Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Loup Garou

Art Spot Productions
Mondo Bizarro

New Orleans, Louisiana

October 8-25, 2009
City Park Old East Golf Course
Loup Garou

Thursdays at sunrise (7am)
Fridays through Sundays at 5pm

"Every half hour, Louisiana loses nearly a football field’s worth of coastal marshes to the Gulf of Mexico. Land loss is ubiquitous, occurring even in interior areas. Six major hurricanes in the last four years have exacerbated an already dire situation. In Louisiana, so many of our cultural traditions and industries derive directly from our relationship with the rich waters and swamps that surround us. What will become of those traditions as the land that nurtures them disappears?

In collaboration with the Gulf Restoration Network and New Orleans City Park, ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro present Loup Garou, a new environmental performance that explores the deep interconnectedness between land and culture in Louisiana.

With Thursday morning performances beginning at sunrise and weekend evening performances ending at sunset, Loup Garou is part performance, part ritual, part howl to the world about southeast Louisiana’s plight. We invite you to join us as we sing a song of love and hope for our precarious homeland."


$15 ($10 Students, Seniors, Artists)
Post-Show Discussions with the Gulf Restoration Network. Fridays include FREE Gumbo.
Pay-What-You-Can Sunday, Oct 11

To make a reservation, please call (504) 826-7783 or email us with your name, the number in your party, and the day you would like to attend. Please provide a phone number in case we need to contact you.

Consider your reservation confirmed unless you hear from us otherwise.

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

Monday, September 28, 2009

Maia Urstad | ISIS Arts

ISIS Arts
5 Charlotte Square
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Thursday, October 1 6 – 8pm
Maia Urstad


"Maia Urstad works at the intersection of audio and visual art. Maia’s work involves integrating sound into specific locations. Recent practice includes outdoor and indoor sound installations and performances, using CD and cassette-radios for both sound transmission and as sculptural objects, commenting on the temporary nature of present technology. The sound-textures for these projects are made from found/concrete sound sources, particularly signals from radio broadcast and telecommunication. At present she is investigating multi-channel FM transmissions sent to multiple radios as sound installations and performances."

[text and graphic from Facebook event page. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Jim Carroll’s Long Way Home


Follow up to an earlier post this month, below is an article by Alex Williams, reprinted in full from the New York Times. Thanks to EC in Buffalo for the notice.]

September 27, 2009
Jim Carroll’s Long Way Home

By Alex Williams

IT’S not easy to come up with a second act when your first act was being Jim Carroll.

He was the author of “The Basketball Diaries,” a cult-classic memoir of his drug-fueled misadventures as a teenager in the 1960s; he then became a celebrated downtown poet; and then, the star of his own hit rock band.

Mr. Carroll had lived a panoramic New York youth that his fans had turned into legend.

But by the time he died of a heart attack this Sept. 11 at 60, Mr. Carroll, who had once hung out with the Rolling Stones and Allen Ginsberg, no longer bore much resemblance to the downtown cover-boy with the chiseled cheekbones and flowing red hair.

His once-powerful athlete’s body had been weakened by pneumonia and hepatitis C, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife, who had remained a close friend. At times, circulation problems in his legs prevented him from leaving his apartment. His trademark hair was flecked with gray, and often tucked under a wool beanie. His cheekbones were hidden behind a white beard that plunged to the collar of his T-shirts.

Mr. Carroll had moved back to Inwood, in Upper Manhattan, to the same building where he had grown up. “Jim would often sit home with these heavy curtains drawn shut,” said Martin Heinz, a friend, one of the few to maintain contact with him in the last months.

But Mr. Carroll did have a purpose. He was trying to finish his first novel, tentatively titled “The Petting Zoo,” an ambitious book about an art-world prodigy of the 1980s, Billy Wolfram, who is driven by early fame into seclusion, where he suffers psychological and spiritual crises. It didn’t take much to see the autobiographical thread.

In his teens, Jim, a scholarship student at the elite Trinity School and fledgling heroin addict, was a high-school basketball star who shot jumpers on the same courts as Lew Alcindor. The journal he kept between the ages of 14 and 16 — dark comic accounts of ducking class to cop drugs, steal cars and hustle in Times Square — earned the praise of Jack Kerouac and later became “The Basketball Diaries.”

He became involved in the downtown poetry scene, receiving praise as a new Rimbaud. In his late 20s, he tried rock ’n’ roll, nudged by his old girlfriend Patti Smith. He was soon jamming with Keith Richards, and formed the Jim Carroll Band, whose first release, “Catholic Boy,” has been described as the last great punk album.

“Jim was really in love with the concept of his own phoenix-like rise, which had happened repeatedly in his life — bottoming out, then transcending his negative circumstances with an undeniably brilliant work of art,” Ms. Carroll said.

A “brilliant work of art” is what Mr. Carroll’s ardent, loyal fans were hoping for in his novel, and what the writer himself must have passionately wished for. A successful novel might have meant that he would not be marginalized as an aging “punk poet,” as he was in some recent obituaries. Given his health, it might have constituted his most unlikely comeback yet.

But Mr. Carroll, who had specialized in street-rap diary entries, poems and song lyrics, found adapting his literary voice to long-form prose challenging. “He definitely wrote a lot and tossed a lot,” said Betsy Lerner, his agent.

And “he worked irregularly,” she added. “Sometimes it was a struggle to pick up the thread again, but once he did, it would be amazing. He’d have these tremendous flights. He was still very much in the old Romantic school, I guess.”

“I always used to tell him, ‘It’s the much anticipated’ ” Jim Carroll novel, Ms. Lerner added. “Then it was the ‘long-awaited.’ Then it was ‘ten years in the making.’ ”

By the time he died, the book was in its final edits, close enough to completion to publish posthumously, perhaps by the fall of 2010, said Paul Slovak, his editor and the publisher of Viking.

In his last years, Jim Carroll did venture out, if infrequently, to Narcotics Anonymous meetings (he had been sober since the ’70s), and joining friends for a “breakfast club” at a Chelsea coffee shop.

At these gatherings, Mr. Carroll was not the scathing street punk described in recent obituaries, but rather a raconteur and yarn-spinner in the grand Irish tradition. His stories — about Greek philosophy, old movies, his youthful adventures on the streets — invariably spun off in epic digressions.

“It would often take three or four breakfasts to get the end of a story,” recalled Mr. Heinz, 48, his friend and breakfast club regular.

There, Mr. Carroll sometimes discussed his ambivalence about his time in the spotlight. And in private, Mr. Carroll’s thoughts on fame and his life could be searing:

“My self-sabotaging tendencies in all aspects of my life, along with the validation needs you referenced, go without saying,” Mr. Carroll wrote in a 2005 message to Mr. Heinz. “There are deep seeded reasons for both, but the latter is also an outcome of the way you are spoiled and coddled by managers, women and media et al when you are on top, and the quickness with which everyone scatters when you recede a moment.”

During the last breakfast club meeting on Sept. 4, Mr. Carroll seemed in good spirits, Mr. Heinz said. He recounted tales from what he called his happiest period, in the 1970s, when he was living a simple writer’s life in Bolinas, Calif. He had gone to escape heroin, as well as the amphetamine pace of the New York creative scene, recalled his friend Anne Waldman, the poet, who visited him there.

To Mr. Heinz, Mr. Carroll looked gaunt, even by Jim Carroll standards. At 6-foot-3, he was so stooped that he seemed four inches shorter. The outline of his skull was clearly visible beneath his cheeks, Mr. Heinz said. His arms looked like skin over bone.

He did eat regularly, his friends said, but could not keep weight on. He was deteriorating physically, even as friends took him on weekly trips to the grocery store. Ms. Carroll, an entertainment lawyer now married to the music executive Danny Goldberg, hectored him about seeing a doctor (he hated doctors, but finally relented).

Mr. Carroll seemed acutely aware that he was aging beyond his years, his friends said. A few years ago, he ended a relationship with a much younger girlfriend, telling her “you can do better,” Mr. Heinz recalled.

As his health declined, he made fewer public appearances. When he did, some fans expressed shock over his condition. Two years ago, Mr. Carroll was invited to read passages of “The Petting Zoo” at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Mr. Carroll seemed lost onstage, fumbling through pages of the manuscript. “There’s typing on both sides of the page,” he said, according to an eyewitness account on a blog called the Ephemerist. “No wonder I can’t find what I’m looking for.”

As he had so often, he saved himself with humor. After the awkward reading ended, one witness recalled in a blog comment, Mr. Carroll shouted: “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I’m from Manhattan, man!”

Money struggles were another distraction, friends said.

He was still living off a 2003 book advance in the low six figures, and the small royalty checks continued to trickle in. (His hit song, “People Who Died,” was used in Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” for example.) “He would sit and do his banking on Friday,” Mr. Heinz said. “There was always a variety of checks for $12, $24, $48.”

THE need for a cheap apartment in part led Mr. Carroll home to Inwood in the summer of 2008, in spite of his history with the neighborhood. In “The Basketball Diaries,” Mr. Carroll used the nosy old ladies on its park benches and the reactionary hard-hats in its bars as a comic foil.

Jim’s underground appearance and lifestyle back then caused a lot of family turmoil, said Tom Carroll, his brother and only surviving member of the immediate family.

“Our father was a bartender in a conservative Irish neighborhood and had to listen daily to disparaging comments made by his customers about Jim such as ‘druggie’ and ‘hippie,’ as well as referring to Jim as ‘his daughter’ because of his long hair,” Tom Carroll wrote in an e-mail message. “In addition to their heartbreak about his drug use, this was a significant source of tension between Jim and our father.” (In fact, Jim’s hair in high school was shorter than Paul McCartney’s — “but still too long for an Irish-bar crowd,” Tom added.)

But by the ’90s, he said, father and son had patched things up. And by the summer of 2008, his childhood address at 585 Isham Street in Inwood might have seemed like a peaceful place to write.

THE focus of the ground-floor apartment was the desk, a padded cart beneath it to elevate his aching leg. There, he plowed through plastic bins of sliced pineapple, a reward for a session of hard work.

The only decorations were a poetry event poster and a photo-triptych of Kurt Cobain. For months, boxes of books remained unpacked and the windows were bare. “He said that sometimes neighbors would smile at him, and he was just sitting there in his underwear,” Mr. Heinz recalled.

Certainly, the neighborhood held a lingering power for him. The strict Irish-Catholic culture there had had shaped him, after all, even as he rebelled against it. “The family was gone, but he was somehow coming back,” Ms. Waldman said, adding, “There’s a lot of the poetic there, of coming full circle, landing, as you’re pulling back from life, and finding sense and sanity and comfort in that. He had a real sense of fragility. I think he knew his days were numbered.”

This August, Mr. Carroll canceled multiple appointments to see Ms. Lerner, his agent, citing doctors’ appointments. The last time she had seen him, a year before, she had listened to hours of rambling, if hilarious, digression. She finally persuaded him to sit at his computer and discuss the novel’s third and final section. The other two were largely finished. The book was close. Near the end, however, Mr. Carroll receded again. He stopped returning Ms. Lerner’s e-mail messages. He seemed to be “grappling with the last questions about life through this character,” she said.

Mr. Carroll was alone the day he died. A neighbor peering into his window apparently saw him slump to the floor and called 911, Tom Carroll said. (“Classic Inwood,” joked Tara Newman, a friend who also grew up there.)

In the final passage of “The Petting Zoo,” Billy Wolfram, accompanied by a mythic raven, succumbs. He is also alone, and too young to die. But his death is not without ecstasy.

Finally, a last sigh of consciousness rocked him gently on the deck of an old schooner ship. Billy’s body, dark blue like the storm clouds preceding the storm, shuttered and his eyes closed dull and loosely. Sensing young Wolfram had given up the ghost, the raven glided back down aside the dead artist, whispering a last demand.

“It’s time your eyes remain shut, Billy Wolfram. Now is the time, so get on with it. Take that single step and fly.”

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

John Coltrane | September 23, 1926

The 'Stream' is delighted to celebrate the eighty-third anniversary of the birth of John Coltrane, one of the twentieth century's greatest composers|musicians|artists.

In this 1963 performance of "Afro Blue," the seminal quartet: John Coltrane [saxophone], McCoy Tyner [piano], Jimmy Garrison [bass] and Elvin Jones [drums].




“I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.”

John Coltrane

Bruce at 60


Live at Hammersmith Odeon, 1975


John Coltrane shares his birthday with Bruce Springsteen–not a bad day for American musician|composers. Springsteen, who turns 60 today.Bruce Springsteen
was born Long Branch, New Jersey. To mark the occasion, here are pair of performances of his sweeping, over the top Jungleland, spanning over 25 years of his career.



New York City, 2001.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Protect Insurance Companies PSA


[FYA, celebrity and parody in the service of advocacy from the aptly dubbed "Funny or Die" site and MoveOn.org. Featuring Will Ferrell, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Thomas Lennon, Donald Faison, Linda Cardellini, Masi Oka, Ben Garant, Jordana Spiro, Lauren, Drew, and Chad Carter.]

Monday, September 21, 2009

The Data Stream is worried


The Data Stream is worried that New York is SCREWED!
http://nypost-se.com

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Mary Travers 1936-2009


Mary Travers



[Performance by Peter, Paul and Mary of Bob Dylans' seminal folk song "Blowin' in the Wind.' Photograph from Google image search. To Ms. Travers' right are music legend Bob Dylan and 60's folk icon Donovan, circa 1965. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Steamroller Prints

The San Francisco Center for the Book

September 19 noon-5 pm
The Sixth Annual ROADWORKS: Steamroller Prints


Local artists and members of the community convene at this annual free street fair to create unique large-scale linoleum block carvings printed with a three-ton steamroller.

[graphic from Center website: 2008 steamroller print by Emory Douglas. Cross-posted to Signal Fire. Thanks to SLM for the tip!]

Monday, September 14, 2009

Jim Carroll

“Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.”

-- Jim Carroll


[Obituary below reprinted in its entirety from the CBC website.]

Monday, September 14, 2009
Punk rock poet Jim Carroll dies at 60


Punk rocker and poet Jim Carroll, author of the autobiographical The Basketball Diaries, has died. He was 60.

He died Friday while working at his desk in his Manhattan home, according to his website. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.

His Jim Carroll Band combined his poetic sensibility with rock 'n' roll and was influential in the burgeoning punk rock scene in 1970s New York.

Carroll made a big impact with his album Catholic Boy and the single People Who Died, which was heavily played in response to ex-Beatle John Lennon's death in 1980.

He rubbed shoulders with artists such as the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe in New York.

"There ain't much time left, you're born out of this insane abyss and you're going to fall back into it, so while you're alive, you might as well show your bare ass," Carroll told Rolling Stone at the time.

Known for his deeply personal lyrics, Carroll recorded the albums Pools of Mercury, I Write Your Name and A World Without Gravity.

He was an influence on a later generation of artists, both musicians and writers, and worked with Pearl Jam, Rancid, Lou Reed, Danny Barnes and John Cale.

Mentioned in Warhol films


Carroll was a poet before he became a rock musician, publishing his first collection Organic Trains at age 16.

Carroll was mentored by poet Ted Berrigan, and moved in circles that included William Burroughs, Beat writer Allen Ginsberg and artist Andy Warhol. He appeared in two of Warhol's films.

From age 12, he kept a journal, chronicling his Catholic childhood as the son of an Irish bartender and the impact of his basketball scholarship.

Throughout his teens, he lived a double life, hooked on heroin but a basketball player and excellent student.

That story would become The Basketball Diaries, published in 1978 and made into a 1995 movie of the same name.

Other collections include:

* 4 Ups and 1 Down (1970).
* The Book of Nods (1986).
* Fear of Dreaming (1993).
* Void of course: Poems 1994-1997 (1998).

Carroll left New York in 1973 and moved to California where he vowed to kick his heroin addiction.

He spent several years enjoying solitude, writing poetry, and met his future wife, Rosemary Klemfuss, there. They later divorced.

In 1978, Patti Smith came to California on tour with her band, encouraged Jim to form a band, which led to the creation of the Jim Carroll Band.

[photograph of Jim Carroll, with Patti Smith, from a Google image search for "Jim Carroll" from Camera Lucida and Lovebomb website. Caption: "Photo: Patti Smith & Jim Carroll (via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger… - sadly no photo credit given)."]

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Willy Ronis 1910-2009


Le photographe Willy Ronis est mort

more [fr]

Wikipedia


[Photo: "Rose Zehner, grève aux usines Javel-Citroën, 1938. Willy Ronis/Agence Rapho)." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Saturday, September 12, 2009

After the Net

AFTER THE NET (2.0)

Peninsula Arts Gallery
University of Plymouth, UK

through October 23

"After the Net explores the paradoxical development of the Internet. As the current Web 2.0 hype begins to wane, the exhibition reflects upon the promises of technological progress, global networking and instantaneous communication. Presented artworks draw attention to key developments: from cybernetics to free and open source software, and social networking platforms.

Reflected in the title, the exhibition makes explicit reference to the documentary film The Net by Lutz Dammbeck (2003.

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

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Take Your Time


Museum of Contemporary Art
20 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago
IL 60611 | 312.280.2660

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson


Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive environments, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia. Drawn from collections worldwide, the presentation spans over fifteen years of Eliasson's career. His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and natural elements such as water, stone, and moss to shift the viewer's perception of place and self, foregrounding the sensory experience of each work. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intense engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.

Through September 13, 2009.

[text and graphic from MCA website. Capiton: "Olafur Eliasson, Beauty, 1993. Installation view at AROS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2004; Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles photo: Poul Pedersen."]

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber


Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

Friday, September 4 • 9:00 p.m.
Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber
Soundlab

110 Pearl Street
Buffalo, N.Y.
$10 general admission, $8 members/students/seniors

"After giving us one of the most thrilling and unique concerts of 2008, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber returns to Buffalo to deliver another dose of their special brand of uplifting spontaneous sonic ass-kicking...

Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber began as a grand and noble idea that begat a quite foolhardy enterprise - update Miles Davis Bitches Brew for the 21st century with players who were conversant in a plethora of post-modern musical tongues. What it has become since then is one of the few modern music groups to freely mash-up any and all forms of vocal and instrumental music like it ain’t nobody’s business if they do."

Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber's manifesto:

"Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber was originally conceived in 1999 as a forum for the New York area improvisational musician to compose, record and perform material which reflects the breadth and depth of American diasparan music in the 21st century. The intent of the Arkestra Chamber, through the deployment of Butch Morris’s conduction system, is to make every performance a fresh interpretation of its constituent parts.

Rather than limit ourselves to the straight jackets that the commercial recording industry uses to market contemporary Black Music, Burnt Sugar freely moves amongst many styles, eras and genres to devise its own exciting hybrids. These hybrids are based on a solid foundation of various musical traditions and the use of cutting-edge music technology. In this sense the group mission honors its deepest inspirations, the first post-modernists of American music – Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic and The Art Ensemble of Chicago.

As with any venture of this ambitious nature, audience development must come in many forms – live performance, magazine and newspaper profiles, and most importantly, cutting-edge recordings, which seem to generate the former two. Because of the necessity to build the TruGroid brand; Burnt Sugar, and its collective, must continually generate new product highlighting the Arkestra Chamber’s continual metamorphosis integrating rhythm and blues vocal extrapolations, rock and roll guitar brio, free jazz horn explorations, 20th century string dissonance and up-to-the-minute electronic manipulations.

Music must be heard – especially music designed to push back current musical boundaries. Burnt Sugar and TruGroid fill a major vacuum in terms of reestablishing a presence and profile for American experimental music on the world stage that is conversant with the idioms and recording techniques of hip hop, drum and bass, jazz and alternative rock. In today’s musical context there are few American bands like the Arkestra Chamber that are innovative on stage and in the recording studio."

“A multiracial jam army that freestyles with cool telekinesis between the lustrous menace of Miles Davis’ On The Corner, the slash-and-om of 1970s King Crimson, and Jimi Hendrix’ moonwalk across side three of Electric Ladyland.”
--David Fricke, Rolling Stone


[text and graphic from Hallwalls press release. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]