M: People are most familiar with your work as a musician and actor/director. How did you make the leap to visual artist?
JL: I believe you have me mistaken with someone else. I am mostly known for being an excellent dancer, in some neighbourhoods more than others.
This is a multi-media work for string quartet, chorus, and pre-recorded sounds. Those sounds include recordings by NASA spacecraft journeying through space e.g. ambient space sounds found in plasma around the planet Jupiter. The sounds have been a part of Don Gurnett’s research at the University of Iowa. Willie Williams did the visual design. Williams was notably the visual designer on U2’s Zoo tour among other rock shows.
Riley also sought inspiration after the events of 9/11, seeking meaning from the universe.
Dracula Enters
Several years ago we saw Kronos perform this piece by P. Glass while they sat behind the huge film screen. Instead of paying attention to their music, we had to stay focused on this famous silent classic. It was an annoying concept where music becomes just a soundtrack or background music.
Tonight, they perform world premieres that hammer this point home. John Adams, that longstanding titan of American minimalism, brings gravitas to the program with his compact, exhilarating new work, Fellow Traveler.
The above is a found video experiment inspired by Raymond Queneau. Raymond Queneau was born on February 21, 1903 in Le Havre.
Although Queneau’s novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.
Ouilipo <> <> <> Zazie dans le Metro (Directed by Louis Malle) “Under the Net” Iris Murdoch’s first novel was dedicated to R. Queneau.
Iris Murdoch’s first published novel, Under the Net, presents the picaresque adventures of Jake Donaghue, a feckless failed artist who guides the reader on pub crawls through London’s City district and Paris’s Left Bank while he searches for love and meaning in his life. The novel is dedicated to French novelist Raymond Queneau, and Murdoch has admitted his and Samuel Beckett’s influence in this work: “I was copying them as hard as I could!”
Queneau spent much of his life working for French publisher Gallimard, where he began as a reader in 1938, rose to be general secretary, and eventually became director of l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956.
In its annual human rights report, Human Rights Watch expresses concerns over the situation of Roma in Serbia and particularly highlights the destitute condition of IDPs and forced returnees from Western Europe. This includes Roma from Kosovo forcibly returned to other parts of Serbia, where the organization points out to [sic] the lack of adequate assistance programmes placing a high burden on the local Roma communities.
Sasame Yuki -(Makioka Sisters - adapted from a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki)
The great Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, died today of pneumonia. He was the man behind such films as The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, and Tokyo Olympiad. (via)
A place maker for a future review of Kon Ichikawa’s great funny poignant anti-imperialist film “A Billionaire”, as soon as I find a copy.
We screened a series of his films at Goldsmiths two years back. The big famous ones are deservedly praised, but A Billionaire was just great - especially the student who built her own atom bomb upstairs in her flat.
Like the work of his contemporaries who manipulate assembled elements, what makes it art is both what he picks and what he does with it after its picked. What makes it monumental is its encyclopedic ambition. (James Wagner)
Art, he explains, ” creates a mold for thought”—a cute formulation, though not very satisfying. Like his installation, it slights the roles in art of sensation and emotion. In any language, Denkmal 11 is over-thought and under-felt: De Cock’s mold is hollow. (Villagevoice-Daniel Kunitz)
I am Blek le Rat. I am a French graffiti artist. I was one of the first artists to use stencils for an artistic purpose in Paris in the beginning of the 1980s—in ‘81 exactly. At first, I put rats and I made them run along the wall. I wanted to do a rat invasion. I put thousands all over Paris.
Happy Birthday Alan, how many beans will you be eating today?
Today is Setsubun. Previously on this day this blog has celebrated the birthday of Alan Sondheim, Gertrude Stein and Simone Weil. Recently Alan reminded me that February 3 is bean throwing day in Japan. Bean throwing sounded too matter of fact in English compared to the poetic sounding Setsubun. Setsubun was never used for a title or subject of any Ozu film (Ozu was not into exorcism) Ozu had Soshun, Bakushu and Banshun, all of which indicate changes of season.
Japanese Drive Out Devils in Spring Ritual
Setsubun Festival celebrated with a fanfare of bean-throwing exorcisms
Censer and censor Alan’s book review - (bio of Baudelaire the author of Flowers of Evil)
Keith’s book fascinates me, in particular because of the violence it does to the text, or at least what appears to me as a violence, and a ‘tenor’ in the translation that strikes me as Jon Stewart meets Bartok; it’s a kind of breeziness across what appears as the subterranean rootings of melancholy, a bridge across that, which is far too often, for me, the bridge of the fast read, which this translation is not. So a contradiction at the beginning. This is founded, for me, on the belief, that the unconscious plays an enormous role in FoE and that the unconscious is, in fact, not breezy, but on the order of the Kristevan chora – inchoate, dark, abject – the murmurings, not the signposts, of language.
Devils are out in the Arizona desert, fortune in and out - (the world needs plenty of luck these days).
Oni wa soto
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