Yay Jürgen Habermas!
My man makes it to No. 7 on the top 100 intellectuals list, 2 below the weasle Christopher Hutchins and beating the pants off world domination expert, neocon braintrust, Paul Wolfowitz, coming in at a pathetic No. 18 (which is of course much higher than me, who comes in at 0).
The question that comes to mind, I'm sure, to everyone out there: who's "bubbling under"? I want to know who made nos. 101-103. Any boy band wuss and tween heartthrob like Slavoj Zizek or Pope Benedict XVI can make the top 20 but it takes a special kind of intellectual to be so out of the mainstream that they can't make the main list. Who is the Velvet Underground of the intellegensia? Where's the next Love of deep thinking? Like Iggy once said, "Mario Vargas Llosa, your pretty face is going to hell."
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Friday, August 05, 2005
Thursday, August 04, 2005
She Comes in Colours
There's a strong urge that builds within you the moment you step out of the final gallery in a blockbuster exhibition at a major museum and into that well-placed giftshop that blocks the exit, so well-placed that it's forehead-slappingly obvious that it's there, so first-year marketing, vulgar, insulting, and yet the urge surges within you to document this moment (which moment? seeing the show? entering the giftshop?), to get some sort of reminder that you were there, and you value that well-earned cynicism that allows you to read through the strategies of any advertising campaign no matter how lithe and dewy-eyed the models who gaze at you (yes, you) through the tv screen and into your world, yet you stand there gazing at Rothko nightlights and you check the price, like somehow, in some strange alternate universe you are going to take that wretchedly-produced post-Pop tchotchky and plug it into your wall so the soft glow of the cheap bulb can flicker near your baseboards and distract your cat for a while.
Remind yourself: what city are you in? Are you a tourist? Are you damp from the Maid of the Mist, standing in line behind Herb and Shirl from Topeka, with a small, soft, polarbear Mountie gripped in your hands? The main question you need to ask yourself is this: can you buy this in New York or London or Paris? If yes, and you're standing in the makeshift satellite giftshop at the TRANS-FORMATION AGO, put down the Frankenthaler keychain, ignore the Morris Louis coasters, and pick up the Jack Bush fridge magnet of Dazzle Red (1965) and feel good that you won't find this at MoMA or Tate Modern or the Pompidou.
The Shape of Colour at the Art Gallery of Ontario closes August 7 and it's a decent way to see some samples of a number of modern and latemodern treatments of colour. Worth seeing is a Robert Motherwell, a massive canvas of powder-blue and thin, jittery, black lines. Clifford Still's roughly painted work stands out as a particularly tactile piece, harsh, not pretty. Ellsworth Kelly's blue and white graphic work is cool and quiet while Barnett Newman and Guido Molinari represent two generations of explorations of large surfaces of colour, solid in every sense of the word, although the younger Molinari moves away from Newman's rigid formalism with a shimmering surface treatment, saturating rather than layering the surface. The intermediary generation are the oft-called second generation abstract expressionists, who awkwardly hold a position in the shadow of the minimalists while waiting for the colour field painters championed by Clement Greenberg (Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella) to mature. These second-wave abstract expressionists, represented here by Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, work with the raw canvas directly, staining the unprimed surface with pigment and oil and the subsequent years see the seepage of the linseed out from the colour and extending the shapes further. Louis and Frankenthaler tend to be rather minor figures, overshadowed by Noland and Stella in the 1960s, while the third generation abstract expressionists resolved the hesitancy of the second-gens, and learned to reconcile the shared language of the colour field artists and minimalists, famously pitted against each other by Greenberg and Michael Fried (think of it as something like the media-invented rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones). It's curious that one of the best examples of the third generation abstract expressionists, Brice Marden, is absent. Marden's extended body of work documents the genealogy of formalist painterly abstraction, from the Classical period of Pollock, Motherwell and Rothko through the half-step of the canvas stainers and finally into the endgame of the colour field painters and minimalism.
Like an afterthought, tucked away in a corner, is a sad little Sir Anthony Caro sculpture, red and deflated. This is what formalist painting did to sculpture. David Smith, Caro's immediate predecessor, created small works to be viewed on pedestals, to extend into the third dimension what the painters were doing on canvas. Of course, to Greenberg, the painters were making paintings that referred to their materiality, their existence as paintings, as paint on canvas, in the real world. That made the position of sculpture rather tenuous. It was a minor art in this particular world, and neither Smith nor Caro seemed to challenge this. Caro's innovation was to flatten the plane of the object. To view an Anthony Caro, one looked straight on, like a painting. It was a flat surface, as if not three dimensional. His more famous works were larger than Smith's and were usually placed on the floor but they were still within the grasp of the viewer as a flat object. Think of it as four views of lines and shapes on four flat picture planes. The Caro piece in The Shapes of Colour on the other hand, sits on the floor as if discarded, the only way to view it is to look down.
Sol LeWitt's monumental string-art installation is a wonder. Red and blue threads trace out large rectangular forms off the walls of one room, quivering. It's both overwhelming and delicate, Richard Serra as interpreted by a group of children.
3 to 1 Groovy Green, part of a series of collaborations between artist Charles Long and the Franco-Anglo band Stereolab, is the stand-out among the contemporary works. A green pod rests on a coffee table with a couch. The surface of the pod is shiny plastic. Listeners can sit on the couch and listen through one of three headsets that plays a loop of a Stereolab song written for the piece. Stereolab makes music that evokes an era of space-age optimism, retro lounge rock sung in mostly French, with la-la-las straight from A Man and a Woman. The pod, the table and the couch would look good in Wallpaper. The tangle of cords from the headsets disturb the polish, the fabricated gleam of a world-weary take on latemodern progressive design, what Long calls "bachelor pad formalism."
Me, I'm looking forward to Catherine the Great: Arts for the Empire: Masterpieces from the State Hermitage Museum, Russia, opening October 1, 2005 at the AGO. Bestial relations with horses never looked so good.*
Remind yourself: what city are you in? Are you a tourist? Are you damp from the Maid of the Mist, standing in line behind Herb and Shirl from Topeka, with a small, soft, polarbear Mountie gripped in your hands? The main question you need to ask yourself is this: can you buy this in New York or London or Paris? If yes, and you're standing in the makeshift satellite giftshop at the TRANS-FORMATION AGO, put down the Frankenthaler keychain, ignore the Morris Louis coasters, and pick up the Jack Bush fridge magnet of Dazzle Red (1965) and feel good that you won't find this at MoMA or Tate Modern or the Pompidou.
The Shape of Colour at the Art Gallery of Ontario closes August 7 and it's a decent way to see some samples of a number of modern and latemodern treatments of colour. Worth seeing is a Robert Motherwell, a massive canvas of powder-blue and thin, jittery, black lines. Clifford Still's roughly painted work stands out as a particularly tactile piece, harsh, not pretty. Ellsworth Kelly's blue and white graphic work is cool and quiet while Barnett Newman and Guido Molinari represent two generations of explorations of large surfaces of colour, solid in every sense of the word, although the younger Molinari moves away from Newman's rigid formalism with a shimmering surface treatment, saturating rather than layering the surface. The intermediary generation are the oft-called second generation abstract expressionists, who awkwardly hold a position in the shadow of the minimalists while waiting for the colour field painters championed by Clement Greenberg (Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella) to mature. These second-wave abstract expressionists, represented here by Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, work with the raw canvas directly, staining the unprimed surface with pigment and oil and the subsequent years see the seepage of the linseed out from the colour and extending the shapes further. Louis and Frankenthaler tend to be rather minor figures, overshadowed by Noland and Stella in the 1960s, while the third generation abstract expressionists resolved the hesitancy of the second-gens, and learned to reconcile the shared language of the colour field artists and minimalists, famously pitted against each other by Greenberg and Michael Fried (think of it as something like the media-invented rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones). It's curious that one of the best examples of the third generation abstract expressionists, Brice Marden, is absent. Marden's extended body of work documents the genealogy of formalist painterly abstraction, from the Classical period of Pollock, Motherwell and Rothko through the half-step of the canvas stainers and finally into the endgame of the colour field painters and minimalism.
Like an afterthought, tucked away in a corner, is a sad little Sir Anthony Caro sculpture, red and deflated. This is what formalist painting did to sculpture. David Smith, Caro's immediate predecessor, created small works to be viewed on pedestals, to extend into the third dimension what the painters were doing on canvas. Of course, to Greenberg, the painters were making paintings that referred to their materiality, their existence as paintings, as paint on canvas, in the real world. That made the position of sculpture rather tenuous. It was a minor art in this particular world, and neither Smith nor Caro seemed to challenge this. Caro's innovation was to flatten the plane of the object. To view an Anthony Caro, one looked straight on, like a painting. It was a flat surface, as if not three dimensional. His more famous works were larger than Smith's and were usually placed on the floor but they were still within the grasp of the viewer as a flat object. Think of it as four views of lines and shapes on four flat picture planes. The Caro piece in The Shapes of Colour on the other hand, sits on the floor as if discarded, the only way to view it is to look down.
Sol LeWitt's monumental string-art installation is a wonder. Red and blue threads trace out large rectangular forms off the walls of one room, quivering. It's both overwhelming and delicate, Richard Serra as interpreted by a group of children.
3 to 1 Groovy Green, part of a series of collaborations between artist Charles Long and the Franco-Anglo band Stereolab, is the stand-out among the contemporary works. A green pod rests on a coffee table with a couch. The surface of the pod is shiny plastic. Listeners can sit on the couch and listen through one of three headsets that plays a loop of a Stereolab song written for the piece. Stereolab makes music that evokes an era of space-age optimism, retro lounge rock sung in mostly French, with la-la-las straight from A Man and a Woman. The pod, the table and the couch would look good in Wallpaper. The tangle of cords from the headsets disturb the polish, the fabricated gleam of a world-weary take on latemodern progressive design, what Long calls "bachelor pad formalism."
Me, I'm looking forward to Catherine the Great: Arts for the Empire: Masterpieces from the State Hermitage Museum, Russia, opening October 1, 2005 at the AGO. Bestial relations with horses never looked so good.*
I Am Curious, Mellow
Okay. This is the Montage meets the Left Banke, which of course is not exactly a major stylistic leap since Mike Brown, the pianist and main songwriter for the Left Banke wrote all the songs for and produced the only album that the Montage recorded. Specifically the Left Banke's Dark is the Bark although I was also thinking maybe My Friend Today but also Men Are Building Sand, which both the Left Banke and the Montage recorded (I guess Mike ran out of songs, but the Montage version is a bit more wee? twee? what would the British music press say?) but in the end this is all very Mike Brownesque.
It's from Sub Pop and I found it on Fingertips Music's This Week's Finds.
Holopaw
Curious
Okay. This is the Montage meets the Left Banke, which of course is not exactly a major stylistic leap since Mike Brown, the pianist and main songwriter for the Left Banke wrote all the songs for and produced the only album that the Montage recorded. Specifically the Left Banke's Dark is the Bark although I was also thinking maybe My Friend Today but also Men Are Building Sand, which both the Left Banke and the Montage recorded (I guess Mike ran out of songs, but the Montage version is a bit more wee? twee? what would the British music press say?) but in the end this is all very Mike Brownesque.
It's from Sub Pop and I found it on Fingertips Music's This Week's Finds.
Holopaw
Curious
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Ayler, Cops
In late July Boing Boing posted a link to a site offering advise on how to deal with the police, particularly in New York, when confronted to be searched. What are your rights when refusing to be searched? The post is archived here and the link to the site is here. It's a good read, pretty thorough, but it only applies to the US. It got me thinking about my own rights in Canada and a couple of things in particular struck me. In Canada we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but I'm certain that there are limits and differences in search and seizure procedures. The problem of course, is that Canadians are familiar with American laws through TV cop shows and there are assumptions that we have Miranda rights or something similar (obviously called something else). Plus, Canadians can be a compliant lot and when asked by a cop to open your bag, I'm guessing a (small?) majority of Canadians would comply without thinking.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, but the problem remains that there's not much info out there dealing with specifically Canadian laws. What are my rights? Can a cop enter my home without a warrant, or search my car, or ask me to open my backpack in the subway? The likelihood of terrorists hitting Toronto transit is small and the chair of the Toronto transit authority already stated that there would be no random bag checks in the near future. But I still don't know all my rights.
I emailed Cory Doctorow, the Boing Boinger who posted the link, and he forwarded my question to Michael Geist. Michael was nice enough to email me to let me know that he wasn't aware of any Canadian websites that had similar info but he would suggest it to a couple of organizations that may be in a position to produce something.
A long, long time ago, two friends and I were driving around my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. We were pulled over by three police cars, including a station wagon with a mean-looking drug-sniffing dog. They said there was a report of a suspicious car driving in the neighbourhood and pointed to my friend in the front passenger seat (I was driving) and said, "that's the one" to each other. They asked for ID from me and him and we produced it. It was only later that I thought about this. The cops had the authority to pull me over if my car answered a description. They had the authority to ask me for ID as the driver. But they had no right to ask my friend for his ID. Anyway, nothing happened, but it's made me wary of these sorts of things and it's about time I'm sure of my rights.
Albert Ayler
Ghosts: First Version
Ghosts (Live)
In late July Boing Boing posted a link to a site offering advise on how to deal with the police, particularly in New York, when confronted to be searched. What are your rights when refusing to be searched? The post is archived here and the link to the site is here. It's a good read, pretty thorough, but it only applies to the US. It got me thinking about my own rights in Canada and a couple of things in particular struck me. In Canada we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but I'm certain that there are limits and differences in search and seizure procedures. The problem of course, is that Canadians are familiar with American laws through TV cop shows and there are assumptions that we have Miranda rights or something similar (obviously called something else). Plus, Canadians can be a compliant lot and when asked by a cop to open your bag, I'm guessing a (small?) majority of Canadians would comply without thinking.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, but the problem remains that there's not much info out there dealing with specifically Canadian laws. What are my rights? Can a cop enter my home without a warrant, or search my car, or ask me to open my backpack in the subway? The likelihood of terrorists hitting Toronto transit is small and the chair of the Toronto transit authority already stated that there would be no random bag checks in the near future. But I still don't know all my rights.
I emailed Cory Doctorow, the Boing Boinger who posted the link, and he forwarded my question to Michael Geist. Michael was nice enough to email me to let me know that he wasn't aware of any Canadian websites that had similar info but he would suggest it to a couple of organizations that may be in a position to produce something.
A long, long time ago, two friends and I were driving around my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. We were pulled over by three police cars, including a station wagon with a mean-looking drug-sniffing dog. They said there was a report of a suspicious car driving in the neighbourhood and pointed to my friend in the front passenger seat (I was driving) and said, "that's the one" to each other. They asked for ID from me and him and we produced it. It was only later that I thought about this. The cops had the authority to pull me over if my car answered a description. They had the authority to ask me for ID as the driver. But they had no right to ask my friend for his ID. Anyway, nothing happened, but it's made me wary of these sorts of things and it's about time I'm sure of my rights.
Albert Ayler
Ghosts: First Version
Ghosts (Live)
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
The Drells, Homer
This is courtesy Illegal Arts MP3s an excellent source for music and audio downloads, programmed more-or-less monthly by guest curators. The track is the classic late-60s R&B wonder Tighten Up by Archie Bell and the Drells. (Simpsons reference: when Bart wants to get a job, Homer recounts his one-man band as a teen, and in the flashback tells the gathered crowd that he's Archie Bell "and I'm also the Drells and this is how we Tighten Up!" He plays the scratchy riff and is then attacked by an organ-grinder monkey).
Illegal Art's July programmer Decomposure sums up the song nicely:
This is courtesy Illegal Arts MP3s an excellent source for music and audio downloads, programmed more-or-less monthly by guest curators. The track is the classic late-60s R&B wonder Tighten Up by Archie Bell and the Drells. (Simpsons reference: when Bart wants to get a job, Homer recounts his one-man band as a teen, and in the flashback tells the gathered crowd that he's Archie Bell "and I'm also the Drells and this is how we Tighten Up!" He plays the scratchy riff and is then attacked by an organ-grinder monkey).
Illegal Art's July programmer Decomposure sums up the song nicely:
i know there's some marginally talented rapper out there itching to deface this song with another stinking pile of insincere cliches, and this song is just too perfect to allow that. If you can crank this up, hear that beautiful bassline in the breakdown and not feel protective of this song, you have no soul.
The Church, Cows
I figured this was as good a way of starting this off as any, with a link to a free mp3 of a newish track by the Church. If you don't know the Church, they're a great, underrated band from Australia, most famous for Under the Milky Way, a late-80s hit (you know it). The track here, Till the Cows Come Home is a great little song, a bit atypical for them, mostly acoustic, somewhat goofy. The Church have never been aclaimed for their humour, though it's there if you want to find it. I saw them twice in Toronto, a city the Church hate, back in '88 and '90. (The band has expressed disdain for Toronto in a couple of interviews, citing the too-cool mentality that does permeate Toronto at times). During the first show in '88, the humour from the band was dry, and maybe a little black. Much sneering at the audience shouting out for Milky Way, asking someone in particular to leave and offering to pay him to leave.
I figured this was as good a way of starting this off as any, with a link to a free mp3 of a newish track by the Church. If you don't know the Church, they're a great, underrated band from Australia, most famous for Under the Milky Way, a late-80s hit (you know it). The track here, Till the Cows Come Home is a great little song, a bit atypical for them, mostly acoustic, somewhat goofy. The Church have never been aclaimed for their humour, though it's there if you want to find it. I saw them twice in Toronto, a city the Church hate, back in '88 and '90. (The band has expressed disdain for Toronto in a couple of interviews, citing the too-cool mentality that does permeate Toronto at times). During the first show in '88, the humour from the band was dry, and maybe a little black. Much sneering at the audience shouting out for Milky Way, asking someone in particular to leave and offering to pay him to leave.
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