 Martin Kemp examing an alleged Jackson Pollock; Photo: Steve Pyke (The New Yorker) Martin Kemp’s daily work involves a magnifying glass, an archive of art books, a nimble memory, and a keen eye. As one of the world’s leading art authenticators he has transformed works that were once thought to be worth pennies into objects that now have the value of small 3rd world countries. The methods by which he arrives at his conclusions are often the object of both praise and ridicule. To hear Kemp articulate what it’s like to come into the presence of an authentic work by a Renaissance master bears all the imprint of a connoisseur in thrall to his subjective vision.
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In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. Carr’s thesis states that Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and the structure of the Internet in general engenders “foggy thinking”, and “attention deficit disorder like syndromes in the mind”, a poverty of deep critical engagement with ideas and texts, and a general feeling of exhausted cognitive function. Carr famously quipped what the use of of the Internet had done to his reading habits: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”
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In 1968 Andy Warhol invited an experimental rock group to open for his exhibition “Screens, Films, Boxes, Clouds and a Book.” at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Warhol had always shown a keen aptitude for identifying musically forward-thinking artists (cf. The Velvet Underground), and when he chose Parson Sound to perform its avant-rock compositions as a prelude to his show it was no different. Formed in 1966 by Bo Anders Persson, a student of music at the Royal Academy Hall who had become disillusioned by the sterile tenor of his academic environment and who decided to form a group that would fuse minimal structures of classical music to a rock idiom and combine all this with an emphasis on euphoric states in live performance. By 1968 Parson Sound had already achieved a notoriety in Swedish circles as a compelling avant force and as such became an apt choice for Warhol’s filmic art exhibition. [Read More]
“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears”
– Heraclitus
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. The film sits somewhere between the fragmented meta-cinema of Almodovar and the dread inducing shadow pulses of early Polanski, with a structure premised on a Beethoven sonata . Campanella, working from a taut politically motivated novel penned by Eduardo Sacheri, along with the support of three highly nuanced performances from his lead actors Soledad Villamil (Irene), Ricardo Darin (Benjamin) and Guillermo Francella (Sandoval), has crafted a finely tuned and wholly engrossing layered work of film-art.
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This weekend the Los Angeles Getty Museum will host a theater performance of one of the towering Mexican poems of the 20th century “Piedra De Sol”, a work by the renowned and Nobel prize winning poet Octavio Paz. The multimedia performance is the commission of director Maria Morrett and is in connection to the sculpture exhibition “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,”. It is a rare occurence that poetry gets an opportunity to pierce the popular consciouness in 2010, much less get a budget to stage a complete theater production around its creation. “Piedra Del Sol” is a poem that deserves such a treatment, it is a magnum opus of seismic dimensions with a lyrical exploration of eros, history, Mesoamerican/Hindu/and Greek symbols, along with a structure that was formed around the architectonics of the Aztec calendar. In many ways Octavio Paz’s poetry and literary ethos represents the manifold and intersecting interests exhibited here at Hydra. It is the pursuit of pluralistic dialogue with a keen curiosity in how cultures respond and affect each other through the arts and letters, with a view to forge and enhance artistic and cultural connections via the logos. [Read More]
Listening to Ariel Pink is like being placed inside a jukebox time machine filled with simulated pop songs from the past. His music exists somewhere between the waking and dreaming state – the equivalent of a drifting delirium while perched at a razor’s edge of lucidity. They are the half remembered songs from your adolescence, it could be Hall and Oates “I Can’t Go For That” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon”, or any song that might have seemed hapless and sentimental in all the wrong ways at the time; but which now you look back upon with a fond sympathy. There is a translucent nostalgia that seeps in through his music, a product of the emotions that could only have been borne out of the meridian of your life. [Read More]
There has been a perceivable spike in African music reissues over the last few years with scores of titles hitting the market from funk, jazz, soul, along with genres as rare as afro-psych being found amongst the swarm. Some grumbling about this has emerged from many corners of the globe as the issue of over-saturation rears its ugly head. One can understand the frustration; it’s difficult to keep up with all the great African music being released, which is to say nothing of the formidable task of separating the wheat from the chaff. However, as far as this writer is concerned, all this fine music being loosed upon the public is no cause for discontent. I would instead suggest on spending this summer absorbing some of these fine releases, minus the fussy urgency. If you are the type of muso who wants an in-depth handle on the history, along with the relevant compilations and albums that are floating around before you dip into the veritable sea of reissues, I cannot recommend this piece by Joe Tangari enough. He dissects the narratives that have brought to light all these exquisite pieces of music with a list of the cardinal releases and labels to be on the look out for. [Read More]
Folk troubadour and enfant terrible, Eduardo Mateo was a paradoxical figure in the Uruguayan rock scene of the 1970s. At a time when Uruguay was undergoing deep political strife due to the uprooting of a democratic government by a dictator, Mateo chose to make folk music that was utterly personal, fragile, and brimming with mysticism. The manner in which folk music in the 60s dialogued with politics has fostered the perception within the public that folk should be political — or at least have political trappings — in the obvious outward sense of the term. Eduardo Mateo shatters such limiting notions. [Read More]
The role of the music producer is analogous to that of the film director; he oversees the many elements that enter into a composition and attempts to conjure from the players involved whatever is necessary to render an artistic work of compelling depth and penetrative vision. There are usually two tendencies that music producers have with regards to this process, there are the Steve Albinis – those that allow raw unfiltered nature to dictate the work; and there are the Phil Spectors, whose artistic personality is the barometer upon which the reputation of the music hinges. In the 00s, the latter method had the most influence on modern musicians. Atmosphere and texture reigned supreme whether you were talking about the melodramatic bombast of a Coldplay or U2, the slick transgressive sheen of Lady Gaga or La Roux, or the broken hauntology of Burial, Broadcast or Radiohead.
Here is my short list for the most influential producers of the past that influenced the music of the 00s. [Read More]
Watching a Sergei Parajanov film is a cinematic experience you are unlikely to forget. His work is akin to a tone-poem, a prism of evocative images that combines magic, folk-mythology, and alchemy. It offers the aesthetic dislocation of surrealism and conjoins it with the pageantry of poetry. Parajanov forces you to to enter a child’s lexicon of imagination, a sage’s vision of time and memory, and a painter’s feel for the composition of color.
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Featured Articles
How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the Debate
By Oscar Paul Medina
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]
 Sanullim: Mountain Echo Psych
By Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]
 We are Freak (Rap)
By Adri Wong
The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]
 ‘The Housemaid’ – A Comparison of Two Korean Films
By Jose-Luis Moctezuma
If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]
Film Review: The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos) dir. by Juan Jose Campanella
By Oscar Paul Medina
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
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