art

Hey New Yorkers, get your shit together and go see my hombre Andrew Dinwiddie and his resurrection of Jimmy Swaggart. GET MAD AT SIN!:

In meticulously recreating one of Mr. Swaggart’s early 1970s culture-war sermons (from a vinyl record) in “Get Mad at Sin!” Andrew Dinwiddie reintroduces us to a gifted orator, compelling performer and thunderous moralizer in his prime. It’s a surprisingly generous act of resuscitation.

Strutting back and forth on a pink carpet, kicking up his legs and swooning at his own rhetoric, Mr. Dinwiddie as Mr. Swaggart breaks into a sweat but never loses his cool. He tosses in theatrical pauses and even some slang to attack the evils of homosexuality, premarital sex and acid rock. Mr. Dinwiddie’s powerful voice contains the echo of the great Baptist preachers as well as a breathy rumble that approaches the erotic.

But this is no Reverend Billy-like satire featuring winks at the hipster crowd or political cheap shots. The director, Jeff Larson, lets this fascinating historical document, which diagnoses a culture lurching toward oblivion, speak for itself, absent biography, context or comment. It’s an interesting strategy and emphasizes the stemwinder as a work of theater.

I'll spare you the lengthy cultural diatribe, but I'm fucking pissed that I'll miss this by a week. It's exciting to see my erstwhile creative peers begin coming into their own, and I really like the sound of this work. First of all because Andrew could conjour humidity on stage like nobody's business, and I have no doubt this performance is something of a tour-de-force; but moreover because of how it's constructed.

See, my generation — if I may be so bold — is post-post-modern. Not to be cheeky (we'll find a better term) but the simple deconstructive irony that seemed so bold and vital say 20 years ago is, well, boring. You can't just mock something and expect that to work. Nor can you reduce something to a pile of pieces and say you've done anything really worthy of anyone's attention.

In the spirit of those oversmart drunk-asses in Portland, I'd say we're moving on into a phase of (re)-reconstruction, or maybe we've come all the way 'round to some sort of neo-modernism. Faced with an ever-growing Undercurrent of Doom There's a yearning out there for answers, even if they may be wrong, even with the knowledge that they are almost certainly wrong. Failures pave the way to truth, and we're at a point as a culture, as a species really, where we can't just sit back and take potshot questions anymore.

It's who dares wins in the 21st Century, and you might start by reducing everything to base components, but you can't stop there. You can't just shamble around in a pile of cultural detrus and expect some thinly-veiled autobiographical content about your sex-life to pull it through. No siree, these days, you have to actually attempt to say something.

And in a way I hope that's what my man is doing. By presenting something in a juxtaposed context and letting it really be, in letting us hear the words of yesteryear's fallen moral tyrant, there's something to be said, something expressed. Even if it isn't correct — even if in hindsight is borders on the tragicomic — there's something being said there. As someone who's grown to know and love the "successful fail," I like that.

Go see the show. You'll dig it.

Via the sister-pal, an ITP (the internetty grad-student floor above my beloved ETW at Tisch) kid did something amazing:

I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

Tweenbots.

So I google, and I find the artist has also made something called Whisper Jars (click the glowing jar). Pretty awesome stuff.

This is where the serious sandbenders shit get started.

So, the annual talent show came again, and I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out another performance piece. It was well-received. Matt Barry (local skate video superstar and all around quality kid) said I won the contest, but it wasn’t a contest, and anyway I think his talent of shotgunning five beers gives me a serious run for my money.

Getting up and doing the thing felt good though. The piece had a bit of my own meta bullshit in it; doubt anyone really picked up on the “head-fake towards sex-piece” inside joke in the opening, but that’s ok. It’s really just a meditation on fear of success vis-a-vis the Black President, internet dating, becoming a boss, and popular self-help quotations, wrapped with a couple choice musical cuts. A good pep-talk.

Full text is here: It’s our turn

The upshot is it makes me think I can do this more often, and gives me some internal steam to push ahead on the video idea. While hot gossip and unicorns help keep things rolling along, the most popular posts of mine over time (top of the pops) are the noodly think-pieces. If I can stand to look at my face enough to convert these into video form, it might actually get some people jazzed. That’d be fun.

Christmas party went off good. Gift exchange. Talent show. Funtime. My performance/pep-talk went over well; I’ll post the text for the archive in a bit.

Number one quote of the night: “Motherfuckers try to front, but the Greatful Dead were hard as fuck.”

In the meantime, here’s something sure to make you smile:

I need to get creative again. I love blogging, but the truth is my sister CrowDawg is a lock to be the great American novelist in the family. And anyway my real bookish ambitions were always more non-fiction-esque (blueprints for the revolution), which lends itself to other formats perhaps more. So I think I know what I want to do.

I want to compete with Joe Felice.

I don’t mean to literally try to beat him at anything — much better to have a little co-opetition — but rather to play in that space of DIY talking-head media. He’s done a fucking inspiring job with his video productions, and I want to get on the bandwagon.

Granted, this is something I’ve made noise about a number of times before, so believe it when you see it, but I’ve been feeling for a while that I need some kind of change of pace, a more structured creative outlet as I said, and for some reason w/Obama getting in, feeling like I want that to mean something, reading this Krugman blog post and seeing the awesome graphic in the post below that Nica made, it all started clicking.

Here’s what I would do:

• Save up several thousand dollars for equipment (camera, workstation) probably by being selfish and not buying any extravagant gifts this holiday season (easy)
• Start writing material; my initial goal would be to do a king-hell job explaining what I’m trying to express in this confusing list of bullet points (medium)
• Build myself a kickass website (easy)
• Move into the garage in Westhaven and construct some kind of broadcast set (medium)

• Sometime in the new year, arrange to devote on work-day a week to get all this stuff done (hard)

The challenge will be to intermingle my talking-head stuff with good infographics and the like. I think the traditional video newsmarket does a really terrible job of presenting ideas, particularly when it comes to meaty topics.

The real challenge will be getting anything off the ground in time to make a difference. That will mean real discipline and time-management, things I want to be better at, but still struggle with to be honest. We’ll see.

There’s even a strong way in which this could play back into my existing dayjob career. It might be very nice.

The partisan jab; way ahead of it's time.

And holy shit, looking for a good url to link my mom's name to, I found this old gem:

Whether it's a pitcher of beer, smoking a bowl or compulsively shopping, many people have felt the effects of unbreakable habits. One New York University theater group travels the country provoking discussions about addictive behaviors.

Quick Fix, a reality-based theater group, will hold performances at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday in the EMU Ballroom. Free tickets for students are available at the EMU Ticket Office.

During the 1999-00 school year, Quick Fix began as a project at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, said Josh Koenig, an actor with the group. He said the year-long project started when a theater class at the New York University conducted more than 100 interviews with students, faculty, lawyers, advertising executives, tobacco executives and people on the street. Then, they put those interviews into a performance piece.

Man, you gotta click through to see our old B&W publicity photo though. That was some excellent stuff. I paid my rent from acting with that!

So, Kellymundo has a subscription to Vanity Fair, which I happened to pick up (RFK cover story) in the bathroom today. This happens to be the issue with the crazy Miley Cyrus Photos!!!!! ZOMG BARE 15-YEAR OLD SPINE!!!!

Sometimes I’m ashamed of America. Sometimes it’s because we start pointless wars of choice that kill thousands and leave millions homeless and destitute. Sometimes it’s because we’re so collectively sexually confused, repressed, frustrated, nervous, and (updated inre Joe’s point in comments) desperately depraved, we can’t fucking tolerate the challenge of, you know, Art.

Annie Liebowitz is the real thing, and this photo is completely respectable.

America, you’re crazy baby but I love you.

Bonus Liebowitz: Sting portrait, and homo Arnold.

God we’re stupid sometimes.

Soon the sassy bastard will be mine: squid w/monocle. Want your own? Talk to the boss-lady

Bonus pic!

My friend Sarah is on her way to India. She’s among the finest of the people I’ve gotten to know fairly well since moving up to these parts, and an amazingly talented artist. We have a few of her pieces around the house, really great paintings, and honestly one of the main things that set the mood and made me really want to live here.

Now she has some of her work online too:

Paintings By Sarah Finestone.

I really love Sarah’s art. It strikes such a great balance between portrait and pastiche, symbols and subjects. That you can see my friends and roommates in some of them probably makes it more exciting for me personally, but I feel that she’s really in a good spot stylistically, and hopefully will go places with her creative endeavors.

If I were a rich man I would be a patron. Maybe someday I will!

I’ve been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper’s, I’ve digested a few books, which I’ll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

Air Guitar
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled “Essays on Art & Democracy,” this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don’t know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn’t really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey’s prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper’s recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the “retreat into criticism” and the “politics of infinite demands.” It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who’s an art critic and not a “Critical Theorist,” but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I’ve ever read.

On Bullshit
This is really a single essay cleverly packaged as a small book, but it’s fantastic, a serious and scholarly inquiry into the ubiquity of bullshit. I also have the similarly-sized companion essay On Truth, but have yet to crack it. Surprisingly, the direct contemplation of bullshit is unclaimed intellectual territory, but it feels vital, and as someone who probably aught to shut up or say “I don’t know” more often — and in failing to do so produce my own quotient of BS and then some — reading through it provides an interesting guide to introspection.

One of the most intriguing takeaways from the book has to do with how the essence of Bullshit is not really about whether or not someone makes true or false statements, but whether this person is even concerned with the truth in the first place, or whether they are instead attempting to convey a sense of their own situation and state of mind, regardless of what the facts may be. The parallels to the current vogue of “balance” in journalism comes immediately to mind, but so does the often mind and spirit-killing discourse of organizational politics (as exemplified by, say, the HBO series The Wire), wherein interlocking and overlapping personal agendas obscure and compromise the putative “real goals” of the entity in question.

The Looming Tower (Not pictured)
Zack gave me this to read, a highly researched non-fiction account of the origins of Al-Qaeda and the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, including the bureaucratic infighting which prevented the FBI and CIA from putting the pieces together. Some of it was remedial, but it certainly challenged several assumptions I’ve made about all this — principally that there wasn’t really any preventing the attacks; this is clearly untrue — and definitely deepened my understanding of Middle Eastern politics and radical Islam.

It’s a tragic read, particular in light of how the past six years have gone. Made me angry again, and feeling a renewed commitment to drive the development of open-source organizing techniques. Far moreso than any technology I piddle around with, the means and methods used in this kind of active wide-reaching loose-tie collaboration need to be refined, packaged and promoted, because, in brief, the Empire will always lose, even if it wins (as we’re seeing.)

Spook Country
It’s no secret that I was a sci-fi kid growing up, played D&D and the whole bit. The literary work of William Gibson is one of the true gems of the genre, and I like to think the level of his writing and quality of his insight helped to elevate my mental state up from comic book clashes between good and evil, helping me become the worldly dude I am today. He’s also an interesting author in that he started out writing about a fantastically distant (though utterly recognizable) future, and now sets books published in 2007 in the year 2006. Reality caught up with his vision, I suppose.

Spook Country continues the present-tense world he began exploring in Pattern Recognition, and feels much the same. I’m not done reading it, but I like it so far, and especially the way it tugs at various contemporary questions about the evolving nature of power as derivative of information, both in the mechanistic and mystic senses. Gibson’s greatest virtue as the “father of cyberpunk” is that he’s always been fascinated with humanity, the mythic elements of personhood, with the voodoo powers we organically possess. His most piercing insights are not about technology, but about how technology (and other things) acts as an agent in the evolution of human consciousness.

Interconnectedly?
It’s a bit of a stretch to put all these chunks of writing into a neat little pattern, but they all contain elements of the stuff I’m really interested in.

To wit: the failures of our current establishment or “system,” and the way in which a more evolved human consciousness, supported by superior technologies of organization, can do it better. That’s really what “the revolution” boils down to for me. Less bullshit, better organization, less oppression and institutionalized inequality, more fun, free time, health, happiness, etc.