Sunday Music Workshop at Tip's

Tipitina's Uptown
501 Napoleon Avenue
New Orleans, LA
ph. 1.504.895-TIPS

February 28 | 1 – 3:30 pm
Sunday Music Workshop Series
Featuring The Johnny Vidacovich Trio

"Resurrecting a program that was popular in the early '90s, the Tipitina's Foundation proudly announces the Sunday Music Workshop Series, the brainchild of Stanton Moore and Johnny and Deborah Vidacovich. These free workshops take place every other Sunday fro, when students have the opportunity to play with and learn from the best musicians in the city.

Sunday Music Workshops offer young, aspiring musicians from all walks of life the unique opportunity to play with and learn from some of the area's most experienced and celebrated musicians. Each workshop offers students a hands-on, improvisational approach to music education. Students should bring their instruments! Each child will have their own chance play with the veteran musicians or solo on the famed Tipitina’s Uptown stage. Usually, workshops close with a jam session mixing students and veteran musicians together for a real Tip's concert experience! As many of the city's various music programs have been put on hold since the storm, these workshops are serving a vital need in the rebuilding process: passing on the musical traditions to a younger generation. Featured artists so far have included Stanton Moore, Johnny Vidacovich, Kirk Joseph, and Theresa Anderson. The free on-stage workshops are only for students, but all members of the public are welcome to attend."

[Text from Tipitina's website. Photo from NolaFunkNYC. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.

A Video Serenade

EFA Project Space
323 W 39 Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York

Tuesday March 2, 2010 | 6:30pm

A Video Serenade:
Selected works by artists from Norway, Serbia, Russia, and the UK

Recent works selected by ArtVideoExchange (AVE) and Format Network.

A VIDEO SERENADE presents a wide range of contemporary video, from the performative to the personal to the fictive and the documentary. The program aims to reflect the unique mix of themes and approaches to video as exemplified by the artists supported by these two groups.

AVE – Serbia
Program selection by Bojana Romić

Big Bang / Bojana Romić / 2009 / 2:30 min.
Never Gonna Give You Up / Goran Micevski / 2006 / 4:00 min.
Exhaustion of Europe / Jovan Čekić / 2005 / 8:07 min.
Clay Pigeon / Milos Tomić, 2005 / 6:41 min.
Atomic Watch / Nenad Kostić / 2006 / 1:13 min.
FPS (First Person Shooters or Frames Per Second) / Wim Janssen / 2006 / 3:08 min.

Format Network, UK
Song Archive / Yvonne Buchheim / 2009 / 5:00 min.
Weightless / Matt White / 2008 / 7:55 min.
A Hard Place / Ronnie Close / 2009 / 4:54 min.
Curtain / Peter Bobby / 2009 / 4.52 min. (extract, HD Video)

AVE–Russia
Program selection by Vika Ilyushkina, CYLAND Media Lab

Son of King / Julia Zastava / 2008 / 4:29 min.
Little Black / Nikolay Kurbatsky / 2008 / 1:51 min.
I want to live through your death / Olga Jitlina / 2009 / 5:44 min.
Storage / Anton Hlabov / 2009 / 2:20 min.
Expulsion from the Paradise / Andrey Ustinov / 2003 / 2:01 min.
Vertigo / Kirill Shuvalov / 2003 / 1:43 min.
Never ending / Masha Sha / 2005 / 2:12 min.
Mom / Yuri Vasiliev / 2002 / 0:55 min.
Feedback / Maksim Svishev / 2009 / 5:42 min.
Purification / Veronica Rudyeva-Ryazantseva / 2008 / 4:30 min.

AVE – Norway
Program selection by Mona Bentzen

Amerika / Ane Lan / 2003 / 3:15 min.
Che Guevara’s Rolex / Birgitte Sigmundstad / 2009 / 4:40 min.
Par Hasard / BULL.MILETIC / 2009 / 5:15 min.
Opacity / Farhad Kalantary / 2005 / 5:30 min.
Erase / Margarida Paiva / 2009 / 3:30 min.
Felix Culpa, A Handmade Massacre / Martin Skauen / 2007 / 5:06 min.
RUR / Mona Bentzen / 2010 / 2:16 min.

A VIDEO SERENADE is organized by Madeline Djerejian, AVE-USA, in cooperation with ArtVideoExchange and Format Network, with support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), CYLAND Media Art Laboratory (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the St. Petersburg branch of the National Center of Contemporary, Art (NCCA).

AVE is an international exchange program and initiative between artists and curators that promotes the production and circulation of video programming worldwide. Format Network is an artists’ group based in Bristol, UK that focuses on staging activities of exchange and engagement, including screenings and exhibitions, lectures by invited artists, critics and theorists, and open-mic performance evenings.

[Text and graphic from EFA website. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Unavoidable and Inescapable Trouble

Latitude 53
10248-106 Street
Edmonton
Alberta Canada

Patrick J. Reed
"Wadcutter"

"... a series of drawings about unavoidable and inescapable trouble. It is about getting prepared for the worst. In the words of T.S. Eliot, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

[Text from organization website. Graphic from exhibition flier. Click on image to enlarge.]

Odd Overtones

Friday, February 19 | 8–10 pm

Royce Gallery
2901 Mariposa St (between Harrison & Alabama Streets)
San Francisco, CA

room: ODD OVERTONES

Pamela Z presents an avant-chamber music evening featuring three stellar, Bay Area clarinetists. Beth Custer, clarinets; Ma++ Ingalls, clarinet; Cornelius Boots; bass clarinet. Each artist will perform solo, and then all will perform an ensemble piece at the end of the evening with Pamela Z on voice & electronics.

[Information from Facebook event page. Graphic from Google image search for "Pamela Z." Photo credit: Donald Swearingen.]

Admission $10 (at the door or through Brown Paper Tickets)

The Literary Map of Africa

Ohio State University Libararies
The Literary Map of Africa

"The Literary Map of Africa is a bio-bibliographical database, designed to be a comprehensive research and information tool on African literature. It does not focus on selected authors or national / regional literatures, nor does it follow the sometimes rigid North – sub-Saharan Africa divide; instead, the database seeks to cover the whole continent. This wider scope makes it possible for writers from different regions and countries, with varied histories and cultures, and who produce works in diverse African and European languages to be represented in one project. One objective this project hopes to fulfill is to include as many emerging writers as possible, especially those based in Africa. Many in this category of creative writers do not have a readership beyond their national boundaries and are therefore hardly represented in many bibliographies and encyclopedias."

visit

[text and graphic from Ohio State University Libararies website. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Get Bent for Lent!

[Arguably celebrating non-stop since their beloved Saints' NFC Championship win sent the team to the Super Bowl, New Orleanians' biggest party begins today. Below is a video by Michael DeMocker from the Times Picayune's nola.com capturing some of the sights and sounds of Mardi Gras 2010.]

Orpheus Rolls Down Uptown Parade Route

index of all Times Picayune Mardi Gras videos.

Zulu Lundi Gras Festival

Monday February 15
10 am – 5:30 pm
18th Annual Zulu Lundi Gras Festival
Woldenberg Park
1 Canal Street
New Orleans

"The festival event will feature local and world -renowned entertainers performing on three stages. Musicians such as Kermit Ruffin, Amanada Shaw and the Cute Guys, Ed Perkins, Rebirth Brass Band, Pinstripe Jazz Band and many more will be providing non-stop music.

The Lundi Gras Festival will add flavor to your day when the 17 food vendors kick up the Cajun aroma of crawfish pie, shrimp creole, file' gumbo, alligator sausage, Jamaican chicken, crawfish bread, barbeque ribs, seafood pasta, catfish po-boys, peach cobbler, pecan pie, and many more New Orleans delicacies. There are other attractions to wet your festive appetite. Everyone can join in a second line as the Zulu Mardi Gras Carnival Characters parade every hour through the thousands of revelers wearing their colorful flamboyant costumes. Who knows -- you may be one of the lucky ones to receive a treasured carnival throw -- the Zulu Lundi Gras Coconut!

Also, witness the arrival of the Zulu King and Queen by U.S. Coast Guard Cutter along with their entourage at 5 pm."

Free.

[Text from Festival website. Graphic from NOLA.com. Caption: "Staff photo by Ted Jackson. Larry Roy, official Zulu Minister of Fun displays a coconut for the crowd, enticing them with the Mardi Gras prize during the Zulu Lundi Gras Festival in Woldenberg Park in the French Quarter."]

"Love is in the Air"

Sunday, February 14 | 5 pm
Krewe of Bacchus Parade
New Orleans, Louisiana

"With more than 1,350 members and 33 animated super-floats, the Krewe of Bacchus is revered as one of the most spectacular Krewes in Carnival history."

Superbowl XLIV Champions New Orleans Saints quaterback Drew Brees will reign as King of the Krewe of Bacchus.

The theme of this year's parade is "Love is in the air."

parade route

Mardi Gras 2010 Parade Schedule

[Text and graphic from Krewe website.]

Krewe of Isis

Mardi Gras 2010

February 13 | 6:30 pm
Metairie, Jefferson Parish
Krewe of Isis

"Isis was the mother of Horus and the sister and wife of Osiris in the mythology of ancient Egypt. She was honored as the goddess of the earth and the moon, a symbol of motherhood and fertility. Isis was also worshiped in the Greek and Roman empires. She was traditionally represented as a woman wearing a cow's horns with a solar disk between them.

In 1973 this all-female organization was charted in the city of Kenner, and the women held their first 7 processions there before adopting the standardized veterans Memorial Boulevard parade route, which more than a dozen Jefferson krewes share."

Krewe of Isis Facebook Fan Page

[text and graphic from Mardi Gras Parade Schedule website. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

The Continuous Flexagon

The Center for Book Arts
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001

Friday, February 12th , 6-9pm

Book Arts Lounge
Moveable Meaning: The Continuous Flexagon

The Continuous Flexagon is a simple moveable folded structure that yields intriguing possibilities. Artist and bookbinder Ana Cordeiro will lead us through conceptualization and construction of these delightful contraptions. Loungers will incorporate found text and pressure printing on the Vandercook to create flexagons that might contain multiple meanings, hidden messages, or even secret Valentine's signals. Bring along several words of found text, and ideas for interesting impressions: lace, string, or other flat and flexible texture-making items.

$10 suggested donation/ $5 CBA members

[Text from Center website. Graphic from Google image search for 'continuous flexagon'.]

Parafictions

[NB: Due to extreme weather conditions, this event, originally scheduled for February 10, has been rescheduled of February 17.]


EFA Project Space
323 W 39 Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York

Wednesday, February 17 | 6:30 - 8 pm
Performance-Presentations
Parafacts and Parafictions: Helguera, Blachly & Shaw

'Parafacts and Parafictions: Helguera, and Blachly & Shaw' is an evening of performance-presentations organized in conjunction with the exhibition Companion, curated by REV- and currently on view at EFA Project Space. Pablo Helguera and Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw will enact live components to their projects included in Companion, followed by a Q & A session moderated by Marisa Jahn, artist and exhibition curator.

"Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty offers a definition of the term 'parafiction', a term used to describe an emergent genre of artwork that plays in the overlap between fact and fiction: "Like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real." If a 'parafiction' operates in that space between fictional and real, alongside this term we might position a second: a 'parafact'-an artwork that more stringently draws from the real-but a 'real' whose narrative is so curious, exquisite, or implausible so as to call into question its own veracity. Pablo Helguera, and Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw's performance-presentations engage both of these tacts. In so doing, the artists raise questions about the function of truth and fiction-its bearing on knowledge, ethics, or aesthetic transformation.

The Temporary Museum of Vaseline in Perth Amboy is the latest iteration of J. Blachly and Lytle Shaw's ongoing research into the cast of characters known as the 'Chadwick family.' While following up leads about missing Chadwick family relics in the New Jersey city, the duo instead stumbled upon the possibility of naturally occurring Vaseline springs in the region.

Pablo Helguera's 'What in the World' replicates a popular television show from the 1950's in which artifacts were presented to a team of archaeologists, artists, and aficionados to decipher. Adapting the show's theatrical conventions for a You Tube generation, Helguera departs from the objects to focus on the eccentric museum staff, positioning the institution itself as the subject of the ethnographic inquiry."

[Text an graphic from EFA press mailing.]

Waste and Recycling

Centro de Arte y Naturaleza
Fundación Beulas
C/ Doctor Artero, s/n
Huesca
Spain 22004
t. +34 974 239 893

Exhibition:
Rummaging in the garbage: Waste and recycling in the contemporary art

"The first notions that usually come to mind when considering garbage, waste and deterioration are generally negative, when not outright nauseating. We are aware of the physical and chemical processes of the matter around us, beginning with the cycles of nature itself, including industrial processes, technical constructions and manufactured consumer items, and ending with the very materiality of the human being as a living organism. This crisscrossing of elements and activities-which, after all, is what makes the human being civilized and cultural, negotiating and struggling to domesticate and exploit the landscape and the ecosystem, the planet, in short-generates endless reactions, overpopulation and overproduction, upsets and imbalances, and therefore waste, before which we often do not know how to react or that, metaphorically, but also in the practical reality, we end up sweeping under the rug and looking the other way."

more

[text from Centro website. Graphic from Google image search for 'Chris Jordan,' participating artist Caption: "Recycling Yard #6." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Social Aid & Pleasure

February 8, 2010 | 7:30pm–10:30PM

Mardi Gras 2.2 Social Aid & Pleasure Marching Club Parade
New Orleans

"Have fun it's Mardi Gras"

"Throws: We give out Purple, Green & Gold flowers from canes.

History: We follow in the footsteps of the Garden District Carnival Club which originated in the Irish Channel. Our King, who started our club, marched in the GDCC as a child along with his father & grandfather. We will be stopping in at 5 locations along St. Charles Ave. during our march for refreshments, starting at Fat Harry's and including Commanders Palace to make 6 stops in total.

We are open to all and encourage involvement, we meet on the 22nd of each month at La Playa on Clio. We do not charge dues but ask for donations to pay for the band & NOPD. Mardi Gras costumes are required to march and ladies wear tu-tu's and any guys that want to."

Mardi Gras 2010 Parade Schedule

[Text from Parade Schedule website. Graphic from image search for "Mardi Gras Parade" – MIT website."]

For Your Consideration

NBC Universal Presents Bravo Reality Series "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist"

PASADENA, CA.- Bravo's latest stroke on the reality canvas brings Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner Sarah Jessica Parker and her production company, Pretty Matches, together with the Emmy-nominated Magical Elves ("Top Chef," "Project Runway") and Eli Holzman, to produce "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” an hour-long creative competition series among contemporary artists. "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” will bring together 14 aspiring artists to compete for a solo show at a nationally recognized museum and a generous cash prize.

Hosting this colorful new series is art enthusiast China Chow, alongside world-renowned art auctioneer, Simon de Pury. Joining them on the judging panel are experts Bill Powers, a New York Gallery owner and literary art contributor, Jerry Saltz, current art critic for New York Magazine, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, esteemed curator and owner of Salon94 gallery.

In each episode, contestants are faced with the challenge of creating unique pieces in a variety of media such as painting, sculpture, photography, collage and industrial design. The weekly assignments are exciting, original and will challenge the artists to push the limits of their technical skills and creative boundaries. Completed works of art will be appraised by the panel of top art world figures alongside a new celebrated guest judge every week. Through a gallery showing at the end of each challenge, the industry luminaries dictate which artists have successfully mastered the subject matter and creation of their piece, as well as whose concept leaves the greatest impact.

"Work of Art: The Next Great Artist" is produced by Pretty Matches and Magical Elves for Bravo. Dan Cutforth, Jane Lipsitz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alison Benson and Eli Holzman serve as executive producers.

Coming Summer 2010.

more

[Text from artdaily.org. Graphic from tv.com. Thanks to DLP in IC fo the tip. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Puppy Bowl VI

For the few of you out there who have not been waiting with fierce anticipation for months for this year's event, we send notice of Puppy Bowl VI, riveting Super Bowl counter-programming by the Discovery Channel's four-legged Animal Planet Channel. The two-hour program will be screened many times during "Super Sunday." [Note that some of you may prefer to watch it 'MOS*' after three or four viewings.]

2008's innovations included the spectacular Water Bowl Cam that according to the Puppy Bowl Wikipedia page, "provides shots upwards through the transparent bottom of a special water bowl built into the stadium floor, with a wide-angle lens that allows viewers to watch the puppies drink water up close."

And don't miss the feline hijinx during the Kitty Half-Time Show that features, again as researched and reported on the Wikipedia page, "kittens playing for 30 minutes with lights, laser pens, balls of yarn, a scratching post, flint sweepers, and a wide variety of other toys."

more

* MOS = Mit Out Sound

[Video above looking back to highlights of the glory that was Puppy Bowl IV. Note that this post is a slight update of last year's notice of Puppy Bowl V.]

A year at the South Pole

Farmlab
1745 North Spring Street, Unit 4
Los Angeles, CA 90012
1.323.226-1158

Friday, February 5, 2010, Noon

Metabolic Studio Public Salon
Simon Balm

A Year at the South Pole

Simon Balm will describe his experiences during a year spent at the South Pole conducting astronomical research in one of the coldest and extreme environments on Earth.

A native of London, England, Simon Balm received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Durham in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Sussex in 1992, working with Nobel Prize winning chemist Sir Harold Kroto. After graduate school he spent two years as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Astronomy Department followed by four years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA where he helped to design, build and install a radio telescope at the geographical South Pole. After several Summer visits to the Antarctic he wintered-over with the telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station during the 1995-1996 season as a scientist with United States Antarctic Program.

[text and graphic from Farmlab website. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]