August 11, 2010

1LOVE: Brooklyn

Not sure why there’s so much Williamsburg because he lives in Fort Greene…

August 9, 2010

Images

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July 27, 2010

Backlog

…a.k.a. link dump / linkage /clickage from the past month; more to come…

• Very Bushwick and very fabulous (NYT)
• You know how we do in Brooklyn (Inc.)
• Pitchfork is Times-worthy.
• I managed to avoid reading any commentary on Inception until I actually saw it for myself yetserday, though at this point, I cannot possibly hope to catch up with all of the bandwidth that has been spilled (not to mention plot spoiled)—in theory and in practice, for example—over Nolan’s polarizing masterpiece. Also: A.O. Scott on film criticism in the digital age in theory and in practice; Dileep Rao (who plays Yusef) gives us the straight dope; Jonah Lehrer speculates on the neuroscience behind the film. Plus, Jonah Lehrer on LSD (in a manner of speaking)
• Am I guilty of “a breezy writing style”? (The Economist; related: China’s microblog macro-crackdown)
• Amid all the talk of his new book Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis also finds time to reflect on American Psycho (The Guardian)
• Sasha Frere-Jones endorses music in cloud form (The New Yorker)
• Tom Vanderbilt included a link to Dave Horton’s unabashedly self-righteous five-part essay on the fear of cycling in his own musings on bicycle highways for Slate. Definitely required reading for anyone who chooses to bike for transportation (as opposed to simply for leisure), with the caveat that it feels a bit too much like justification for my sense of entitlement that I feel when I tell pedestrians to get out of the bike lane. Still, the car culture of the US is easily worse than that of the UK (where Horton’s expertise lies; at least London has congestion pricing) and the essay actually affirmed my fear that cycling still has a long way to go.

• Deitch’s new projects (NYT)
• Brillo: from design to art (Print via BoingBoing)
• An amazing tale of art forensics (highly recommended) (New Yorker; cf.)
• Brion Gysin at the New Museum (NYT); interview with curator Laura Hoptman (AnOther)
• Graffiti prosecution in the Bronx vs. abroad
• Rhizome visits Babycastles.
• Wu Guanzhong, Chinese Artist, Dies at 90 (NYT)
• Why the Art World Hates “Work of Art” (Salon)
• Why Saltz kind of likes “Work of Art” (NYMag); he’s been recapping the show lately. (GQ, for their part, has been interviewing guest judges lately, but New York, not to be one-upped, has exit interviews, including why token outsider Erik kind of likes Jerry Saltz.
• Saltz on the Whitney as it should be (NYMag); Christian Marclay reviewed by his significant other (NYT); plus, the Whitney as it might be and Whitneys that never were; last but not least,  The Future Is Stupid: Jenny Holzer × Keds × Whitney = Bloomingdale’s Live Art

July 12, 2010

Summer in Brooklyn

July 7, 2010

What They Eat Where

About damn time: Very Small Array is back with another instant classic.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the boroughs…

July 1, 2010

About Damn Time

The most obscenely hipster shit ever:

Plus: PS1′s Warm Up lineup (finally) announced, also pretty decent as far as I’m concerned…

May 23, 2010

Photos

Amy Davidson of the New Yorker responds to Conor Friedersdorf’s critique of NYC narcissism for Atlantic. It’s a fairly accurate assessment all around to mark my upcoming two-year anniversary here.

Photos (click for full-size):

May 13, 2010

Sleigh Bells

If you don’t know, now you know: Sleigh Bells are the latest product of blogosphere hype machinery, and at the risk of fanning the flames, I’ll echo everyone from my friend Sean (who has a nominal claim to their rise, since he booked their second gig back in October) to the New York Times in praise of the Brooklyn duo.

Despite Sean’s best attempt to get me to see them last fall, I didn’t end up at that show (I should have known better after his last tip on the Drums), but between CMJ and SXSW, Sleigh Bells blew up: they played to a sold-out crowd at Ridgewood Masonic Temple on Tuesday to mark the release their debut album Treats. I was lucky enough to have bought my ticket before M.I.A.’s unannounced guest appearance at smaller gig last Friday, which surely spurred ticket sales over the weekend.

The Sundelles’ surf/garage stylings was merely a diversion and I was curious about Cults, who are on the fast track to blowing up, but I was mostly looking forward to my first Sleigh Bells experience and they didn’t disappoint. There’s not much to the performance itself but it’s as good a time as one might have at a concert, and I completely agree with Matthew Perpetua’s excellent appraisal of Sleigh Bells at Tuesday’s show:

Like the music itself, the show is elemental and assertive, simple enough to be obvious, though novel enough to make you wonder why no one has ever really done it quite like this before.

–Matthew Perpetua, Devil Horns Best Friends, Fluxblog, May 12 2010

To Perpetua’s list of adjectives, I would add: visceral, immediate and cathartic; apocalyptic yet ultimately triumphant. It’s pop, punk and hip-hop, compressed to the limit of listenability, which somehow makes it all the more appealing… or overhyped, depending on your point of view.

As for the music itself, Alexis’s vocals strike me as more riot-grrl than M.I.A., though affinity is clear: those drum-machine-gun beats could turn a ghettoblaster into a Future Weapon, while Derek’s SG delivers more hardcore riffage than most indie kids would dare (he previously shredded for Poison the Well).

Even so, the sonic assault scarcely belies the sheer catchiness of the tunes, and Treats is the first party album of the summer whether you like it or not. Sleigh Bells are the band of the moment, and frankly there’s nothing wrong with that.

April 29, 2010

Images: Super Deluxx Edition

Henri Cartier-Bresson's portrait of Sartre is currently on view in his retrospective at MoMA

As with his entire body of work, Sartre’s theory of imagination refers to—and, naturally, affirms—his ontology, in which he explores Husserl’s tenet that “all consciousness is consciousness of something” in the context of the ‘detotalized totality’ of being-in-itself / being-for-itself dualism. Sartre postulates an admittedly underdeveloped notion of image consciousness in his early work The Imaginary (1940), though these writings are largely eclipsed by his later political [viz. Marxist] proclivities; nevertheless, his theory of imagination is a sufficient foundation of a phenomenological aesthetics.

Notably, Sartre implies that the imaginary (or ‘irreal’) has the same ontological import as the real: if the real is never beautiful, it is simply because beauty is, by definition, imaginary, where imagination is a permanent possibility of consciousness. A painting, photograph, film, song, performance, etc., necessarily transcends perception—i.e. consciousness of oil on canvas, ink on paper, a projection, an actor, etc.—as an object of image consciousness, which overflows with the meaning of the portrait (etc.): a particular arrangement of brushstrokes or sounds immediately presents itself to consciousness as an image or melody. The abstract, then, is that which escapes us in experience qua perception; colors transcend pigment to conjure mood or geometry.

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April 25, 2010

Breukelen