“Thank You God”
from Listen To My Song: The Music City Sessions
on Omnivore Recordings
Archives for November 2019
William S. Burroughs And A Thanksgiving Prayer
A Portrait Of Bolivian Heartbreak
An Associated Press photo by Natasha Pisarenko shows an indigenous Bolivian woman standing amid clouds of tear gas, holding the national flag and at its tip, the Wiphala flag of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Her society is again a victim of history. Its dreams vanished in acrid smoke. The photo’s aesthetic is both human and brimming with intensity. [Read more…]
The Breathless Charm Of Tina Brooks’s Minor Move
on Blue Note Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Soulster James Brown was known as the godfather of soul for a reason. His syncopated music had the sound of a crisp, rehearsed band that could stop on a dime. In live shows, the singer demanded that same precision found on his studio recordings. Brown regularly fined bandmembers onstage for miscues and dropped notes, dancing his way over toward the offending bandmember in mid-song and flashing with his hand the amount of the fine. It’s been lauded as part of his perfectionism, a backbone of his “hardest working man in show business.” But to be clear, that is business, not music. [Read more…]
“Pressure Drop” Takes Cue From Its Own Internal Implosions
the Suzanne Kraft remix
from Pressure Drop, newly released by C.A.R.
on Ransom Note Records
Sarah Sze, Poet Of Clutter
at Tanya Bonadkar Gallery, NYC and MoMa, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
For several decades, Sarah Sze has artfully transformed detritus into art, whether it’s the corner of Central Park at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, where she submerged a mini-replica of the white brick apartment complex across the street, filling it with objects from socks to alarm clocks, (Corner Plot, 2006), or the clever 1997 transformation of a closet in the Tribeca loft of Michael and Susan Hort, major Manhattan art collectors. Consider her the poet of clutter. [Read more…]
Coyote Leaves The Res: The Art Of Harry Fonseca
at Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
I looked a coyote right in the face
On the road to Baljennie near my old hometown
He went running thru the whisker wheat
Chasing some prize down
And a hawk was playing with him
Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes
He had those same eyes just like yours
Under your dark glasses
……………………………………….– Joni Mitchell, “Coyote”
Joni Mitchell’s song, “Coyote,” about a lover she describes as a shape-shifting trickster, seems a fitting soundtrack to the Autry Museum of the American West’s Coyote Leaves the Res: The Art of Harry Fonseca. The beautiful exhibition is the inaugural presentation of Fonseca’s work taken from the museum’s acquisition of the artist’s vast estate. In it, viewers meet an evolving humanization of the artist’s character of Coyote, an elusive figure who could very well have slipped into Mitchell’s heart and music. [Read more…]
John Coltrane’s Cat In The Bag: Blue World
on Impulse!
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
John Coltrane died from liver cancer 52 years ago. Nevertheless, in the last two years, he has released two new recordings. Both were lost: one forgotten in the attack of a relative, the other hidden in a Canadian film archive, protected from the devastating Universal Studios Fire of 2008 that destroyed more than 100,000 master tapes, some Coltrane recordings among them.
This year’s release, Blue World, is the only soundtrack the musician recorded across his entire career. It dates from his most fertile period, recorded in the lead-up to the creation of A Love Supreme, his landmark work. [Read more…]
How the Frenzy Feeds: Affect and Delusion
The only thing puzzling about the tweet-stream smear-campaign bullying tactics that keep Trump’s popularity going is the inability of mainstream analysts to understand their success. These baffled experts keep bringing reasoned arguments to bear, like people debating the flammability of materials while standing in a house that is burning down. The sheer force of affect seems to escape notice, as if by ignoring the tantrum they might restore order. The frenzy feeds on high volume attention—negative or positive—and generates its own energy fields as a result. The implications of this are profound, and the dynamic systems that support this generative activity are integrated into every aspect of our daily lives through all forms of communication. The orchestrated effect of the spectacle of distraction is of course an essential aspect of the constant unfolding of “events” in news space. But the frenzy has its own momentum—and we are participatory instruments in this phenomenon. Recognizing how this works is crucial. [Read more…]
MORPH: Transformation In Technicolor
at Mash Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 21)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
The group exhibition MORPH is thematically about transformation, boundary pushing, and serves as an exhilarating tour de force by the artists as they explore edgy, surreal and transitory forms. But more striking perhaps than its theme is its color. Vibrant, dazzling, surprising and strange, mixed with heightened, dimensional textural elements or purely 2D ink and paint. It is that technicolor vividness that grabs the viewer first, almost daring the eye to enter thrillingly into its radiant, reality-bending dimension. [Read more…]
Nadine Shah’s Enchantingly Banshee-esque “Fool”
From Fast Food
on Apollo Records
Parasite
South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho has been thrilling critics and genre fans since 2006, when he unleashed his rambunctious yet heartbreaking creature-feature The Host. He’s awed us again and again with marvelous movies like the mind-bending murder-mystery Mother, the star-stuffed dystopian drama Snowpiercer, and the whimsical yet brutal fantasy-adventure Okja. By now, when you walk into a Joon-ho movie, you should expect something wildly riveting and wickedly clever. And that’s about all you can predict, because Joon-ho’s stories take audiences down paths twisted and devastating, often just when you think everything might just work out. In this vein, his pitch-black comedy Parasite (2019) might his masterpiece. [Read more…]
Errol Morris On Sitting Down With Alt-Right Nationalist Steve Bannon In American Dharma
Errol Morris, one of the great documentary filmmakers, has sat down with men from the halls of power for years. In his new film, American Dharma, Morris faces Steve Bannon, one of the darker lingering figures of our very recent collective history. If some of the world’s major publications were a bit more astute they would have long ago tagged Bannon as the person of the year, if not the decade. An argument can be made that Bannon is the most dangerous man in the world. Known primarily as the odd right-wing firebrand who helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and before that as the head of the infamous website Breitbart News, Bannon’s shadow casts over every major gain by an emerging, new proto-fascism. In Brazil he consulted the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, in Europe he rubs shoulders with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, power players united in their paranoid policies aimed at immigrants and leftists. What sets Bannon apart from the stereotypical Trump aficionado, if not Trump himself, is that he is an actual ideologue, a reactionary internationalist designed for a postmodern world. [Read more…]
Cross Colours: Black Fashion In The 20th Century
at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through March 1, 2020)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei
Everything old is new again. This motto has held steady for years in the world of fashion, with it’s here-today-gone-tomorrow trends, and nowhere has it rung more true than in the waves of 1990’s urban culture that are currently enjoying a huge resurgence on runways. As numerous high fashion and luxury brands clamor into the billion dollar market for streetwear, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century, showing at the California African American Museum (CAAM), is a fresh and dynamic exhibit examining the history of the recently rebooted Cross Colours: a Black-owned brand that was one of the first to cater exclusively to a young, Black, and ‘urban,’ i.e. inner-city, customer who predominantly wore streetwear. A testament to its culture-shifting perspective, the retrospective opens with the story of how the line came to be, and then moves through its brand history and significance in time as viewers explore the gallery. [Read more…]
Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels
at National Portrait Gallery, London, through 5 January 2020
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
In her new solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, New York artist Elizabeth Peyton offers a procession of glistening vignettes, portraits of famous and not-so-famous faces, whose cool freshness leaves the visitor with an excited, if slightly outmoded sense of pursuit. Many of her male subjects carry a melancholy, morning-after expression that signals an unabashed adoption of the female gaze. Peyton has painted Kurt Cobain and David Bowie, David Hockney and scenes from the Twilight films, as well as personal friends and lovers. Her eye tends towards the sheen of beauty, where cheekbones are elevated and noses are streamlined. [Read more…]
David S. Ware New Quartet’s Théâtre Garonne, 2008
Out November 15 on Aum Fidelity
Reviewed by John Payne
When David S. Ware passed away in October of 2012, the world lost a sound it’s never getting back again. That sound was revolutionary, it was a tough sound, a punk-jazz sound that asks a lot of questions and can’t wait around for answers. Ware’s sax tone was a raspy, ragged, haaard-blowing, Ayler-ish thing that frequently produced a kind of fear – fear that the man was gonna explode, he’s blowing so hard. That concern is palpable on this live concert recording, Théâtre Garonne, 2008, the latest issue from the David S. Ware Archive Series on the ever-righteous Aum Fidelity label. The set showcases the fact that Ware had already been suffering the strains of the illness that eventually killed him. [Read more…]
Joker Resurrectus: Pop Iconography Fills The Nihilist Void
As these words are written the streets of Santiago, Chile and Beirut, Lebanon are ablaze with the fury of thousands of voices raging against an irrational economic system. It is a world of tremors at the moment, with riots serving as a conduit for the general mood of vast communities. Significant is the fact that we are also living through a moment devoid of political vision or revolutionary alternatives. The old icons have receded in the public consciousness. Who are the thinkers of our time brushing away the old world? The cost of living hurtles upwards and an economically stable life becomes elusive for the young. Who speaks for them? Within the current void the masses instead lose themselves in the comfort of fantasy and caricatures that symbolize their despair. [Read more…]