Thursday, October 11, 2007

Doris Lessing

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Doris Lessing "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

more

[photo from nobelprize.org Web site. Credit: "Photo: Scanpix/Ulrich Perrey"]

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Lulu's Back in Town - Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982)

[Please join the The Data Stream in celebrating the 90th anniversary of the birth of Thelonius Sphere Monk, a giant of jazz and one of the twentieth century's greatest composers and pianists.

Below is a fantastic performance of Harry Warren's 1935 Lulu's Back in Town, a standard in Monk's performance repertoire. The YouTube information is listed as follows:
Live in Norway 1966
Thelonious Monk - Piano
Charlie Rouse - Tenor
Larry Gales - Bass
Ben Riley - Drums]



Monday, October 08, 2007

Before vs. After


John Jay College Gallery
899 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10019

October 9-27, 2007
Nola Romano
Before vs. After


[image from exhibition announcement]

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Flickrvision

[Companion to earlier post regarding Blogger Play]

Flickrvision

[image: screengrab from Flickrvision Web site.]

Thursday, October 04, 2007

B. Sakata Garo Gallery
923 20th Street
Sacramento, CA 95811

Alice Shaw Paint/Sculpture/Landscape/Architecture
October 2-November 3
Opening Reception Saturday October 13th 6-9

[photograph by Alice Shaw]

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

No Wave Cinema



EFA Gallery
No Wave Film Night

New York City
October 17, 2007 | 7 — 9 pm

"Three distinctive films by the director/artists Beth and Scott B and Amos Poe will be screened. These films mark the genesis of the "No Wave" or "New Cinema" film scene."

G-Man by Beth and Scott B (1978, 40 min) An exploration of social schizophrenia in which terrorists consult their mothers before planting bombs, and the head of the NYC bomb squad succumbs to his dominatrix. With Bill Rice and Marcia Resnick.

Letters to Dad
by Beth and Scott B (1979 15 min) A litany of letters written to Jim Jones read by a cast of artists and musicians. With Arto Lindsay and Pat Place.

The Foreigner by Amos Poe (1978 60 min) An agent sent on a secret mission blindly navigates the darkened corners of New York City while thugs and counter spies shadow him and plot his demise. With Eric Mitchell, Patti Astor, Anya Phillips, The Cramps and The Erasers.

Primarily seen as an art movement, No Wave or New Cinema flourished in the Lower East Side between the years 1976 and 1984. Each film, shot on super-8 and then transferred and edited on video, was a collaborative effort between artists, filmmakers, actors, and musicians. By mimicking B-movie narratives, these underground films set themselves apart from the structuralist films of the time and are predecessors of today's "indies.""

[Image: Amos Poe: The Foreigner from EFA Gallery mailing]

Monday, October 01, 2007

Death to Powerpoint or Pecha-Kucha



[With thanks to CDN in San Francisco for the tip: for those of us frequently caught in mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, the practice described in the video above and text below—reprinted in full from the YouTube description—may provide some rays of hope. In any event, it's an interesting phenomenon reflecting how people are grappling with communications.]

"Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate clich into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

The duo — Dytham is British, Klein Italian — invented pecha-kucha four years ago to help revive a struggling performance space they owned. The first presentations were such a hit that they began hosting monthly pecha-kucha events, boozy affairs at which Tokyo architects and designers showcased their streamlined offerings to crowds of hundreds. Now there are pecha-nights in 80 cities, from Amsterdam and Atlanta to San Francisco and Shanghai. Why? Dytham believes that the rules have a liberating effect. "Suddenly," he says, "there's no preciousness in people's presentations." Just poetry.

By Dan Pink | Wired Magazine Issue 15.09"