Jozef Van Wissem

on UBU
The track 'After the fire has
devoured all it will consume
itself' is a must. so beautiful.

Silvia Bächli

incoming heirlooms

as per a friend's advice, I took the seeds
from an outrageously delicious heirloom tomato
I got from the farmers market and planted them
and here they come...
yay to southern cal's 10 month tomato season...
any local planty friends are free to take a seedling,
I will have many

happiness is a new (studio) bookshelf

Uncle Yanko

Saw an amazing short film by Agnes Varda (who was in attendance to my great surprise and excitement!) about rediscovering her amazing bohemian artist greek Uncle Yanko, alive and well in a houseboat community in Sausolito. The film is seriously breathtakingly beautiful kind of stopped me dead in my tracks. Inspired to say the least. CINE-VARDA fest at the AERO continues - don't miss it Angeleno's!

TINARIWEN in series: Live At Other Music from Dig For Fire on Vimeo.

psyched

"Subway II, the debut album by Subway on Soul Jazz Records, is a startling cosmic marriage of influences – German electronic rock music from the 1970s (Cluster, Kraftwerk, Neu, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel), 80s Detroit science fiction techno (Carl Craig, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills) and a hint of Italian and European disco (Danielle Baldelli meets Cerrone, Space, Moroder and Jean Michel Jarre)."

Just watched this the other night

and I've been describing it thusly:
You know in a really amazing david lynch
movie when all the shit hits all the fans all at once -
That's what this film is like start to finish, for real.
MUST SEE!

ALI AKBAR KHAN
Sarod Virtuoso,
Dies at 87

Harriet Hosmer, Lost and Found’

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park
Through Jan. 24

Patricia Cronin first became aware of the American 19th-century sculptor Harriet Hosmer when she came across images of Hosmer’s marble figures while doing research for a sculpture of her own, “Memorial to a Marriage,” a larger-than-life marble tomb carving depicting herself and her lover, the painter Deborah Kass, locked in an embrace. Ms. Cronin saw examples of Hosmer’s surviving monumental work a few years later while on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

Ms. Cronin’s reaction on both occasions was to wonder why Hosmer wasn’t better known, and she decided to do something to ensure that she would be. The result was the project just installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum: a show of 20 of Ms. Cronin’s black-and-white watercolors accompanied by a book, which together constitute a document of, and homage to, Hosmer’s work.

Born, like Ms. Cronin, in Massachusetts, Hosmer (1830-1908) studied sculpture in the United States, but in 1852 moved to Europe to expand her career and find a more tolerant atmosphere for her life as an independent woman and a lesbian. Both aims were at least temporarily realized in Italy. There she landed significant commissions, enjoyed a congenial circle of female friends, and was part of a cultural network that included George Eliot, the Brownings and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who used Hosmer as a model for a character in his book “The Marble Faun.”

Hosmer’s neo-Classical sculptures included two figures of fauns, though most were of women. Some, like Daphne and Medusa, were mythological; others, like Queen Isabella of Castile, from history. A few were contemporaries, as in the case of the reclining tomb figure of a 16-year-old named Judith Falconnet. Commissioned for the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, the work was, Ms. Cronin notes in the book accompanying the show, the first sculpture by an American to be permanently installed in a Roman church.

The Falconnet tomb is the subject of one of the watercolors that make up the show and that together depict all of Hosmer’s known works. The sculptures that are extant or that survive in printed reproduction are painted by Ms. Cronin in an idealized version of photographic accuracy. Sculptures that are considered lost but that may still exist somewhere appear as near-abstract ghostly auras.

The complete set of paintings, arranged in chronological sequence, is reproduced in the book, along with scholarly data about each sculpture and commentary by Ms. Cronin. This exhibition catalog doubles as a catalogue raisonné of Hosmer’s art as seen through the eyes and hand of another woman and artist.

In short, Ms. Cronin’s Hosmer show — organized by Lauren Ross, interim curator of the Sackler Center — is a complex package: a total work of art that is also a historical document of the careers of two artists, past and present, and a salvage operation to secure the visibility of both artists over time.

Visibility is, of course, unpredictably elusive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a version of Hosmer’s “Daphne,” but hasn’t included it among the sculptures in its recently revamped American Wing.

By contrast, Ms. Cronin’s “Memorial to a Marriage” is on what will presumably be permanent view at the gravesite she and Ms. Kass jointly own in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a monument that Hosmer, one suspects, would have loved.



HOLLAND COTTER

penguin

reissue, repackage

THREE REISSUES...

Morrissey's MALADJUSTED - remaster corrects previous horrible artwork, has 5 extra songs, and awesome liner notes by MOZ wherein he explains the doomed proceedings of the creation of MALADJUSTED (joe strummer nixed as producer because he smoked, Morrissey's newfound friendship with Anthony Newly curtailed by Newley's death, bad vibes from aftermath of SMITH'S lawsuit etc..) I used to hate this record, its getting a second chance..

FRIPP & ENO, NO PUSSYFOOTING. Two disc reissue, - extra tracks are just the original tracks at half speed and also reversed. Simple, and amazing.

Richard Crandell - on vinyl. I really really keep listening to this one on cd, and stoked to have it on vinyl...

george henry longly

this kid is cool....

LAME

LISA TAN



"All the times the words death, die, dying, died, and dead appear in Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence", 2008, archival ink / paper and photograph, framed, 47,5 x 62,7 cm




"Two Against Nature", 2006, framed photograph, 37,5 x 45 cm

highline nyc neccesitates summer trip

when I last worked at a record store, in NYC,
one day someone came back from their lunch
break having picked up this strange LP


by former model Leslie Winer, from the record bins at APC.
We started listening to it and then as each person took their lunch break,
they would run to APC and buy another copy. Not sure why
I didn't end up with a one,
its a really really strange album, a weird combination of time
capsule and pre-cursor - definitely a lost record...

googling her is a bit circuitous but reaps lots of fun nyc 80's info..

some back ground here
and here she is as a FACE cover girl

ALISTAIR FROST

NOAM RAPPAPORT

EXCITING

The Disco Files 1973-78: New York's Underground, Week By Week – Vince Aletti (2009)

With reviews of every disco record worth knowing about, weekly reports from New York’s club scene, classic magazine articles and 800 contemporary club charts, this is the definitive chronicle of disco. It's the personal memoir of Vince Aletti, the very first writer to cover the emerging scene, bringing to life the clubs, the characters, and above all the music.

The Disco Files were evidently inspired by a limited edition 400 page collection of Vince's Record World columns put together by artist and curator Matthew Higgs which accompanied an exhibition of Aletti's portrait collection entitled "Male" held last March at New York's White Columns and last summer at Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery.

sanfranciscodeathtrip