mount Hood, we'll be able to capture a little bit of that inspiration and still offer the incubation of a space."

Source: The Bear Deluxe 

Image by Darren // DA Creative Photography, licensed under Creative Commons.

Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book Angela’s Ashes, was Daniel Radosh’s high school English teacher. After McCourt died last week, Radosh—himself an author of the book Rapture Ready—wrote a funny and beautiful eulogy to his former teacher on his blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Beyond the practical lessons I learned in Frank McCourt's class, I'll always remember him as a model for how to be cynical without being jaded and sarcastic without being inhumane. I'm pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife, but he had to believe that there is an immortality in living so that your words and actions transform the world around you in ways that will continue to reverberate forever. No one with so much life in him can ever truly die. And if there were an afterlife, I can guarantee you that somewhere right now, Frank McCourt would be mightily pissed off that he's not around for what's sure to be a hell of a wake.

Radosh was kind enough to sit down with Utne Reader last year to talk about Christian rock music that doesn’t suck.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Source: Radosh.net

Image by  David Shankbone , licensed under  Creative Commons .  

When we blogged about rogue taxidermist Sarina Brewer, we thought we had bumped up against the outer limits of the taxidermist universe. We were wrong. Meet WTF Taxidermy, an online community organized on Livejournal to "discuss and share photos of taxidermy at its worst—funny anatomical abominations, ridiculous eBay auctions, cheesy novelty mounts, and just plain bad taxidermy! We also want to showcase the best and most unusual taxidermy mounts, including highly realistic or imaginative mounts as well as rogue taxidermy and mythological animals."

(Thanks, Art Fag City.)

Image courtesy of  Sarina Brewer .   

The art of graffiti: you either see it or you don't. Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab drags us out of that tired debate and shows us the science of tagging. His Graffiti Taxonomy project has just posted its Paris findings and a transfixing interactive demonstration of the lettering of 180 Parisian taggers. Individual letters were extracted using a process that looks something like this:

Here's a short video about the project:

Alt Wire   is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Eyeteeth and Minnesota Independent editor Paul Schmelzer.

Seed bombs: We've all heard of seed bombs—clumps of seed-embedded earth tossed into abandoned lots by guerrilla gardeners—but here are two new takes. Korean artist Jin-wook Hwang imagines actual cluster bombs that disperse seeds in the air to combat desertification (via Another Limited Rebellion), likening the action to that of Gale "Candy Bomber" Halvorson, an American World War II pilot who dropped candy from his plane for the children of Berlin. Japanese-born Hiroshi Sunairi, an NYU art professor, is sharing hibaku seeds—literally, "A-bombed seeds," ancestors of those affected by the bombing of Hiroshima—for people around the world to plant and tend. The persimmons, Japanese holly, jujubes and other varieties have been sprouting in places as far flung as London, Geneva, New York, Holland (Mich.), Joetsu City (Japan) and Minneapolis—where I'm tending my persimmon. The project's documentation will be exhibited at the New York Horticultural Society this December.

The Visual News: Two of my favorite sites for considering the visual aspects of the news are Michael Shaw's BAGnewsNotes and No Caption Needed, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The former recently republished an MSNBC photo entitled, "Last-second Escape"—which shows a U.S. Marine diving to avoid an explosion in Afghanistan—noting that the headline misleads: while one escaped, two other Americans were killed by the IED. Shaw calls it "an example of the disconnect between these wars we keep getting ourselves into and the all-too-familiar tendency to deny or romanticize." The latter has recently looked into news imagery of fallen soldiers returning to their home countries, finding that too often this somber ritual reflects a "radical isolation."

Street screeds (and other free-culture gems): UBUWEB is a wonderful trove of cultural resources, from the just-posted 1983 video, "Martha Rosler Reads Vogue" (in which she deconstructs messages in the ads and content of the fashion magazine), Craig Baldwin's film-collage Sonic Outlaws (a must-see for culturejammers, DJs and copyleft activists), and an incredible gallery of NYC street flyers—hand-made posters that range in theme from the political to the philosophical (here's one by a woman who thanks supporters for helping her win the U.S presidency three times—in 1973-1/2, 1976-1/2 and 1999-1/2.)

Pity the Nation: While it feels like a Bush-era remnant, Staceyann Chin's reading of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem Pity the Nation—with its reference to a "nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves"—never fails to give me chills, and should serve as a reminder to stay vigilant.

Mashups for peace: If Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" can peacefully (and rhythmically) coexist with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (thanks to DJ Morgoth), can't we all? Here are two more new lion-and-lamb mash-ups: Yes-meets-Sir Mix-a-Lot in "Owner of a Lonely Butt" by Minneapolis artist Richard Barlow. And Jay-Z meets Thom Yorke in New York DJ Max Tannone's Jaydiohead: The Encore.

Bio: Minneapolis-based writer and editor Paul Schmelzer blogs about art and activism at Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas; by day he is editor of the Minnesota Independent. He recently moderated Designing Obama, a panel hosted by the Walker Art Center.

Review of Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India
by Rory MacLean (Ig Publishing)

Before Allen Ginsberg wrote about his year-and-a-half stay in India in the early ’60s, the subcontinent didn’t take up much space in the Western mind. But like so much in those days, the Western mind was changing, and soon thousands of young seekers were setting off along the road where Ginsberg had posted his existential arrow sign: “Find Thyself, This Way.”

Before long, the old Silk Road had become the “Hippie Trail,” and it changed the world in ways that haven’t been fully appreciated until the publication of Rory MacLean’s wistfully merry Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India.

Nearly 30 years after the trail was cut off by the Iranian revolution, MacLean set out to see what was left of the route, starting at the Pudding Shop restaurant in Istanbul, where travelers piled into smoke-filled buses before rolling east through Iran, Pakistan, India, and finally to Kathmandu, where they stayed while they searched for something like nirvana.

MacLean finds that many traces of the old trail still exist, and he even runs into old travelers looking for the places where they once found themselves, including “Penny,” a woman who claims to be the original flower child. MacLean’s vivid writing shows how much the Hippie Trail changed not only the way we travel (giving us Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, and the budget travel industry), but also the places it passed through and the people who traveled on it.

This review is from the  July-August 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

You love fonts, you love cars, and you've always wondered how to marry the two. A Belgian ad agency called Happiness Brussels (seriously, that's their name) has done it. Two typographers and a pro race car driver have created a font called iQ. Here's how they did it, with apologies for the atrocious music:

Source: Creative Review 

In 2007, 28-year-old Baghdad resident Firas Adil Saadi got a tattoo. The ornate marking on his right shoulder wasn't an aesthetic decision. Saadi explained the tattoo to an Los Angeles Times reporter:

"The idea came to me after seeing these daily incidents during which some corpses are mutilated and distorted, some were even headless, and the fact that the identity cards are either lost or destroyed," said Saadi, a trader who works in Baghdad's Shorja market, which has suffered numerous bombings. "Even the water of the firefighting equipment is destroying them, so I thought about an irremovable identity card, which is the tattoo."

In those days, identity tattoos were something of a trend. Today, according to a report by IRIN, a news agency affiliated with the United Nations, identity tattoos are on the decline but tattoos of the decorative variety, though they are taboo to many in Iraq, are still in demand:

“Few people were interested in getting a tattoo for the look of it during 2005, 2006 and 2007 as their aim was only to put a mark on themselves to help their families identify their bodies if they were found mutilated,” Abdu, a Baghdad tattoo artist, told IRIN on condition that his full name not be mentioned for his safety.

Today, Abdu said few men come to him for that reason while many youngsters are seeking tattoos for purely decorative reasons. He said he charges US$10 to $200 for all kinds of artwork, such as images of dragons, snakes, tigers, hawks and hearts.

However, Abdu continues to keep a low profile for fear of being attacked by extremists who see his work as being prohibited by Islam or too westernised.

“Turnout is high, but our work is still limited to close friends and people we trust,” said Abdu, a 28-year-old Christian who learned his art as a refugee in Lebanon when he fled there in 2004. On his return to Iraq, he decided against opening his own tattoo studio and instead operates out of a friend’s tailoring shop.

Source: IRIN, Los Angeles Times

Great art is subjective. Bad art, on the other hand, can be identified by a pigeon. According to the New Scientist, psychologist Shigeru Watanabe taught art appreciation to several birds by rewarding them with food when they correctly discerned good art from bad. To identify the quality of the art work, Watanabe used children’s paintings that had been graded in a class and by a panel of adults. According to Watanabe, “The experiments demonstrated the ability of discrimination.” He added, however, that it did not show “the ability to enjoy painting.”

The pigeons may be smart, but the research “conflates so many different aspects of the human response to art,” Jessica Palmer writes for Biophemera. Palmer questions, “What is the relation between beauty in art and the quality of the art? Specifically, can ‘good’ art be ugly? Can beautiful art be ‘bad’? Can ugly art, paradoxically enough, be beautiful?” The pigeons haven’t been able to account for these subjective art questions. So, at least for now, art critics won’t be closing up shop just yet.

Sources: New Scientist, Biophemera

Image by Ricardo Martins, licensed under Creative Commons.

Hermas Zopoula is a musician from Burkina Faso in West Africa. In the July-August Utne Reader, writer Frank Bures calls his new two-CD debut album Espoir “a great addition to any Afropop fan’s library.” Zopoula is not yet living the life of a world music star, however: He still works as a translator for Air Burkina at the international airport in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, as he prepares to record his second album and hopes for his star to rise. Bures recently caught up with Zopoula by phone to discuss his music and his life. Here is their conversation. —The Editors

Listen to a sample track from Espoir:
"Companion de Route" by Hermas Zopoula

Hello, Hermas. How are things in Ouagadougou?

I’m fighting with the heat.

Is it hot there now?

Well it’s six o’clock and dark is just coming, so now it is a little bit not hot. But to you it is hot. If you were here at around 12 o’clock I’m sure that you would melt.

How did you get your start in music?

In all my family are what we call griots, people who are singing and praising, giving praises to very important people in the village. My family used to do such a thing. Since when I was born, all my family are Christians, but this mark was still on me. I could still see some people singing and praising each other. I grew up with that. At around 12 years I said I will become a singer. So I started training myself. And in 1999 I moved from Leo to Ouagadougou and I continued in the music. When I was 18 years old I started to do music really well, doing my own songs. And in 2000 I met Jonathan [Dueck] and his wife. OK, I have spoken a lot. Now you must ask me another question.

So are you a still griot? Are there griots still around?

Yes, there are still griots. But with the religion, they are stopped. They are nothing like they used to be in the past. In the past we had our griots and they were using their abilities to sing praises to the idols. So now they are not singing in that same way.

Musically, which artists are your influences? 

We have some musicians in Burkina that are really loved much, but I don’t use the style they are using to play their instruments. I can say [Ivorian reggae star] Alpha Blondy is the first one. [Late South African reggae star] Lucky Dube is another one. And we also have some old musicians that are really—I liked the way they play. Pepe Kalle. You know how he dances and how he sings?

Yeah.

Sam Mangwana.

Yes, I know Sam Mangwana.

We have so many of them here in Burkina Faso.

Like how many musicians?

Wow. That is a great question. I really cannot figure it out. Because each year we have something we call the Musicians' Festival. And we can see on the television that they have more than 80 musicians registered.

Will you be in it?

I’m not sure because you have to have two albums for sale before you register. So maybe in the coming year I will be able to.

Are there many music venues around Ouagadougou?

We have so many places. Sometimes we don’t even need to go to a very remarkable place. Even you can just play on the corner. But if you want to organize a very big concert and we have places you can go to. And if you are a very, very well-known musician you can hire the stadium. Alpha Blondie. Lucky Dube.

So do people do in Burkina Faso like music?

Yes, they do. But in the past, Burkinabé people, they like music but they are not trying to play music by themselves. They were buying cassettes from Abidjan. We have more than 6 million people in Abidjan. So going and coming back they would just buy some tapes from there, and they don’t care about other musicians here in Burkina Faso. The new music from Burkina Faso is there in Abidjan, and we also have theirs here.

So is the music from Ivory Coast and Mali and Niger and Mali different from Burkina Faso’s music?

Yes, yes. Very different.

How so?

In Burkina Faso you’ll see that people are saying we are singing warba. Most people in Burkina Faso are Mossi people. And Mossi people used to dance warba. But if you go to Mali, it’s madang. And now in Abidjan, it’s very mixed. I can’t tell you what kind of music they’re dancing to there because they have a very mixed population. You will see Ghanaians. You will see Burkinabé. You will see Malians. You’ll see people from every country living there. They have everything: reggae, madang, and since they have more than 6 million Burkinabé there, if you bring a cassette, they can start dancing warba.

Are those dance styles or music styles?

They are dance styles, but all styles of dance are coming with their own style of music.

What is your dream as a musician?

I want to be a very well-known musician. And I want to have my own team and my own studio. If you have your own studio is very easy for you to perform songs. Very easy! Because you’ll have all the time to mix and remix them to review all that you have been doing before you let it go out. And I want to move around the world.

Do you want to fill the stadium like Alpha Blondy?

Yes, I want to fill the stadium! I want to have many fans on my back when I am moving across the city, and people say, “Here are the artists. Here are the artists!” (laughs)

Do you have any concerts coming up soon?

In Ouagadougou?

Yes.

No, not here in Ouagadougou. Not yet. My plan is that I’m looking to go to the U.S., where I will be making my second album. But now it is the period when people are going on vacation, so at the airport where I am working, we have so many flights. So I don’t have any time to organize anything during this period. Maybe from October to February, something can be organized. Now I’m working seven days a week. So that leads me to being not able to accomplish something of my desires.

Are you married and have children?

No, I don’t have any. I am free. I’m open.

I’ll put the word out. That is all of my questions. Was there anything else you wanted to say?

Yes. I had another thing to let you know: Out of 36 brothers and sisters I am the last born. My father was married to six wives. I’m the last one of the family. I was born when my father was nearly 80 years. Some people say he was 90 years.

So you still have time to have children.

Yes, I have to live more than my father! He lived more than 120 years before he passed away. I have a lot to do, because we have a saying here in Burkina Faso: Every child is supposed to do better than his father. So maybe I’ll be looking to make 40 children. (laughs) I’m joking. And maybe 10 wives, or 20. I don’t know. (laughs)

Image by  Inoussa Nadie , courtesy of  Asthmatic Kitty Records .

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 .

In a recent Utne Reader article, I wrote about crate-digging bloggers who are posting all kinds of obscure and fascinating world music on the web. But I only scratched the surface of the websites doing this kind of excavating. Nathan Salsburg at the self-described music “blob” Root Hog or Die has gone deeper and come up with an amazing list of websites and blogs that run a huge gamut of sounds. Visit the site to check out the whole smorgasbord, but here are a few of my favorite nutshell descriptions:

FarsiTube : Outfitted like that one site with all the videos, Farsitube also has a prodigious music section, with tunes running the gamut from classical, folk, rock (from killer psych to the chintziest and most vapid of ’80s material), to contemporary pop. You kinda just have to jump in and start clicking …

Honking Duck : A digital hillbilly goldmine of banjo-hyper-collector Jim Bollman’s stacks of 78s.

Iranian.com: America might be Ahmedinejad’s “Great Satan,” but he should keep an eye on the electric guitar riffs gracing some of the unbelievably guiltily-pleasurable pop tunes available here.

Juneberry: The Roots Music Listening Room : Lock yourself in your room with a Coleman camper stove and some cans of soup and an internet connection and this website and maybe we’ll see you later.

Public Domain 4 U: The title’s an anticipation of how Prince’s catalog will be described in 50 or so years, but this totally sketchy looking site is actually a nice little stop for some wonderful old-time and blues tunes.

Source: Root Hog or Die

Image by  oddsock , licensed under Creative Commons.

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.

Invite-only film downloading clubs hide in the darkest, most exclusive corners of the internet. Writing for Film Comment, a writer known as Quintín ventured into a clique he pseudonymously calls “Black Crow” and discovers the hidden cost of a place “where all cinephilic fantasies can come true.”

Though Black Crow grants access to all the 1940s Hungarian cinema that a film buff could ever want, members must contribute back to the community in uploaded material. “The goddess of Black Crow demands that the faithful pay tribute,” Quintín wrote. The community’s obligations were nearly impossible for the writer to fulfill, and he began obsessively checking his upload to download ratio. “From feeling like a billionaire, I began to act like a high-stakes speculator who bets his last penny on Wall Street during a financial crisis.”

Unable to sate the demands of Black Crow, Quintín was eventually kicked out of the illegal downloading community. “I learned that there is something worse than being denied entry into an exclusive club,” Quintín wrote, “and that is to enter the club only to be kicked out.”

Source: Film Comment (article not available online)

Afghanistan's epic battle against Soviet occupation spawned an unusual genre of war story: the war rug. It's a tradition that continues to this day, with Afghan weavers telling the story of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent American invasion.

Max Allen is a curator of a war rug exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada. Here’s what he has to say about the rugs:

During the Afghan wars which have gone on from 1979 to the present the whole country is full of war equipment. You can hardly avoid seeing it. And just like television or newspapers these rugs report what’s going on in Afghanistan. Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan there was nothing anywhere in the world like this. It came out of the blue. Are the rugs pro-war or anti-war? I don’t know. You can read a message into them but whether the message was put there by the weaver, I don’t know.

Hear more from Allen and to see some of the work in this short audio slideshow:

(Thanks, Strange Maps.)

It's the Fourth of July! Buy some fireworks, give them to a group of small children, and just sit in front of your easel and paint what happens next. That's probably not the genesis story of this particular piece of firecracker art. All the same: Wow.

The always linktastic Coudal Partners has added CRACKERPACKS, an archive of firecracker art, to their Museum of Online Museums.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

Our lives are surrounded by small and seemingly insignificant objects that, if we stop and think about them for a moment, were created by designers. Golf balls, barrettes, toothbrushes: They are not simply manufacturing accidents but very specific responses to our needs and wants and the designers’ aesthetic goals. The “Objectify Me” section of the website for the design documentary Objectified invites designers and design-watchers to muse on these small wonders with wonderful results. The golf ball prompts Craig Foltz to ask a series of whimsical questions. Debbie Millman recalls a juvenile obsession with barrettes that led to misdemeanor theft. And Alice Twemlow turns her gaze to the badminton shuttlecock, which

seems to me to contain all the time and space of a long summer’s afternoon on a large green lawn. In its delicately ribbed frame are encapsulated pitchers of lemonade, the drone of bees, the smell of mown grass and the sun-baked mustiness of the garden sheds where shuttlecocks rest along with broken croquet mallets, dog-chewed Frisbees and trapped flies.

Source: Objectified

Image by barkertrax, licensed under Creative Commons.

Modern zoos often try to mimic pristine, natural habitats when presenting animals. Penguins frolic in crystal-clear water and buffalo roam in lush grass. If zookeepers were really trying to recreate the natural world, the habitats would be far less pristine. The project “Trouble in Paradise” questions the authenticity of zoo restaging areas in a world where natural habitats are increasingly threatened.

(Thanks, Pruned.)

Source: Dempf/Steinbrener

Images courtesy of Rainer Dempf and Christoph Steinbrener.

 An amazing thing happened over at Drawger , a website where illustrators post and discuss their work. Yesterday, artist Tim O’Brien posted the above portrait  he drew of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman whose death has become a symbol of the opposition movement after the contested election in Iran. As usual, other illustrators responded in the comments section. But through the magic of the internet, citizens in Iran also found it, and flooded the post with their own heart wrenching and inspiring comments . According to the artist, what is missing from the site are the hundreds of e-mails he received from people less comfortable posting in public. It makes you ponder the power of visuals, and how one image that strikes a chord can inspire a movement.

(Thanks, Edel Rodriguez .)

Image courtesy of Tim O’Brien

Guy Laramée turned a set of dusty old encyclopedias into a gorgeous replica of Jordan’s Petra, one of the world’s best-known archaeological sites.

The excellent Magers & Quinn blog tipped me off to this stack-of-books-sized rendering of Petra, which Laramée sculpted using a set of sandblasted encyclopedias. The piece was featured in a recent book-art exhibit at Seattle’s Bellevue Arts Museum; you can see more of Laramée’s work here and here.

(I'm sure there's a joke to be made about looking up Petra inside the encyclopedia, but I don't think it merits non-parenthetical treatment.)

Source: Magers & Quinn blog 

Guy Laramée, Pétra (2007). Eroded encyclopedias, pigment, 12 x 11.25 x 8.5 in. Courtesy  Galerie Orange  and the artist.

 When I heard about the new legislation restricting the marketing of cigarettes , I wondered how the tobacco industry would respond. The St. Petersburg Times  asked noted designer DJ Stout of Pentagram  to dream up a solution. He came up with a novel (at least for the tobacco industry) approach: Tell the truth. He explains:

Our marketing advice to cigarette companies in the new heavily regulated era is to fully accept the new aggressive anti-smoking restrictions and wallow in the government’s apocalyptic health warnings. Don’t make excuses or dance around the stepped-up marketing regulations, just transform the whole cigarette pack into a three dimensional warning label.

I think they are brilliant, what do you think?

(Thanks Design You Trust .)

Images courtesy of Pentagram

Using people’s brain waves as the notes, scientists have created music. The researchers from China took brain wave readings from EEGs as the original source and used complex math to create pitch and rhythm for the waves. If their methods were improved, according to the Neruotopia 2.0 blog, the music could be used to detect Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, or other irregularities in the brain. 

Here are a few of the tracks that the researchers have created so far:

Brain with eyes open 

Brain in REM sleep 

Brain in slow-wave sleep 

Right now, Neruotopia 2.0 points out, the notes sound more like a cat on a keyboard than real music:

Source:  PLOS One , Neruotopia 2.0 

Image by Csaba Segesvári, licensed under Creative Commons.

Music by Dan Wu, Chao-Yi Li, De-Zhong Yao, 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).

You need a weekend project, don’t you? No? Hogwash! Literally. In the endless stream of bacon-related pleasantries, you can now make your very own bacon-infused soap that resembles uncooked bacon. The recent issue of Make, the techie do-it-yourself magazine, features step-by-step instructions on how to take bacon fat, red food coloring, and a few other ingredients, and turn them into glorious, grease-free suds. Enjoy!

Source: Make 

"When I'm singing I remember many things—the good times when we have the life in Somalia... Now everything is zero. The solution is to be dead. When I play music I remember the good times and I become very happy." That's Somali musician Mohammed Abbi Samantar. He lives with his wife, Kaha Mukhtar Mohammed, in a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. In this video, the two sing beautifully together in their mud shelter as photos from the camp and the conflict in Somalia flash across the screen.

Source: Global Post

What are they listening to in Paris? Gareth Murphy at the new and impressive Journal of Music fills us in on the expansive playlists of Parisian radio stations:

Classical, jazz, electro pips and boinks, apocalyptic gangster rap from the Paris hoods, gay house, Congolese rhumba, chanson française, Hebrew religious songs, arty hip-hop from New York, Zouk from the Antilles, salsa from Havana, crooner slows from the 1980s, accordion cheese, Arabic trad, Algerian raï, French R&B for suburban girlies, weird cinematic soundtracks about geese flying to Moscow. Parisians approach music rather like food: they want to taste every dish that human civilisation has ever invented.

Murphy attributes this wild eclecticism to several factors. France is better known for painting, literature, and cinema than for music; hence its relatively small music industry “does not possess the arrogance and influential export market that the pop music scene in London is renowned for” and is free to play what it wants. He also posits that theater is a subliminal artistic reference point for the French, resulting in a strange combination of musical tastes:

Caught in a split personality between the brooding of Northern Europe and the simplicity of Mediterranean culture, it’s almost as if the French still don’t know whether music is supposed to be stupid or serious, ironic or first degree.

Murphy notes that many talented artists who failed to launch their careers in their homelands end up being the toast of Paris. For example, have you ever heard of the U.S. folk singer Alela Diane? Neither had I. But Murphy reports that this “rising genius” has gotten huge exposure through repeated plays on France Inter, the country’s news, society and culture broadcaster, launching her on national tours. “The Paris music scene does not have any special secret to teach the world’s musicians,” he writes, “except maybe that the expectations and values of your audience will denote the ambitions and content of your work.”

Source: The Journal of Music (subscription required for full article)

Fans of street art may be familiar with French artist Invader , who creates 8-bit-inspired mosaic tile art that can be found on city streets and in galleries around the world. He is also credited with originating a style of art called “Rubickubism,” which, as he demonstrates in the video below, uses Rubik’s Cube squares as the medium for a sort of digital pointillism. He has an upcoming solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery , one of my favorite galleries in New York, starting June 27th.

(Thanks, Wooster Collective .)

Image courtesy of Invader

Some people never leave home without their phone or wallet. Minneapolis artist Sarina Brewer never leaves home without a cooler, a hacksaw, and rubber gloves. That’s because she’s always at the ready to find road kill and other “pet casualties” to use as art subjects for her special brand of “rogue taxidermy,” which includes winged monkeys, conjoined squirrels and rabbits, and even a chicken-carp-lamb combo, Bust magazine reports.

She essentially creates fanciful, often irreverent sculptures by splicing together the bodies of various taxidermic animals, or, in other instances, transforming the creature into a freak-show mutant by adding an extra head, leg, or other body part.... Unlike traditional taxidermists, who preserve only animal hides, Brewer tries to avoid wasting the innards. As a consequence, she makes a fair amount of carcass art, which she creates by chemically treating muscle tissue before fashioning them into a whimsical pose—like a sculpture of dancing squirrel guts.

Brewer herself is fascinating, having grown up in a family so fond of their deceased pets that they relocated the remains whenever they moved. That same sense of memorializing has been a key influence in her work. The article isn’t online, but you can at least check out some of Brewer’s mutant creations in Bust's mini-mag if you scroll to pages 52-55.

Source: Bust

Image courtesy of Sarina Brewer.   

To much of the world, Burma, also known as Myanmar, is a closed country. The military dictatorship in power tries its best to keep it that way. Under the regime’s oppressive control, the 2007 anti-government uprising that happened there could have passed without much notice, were it not for the daring work of a few video reporters who risked torture and death to provide some of the only footage of the protests to the outside world.

The film Burma VJ follows a group of clandestine video journalists (VJs) known as the Democratic Voice of Burma as they dodge secret police and try their best to document the uprising. Mere possession of a video camera in the country is enough to get a person arrested by the police, and much of the film is shot by shaky hand-held cameras, hidden inside bags to avoid detection.

In August of 2007, the Burmese junta lifted fuel subsidies, causing a sharp rise in prices on everything from bus fares to food. The film’s main character, known only as “Joshua,” began filming small-scale protests that were swiftly quelled by government forces. By September, thousands of Buddhist monks joined and began leading the protests against the government.

One particularly illuminating scene came when a reporter from the Democratic Voice of Burma tried filming the Buddhist monks protesting. At first, the monks tried to push the journalist away, saying they didn’t want trouble. The narrator said they had mistaken the journalists for secret police. Moments later, the real secret police appeared and tried to arrest the journalists. The monks physically protected the reporters from arrest, and accepted the journalists into their march.

Footage of the protests, including the government’s strong-armed responses, were somehow smuggled out by the Democratic Voice of Burma and broadcast on CNN, the BBC, and other major news outlets. Eventually, more than 100,000 people joined the protests, openly advocating for the junta’s downfall. The images captured the attention of then-President George Bush, who strongly condemned the junta’s "vicious persecution" and expanded sanctions on the country.

The sad truth of the film is that the protests did not work. Government forces became increasingly violent, firing tear gas and guns at unarmed protesters, killing many, including a Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai. The monks backed down, but not before many were beaten, killed, and disappeared by the junta. The government is still in power today, and journalists are still the targets of attack.

One of the few inspirations in the film was opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In the film, protesters marched toward her home, where she had been under house arrest for 13 years. Today, Suu Kyi is making headlines again, facing accusations from the government that she violated her house arrest by sheltering a man who swam to her compound.

If there’s one hopeful outcome of the government crackdown, it’s in the Democratic Voice of Burma. The group claims to have recruited 80 new video journalists, many inspired by the 2007 uprising, who will continue to try and report from inside the country.

You can watch the trailer for Burma VJ below:

Image courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories/HBO Documentary Films.

Source: Burma VJ

In Mumbai, where nearly 90,000 taxis roam the streets—mostly old, square-ish, yellow-and-black Fiats—drivers often go to great artistic lengths to make their cabs stand out. Brightly colored graphics, hand-cut from reflective adhesive material, liven up taxis’ exteriors throughout the city, reports Creative Review, in the form of “favorite gods, elaborate geometric patterns, portraits of film stars, and the logos of luxury brands.” The hip graphic-design magazine recently interviewed two of Mumbai’s most accomplished taxi artists, the father-and-son team of Manohar and Samir Manohar Mistry.  

Samir: The taxi art form is different. It’s natural, like freehand drawing. You take a piece of sticker and you can cut whatever shapes from it you like. It’s a spontaneous art. There is no set way to do it. The cutting depends on the skill of your hand and how you use your mind.

The men also worked with Mumbai design studio Grandmother India to create an elaborate type-covered taxi for Creative Review's typography issue (that's the taxi pictured above and on their cover; check out a bunch more amazing photos here).

Source: Creative Review 

Image by Aashim Tyagi, courtesy of Creative Review.

“How is it that we have so many people of energy, ideas, creativity and intelligence in the arts, and yet they haven’t even begun to generate enough money to support what they do?” asks Toner Quinn, editor of the recently launched, internationally minded Journal of Music. Good question.

Quinn has a plan, and it begins with blowing up our assumptions about “the economics of the arts.” We praise arts organizations for doing amazing things on shoestring budgets, he writes, and when there’s extra money to go around, it generally goes toward improving compensation for undercompensated people. Fair enough. Quinn notes, however, that arts organizations and artists often operate in bubbles, struggling to meet their economic needs without tapping into collective economic experience.

“Conventional thinking on the relationship between the arts and business is that it inevitably leads to compromise for the former,” Quinn writes. “Arts communities, however, have many successful people who manage to outwit that, striking a balance between business acumen and cultural concern, between artistic ambition and financial prudence, between the language of cultural entrepreneurialism and the language of commercial business….

“What they know cannot be found in books; and it won’t be issued as a memo by any commercial business. It is only learned through having formative experiences in the arts.”

Quinn proposes that arts councils rustle up their experts in the business side of the arts and offer their advice to newcomers. Extending the concept to art galleries, theater companies, publishing groups, and the like would eventually produce a system of economic mentorship. In addition to reducing missed opportunities and generating more money all around, such an insitutution would also strengthen the fabric of arts communities. Good idea, I’d say.

Source: The Journal of Music

DJ Derek doesn't smoke weed. "I tried it," he says, "but it didn't do anything for me." With that out of the way, let us get on with the story of this 67-year-old English DJ and reggae lover. Jamie Foord & Russell Smith have produced a delightful documentary short consisting mostly of DJ Derek telling the story of his life whilst gripping a pint. It's a hell of a story. Of his work, which consumes two to three nights a week on average, he has little to say: "I’m listening to music I like, generally among people I like, I can drink, and at the moment I can still smoke while I’m doing it. I can’t see how anybody wouldn’t be happy being able to live like that."

Here's the film:

(Thanks, Creative Review.)

Sometimes the news needs art. And there is perhaps no better art to illustrate the implosion of the American auto giants than Karl Biewald's Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle. It's a completely mesmerizing slow-motion car crash, where two American muscle cars are squeezed together over a period of six days to simulate a head on collision. I suggest you watch the sped-up footage of the crash to the sound of General Motors CEO G. Richard Wagner getting grilled (ahem) on Capitol Hill.

(Thanks,  Things .) 

How much does it cost to spread 650,000 pennies on the floor in a delicate wave pattern, atop a bed of oozing honey? Including the tableau attendant and accommodations for the sheep, about $13,791.36. (1989 dollars, of course.) The installation in question is Anne Hamilton’s “privations and excess,” which The Believer details in the latest installment of Creative Accounting, a series that’s plainly perfect for those among us who love both the arts and getting down and gritty with the details. Ahem.

In past issues, the magazine has unpacked the fiscal details of an unnamed Flaming Lips album ($158,338.53); a modestly-made indie film ($15,4800), and a less-modestly made yet nonetheless indie film ($18 million), which kicked off the series last March.

 Source: The Believer 

Image by kevindooley, licensed under Creative Commons.

I’ve been haunted, or is it blessed, by the song “Pulling on a Line” by the Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers from their new album Lost Channels. It’s a simple but gorgeous folk song, deploying a sly fishing metaphor, gently strummed guitars, and a persistent melody that, once you’ve heard it, doesn’t easily drift away. Moreover it strongly evokes a sense of place, with images of water, snow, and “electric flushes” in the “dark sky” conjuring a northern landscape of natural wonders.

It turns out that head Swimmer Tony Dekker is all about soaking up his surroundings. He and his band recorded the album in the Thousand Islands region off the coast of Ontario, laying down songs in places that included a castle, a church, and a theater repurposed as an arts center, according to an article in Thousand Islands magazine:

The native of Wainfleet, Ontario, near Lake Erie, said the band wanted to record the album in a setting reflective of the group’s name as well as the spirit of its folk rock music.

“I grew up along the Great Lakes,” said Dekker. “I like that through music you can tell the story of the place where you’re from.”

Dekker’s fondness for rustic recording sites is also the focus of an article in the May-June issue of Tape Op magazine (article not available online), which presses him for the technical details of wiring an empty grain silo for a session, as he did for the band’s 2003 debut album. But he’s not just interested in the way sound bounces off the walls:

“The space becomes an instrument in a way. You can see it as providing texture, but I think it does more than that—it helps tell the story. The effect of singing or playing in a room changes the way you perceive the sound.”

And in an interview with Stereogum, he allows that there might be more than one metaphorical thread running through “Pulling on a Line”:

“The line being pulled in the refrain could be the act of writing or creating. … Sometimes I think the creative process is a lot like fishing, or like flying Benjamin Franklin’s kite, in the waiting for inspiration to strike.”

Sources: Thousand Islands, Tape Op, Stereogum

The Fader has posted a three part audio and photo tour of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s enormous workspace. Byrne’s commentary is fabulous. Enjoy.

Part 1: Peculiar Objects and Ephemera

Part 2:  More Peculiar Objects and Ephemera

Part 3: Personal Works of Art

The Fader won an Utne Independent Press Award this year for arts coverage.

Source: The Fader

A black man in the White House is not merely a breakthrough; it’s a prime opportunity to sell some Russian ice cream. Here’s an ad for a new ice cream bar, which exclaims: “The flavor of the week! BLACK in WHITE! Wow!” The executives behind this one are a special breed of blockhead. 

Source: English Russia 

No matter how great a book, film, or album is, there’s always someone on Amazon.com who’s willing to give it a bad review. The Cynical-C Blog has compiled some of the best one-star reviews into a section they call “You Can’t Please Everyone.”

Here are a few highlights:

Citizen Kane:
I saw this movie and just about puked in my lap because it was so terrible! Go see the Da Vinci Code instead. Tom Hanks is ten times the actor Orson “Fatty McFat” Welles ever was!

Wizard of Oz:
the wort movie ive ever seen .I mean they clorized once color tv came out and there special effects are lame ,the costumes are ugly the props are ugly so never buy this film!!!!

1984:
first of all its NOTHING like the future is probly going to turn out. second of all every one says the aurthor george orwell is so trippy and wierd but i think he’s just trying to cover up for the fact that HE CAN’T WRITE. please george do us all a faver and stop writing books.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl:
It was really really boring. Its about some girl and her life- who cares!?! It is a total girly-girl book. Too dull to even care. I couldnt even pay attention to what happened to her, why it was so awful. Oh Well, NEXT…

The Odyssey:
This book sucks. I dont care if Homer was blind or not this book is like 900 pages too long. I could tell this story in about 10 pages. Homer taking all long to say stupid stuff.

Spinal Tap:
People, whatever you do, don’t buy this trash! Just wait until Limp Bizkit (the greatest band ever!) makes a documentary on their wild and crazy and cool antics! It’s sure to put this to shame!

Abby Road:
This is more music for druggies. The Beatles should be ashamed to put out this album. I saw Paul Mcartney live last year and he was better than this album, and the other Beatles weren’t even there. But the stage show was boring, there where no pyrotecnics or girls. When I saw Motley Crew during there Dr. Feelgood tour they at least had Fireballs and dancing girls. Plus Mick Mars destroys George Harryson on guitar!

Source: Cynical-C Blog 

Click on any square in the grid and it lights up, pulsing a single musical note. Click on another, and you’ve got the beginning of a looping, tone-drenched pattern. Flashcoder Andre Michelle describes his ToneMatrix as a “simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer.” How about rephrasing simple as addictively delightful?

(Thanks, Brandon Ivers.)

I was delighted to discover the cartoons of the artist known simply as Lunchbreath. His twisted infographics borrow from the visual vernacular of flow charts, bar graphs, how-to diagrams, and cross sections but inject a subversive and often hilarious viewpoint. Scroll down to see several of my recent favorites, and visit his Flickr photostream for more.

(Thanks, Treehugger.)

Source: Lunchbreath

All images courtesy of Lunchbreath.

Workers renovating a 270-year-old church in Bunker Hill, West Virginia have uncovered the work of Civil War-era graffiti artists. "It's down low. It's up high. It's just everywhere," says local bishop W. Michie Klusmyer. The scribblings are apparently the work of both Northern and Southern troops. Among the scribblings ("Down with traitors" and "I should not have written on the walls of the house of God") Klusmyer has seen drawings of pigs and a woman being chased by a man with horns. Somebody notify the Wooster Collective!

(Thanks,  Animal .) 

Source:  The Journal  

Image by  Culpeper Department of Tourism . 

It’s a gut reaction thing. When confronted by a musical composition called “Burning Piano” that involves, yes, playing a piano as it burns, you’re probably going to be curious or dismissive: It sounds either brilliantly subversive or like a horrible waste. Here at Utne Reader, we were so taken by composer Annea Lockwood’s description of “Burning Piano” from an interview in the New Zealand arts mag White Fungus that we’re reprinting an excerpt in our July-August issue. (Look for it soon on Utne.com.)

“It’s very magnetizing,” she said in describing her first performance of the piece decades ago. “It turned into an event of itself, almost a funny little ritual, something in its own right.”

Too bad we didn’t know that “Burning Piano” was about to be performed in our backyard as we read those words. Some lucky students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, got to partake in the ritual April 30 in a “Burning Piano” concert attended—and ignited—by the composer herself. The student who instigated the project, Carleton senior Caitlin Schmid, confirmed our impression of the polarizing effects of torching a piano.

“Watching Lockwood’s performance really generated a lot of discussion among the students,” Schmid told the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune. “Some of us were really moved by the piece, while others were deeply offended. They couldn’t get past the idea of destroying a piano and calling it ‘art.’ ”

The ensuing reaction in the newspaper’s “Comments” sections turned—as it too often does, unfortunately—into a partisan battle, with one commenter even speculating that “this flaming idiot ‘performance artist’ also likely voted for Obama.”

Perhaps. But sometimes maybe a burning piano is simply a burning piano.

Sources: White Fungus, Star Tribune

Images by Nate Ryan, courtesy of Nate Ryan.

Happy Memorial Day, dear readers. It's a time to enjoy the outdoors and it's a time to remember—even mourn. It's a time, we can all agree, for goths in hot weather.

(Thanks,  Art Fag City .) 

Image by  eschipul . Licensed under  Creative Commons .

Growing up in suburban Cincinnati with Indian immigrant parents and a penchant for makeup and ballet, Kiran Sharma knew he was different. The children at Martin Van Buren Elementary School wouldn’t let him forget it. At twelve years old, though, Kiran couldn’t quite figure out the problem. One day he thought he came to a realization: Maybe he was actually the long-awaited reincarnation of the blue-skinned Hindu deity Krishna.

As the main character of Rakesh Satyal’s debut novel, Blue Boy (Kensington Books, 2009), Kiran overflows with personality like rich Indian cooking exudes smells. Struggling with the painful awkward pre-teen years, Kiran explores his Indian heritage, American identity, gender, and sexuality in endlessly endearing prose.

Rakesh, who happens to be a friend of mine, recently read from his novel in Minneapolis. Hearing him perform the voices of Kiran’s protective mother and his penny-pinching father in a flawless Indian accent reinforced the humor and wisdom infused throughout the novel.

As Kiran endures the youthful jeers and growing pains, a delightful portrait emerges of growing up gay and Indian in America. Explaining the endemic danger of suburbia, Satyal writes: “India may be full of man-eating tigers, but Ohio is full of Ohioans.”

Source:  Blue Boy  

Ian Albinson and Alex Ulloa collect intriguing title sequences from film and television at their blog, The Art of the Title Sequence, where you can watch the opening credits roll on Dexter, Soylent Green, Iron Man, or even the much-maligned super-bomb The Island of Dr. Moreau, which can count its beautiful title sequence as, perhaps, its only merit.

Ulloa tells Creative Review (May 2009): “We want to be to the history and future of the form of title sequencing what the opening sequence to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris is to cinema: an exploration of what is universally felt, but with some fresh discourse.”

Sources: The Art of the Title Sequence, Creative Review 

Without tickets, concessions, or a traditional screen, guerilla drive-ins retain a 1950s drive-in nostalgia without a lot less consumerism. According to Toronto’s Spacing magazine, guerilla drive-in theaters are reclaiming public spaces and screening films on the sides of buildings from Maine to Oregon, and even in Norway.

The participants don’t bother with permits or screening rights for the movies, but so far, the Guerilla Drive-In Victoria hasn’t had any problems with the law. A representative from the Santa Cruz, California, collective told Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon that the police once shut down a screening, but participants just picked up and moved to another location.

For more information, the website Instructables has detailed instructions of how to set up your own guerilla drive-in.

Image by  Eric Lewis , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: Spacing (article not available online), Weekend Edition, Instructables

The good people at Things magazine tipped us off to a set of manipulated photographs posted to a Russian blog. Each photograph features a shot of a war-ravaged St. Petersburg street seemingly rubbed into a recent photograph of the same spot. The results are simply incredible.

Source: Things 

The new issue of Asian pop-culture mag Giant Robot got me hooked on Makiko Ogawa’s bento art, or “charaben” (character bento), which is charming, adorable, and entirely Cute Overload–worthy. “Basically,” she tells Giant Robot, “I just make bento that my children would want.” 

She began making charaben a few years ago, when her son started kindergarten. "He cried and cried," she says. "I hoped that my bento would make him happy."

Her children are a bit older now (7 and 8), but Ogawa still sends them off with cute bento and shares her favorite creations on her (adorable!) Flickr page. Don’t miss Ogawa's pirate bento, inspired by a recent viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean, or her walruses, elephants, and tiny quail-egg polar bear.  

Source: Giant Robot 

Image courtesy of Makiko Ogawa.

For many film buffs, there are no “guilty pleasure” movies. If you think a film is good, then preach it proudly, even if that film is Road House or Purple Rain. But that doesn’t mean people can’t change their minds. Phillip Lopate writes for Film Comment about a few films he’s seen in a new light, for better or for worse.

After an initial distaste for Annie Hall, Lopate eventually came to view Woody Allen as “an American Master.” On the other hand, it took him seven times viewing The Third Man with Orson Wells to see it as “tinny and calculating and shallow.”

For my part, I loved the Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn film The African Queen the first time I saw it, at the age of 17 while trying to impress a woman with my knowledge of classic films. Now I think it’s overwrought and ultimately unsatisfying. Dumb and Dumber, however, distracted me at first blush with its physical comedy, before I realized how funny the writing was in the film.

For a more juvenile take on the issue, read a list of “Five Shitty Movies that Everyone Loves,” including Braveheart and the Karate Kid.

Image from the film Dumb and Dumber.

Source: Film Comment 

It's happened again: We're knee-deep in baseball season. The University of Nebraska Press is capitalizing with the release of Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song. Those of you who need all 123 pages of that story will no doubt find your way to it. For the rest of you, let me attempt to distill the story to two rather fantastic elements.

First, there is this, as told by author Amy Whorf McGuiggan:

Dashed off, with accompanying doodles, on a scrap of paper during a New York subway ride by Jack Norworth, a vaudeville song and dance headliner who, it was said, had never attended a professional baseball game, 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game,' with music by Tin Pan Alley composer Albert von Tilzer (who also had never attended a game), was debuted on a vaudeville stage in April 1908.

Second, there are the copycat songs that went nowhere and, even better, the sheet music art work that accompanied those songs. Here's a sampling:

“It’s amazing how times change.” That’s how Marc Schiller from the website Wooster Collective, a stalwart booster of international street art, began a letter to their readers explaining why they had been invited to the White House, why they accepted, and what they found there (namely, that there are graffiti artists working in the White House).

Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

When Sara and I started the Wooster Collective eight years ago, it felt to us at the time that the ONLY lens the media was providing as a way into understanding street art and graffiti was vandalism.

We want this to change.

Last month when we received an invitation to attend a briefing at The White House (yes, that one), we were at first a bit shocked, definitely skeptical, and finally, after giving it a lot of thought - absolutely delighted. To be included in the conversation at the level of The White House, we felt, was a huge testament that our voice (meaning our collective voice) was being heard.

Yesterday, along with about sixty amazing organizations who are committed to grassroots arts initiatives, we met with various officials in the Obama Administration, to listen and learn what the administration was thinking in regards to the Arts, to ask questions, and then to participate in working sessions on issues that we felt passionate about. (Ours was the need to better understand the issues around public and private space)

Read the entire letter and the conversation it sparked.

Source: Wooster Collective

Draw tattoos on Henry Rollins, play punked-out word games, and color this picture of Iggy Pop! It’s all in Aye Jay’s new Punk Rock Fun Time Activity Book, just out on ECW Press.

Thanks to the kind folks at ECW, you can download and color the book’s 10th page: this awesome (if mildly pornographic) drawing of Iggy Pop (PDF).  

If punk-rock activities aren't your thing, check out Jay's previous crayon-friendly works: the Heavy Metal Fun Time Activity Book and the Gangsta Rap Coloring Book.

Source: Punk Rock Fun Time Activity Book 

Image copyright © 2009 by Aye Jay Morano.

Finding a girlfriend is difficult on the remote Kazakh steppe, where it can take a full day of travel to reach the nearest single woman. In the film Tulpan, the postpubescent protagonist Asa, freshly home from the Navy, sets out on a quest to find a wife and fulfill his dream of owning a herd of sheep. Director Sergey Dvortsevoy, who gained recognition with his 1998 documentary Bread Day, lends the film a hyper-realistic feel, allowing the humor and affection of rural Kazakhstan to linger naturally, like a slow-moving dust storm seen from a distance.

The film gives an inside-the-yurt view of Kazakhstani family life surrounded by the harsh steppe climate and depicted by many non-professional actors. Dvortsevoy told Reverse Shot magazine that the actors and crew lived together in yurts in preparation for the film. Two of the main actors and some of the child actors lived together for a month, even before the filming had started, to prepare them for the climate and to get the actors comfortable with each other. The result is a series of endearing familial scenes that feel spontaneous and unforced.

The beautiful desolation of the Kazakh countryside plays a central role in the film, as do the various sheep, dogs, and camels. One of the most talked about scenes centers around a rather graphic sheep birth that the main character is forced to perform. Considering the unplanned nature of the livestock, Dvortsevoy allowed the film to develop freely, changing the script and the film in the middle of production. He told Reverse Shot, “I didn’t try to think up a special approach, I just followed the material, followed the characters. Maybe I’ll use this approach again, we’ll see, I don’t know. It doesn’t come from calculation, from mathematics. It comes from my soul.”

Tulpan played as a part of the Premieres: First Look series at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

You can watch a trailer for the film below:

“More than in any other field, misperceptions about contemporary art keep audiences from effectively engaging it,” writes Alt Wire alumnus Paddy Johnson in her latest L Magazine column.

In an effort to “give the gallery-goer a few tools to make sense of what they see,” Johnson, who also blogs at the wonderful Art Fag City, has constructed a list of myths about contemporary art. We’ve included a crib sheet below, but you really ought to read her rundown of each item.

Paddy Johnson’s “Eight Fallacies About Contemporary Art”:

1. This work generated so much discussion, it must be good!
2. Anything can be art!
3. Value is completely subjective.
4. Anyone could do that.
5. Elitism rules the art world.
6. Pioneering artists are “ahead of their time.”
7. I don’t know enough about art to talk about it.
8. Art professionals wear black.

Source: L Magazine, Art Fag City

Image by  My Hobo Soul , Licensed under  Creative Commons .

Dan Bergeron seems to have done the impossible: he's found a way to make pedestrians on busy sidewalks look at homeless people. His life-sized, full-body shots of men and women appealing to passersby with handmade signs have been pasted to walls on the streets of Toronto. The people look real, though they are merely black and white reproductions of real people. The signs are the message, and read "I'd rather die than be homeless another winter" and "The system is broken. I am not."

The artist explains the project to Wooster Collective:

The project is called "the Unaddressed" and it focuses on the under-housed, giving voice to their personal opinions. Over the course of 3 months I met with 18 individuals who are currently or have recently been homeless. Through meeting, talking about their lives and discussing issues that were important to them, they developed their announcements and created a cardboard sign to reveal them. By photographing homeless and formerly homeless individuals holding cardboard signs that announce their concerns, the hope is challenge preconceived notions of homelessness and make the passers-by realize how serious the situation is and that everybody deserves the same basic necessities of life and to be treated the same way. Basically do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Source: Wooster Collective 

David Levinthal's haunting photographic recreations of the tragedy and drama of war in Afghanistan and Iraq evoke the words of the novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien: "A true war story makes the stomach believe." Levinthal's soldiers and civilians are toys scuffed and posed for his camera. Still, they are photographs you believe—with your stomach.

For each photograph in I.E.D. there is a short burst of text—excerpts from the exceptional military blog The Sandbox, a collection of narratives and observations from service members deployed in Iraq.

"It's interesting to watch people trying to be normal in the aftermath of a fundamentally disturbing event," writes Owen Powell in 2006. "A few blocks away, corpses were littering the blackened asphalt of a city square, burning. Ambulance crews would be arriving and trying to find the wounded amongst the debris and the dead. But not us. It was someone else's job, and there really wasn't anything to do here but carry on with the mundane details of the still alive. So, we all walked around and fiddled with our gear or stood and tried to make small talk through clenched jaws."

Stories like this push Levinthal's photographs deeper into your stomach and don't fade easily from your mind. Here are some of the images:

Images courtesy of powerHouse Books.

As anyone who’s lived in an urban apartment knows, it’s nearly impossible to turn off your sense of hearing. Plug your ears, and you can still feel vibrations echoing in your head. Knowing this, US soldiers in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay have used popular music to “break” detainees into giving up information. Pundits tend to focus on the absurdity of using the theme song from the kids shows Barney and Sesame street as an interrogation technique, but Martin Cloonan writes for the New Humanist, “musical torture is far from being a laughing matter.”

Music as a weapon is often characterized by an “assault on identity and the lack of control,” Cloonan writes. He points out that British soldiers used white noise to attack Republican detainees in Northern Ireland, and classical music is still being played in various public places to keep young people from congregating. While researching music in neighborhood conflicts, Cloonan found, “Often what began as a request to turn sound down escalated into another form of sonic warfare, resulting in court injunctions and physical violence – including murder.”

Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack are pushing back against the torturers, showing support for the Zero dB campaign, aimed at banning music for the purposes of torture. Jonathan Mann, on the other hand, has used his music to call attention to the torture memos that were recently released. You can watch that below.

Sources: New Humanist, Zero dB, Jonathan Mann 

There is nothing inherently meditative about a man shooting eggs at another man who is wearing goalie gear. And there is nothing inherently transcendent about two elderly people bowling. But artist Graeme Patterson can make it so. Patterson is a maker of tiny puppet-figures and usually those puppet-figures star in his memorizing stop-motion animation. Blackflash magazine, a journal of photography and new media art, features Patterson’s recent Taming the Wild project, a collection of his puppet-figures posed in arresting photographs like the one to the left. He’s assembled a larger collection of his work on his YouTube channel, where we found these films:

Source:  Blackflash  

In the throes of the H1N1 frenzy, it is perversely subversive to seek beauty in the microscopic actors at the center of the public health scares and tragedies of our times. That's exactly what artist Laura Splan has done—or did. A dusty Discover review of her "Doilies" project, which has resurfaced in the clamoring for public health information on the internet, describes the collection:

"Layers of stitches form delicate portraits of pathogens. The genetic material of the virus is depicted in the doily's center, and viral surface proteins appear as protuberances around the edge. The discs retain the dainty grace of an antique armrest cover. Splan says she aims to inspire 'beauty and horror, comfort and discomfort.'"

Here are Splan's beautiful and horrible doilies. In order of appearance: SARS, HIV, Herpes, and Influenza:

(Thanks, C-Monster)

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.

Chicago gangs of the '70s and '80s carried calling cards. There were no numbers or addresses, just a crude logo and a list of crewmembers with names like Nacho, Sun Down, Bubbles, Sir Lazy, and Lil Bear. The blog We Are Supervision features a rich selection. Here's a sampling:

Source:  We Are Supervision  

(Thanks, Coudal)

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Roger White, co-editor of the contemporary art journal Paper Monument. We asked him for five links and here's what he came up with:

Mystical, Creative Acts: Collaborative poetry duo Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch recently guest-edited an issue of the online poetics journal Interval(le)s, centered on the idea of transcription. It’s a wonderful, formidable document—and only possible on the internet. The mammoth project contains thousands of PDF-ed pages of transcription-based prose and poetry (and a little bit of art), and none of it—from Kenneth Goldsmith’s Celexa® (citalopram hydrobromide) Tablets/Oral Solution (20 pages of drug warnings and pharmaceutical legalese) to Eileen Myles’s Myles/Driving (a notation of words and phrases uttered by the author while driving alone in Los Angeles)—is going to make Oprah’s Book Club any time soon. But the reward for investing your time with these often-demanding texts is this: paying attention to people who pay attention to speaking and writing makes you pay more attention to speaking and writing yourself. After perusing Cotner and Fitch’s journal, everything from sending a text message to ordering a sandwich will seem like a mystical, creative act.

The Myth of Artist Privilege: Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) is a recently-formed arts activist organization created to bring attention to—and transform—some lousy economic practices on the part of contemporary art institutions in particular, and the situation of art workers in general: people on whom a multimillion dollar industry is based, and who often never see any actual financial returns from it.  You may ask: do artists have it so rough? Well, no more or less rough than other labor forces in the United States without job security, health care, a union, or political visibility. W.A.G.E. is interesting both in its campaign to dismantle the myth of the artist as a privileged fauxhemian, and in the fact that its constituency is looking less like an exotic subculture and more like a possibly very accurate representation of tomorrow’s American workforce. 

Volunteer Critical Sleuthing: There are always more good paintings being made than there are places to see them. As the contemporary art market contracts and galleries go out of business, art blogs are going to become even more important simply as exhibition venues. And while looking at a painting as a JPEG is even worse than listening to a record as an MP3, these are desperate times and I’ll take what I can get. Two New York painting-centric blogs, Anaba and The Old Gold, are consistently surprising and accessible documents of the medium and its practitioners. Both are highly idiosyncratic, interspersing things you’ll probably see in commercial galleries with things you’ll probably never see anywhere else. Martin Bromirski and Jon Lutz, respectively, do a tremendous amount of volunteer critical sleuthing, sometimes tracking under-known artists for years in a valiant attempt to patch the gaps in the ongoing history of painting.

Unusual Phobias: Trying to find a word for “the fear of everything,” I came across Unusual Phobias, a decidedly non-professional but meticulous survey of the world of irrational dreads. Based on user-submitted accounts of personal, “not-psychologically recognized” phobias, the site indexes a host of bogies ranging from banal objects—crickets, rice puddings, and necklace jewelry clasps—to improbable situations—gravity reversing itself, waking up during surgery, or becoming a ghost. While there’s a certain amount of one-upsmanship in the confessional accounts posted, and some of them are blatant piss-takes (fear of Thousand Island dressing?), the site does confirm an unnerving truth: no matter what it is, someone, somewhere, is afraid of it.

The Indexer: The good thing about the internet is all the information. That’s also the bad thing, as it turns out, and historians of the future will look back on our era and shudder at the crimes against information science perpetuated every day on the web. Luckily, the Society of Indexers has been working since 1953 to promote clarity and rigor in this field, and they’re not stopping, not even when print is completely dead. The Indexer, their semi-annual journal, is online and picking up the gauntlet thrown down to informatics by the eventual digitization of all printed matter. The Indexer couldn’t be more out of step with the laissez-faire spirit of digital information economies, and that’s a good thing: somebody needs to regulate all this data. Articles on the indexing of Chinese personal names, creating searchable databases for digitized films, and the perennial problem of the word The in indexing the titles of works of art, all speak to a drive for order which will keep pace with the challenges of the future. 

Bio: Roger White is a painter and co-editor of the contemporary art journal Paper Monument. He exhibits his work at the Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York.

Previous Alt Wire Guests:  Dan Sinker, Phil Yu, Matt Novak, Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel, Anne Elizabeth Moore 

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 

Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate uses traditional Native American tunes as raw material, fusing them with old-fashioned classical forms like the fugue and the sonata.

In an interview with New Music Box, Tate discusses his approach to composition and his place in the history of both Chickasaw tradition and Western classical music.

Tate points out that, while he may be unique as a composer, the basic idea of synthesizing Native American culture with non-indigenous influences is hardly new. “The two things that Indians are known for the most are beadwork and horses, neither of which is originally from here.”

Similarly, Tate explains how his compositions fit into the tradition of several hundred years of classical music, which began, as he explains it, “with monks in a Catholic church…These guys were singing traditional tunes. I equate that with the traditional music of my tribe: It’s the old music of a culture, a certain group of people with a standard set of tunes and music that was used for the mass and different occasions and that was it…Then what happened was they started writing it down. That was the birth of what we call classical music…Now that you’ve got it down on paper, you can actually do what is so unique to classical music and that is the idea of abstracting your own music…So I don’t see it as assimilating Western music. I see it as participating in this way of classical abstraction…Once you start to reinterpret it, it’s not the same music. But like I said, I think you try to, at least I do, keep this ethos of the traditional music in the final product.”

Audio excerpts of many of Tate’s compositions are available on his website.

Source: New Music Box

Global street artist Above’s recent piece, Easter AIG Hunt, skewers corporate bailout culture by imagining a Wall Street type stealing eggs from crying children. 

For more information on Above, read this profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, visit his website, or check out videos from his world tour from Wooster Collective.

Source: Wooster Collective

The “Marsalis mafia” of young musical neoconservatives who took jazz by storm in the ’80s keep making vibrant, piquant music that both challenges and enriches tradition. (If only the political neocons had half as much sense and historical scholarship.) On Watts, drummer “Tain” Watts delivers original compositions that variously enable saxophonist Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Terence Blanchard to joust over rugged post-bop and revel in their New Orleans heritage. Watts is a creatively turbulent timekeeper who pays heed to the tom-tom and bass drums as much as to the cymbals and snares. He turns himself up in the mix and completes the quartet with stentorian superbassist Christian McBride as a worthy rhythmic foil.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

Listen Now to a Streaming Track:
Katrina James by Jeff "Tain" Watts 

Providing welcome relief from a parade of bleak economic tales, a recent piece in The Dubliner entitled “Will Art Outlast the Recession?” (article not available online) asserts that the recent downturn may actually be a boon for the art world.

Art market sales are returning to “normality,” according to one auctioneer cited (normality equates to the 50 to 60% sales made by auctioneers in 2000, before the market was “driven by greed and speculation”). Financial troubles, it seems, are less of a detriment to business than simply finding enough quality work to sell.

The piece cites art critic Waldemar Janusczak, who says the recession hitting the art world is akin to the occasional fires that help forests strengthen, regenerate and return to their essence. They also put it in slightly more straightforward terms: “People will no longer pay silly sums for second-rate or gimmicky pictures…They will evaluate the work for itself, and that is a good thing.”

Image by Richard Cornish, licensed under Creative Commons.

For poets Bassey Ikpi and Giles Li, spoken utterance has the undeniable power to create bonds between people across physical and social divides. These two artists came up during the re-emergence of the contemporary spoken word scene, when groups like the Nuyoricans and programs like HBO's Def Poetry Jam brought the art form to a wide audience. Like many performance artists, Boston-based Li and D.C.-based Ikpi developed their craft as a means for expression, a way to share in a commonality of viewpoint and emotion with a live audience. And now, even as Ikpi has graced Def Poetry Jam five times and Li has established the Boston Progress Arts Collective and toured the country, their success hasn't deterred them from that original impulse. They still write from that place of wanting to be heard.

Read the entire piece: Spoken-Word Artists Bassey Ikpi and Giles Li Tell It Like It Is 

Photo of Giles Li by FireBox Photography

Listen Now:
Giles Li performs his spoken-word poetry

Poet Bassey Ikpi on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam:

Internationally, Baaba Maal is one of Africa’s most renowned musicians. Inside his native Senegal, Baaba Maal’s role is more like an elder statesman and conflict mediator. Where he grew up in northern Senegal, Rachel Aspden writes for the New Statesman, “Master musicians become community leaders, spokesmen and arbiters of disputes; hence the audiences that queue to consult Baaba Maal after a show.” 

Unlike the celebrity activists of Western culture, Baaba Maal’s roots his social work in Senagalese tradition. “We’re all part of the same community,” he says, “we just sit down and talk together.”

To watch a clip of Baaba Maal’s music, click on the video below:

On March 1, 1981, Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands led a hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. Sixty-six days later, he died at the age of 27, a shriveled-up version of his former self. British director Steve McQueen’s chilling, superbly crafted vision of the events leading up to Sands’ death doesn’t conform to predicable patterns of political filmmaking. The movie unfolds in distinct, commanding vignettes ranging from the elegiac (a prisoner’s hand caresses a bee) to the heart-thumpingly brutal (when riot police crack down on the inmates). Hunger does not simply chronicle a historic act of protest; it renders it timeless and transcendent.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

Shakespeare wrote that music is the food of love, but for new booking and promotions group Substance, music is also the food of protest. This ambitious new organization envisions a fresh model of activism, one which utilizes multidisciplinary arts events as a means for drawing new audiences to political and social causes. Think of it as music with a heaping side of activism.

Substance member Jim Forrey describes their work in this way: “[The concert] brings someone to a political event, and they don’t even know it’s a political event.” This “build it and they will come” belief was realized at the organization’s inaugural event, Manifestation, which took place at the historic First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis this past weekend.

Manifestation brought together a diverse blend of local and national music acts, as well as community-based political and social activist organizations. New York hip-hop and spoken word artist Sage Francis headlined, while Building Better Bombs, B. Dolan, and the God Damn Doo Wop Band also performed. A capacity crowd of young people swelled the building and looked to be having a great time.

Lining the main floor were tables plying various social and environmental causes, from Oxfam America and United Students Against Sweatshops to Planned Parenthood and Alaska Wilderness League. Underneath the bars stood “Zero Waste” stations, with separate trash and recycling receptacles. Near the back corner, visual artists were painting large-scale works of art on the spot.

It all made tangible Substance’s vision of “rethinking what has become a standard preacher-and-congregation model of art and music as activism” in order to “engage, inspire, and involve concertgoers in urgent movements for tangible change.”          

Looking out over the impressive turnout, Substance organizer Nolan Morice seemed pleased and encouraged. When asked if the evening had brought any unforeseen problems, he replied, “The only thing unexpected has been that nothing unexpected has happened.”

Manifestation builds on the energy and enthusiasm that Substance created with the Ripple Effect event at last year’s Republican National Convention, which featured Rage Against the Machine.

“I never would’ve dreamed we could pull something like that off,” Forrey says in reference to the Ripple Effect. “We learned that if you stay focused and don’t listen to the naysayers, you can achieve anything.”

Part of the appeal of South by Southwest is the joy of surprise: happening upon a band that you’ve never heard before, and might never hear again, and being drawn into their musical world for a short time. I left room in my itinerary for such happy accidents by veering off any schedule at times and following my wandering ears. One particular night turned into a series of unexpected revelations—some fleeting and ultimately disappointing, but revelations nonetheless.

The first occurred when I was exiting a restroom at the Austin Convention Center and heard what sounded like Bjork being tortured by a metal band. I just had to check this out. I homed in on a music hall where the L.A. group Shiny Toy Guns was blasting out full-on rawk music with metal, electronic, prog, and pop elements. The band was visually intriguing, with a gothy drummer on the left side of the stage, a hunched-over keyboardist at right, and between them a guy on guitar and a woman on bass. She was the besieged Bjork. For a time their music was completely mesmerizing, a pure sonic blast of adrenaline, deep and loud and tight. But alas, they could not sustain this, and soon slower tempos and intelligible lyrics revealed the cracks in their metal armor. They were entering power ballad territory when I split, fast.

I strolled several blocks to the Cedar Street Courtyard, where a much more sedate sort of rocking was occurring: The duo Beach House was doing their Mazzy Star/Nico thing, creating a gauzy haze of music that cushioned listeners’ heads like pillows.

I was becoming hypnotized and sleepy by the time Toronto’s Bedouin Soundclash took the same stage and ratcheted up the energy level with their hopped-up ska music. Sporting two horns, a rock-steady rhythm section, and a throaty vocalist, they sounded as natty as they looked in their black shirts and jaunty hats. The singer’s Canadian-Jamaican patois was clearly an affectation, but a damn good one. A crowd sing-along with “Stand by Me,” though? Time to go.

The Felice Brothers were as ragged as Bedouin Soundclash was sharp, in both appearance and musicianship—and yet their gig over at the Habana Café Backyard was equally fun. A roots-fueled band of brothers from upstate New York, the Felices played washboard, accordion, fiddle, and other trad instruments with abandon, ripping through songs like “Whiskey in My Whiskey” and “Ain’t Gonna Think About Trouble Anymore.” Two drunk dudes danced Western swing-style in front of me, their lit cigarettes nearly burning each other’s face as they whirled. (I love you, man.) Ending the show, one Felice tackled another and wiped out the drum kit. “We didn’t mean no harm,” one said as they cleaned up the wreckage. Like the stage, their music was a glorious mess.

With so many types of music acts from so many places, South by Southwest often feels like anything but Texas: Hairball Japanese metal bands, Brit-poppers, and electro-geek ensembles don’t exactly shout “Howdy!” But the Doug Sahm tribute at Antone’s, sponsored by Utne Reader and the Americana Music Association, was fully steeped in the Lone Star State.

Sahm had a passion for “American music—blues, jazz, real country, Tex-Mex, garage rock. He loved it all,” music journalist Tom Surowicz, a friend of Sahm’s, told me. There were tinges of all of these and more on the Antone’s stage as a rotating cast of Texas musicians took a whirlwind spin through Sahm’s good-time music to honor him and promote a new album, Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm, on Vanguard Records.

The tribute kicked off with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, who along with his late brother Stevie Ray is a legend of Antone’s stage; Austin roots-rockers the Gourds; Sahm’s son Shawn Sahm and the Tex-Mex Experience; California folk-blues tunesmith Dave Alvin, who wore a Stetson and a bandana for the occasion; and the boot-kickin’ band Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles. All delivered spirited versions of Sahm classics to a rapidly filling house.

Then things started to get legendary. Shawn Sahm brought out surviving members of his dad’s band the Texas Tornados, including keyboardist Augie Meyers and accordionist Flaco Jimenez, and proceeded to lead them through blazing renditions of more Sahm favorites, including the biggies “Mendocino” and “She’s About a Mover.” Shawn, a wiry, slight guy in a cowboy hat and a black Beatles shirt, was giddy with excitement, grinning ear to ear like his dad, tossing his head back to laugh, and wagging his tongue as he put the all-star band through its paces. When he shouted out “I love you, Dad” near the set’s end, it was clear from the crowd’s enthusiastic response that they did, too.

It’s all about the rhythm. The entire premise of rock ’n’ roll is built on a solid backbeat, of course, but many of the bands at the Utne Reader-sponsored Team Clermont showcase at South by Southwest were notable for using extra drums, cymbals, tambourines, and sampled beats to infuse their music with an even more deeply percussive undertow.

The first two of the six bands were lessons in the basics. First act Ruby Isle, a keyboard-keyboard-drum trio, delivered manic electro-power pop fueled by a propulsive drummer in the classic style. Singer-keyboardist Mark Mallman was a complete spazz in a sleeveless flannel shirt, tight black jeans, and yellow track shoes, often perching on the utility ladder that served as his keyboard stand to gesticulate and grandstand. The trio used extensive sampled instrumental tracks to make up for their lack of guitars.

Telekinesis, a Beatles-infused Seattle quartet, also stuck to the standard beat prescription, but as a drummer-led band it stood out for its configuration, placing drummer, singer, and bandleader Michael Benjamin Lerner front and center. He came off as a fresh-faced schoolkid compared to the unhinged Mallman, focusing his intensity on the music instead of the audience as he played his hook-packed, often joyous pop.

Then things started to get farther out. Slaraffenland, an experimental-leaning outfit from Denmark, had a starting lineup of two guitars, sax, keyboards, and drums, but ended up switching in clarinet and trombone and sending some of the members back to the kit to help the drummer work the tom-toms and cymbals. Their highly unconventional songs had constantly shifting textures, traversing sounds from pop, rock, jazz, and art rock as each composition built to a controlled cacophony. One song deployed an unconvincing chant of “I won’t track you down,” which they repeated over a building techno beat; another deconstructed to a marchlike cadence; and another ended with three members drumming at once in a tribal exercise that felt like some sort of art-rock invocation.

The Modern Skirts from Athens, Georgia, tilted more toward pop but also brought an enhanced rhythm section as the keyboard player had both a piano and a snare drum. Despite their Athens pedigree and their ties to R.E.M. (whose Mike Mills produced a track on their album), they were more jumpy than jangly, often literally: Singer Jay Gulley spent half the gig in the air as he bobbed up and down. Still, their music would seem perfectly at home in the college-radio realm, and Gulley’s vocal similarities to Oasis were unmistakable.

Things slowed down for the next set, which was no surprise, since the band was called Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Yes, it was downbeat electronica. Stationed behind a stack of keyboards and a tangle of wires, beefy, bearded Owen Ashworth sang in a beaten-down baritone about what appears to be a sorry mess of a life. I didn’t much care for his lo-fi, cheap keyboard sounds or his aggressively disaffected voice, but I’ll concede that more so than most of his electronica peers, he writes actual songs to hang his beats on.

Pulling us back from the brink was Mirah, a singer-songwriter who sang winsome, personal tunes with a folkie feel. Using soft mallets and standing, her drummer forged a soft pulse to underlay these confessional numbers. Mirah’s slight, quiet songs were sometimes lost in the din of a distracted audience, and I could see her going over well in a coffeehouse or similarly low-key venue.

The penultimate act of the day was Loney Dear, a Swedish outfit led by Emil Svanangen. He writes songs that in an earlier age could have passed as folk, but his electronic ornamentation makes them fully contemporary. Again, the rhythm was king, with a driving drummer, tambourines, and backing tracks fleshing out the beats. Loney Dear held the re-engaged audience rapt by mixing up moods and tempos, and a new song called “Summers” was a real treat, triumphant and wistful at once. At one point, Svanangen whistled the unmistakable melody from “Young Folks” by Peter, Bjorn and John, a sly nod to his fellow Swedes who became an international pop sensation. If he keeps this up, he could do the same.

 

In the 1980s, when “alternative rock” connoted something other than a marketing template, the boutique London-based record label 4AD was one of the most distinctive labels around. Bands like This Mortal Coil, the Cocteau Twins, Wolfgang Press, and the Breeders didn’t necessarily all sound alike, but there was an aesthetic consistency to 4AD releases that made the label a trusted source for seekers of new sounds.

After that early heyday, 4AD registered as a smaller blip on the hipster radar, but now the label is back at the fore, with newer artists like Bon Iver, M. Ward, and the National bringing back its cutting-edge reputation. A 4AD showcase at the 2009 South by Southwest made a convincing case that it fully deserves its recaptured respect.

A long line outside the Central Presbyterian Church, one of the more unusual SXSW venues, was one indication of the label’s resurgence. When I got inside, singer-songwriter, M. Ward had just finished his set, and the crowd was abuzz. “It was just him and his guitar and he was a total master,” said a fan behind me. Both of Ward’s 4AD albums, 2006’s Post-War and the new Hold Time, have cemented his reputation as one of indie rock’s more craftsmanlike tunesmiths.

The next act to take the stage under the giant crucifix was Department of Eagles, a four-man band that delivered a set of lurching songs with off-kilter rhythms that often built up into towering crescendos of sound. Steadfastly refusing to lock into a predictable rhythm or even a melody, their songs seemed to strain to break free of these idiosyncratic forms, but never did, creating a tension that held the crowd on the edges of their pew seats.

Following them was St. Vincent, an Austin act that clearly had lots of local fans in the house. Their sound is perhaps best described as arty chamber rock, and like Department of Eagles many of their songs swell toward cathartic, unsettling conclusions. But singer Annie Clark’s voice, which recalled the great 4AD singer Elizabeth Frazer, added a sweeter edge, especially on the love-soaked plea “Marry Me,” in which she sang, “We’ll do what Mary and Joseph did, without the kid.” And some of their songs took a more decidedly pop tilt, especially the brief but brilliant “Actor Out of Work,” which might have passed for power pop if not for the shards of electric guitar that punctuated it.

Scottish “twee” band Camera Obscura, newly signed to 4AD, concluded the night’s arc perfectly, playing pure pop that doesn’t challenge so much as delight. Singer Tracyanne Campbell, her hair in a bob and wearing a dress fit for a Sunday picnic, was an anti-rock-star frontwoman, making no effort to drop her inner geek or, for that matter, her Scottish accent. “This is our first shew in the steets for a while,” she said, “and our first shew in a warking church.” My wishes were fulfilled when they played “Let’s Get Out of This Country,” a perfect pop song from their last album that gave me solace in pre-election America. Their first 4AD album, My Maudlin Career, is due out next month.

All through the night, the intermission music consisted of great songs from the 4AD back catalog, like "You and Your Sister” and “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil. While it was wonderful to hear these tunes, if they were intended to demonstrate the label’s excellence, they were superfluous: The music emanating from the stage did that very well.

It was obvious that this wasn’t just another flight as I got on my plane to South by Southwest. Hairstyles, fashion choices, and a surfeit of indoor sunglasses clearly indicated that this was a rock and roll crowd. Musicians struggled to fit guitar cases into overhead bins, and I spotted Minneapolis singer-songwriter Gary Louris making his way down the aisle.

In Dallas, I chatted with Louris as we waited to change planes. He’s got four shows scheduled for the conference to promote his new album with Mark Olson, his ex-bandmate in Minneapolis roots-rock band the Jayhawks. The disc, called Ready for the Flood and released by the New West label, is an acoustic, stripped-down album that highlights the Louris-Olson harmonies that were a Jayhawks trademark.

My Dallas-to-Austin connecting flight was even more rocking as the ratio of SXSW-bound music industry folks increased to the saturation point. Peter Jesperson, the New West A&R exec and former Replacements manager, hopped aboard. In Austin, baggage claim bustled with instrument cases, and outside the terminal a limo driver walked around with a sign reading "Bar Kays" as he looked for the legendary Memphis band.

A shuttle van to the hotel turned into a networking opportunity for the passengers, which included one hip-hop tour manager; two guys from a graphic design firm; two women from an “orchestral pop” ensemble; and one magazine journalist, me. Business cards were exchanged, gigs announced, and war stories traded. The tour manager spent half the ride on his cell phone discussing the cost, in British pounds, of concert gear for an upcoming tour. Business taken care of, we disembarked and prepared to immerse ourselves in the festival.

Later that night, after midnight, I found myself looking for one more gig to catch after the excellent 4AD showcase  at Central Presbyterian Church. Aha—I recalled that one of Louris and Olson’s gigs was just two blocks away. I hustled over to the Victorian Room at the Driskill Hotel, where Louris, Olson, and their two acoustic guitars were holding a crowd spellbound with just their acoustic guitars and voices.

Their new material fit seamlessly alongside the Jayhawks classics that sprinkled the set, namely, “Over My Shoulder,” “Two Hearts,” “Waiting for the Sun,” and, as the closer, their biggest hit and perhaps my favorite Jayhawks song, “Blue.” The crowd let out an exuberant cheer at the distinctive opening notes, and as the honeyed harmonies filled the room, it seemed to me that at South by Southwest, business as usual is sometimes transcendent.

Add-Art: The Anti-Advertising Agency doesn’t just critique and poke fun at the excesses of modern day advertising, it does something about it! Their recently completed Firefox plug-in Add-Art, replaces annoying web ads with curated art that’s changed bi-weekly. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and it’s completely changed my experience of the web.

Bent Objects: When I was working on my Skull-A-Day project I stumbled into an entire universe of art blogging folks I had no idea existed. By far one of the best is Terry Border’s Bent Objects. His brilliant wire and household object constructions, posted every couple of weeks or so, strike just the right tone of clever, funny, and disturbing and are consistently inspiring to me. It helps that they are also immaculately shot, thanks to his commercial photography background.

Kristen Hersh: I’m addicted to music and Kristin Hersh has been feeding that addiction since I fell in love with her sadly underappreciated Throwing Muses in the 80’s. Not only is her music diverse and beautiful, but she’s recently been pioneering the future of music distribution by giving away her latest solo and side- project recordings for a donation of your choice (or free if you’re feeling stingy) via the CASH Music project. Plus they’re Creative Commons licensed, so you’re encouraged to experiment with them.

Power to the Poster: Whether you want to prepare for your next rally or just decorate your living space, designer Justin Kemerling’s Power To The Poster project has you covered. The site features free downloadable PDFs of issue driven posters by designers from around the world ready for home printing. Originally in B/W only, the post-election site now features inspirational posters in color and is accepting new submissions until May 1st.

Trailers from Hell: I’ve been a cult movie fanatic since I was a kid, so discovering Trailers from Hell is like finding a free candy store! Some of the greatest cult movie directors wax poetic over the trailers of some of the most amazing films (cult and beyond) ever made. It’s basically 2-3 minute chunks of sheer joy regularly updated and freely available courtesy of Gremlins’ director Joe Dante himself.

BIO: Noah Scalin is an activist and founder of the award-winning, socially conscious design & consulting firm Another Limited Rebellion. Noah's work at ALR has gained international exposure in over two-dozen books and is frequently featured in design publications. Noah's fine art has been exhibited internationally and his first book, SKULLS, based on his Webby award- winning online art project Skull-A-Day, has been featured in a segment on the Martha Stewart Show and was honored by the Young Adult Library Services Association as a Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. Noah is a regular lecturer at universities and to business groups. Noah is also an adjunct faculty member in the graphic design department at Virginia Commonwealth University where he teaches Design Rebels, a course on socially conscious graphic design.  He is currently plotting to take over the universe with his multi-platform science-fiction project League of Space Pirates.

In 1985, simply putting out an album titled Rum, Sodomy & the Lash and produced by Elvis Costello was enough to guarantee a certain cachet with the punk set. Luckily for every spiky-haired kid who picked it up for its rich promise of degradation, the Pogues’ breakthrough album was a mind-blowing trip through time and across borders, drawing unexpected connections between Celtic folk, punk rock, and American roots music. In this book by the same sordid name, Jeffrey T. Roesgen tells the story behind the album, interwoven with a tale of his own creation, a seafaring narrative starring the band and several of their lyrics’ characters.

If this all sounds like something by and for serious fans, you’re right. The book is one of the latest in the 33 1⁄3 series, a collection of smartly dissective tomes about notable rock albums, from Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica to the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder and beyond. (See the full list at www.33third.blogspot.com.) The idea is to hitch up talented music writers with the object of their audio obsession and let them parse and probe it at length—an enterprise that, as you might guess, is as fraught with peril as being adrift at sea with the Pogues. There is the ever-present danger of wrecking on the shoals of metaphor, then flailing about in search of adjectives.

Roesgen, for his part, steers clear of such hazards and delivers a spirited novella along with vivid snippets of rowdy, romantic rock ’n’ roll history.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

Utne Reader had so much fun at South by Southwest last year that we’re going again. This time out, we’re sponsoring two wildly different concert bills and blogging daily from the mega-music conference in Austin, Texas.

Both our events take place on Thursday, March 19. The Official SXSW College Party, presented by Utne Reader and Team Clermont, begins at noon at the Flamingo Cantina with a roster of up-and-coming indie rockers: Loney Dear (5 p.m.), Mirah (4:10), Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (3:20), Modern Skirts (2:30), Slaraffenland (1:40), Telekinesis (12:50), Ruby Isle (noon), and Rafter (DJing between sets). I’m most keyed about the Scandinavian folk-pop of Loney Dear and the lo-fi musings of Telekinesis, but I’m keen to see all of these promising acts. I’ll be wearing my western-style shirt in ironic hipster style at this event, which goes until 6 p.m.

At 8 p.m., after a break just long enough for a takeout burrito and a Mexican Coke, we kick off a completely different sort of affair over at Antone’s—a roots-rock bill called Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm, featuring the Texas Tornados, Shawn Sahm, Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez and the West Side Horns, Jimmy Vaughan, Dave Alvin, Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, and the Gourds, along with Justin Townes Earle, Carrie Rodriguez, Raul Malo, and Band of Heathens. I’ll still be wearing my western shirt, but I’ll ditch the irony for a long, tall cold one and a bunch of twangy guitar solos.

Sponsored by Utne Reader and the Americana Music Association, the show is curated by Vanguard Records, which is just about to release a Sahm tribute album also called Keep Your Soul. If you don’t know who Sahm was, well, he was a character akin to Gram Parsons in that he mixed rock and roll with country music—but threw in some R&B and Tex-Mex, too—and scored a few pop hits along with a cultish following. The sheer talent lineup of this show and the attendant album (which includes Los Lobos, Alejandro Escovedo, Charlie Sexton and many others) is a testament to Sahm’s long-lived legacy.

One musician who was supposed to be on the Antone’s bill is instead recuperating at home from open-heart surgery: Buddy Miller. One of country music’s finest songwriters and a sideman/guitarist to Emmylou Harris and many other rootsy artists, Miller had a heart attack last month. His prognosis for a full recovery is excellent, Jed Hilly of the Americana Music Association tells me, and several tour-bus operators vied for the honor of taking Miller home from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he had surgery. We’ll miss Buddy at Antone’s, but we’re cheered to hear that he’s sticking around.

Follow my blogging from South by Southwest at www.utne.com/arts.

German playwright, poet, and theorist Bertolt Brecht believed that when an audience gets too emotionally involved in a play, they lose their ability to think and thus their ability to take action. In plays like Mother Courage and Threepenny Opera, he utilized non-naturalistic techniques intended to constantly remind theatergoers that they were witnessing artifice. These included direct address to the audience and songs that were more like non sequiturs set to music than traditional musical numbers.  His influence can be found in the work of many contemporary dramatists, including Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, Caryl Churchill, and Augusto Boal.    

One of Brecht’s lesser known works, Roundheads and Pinheads, has been given a new treatment by pioneering choreographer David Gordon. The politics of division provide fertile ground for Gordon’s Uncivil Wars: Moving with Brecht & Eisler, which premiered at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this past weekend.  Surprisingly prescient considering it was written in 1936, the central story explores how governments devise wars to distract from other problems. 

Set in Yahoo, a fictional country with “a big deficit and an overproduction of corn” (sound familiar?), the Viceroy and his Vice-Viceroy decide that the source for all their problems are the immigrant, pointy-headed Czichs (“chicks”), as opposed to the native, round-headed Czuchs (“chucks”).  The play unfolds in true Brechtian style, with direct audience address and a stripped down set to render the performance transparent.  The narrative is interspersed with songs composed by Eisler, whose raucous melodies often work against overtly political lyrics.  Gordon has added an extra layer of meta-commentary by casting actors as both Brecht and Eisler, who narrate both the play’s story and the story of how they created the play.  They also educate the audience on the artists’ lives and ideologies.

The result is a theatrically rich production that engages on multiple levels.  Although the premise itself is quite simple—one person I was with compared it to Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches—its larger themes ring as true today as when Brecht penned it.  And Gordon’s reworking foregrounds this relevance by contextualizing the piece in history and theory.  Considering the divisive politics that characterize so much of today’s world, this is necessary theater.          

Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Walker Art Center

Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird aims squarely at the pleasure center of the bookish indie set. His several acclaimed albums of postmodern chamber pop highlight his nimble playing and the warm electronics of his frequent collaborator, the drummer and producer Martin Dosh. 

Only a team as visionary as Bird and Dosh would strive to fix what isn’t broken and transcend this winning formula, as they have with Noble Beast, where suitelike song structures, instrumental interludes, and audacious lyrical constructions build and soar but never topple into excess.

“Masterswarm” begins with a minor-key acoustic prelude to a joyously orchestrated tango of violin flourishes and handclaps. Bird’s whistling and tremolo guitar splice the mood of Strictly Ballroom with that of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The arrangement employs addition, then subtraction, as the song’s instrumentation is gradually pared away until only the crushed bits of Dosh’s rhythm loop remain.

Indeed, Noble Beast’s most successful moments are its most percussive and experimental, evenly blending Bird’s meticulous performances and Dosh’s manipulated grooves. Lugubrious pitch-shifted drums lumber across “Souverian”; the canter and shuffle of “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” ultimately careens into a spooky, swirling meltdown of queasy violin and bowed bass.

Bird’s favorite instrument is probably the English language itself. He’s still unable to resist a geeky portmanteau (“Anonanimal”), a smirking pun (“Fitz & Dizzyspells”), even the occasional palindrome. But we should be grateful he’s transcending pop clichés. You can get away with plenty of too-clever-by-half lyrical stunts if they’re buttressed by such brilliant arrangements and beguiling melodies.

This review is from the  March-April 2009 issue of Utne Reader .

Listen Now to a Streaming Track:
"Masterswarm" by Andrew Bird from Noble Beast 

A jiggly observation from Giant Robot: “Asian Jell-O-style desserts aren’t as sweet, but are more hardcore than their colorful and kidcentric Western counterparts.”

So, naturally, one of our favorite super-hip arts magazines had to stage the coolest Asian Jell-O-making competition ever: a casual, creative affair at the Music Friends studio, not far from Santa Cruz, California. Who knew gelatinous desserts could be so artsy?

The turnout was impressive and the competition was intense. Some were traditional (red bean and coconut agar in lotus form) and others were new takes on classic forms (pear agar layered with almond jello in a Bundt cake form). There were also brand-new styles, including a Marc Rothko-inspired orange and apple juice sculpture and a wood grain panel made of agar.

The article isn't available online, but Giant Robot publisher and co-editor Eric Nakamura was kind enough to send us these droolworthy photos. Pictured, from top to bottom: Elaine Chen's layered project with lychee, coconut, and pear flavorings; a gelatin slab o' wood designed by Ken Mori, who used coffee to fill in the wood grain; and Wing Ko's agar sculpture of the Giant Robot logo, which was stood up to serve as the event's centerpiece. If you pick up the print edition, you'll be treated to a vast spread of all the competitors' entries—a table loaded with jiggly desserts of all colors, shapes, and flavors, including a trendy pomegranate-and-pear combo—and a fun history of the form in Asian and Asian-American culture.

Source: Giant Robot

Photos courtesy of Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong.

Learning to play the violin is part of the program at a drug rehab clinic in Taiwan. At the Taichung Drug Abuse Treatment Center in Taichung, 20 addicts attended a three-hour violin class every week for three months and then gave a “successful concert” at the end of the program, according to the country’s Central News Agency.

“The overwhelming public response to the music therapy program prompted the center to invite the teacher to conduct a second class,” reports Taiwan News, noting that the center’s director believes “that in learning how to play the violin, the drug abusers have built new values in life—and have found the spiritual strength to help them overcome drug addiction.”

(Thanks, Bluegrass Blog.)

Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Taiwan News

How do people relate across racial and economic boundaries in post-apartheid South Africa? Cape Town artist Bryan Little designed a temporary public installation that broaches the question, based, he says, on “the names we call each other in the new South Africa.” Culled from the country’s 11 official languages, the names are both epithets and endearments, reflecting the divisions that persist as well as the connections being forged. Kees Jan Husselman used the installation as a backdrop for a poignant short film that gathers South Africans’ views on race, class, and the future of their country:

(Thanks, Wooster Collective.)

The recent Academy Awards may have exhibited Hollywood’s robust health, but the current state of independent film is not so rosy. Andrew Rodgers reports for Soma (article not available online) that the world of independent film in fact experienced a seismic shift in 2008, as a number of indie distributors either shut down altogether or were folded into larger parent companies. 

Rodgers hypothesizes two causes: 1) as independent film distributors became more successful, they neglected indie business practices that spread risk over a variety of small projects and instead invested heavily in larger ones, thus increasing the impact of any individual box-office failure (in other words, they acted like big Hollywood studios); and 2) the economy, of course, as marketing costs rose and ticket-buying audiences declined. 

Signs of hope include the emergence of smaller niche distributors such as Oscilloscope Pictures (helmed by the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch) and Chicago’s Music Box Films. Rodgers also envisions a future in which theatrical releases are only one small part of film distribution, as audiences increasingly receive content via online or mobile device downloads. 

Source: Soma

Slumdog Millionaire may be the darling of this year’s Golden Globe and Academy Awards, but the film has Carmen Van Kerckhove and Thea Lim wondering how a story that features poverty, violence, abuse, and torture gets sold as the feel-good movie of the year.  In Addicted to Race, a podcast for New Demographic, they discuss how race may have impacted public reception to the film (as an added bonus, they also analyze how race plays out in He’s Just Not That Into You).  Listen and weigh in.

Sources: New Demographic, Addicted to Race        

Image by A y A n, licensed under Creative Commons.

Certain clichés are nearly inevitable when writing about composer Philip Glass. He’s a master of minimalism. He knows when not to play. Postmodern, repetitive, ambient, genius: Choose your adjectives from the well-worn menu.

In previewing a Napa, California, performance by Glass, Gabe Meline at the North Bay Bohemian avoids the peril of a rote profile by writing about a 2007 Philip Glass concert in a style that takes inspiration directly from the composer. A snippet of Meline’s article:

“Sold-out house hangs. On every word. Small man is dry, is plain. Music is anything but. Plain, yes, on the surface, like glass. Dry, hardly. Like a storm. ‘Metamorphosis.’ Right hand goes tinkle tinkle tinkle tinkle tink, tinkle tinkle tinkle tinkle tink, hush hush hush and pouuuuuuuuuur.”

Image courtesy of Philipglass.com.

Source: Bohemian.com

Artist Lawrence Yang responds to the much-maligned Pepsi logo redesign.

(Thanks, Coudal Partners.)

UPDATE (2/24/09): I think PepsiCo may be learning the difference between “rebranding” and “reblanding” the hard way. The New York Times reports that the makers of Tropicana orange juice have decided to scrap their recently redesigned OJ packaging and go back to the original design due to customer complaints. Ouch.

If your knowledge of Japanese taiko drumming is limited to that sexy Mitsubishi commercial or the soundtrack for the 1993 Wesley Snipes film Rising Sun, you now have an opportunity to watch taiko performed by the masters. Kodo, Japan’s premiere taiko ensemble, is in the midst of their 30-plus-city One Earth tour of North America and recently performed at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. 

It’s impossible to convey in words the sheer power of a Kodo concert. Members coax such deep, rich sounds from their drums that they seem to somehow transcend time and space. Something ancient lives in the taiko drum, and Kodo has learned how to wake it. 

Since their inception 30 years ago, they have perfected their style of taiko through a highly disciplined practice that can only be described as a way of life. Group members live in a communal setting on Sado Island, where their training includes not only famously rigorous physical exercise (stories of drummers running up mountains, carrying heavy drums on their backs, are common); but also traditional Japanese culture such as tea ceremony, Noh theater, and rice farming. 

They now have a beautifully produced promotional video on their website, but an abundance of amateur tributes to Kodo also exists on YouTube:

Art history text books are often expensive, heavy, and boring tomes that don’t capture the creative and conversational experience of a good trip to a museum. Knowing that, Beth Harris, the Director of Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art, and Jeff Zucker, Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, gave art history an upgrade on smARThistory.org.

The free website incorporates videos, podcasts, and a ton of image and descriptive texts, into a “web-book” of art history. Unlike a normal text book, visitors can browse by date, author, style or themes. The podcasts and videos also capture the fun, conversational elements of museum-going, as Harris and Zucker argue and crack jokes with each other while imparting their vast knowledge of art. 

(Thanks, OpenCulture.)

Image by  F Delventhal , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: smARThistory 

New Yorkers are notoriously provincial, or so the stereotype goes. Here are two charming projects that attempt to explain the devotion:

Jason Polan asked people to name their favorite thing about New York, then did his best to draw each one. Esopus published the results of the collaboration in its latest issue. The sketches capture the city’s quiet, day-to-day movements, celebrating the humble things—from pigeons to a row of discarded chewing gum—that make New York a great place to live. 

Fred Argoff publishes a zine called Brooklyn! (not available online). Argoff posesses an encyclopedic knowledge of his favorite borough, and his zine proffers seemingly endless reasons to love it. Recent issues have featured guides to Brooklyn slang, the history of a famous local rollercoaster, and a great collection of aerial photos.

You don’t have to like New York—or even know it—to enjoy the drawings or the zine. The hometown love is infectious. It’ll leave you composing local paeans of your own.

Source: Esopus, Brooklyn! (for more info, write Fred Argoff at Penthouse L, 1170 Ocean Pkwy., Brooklyn, NY 11230-4060)

I feel like I should hold my breath around Vasco Mourao’s illustrations. His teetering, lopsided buildings look as though they’d be toppled by the slightest breeze. To say they’re shaky, though, doesn’t mean they’re messy: Mourao realizes his labyrinthine structures meticulously, with an almost obsessive attention to detail. It’s partially this tension—between the precariousness of the subjects and the sureness of his hand—that makes the drawings so compelling. Check out more of his work here.

 (Thanks, Lost at E Minor.)    

The laptop screen still can’t compete with the silver screen for cinematic grandeur, but what the computer lacks in scale, it compensates for in breadth and immediacy. Visitors to the Europa Film Treasures website will find themselves just a few mouse clicks away from a 1919 Hungarian Revolution parable from the director of Casablanca, a 1928 Russian mini-epic of animated marionettes, and an elegantly astute 1955 Macedonian documentary on a fraternal order of dervishes observing Ramadan.

This welcome trove of the motion picture medium’s formative juvenilia aggregates dozens (so far) of short-form relics—many with new original scores, most in pristine restorations, and all searchable by title, date, nationality, genre, director, cast, and more. Each is appended with a concise scholarly history, synopsis, and production specs; subtitles, where necessary, come in your choice of five languages. It’s the brainchild of compulsive film archivist and restorer Serge Bromberg, whose company Lobster Films houses more than 100,000 reels in its labyrinthine Paris offices and is one of the 28 European film archives from which Europa Film Treasures gathers its remarkable content.

The site isn’t all serious and scholarly. There are also pure entertainments—and impure ones—running a gamut from the 1917 John Ford western Bucking Broadway, in which a cowboy loses himself in New York City, to the understandably popular 1948 erotic short aptly known as The Apple-Knockers and the Coke. Best, and most web-appropriate, is that it’s a work in progress, adding content and interactive features regularly.

This review was originally published in the January-February 2009 issue of Utne Reader.

Image from Bucking Broadway by John Ford.

Make bills itself as the magazine for “technology on your time,” and its blog spotlights all manner of DIY tech projects. But the site’s eye for creative, unusual work, and its tone—cheeky, accessible, and infinitely curious—makes it one of my favorite web destinations for art. The blog presents pieces with the exploratory ethos of a science fair, reveling in the geeky pragmatics of process and construction. Here's a sampling of projects that Make has covered recently:

Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener built a voice knitting machine that translates vocal frequencies into knitted patterns:

Robert Wechler's public art relies on the natural curve in a line of shopping carts:

Chris O’Shea and Cinimod Studio’s kinetic light installation “Beacon” interacts with visitors as they move through a gallery space:

Once an obscure subset of reggae, the music known as dub has mutated into a remarkably broad category, with digital-age DJs applying its looping, backmasking, slice-and-dice aesthetic to all sorts of music, from punk to house to world. On A Town Called Addis, veteran British producer Nick Page—a.k.a. Dub Colossus—taps traditional Ethiopian sounds and state-of-the-art mixology to create a modern dub classic.

From the first bright horn bursts, psychedelic sound effects, pulsing groove, and honeyed vocals of “Azmari Dub,” the album grabs listeners’ attention with its hyper-defined sounds. It’s the exact opposite of a murky mix, tantalizing the ear with a Sgt. Pepper–like landscape of sonic doodads and textures while respecting the Ethiopian music at its core. Page creates spectacular settings for rustic instruments such as the messenqo one-string fiddle, the washint flute, and the kraar harp and unveils surprise talents including the singer Sintayehu Zenebe, whom Page has called “the Edith Piaf of Ethiopia.”

If the music at times resembles jazz, it’s the cosmic, far-out jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and if it occasionally enters the Afrobeat realm, it’s the funky turf of the master, Fela Kuti. But the music owes perhaps its largest debt to dub innovators from Lee “Scratch” Perry to the Clash, who were mashing up music long before Pro Tools came along. Dub is no longer dismissed as the work of stoners who spent too long at the mixing board, but has come into its own as a vital form full of endless possibilities. Dub Colossus exploits them to their fullest.

STREAMING TRACK: "Azmari Dub" by Dub Colossus from A Town Called Addis

Listen Now:

 Azmari Dub: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The winner of last year’s Tropfest Australia film festival was recently released over YouTube. The film, directed by Michelle Lehman, is funny, well-made, and absolutely compelling. You can watch it below:

(Thanks, Coudal.)

If you weren't completely satisfied by watching former president George W. Bush leave Washington D.C. in a helicopter yesterday, check out this retrospective of Bush images by award-winning photojournalist Christopher Morris. You may recognize the first image in the slideshow, “The Three Amigos,” which appeared on the cover of our July-August 2007 issue. The images will also be exhibited through February 16th at 28 Jay Street in Brooklyn.

(Photo courtesy Christopher Morris /VII)

The Czech Republic, in celebration of its new appointment as temporary head of the European Union, commissioned Czech artist David Cerny to spearhead a sculpture to commemorate the distinction. His assignment was to create a sculpture mosaic in collaboration with an artist from each country in the EU (27 in all).

However, he soon figured that such a project could not be completed on time and under budget. So he and his team, without telling the government agency that donated the funds, “decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes."

The result is Entropa, a mosaic of giant snap-together plastic parts, with each piece depicting the stereotypes of a particular country. Romania, for example, is shown to be a Dracula-themed amusement park, while France is draped with a banner reading “On Strike!"

Needless to say, the uproar has been considerable. Czech Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra has since apologized for the incident, but Cerny remains adamant that Europe simply needs to lighten up. According to the artist, the aim was to raise the question “What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. … We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.”

In the end, Cerny agreed to return the Czech government’s ₤300,000 grant for the project, but there’s little chance the sculpture will actually be removed from its display at the EU Council in Brussels

View more pictures of the work and read the official brochure, complete with the fake artists’ explanations.

(Thanks, BoingBoing.)

Image courtesy of centralasian, licensed under Creative Commons.

Mountaintop removal coal mining isn’t just destroying Appalachia’s landscape. It’s also also fracturing the region’s culture, including its traditional music. The "faith, politics, culture" magazine Sojourners reports on the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School in eastern Kentucky, which trains youngsters to play—and be proud of—the old-time music that has been losing its foothold in the hollers.

“East Kentucky is a very poor area, and it gets the short end of the stick in a lot of ways,” school founder Beverly May tells Sojourners. “There are terrible problems of environmental devastation and economic devastation from the strip-mining of coal. The kids see all this, and they know where they stand in the American scene. They’re hillbillies. The Cowan Creek School counters that. It says you have a heritage that is honored all over the world and is one of the main sources of all American popular music. Saving this music is a part of saving this regional community.”

Banjo player Randy Wilson, who teaches at the school, tells Sojourners that coal mining is still a touchy subject in the area: “We got some flak last summer because so many of our music school teachers publicly voiced opposition to strip-mining and mountaintop removal. Some people said we needed to be aware that many of the local people at our events also work for a coal company. It is a shame that we have to pit jobs against honoring our heritage, but that is how it is here in Appalachia.”

This internal conflict is also the thread running through the forthcoming book Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal, which will be published in April by the University Press of Kentucky. The authors, Silas House and Jason Howard, both grew up in families with coal-mining backgrounds, and in the introduction they describe the pressure exerted on those who dare to speak out: “Many Appalachians find it difficult to oppose this practice because of the coal industry’s long history of convincing people that to protest any form of mining is to oppose an industry that has long been a major supplier of jobs within the region.”

The book goes on to both puncture that argument—mountaintop removal actually doesn’t provide many local jobs—and give voice to 12 courageous local witnesses to the devastation, including many who also draw connections between coal and culture. One is 86-year-old songwriter Jean Ritchie, sometimes called the “mother of folk,” whose music was recorded by famed musicologist Alan Lomax. In a song that still rings true, she sings of “black waters run down through the land” and says, “The memories, they just push right down on me sometimes.”

Look for more coverage of the book at Utne.com closer to April.

Image courtesy of Cowan Creek Mountain Music School.

Aaron Copland’s rousing Lincoln Portrait is on several orchestras’ programs for the weeks surrounding the inauguration. The piece, scored for symphonic orchestra and narrator, integrates text from Lincoln’s speeches and writing with musical material that celebrates the American folk tradition, quoting tunes like “Camptown Races.”  

Here’s a short clip from the Chicago Symphony’s September 11, 2005, performance, with Barack Obama as narrator.

(Thanks, Opera Chic.)

In a fog of photographs and video footage showing Palestinians bloodied and bandaged in Gaza, the arts community of Gaza has effectively been disappeared with countless other indicators of a thriving human community interrupted by unthinkable violence. Maymanah Farhat specializes in modern and contemporary Arab art and has written a compelling piece about Gaza's artists which we've reprinted here with the permission of Electronic Intifada.

"I am working under the voices of fire, Israeli warplanes ... I still breathe, take some pictures everyday"
- Shareef Sarhan, Palestinian artist, 12 January 2009

Israel's vicious attack on Gaza has already claimed more than 1,200 lives and has injured thousands while destroying the infrastructure of the tiny coastal territory, including the handful of nonprofit venues that make cultural life possible. Even before the invasion, the combination of 41 years of Israeli occupation, frequent military incursions and attacks, infighting among Palestinian factions, and a dwindling economy created a difficult, if not impossible, environment to sustain an art scene. Yet, with the determination that has defined Palestinian art for decades, artists in Gaza have continued to create and organize, including establishing artistic associations and collectives and organizing frequent exhibitions both at home and abroad. A look at some of Gaza's seminal artists reveals an artistic tradition that has survived years of conflict while contributing greatly to Arab culture.

Born in Lydda in 1930 and forced to live in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in 1948, Ismail Shammout was one of Palestine's leading modernist painters. He organized his first exhibition in Khan Younis in 1953 and lived in exile throughout most of his career, residing in Kuwait, Jordan, and Lebanon with his wife and colleague, Palestinian painter Tamam al-Akhal. Often incorporating local folklore and history in portraits of women and children amidst scenes of expulsion and conflict, his monumental compositions and expressionist style became an important part of Palestinian visual culture, influencing generations of artists seeking to articulate their collective narrative. In addition to creating an impressive body of work and exhibiting across the region, Shammout produced Art in Palestine (1989), one of the first English-language texts on Palestinian art.

Returning to Lydda after a 50 year absence, Shammout found his ancestral home occupied by Israeli settlers. The experience launched him into creating a large-scale series of paintings with the hope of having it on permanent display in Palestine. "Palestine: the Exodus and the Odyssey" (1997-2000) contains some of his most memorable work -- several mural-size canvases chronicling the Palestinian existence from the Nakba, or expulsion in 1948, to the first and second Palestinian intifadas with the visual prowess and historical magnitude found in the work of those he admired such as the Mexican Muralists. In "Life Prevails" (1999), a woman stands as an anthropomorphic representation of the Palestinian spirit -- defiant and stoic above dozens of children while the mosques and churches of Jerusalem and shores of Gaza are shown in the background. In an inscription accompanying the work Shammout stated that "The Israeli occupation was oppressive and ruthless. But we struggled to survive, to assert our presence, to preserve our traditions, and sustain our dreams." He died in 2006, just days before Israel's assault on Gaza and Lebanon, which devastated the neighborhoods near his Beirut home.

The pen and ink drawings of Abdel Rahmen al-Mozayen have become synonymous with Palestinian liberation struggles. Born in Kubyba in 1943, al-Mozayen's mother was an expert in the art of embroidery and while serving as a resistance fighter with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) he produced a number of political posters in the 1970s and 1980s, iconic works that incorporate a unique combination of embroidery, ancient history, and stylized figures. Using the complex symbolism found in Palestinian embroidery to communicate steadfastness, his references to Canaanite heritage testify to the ancestral roots and longevity of Palestinian art, an element that is paramount to combating the co-option of local culture by Israelis and the near erasure of historical evidence by the occupation. Simultaneously, his employment of embroidery is significant -- with occupational forces often clamping down on the displaying of flags or material related to the resistance, the art form evolved into an intricate coded language of signifiers used as an act of defiance.

In "Children of the Intifada" (1988), al-Moyzen depicts two young children dressed in traditional Palestinian garb sitting atop a horse. The horse is adorned with an embroidered tapestry that reads "December" in Arabic and "1987" in English -- the month during which the first Palestinian intifada erupted. From the horse's bridle hangs a key, a familiar symbol for Palestinians, as many took the keys to their homes when forced out by Zionist militias in 1948, expecting their expulsion to be temporary. The children have slingshots in their hands and a supply of stones nearby, a reference to the rock-throwing youth that were essential to the protests of the uprising. In mid-journey, the horse takes the children over a bed of rocks, perhaps suggesting the Jordan River as they enter to liberate Palestine or a metaphorical road that is paved with the very tools needed for their resistance.

In contrast, the pensive and morose paintings of Fayez Sersawi underscore the psychological and physical effects of the Israeli occupation. Working to document the brutal tactics used by Israeli forces, he paints images capturing the daily experiences of Palestinians under widespread violence. Concurrently, he has created such works as "Two Men" (2001), an introspective portrait of two figures, presumably a father and son. The positioning of the men, as they lean against each other, occupies the foreground and center of the composition, leaving little room for an identifiable setting. Instead, the same expressionist brushstrokes that detail the age and wear of their faces appear in the background, unifying the figures with their surroundings. Rendered with aggressive markings that suggest chaos, the violence of the background continues on the bodies of the figures as though consuming their entire beings. The intimate posturing of Sersawi's subjects is also of interest, as it resembles that of Christian icon painting. Tracing its roots to early examples of icon painting near pilgrimage sites such as Jerusalem -- an observation brought to light by painter and scholar Kamal Boullata -- much of contemporary Palestinian art can be viewed within this artistic practice. Resembling compositions of the holy mother and child, the artist's iconification of Palestinian men under siege is a bold take on the tradition with weighty political inferences.

Sersawi has also greatly contributed to art education in Gaza. Using a YMCA facility equipped with the workings of a university-level classroom, he taught dozens of artists, many of who are now actively taking the reigns of the cultural scene. Today this new generation continues the movement formed by these visionaries. Unlike the Western model, in which commercial venues and public and private institutions shape artistic output or at least determine what is shown, the Palestinian art scene, which transcends Israeli checkpoints, Israel's wall in the West Bank and the continuous annexation of land, has relied on a dynamic community-based system of nonprofit galleries and art spaces that remains in line with the everyday political realities of its surroundings.

Artist organizations play an important role in providing a much-needed environment for creation and the furthering of art through public events and education. Two leading Gaza organizations comprised of young and emerging artists are Eltiqa Group and Windows From Gaza. Boasting a variety of artists working in photography, sculpture, new media and painting, these groups regularly produce exhibitions and workshops open to the public.

Among its eleven members, Eltiqa Group includes painters Rima al-Muzayen and Mohamed Dabous. Al-Muzayen's colorful compositions explore the experiences of Palestinian women. Dabous teaches visual arts at Gaza's al-Aqsa University and creates striking abstract ink and pastel works on paper. In 2008, Eltiqa hosted a number of noteworthy events for its members including the solo exhibitions of al-Muzayen and Dina Matar at the French Cultural Centre and a group show of Palestinian art featuring Abdel Nasser Amer, at the Rashad Shawwa Cultural Center. Outside of Gaza, Eltiqa was part of an impressive lineup of events such as Without Preparing -- From Gaza, a joint exhibition with artists from Windows From Gaza at Makkan House gallery in Amman, Jordan and Morceaux Choisis Gaza, a group show at the Universite Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France.

A number of Windows From Gaza members concurrently work in video, installation, photography and painting such as Basel al-Maqousy, an art instructor at the Jabalia Rehabilitation Centre who was recently featured in the AM Qattan Foundation's inaugural London exhibition Occupied Spaces, and Shareef Sarhan, whose art comments on the destruction of Palestine under the Israeli occupation. Sarhan has been photographing the damage, turmoil and civilian toll of Israel's current assault on Gaza.

The impact of Israel's latest act of barbarity on Gaza's cultural infrastructure has yet to be fully assessed. Reports have circulated that the Rashad Shawwa Cultural Centre has been bombed and the Institute for Palestine Studies has confirmed the destruction of the newly founded Gaza Music School, which taught children aged seven to 11, the majority of whom were girls. Located in a building owned by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the Music School was hit in the first wave of shelling on 27 December. The fate of such important venues as the French Cultural Centre, the Municipality of Gaza's Arts and Crafts Village, al-Karam Center for Cultural Arts or the YMCA in Gaza City is unknown. Even if these centers were to sustain little or no structural damage, their futures are still uncertain as the cultural workers whose dedication they depend on are sure to be facing dire circumstances.

Images: Ismail Shammout, "Life Prevails" (1999). (Image courtesy of Al Jisser Group); Abdel Rahman al Mozayen, "Children of the Intifada" (1988). (Collection of Souha Xochitl Shayota, New York)

For a guy who listens to John Coltrane, Barack Obama has an inaugural celebration musical lineup that’s playing it pretty safe: You’ve got your Beyonce, your Bono, your Boss. But I suppose we ought to cut him some slack. For one thing, it’s not like the guy booked it personally. He’s got a few other things to think about. Also, if you think about it, the sprawling, middle-of-the-road bill is in keeping with his whole big-tent approach. He’s reaching out to rural America with Garth Brooks, boomers with James Taylor, the hip-hop nation with Mary J. Blige. It’s going to be a party to which everyone is invited. (I guess that’s why 800,000 people are showing up.)

But there’s one performance recently added to Sunday's bill that I’m really keyed about : Soul singer Bettye LaVette will perform Sam Cooke’s classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Just watch this clip in which LaVette sings “Love Reign O’er Me” at last month’s Who tribute at Kennedy Center Honors to understand why I think her performance might be the Barackathon’s emotional showstopper. You don’t even have to know, let alone revere, the original version to be swept up in her soul-searing rendition:

Wonka Vision has shipped its first “Women in Rock” issue. Copy editor (and former NYC crime reporter) Ellen Thompson sets it up with an editor’s letter:

…Our main administrative staff is now 90 percent female, yet we’ve managed to fill the pages with articles in which notable women bitch about the disparities between males and females from the metal and punk to the indie and hardcore genres.

Sure we highlight bands like Bleeding Through Walls, along with solo acts such as Kate Nash, illustrating the contributions these women have made to their genres, but those are contributions that merely add glossy shine to the surface. The disparities the notable women in the following pages are bitching about have more to do with what’s not meeting our eyes and ears. It’s the disparities in the boardrooms and recording studios of record labels and in the lighting booths at clubs and venues.

…There are more teenaged girls who know [performers like Avril Lavigne] and what they’ve done than there are adult women who can tell you who Trina Shoemaker is…Shoemaker is the only woman to have won a Grammy for sound engineering.

Inside the magazine there are interviews with Feist, Tegan & Sara, Amy Millan, and a mix of women with far less notoriety.

Band manager, tour manager, and record label lady Kate Hiltz says: “I think it used to me more of an issue than it is now. I used to get a lot more comments like ‘whose girlfriend are you?’”

“Often people think that women in the music business are sluts who got their jobs because they slept with guys,” says freelance photographer Cindy Frey. 

Movement is slow. Ohio State women’s studies professor Susan Burgess speaks to this: “Just like in feminism,” she says, “there are these conflicting threads of oppression and stereotypical norms and progress in rock that continues until this day. But then you also have to acknowldege that serious scholars have said that rock music is most responsible for popularizing feminism.”

That reminds me...

In the art world, graffiti is sexy, the subject of fawning attention from galleries, museums, and collectors. Tagging, though, largely resists the limelight. Photographer Martha Cooper’s book Tag Town, released last year, celebrates its stubbornly unglamorous aesthetic and documents the rise of tagging in 1970s New York. The art website Fecal Face recently sat down with Cooper to discuss the collection.

Sadly, the interview doesn’t break much new ground. The questions conflate Cooper’s interest in tagging with her interest in graffiti more generally, so we never get to hear what makes it a worthy photographic subject. It’s disappointing, because there are intriguing hints of insight. At one point, asked if she’d ever tried tagging, Cooper observed she’d never mastered it—she “found out how hard it was to repeatedly write with style.” Her respect is apparent in her photos, and I wish Cooper had been given a chance to elaborate. 

It’s still worth a look, if only to hear Cooper talk about her experiences documenting a piece of budding hip-hop culture and to get a look at some of the Tag Town pictures.

In a clever example of life imitating art, one Flickr group gathers images in which people photographically re-create "The Far Side" cartoons. The results are often accurate, detailed, and humorous.

(Thanks, Quipsologies)

Image courtesy of Kevin Steinhardt, licensed under Creative Commons.

Normally, art reaches us as a finished product. We see nothing of an artist’s process, of the tentative first steps, the mistakes, the experiments and abandoned ideas. I found two blogs that make me think we’re missing out:

Jonathan Burton documents the evolution of his drawings, from their scribbled seeds to final drafts, in The Unreachable Itch. He keeps pretty tight-lipped, providing little comment on his process, but he includes enough drafts to let you register his shifts in thought yourself.

In Salamunic Illustration, Tin Salamunic posts pages out of his sketchbooks, many of which never develop into polished, full-fledged pieces. But these images possess an immediacy that’s even more compelling than his finished work. He layers doodles with more meticulous studies and snippets of text, creating unfiltered peeks into his day-to-day musings.

(Thanks, Drawn.)

(Thanks, Lost at E Minor.)

Billboard’s top 25 songs of 2008 have been compiled into one mashup by DJ Earworm. The result is synthetic, understandably, but surprisingly well done. 

Here’s the video:

(Thanks, National Review, of all places.)

Hollywood’s romantic comedies aren’t just innocuous cinematic tripe. They’re actually warping children’s minds (pdf), according to new research from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The films, including Notting Hill and You’ve Got Mail are skewed portrayals of relationships with “both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities,” the researchers write, where romantic problems or transgressions “have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning.” The films tend to focus on the early stages of relationships, but the characters displayed emotions that generally develop over time, including deep feelings of love and emotional support. Adolescents sometimes use these films as models for their own relationships, which could lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment. 

In the book and film High Fidelity, the main character  asks, “What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?” For romantic comedy films, researchers may now have an answer. 

(Thanks, Miller-McCune.)

Image from the film Notting Hill.

French cartoonist David B. takes stock in dreams: For more than 35 years, he has faithfully recorded his brain’s nighttime wanderings. He mines this unconscious material in Nocturnal Conspiracies, a new collection of comics.

The artist continues to hone the surreal style he’s known for, one that’s especially well-suited to dreamscapes. Conspiracy is all weird angles, stark coloring, and unsettling proportions. The text, bare-bones and subdued, allows the beautiful, strange images to do most of the talking.

New York magazine arranged a peek into the book.

The mainstream media have given Elvis Costello’s new talk show on the Sundance Channel a bit of press, most of it assuming viewers can’t process anything subtler or more sophisticated than an episode of MTV’s Rock the Cradle, but Spectacle demands an unabashed rave. Featuring a rough mix of laid-back, consequently revelatory interviews and flat-out stunning performances from Costello and his guests—who have included Elton John, Lou Reed, Charlie Haden, Pat Metheny, and James Taylor—it’s a gloriously unorthodox “talk show” for people who dig music for music’s sake and draw inspiration from the creative process. In other words, it’s not for everyone—which is why it’s on cable, worth every penny your provider will bilk you for, and probably won’t be around for a season or two. Such is always the fate of tuned-up television. Remember Night Music? How about Stars of Jazz? That’s what I thought.

Make no mistake about it, Costello comes to his subjects as a fan, treats them as vocational peers, and is deeply steeped in pop, rock, and jazz history. So, yeah, as some critics have complained, the musical references can get a bit arcane from time to time. But it’s the rhythm of the conversation as much as the questions and answers that fascinates. You actually feel like you’re seeing a real person ruminate on their craft with a pal, as opposed to an interview subject jousting with (or avoiding) a half-witted, smart-ass host or pitching a project. Plus, a bit of musical history could do the world a lot of good. After all, there’s no rule that a person can’t learn a little something while parked in front of the boob tube.

Best of all, this intimate, somewhat sycophantic atmosphere has so far facilitated inspired performances from all involved: Costello and Reed in perfect pitch on the latter’s “Set the Twilight Reeling,” a soulful Taylor crooning about his “Sweet Baby James,” and Haden and Metheny serenading guest Bill Clinton with the tear-jerker, “Is This America? (Katrina 2005).”

There are nine episodes left, featuring the likes of Tony Bennett, Rufus Wainwright, and the Police. And while watching to see whether Costello can find his way around Sting’s titanic head promises to be memorable, it will be hard to beat the season’s highlight so far: filmmaker Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), scotch in hand, reciting the lyrics of Reed’s “Rock Minuet” like a lost poet.

“In the back of the warehouse were a couple of guys/They had tied someone up and sewn up their eyes/And he got so excited he came on his thighs/When they danced to the rock minuet.”

Now, watch every night if you like. But you ain’t going to hear spoken word like that on Leno.

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art is in dire financial straits, having dug itself into a hole through rampant overspending. Billionaire Eli Broad has offered $30 million to the museum, but only if the museum raises an additional $15 million itself. Artists David Weiner and Angie Lee tried to help out the old-fashioned way: by holding a bake sale.

Almost all of the treats were based on pieces from the museum’s collection, including Giacometti-shaped baguettes and Jasper Johns-frosted cakes. But the most coveted treat was definitely the financier cookies, selling for a cool $1 million apiece.

In the end, the bake sale made just over $300. Alas, that means none of the high-roller cookies were sold, but the sale still drew quite a crowd to see the wares and watch Weiner dole out Claes Oldenberg-esque slices of fruit pie.

(Thanks, CultureGrrl.)

Image courtesy of douglemoine, licensed under Creative Commons.

Not even movie stars are immune from the effects of recession. Illuminating an unexpected consequence of economic volatility, Minnesota Public Radio reports on research showing that our conception of beauty changes with the market. Reporter Nikki Tundel spoke with psychology professor Terry Pettijohn, who studied the phenomenon by analyzing the physical features of popular actresses during economic booms and busts. Tundel reports:

In the early 1980s, for example, the country was emerging from a recession. Things were looking up. That's when women like Sissy Spacek and Sally Field really made it big on the big screen. Both actresses, says Pettijohn, had young, almost cherubic features. The same could be said for a young Bette Davis, who had one of the most popular faces during the 1940s, another era where prosperity was on the rise.

The early 1990s, on the other hand, were a time of economic struggle. During those years, Emma Thompson and Sharon Stone were among the most celebrated actresses. Both had strong bone structures, smaller eyes and more mature-looking faces.

While Pettijohn found perceptions of female beauty varied with economic conditions, he told Tundel physical characteristics deemed attractive in men were unaffected.

Michael Franti has never been shy about his politics. The latest album by Franti and his band Spearhead, called All Rebel Rockers, mixes the songwriter's progressive-minded lyrics with some of the best music of his career. It’s also been his most commercially successful album, showing that people are hungry for consciousness-raising music.

In the latest episode of the UtneCast, senior editor Keith Goetzman talks with Franti about recording All Rebel Rockers in Jamaica, Franti's politics of inclusion, and his music's role in rallying progressives.

Listen to the interview below, or subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes.

Listen now:

 Michael Franti on Politics and Music: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, is art still an investment worth holding onto? Or is the payout from selling a valuable work too tempting to refuse? As the economy teeters and budgets constrict, museums and institutions around the country are considering the dilemma of selling art to pay the bills—setting off heated debates about  the moral and social pitfalls of viewing art as an untapped financial resource instead of a priceless public good.

Such was the case this summer, when, just weeks after flooding destroyed much of the University of Iowa’s campus, Iowa Board of Regents member Michael Gartner asked for an appraisal of Mural, Jackson Pollock’s 8’x20’ painting and the crown jewel of the school’s museum. (The piece was donated by Peggy Guggenheim herself.) Media outlets from the Des Moines Register (article not available online) all the way to Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal caught wind of the affair and sounded the alarm. Could a sale be on its way? How dare university officials sniff around this magnificent piece as if it were a piggy bank waiting to be smashed open! Were they seriously considering selling part of the public’s property when insurance and FEMA funds were already on their way?

After almost two months of silence, the Board of Regents finally stated once and for all that the painting would not be sold; no further explanation was given. It could have been that the administration was merely curious about the painting’s value, and looked into it at the most inopportune time possible—or that the condemnation was so vehement that the regents retreated, tail tucked between their legs.

The idea of selling, trading, or auctioning parts of a collection—a practice known as deaccessioning—is more common than we think. Museums often look to clear out lower-quality works in order to purchase new ones or to simply free up space for the rest of their collections. As art buyer Lisa Hunter said on her blog, “If you could trade four mediocre Renoirs for one great Matisse, wouldn’t you do it, too?”

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), which establishes moral and ethical standards for its 190 member museums, has set down guidelines for museums wishing to trim or adjust their collections. Art should be sold or auctioned only for the benefit of the rest of the collection, and proceeds from that sale should be used only for the augmentation of the current collection. These practices ensure that mutual benefit is extended to the museum and the public, for whom the art and the museums exist.

The association is adamant that deaccessioning not occur “in reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment”—a moment like, say, flood damage to the museum’s governing institution.

But the idea of selling Mural did actually find some support. Felix Salmon, financial and art writer for Portfolio.com, reasoned that “some paintings belong not to ‘the people of Iowa’ so much as to the people of the world, and belong in a world-class collection. Which, frankly, the University of Iowa Museum of Art isn’t.” Does such an important work really belong in a small community? On the other hand, isn’t it unfair that a handful of art elitists should decide who has access to great art?

Somewhat less snobby was the reasoning of Gilbert E Schill Jr. and Jacob H. Rooksby, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription or online pass required). “If colleges were not allowed to sell what they own ... institutional progress and the fulfillment of the colleges’ missions would be impeded ... The [public property] argument necessarily fails because it knows no end.” Schill and Rooksby consider a school’s mission to be that of education and overall well-being, not of holding onto art collections as untouchable holy relics.

A case in point is the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Last year the gallery's administrators decided to auction off several of its priceless antiquities, saying that they fell outside the gallery’s “core mission” of modern and contemporary art. The gallery made a killing; its prize piece, the early Roman sculpture Artemis and the Stag, was projected to sell for around $6 million. The final bid was for more than $28 million. In total, almost every Albright-Knox piece sold made at least three times its pre-auction estimate, netting the gallery more than $90 million.

A short time later, the museum announced a campaign to expand its facilities that included designs from a “world-renowned architect.” According to the AAMD guidelines, it isn't allowed to use its auction earnings for the new building, though the timing is suspicious to some observers. But the most disturbing facet of the sale wasn’t the possibility of padding out the building fund. It was that Artemis and the Stag, a rare masterpiece, was purchased by a European private collector, meaning that it would perhaps never again be in the public eye.

It’s reasonable to assume that the same thing could have happened to Mural had it been put on the auction block. But due to the surrounding circumstances, the backlash against the Iowa Regents was so virulent that, in the words of Press-Citizen columnist Bob Elliott (article not available online), regent Michael Gartner was “verbally tarred and feathered as if he’d come out against baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.”

Paradoxically, Elliott goes on to name Gartner as the most important figure in the Iowa City art scene precisely due to the emotional rhetoric in support of the Pollock’s place in the community. Even Gartner conceded in the Chronicle (subscription or online pass required) that very few people were even aware of the painting’s existence before this controversy cropped up: The publicity for the museum and for the painting itself was priceless.

But all this analysis may be moot in the face of the world’s current financial crisis. Many of the museums that opted for deaccession were lured by the art market’s out-of-control prices paid for even minor works. For the past 10 years, the art market has been driven onward and upward, with many buyers coming from the financial field. (Lehman Bros. was a particularly enthusiastic collector.) Now that so many companies are tightening their budgets and the United States is in the throes of an official recession, the breakneck buying has dropped off. The art world’s previous feeding-frenzy atmosphere, which threatened to suck works off the wall like a vacuum with its promise of easy money (and lots of it), has lost some of its power. Some remaining art dealers and even gallery owners find the slowdown beneficial overall. For so long, the dominant dialogue had been about art as an investment: Now the talk can return to the art itself.

Image courtesy of the  University of Iowa Museum of Art .

In their efforts to lower the age of the average listener to under 60, classical music ensembles have tried everything from pre-concert happy hours to marketing performers like pop stars to offering ringtones for download on their websites, with limited success.

As a grant writer with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Ronen Givony realized that these strategies were failing to reach young, intellectually curious indie rock fans like himself.  He developed the Wordless Music series, which programs 30 minutes of classical chamber music alongside a headlining rock act.  Givony contends that his target audience is “ripe for being turned on to the sound world of someone who would meet them halfway about classical music.  The world of chamber music and instrumental music, and how great Haydn and Mendelssohn trios were, was a major revelation to me and I wanted to evangelize on the music’s behalf.”  His programming has paired Ligeti with Glenn Kotche of Wilco, Chopin and Arvo Pärt with Beirut, and John Adams with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.

So far, this pill-ground-up-in-a-spoonful-of-jelly strategy has been a success—several concerts have sold out, and all have ended in the black.  Last season the series began expanding outside of New York City, with an inaugural show at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis.  While Givony estimates that more than 90 percent of concertgoers come to see the rock act, many contact him after the show with questions like “tell me more about this Osvaldo Golijov guy and why does he sound so much like Beirut and why didn’t I know about him before?”

(Thanks, Gramophone.)

Theater critics Isaac Butler and Rob Weinert-Kendt unveiled their Critic-O-Meter blog last ­­­week, giving New York theater enthusiasts a one-stop site for play reviews and, in the words of the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Leigh Morris, laying bare a “philosophical divide between criticism that investigates and that which judges.”

Critic-O-Meter gathers any and all reviews it finds on a given play, translates each review into a letter grade, and averages the grades into an overall score. Butler and Weinert-Kendt then write a short blurb summing up the critical reaction. Further links offer visitors the option of browsing excerpts from the original reviews.

Morris’ piece explores feedback to Critic-O-Meter thus far, particularly in the critical community. Their responses have been divided: While some less-established reviewers express gratitude for the exposure (one gushes at the possibilities for “a lil' ol’ aspiring theater critic”), other writers view the blog disdainfully. A particularly apocalyptic critic sniffs that it is “evidence that the final stage in the devolution of the theater review has arrived.”

Morris has some beef with Critic-O-Meter—he rejects, for instance, a logic that assumes subjective reviews can be easily converted into objective grades. But even as he indulges in some editorializing on the blog’s value, he acknowledges that such compilations are already entrenched in our critical culture. After all, movie and music reviews have long drawn on thumbs, stars, and letter grades to assess a piece’s worth.

Morris ends, somewhat breezily, there: We like our criticism to tell us what’s good, and fast. Those who voice dissent, no matter how nobly, are “spitting into the wind.” While there’s doubtlessly a degree of truth to his conclusions, he leaves some strands of analysis underdeveloped. For instance, he might have examined the differences between the critics who support tools like Critic-O-Meter and those who greet it with handwringing. The detractors seem intent on maintaining a certain purity in theater criticism. It’s hard to tell whether this stems from an elitism about the theater world or more practical concerns about the future of their jobs. As reviewers in the fine arts increasingly take their cues from critics of more popular forms, these kinds of issues ought to be explored.

Image courtesy of Joel Telling, licensed under Creative Commons.

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.)

With its 25th anniversary coming next year, book publisher 4th Estate (part of Harper Collins) asked design and marketing firm Apt to help with the celebration. The result is “This Is Where We Live,” a stop-animation video with scenery and figures made entirely out of the imprint’s books (more than 1,000 ended up being used).

The video is sweet and charming, and every viewing reveals another clever use of the material: Watch for The Corrections as a crosswalk and The Perfect Storm in the form of a fishing boat. After watching, take a look at the mind-blowing production stills and videos.

 

“We've seen the whole face of America change,” says Los Lobos drummer Louis Perez in Chicano Rock! The Sounds of East Los Angeles, “and that face is brown.” Chicano Rock!, a new documentary scheduled to air this Sunday on PBS, examines this demographic shift through a cultural lens, exploring the musical fruits of the twentieth-century influx of Mexican immigrants to the United States. A recent article in the Indianapolis weekly Nuvo previews the film and talks to its creator, Jon Wilkman.

In the documentary, Wilkman traces the lineages of several groups of Chicano musicians. He looks at performers like Lalo Guerrero, who channeled traditional Mexican sounds, as well as bands like Cannibal and the Headhunters, who drew more heavily from U.S. rock influences. Wilkman seems most interested in a third group that bridged the first two; for him, they tell a story that’s bigger than the music they made, helping us see the cultural give and take that occurs as immigrant groups settle into new lives in the United States.

“We are, like Chicano musicians, beginning to blend cultures, just like they blended musical sounds," Wilkman says. "It's not only a story about the past; it's suggesting what our future is going to be—not only musically but culturally.”

Image courtesy of Riza Nugraha, licensed under Creative Commons. 

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.)

When we reflect on evil events of the past and present, it's natural for us to relegate the perpetrators into categories separate from ourselves. We often believe that something innate in these perpetrators’ personalities inclines them toward evil, something neither we nor anyone we know possesses. By placing these individuals outside ourselves, we do not have to think about whether we would be capable of despicable acts.

Photographs recently unearthed from historical obscurity perfectly encapsulate this inner struggle of capability. According to an essay in the latest issue of Culture (pdf available online), a publication of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, an American soldier last year anonymously donated a photo album found in an empty German apartment to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. At first glance, the photos from the album appear to depict summer camp or a corporate retreat; the subjects are laughing, eating, and relaxing. They are on a retreat of sorts, but not from the daily grind of a corporate office. Instead, the smiling faces are decompressing from their duties as SS personnel at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Writer Jennifer L. Geddes points specifically to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” and thoughtlessness as a “moral failing of the highest order,” applying these concepts to those in the photos:

“We are given a chilling vision of this ‘strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil,’ of the ways in which these SS personnel refused to think about what they were doing, failed to be reflective about the evil in which they were thoroughly engaged, and were able to enjoy a good time together with bowls of fresh blueberries and accordion music, even as they took part in mass murder.”

Nothing about the people in the photos signifies an innate evilness. One can easily imagine themselves and their own friends lounging on a porch or laughing in the rain. With context, however, the photos assume an ominous, eerie sheen. Taken less than 20 miles from the killing center, during a time when Auschwitz was working over capacity, the photos show the “interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” better than words could ever tell.

Spend much time contemplating positron emission tomography? Or asymmetric mutant hybrids? Yeah, me neither. Science magazine, sensing a disconnect between scientists and the general public, dreamed up a novel way to make the researchers' jargon more accessible. It challenged them to translate the dense language of their work—into dance.

Science announced the winners of the second-annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest last week. The results, it acknowledges, are “not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article,” but they’re infinitely more entertaining. Here’s the winning video from the graduate student division, which explains the role of vitamin D in beta cell function with headlamps, bubbles, and a lot of flailing around:

The budding choreographers won the chance to work with real ones, who will help each winner transform a second article into a new dance. The fruits of these collaborations will debut at a “This Is Science” performance in February.

(Thanks, Daily Beast.)

The single exhibition on display at the Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art illustrates how seriously art museums take their aesthetic commitment through a unique lens: their toilets.

The toilets at the top of the pack fit seamlessly into their museum’s identity. The sleek, contemporary design of the Tate’s urinal (pictured), for instance, is an appropriate companion to the museum’s modern collection. But the photographic evidence gathered from some institutions, like the Russian Museum, is just plain icky.

(Thanks, Design Observer.)

Image courtesy and copyright of Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art.

The past 100 years have seen a dramatic evolution in the world of cuisine and cooking, from traditional techniques to canned goods and space food to nouvelle cuisine (think big plates and tiny food). A current trend is molecular gastronomy, a combination of science and cooking where chefs use chemicals and special equipment to change the physical properties of food.

An essay in The Smart Set addresses the intriguing question, Is this type of cuisine contemporary art? Of course, food is meant to be eaten. But on the other hand, both contemporary art and molecular gastronomy experiment with form and tradition, often eschewing both just because they can.

And, like contemporary art, molecular gastronomy is not for everyone. One of the essay’s profiled chefs has created a dish called “Kellogg’s paella,” a mix of shrimp heads, vanilla mashed potatoes, and Rice Krispies.

Alinea, perhaps the most famous U.S. restaurant practicing the craft, recently released a cookbook with recipes like “Pheasant, shallot, cider, burning oak leaves,” which calls for ingredients like “8 narrow oak twigs with dead leaves attached” and agar agar.

The question of molecular gastronomy as art is ultimately unanswerable, since “there is something poetic and ephemeral about deliciousness," write Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg. "We don't want that property to be reduced completely to synapses and chemical reactions. Yet through a better understanding of synapses and chemical reactions, molecular gastronomists are creating poetry.”

Image courtesy of Zesmerelda, licensed under Creative Commons.

In shaky economic times, government arts funding may be quick to land on the chopping block. In a timely article on Depression-era arts funding, DIY magazine ReadyMade questions the wisdom of this political logic.

Apparently, even in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt (or Eleanor, depending on your sources) viewed artists as an important investment on the road to economic recovery. For nearly a decade, the Federal Arts Project employed out-of-work artists in a slew of public arts projects. Other initiatives, bundled under the larger Federal Project Number One, did the same for musicians, actors, and writers.

FAP-sponsored artists often lent their creativity to the Works Progress Administration’s Poster Division, crafting promotional posters for New Deal programs. The results were often beautiful, vibrant with a sense of optimism both political and artistic. ReadyMade, wondering how such spirit might translate today, asked five artists to create FAP-inspired posters to comment on our current sets of political and economic challenges. The responses range from Christoph Neimann’s abstract celebration of art to Christopher Silas Neal’s exhortation to buy local. All are available for free download, and are accompanied by quick statements from the artists. Some seem to have found the FAP artists' buoyancy contagious. Nick Dewar envisions a cyclist utopia where “reflective bike clips would replace fancy ladies’ purses as the current must-have fashion accessory.”

The posters, while lovely, pose questions more than they provide answers. How, for instance, might artists help rejuvenate the country’s political spirit? As ReadyMade acknowledges, artists will need to do more than look to the past. They’ll also need a “brand-new graphic language,” one “equal in impact to the original initiative, but decidedly different.”  

“Africa and its artists don’t need love. They don't need recognition. They don't need to be discovered by some new Christopher Columbus. They just want to be left to perform their craft,” writes Cameroonian curator Simon Njami in November’s Juxtapoz (articles not available online).

So begins the “African Art Issue.” Clearly, the U.S.-based arts magazine is uncomfortable assuming authority on the subject.

And they avoid doing so at all costs, by recruiting African curators and thinkers to weigh in on the state of African art and allowing the artists to speak for themselves whenever possible.

Many critique the whole premise of the issue, questioning the label “African art.” Multimedia artist Ghada Amer, for instance, resolutely shuns such narrow geographic classifications, arguing that they unfairly limit the reception of an artist's message. Critics routinely interpret her art as commentary on the role of women in Muslim nations, and she resents the mischaracterization of her work, which she describes as “between cultures and about all the women of the world.” Meanwhile, self-described Afro-futurist Wangechi Mutu worries that the moniker implies an untrained, outsider status, leaving no room in contemporary art circles for artists of African descent. She wants her art, which includes conceptual installation work and mixed-media collages, to be taken seriously so that she and others can be recognized as “players in the making of art history.”

The issue's end result? No orderly definitions of African art, but that’s probably the point.

Though several Asian countries practice the art of vehicle decoration, Pakistan takes the custom to a higher level. Across the country just about every kind of transportation, from trucks to fruit carts, has vibrantly decorated examples among its ranks.

Amherst religion professor Jamal J. Elias has spent years researching this form of expression, and has found that the embellishment is not just aesthetic, but also represents the “religious, sentimental and emotional worldviews of the individuals employed in the truck industry.”

This kind of adornment doesn’t come cheap. It costs about $5,000 to decorate a truck completely, most of that money going to structural modifications such as additional levels and extended roofs. (Note that the country’s per capita income is only about $2,000.) Most transport companies will even foot the bill despite the lack of a discernible business advantage, illustrating the importance of the tradition to drivers.

“Since trucks represent the major means of transporting cargo throughout Pakistan," Elias concludes, "truck decoration might very well be this society’s major form of representational art.”

(Thanks, Neatorama.)

Image courtesy of Murtaza Imran Ali, licensed under Creative Commons.

Todd Sklar is hitting the road like a rock star. But instead of churning out guitar riffs, Sklar is entertaining audiences on his 22-city fall tour with screenings of four indie films, including his own debut feature, Box Elder.

The films on tour were all well received on the festival circuit but not widely distributed. Sklar hopes his new distribution model will help put the films before audiences that appreciate them but might otherwise not have access to them. As Anthem points out, when Picturehouse and Warner Independent Films recently closed up shop, it didn’t bode well for the future of indie distribution. But Anthem thinks Sklar’s “proactive search for a sustainable distribution model may very well prove to be the shining beacon of light that independent filmmakers are looking for.”

In addition to Box Elder, the tour is bringing On the Road with Judas, Registered Sex Offender, and In Memory of My Father to cities and college towns across the country. Find the full schedule here.

“I am, unabashedly, pro-fort,” writes Morgan Meis. Meis is a founding member of the New York City-based arts collective Flux Factory and a contributor to the 2008 Art Issue of the Believer, out this month. In his essay “Classified Report from ‘The Secret Clubhouse’ ” (excerpt available online) Meis opines on the artistic value of forts, be they minimalist sheet-and-pillow shelters or the decidedly luxurious structure built by his friend, which included indoor plumbing and electricity.

Who can forget the whimsy of entering a fort you’ve built from found materials around the house, transforming daily activities into clandestine operations of the highest degree? Meis and Flux Factory recapture that magic with their own creations, having famously occupied a room in the Queens Museum of Art for several months in 2002, building and rebuilding a gigantic fort.

Meis’ essay seeks to explain what creates this special connection to our forts: “Take two identical objects, one built to be a toolshed and the other built as a fort. They look exactly the same. But once you know that one is a fort, it transforms. You approach it with diffidence, with the respect of someone entering a sacred space….It is the same with works of art. You don’t treat them as mere objects even if, strictly speaking, there is nothing in their material makeup to differentiate them from mere objects.” Meis offers Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and Marcel Duchamp’s Prelude to a Broken Arm, which is simply a snow shovel, as examples of everyday objects we view as art.

Forts are not the only artwork covered in the newest issue of the Believer. You can also read articles about—among other things—passport photography, a bad-luck painting, imposing public art, and interviews with Global Seed Vault artist Dyveke Sanne, painter and printmaker Frank Stella, author Lynda Barry, mechanical-pencil artist Robyn O’Neil (full text online) and cartoonist Keith Knight.

Image by tastybit, licensed under Creative Commons.

David Klein was an illustrator and art director best known for his Broadway window cards and TWA travel advertisements in the 1950s and '60s. His work has been adopted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a recent Klein Estate auction at Tepper Galleries yielded tremendous results: More than 90 percent of the 300 works brought to the block were sold.

His website allows you the opportunity to browse his collections of vibrant posters, window cards, and illustrations that fit perfectly into the current popularity of retro images. For those who contend that graphic design isn’t art (a hot debate in recent years), they need only look at his playful work to see evidence to the contrary.

To see more classic graphic design, check out Utne Reader's story on WPA posters.

Image courtesy of the Estate of David Klein.

Singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson’s Beautiful World is one of the best folk albums of 2008, with lyrics that tackle tough social and political issues set amid crisp acoustic music that makes these themes easy, even enjoyable, to swallow. Gilkyson has clearly mastered the delicate art of the topical folk song, avoiding the cringe factor that plagues so many well-intentioned but ham-handed protest singers. Her dusky voice and lilting melodies are alluring enough on their own; her knack for insightful analysis just adds another layer of meaning to her multifaceted music.

Beautiful World’s lyrics carry warnings about the wages of excess (“The Party’s Over”), an impending “Great Correction,” and the human carnage of Web porn (“Dream Lover”). But the album also has an old-timey ode to a spring-fed swimming hole (“Wildewood Spring”) and offers plenty of handholds for optimists clinging to the cliff of doom, especially on the two closing songs, “Beautiful World” and “Unsustainable.” I recently spoke with Gilkyson by phone from her home in Austin, Texas, about community, collapse, and the still-coming great correction.

Beautiful World came out in the spring. You must be quite proud of yourself for having predicted the economic crisis and the downfall of the Bush regime with “The Party’s Over” and “Great Correction.”

(laughs) “Yes, well, I had read The Collapse, you know, and I think I felt that we were treading on thin ice for a long time. At first, when the record came out and the collapse, the correction, hadn’t occurred, I was thinking, God, everybody’s working so hard for Obama right now that the timing isn’t right on this because everyone’s all excited and everything, and I’m writing a record about a collapse. (laughs) But it turned out that the timing was right.”

What did you have in mind when you wrote “The Party’s Over”? Did it start out as a political song, or a personal song, or something in between?

“I did not mean to write it about the Bush regime, by any means. I was writing it about First World consumers. That’s really what I was targeting in this recording. It wasn’t red state, blue state in my mind. It was First World nations being the major consumers of energy and raw materials—and that it’s unsustainable and we’ve come to the end.”

“The Great Correction” is about a sea change for the better. Is Barack Obama the Great Correction?

“Not in my mind. That’s a blip on the screen. I actually really like Barack, and I’m hopeful that he will at least be honest in his accounting of what he’s doing. But I still see the Democrats and Republicans as being part of an unsustainable system. I think capitalism, the way it is now, is unsustainable, so I don’t see Barack Obama coming up with—he’s going to come up with compromises that I don’t think we can afford, so I still think we’re going to have to see a greater correction than the one we’re seeing.”

I understand that your inspiration for the album Beautiful World sprang in part from a monthly community forum called Last Sunday that you and author Robert Jensen hosted in Austin. Can you tell me what these forums were about and how they led to the album?

“Yes, we had decided that we wanted to address issues that were important to us—everything from immigration, racism, gender issues, economics—but we really wanted to put it over the overarching feeling that things were coming to a huge change. That either we get off fossil fuel now and have a collapse, or we prolong it longer and have another kind of, probably an even more intense, collapse.

“So we thought, let’s get the community together. Let’s see if this is attractive to the community. Let’s see if what I consider to be the progressive community, can we all get together in a room and have meaningful conversations around these issues? We brought in speakers, and we brought in a very left-leaning Presbyterian minister who I think is just brilliant, Rev. Jim Rigby. He’s really thinking cutting-edge thoughts along the lines of spirituality and religion and the real teachings of Christ, in a way. He’s a very far left thinker, and not a particularly religious person.

“The first ones we had were really successful, and then what we found was that we had every manner of left-thinking group or person on board, and each person had an individual agenda, and everybody thought, ‘This is what we need to focus on.’ There was never any consensus about where we are in history, about what needs to be done, who we turn to, how to organize. It was actually a great big lesson in why we haven’t been able to organize a cohesive movement in the left. It didn’t mean there weren’t some brilliant people there, and brilliant ideas, but the ability to agree and to come up with even a session where there was some cohesion, that never really jelled.

“So it was a learning experience for us. I wrote these songs for each of the different agendas. I mean, I didn’t sit down and think, OK, now I’m going to write a song about this, but I just kind of let myself kind of free-form create during that time period, and these are the songs that came out of it.”

So the forums, while they weren’t especially valuable in leading to solutions, at least led you to create an album.

(laughs) “Exactly. Well, what was interesting was that we realized that we didn’t want solutions. We wanted community, and a lot of them wanted solutions right here and now. I don’t feel that we’re capable of coming up with overriding solutions right now. I think it would be more in our best interests to really educate ourselves about how we got here and where exactly is it that we are before we go forging ahead with solutions.

“And I think there’s more analysis that needs to take place. But these songs were about that process more: Where are we as human beings? Where are we—in time, in history, culturally, as individuals? That’s where the songs came from. So that did come out the [forums]—personally I got a lot out of it.”

Here at Utne Reader we’ve long been involved in the salon movement, which is much like the community forums that you’re talking about. So I’m curious: Did you learn anything about how you might better approach forums like this?

“I really wish I had a pat answer for that. If anything, at this point, I think I would rather see us come together first as a community. What I loved best about Last Sunday was [Rev.] Rigby, because what he did was he put everything in a spiritual basis without it being new age, airhead, everything-is-beautiful—he really got into the challenge to us as individuals, the kinds of ways we need to change how we live our lives and how we view the systems that are in place. And he did it in a way that was so moving and touching that I felt that community spirit—I felt that communal relationship between all of us.

“I think the music [on “Beautiful World”] did that, too, and I think the ideas came across better once we had established that sort of spiritual bond. And if anything, I would say that sense of communal bond has to be there first, or else we are a bunch of individuals with a bunch of varying ideas and agendas. I think that is one of the big problems.”

There’s an undercurrent of optimism to the album, with lines about keeping your heart open and the light burning brightest at the darkest time. Are you ultimately an optimist at heart?

“I am. I just default to joy. I don’t know why—it could just be the way I’m chemically made up or something. But I am optimistic. I’ve been trying to train myself to become more open to a collapse of the system that we live under, and not be afraid of that, to embrace it, because it will mean the end of something that just plain hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked for the last 250 years, the whole capitalist extraction model. It hasn’t worked, and even those of us who lightly prospered by it, we’ve lived beyond our means.

“So I don’t want to be afraid of it. I want to feel joy about what will come instead of the system that’s in place. I want to start looking forward to it. The problem is, of course, that you grieve the losses. There are so many losses, certainly in terms of the natural world—there is this grief that’s going on at the same time that we kind of cling to what is dear to us. And that’s what this record is really about—processing the grief and preparing to do battle at the same time, preparing oneself mentally and emotionally for a transition that will really try even the most emotionally stable of us.”

There’s a real trick to writing songs that are political without beating people over the head or seeming shrill, and you seem to know something about this. What’s your secret?

“I’ve studied this. I really have studied it. First, you want to make good music and good poetry. I mean, first and foremost, it’s got to fly on its own as art, and that’s really what I concentrate on when I’m in the studio, that’s what I concentrate on when I’m writing. There’s a cathartic, artistic process in the writing. You can’t come at it going, ‘Now I’m going to write a song about this,’ and sit down and just churn it out. You have to get into a very creative process with it, and really treat it as art first. And that’s abstract, but that is the process for me. It’s very abstract. It’s got to resonate with some sense of emotional catharsis in a way—so in other words, I’ve got to personalize it.”

You seem to be one of those songwriters who thinks that music has the power to change minds. Is that so?

“I think it has the power to make a person feel safe enough to consider other ways of looking at things.”

“Dream Lover” is about the damage inflicted by Internet porn. What inspired that song?

“Well, Robert Jensen, who is my partner, has written a book called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. It’s a great book, because this is a subject that the new feminists really don’t touch because they’ve pretty much sanctioned the sex trade industry as being a woman’s choice. But after having really studied this issue, I really see Internet porn as being a huge and powerful bastion of patriarchy that is being allowed to grow at a phenomenal speed and really do treacherous, dangerous work in terms of the social conscience, and the cultural underpinnings of our society. Because, really, what we’re looking at is not the porn that maybe people from my generation remember as pretty much maybe straight or group sex or something—this is violent, degrading, abhorrent treatment of women. And it’s only getting worse, this gonzo porn—it’s like an addiction and it only gets worse.

“And I think it needs to be marked not as a moral issue against these women who are choosing this. What we’re seeing is that these people are suffering. These women are suffering, and they have suffered probably their whole lives. Ninety percent of them were abused as children—I mean, even if a porn queen is telling you this is what she’s chosen to do with her life, you have to really ask yourself, is this a profession that you would want your child to aspire to? I think society has to look at this industry—a huge industry run by men—and ask ourselves the tough questions. And I think it’s really a lot on the men: Is this what I want intimacy to look like?

“I think these are ethical questions we need to be asking ourselves, not hitting yourself over the head with ‘You’re going to go to hell.’"

You’re appearing with Jensen at a few events around the country that are a fusion of music and literature. How are these events structured?

“We’re just starting to experiment with this. Right now I do a few songs, he speaks; I do a few more songs, he speaks: We take turns.”

And you’re tying some of your songs to the things he’s speaking about, or at least loosely?

“Yeah, loosely. I think in the case of a bookstore, where we’re doing this kind of thing, we can be closer to the subjects. Because when I do a show, the issue stuff is very hidden inside a playful night of a broad expanse of topics and music.”

And these events put them more at the fore.

“They really do. People know what they’re coming to hear, and in a lot of ways I’m setting up Robert. He’s such an eloquent speaker, though I don’t think he would agree with that assessment. The songs are kind of a way to get yourself into the emotional space, and then he gets into more specific analysis.”

“Beautiful World” is a very impressionistic, unconventional song, kind of unlike anything you’ve done. It’s almost a meditation. Were you consciously trying to step outside the verse-chorus-verse folk song structure when you wrote that?

“I was—and it’s natural for me to do that. I have stuck closer to the folk format for the last four or five records because I had been labeled as a new age artist years ago, and so I was very cautious. I wanted to really establish my honest roots as a folksinger, because that is really where I come from, and so I spent a lot of time building a foundation around a very simple, straightforward folk approach and production, as a writer and a producer.

“But this record I really felt that I just owed it to myself to just be a little bit more free-form, because I do write that way, especially on the keyboard. So it was kind of fun to just let it go.”

“Unsustainable” is another song that’s unconventional for you. It’s more like a jazz standard than a folk song.

“Mm-hmm. It was so fun to sing.”

“Wildewood Spring” is a more in the vein of a traditional sound. It almost sounds old-fashioned, if not for the lyrics about engines idling and other modern images.

“Yeah, it was kind of old-timey—kind of back hills, almost. And that was the point on that one, because it’s a song about a community, and I just wanted it to be sweet and almost corny. But then of course, it is with the backdrop that when you go into the springs in Austin, especially at 5 o’clock, you can hear the traffic moving, but you’re in this bucolic setting with these sacred springs, and you can see that just three minutes away is this whole other reality in the city. So it was just pitting that one image against the other.”

So Wildewood Spring is a spring right in Austin.

“Yes. Barton Spring pours right out of the ground, and it’s a huge pool that thousands of people can swim in at once.”

Are you already writing songs for your next album? Are you always writing?

“No, I don’t always write. I really have to screw my head on a little different when I’m writing. It used to be, when I was younger, I was able to kind of write songs on napkins as I went, but these days, touring is so grueling that I really just get into sort of a road warrior place, and it’s not as creative a place. It’s really much more about just keeping my body in shape and my voice intact, and getting enough sleep (laughs).”

Image courtesy of Red House Records.

Marnie Stern, the woman Pitchfork calls the “Sorceress of Shred,” has risen to prominence in part due to the fact that there just aren’t that many women doing what she does: frenetic, virtuosic electric guitar alongside high-strung vocals. This is bad news for gender parity in the world of Awesome Guitar Skillz, but good news for Stern, for she is truly one of a kind.

Since the release of her dizzyingly titled sophomore album This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, Stern has been garnering a lot of attention, receiving a benediction from Pitchfork, who also showcased her hilarious video “Ruler,” a workout/boxing montage a la Rocky. She also stopped by the University of Minnesota’s Radio K for an in-studio performance last week.

This Is It is definitely worth checking out, but might not be for everyone. Its instrumentation is loud and brittle, comprising Stern’s blistering fretwork and the unconventional percussive grammar of Zach Hill, the drummer for freak-prog outfit Hella. For guitar geeks with eclectic taste and a healthy sense of humor, however, Stern’s high-energy music, her playful videos, and her plans for a rock-festival kissing booth ($100 for “some tongue”) will be a revelation. 

Image courtesy of rephlektiv, licensed by Creative Commons.

In troubling economic times, arts funding is almost always put on the chopping block. But thanks to United States Artists (USA), an arts advocacy nonprofit, at least 50 lucky artists won’t be feeling the pinch this year.

The organization, which was founded only three years ago, just announced the winners of its 2008 fellowships, worth a sweet $50,000 to each recipient. The New York Times writes that in USA’s short history it has “won recognition as one of the few new sources of artists’ grants at a time when federal financing from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts has diminished,” particularly for individual artists.

This year’s fellows include architects, dancers, musicians, writers, visual artists, and craftsmen, among others. Here are just a few of the fellows that piqued my interest:

Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, an Alaskan filmmaker whose short film Sikumi, or On the Ice, about an Inuit hunter who witnesses a murder, is the first film made entirely in the Inupiaq language. “That was really important to me,” MacLean told the Anchorage Daily News. “Hearing Inupiaq in film and hopefully TV someday, as well, will help us re-teach ourselves the language and preserve it.”

Sweetgrass basket weaver Mary Jackson, whose craft is “the oldest art form of African origin in the United States,” according to USA.

Julie Bargmann, a landscape architect from Virginia who specializes in making Superfund and other nasty, toxic sites both beautiful and healthy again. Archinect writes that Bargmann “works to transform the waste produced by a century of manufacturing and consumption into something culturally and ecologically productive.”

Photo: Vase with Handle, 1998, sweetgrass, pine needles, and palmetto, 19" x 15". Photo courtesy of Mary Jackson.

Did hip-hop play a big role in the ascendance of Barack Obama?

Absolutely, hip-hop author Jeff Chang told Eli Lake of the New York Sun on Bloggingheads.tv. It was still before the election—October 29—but Chang already saw change afoot.

“Potentially what [an Obama victory] could mean is the beginning of the undoing of about 40, 44 years of really nasty racialized politics in the U.S.,” he said. “And I think it is in large part due to hip-hop, actually. Hip-hop, in a lot of ways, culturally prepared the way for the U.S. to be able to seriously look at a young, biracial candidate for the highest office in the land.”

It’s a point Chang makes at greater length in the cover story “The Tipping Point” in the November Vibe (excerpt available online).

And it’s one made much more concisely by British hip-hop star Dizzee Rascal in a post-election interview with the BBC. “I don’t think [Obama] could have won it without hip-hop,” Rascal told anchor Jeremy Paxman. “Hip-hop is what encouraged the youth to get involved.”

Rascal also told Paxman Britain could one day follow the U.S.’s example and elect a black leader.

“I think a black man, purple man, Martian man could run the country. Whatever, mon. As long as he does right by the people.”

New York-based photographer Tim Barber curates a stunning collection of art books at TV Books, a bold new on-demand publishing project that hints toward a sturdier future for print publishing—and art, for that matter. Barber, a New York-based photographer, designs the books, advertises them on the site, and prints copies via the self-publishing site Lulu as orders come in. About a week later, voila! The book shows up at your door. And art consumers know exactly what they’re getting: For each book on the site, there’s a super-short video in which someone’s hands (often Barber’s) flip through the monograph page by page.

Barber’s ingenious project eliminates the huge costs typically involved in print publishing: printing presses, distribution, storage space for finished copies, ink and paper (which are especially pricey for high-end art books). He’s just giving artsy types exactly what they want, when they want it.

It’s as easy to lose hours of your day poking around the TV Books site, which currently exhibits 18 books, as it is to lose them at Tinyvices, the online art gallery Barber has run since 2005. The TV Books project is a natural extension of Tinyvices, he says: “I wanted to take that project and make something tangible, and I’ve always loved making books.” He’s also working with the nonprofit arts foundation Aperture, which will publish a series of monographs from Tinyvices photographers.

From the first words out of his mouth—“I don’t really like recordings, you know”—veteran producer T Bone Burnett is a font of eccentric studio wisdom in a rambling interview with Tape Op (article not available online), which calls itself “the creative music recording magazine.” As the mastermind behind one of last year’s unexpectedly great albums, Raising Sand by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, as well as many other first-rate recordings, Burnett has the studio cred to back up his sometimes surprising statements and old-school ways. Here are some of the interview's highlights:

Following up on his opening statement, he explains, “I love recording but I don’t really love recordings. I hardly ever say, ‘Wow! That’s a great recording.’ I say, ‘That’s an incredible song or an incredible piece of music.' ”

“I don’t particularly like processing. What I really like is hearing … a group of musicians playing in a room. … I love the sound of an instrument bouncing off a wall and into a room when you hear that pure, deep sound.”

“I never tell anybody what to play. … Usually the first thing a musician plays is the best thing he’s going to come up with. … I take what they give me and I’m very grateful for it.”

“Everyone [in my studio] knows that tape is rolling all the time. There’s no reason not to record.”

“We’ve developed a system for releasing records called CODE. It’s a system for the production, manufacture, and distribution of records in this age. … We’re gonna offer records in three forms: high-resolution vinyl … high-res digital discs … and high-res files. If you buy any one of those three, we’ll just give you anything else that you want.”

“I don’t blame people for not buying CDs anymore because they’re not as valuable as records were … We’re in a position now where, if you go to a show and hear a band and you buy the CD or MP3—it’s like going to a museum, seeing a painting and then somebody takes a photograph of the painting and then somebody takes a Polaroid of that at then somebody’s trying to sell it to you.”

Stories in the Los Angeles Times and Wired go into more detail about Burnett's CODE music format. "Our aim is to democratize high-fidelity," he tells the Times.

Image courtesy of  Tboneburnett.com . 

Jillian Tamaki, a Brooklyn-based illustrator and art instructor, recently posted an elegant essay on her personal creative process, explaining step by step how she creates her work and offering advice to those who hope to be effective artists.

Step One, the most important, is "Be interested." Everyone, artists and appreciators alike, should be aware of the aesthetic qualities of the world around you and also of the world that came before. "You might be surprised to learn that your favourite artist is really a knockoff of someone from 100 years ago."

The essay is an excellent insight into not only the creative process of an artist, but also the process behind appreciating art and creativity. Her advice boils down to one straightforward concept: "The viewer should be charmed, intrigued, empathetic, repulsed, provoked. SOMETHING. They should be touched enough to want to cut the illustration out of the magazine." It really is as simple as that.

(Thanks, Drawn!)

Image courtesy of  lumaxart , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Kate Bornstein didn’t go through with her sex change operation with the intention of tackling gender theory.  “No, I went through my gender change with the intention of being pretty,” the artist and author said at a performance last year at Virginia Commonwealth University. “I never set out to deconstruct a gender binary. I didn’t have a clue of what that is. I just wanted to be a pretty girl.”

But 22 years after going under the knife, Bornstein has four books, countless performances, an entire system of postmodern gender theory, and a new coalition of sex positivity to show for her work, as highlighted in the Summer/Fall issue of Shameless.

Bornstein’s performances focus heavily on pleasure and joy, and avoid excluding those of us who might not relate too closely to a “transsexual polyamorous sadomasochistic dyke pornographer,” as she calls herself. Though her entire audience isn't always queer, Bornstein acknowledges everyone's identity despair in her perfomances and books, most notably in Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws, now in its third printing.

The article’s author and Shameless editor Megan Griffith-Greene tames the tone of Bornstein’s lectures for the magazine aimed at teenage girls, and focuses mostly on the artist’s credo: “Don’t be mean.”

“The world needs more kind people in it, no matter who or what they do,” Bornstein writes on her blog. “The world is healthier because of its outsiders and outlaws and freaks and queers and sinners. I fall neatly into all those categories.”

Shameless took a chance in celebrating such a subversive figure among essays about summer camp and female inventors, but it’s a positive sign that the indie publication is filling a much-needed niche, and that Bornstein’s refuse-to-be-silent words are being heard.

“I’m giving myself permission to feel sexy,” Bornstein said at the VCU performance. “and that’s making life a whole lot more worth living for me right now. It’s giving me some time for myself that’s not all about politics and art. It’s just about joy. So do you feel sexy?”

Image courtesy of Kate Bornstein.

Until recently, the Puerto Rican dancehall music reggaeton was better known for its sexualized dance moves than political messaging. That changed when musician Daddy Yankee, complete with signature sunglasses, stood proudly on stage with John McCain, talked about immigration policy, and endorsed the Arizona senator for president.

Now, reggaetoneros like Daddy Yankee have taken center stage in the 2008 election, Marisol LeBrón writes for NACLA. Barack Obama’s campaign quickly garnered endorsements from other prominent reggaeton artists including Don Omar, Julio Voltio and Puerto Rican-American rapper Fat Joe. The International Herald Tribune reports that Daddy Yankee turned to more local politics, moderating a televised gubernatorial debate on the island that was designed to attract young voters. 

Unhappy that reggaetoneros “are being used in an effort to attract youth to a political system that systematically ignores their concerns,” NACLA reports that protesters showed up at Daddy Yankee’s moderated debate, burning his albums in defiance. One artist Sietenueve released a scathing single called “Quedate Callao” (“Shut Up”) insulting Daddy Yankee for his political ignorance (video available below).

The problem wasn’t that reggaetoneros were engaging in politics. According to NACLA, Daddy Yankee’s political endorsements and debate moderating “threatened to turn reggaetón into a hollow signifier, separating it from its radical and subversive potential.”

Feeling discouraged by the nasty partisan attacks of the presidential campaign? Overwhelmed and exhausted by politics in general? An antidote awaits in the form of Callie Shell’s photo essays.

Shell’s stunning series of photographs for Time magazine, following Barack Obama on the campaign trail from October 2006 to the present, have been circulating in the mainstream media for a while now. But they are worth all that attention—in fact, they deserve several thorough viewings, for like a good book upon a second reading, they reveal new narratives and imagery with each look.

Despite Obama’s ubiquitous mediagenic charisma, not many photos or videos have succeeded in portraying him as an actual human being. (This is probably due in part to the messianic aura bestowed upon him by acolytes and detractors alike.) By gaining unprecedented access to the candidate over two long years, Shell captured Obama when no one else did—in the interstitial moments between photo ops. This is how she grants us rare glimpses of the candidate napping, eating an ice cream cone, or regrouping with his family just like any other father.

We get a glimpse of Obama’s frugality—not a quality often associated with politicians, especially former lawyers—in the worn soles of his shoes as he puts his feet up on a table. We get a shot of him at an Illinois rest stop in the early days of his campaign—striking for its juxtaposition of an extraordinary figure against a banal tableau. There are also new takes on the assured, tenacious candidate we know: his playful competitiveness as he hangs from a pull-up bar in a gymnasium, or the satisfied smile on his face just before taking the stage in Denver to accept his party’s nomination.

Even more poignant, however, are Shell’s images of the people who gather at Obama’s rallies. These are reaction shots in the purest sense: In one shot, tears streak the faces of two teenage girls in a South Carolina crowd. In another, a pair of young African-American boys wait in line to meet Obama. (Their grandmother told Shell, “Our young men have waited a long time to have someone to look up to, to make them believe Dr. King’s words can be true for them.”)

The campaign’s early days are marked by shots of Iowans mingling with Obama in diners and barns, while its final phases produce images of the man standing before staggering seas of people in Berlin and Denver.

Digital Journalist collects the images in chronological order, from the Illinois rest stop to the end of the DNC. The arrangement provides an uplifting, dignified chronicle of an election season that has too often been anything but.

Back in July, I blogged about Phil Toledano’s elegant visual profiles of phone-sex workers. Now, he’s moved on to foreign policy, asking the simple but odd question: “If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?” 

Using what he calls the “vernacular of retail,” Toledano takes us on a surreal commercial tour of the last eight years—a trip well worth taking on the eve of the election.

“We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience,” Toledano writes. “What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?”

The fantasy store’s stock includes the requisite T-shirts (“I Was Rendered to a Secret Prison and All I Got Was this Lousy T-Shirt” and “I (Heart) Unilateral Preemptive Strikes”) and some chocolates, along with an inflatable Guantanamo Bay bouncy prison cell and an Abu Ghraib bobble head, which Toledano tells me he had to have fabricated in China since no one stateside would make it.

Toledano’s installation is being shown today at Meet in New York (101 Crosby Street). If you can’t make it, take a virtual tour here.

Images courtesy of  Phil Toledano . 

For film buffs dying to see a new documentary but short on change, the Canadian magazine Broken Pencil offers a fun little three-point plan for stealthily infiltrating film festivals in its Summer How-To Issue.

Fiona Clarke suggests that smaller film fests are more opportune for creating mock passes, but “don’t put yourself too high on the totem pole, someone might actually ask you a question.” She says the trick is to create an identity that is “simultaneously vague and with a hint of hyperbole to guarantee confused acceptance.”

If you can’t gain access with your “official pass,” why not try a disguise? Clarke suggests transforming into a tradesperson:

If you can pass as an electrician or plumber, use this. Get a small toolbox or equipment bag, look haggard and confused at the long line of people waiting at the theatre and walk up to the front. Dismissively inform the FOH manager of a “building issue” that the theatre management has called you in about and you were told you should be let through.

Plan B: You can be a courier that has “an urgent delivery of ‘paper-tape.’”

Clarke warns that building infiltration is highly tricky, but “most festivals in big cities rely on old, large movie houses for their screenings. These old theatres contain all manner of surprise entrances and hidden areas.” For additional tips, crack open a copy of All Access Areas, a book by the creator of Infiltration, a zine about “going places that you’re not supposed to go.”

But getting caught will come with a price (and it might be more than a festival ticket), so Clarke advises that it’s probably best to pony up for a ticket or else volunteer. We agree. While events like Sundance can spare a few lost dollars, your local film fest probably can’t.

For 13 years and 75 issues, No Depression was a beloved chronicler of the alt-country music world. In February of this year, the magazine’s publishers sadly announced they were halting production, citing insufficient ad revenue, a music industry in transition, and the troubled economy.

“Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish,” publishers Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock and Kyla Fairchild wrote in the magazine’s March-April issue.

Just eight months later, Alden and Blackstock provide this addendum: “As it turned out, the angels who interceded to preserve No Depression were mostly well-known to us. Some who responded were rank strangers; all were generous and kind.” So begins issue #76 of the resurrected magazine, in the form of a lavish, 145-page, ad-free paperback—or, in the words of its cover copy, “bookazine (whatever that is).”

Published by the University of Texas Press and hitting stands this week, the theme of Issue #76 is “The Next Generation,” its cover graced by Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet and its profiles mostly devoted to emerging artists like the Infamous Stringdusters, Bowerbirds, and Samantha Crain. Tucked in the back of the issue is a feature on Hanson—yes, that Hanson.

No Depression’s online organ—currently offline, but set to relaunch soon—will continue with news and reviews, along with a near-complete archive of back issues. The bookazine, published semiannually, will contain less time-sensitive content.

In a troubled publishing industry, No Depression’s unique reincarnation might provide a model for other endangered or extinct publications—the bookazine represents one altered, but not necessarily diminished, manifestation of the independent magazine in a changing media landscape.

Writing for the new issue of make/shift (article not available online), Keidra Chaney profiles the welfareQUEENS, a performance art group that aims to “make poor women of color visible and vocal in the U.S. dialogue on poverty,” adding their stories and experiences to the opinions of policy makers and “experts” who have rarely (if ever) experienced poverty themselves. (The welfareQUEENS’ name, of course, is a reclamation of the hideous term popularized by Ronald Reagan during his first presidential campaign.) Chaney writes:

At a time when the gap between the wealthy and the poor seems insurmountable, poverty remains misrepresented in both mainstream and independent media. Poor people, often demonized as criminals or infantilized as charity cases, are rendered silent. The voice of experience is quieted in favor of the voice of so-called expertise. Academic scholars, social workers, and pundits are allowed to represent the poor in the media while those who actually experience poverty daily go unquoted.

Back in May, I pointed to an excellent FAIR study that backs up this argument. In fact, the study notes, “If you’re poor and want to get on the nightly news, it helps to be either elderly or in the armed forces.”

The welfareQUEENS are neither, so they communicate their stories another way: Last year, the group wrote a play based on their experiences with poverty, then performed it at the U.S. Social Forum and at San Francisco’s Brava Theater.

Chronologically structured around the experiences of three generations of women, the play looks at the herstory of the welfare system. The performers speak of the lives of their grandmothers and mothers, who experienced domestic abuse, discrimination as single parents and women of color, and separation from their families through domestic work.

The Bay Area–based welfareQUEENS are part of the POOR News Network, a grassroots media organization that includes the online POOR Magazine and tons of other poverty-related projects.

For more alt-press dispatches from Blog Action Day, click here .

What has happened to great rock concert photography? Is it part of a bygone era, or has the music industry forgone photographers due to control issues? A mix of both, says Mark Paytress in Creative Review’s article "Three Songs and Yer Out! The Dying Art of Gig Photography" (reprinted from a recent issue of M magazine). The "three songs" refers to an industry-wide guideline that photographers are allowed access to the artists only for the first three songs of a performance. The practice started as a courtesy to performers to keep distracting flash bulbs to a minimum. But then it worked its way around the scene and became the rule at most venues. Artists and their management blame the venues for enforcing the rule, while the venues insist they're just doing what they're told by the management.

Blame game aside, it's difficult to capture great images when you know you're racing against the clock. Paytress points out that some of the greatest photos of rock 'n' roll came from the latter part of the set. For example, Pennie Smith snapped Paul Simonon of the Clash smashing his bass at a show in an image that would later be used as the cover for their classic album London Calling.

The three-song rule is a symptom rather than the illness. For the past decade or so, musicians have increasingly gone from being entertainers to being corporations. Case in point: Both Madonna and Jay-Z left their longtime labels to sign with concert promoter Live Nation. The PR departments of these corporations try to control images of their clients all costs, shunning the raw candid shot for staged, vetted images. Add the limited opportunities to the ever-shrinking medium of music imagery (the evolution from LP to CD and CD to digital thumbnail image), and you can see why Paytress and many photogs call concert photography a dying art.

All that's really left for rock photography are studio shoots, where the photographer and the artists can explore their creativity, albeit without the delicious spontaneity of a live show. But with the music industry continuing on a downward spiral, who knows how far budgets for those shoots will stretch.

Although the outlook is bleak, there are still great photos out there. You can find some of them at: Rock Archive ( rockarchive.com ), Redferns Music Picture Library ( redferns.com ), Rex Features ( rexfeatures.com ), Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive ( pymca-library.com ), and Steve Gullick ( gullickphoto.com ).

Image courtesy of flashbacks.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

There’s a whole lot of Obama-wear out there, from the streets of New Jersey to the runways of Paris, but the printed Ts and onesies made by Piggyback-Kittycat are especially fetching designs that ought to do well with the baby-mama set. With messages like “Baby Needs a Change” and “My Mama’s for Obama” for the kids and “Go Bama” and “Obama’08” for mothers, they take equal inspiration from children’s wooden blocks and contemporary design. Babies can’t vote, but the persuasive power of cuteness plus progressive advocacy shouldn’t be discounted when undecided grandparents (pdf) come for a visit. Piggyback-Kittycat “head hog” Ruth Weleczki says she custom-designed a shirt for one customer that targets an older demographic: It reads “Audiologists for Obama.”

Image courtesy of Piggyback-Kittycat.

Dorothy Polley, New York expat and owner of Dorothy’s Gallery in Paris, has commissioned 30 artists to create paintings, sketches, videos, and other media inspired by Barack Obama. The artists are mostly French, with a few notable Americans (like cartoonist Edward Koren) featured as well.

Inspired by the Manifest Hope gallery in Denver, Polley organized the show in less than a month, paying the artists out of her own pocket. In addition to the art, Polley has organized several events designed to raise awareness and funds for Obama’s campaign like a fundraiser cocktail party, a roundtable discussion with members of Democrats Abroad, and an evening of music conceived with Obama in mind.

The show runs from October 3 to November 17, with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of works going to the Obama campaign. It’s unclear if Obama actually needs more money, but with so much art, music, fashion, and even poetry coming out of the presidential race, the national trend of political creativity was bound to catch on overseas sooner or later.

Image by Cyril Anguelidis, courtesy of Dorothy Polley.

By the time Tina Fey emerged onto the cultural landscape in 2000 as an anchor on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, the Second City alum was already the show’s head writer, quietly shepherding the comedy institution into its late-'90s renaissance and noticeably improving its ratio of funny-to-bad sketches.

Her star continued to rise with the razor-sharp satirical sitcom 30 Rock, which premiered in 2006 and solidified her status as the embodiment of geek chic in an entertainment climate where brainy, funny women are tragically undervalued. Fey has carved out a career in which she accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of injecting savvy cultural and political commentary into mass entertainment, with her cerebral, rapid-fire monologues on “Update” and then with the surprisingly subversive 30 Rock.

But no one could have predicted Fey’s next act until August 29 of this year, when John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. The world pounced on the striking similarity between Fey and the VP candidate, and Fey didn’t disappoint. She has returned to Saturday Night Live to lampoon the candidate’s disastrous interviews with Katie Couric and her debate against Joe Biden, and delivered a speech with Hillary Clinton as played by longtime collaborator Amy Poehler. For her part, Palin has joked about honing her own Tina Fey impression, telling reporters she dressed as Fey for Halloween. (When? Last year?)

This week, Fey signed a multimillion-dollar book deal for a collection of humorous essays in the vein of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron. She appears undaunted by relative missteps like the box-office flop Baby Mama or her shilling for American Express, and now wields enormous cultural influence—as writer, performer, and human barometer of that uniquely American nexus of politics and entertainment.

Fey doesn’t necessarily relish her newfound cultural clout, however. As successful as her Sarah Palin gig has been, Fey hopes it doesn’t last long: “I want to be done playing this lady November 5,” she said backstage at this year’s Emmys. “So if anyone could help me be done playing this lady November 5, that would be good for me.”

We’ll do our best, Tina.

Image by David Shankbone, licensed by Creative Commons.

In Jamaica, “where music saturates everything like fluoride in tap water, the water these days has a new bitterness to it,” Edwin “Stats” Houghton writes for the Fader. That bitterness is embodied in the musician Busy Signal, part of a wave of Jamaican dancehall that has garnered worldwide attention, but has been unable to transcend the feuds endemic in the lyrics and origins of the music.

A general angst permeates the Jamaican dancehall scene, according to Houghton, with feuds breaking out between musicians. And some of the fights have translated into real violence in the streets. Many believe the petty fights between the stars of Jamaican dancehall have held the music back from achieving its full potential. An industry professional confided in Houghton, off the record, that the music has, “Too much war and bun chi-chi man. Nobody outside Jamaica wan hear that!”

Busy Signal began at the center of the musical feuds, trading violent lyrics and allegedly pulling a knife on stage in 2006. He then took a hiatus from the scene in a an attempt to transcend the fights between his fellow Jamaican musicians. His new music still addresses violent themes, but he now emphasizes a unity among his fellow dancehall luminaries, choosing instead to focus on the music. He told Houghton:

Sundays to Sundays, music. By the sweat of your brow, you eat. Me wan build a museum, an me nuh want no museum built after me dead. We wan do these things before man, so if death come, whatever. Keep Drilling.

The problem, Houghton writes, is that “His voice has become so synonymous with the dark pulse of runnings in Kingston that it seems legitimate to wonder if he is part of the curse or the disease.”

Watch a video of Busy Signal’s song Nah Go a Jail Again  below:

Nah Go A Jail Again

American politics crept its way into Paris Fashion Week, where models lankier than Obama himself strutted down runways in attire inspired by the presidential contender. Designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac debuted a loud yellow, black, and white dress with a headshot of Obama printed on the front and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words, “I have a dream today,” on the back. The model sporting the dress wore fingerless gloves reading “yes” on one hand and “no” on the other. Obama also captured the creative imaginations of Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind Rodarte, who sent a simple knit dress with “Obama” written boldly across the chest down the runway as part of a tribute show to Sonia Rykiel.

But the Democrat isn’t the only one making a mark on the design and retail worlds. Mother Jones reports the release of the Sarah-Cuda, a pink camouflage crossbow named after Sarah Palin and touted by the retailer as a “tribute to women like Sarah Palin who bear the responsibility of family and work while strengthening the moral fiber of society.”

The fourth most popular film in America right now isn’t the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. And it’s not Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s Kirk Cameron’s new Christian film Fireproof. Made by a cast and crew of 1,200 volunteers, the Catholic News Agency reports that the film has grossed $6,804,764. That’s something of a miracle, according to the Guardian, considering the film cost just $500,000 to make.

Cameron, best known as Mike Seaver on the TV show Growing Pains and co-star of the Way of the Master anti-evolution DVDs, stars in Fireproof as a fireman who contemplates, and later rejects, divorce. In the film, Scott Tobias writes for the Onion AV Club, “Cameron acts like a childish jerk, even in the reconciliation phase, and the underlying reason is that he—and the movie—hates women.”

Image by Allan Light, licensed under Creative Commons.

Charlie Haden , a legend of American jazz music, has been detained in Portugal, followed by the FBI in Manhattan, and embraced as a hero by a South African parliamentarian who had been jailed during apartheid. All of this for his legacy of protest songs without words.

The bassist will bring his decades-old and ever-changing Liberation Music Orchestra to New York City's Blue Note jazz club in early November, the same week Americans vote for George W. Bush’s successor. At a show in Minneapolis last week, the longtime radical told audience members he’s sure the results will warrant celebration.

“He feels strongly that we're at a critical moment here,” says Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center and the person responsible for bringing Haden to Minneapolis. “He's completely convinced that the McCain camp represents a continuation of the Bush policies that have been an utter catastrophe for the United States and the world at large.”

Haden, whose contribution to jazz can be traced back to his bass playing on three seminal records by saxophonist Ornette Coleman, convenes his Liberation Music Orchestra only during Republican administrations as a soundtrack of resistance. The group's self-titled 1969 debut was a reaction to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War his administration inherited. Ballad of the Fallen, released in 1982, was a statement against Reagan's policies in Latin America. George H.W. Bush was president when Dream Catchers was pressed in 1990; a comment on the tragedies and struggles of Latin America (again) and South Africa.

The militarism of George W. Bush inspired the Liberation Orchestra's 2005 release, Not in Our Name. Haden chose the title while touring through Europe in the early stages of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “We were walking down streets in different cities, and we would see unfurled from balconies of the apartment houses: 'Not In Our Name' … the people in Europe really cared … that stuck with me,” he recalled in a 2006 interview.

“Touring jazz musicians,” Bither says, “have a unique vantage point on how America is viewed in the world.”

In Minneapolis last week, Haden and his 11-member orchestra responded to what America has become by reclaiming it. A rambling medley anchored in “America the Beautiful” was equal parts somber, sentimental, joyful, and subversively discordant—a formula the group has held to since its inception.

Traditionally, the Liberation Music Orchestra—aided by brilliant pianist and composer Carla Bley, Haden's collaborator since 1968—has appropriated songs of liberation and protest mostly from other nations. On Not in Our Name, Haden decided to play music only by American composers—his own form of patriotism. “I wanted to do 'America the Beautiful,'” he said in an interview shortly after the album's release, “to show that there's a lot of work that needs to be done in this country.”

Here's a video of Haden and Bley and the Liberation Music Orchestra performing in 2003—convened in response to the prospect of a second term for George W. Bush.

Image by Thomas Dorn, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

The director of the indie film festival favorite Ballast is taking the feature to American audiences his own way: city by city, like a rock and roll group on the road: “I’m setting up a tour, like a band, traveling with the film for single screenings, as many as 70 over the next year,” Lance Hammer tells Rob Nelson in Film Comment (full interview available online).

In January, Hammer was the toast of Sundance for Ballast, a film set in the Mississippi Delta that used nonprofessional actors and a distinctly non-Hollywood style of pacing and storytelling. Film critic and Utne Reader contributor Anthony Kaufman, in his review for IndieWire, called the drama “tough” but “far from impenetrable,” “a crystal clear humanist vision of broken-down people who find a semblance of stability in each other.”

This summer, Hammer surprised the indie film world by backing out of a Ballast distribution deal with IFC Films, a development that Kaufman wrote about for IndieWire.

Now Hammer tells Film Comment that part of his motivation was to bring the movie to the Southern black audience—people like those whom the movie portrays.

“The people at IFC are the greatest people, really. They wanted to release the movie in the South, but they really didn’t know how to do it. And I thought that to not show the film to African-American audiences would border on racism. IFC is certainly not racist in any way, but they didn’t think the movie was going to make any money in the South. And they’re a company that has to make money in order to survive. The only way to attack something like that is to be in a position to say, ‘Well, I guess I don’t have to make money.’ I think it’s really important. And maybe it is possible for filmmakers to make that kind of approach work now that the box office has become so poor for small films in conventional release.”

Hammer points that there are audiences “rabid for film” at offbeat venues like rep theaters, film societies, museums, and film schools. “They come in droves to a special event because people trust the curators in those places. … For one screening, you can get as much money as you could in an entire week in a city like Seattle. More important, I feel like I’m accessing the core audience in a way that wasn’t possible with a distributor.”

Image by Lol Crawley, courtesy of  Ballast LLC . 

Good magazine is asking its readers to join the ranks of artistic politicos and get creative for the cause. Reviving a project the magazine started for the 2006 midterm elections, Good is soliciting original bumper sticker designs incorporating the word “vote.” Why bumper stickers? “From 'My child is an honor student' to 'Support our troops,' Americans have been using their cars to get messages out for a long time,” writes Good. “And if you’ve ever been stuck in traffic, you’ve had time to contemplate quite a few messages being broadcast from the SUV in front of you. This project is simple: a bumper sticker. The message is simpler: vote.”

Here’s a sampling of submissions from 2006 and the current project:

—Amy Martin, 2008

—Gary Holmes, 2008

—not attributed, 2006

—Steven Blumenthal, 2006

—Gabriel Avenna, 2006

Images courtesy of Good.

The American Society of Magazine Editors has announced the finalists for its third annual “Best Covers” competition. The covers are indeed gorgeous, but the judging smacks of bias. Even though the organization’s website says that entries are considered “based on excellence in design/creativity, not on circulation figures,” the nominees are almost exclusively high-circulation and fairly New York-heavy. (The New Yorker is nominated four times, New York magazine six.) It prompts the question: Can they really call it a “Best of” competition when only a small slice of what’s out there is represented? Or are high-profile magazines the only ones with the artistic talent that makes the grade? The winners of the eight categories will be announced Monday, October 6.

Thanks, Quipsologies.

For nearly ten years, Jennifer Ilse and Paul Herwig have been staging productions in their own backyard—literally. The Off-Leash Area Contemporary Performance Works is headquartered in the couple’s garage, which they converted into a 38-seat theater.

But there’s nothing amateurish about the company’s production values, and with more than a dozen original productions to their name featuring luminaries of the Twin Cities theater scene, Ilse and Herwig are garnering acclaim for their performances and set designs.

The garage shows are still intimate, informal affairs: “While we have the full support of our neighbors, to minimize neighborhood disturbance, attendance to events at Our Garage is by reservation only,” the Off-Leash Area website reads. “After each performance the audience is invited to Our Backyard to visit with their fellow patrons and the artists for an evening by the fire pit and for refreshments.”

I suppose it’s this sort of ingenuity that has allowed the Twin Cities to boast more theater seats per capita than any American city outside New York.

The Jury opens next month in the Off-Leash garage; check the website for showtimes.

Image by dmealiffe, licensed by Creative Commons.

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show that premiered last month at the Bumbershoot music and arts festival is an enlightening mashup of graphic design sensibilities in which Western motifs and techniques meet Persian script, and the hipster rock world intersects with ancient Middle Eastern culture. The show’s approach is to pair up posters, one by a U.S. artist alongside one by an Iranian, based on their styles and imagery.

Although the Iranian posters are not explicitly political, their design choices are more loaded with meaning than meets the Westerners’ eye. “In Iran, graphic design is viewed by many as a creation of the West and is met with skepticism,” Mark Baumgarten writes in Seattle Sound (article not available online). The use of Persian script itself is guided by cultural strictures.

“Graphic designers in Tehran are expected to treat it with a respect that does not allow for using the language’s characters creatively,” he writes. “Still some artists are rebelling against that orthodoxy.” One is Shahrzad Changalvaee, whose work (above) is paired with a Spoon poster by Jeff Kleinsmith in the show, which is being billed as the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian posters in the United States.

Curator Daniel R. Smith, who traveled to Tehran to find poster artists, tells Seattle Sound the search was a challenge—he had to escape his “tour guide” minders to do it—but that state censorship was more a chilling effect than a death-sentence scenario.

“There’s just this general sense of what you probably shouldn’t be doing in terms of imagery and definitely in terms of political stuff and poster design,” he says. “But what I also hear is that whatever you want to do in private is not a problem. If you want to have a private exhibition of nudes, you can have it in your own house.”

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show will be on exhibit through October 15 at Design Commission in Seattle. Next year it will travel to Tehran, where its organizers aim to share it with Iranian designers who are often prohibited from visiting the United States.

Images of posters by Jeff Kleinsmith and Shahrzad Changalvaee courtesy of the  Seattle-Tehran Poster Show . 

“I wasn’t sure for a minute if this show was going to happen tonight,” singer Zach de la Rocha told the frenzied crowd of Rage Against the Machine fans Wednesday night at Target Center. The people roared. Only a day before, the police had shut down the Ripple Effect Festival at the Minnesota State Capitol just as de la Rocha and his bandmates were arriving to make an all-but-surprise performance.

The resulting fracas put a heady spotlight on Wednesday night’s show—as if Rage weren’t already sufficiently politically charged. Following 9/11, Clear Channel banned every one of the rap-metal band’s numbers on the notorious list of “songs with questionable lyrics.” In 2000, the evening of a Rage performance across from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles ended in violent protesters/law enforcement conflict, soon after which the band split up—remaining disbanded for six-and-a-half years.

Last night, no rust was apparent. Alert sirens wailing, Rage took the stage in darkness. Fans screamed. Floodlights snapped on. Four figures stood in orange jumpsuits, black hoods over their heads. Even as the bass pounded, the sight of those iconic garments was chilling. Rage played a fever-pitched “Bomb Track” clad in that attire, recognizable only via de la Rocha’s inimitable voice and Tom Morello’s unmistakable finesse with the guitar.

Bassist Tim Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello jam during “Bomb Track.”

After the first number, Rage executed a quick-change off stage, re-emerging in street gear and belting out “Testify” to an ecstatic audience—many of whom, doubtlessly, were seeing Rage for the first time, having either missed the boat or been too young in the ‘90s. At least, there has to be some explanation for the googly-eyed delight splashed across everyone’s faces. This wasn’t standard-issue rock star gawkerdom: It was as if Che Guevara himself had just burst out of Brad Wilk’s kick drum.

Rage cranked through an impressive set with seemingly boundless energy. (At one point I found myself wondering how any of the spry guys have knees left, after years of jumping, bouncing, stomping, and leaping. De la Rocha’s unrelenting vocal chords present an equally vivid mystery, although one perhaps enlightened by this detail: He sipped a mug of what looked to be hot tea between several songs.) Quite frankly, too, I’d be remiss if I didn’t harp on Morello’s fantastic guitar playing; his fingers looked like a piece of cloth fluttering in wind as he poured them over the frets.

At the end of the evening, after Rage closed with “Killing in the Name,” de la Rocha took the pitch down a notch, evenly entreating fans to demonstrate discipline when they momentarily flooded out into the riot-cop-lined streets of Minneapolis. It was a noble effort (and showed remarkable restraint) from the fiery frontman, although the message was somewhat diluted by his politically-stirring between-song commentary and a light display that read: RNC F*CK YOU. But his words clearly came from a place of genuine concern, and, really, there’s only so much you can do when you’re trying to convey nuanced approaches—such as “peaceful, but not passive”—to a stadium arena’s worth of people.

Which is why, almost inevitably, there were some people not content to leave it at that, and a portion of the crowd dispersing into First Avenue began a slow, somewhat disjointed protest that ended with 102 people being detained several blocks away for “blocking traffic.” Minneapolis law enforcement was clearly prepared for the worst: Riot-gear-clad officers were present on foot, bikes, and horseback, as well as in squad cars, motorcycles, and mini vans (plus a small vehicle that looked like offspring of a golf cart and a Hummer). Here are some photos from the post-Rage ruckus:

The aforementioned small vehicle, from which Minneapolis police chief Tim Dolan instructed the crowd—which was blocking the street—to disperse. The area was thick with curious onlookers, most of whom didn’t clear out, presumably because they didn’t consider themselves part of the protest action.

The Minnesota Peace Team, a squad of volunteers trained in de-escalation techniques put together especially for the RNC, was present, as were the Guardian Angels. The two Peace Team members pictured above successfully talked down a shirtless concert attendee, who stepped forward (alone) and danced ridiculously as the mounted police attempted to advance their line.

Eventually, a more organized group of people emerged, hoisting a banner made of four defaced American flags. A group of people collected behind the flag, which the bearers carried forward in a challenge to the police line.

Things seemed as though they would come to a head as the flag-bearers marched into a blockade on Seventh Street; all officers present, including bicycle and mounted police, pulled on their gas masks. If it was a scare tactic, it wasn’t apparently scary enough: The crowd of onlookers remained placidly stationed along the sidewalk. One gleeful fellow (was he protesting? gawking? did he even attend the show?) skipped past me and naively chipped: “We’re gonna get gassed! Something big is gonna happen now!”

When the police barricade dispersed, the protesters made an impromptu march down Seventh—where, eventually, police surrounded and detained them, a “tame” round-up, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  All but two individuals were given citations and released. “In a way, for most fans, it was the perfect end to a Rage concert: defiance of arbitrary authority without painful consequences, just enough real danger to get the juices going. (‘Fuck you, I will do what you tell me, but only after shouting at you for a while!’),” writes Peter Scholtes for the Minnesota Independent.

Images by Julie Hanus.

For more of Utne.com’s coverage of the Republican National Convention, click here.

Stepping into the Provention concert on Tuesday night at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, was literally a breath of fresh air. Clouds of dissipated tear gas hovered in the cool evening outside, and a din of antiwar chants, shouts, sirens, and police helicopters echoed through the downtown canyons as I arrived late, delayed by an encounter with several thousand riot police and protesters. Going through the lobby was like disappearing through the looking glass, and soon I found myself settled in a soft velvet chair, fully ensconced in the music of singer-songwriter Haley Bonar, the sound of conflict swept out of my mind by her acoustic guitar and plaintive voice. No longer in danger of being arrested, I was now being serenaded

While other RNC-related protest concerts this week Raged Against the Machine, staged a Coup, and hoisted the Anti-Flag, Provention was a more thoughtful and less in-your-face affair, meant not so much to fight the power as to create a sense of kinship amid chaos. Joe Spencer, the arts and cultural liaison for St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman who was instrumental in organizing the concert, said as much from the stage in between sets.

“I’m scared by the guys with the face shields,” he said, referring to the riot police, “and I’m scared by people who are picking up bricks from hundred-year-old buildings and throwing them through windows. So I’m conflicted, and when I feel conflicted I long for a strong sense of community.” Musician John Munson, who originally came up with the Provention idea, called the event “a tent of togetherness.”

Bonar, like most of the performers who followed her, chose songs that hewed roughly to the politely political theme. Introducing “Nobody’s Safe,” she noted that she marched in Monday’s antiwar protest but decried the rabble rousers who took things too far. Her reflective, folky songs were disarmingly honest, and when she said, “St. Paul is a great city,” it didn’t sound like an RNC welcoming slogan but a heartfelt sentiment. (Before I arrived, several acts, including Maria Isa, the New Standards, and Jeremy Messersmith, had already played.)

Next up were the Warblers, the duo of Chris Osgood and Dave Ahl, former members of Twin Cities proto-punks the Suicide Commandos, dressed like dude ranch guests and harmonizing on topical old-time ditties like “Everybody’s Going for the Money” and “Wild in the Streets.” All night long, novelty-style acts like this filled the between-set slots, giving the concert the air of a variety show.

The Warblers were followed by another harmonizing duo, the Twilight Hours, composed of Matt Wilson and John Munson, who played sweet and passionate modern pop that occasionally entered the rock and roll zone, as on Wilson’s sweeping “Descender.” Both former members of beloved Twin Cities band Trip Shakespeare, they still have a strong musical kinship and well-matched voices, with Munson holding down the low end and Wilson holding up the high with his still-boyish timbre. Their opening song, “These Dreams Are Killing Me,” and the Big Star classic “Ballad of El Goodo” were especially delectable. They were joined for a while by Matt’s brother, Dan Wilson, also a former Trip Shakespearean as well as a more recent bandmate of Munson in Semisonic.

Potent, literate rockers the Honeydogs next took the stage as a nine-piece and soon grew to 10, bringing an expansive, textured sound that recalled Elvis Costello’s bigger bands, complete with a three-piece horn section. Leader Adam Levy had a special stake in the concert, having stepped in to help an overwhelmed Munson organize the gig. He acquitted himself well as both concert promoter and bandleader—and as usual made a strong sartorial statement, rocking a pinstriped white suit with a red-bloomed boutonniere. “Truth Serum,” Levy’s plea to his soldier son with the line, “You’re too young to die,” was one of the evening’s most powerfully topical songs.

Dan Wilson next played a solo set, drawing on Semisonic material as well as tunes from his solo album, Free Life, and singing his Grammy-winning song written for the Dixie Chicks, “Easy Silence.” He described the Chicks as “bad-ass” for weathering the right-wing attacks on their infamous George Bush critique.

The final act, New York singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, apparently didn’t get the memo about rhetorical restraint, acerbically riffing on Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, Joe Lieberman and other ripe targets in song and speech. “She’s a zealot,” Levy noted as he introduced her, and this was not a complaint but a compliment. McKay’s smart wordplay and all-over-the-place sound made for a bracing conclusion to the concert despite a thinning crowd.

When I finally stepped back onto the streets well after midnight, it was quiet and still, with little sign of the night’s earlier chaos. It seemed that Provention, which was billed as “a concert for people, peace, and the planet,” had achieved a bit of good on all three fronts.

Image by Charles Robinson.

The words “music festival” invite rain, and Tuesday was no exception as Ripple Effect, a drizzly but celebratory arts and activism festival, took shape on the Minnesota State Capitol lawn, in jubilant defiance of the convention happening at the bottom of the hill.

The local jam band Wookiefoot was first, featuring the Orthodox Jewish rapper Matisyahu guesting on vocals. Until Tuesday I had been under the (grateful) impression that jam bands fell out of vogue when Phish broke up, but the fervent crowd emphatically proved me wrong, and I was suddenly surrounded by a magnitude of dreadlocks and hemp clothing I haven’t experienced since my college days.

 

During one break between songs, the lead singer addressed the Wookiefoot faithful thusly: “You have heeded the call … the call for all Jedi to galactivate!” Whatever language he was speaking, the audience took it to heart.

 

Still, my uninitiated tastes and the intermittent rain were not about to dampen the spirits of the festival participants. There were a number of tents offering political and spiritual shwag, and numerous artistic assemblages, such as this flower art that passerby were invited to help sculpt:

There was also an elegant and affecting memorial comprising some footwear of those killed in the Iraq war:

And not just fallen soldiers, but civilians too: 

All told, Ripple Effect seemed a tentative success. The crowd I observed was well short of the 7,000-10,000 people Substance had anticipated, but after I left things apparently gained momentum, as the crowd swelled and the Establishment crashed the party.

For more coverage of the event and links to featured artists, speakers, and groups, visit the Ripple Effect website.

Images courtesy of the author.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Republican National Convention, click here. 

Rage Against the Machine fans who flocked to the Ripple Effect festival at the Minnesota State Capitol on Tuesday didn’t get the free concert they were expecting, but they certainly got a show.  

Police shut down the fest before Rage took the stage, much to the dismay of fans, who responded by chanting “Let them play!” and “Free speech!” while pumping their fists in the air.

Not taking no for an answer, the band, led by Zach de la Rocha, descended into the crowd gathered on the Capitol lawn. After instructing fans to keep the peace, de la Rocha let lyrics fly into a megaphone and then led an excited pack chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” on a spontaneous march through St. Paul.

State troopers, riot police, and snipers flanked the crowd and were tight with information about why the concert was cut short. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports the performance was stopped because the band didn’t have a permit.

The scene promises energy will be high at Rage Against the Machine’s Wednesday show at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Republican National Convention, click here . 

Abandoned houses, churches, and stores can give strange and eerie looks into the past. They also provide opportunities for some great photography. The blog collective Web Urbanist has compiled links to flicker groups for photos of the world’s discarded places.

For a creepy look into a place of broken dreams, the creators of the website illicitohio photographed Mike Tyson’s abandoned mansion. In the pictures, zebra print carpets, over-grown landscaping, and shuttered windows tell a story of former opulence gone awry.

Image by  Jule Berlin , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Most of us think of postcards as the glossy tabloid of correspondence: pretty pictures, trivial statements, all easily forgotten. But California-based artist Julianna Parr had a different idea: Why not use the postcard as a legitimate artistic medium? Starting 10 years ago, she set out to draw or paint one work of postcard art each day. The result is Time Stamp: A Diary in Postcards, now at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's Advocate and Gochis Galleries. Parr’s postcards are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes abstract, but all take well to their tiny medium, where the confined space paradoxically makes them more expressive and accessible than would a bigger canvas of a similar work. According to the exhibit’s press release, Parr wanted not only to showcase her creations, but to remind the viewers that they could easily do the same thing and explore their own creativity. “One of the underlying themes of this show is that I did all of this, and you can too,” she says. The entire exhibit (over 1000 postcards) is also available to browse online, where you can search by keywords and order prints of your favorites.

(Thanks to Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog)

Image courtesy of Julianna Parr.

People seem to be more vulnerable to earworm infections in the summer, and the ditty that’s been bouncing around my cranium lately is the insidiously catchy “Pot Kettle Black” by Omaha, Nebraska's Tilly and the Wall. The chant-along chorus, the repeating five-note guitar hook, the descending organ line, the big beat supplemented by tap-dance percussion: This is a soundtrack-for-the-season type of tune (and completely unrelated to a song of the same name by Wilco, I might add). It’s also got an amateurish but cool video (see below) in which the band members stage guerilla street performances around Omaha, star in a parade, and whip out some Michael Jackson-esque dance moves. Go ahead, give the song a try. It’s just waiting to find a nice, warm home in your ear canal.

What do the Republican National Convention and rock and roll have in common? Very little, which is why most of the rock concerts in Minneapolis and St. Paul during RNC convention week are renegade events aimed at countering the Republican mania, not fueling it.

On Labor Day, which is RNC kickoff day, a host of national acts with working-class sympathies will rock the Take Back Labor Day Festival at Harriet Island Regional Park, just across the river from the convention site. On the docket of this concert sponsored by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) are Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Atmosphere, Alison Moorer, and Tom Morello, a.k.a. the political hell raiser known as the Nightwatchman.

On Tuesday, September 2, a large roster of local bands plus smartypants New York singer-songwriter Nellie McKay will play at Provention, “a concert for people, peace, and the planet” at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul. (Utne Reader is the concert's media sponsor.)

Finally, on September 3, the eve of the convention’s close, Morello and his briefly reunited Rage Against the Machine bandmates will bring their potent rap-rock to the Target Center in St. Paul’s sister city of Minneapolis. You might recall that Rage broke up shortly after an incendiary gig during the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

Altogether, this show of musical force seems to reinforce the idea that apart from Ted Nugent, the Republican Party doesn’t have many rock and rollers on its side. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who’s been getting a lot of buzz as a potential McCain running mate, was famously flummoxed before the 2004 election to learn that his favorite rock artist, Bruce Springsteen, harbored liberal tendencies. As the governor may have figured out by now, it’s not just the Boss who’s blue.

UPDATE (8/15/08): The date and venue for the Provention concert have changed, as noted above, to Tuesday, September 2, at the Fitzgerald Theater. The last we heard, the bill included Nellie McKay, the Honeydogs, Dan Wilson, the New Standards, and Matt Wilson and John Munson, along with several other acts. Get the latest here.

As a commenter notes below, the Ripple Effect music festival (motto: “beyond the convention, beyond partisanship”) will take place on the State Capitol lawn on Sept. 2, with Michael Franti and Spearhead, Matisyahu, Dead Prez, Anti-Flag, and other bands as well as polar explorer/environmentalist Will Steger and Code Pink antiwar activist Medea Benjamin. 

And the Black Dog Block Party is “an all-ages, free-admission, outdoor experience” happening on two nonconsecutive days (Sunday, Aug. 31, and Tuesday, Sept. 2) in St. Paul's Lowertown area. Political funksters Boots Riley and the Coup are flying in from the Bay Area to headline this event featuring several local bands.

Finally, the official Republican entertainment roster is indeed packed with country acts, as Hannah Lobel notes below, but I see that a few glad-to-get-a-gig rockers have signed on with the RNC: Sammy Hagar, Smash Mouth, and American Idol figure Chris Daughtry.  

Image by Andrea Sartorati, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky produced color images decades before color film, but his photos of the Russian Empire didn't go on public display until the 21st century. It's no surprise, since shortly after Prokudin-Gorsky's cross-empire photo survey (between 1905 and 1915), the October Revolution erupted, the photographer's supporter Tsar Nicholas II was executed, and Prokudin-Gorsky fled to France. But the years spent documenting the empire must have been heady, traveling in a darkroom-outfitted railroad car, producing images of miners, prisoners, tea harvesters, and yurt-dwellers. “Using color-filtered glass plates to capture a red, a blue, and a green channel of each image, the chemist-turned-photographer was able to project dazzling pictures onto Russia’s walls long before the advent of Lumicolor and Kodachrome film in the 1930s,” writes Russia! (article not available online), a U.S.-based Russian culture magazine that reprinted several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s images in its summer 2008 issue. The images were quietly bought up by the U.S. Library of Congress after World War II and got little attention until they served as records for church restoration in the post-Soviet 1990s, reports Russia!. The images are available for the first time to U.S. audiences at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, through October 1.

We’ll wait to see whether it joins “cool jazz” and “post-bop” in the jazz lexicon, but jazz has entered the “Radiohead Era,” according to Jonathan Zwickel in Down Beat (article not available online).

Down Beat certainly isn’t the first to notice that it’s become common for hip young jazz musicians to cover songs by Radiohead, one of rock’s most sonically innovative groups. The practice has almost become almost de rigueur among a certain crowd. Brad Mehldau, Marco Benevento, the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Petra Haden, and the Bad Plus are among the players to have interpreted the band’s murkily majestic music.

Zwickel attributes the connection in part to Radiohead’s “balancing act between innovation and communication. Radiohead speaks clearly to the masses, but in its own language.”

 “For me and my friends, jazz includes Radiohead,” Reed Mathis, bassist in Benevento’s trio and the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, tells Zwickel. “Thom Yorke has synthesized rock ’n’ roll forms with harmony that sounds like Rachmaninoff and Chopin—a weepy, dramatic, late-19th century thing.”

Museum guards spend untold hours gazing at the artwork in their care, so it's unsurprising that an art critics sometimes lurks behind the name tag and the impassive expression.

Or at least that's the assumption underlying Esopus magazine's “Guarded Opinions,” which features an interview with a museum guard in each issue. In its spring 2008 issue, Esopus (article not available online) talks with Corcoran Gallery of Art guard Berhanu Taffa about his work. When Taffa took the Corcoran job four years ago, he dreaded the long days on his feet. Then he started following docent-led tours and reading about various art movements. With new exhibitions opening every three or four months, Taffa has frequent opportunities to study new pieces. “Other than the standing, it’s a really great place,” says Taffa. 

Claude Monet’s Willows of Vetheuil is one of Taffa’s favorite pieces in the Corcoran’s permanent collection. “I guess if you had an extensive knowledge of art, you could say, ‘I like the way he uses his brush here,’ or talk about the texture, that kind of thing,” says Taffa. But it doesn’t take a formal art education for Taffa to enjoy Willows. “I can almost picture myself with the artist, sitting next to him as he’s painting. It makes me feel peaceful, independent.” 

Taffa can’t lose himself in his reverie too deeply, though, since misbehaving visitors abound. “People always try to touch the art,” says Taffa. “They know the rules, they know they shouldn’t, but they do it anyway.” 

Image by Charlotte Claeson, licensed under Creative Commons.

We need more sing-alongs. Before you start picturing barbershop quartets or the Utne Reader staff kumbaya-ing around a campfire, know that the idea comes from musician and producer Brian Eno writing for Resurgence. And he's not writing about office bonding or spangled matching outfits. He wants a capella groups, like the one he started a few years ago, to spring up among friends, without the goal of reaching the stage or recording studio. Giving up the expectation of performing, writes Eno, “gives us the freedom to get it all wrong.” But the activity still has all the benefits of song, including happy old age, according a Scandinavian study, healthy lungs, and an immediate “sense of levity and contentment.” 

To help readers start a capella groups of their own, Eno offers a few tips. First, choose songs with chords common to blues, rock, or country, “the same chords you hear at the beginning of ‘Louie Louie’ or ‘Wild Thing.’” Since the chord sequences are familiar, singers can improvise “without the risk of a catastrophic harmonic train-crash.” 

Other important considerations include finding “vowel-rich” songs that are “rhythmically interesting,” and matching tones among singers. And on the practical level, Eno suggests providing drinks and snacks and warming up before singing. 

“If I were asked to redesign the British educational system,” writes Eno, “I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine.” Just as Eno’s group never performs, neither would students be forced to. “You will do this every day, and you will never be examined on it.”

Image by Superbomba, licensed under Creative Commons.

Iranian documentaries are startlingly candid, coming from "an essentially totalitarian society," writes the documentary film magazine Point of View (article not available online). The trade-off: not all Iranian films at international festivals come with official approval, nor are they all allowed to be screened in Iran. 

That tension doesn’t mean Iran’s government doesn’t applaud its filmmakers. On the contrary—At the opening of Tehran’s Cinema Verité documentary festival last October, reports Point of View, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance praised documentary filmmaking as “a method of uprising against a world in which the truth is denied.” He also called it “a readily understood language which can be used in the struggle against evil.” 

The Iranian documentaries discussed are more modest and less cryptic than the minister’s statement, not to mention more revealing about Iranian society than the cultural minister might like. They give less-than-lofty glimpses into “individual experience” like incarcerated youth dealing with the effects of drug abuse (It’s Always Late for Freedom) and Iranian male-to-female transsexuals (the Sundance-screened Be Like Others). The films reminders viewers of Iranian citizens’ humanity and individuality, writes Point of View, “at a time when our everyday knowledge of Iran is predicated on cultural generalizations.”

 Image by Hamed Saber, licensed under Creative Commons.

The phone sex world thrives on anonymity, on the ability of strangers to confess their innermost desires to a person both real and of their own creation. Phillip Toledano’s Phonesex project, featured in Mother Jones, lifts the veil on this interior world with a series of elegant, respectful portraits paired with text written by the subjects themselves.