John Joseph Lydon [born 31 January 1956]

[Below the first of three posts spotlighting punk, from London to Los Angeles: in this YouTube video, the Sex Pistols perform their anti-anthem "God Save The Queen" circa 1976. John Lydon, dba Johnny Rotten, is the lead singer.]

Beuys Music Video

Leibfrei, who posted the video to YouTube, comments: "The name of the song is "sun instead of Reagan". "Reagan" sounds like "Regen" (="rain") in German. It´s been made in 1982 and it´s mainly a charming statement of the anti-nuclear movement."

[with thanks to Nadija in Rijeka, Croatia for the tip!]

We Interrupt Your Program

Mills College Art Museum
through March 16, 2008

Organized by Marcia Tanner, Guest Curator

Continuing its commitment to the work of women artists and curators, The Mills College Art Museum presents We Interrupt Your Program: a group exhibition of video and new media works by fourteen emerging and mid-career female artists.

The works in We Interrupt Your Program intervene in, reconfigure, augment, and/or re-contextualize dominant narratives of war, power, science, technology, and gender from what are arguably distinctively female and feminist perspectives. Spanning a range of media and aesthetic strategies, the exhibition includes computer-manipulated video, digital animation, video installation, interactive sculpture, and photography.

All of the artists in We Interrupt . . . respond to contemporary mainstream media—including network television, mass market feature films, instructional science videos, and online communication platforms such as email and chat rooms—interrogating them as restrictive vocabularies and structures that routinely exclude the female voice and point of view. Their work, which often formally refers to art historical precedents like minimalism or landscape painting, as well as popular visual culture, is powerfully expressive, conceptually complex, and relevant to our cultural moment.


February 20th, 7:30pm
Mills College Visiting Artist Samara Halperin in conversation with Anne Walsh and Gail Wight

March 12th, 7:30pm
Lecture by Marisa Olson

All programs are in Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building

Viewers interested in this exhibition might also like to visit Small Things End, Great Things Endure at New Langton Arts, which features works by Akosua Adoma Owusu, Maja Bajevic, Andrea Bowers, Zoe Crosher, Eve Fowler, Wynne Greenwood, Anna Maltz, Ali Naschke-Messing, Emily Roysdon, Jen Smith, Jonathan Solo, and Matilde ter Heijne, on-view through March 15, 2008.

[Image from exhibition press release: Shannon Plumb, Olympics, 2005 Single–channel video.]

New Orleans Mardi Gras February 5, 2008!

[Above screen grab of www.mardigras.com/ a terrific resource for information on Fat Tuesday!]

Dolly Parton - b. January 19, 1946

[Long before Dolly Parton was a Hollywood celebrity, she was a brilliant composer and performer. On the occasion of the sixty-second anniversary of her birthday, a day late, below Dolly performing her composition "I Will Always Love You," a song she wrote with her partner Porter Wagoner in mind, with whom she had a troubled, vital collaboration.]



Click here for a complete performance of the song.

A piece of her heart: Janis Joplin b. 19 January 1943

[YouTube 'caption:' "live @ Jahrhunderthalle, Frankfurt, Germany
Apr 12, 1969 (her one and only show in Germany)." On the sixty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Janis Joplin.]

Chris Ware, The Smartest Kid on Earth

Call for submissions for The Cult of Difficulty: Critical Approaches to the Comics of Chris Ware, edited by Dave Ball, Dickinson College, and Martha Kuhlman, Bryant University.

The Cult of Difficulty is a proposed collection of essays on the work of Chicago-based contemporary graphic novelist/comic book artist/ cartoonist Chris Ware. Author of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000, winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Award), Quimby the Mouse(2003), and The Acme Novelty Library (2005), Ware has quickly emerged as one of the central figures in the recent ferment of graphic narratives and comics criticism. We are currently seeking abstracts for 20- to 25-page articles that analyze Ware's work, with particular interest in multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to his oeuvre. Essays that address the following questions are especially encouraged, but other topics are also welcome:

--How is Ware's work engage with the history of Chicago, and with the Columbian Exposition of 1893?
-- How do Ware's texts raise questions about representations of race, gender, class, and disability? In particular we are eager to receive analyses of Jimmy Corrigan and Acme Novelty Library that engage with these topics.
-- How has Ware's work as an editor, anthologist, and collector shaped the landscape of contemporary comics and informed his own corpus?
-- What is Ware's relationship to the literary canon (both in terms of graphic and conventional literature) and how does he re-imagine our relationship to the idea of literariness?

Please send 500-1000 word abstracts (or completed articles), c.v., and contact information in Word format to warecollection@gmail.com by March 10th. Papers from a diversity of disciplinary orientations and methodological approaches are especially encouraged.