Category Archives: Art

Q&A: Kathleen Hanna Talks About “The Punk Singer”

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Photo via the New York Times. Photo by Shervin Lainez.

In today’s New York Times Kathleen Hanna spoke about why she cooperated with having a documentary, “The Punk Singer,” made about her life, and why she is so open about herself in the film. “The Punk Singer” will be in theaters starting next week. There’s a clip from it below.

You really opened up your life, from late-stage Lyme disease to your relationship with your husband.

Mortality looming over you really changes your personality in such a huge way. I thought I was dying, so I was like, “I don’t care anymore — I am vulnerable. I’m sick of being guarded!” Adam really got me through coping with Lyme: every day, he would place every single one of the 39 pills I had to take in my pill case so I didn’t have to do it. He’s the person who changed my IV bags, kept the house clean, cooked every single meal for me and kept everything running for two years. Besides the fact that he’s hot as hell, really talented and has the best sense of humor of anyone I know, who else would change an IV bag for you while you’re laying on the couch having a seizure?

“The Punk Singer” begins with footage of you performing an early confessional spoken-word piece where you describe the importance of “screaming what’s unspoken.”

I’m standing in a coffee shop with Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, rocking back and forth and saying all this stuff about incest! When I see it today, my stomach drops and I want to hide under a blanket. At the same time, that’s what I was like — Mr. Confrontation.

For more, head to the New York Times.

Listen: New, Epic Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra Song, “Austerity Blues”

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Cover art for the new Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra album

A new album from Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra is due out January 21, 2014.

It’s got a great title: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything.

While you wait for the album listen to this track off it, “Austerity Blues.”

Thanks Consequence of Sound!

Beautiful Tribute to Lou Reed In the New York Times

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Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.
Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

In today’s New York Times, book critic Michiko Kakutani offers a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed. It is fitting that Lou Reed, the New York outsider who documented the outsiders of New York, should now be celebrated in the ultimate New York establishment media, the New York Times.

About the New York that Reed wrote and sang about in song for close to 50 years, Kakutani writes, it was “as distinctive as Chandler’s Los Angeles or Baudelaire’s Paris.”

Kakutani continues:

Mr. Reed was a pioneer on rock’s frontier with the avant-garde, translating lessons he learned at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the disruptive innovations of the Beat writers — Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. (“Last Exit to Brooklyn”) — to the realm of popular music. He not only embraced their adversarial stance toward society and transgressive subject matter (in songs like “Street Hassle” and “Heroin”) but also developed his own version of their raw, vernacular language, while adding a physical third dimension with guitars and drums. His early songs for the Velvet Underground — delivered in his intimate, conversational sing-speak — still sound so astonishingly inventive and new that it’s hard to remember they were written nearly half a century ago.

If Mr. Reed provided a literary bridge to the Beats (and through them, back to the Modernists, and the French “decadents” Rimbaud and Verlaine, and even Poe, the subject of his 2003 project “The Raven”), he also created a bridge forward to punk and to glam, indie, new wave and noise rock. He would become a formative influence on musicians like Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Roxy Music, R.E.M., the Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, the Strokes, Pixies, and Antony and the Johnsons. As his friend the artist Clifford Ross observed, “Lou was the great transmitter” — of ideas, language and innovation.

Read the whole essay at the New York Times.

Memorial For Lou Reed To Be Held At Lincoln Center Thursday

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A memorial for Lou Reed, who died Sunday October 27, 2013 in Southampton, New York, will be held at Lincoln Center beginning at 4 PM. The public is invited.

On Lou Reed’s Facebook page a new post reads:

“New York: Lou Reed at Lincoln Center”
A gathering open to the public – no speeches. no live performances, just Lou’s voice, guitar music & songs – playing the recordings selected by his family and friends.

The Paul Milstein Pool & Terrace at Lincoln Center
Thursday November 14th. Time 1:00PM to 4:00PM

Bono offered a tribute to Lou Reed in Rolling Stone that begins:

The world is noisier today, but not the kind of noise you want to turn up. The world of words is a little quiet and a good bit dumber, the world of music just not as sharp.

Lou Reed made music out of noise. The noise of the city. Big trucks clattering over potholes; the heavy breathing of subways, the rumble in the ground; the white noise of Wall Street; the pink noise of the old Times Square. The winking neon of downtown, its massage and tattoo parlors, its bars and diners, the whores and hoardings that make up the life of the big city.

New York City was to Lou Reed what Dublin was to James Joyce, the complete universe of his writing. He didn’t need to stray out of it for material, there was more than enough there for his love and his hate songs. From Metal Machine Music to Coney Island Baby, from his work in the Velvet Underground to his work with Metallica, the city that he devoted his life to was his muse more than any other. Until Laurie Anderson came into his life 20 years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lou had no other love than the noise of New York City. If he thought people could be stupid, he thought New Yorkers were the smartest of them.

Lou Reed’s final performance, a reworking of the sad ballad “Candy Says” (from the Velvets third album), which took place at Paris’ Salle Pleyel in June of this year. Reed is joined by Antony.

Art: Eric Clapton Sells Gerhard Richter Painting For $20,885,000

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Gerhard Richter’s “Abstraktes Bild (809-1).”

This evening in New York, “Abstraktes Bild (809-1),” a painting by Gerhard Richter owned by Eric Clapton, sold for $20, 885,000 at a Christie’s art auction.

A triptych by Francis Bacon, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” with an estimated value of $85 million, sold for $142,405,000.

To see what other art sold for at the auction, including work by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, head to Christie’s and scroll down.

Listen & Watch: My Bloody Valentine Blitz the Hammerstein Ballroom

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My Bloody

My Bloody Valentine played the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York last night (November 11, 2013). Read a review of the show at Brooklyn Vegan, and check out some of the performances below.

“Soon”:

“New You”:

“You Never Should”:

“Only Shallow”:

Art: Painting By Gerhard Richter Expected To Net Eric Clapton Nearly $25 Million

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Eric Clapton to sell his Gerhard Richter, which is titled, “Abstraktes Bild (809-1).”

The high-end art market has gone crazy. This evening, a painting by German artist Gerhard Richter, “Abstraktes Bild (809-1),” is expected to sell for around $25 million.

A triptych by Francis Bacon, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” also to be autioned by Christie’s this evening in New York, has an estimated value of $85 million.

Seven years ago, in 2006, a Bacon triptych, “Three Studies for a Self Portrait,” sold for about $5.5 million; in 2011 that same painting sold for $25,282,500.

Watch the bidding:

In a press release about Clapton’s Richter, Christie’s writes (hypes?):

An infinitely evocative meditation on color, texture, and its rhythmic motion across canvas, this magnificent, vibrant work stands among Gerhard Richter’s summary essays in abstraction. Executed in concert with three such masterpieces, this series reflects the artist at the apex of his formalist-aleatory operations. Employing a heady mixture of intention and chance, the artist layers the canvas in a wet-on-wet mélange of primary and secondary colors – red, the darkest of purples, violet, and yellow – creating a richly saturated chromatic field, where flames of red interpenetrate the almost blackened violet hues, and striations of blazing yellow enfold the whole in a sumptuous blanket of impasto. Here dazzling coloration is ravaged by repeated campaigns with both a sharp, wide-headed palette knife and squeegees of various sizes, either entirely clean, fully loaded with oil paint, or distributed lengthwise just along the edge, which are then dragged along the canvas, disturbing its surface.

Arresting in its compositional complexity, effulgent in its coloration, presenting an almost hallucinatory confusion of planes and shapes, Abstraktes Bild (809-1) is stunning for its surface agitations, a riot of textures and color fields that destabilizes even as it rewards looking.

For more head to today’s New York Times and the Huffington Post.

Watch & Listen: Director Jim Jarmusch Makes Noise-Rock

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jimJ

Director Jim Jarmusch is known for his films but he also plays guitar.

For his film “The Mystery Of Heaven” he collaborated musically with classical lutenist Jozef Van Wissem.

Now there’s a video for the instrumental, “Etimasia,” directed by filmmaker Jacqueline Castel, which you can look at while you hear the duo’s minimal music.

Miles Davis The Painter? Who Knew?

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Turns out Miles Davis painted and drew for many hours each day.

His art is damn good. Some reminds me of Basquiat.

A book, “Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork,” was published recently.

You can see 12 examples of his painting and drawing at The Daily Beast.

Miles’ heirs are working away at keeping the legendary jazz musician in the spotlight, and bringing Davis’ music to younger generations. Some of their plans — remixes by hip DJs — seem sketchy, others — ties and scarves? — seem sacreligious. But a biopic is a great idea, and I welcome more music.

A story in todays New York Times details some of what his three heirs are up to.