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Fashion Police: Death of Punk

May 11, 2013 //
4

There were several pieces posted on my FB flist on the fatuousness of the celebs at the Vogue mag sponsored Met gala celebrating the opening of the punk clothing show at the Costume Institute.

Just for the record, no one missed the death sentence for aging Plaid Forevers that the Metropolitan’s museumization of their youth represents.

Jaded Punk misses the point entirely, however, in lambasting Anna Wintour’s guests  for being sellouts. Srsly, Wintour asked uber punk Kanye West to entertain. He brought his baby mama Kim Kardashian, who was dressed in Givenchy maternity wear as the Duchess of Devonshire’s sofa. We were not amused in 1981 by punks’ puerile performance of purity and lack of selling out. And nor are we now.

Here is baby mama Kardashian at the Met Gala. Actually the Duchess’ sofa Kim wore is more punk than the plaid flannel shirt Leonard DeCaprio wore to the black tie event.

Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala opening for the Costume Institute show on punk fashion.

The thing is, punk was always performance wear, and couture designers of the aging Plaid Forevers generation have always alluded to it. That’s what the museumization — the show at the Met — is about. I’m not sure if it actually makes the point that performance wear kind of museumizes (in the full Foucaultian sense of the word) itself the minute a Ramone shreds his jeans, and it is little different from the most exquisitely confected couture evening dress, or, punkest of all, Andre Leon Talley’s vast evening coat which looks like a vast suzani-appliqued kimono. Talley, who represents everything that is punk and actual wear, and Kardashian, who represents everything that is performance wear/fashion troll,  looked more alike than either of them knew.

Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley in a Tom Ford evening coat at the Costume Institute punk show gala.

I want to salute the girls at Go Fug Yourself for carrying on a long existential dialogue on performance wear versus actual wear. These are two parallel discourses in fashion little explored elsewhere. You can get publicity in this paparazzi world by trolling fashion — wearing performance wear rather than actual clothes.

There was no real coverage of this event except deep in the Times Style section last Thursday. There was a long story inside about the East Village (aka center of the universe) shop, Trash and Vaudeville, where the Ramones actually got their black jeans,  from which punk fashion took over the U.S. universe. Its longtime proprieter, Ray Goodman, points out there were two kinds of punk. The Ramones kind of street fashion he helped establish, and the “more theatrical” British invasion kind established later on. Actual wear vs. performance wear.

The manager of Trash and Vaudeville is an old school heroin addict — an upstate boy who came to the East Village in the ’70s lured by a Lou Reed song. He bottomed out, went back upstate, then returned to the East Village of his youth. Spiked and wrinkled, now, both, manager Jimmy Webb makes explicit what not selling out is.

He says, “We are true mom-and-pop, the bodega of rock ’n’ roll clothing. It’s here because of truth and spirit, just like Iggy Pop giving it his best every night and going all the way until everything in your body is broken except your soul and rock ’n’ roll. We can move it to Mars and still live.”

Jimmy Webb, manager, Trash and Vaudeville, the venerable Saint Mark’s place punk fashion store which dressed the Ramones.

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Categories art, fashion

Gates and Guyton: Is Microsoft Word the New Masolino da Panicale, Inventor of Perspective?

October 1, 2012 //
0

The Banquet of Herod, in which di Panicale invents perspective.

Handsome as a movie star, Wade Guyton hails from Tennessee, can’t draw and had trouble getting NYC art fellowships. Got his start in NYC as a security guard at Dia.
Now his computer generated “paintings”, which he designs using images he scans from books designed by other graphics artists, get a prestigious “mid career” retrospective at the Whitney.

Wade Guyton, by Karsten Moran for the New York Times.

This is the one graf in the whole story which makes me stop screaming ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL.

By Daniel Clowes, from his comic book Eightball.

“I would drag Web pages over other printed materials,” he explained. “What I realized is that Microsoft Word has a structure to it. It has a language and margins. It has functions and a default size and a default color, which is black. And all those presets I decided to use as the structure for making drawings.”
Interesting. Ish. The problem is that the template is Bill Gates’, who will

Unaesthetic doesn’t begin to describe Guyton’s medium. Recent stories about Gates’ anti-innovation business model underline the point.

Jeez, is everything bullshit?
________________________________
*Welcome to Soweto, white boy:
Gates looks back with some amusement at his belated realization that access to technological information might not be the answer to the world’s most serious problems. Microsoft was donating computers to poor communities in Africa in the mid-90’s, and during a visit to Johannesburg, Gates went to Soweto where he was proudly shown the town’s single computer. As he took in his surroundings, he recalls, he said to himself: ”Hey, wait a minute — there’s only one electrical outlet in this whole place.’ And yup, they had plugged in that computer, and when I was there, man, that thing was running and everybody was very thankful. But I looked around and thought, Hmm, computers may not be the highest priority in this particular place. I wondered, Who the heck is going to be really using this thing?”
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Categories art, news, popular culture

Kuk Harrell, Culture Czar, System D CEO

June 30, 2012 //
0

Ever since I read this vignette, in 2000, about Bill Gates’ great Eureka, in which he finally ceases to be an entirely white boy, I have been thinking.

Gates looks back with some amusement at his belated realization that access to technological information might not be the answer to the world’s most serious problems. Microsoft was donating computers to poor communities in Africa in the mid-90’s, and during a visit to Johannesburg, Gates went to Soweto where he was proudly shown the town’s single computer. As he took in his surroundings, he recalls, he said to himself: ”Hey, wait a minute — there’s only one electrical outlet in this whole place.’ And yup, they had plugged in that computer, and when I was there, man, that thing was running and everybody was very thankful. But I looked around and thought, Hmm, computers may not be the highest priority in this particular place. I wondered, Who the heck is going to be really using this thing?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/16/magazine/how-to-give-away-21.8-billion.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

I’ve been collecting a number of pieces of string around this, one being that Gates was so overwhelmed by actually being able to See something among all the invisible men and sockets in Soweto that he missed the picture of Tupac taped to the wall. I imagine the wall to be made of flattened 25-liter cooking oil tins. Maybe the picture is of Diddy or Little Richard or Snoop or Afrika Bambaataa or L’il Kim’s plastic breasts. Maybe it is affixed to the wall with a magnet, or wired to the wall through holes drilled in the tins. Whoever the picture is of, it is not a picture of anything Americans promulgate as American culture. American culture would be the socket they don’t have. The software Gates is trying to sell them.

From that moment, I realized that African Americans are the arbiters of American and thus global popular culture. Just finished reading a book called An Empire  of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. I await the sequel, about how African Americans — and System D — invented popular culture. And I do believe, as a very old school fan of the O’Jays and their love train, that the hip hop love train energy is what is moving through System D — what the African Francophones call the back channel economy, which now employs half the world’s workers and is the second-largest economy (after ours)  — to save the world. Out of the garbage pile that is Lagos it comes, slouching toward Bethlehem Wall fucking Street.


As usual, the comments on this clip are as important as the clip itself, if not more so.

Now comes this stunning profile of Kuk Harrell, a  black man who is Justin Bieber’s and Rihanna’s vocal producer. He is now my template for culture czar. First thought. It’s all pastiche and technology. Second thought, Romare Bearden is all pastiche and he did it, he sliced up America, Justin Bieber, Bill Gates and Rihanna, listening, as many African American fine artists do, to jazz.

Kuk Harrell, culture arbiter.

Jazz is way too intellectual for me. I suspect it has to do with the heroin-like abstractions of bone-deep existential Cool. I am not cool. I do lurk late though, and so I nearly passed out staring at Bearden’s Tomorrow I May Be Far Away at the National Gallery’s great 2003 retrospective when I saw fragments of wood siding samples pasted into the [entirely modernist] cubist melange. (Was Picasso the first black president?)

I immediately connected them to the collageurs and pastiche masters of African American yard art, in which hub caps are transformed into mandalas and geomancy energy changers, and drive shafts driven into graves into axes mundi. This Bearden did with advertising images he clipped and re-imagined from white Life or black Ebony magazine.

Romare Bearden. Tomorrow I May Be Far Away. 1967

Finally, there’s nothing post-modern about the pastiche. I need to think some more about that. It’s totes modern, and totes Marxist in its deconstruction, or explosion, and synthesis (as Harrell’s biographer puts it) into a Frankensteinian work of cobbled System D art. It’s a total reappropriation by Harrell/Bearden/Frankenstein. I need to think a whole lot more about that, and the interpolation of technology — the mastery of recording technology — with which Harrell mediates, collages, and pastiches a song. You think it’s Bieber? Think again.

For now, hear this. African Americans and Kuk Harrell are your popular cultural arbiters. Nothin’ post-racial about it.

I have to get some more System D and Frenchie philosophy under my belt. I’m still flipping out around the idea that Lacan was a Freudian psychoanalyst. Nothin’ Afro pomo homo about that.

People all over the world? Join hands. Join hands.

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Categories art, popular culture, the new economy

Phoenix: Be Impeccable With Your Word

June 23, 2012 //
0

My life, since I came back from Cuba, has been all about the dream deferred. I haven’t minded taking care of my mother, and taking care of, once and for all, my terrible upbringing — the epiphany is entirely quotidian but earthshaking.

As an ACOA once described it to me, it is pausing at the door of the hospital room and realizing, in one tsunami of emotion, that they had never taken care of you and now you must break the chain of karma alone. Then there was what I call the vortex of mayhem, managing two storage spaces, five or six dwellings, three of them (including the $8000-a-month-room in the big house, and the $2000 a month one) infested, moving the Aged Parent six times in two years, from shithole to shithole, the voice in the burning bush which told me last year I was “working out of the wrong energy” and that the “answer is in your house” — but it has been a job. I resent having the goalposts moved, just as I was fixing to start to sell my book. I resent, terribly, the financial and health implosions, and have noted that being the victim target of terrible helpless insane peoples’ cruelty is humiliating. Don Miguel’s second agreement, and all the forgiveness work I’ve been doing, speaks to this.

What I have forgotten is what the job coach started to talk to me about just before the shit hit the fan. First, that nobody would hire me as long as the Aged Parent was not in a nursing home. (Having to move her to five different ones and two “rehabs” did not solve this problem.) Second, a 10 year plan. I find myself with artifacts of that straight talk of so long ago — a plus size work wardrobe for a woman of a certain age, budget wise, confected to convey readiness to work, [false] able-bodiedness and up-to-date skills. This itself is as big a mountain to move as was a suitable work wardrobe in 1969, when there was no such thing.

The 10 year plan was then and is now, I have realized, over the last month, about New York City. I wasn’t wrong to choose it then, and I am not wrong to choose it now. Ariele and Amelie’s posts about finally getting studio space in Brooklyn crystallized it for me, as did the dawning realization that Macondo is all about being too far away from God, and Forty-second Street, with the A-bomb, Camp Ped and [redacted from private blog]. I came here because the nursing homes were one-quarter the price of the ones in D.C. and I had to plan for a life that including my mother’s living for another 10 years. My recent visit to Phoenix, which, while it is literally 107 degrees in the shade, overwhelmed me with the happiness and agency and purposive well-kept optimistic and artistic public spaces, entirely lacking here in Macondo. And don’t blame it on the Indians or the Chicanos. They got them, and their genocided ghosts, in Phoenix too. I blame it on the Hispano Inquisition penitente karma, the caudillismo. Macondo. First in the nation in prison rapes. First with the A-bomb.

Sore-eye poppies at ground zero, Trinity Site, White Sands, NM

The fireflies in Gramercy Park. I just remembered that, and realized it is still completely within my grasp.

http://leftfieldcards.wordpress.com/

http://brooklyntowest.blogspot.com/

I want it. I have never gone without anything I wanted.

Laura Foster Nicholson ribbon.

http://www.lfntextiles.com/servlet/the-ALL-RIBBONS/Categories

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Categories art, news, spiritual, urban theory

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Pomoes

June 5, 2012 //
0

I am sometimes amazed at the accuracy of my nose for news. The reading of omens is, you will comprehend, a child survivor strategy which, because it operates on an almost limbic, and yet learned level, I never really credit as fully evolved intelligence.

But it is. Thanks to the colloquy over at [a friends-locked blog] on bloviatin’ bloggers’ overuse of the term curating, I am reading, finally, a generation after everybody else, Douglas Crimp‘s admirably crystalline On the Ruin of Museums, which you can gank in PDF form here.

He says everything I’ve been thinking about for 20 years, while I was aware, in a mildly amused way, of the Foucauldian museum wars.*

These were at their fiercest while the Jews, the Native Americans, and the African Americans were all playing the race card to jockey their museums into one of the last few spaces of the Mall in D.C. — the Mall having been designed as America’s great democratic gathering space, bookended by the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial.

Of the pomo museums, the Holocaust Museum is the most Disneyesque — Epcot Auschwitz — I have yet seen, truly insulting.

(I hasten to add that its library, all honey-colored wood and carpet and clerestory light, is almost as gorgeous as the I.M. Pei library in the East Wing of the National Gallery, which may be the best modern space ever. You know I dote on library architecture, and had a long discussion once on my private blog about what a lady’s library might look like. Part of my love is that qua public space, libraries — like museums — are the very instrument of democracy. They are the tool with which nations are built, as Foucault argued, and as the Jews, and the Native Americans and the African Americans knew before he did. This piece, about America’s busiest library, in Queens, N.Y. makes me want to stand and sing every time I read it. Sometimes I can still believe. Rejecting the canon is for people who have a nation; and the very identity politics “museumization” seems to decry are the tell-tale, self-destructive, modern earmark of post-modernism.)

The best thing about the Native American museum is the way the pond has attracted and shelters “wild” birds within view of the Capitol.

It surprises me to think that people say Foucault defines post-modernism, as Crimp asserts, as rupture from past historicism. I thought (schooled by Marxists, I admit; I think Marx got modernity right, and I’m thrilled that Crimp quotes clever old wrong Adorno first) modernity itself was defined as rupture, coalescing, rupture — thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And that pomo, like fascism, is just one of modernity’s….antitheses? Or backlashes.

My latest theory is, we haven’t worked out the ideas and problems raised in the 19th century’s great access of modernity yet. The 20th century was all reaction to that shit, without any time spent working out you know, the issues raised in Saturn Devouring His Son or Faust or Our Mutual Friend, surely three of modernity’s greatest documents, much less Darwin and Marx. (Museumization note: Googling for an image to illustrate Faust building his metropolis, the number four image for “Faust’s metropolis” is a Flickr shot of my own backyard, which I’ve tagged “Faust’s Metropolis”. This is….sputter…sputter… retromingent.)

To which end, I am going to try to read Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club. You will congratulate me for the marathon achieved in completing the 800 page bio of William James, exceedingly well written, I must say, on a subject worth every page, fascinating as a survey of the enormities of the 19th century (Swedenborg! holy crap! the Civil War! Boston as the capital of the republic of women! America as the laboratory of modernity!), and accurately subtitled In the Maelstrom of American Modernism,  touched upon above. In short, a true portrait of modernity at its most influential, the point to which, my nose for news tells me, we are just now getting back to.

As one of the major progenitors of modernity, you don’t want to mess with Goya.

_____________

*I think they are well-taken, the essentially feminist, queer, subaltern arguments of the baby boomer counterculture. Nuthin’ pomo about that.

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Categories art, public space, queer theory, urban theory

Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Too Fascist for Girls?

June 2, 2012 //
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Silence is my metier, and in it I am not always certain rock and roll is good for girls. In spelunking around the intarnets, I discovered the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, its conference, its publication, which is on the right track if not, in major ways, persuasive.

One graf from the IASPM call for papers for its March, 2012, conference:

–Ladies on the Town: Cities have always been sites of female empowerment and risk taking, where the village daughter becomes a Bollywood star or a budding feminist forms an all-girl band. If this has stimulated fears of “women adrift,” free of small-town norms, from Dreiser’sSister Carrie to the girls who “need blinders” in Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” it has also incited celebrations: Beyonce’s single ladies, “up in the club, doin’ my own little thing.” How, within music, has the city made women, and how have women made the city?
http://iaspm-us.net/conferences/

Hmmmm. Beyonce made it on her own? Budding feminists form all-girl bands? Do they now? Or is that the sell-out?

I’m inclined to think that’s part of the Art School Confidential scam. Indeed, the biggest art school confidential scamster I have encountered was [redacted], forming rock bands, posting pictures of her [redacted] boyfriend’s poop, writing artist’s statements enough to put you off art until the end of time, and getting a fine arts degree from Pratt, in the 21st century, with a senior project — her collection of plaster casts of penises. Been done, dude. Baby boomers beat you to that one too. What’s new, and awesome, is you call it art. And it empowered you. Rilly.

And then there’s Alice Bag. And the indies. A whole nother can of worms.

You know, that political agency in rock and roll only exists when subcultures make the music. And it better not just be Suzy Creamcheese whining.

Always mindful that David Bowie and Mick Jagger together watched Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of fascist art together. Fifteen times. And declared Hitler the first rock star. Yay, political agency.  So transgressive! For a quick rundown of the elements of fascist art, including sexual*, you might want to check out this and also this:

The squirmin’ dog who’s just had her day  
Under my thumb  
A girl who has just changed her ways
 It’s down to me, yes it is  
The way she does just what she’s told  
Down to me, the change has come  
She’s under my thumb

That marimba? I can tell you from the way it took me in 1966 it is rock and roll for sure. But is it too fascist for girls? Probably. Am I sorry I danced? Probably not. It is essential to know how the predator moves.

I am thinking of the eyewitness account in the bio of Pauline Kael I’m reading, previously in my reading referred to apocryphally, of a Hollywood producer going through head shots of actresses for a part.

He sorts them into two stacks. Fuckable. And un-.

Grace Slick, who was and is beautiful, if unfuckable, has recently said in her day you didn’t have to be good-looking because there were no music videos.
http://blog.discoversd.com/san-diego-entertainment-blog/grace-slick-dishes-on-sex-drugs–rock-and-roll.html

Mmmm-hmmm. I’m not sure it’s possible to be anywhere near hip, much less empowered, anywhere near rock ‘n’ roll. Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids — along with the great biography of de Kooning, the manifestos of the East Village and hipster life, ca. 1945-80 — makes one thing very clear. It was all about being fuckable, about Allen Ginsberg’s — and Mapplethorpe’s — thinking she was a beautiful boy. That’s why they call it rock ‘n’ roll.

And making a living on your back, as Anne Boleyn, say, among the married ladies, or Fakhra Younus, among the dancing girls, or the Eagles will tell you, is the very hardest way to go.

We can beat around the bushes;
we can get down to the bone
We can leave it in the parkin’ lot,
but either way,
there’s gonna be a heartache tonight….

___________________

*Umberto Eco discerns 14 signs of a fascist, including:

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

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Categories art, fashion, feminism

Omphalos

May 29, 2012 //
0

That is the word that rose to the top of the great green greasy Limpopo as I chewed my salad and looked out the window into the rain on — 22nd Street — and thought about what I saw at the Bonnard show.

1. The Open Window is one, if the word means what I think it means. and for the first time in forty years of looking at it I realized that it is Africa that is outside the window: what I saw looking out the window in Africa: the abundance, incredible polymorphous capacity of matter to body itself forth into a million different leaves, forming trees, forming jungles, forming a vast shape against the sky, as rain moves in a gray line implacably toward me every day at 2 o’clock on the dot. The great cat lifts its paw and puts it down as Virginia Woolf says; but this implies malice and caprice. Nature is completely powerful and affectless — one dissolves in it, as Bonnard and not Picasso knew.

The Open Window, Pierre Bonnard, 1921.

Bonnard is the anti-Picasso.

He says, “…that which begins from nothing, that which does not mean anything, a picture just for the sake of a picture, appears to me as a monstrosity….Art will never be able to do without nature. When one forgets everything, all that remains is oneself and that is not enough.”

Picasso: cubism: Guernica: mind-fucking, pinning to the center of the canvas the helpless object for dissection. His horizon will always be beneath him.

2. Her belly button is two, in the great epochal Nude in the Bath and Small Dog. Which didn’t make me cry this time. It only made my chest ache and I had to sit down.

Nude in the Bath With a Small Dog, Pierre Bonnard, 1941-6.

But the Blossoming Almond Tree, which he saw out the window from his death bed, did bring out the specially prepared handkerchief. Van Gogh’s blossoming almond branch, painted at a very low point, in honor of the birth of his nephew. Manet’s last death-bed bouquet painting of his favorite white lilacs. Tooth glass. Perfectly refracting, and blazing out against the oncoming darkness. The burning bush.

3. His eyes in the 1945 self portrait are three and four.

Sel-portrait, Pierre Bonnard, 1945.

This may be one of the most accurate portraits of a human face I’ve ever seen. Yet it is almost featureless.

On his deathbed, he told his nephew, draw more.

Yes, maitre.

Originally blogged January 3, 2003, in Washington, D.C., after the Bonnard show at the Phillips. This post is central to what I think.

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Categories art, spiritual

Internet Ethics: Yvestown Raises the Roof

May 21, 2012 //
8

So Yvonne Eijkenduijn is probably one of the most influential DIY interior designers on the internet.

She purveys the popular northern Euro all-white aesthetic — well exemplified by Suki in Helsinki or  Benita Larsson who also DIY it —  of what is, I think, an essentially Gustavian Swedish style to offset long grey winters, where evening falls at 3 p.m., with glowing white or pastel interiors.

Eijkenduijn and her husband are meticulous renovaters and crafters; she adds minimal pops of floral color and hand-crafted or peeling vintage things to her white rooms, which makes them seem less twee than beautifully ordered and sculpted. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like Eijkenduijn’s style. Essentially Eijkenduijn and Gustav solve the problem of how to make uncluttered modern interiors femme. It is the moral question of the 20th century: where is a girl supposed to sit, and concatenate the moral community home represents, in a Bauhaus living room?

Eijkenduijn’s kitchen. http://www.yvestown.com/archive/2012/05/kitchen-update.html

Eijkenduijn has been blogging for seven years and has made a design career from the success of her blog. It carries no ads, which seems to be a point of pride — and an Old School WELL-era  internet campaign — among the professional DIY home design visionaries like Anna Dorfman, for example. Others, equally inspiring and creative, seek sponsors, like Morgan Sattersfield,  for example,  with her hard-core thrifted mid-century-modern Palm Springs Cali aesthetic,  or suburban DIY nesters who have monetized their blogs and, in the case of John and Sherry Petersik, for example, do a terrific professional job.

Eijkenduijn has always seen the blog as a cottage industry marketplace to sell books or yarn, other peoples’ creations and, less often, things she has made. She solicits sponsors and swag in a way the Petersiks, who live off the income generated by their sponsors, do not. The Petersiks, for example, both of whom have creative backgrounds in advertising,  clearly state they don’t accept products for review, and recommend only things they actually use. It is the foundation of their trustability and, I believe, their huge traffic.

But Eijkenduijn recently asked her readers to pay her back for all the time she’s put into the blog by contributing money to build her a new roof. Lots of readers are pissed off. I am slightly put off too, as if I had been lulled into thinking she’d invited me to dinner and then presented me with a check.

What do you think? Should we chip in for Yvonne’s roof? Has she made a faux pas? Is it a cultural thing that her American readers are pissed off and the Europeans aren’t? Are Americans, who generally believe that journalism is about hustling your music video, naive? What’s happening?

Update 5/22/12: Eijkenduijn has taken down her roof fund posts with  strange rancor.

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Categories art, crafting, internet ethics

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 1925-2012

May 19, 2012 //
0

Wehrmacht stable boy on the Russian front, P.O.W. entertainer, baritone, most-recorded singer, transcendentalist.

The German character, which has been under scrutiny since Luther advised his princes to “smite, slay, and stab” a peasant insurrection because the Devil was in the lower classes, has several threads. Fischer-Dieskau, the foremost interpreter of German lieder, who memorized Morgenstern’s poems on the Russian front, took his homeless mother to the opera after she was bombed out, and interposed art to every calamity, represents what is immortal in the German character. The idealism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskau-german-baritone-dies-at-86.html?_r=1

The recording of Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s lieder is the one I sent to a dying friend, who had been born in Germany. Hopefully, it took him to heaven.

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Categories art, news, spiritual

Straight Skinny Epitaph: Charles Louis Brown, 1936-2012

May 17, 2012 //
0

Brown invented go-go music, which defines the independent alt. culture history of Washington D.C. as the capital of the African diaspora.  Music theorist and visionary. Culture czar of Chocolate City.

“It’s about love, the communication between performer and audience,” Mr. Brown said of go-go. “When you’re on stage, the people put that love to you and you give it back. There’s no other music like it.”

Next time you hear a politician say he’s running against Washington, think of Chuck.

My go-go at the Smithsonian epiphany: I went down to the brown bag lunch time lecture on D.C.’s indigenous music, expecting a crowd of perhaps 50 — the usual size for these esoteric yet superficial talks.

There were at least 3,000 people there, all of them in crisp creased blue collar uniforms. The subway drivers, the UPS guys, the janitors, the mailpeople, the bus drivers, the dental hygienists and LPNs in their pink scrubs, the people you always wondered about how they kept their shit together to send their children to Catholic school and on to college. The answer? Go-go. The godfather of go-go, Chuck Brown, was there. Everyone had mind-bogglingly sophisticated questions about studio technology, entertainment law, music theory and so on, and Chuck Brown — also amazingly groovy after 180 years of playing rough, nut-cuttin’ crowds at the Ibex — oh, the Ibex — had nothing but the sweetest love and brilliant advice to give back.

Everybody had both a right livelihood and a right vocation, as Buddha in his Noble Eight-Fold Path recommends. I call this my go-go vision.

Keep what you got
Until you get what
You need y’all
You got to give a lot
Just to get what
You need sometimes y’all
Gimme the bridge now
I feel like busting loose
Busting loose

XHHNXesVW88

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Categories art, news, urban theory
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