Preeminent West Coast rapper Calvin Broadus created an extraordinary work of art in his now legendary hybrid animal/human alter ego, Snoop Doggy Dogg. His debut effort, Doggystyle, features an illustrated depiction of a personified hound reaching towards a female counterpart who explicitly props her rear in the air in the standard doggystyle position, [Read More]
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Still from Whacker, 2005 I first encountered the work of Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn at the Getty’s California Video exhibit in 2008. In Whacker , 2005, Stanya Kahn is in the middle of one of those abandoned, overgrown hills you see along the road in LA, trying to mow the weeds with a weed [Read More]
In Heiner Müller’s play “Quartet,” the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont of Les Liaisons Dangereuses have become old, saggy, warty, perhaps syphilitic, but are ever more determined to woo and exchange body fluids with unsuspecting young virgin nieces. Yet in all the rave reviews Wilson’s Quartett has received so far, not a [Read More]
Many literary purists may dismiss the photographs, colored markings and letter facsimiles of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as mere gimmicks–flashy pyrotechnics meant to catch the attention of lazy readers. But for the attentive reader these visual artifacts are props in creating the semiotic drama of Foer’s intention. Throughout [Read More] Serge Gainsbourg is one of the most iconic French musicians of all time. His contributions to pop, rock, soundtracks, jazz and the avant-garde are unparalleled in French contemporary music. His concept album “Histoire de Melodie Nelson” ( a rock opera about the seduction of a female nymphet ala Lolita) is one of [Read More] “Genius is just a word, filmmaking is a craft” Julien Duvivier is an early 20th century French film director whose work spans 67 films over a 30 year career; prolific is too small of a word for this man. Although unquestionably one of the greatest filmmakers to come from France, his work remains largely under appreciated [Read More]
Navigation by celestial positioning has been as useful to seafarers as to poets. As a result of Peter Gizzi’s newest book of poems, The Outernationale, it is possible—perhaps necessary—to generalize further about the art of locating oneself by approximation of arcs of distance and nearness in relation to true places of heavenly bodies. [Read More]
In that symbolic year of 2000, at the turn of the present century, Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor was released. Andersson, virtually unknown to the rest of the world outside of Europe, had earlier enjoyed high praise for his first feature-length, A Swedish Love Story (1970); but his second film, Giliap [Read More]
A couple months ago I got the chance to witness the grand opening of Kommunitas, a curated “allery” (alley gallery) located just off Townsend between 5th and 6th streets in San Francisco’s SoMa district. I had previously known SoMa’s Bluxome Street corridor well, a staple for graffiti enthusiasts on par with Mission favorites, [Read More] In many ways the mix cd/tape is obsolete as a medium that carries force as a totem of change and innovation in underground music culture. Now that ipod’s, playlists, and mp3′s dominate, everyone is a DJ and a personal curator of sound. In a world where individuation and technology are the driving ethos of our [Read More] |
 Luigi Russolo: How The Art of Noise Revolutionized 20th Century MusicIn 1913, a young Italian painter wrote an impassioned letter of admiration to composer Balilla Pratella after being witness to a performance of his symphony at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome: “While I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, there came to my mind the idea of a new art, one that only you can create: the Art of Noises, a logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.” The artist’s name was Luigi Russolo and what he envisioned for the future of sound on that day set the template for modern [Read More]  Can Video Games be Art? A Response to Roger EbertAfter eleven years of anticipation, yours and mine surely, Blizzard Entertainment finally released, at the end of last month, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Still, one question lingers concerning video games. And we can thank film critic Roger Ebert for lighting the fire under the conversation. Can video games be art? [Read More]  The Art of the Take Away ConcertBy Adri Wong
Music is not divorced from place. We know that songs and albums are psychically and sensorily linked to specific memories, specific ages: the temperature of a summer in a foreign city, the smell of an old friend or lover. The take away concert carves out a role for this method of [Read More]  ‘Inception’: Three Film TheoriesIf the proof of the synthesis of the dream-life and real time is the meta-dream of the cinematic, then Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film of grandiose mechanics and mnemonic architectures, introduces cinema itself as a powerful allegory for the possibility of shared [Read More]  Future Funk: Searching for the Lost GrooveFunk was born from the sludge, the grainy mud of the earth. It festered in the primordial soup until the spirit of life sucked itself into its own existence, and grew into form, and that form changed under the cycles of the sun and moon and stars. The funk has since changed in shape and appearance, once nearly forgotten and then revived in the backbone of hip-hop, but now the possibility of a future funk is making itself clear. [Read More]    |
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