In a small theatre on a cobblestone street in the heart of the city’s most prominent art gallery district, director Jay Scheib recently presented the premiere of his masterful adaptation of a cultishly adored science fiction novel. The story itself, based on Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, tells of a city wrought with chaos out of which violence, sex and creative genius emerge. The performance allows this chaos to take shape within the bodies of the cast and the work of the crew giving to the audience a palatable vision of what true community could provide in a world without boundaries.
The Kitchen, the darling of NYC’s performance art venues, is often the site of perceptive and challenging work. The venue originally opened on the lower east side, just blocks away from where Delany himself was living, before relocating to Chelsea in the late 80′s. On most any night the theatre is packed with audience members eager to see something thought-provoking, the nights between April 1st and April 10th of this year being no different.
Within the drama’s fictionalized city of Bellona all havoc has broken loose: a prominent black radical has been murdered, a young woman has been raped and the city’s newspaper has been monopolized all as the result of an apocalyptic fire the origins of which are unknown. In the midst of this chaos we see two distinct methods of managing: one from a group of outsiders confronting their differences and another from a family of four trying to hold on to the lives they led before the fire.
True to the book, the play aims to give the nebulous boundary between the real and the constructed a tangible tension. Intimate moments take place behind the set’s few walls and are projected onto a video screen at the front of the stage mediating moments of both psychological and physical vulnerability. The action is filled with sex and violence and the story includes love and loss, all of which is seen both on the screen and in the flesh.
While the stripped down set design and the video feed contributed to the mood the technical details were overall less important than the strength of the ensemble performance. Sarita Choudhury portrayed the protagonist’s wide emotional landscape with ease, gracefully moving between a tough explorer, a vulnerable lover, a hurt chid depending on what the moment required. Mikeah Ernest Jennings delivers an equally complex performance by tackling two roles at once; one a man assassinated for his political views and another a man aggrandized for his potent sexuality. Tanya Selvaratnam adopted a ritualistic mirror gazing, face-slapping, hip shaking dance when her sex crazed house mom character was left home alone.
In the end the production provided a sophisticated vision of a traditional family relationship turned cold from formality along with the intimate struggles of an explorer searching for and authenticity. Throughout both interwoven stories were examples of people hurting and helping each other and the terrible back and forth between the two extremes. The play provided the feeling of what it’s like be in the midst of chaos and served as a reminder that embracing confusion may be the only way to experience moments of clarity.
This weekend PS1 turns its galleries spaces into a place for art book publishers and their fans to get silly with each other. Remember the musky smell of library stacks, the metal shelving units lining dark halls illuminated only by crank operated lights? This isn’t like that.
Don’t miss these five points of interest along the way:
The Classroom:
PS1 used to be a public school. duh – so it only makes sense that one of the rooms turned galleries be left open for adult education. The talk I saw was about a wheat pasting art-porn artist getting let off the hook for “putting up flyers for his new show”. ‘Course the posters were photos of a roof-top blow job but we don’t need to tell Judge Judy about those naughty bits unless we’re handcuffed to do so, right?
Red Fox Press:
Ever seen a couple that’s so totally in love they’re probably just a hologram? Such is the pair behind the booth for Red Fox Press who screen printed portraits they drew of each other cattle feed bags and hand bound the pages together into a book. Another book features collection of patterns from the insides of envelopes bound together with graph paper print tape. I got me a copy of “drawn with my left hand” on account of my boyfriend’s recent injury, but if I had the greens I would have bought up one of everything.
The Hairy Bunch
You probably couldn’t miss this one even if you wanted to. Large and looming hair covered canopies stand towering in the courtyard; not a sight for sore eyes nor terribly hospitable neither. You can’t really beat the above ground wading pools surrounded by sun decks and hammocks from a few years back, but at least this installation reminded me that Where the Wild Things Are comes out soon.x
Macaroons!
On small wire towers on a table just outside the cafe sit the most delicate sweets known to this womankind’s taste buds. They’re like a cross between a cookie and a marshmallow, but like not in a mallomar sort of way. Probably eat only one though because even though they’re free you should let other people get some too.
Sto
If you know Sto, you know it’s easy to spot him because his hair’s always spiked out real uneven like. Make sure you find him at the fair because when you do you’ll also find yourself in the company of butt booklets and pages filled with somber looking solo sex acts. He’ll be near the gobbed up gold letters hanging on the wall that spell out “Cinders”.
Posts to come include “Five Things Not To Do When Your Dead Bolt Locks You Out” and “Jessica Cutler Lies on Craig’s List and I Lived To Tell About It.
* photo take from Apartment Therapy’s post on Book Stairs
A friend asked me to volunteer art direct for an Au Revoir Simone music video shoot at Brooklyn’s Bell House. The first music videos they made for the band a few years back was a beautiful and misty romp through the woods that ended with the ARS girls fishing for their keyboards off the side of the a dewy dock, so I said yes. I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into and I think the other boys and the girls on the crew may have known even less.
The girls were fresh faced, bright eyed and on set hours before the cameras were turned on. While picking outfits, doing hair and making up, they conducted the business of being three friends in a band careful to accommodate each other in every way possible while rising step by step to the top of their game. Gold and purple tee shirts have to be made, opening bands must be chosen, fans must be responded to and it all must be done together with ease and success. Tres impressive.
Without giving too much away, the idea was a create a stop motion merry-go-round sort of look using multiple cameras and more angles than you’d find in geometry book. Part of my job was to make a nice-looking star formation out of amps, keyboards and monitors so when the whole set is shot from above each piece is mirrored by another. Think of, I dunno, say a big fat diamond engagement ring that shimmers like crazy with each facet reflecting brightly off one another.
Achieving this effect meant hours of taping down degrees of circles on the floor using protractors, pencils and string until both the space around the band, as well as each band member, were marked up to perfection. Later, large metal sections of circular rails held five separate cameras clamped to exact locations. This unit was moved around the map until all 360 degrees of the set had been captured. Each performer also had to be surrounded by crew members with cameras held steady as we shuffled, shoulder to shoulder, around the curves. While the song played on repeat. Till 2am.
Sounds fun, right?
Well, yes, yes it was! You know the sort of feeling when you leave camp and all these people you knew nothing about at the beginning of the summer now seem like they’ve been part of your life all along? It was like that. We’re calling each other by nicknames carefully chosen at opportune times, giving away hugs like they are ice cream sandwiches and shouting out times to get together out through the darkness as we each retreat back to our own lives. Even while joyfully imaging sleeping in my very own bed and soon, I still didn’t want to leave.
And this, of course, is due to the non-stop hard working creatively visioned humorously inclined crew who ended the night on a dolly cart whirling around the set to capture the most important and most difficult shot. Dispose of everything, keep nothing but a pure heart and lots of love. Good luck in Paris, Ladies!
Filed under: internets, owlie hour, technology | Tags: facebook, helen fisher, open relationships, tumbler, twitter
This week, Lvrgrl and Owlie waste another perfectly good hour or more on the internet.
Notes from the wild:
We have a tumbler account. We never use it. We did think it was cool that you could call it and leave your blog a voicemail message in the form of a post. We haven’t tried it.
We made a twitter that links up automatic-like with our tumbler account. We never use it.
Internet Guards! Let us in!
Owls, I killed Facebook, so you can’t use my account to look up old flames anymore. Besides, I’m not friends with most of them anyway, nor was I ever, and their empty profiles won’t tell you much aside from that. Wait, when are you setting up my netvibes?
Lvgrl: So like, i want to have a web page with a picture of a phone on it. There’s a number under the phone. When you call the number, the phone on the screen rings. Owlie: I dunno em, that might be over my head. Lvrgrl: Me too.
The following will not work to make a website call your phone. NO WAY that would work. What it will do is allow your phone number to appear on the status bar of your browser when you try to click “call me” in red. So that’s fun.
Open relationships, yea or neigh?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html
No amount of Logic can make a song have soul.
First we lost the first half of the chat. Now the second’s gone missing.
That’s all neighbors, see ya on the W.
What if, dear friend, your profile disappeared tomorrow? What of all your pithy comments <audience gasps> and carefully tagged photos <eyebrows raise>. Or even, everything you’ve ever put on the internet since 1989, up in smoke Overnight!
What if you even had a heads up: twenty four hours, but still no god given way to pack it all up and take it with you. It would fit in a small suitcase, to be sure, but the trouble is finding it all! And keeping it all in tact with the delicate connections you saw fit to form.
You see my point compadre, there’s more to worry about these days than stolen rights to the prolific content right here in front our very eyes. No, no, don’t do it, don’t jump! The threat is false but the fear is real: do you know where you’ll be when facebook ends?
anyways, call me.
The Stereo Memory Man with Hazarai is the pedal for today’s rocker.
The basic gist of a loop pedal is you play a small tidbit of music into the box and it will grab the sample and play it over and over again for all eternity. What’s more, you can layer these loops on top of one another for a cacophonous effect. This method is used by many a solo artist, like the recent Andrew Bird, to create the appearance of friends.
But the M squared is not just your run of the mill looper. Nor is it a practical one, like the multiple phased Boss looping station used by Owen Pallett of Arcade Fire / Final Fantasy or the USB inputable Digitech Jam Man, even better than the station for a mere $20 more. And sure, you could get the single nail polish red Boss pedal to add to your collection of colored things that look the same but better as you add more of them, but we’re models of conservation these days, right?
No, this Electro-harmonix jobby is not a piece of beginner’s gear, but then you don’t make beginner sounding music now do you. The looping function is paired with blend, decay, filter, reflect and delay controls. This means a few things: one is you can click just the right hand bypass button and use these effects without looping or you can click the left hand button to loop and add the above effects to any sample – even after you’ve recorded it. But most importantly the additional controls mean that the sound is immediately textured and forever pliable so you’ll be making noise out of music in no time.
The Hazarai doesn’t refer to the 70′s party pattern, but it’s eight different programmable modes, the true bells and whistles of this little guy. Each of these modes, in combo with the controls above, allow you to create different settings for the repeated parts of your loops. For instance you can make your bit of music start off soft and then grow louder and louder, like a rushing wave, each time it repeats. This happens automatic like and without turning a knob slowly in real time to get the effect if you catch my drift.
The stereo feature only works to create a ping pong effect between the two speakers if you actually have two separate outputs. If you are just using one cable to one amp the whole stereo idea null and void. The tap tempo is supposed to be critical for live performance but I wouldn’t know about that part since this thing has yet to see the light outside the basement.
Some actual down sides, just to be upfront:
There’s only one, yes one, input. So if you want to layer say your vocals over your guitar you need some more gear, like maybe a switch pedal. Also, unlike almost every other pedal in existence you have to actually HOLD DOWN the button with your foot while recording, which means you have to wear shoes. This prevents you from tweaking the knobs with your toes and you are not likely to hold shows in galleries anytime soon.
You can find it at Main Drag Music real easy since it’s the only looper they carry. Ask for Teddy: a moppy dark haired man who knows a lot about synths. You can use their private rooms to try it out with a Moog keyboard that practically plays itself. If you find that the first line your record gets quieter when you record and play the next layer of the loop, it’s not a drawback of the device. Just make sure the repeat knob is set to less than full and you’ll get equal levels for everything you record, if that’s what you are going for!
Coraline, the movie, is a story about an eleven year old girl just moved into a big pink mansion on a hill.
Through the portal of dreams she discovers a tunnel that takes her to a parallel universe, one that had been locked away and hidden for years. The new world is enticing, but dangerous; ruled by another mother who provides perfection in exchange for entrapping love. When mom no. 2 doesn’t get what she wants she morphs into a black widow spider who likes to play games to win her way.
Coraline’s boy friend, Wybourn, calls her crazy when she discloses her fear. Later, Why Born, or Why Be for short, gets schooled by his grandmother and he rushes to Coraline’s rescue. Together they cast the bad mom down a well of so dark she’s sure never to surface again.
Classic Freud: straight up, no twist. The other mother, as anyone who’s been to post feminist lacanian psychoanalysis will know, is not an ACTUAL mother, but the mother INSIDE of you. The house is your body and the unexplored rooms your sexuality. The knight in shining armor, well we know that one is a myth.
Were it not for the prominent appearance of talking flowers and black cats throughout my childhood dreams, I’d throw the whole thing out with tomorrow’s garbage myself.
Conde Nasty launches a publicity mechanism in the wake of Domino’s fall. The yawn worthy cover inspires the blogsphere to shout, “yes, all women r naked too.” The media weighs in with lavish commentary and significant skepticism:
Media Bistro calls the cover a misstep noting that the fat girl thing has been done before in like 2007 and it didn’t work then.
The Telegraph tells us the cover holds all 210 pounds of her (so that’s like two Kate Mosses for the price of one).
The Herald Tribune sees Love as a “title for ‘imperfect’ times.”
And even Hipster Runoff says: “I’d do her.”
Editor Katy Grand adds poetry to the affair, reminding us to wake up each morning with a “truckload” of confidence.
A heavily anticipated follow up cover will appear six months from now featuring Marilyn Manson nude save a tutu.
Better news at The Gossip.
I felt interaged about this little piece of news until I scaled down the wall to twenty-five things that serve this man right:
