Holding Out and Hanging On

[with thanks to our Buffalo scout EC for the tip:]

Studio Hart
65 Allen Street | Buffalo, New York

Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina
Photographs by Thomas Neff
Through October.

As a volunteer in the city in the early days after the flood, Baton Rouge photographer Thomas Neff witnessed firsthand the confusion and suffering that was New Orleans as well as the persistence and strength of those who stuck it out. Neff subsequently spent forty-five days interviewing and photographing the city's holdouts, and his record is a heartbreaking but compelling look at the true impact of the disaster.


Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina, Neff's first book will be released in December, 2007, by The University of Missouri Press.

[photo of Antoinette K. Doe by Thomas Neff]

The Nature Of The Universe

"personal histories, enigmatic codes, and visions of the Apocalypse meet in Kamau Patton’s new exhibit at Machine Project.

Equal parts religious rite, glam spectacle and public access television show, Kamau’s installations bring a personal cosmology to bear on existing folk narratives. For this exhibit at Machine, Kamau’s work investigates the media produced of African American cult activity in America, including the 5 Percent Nation, Nuwaubian Nation, and the Black Hebrew Israelites. Also discussed will be the Nature Of The Universe."

Through November 3rd

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Blogger Play

Blogger recently released a feature called Blogger Play:

Blogger Play displays a real-time stream of images being uploaded to public Blogger sites. Clicking on the images will take you to the sites.

Blogger hosts The Data Stream and is owned by Google.


[Screen grab from Blogger Play]

New Yorkers Ride Bikes

The New Yorker Festival

October 7
7:30 p.m. Town Hall ($16)
123 West 43rd Street
(Tickets are also available at the Town Hall box office. Free valet bicycle parking will be provided.)

Saturday Night Special
David Byrne Presents: How New Yorkers Ride Bikes

David Byrne will host an evening of music, discussion, film, readings, and surprises dedicated to the advancement of bicycling in New York City, including talks and performances by the Classic Riders Bicycle Club, Jan Gehl, Buck Henry, Calvin Trillin, Paul Steely White, Jonathan Wood, and the Young@Heart Chorus.

David Byrne is an Academy Award-winning musician and visual artist who co-founded the rock group Talking Heads in 1976. He has bicycled in New York City for almost thirty years.

The Classic Riders Bicycle Club is a Brooklyn-based group of antique-bicycle enthusiasts.

Jan Gehl is a Danish architect and the author of “Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space.” His work in Copenhagen and elsewhere has sought to improve the environment for cyclists and pedestrians.

Buck Henry is an actor, screenwriter, and director. He co-wrote “The Graduate,” co-directed “Heaven Can Wait,” and has appeared in more than thirty films.

Calvin Trillin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963.

Paul Steely White is the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a New York-area citizens’ group working for better bicycling, walking, and public transit.

Jonathan Wood is the deputy chairman of the Warrington Cycle Campaign, which promotes safer cycling in Warrington, England, and aims to enable more people to travel by bicycle in the town through more equitable sharing of roadways.

The Young@Heart Chorus was formed in 1982 at a meal site for the elderly in Northampton, Massachusetts. Its current members are between seventy-three and eighty-eight years of age.

[image: 1983 New Yorker cover by Jean-Jacques Sempé]

The Art of Lee Miller

Victoria & Albert Museum
London

The Art of Lee Miller

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[image from V&A Web Site. Caption: Women with fire masks, Downshire Hill, London, 1941. Lee Miller. © 2007 Lee Miller Archives. All rights reserved"]

John Coltrane | September 23, 1926

The 'Stream' is delighted to mark the eighty-first anniversary of the birth of John Coltrane, one of the twentieth century's greatest composer|musicians, with a YouTube clip of a performance of one of his signature renditions, the Oscar Hammerstein|Richard Rogers tune "My Favorite Things" from "The Sound of Music."

The clip provides the following information: "1961 in Baden-Baden Germany.
John Coltrane - soprano sax, tenor sax
Eric Dolphy - flute, alto sax
McCoy Tyner - piano
Reggie Workman - bass
Elvin Jones - drums"

From many interesting clips on YouTube we include a second below, a performance of his composition "Naima" [identified as from 1965] with the 'classic' John Coltrane Quartet, with McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; and Elvin Jones, drums.

Agency

The New School
Inaugural Lecture on the Vera List Center's 2007/2008 theme of
*agency*

*Agency and Art in a Hyper-Consumerist Culture:
The Agent as Artist, as Consumer and as Citizen *

Benjamin R. Barber, University of Maryland


Tuesday, September 25, 2007 - 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
The New School
Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
New York, New York
Admission: $8, free for all students, as well as New School faculty,
staff and alumni with valid ID

Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center's annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. This year, the theme of "Agency will be introduced by Benjamin R. Barber, Professor of Civil Society, University of Maryland

Benjamin R. Barber will explore the impact of the commercialization and commodification of art and the subordination of art to utilitarian ends (such as happiness and wealth) through the lens of agency and freedom. The term "cultural property" suggests some of the issues to be addressed. The kind of freedom associated with consumers as citizens (their private vs. public liberty) and its impact on notions of agency.

[image from a google image search for "agency"]

Art by Displaced Children

New Orleans Museum of Art

Katrina Through the Eyes of Children: Art by Displaced Children at Renaissance Village

Through October 7, 2007

"Katrina Through the Eyes of Children is a sampling of the cathartic art that has been created in a collaborative effort between the children who live in Renaissance Village, currently the largest FEMA trailer site in the country, and teams of registered art therapists who have been working with them since October 2005."

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[Detail of image from Exhibit Web site]

Pioneers of the Immemorable

Apex Art

Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Immemorable
curated by Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago

Sept 19 — Nov 3, 2007

Zbynek Baladran, Alejandro Cesarco, Felix Gmelin, Sanja Ivekovic, David Maljkovic, Ahmet Ogut, Katerina Seda, Artur Zmijewski

"Every new telling of a story perfects its narrative but also rearranges, edits and moves it further from its original, authentic plot. What do we remember? How do we remember and retell stories of the past? How do we project them into the future?

In his book of essays, Idea of Prose, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines the concept of the "immemorable" as that which "skips from memory to memory without itself ever coming to mind [and which] is, properly speaking, the unforgettable." This immemorable, or unforgettable, is an unconscious element that infiltrates the conscious memory and creates an involuntary memory. As Agamben further explains, "The memory that brings back to us the thing forgotten is itself forgetful of it and this forgetfulness is its light. It is, however, from this that its burden of longing comes: an elegiac note vibrates so enduringly in the depths of every human memory that, at the limit, a memory that recalls nothing is the strongest memory." Located in the space between remembrance and forgetfulness, the conscious and unconscious, the immemorable brings to mind another concept, that of modernist nostalgia—a future-oriented longing for something that never existed."

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[note: pdf of exhibition brochure available on exhibition Web site.

image from exhibition Apex Web site. Caption: Felix Gmelin, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, 2002]

The Films of Guy Debord

The Lab + ATA present:

The Films of Guy Debord

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007, 7:30 PM
$6-10 suggested donation

On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time
Critique of Separation
Howls for Sade

"Situationist strategist and adventurer Guy Debord made six films. A subtitled version of The Society of the Spectacle (based on Debord's book of the same name) has circulated during the last few years, but the others have rarely been seen outside France. During September - October of 2007, The LAB and ATA will co-host a presentation of all six films, subtitled or dubbed with the authorized translations of Ken Knabb.

Ken Knabb will briefly introduce each film, and will answer questions following each film.

Technically and aesthetically these films are among the most brilliantly innovative works in the history of the cinema. But they are really not so much "works of art" as subversive provocations. Passage is an "anti-documentary" on the adventures of Debord and his friends in the bohemian underworld of 1950s Paris. Critique of Separation is an attack on the global "commodity-spectacle system", and at the same time a critique of the cinematic medium insofar as it is an expression of that system. Howls for Sade is in a class by itself, and will be shown in an abridged form for reasons that will become evident.

Ken Knabb's translations, which he was asked to make by Debord's widow Alice, are also available in the book Complete Cinematic Works of Guy Debord (AK Press, 2003)."

Information on ATA's programming

[graphic from google image search for Guy Debord]

365Superfund Site-A-Day

[With thanks to EC in Buffalo for the tip, below some information and a link to a brilliant, socially engaged hypertext project.]

Superfund365, A Site-A-Day is an online data visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and email alert system.

Each day for a year Superfund365 will visit one toxic site currently active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We begin the journey in the New York City area and work our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii. In the end, the archive will consist of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund's National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, we will conduct video interviews with people involved with or impacted by Superfund. Content changes every day so be sure to visit often or use the subscribe tools to have content delivered to you.

Superfund365 is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation. Additional funding provided by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

[image from Superfund365 Web site]

9-11

"We do not know in fact what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appelation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy-a name, a number-points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about."

Jacques Derrida

Smashing Data Vis

[With thanks to CDN in Napa, Follow-up to an earlier post highlighting Information Architects Japan's Web Trend Map.]

Smashing Magazine

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

[Graphic from Smashing Magazine Web site.
caption:
"4. Displaying connections
Munterbund showcases the results of research graphical visualization of text similarities in essays in a book. “The challenge is to find forms of graphical and/or typographical representation of the essays that are both appealing and informative. We have attempted create a system which automatically generates graphics according to predefined rules.”]

CFF

The Doors Art Foundation presents:

Croatian Film Festival NYC

18 new films from Croatia to screen September 13-16, 2007
at the Museum of the Moving Image and Tribeca Cinemas

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[image: Photo by Stanko Herceg of the music group Svadbas. From their Web site. As part of the festival, Svadbas will be playing at the Knitting Factory on September 13.]

Words Fail Me

[with thanks to KMcG for the tip:]

Museum of Contemporary Art-Detroit

Words Fail Me

Curated by Matthew Higgs
September 16, 2007 to January 20, 2008


Artists in the show include: Lisa Anne Auerbach, Tauba Auerbach, Anne-Lise Coste, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Sam Durant, Peter Fischli, Ryan Gander, Siobhan Liddell, Jonathan Monk, Philippe Parreno, Jack Pierson, Carl Pope, Kay Rosen, Ron Terada, Rirkrit Tiravanija, David Weiss, and Jennifer West.

"Words Fail Me is an exhibition that explores visual art's ongoing engagement - and entanglement - with language. Language is labyrinthine, its permutations endless: This is partly the pleasure of words. The complexity of language, its ability to both inform and confound us, is - no doubt - part of its continuing appeal to artists. Words Fail Me considers highly idiosyncratic manifestations of language in recent contemporary art produced by an international and intergenerational group of artists."

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[image from MOCAD Web site. Caption: he MOCAD building featuring a mural by artist Barry McGee. Photo by Greg Holm.]