etc. – Page 14 – greg.org

Authenticity vs. Realness

Look, I dragged out my old Topsiders, too, same as the next guy. But I’ve just about had it up to _here_ with the obsession with “authenticity” that is the uncritical core of this dragging-on moment in men’s fashion.
It ranges from picayune discussions of selvedge denim carried on over your dad’s Miller High Life; to competitive fleamarket picking to rediscover the most obscure canvas tote bag manufacturer; to American-made worker boots for publicists; to the umpteenth reincarnation WASP-y preppy fashion, called Trad, just like it was in Japan in 1986. It’s as if the Emperor could somehow be naked and wearing two NOS Izod shirts, small batch, reissued Duck Head khakis, and Japanese export Redwings at the same time.
It all reminds me of nothing so much as Jennie Livingston’s documentary, Paris is Burning. Schoolboy Realness, Town & Country, Executive Realness. Here’s the late, great drag queen philosopher [and accomplished body-stasher!] Dorian Corey:

In a ballroom, you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive. And therefore, you’re showing the straight world that, “I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity, I can be one. Because I can look it.” And that is a kind of fulfillment.
Your friends, your peers, are telling you, “Oh, you’d make a wonderful executive.”

And just line this quote from Pepper LaBeija [above, in fur], legendary head of the House of LaBeija…

To be able to blend. That’s what realness is.
If you can pass the untrained eye, or even the trained eye, and not give away the fact that you’re gay, that’s when it’s real.
The idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart.
The realer you look means you look like a real woman. Or you look like a real man. A straight man.
It’s not a takeoff, or a satire. No. It’s actually being able to be this.

…up against the Trad guy in the Observer yesterday:

“When done right, it should almost be invisible,” said John Tinseth, 52, an insurance broker and longtime traddy who’s been writing a blog called The Trad–anonymously, until now–for the past two years. He was on the phone from his West 57th Street apartment, dressed, he said, in L. L. Bean khakis and moccasins and a striped yellow Oxford University rugby shirt.
“A guy should walk right by you and he’ll have the whole thing down and you won’t even notice,” Mr. Tinseth said. “That’s when it’s done perfectly.”

Authenticity is a pose, people, plain and simple.

Public Art On The Mall: Centerbeam & Icarus

While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects like Centerbeam and Icarus.
Centerbeam was the result of a 22-artist collaboration organized by MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies under the leadership of the artist Otto Piene. It was a ~~144-ft long~~ 128-ft long [in DC] steel sculpture resembling a radio tower on its side, which served as a platform for an array of artistic deployments of cutting edge technologies, including laser projections on steam, holograms, neon and argon beams, and electronic and computer-generated music. And giant inflatable sculptures.
After a highly acclaimed debut at Documenta 6 in 1977, Centerbeam was reinstalled on the Mall during the Summer of 1978. The site was the open space north of the newly opened National Air & Space Museum, and directly across the Mall from the just-opened East Gallery of the NGA [where The National Museum of the American Indian now stands].
Centerbeam gave nightly performances/happenings/experiences throughout the summer, culminating in two nights’ performance of Icarus, a “sky opera” in steam, balloons, lasers, and sound created by Piene and Paul Earls.
Based loosely on Ovid, Icarus cast Piene’s 250-ft tall red and black flower-shaped sculpture as the title character; another red anemone-shaped balloon was Daedalus, and Centerbeam was the Minotaur.
Centerbeam was officially sponsored by the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over the Mall, and the Smithsonian. The directors of both the NGA [Carter Brown] and the Hirshhorn Museum [Abram Lerner] are thanked for their encouragement in MIT’s 1980 catalogue of Centerbeam, but no Smithsonian art museum–and no art curator–appears to have been involved in the presentation of the work. Most of the coordination was handled by Susan Hamilton, who worked in the office of Charles Blitzer, the Assistant Secretary for History and Art. In fact, the Air & Space Museum’s director and staff gets the most effusive praise and seems to have been the most closely involved with the project, even to the point of using the NASM as Centerbeam‘s mailing address.
The Washington Post did not review Icarus, and in the paper’s only feature on the opening of Centerbeam, Jo Ann Lewis cited anonymous critics who “generally saw it as a big, endearing toy, but not art. There seems no reason to amend that conclusion here.”
Of course, no one cares what the Post says about art, and Piene and his CAVS collaborators probably did not mind the absence of more traditionally minded art worlders. Since his days as a founder of Group Zero in the early 1960s, Piene had been self-consciously seeking a path that would lead art out and away from the rareified, precious object fixations of collectors and museums.
Group Zero was ahead of several curves, and their place in the story of conceptualism, minimalism, Arte Povera, and other important developments of art in the 1960s is getting a boost. And Piene’s work looked pretty nice and strong in Sperone Westwater’s very fresh-looking Zero show last year. Are Centerbeam and Icarus really just wonky art/science experiments, examples of the played out model of unalloyed, Utopian technophilia that spawned earlier collaborative dogpiles like the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair?
Or is there a real history of “real” art by Piene and his collaborators that needs to be looked at again? Despite the apparent indifference of its official art world at the time, was Washington DC actually the site of some significant artistic production that did not involve freakin’ Color Fields? Inquiring balloon-sculpting minds want to know.

District Of Colombia??

W. T. F.???
The National Mall is ringed with Smithsonian museums, none of which seem to have programmed a piece of public art or sculpture outside their own walls in at least a generation.
Washington DC has no public art program to speak of. And that’s not just because you can’t call those insane “parades” of paint-a-pandas and paint-a-donkey/elephant “art”; they’re tourist marketing, pure and simple.
And yet. Another such parade seems to have miraculously materialized on the District of Columbia’s streets. A parade of hearts. There was one in front of my family’s hotel when we picked them up to do the tourist circuit. There were three along our walks to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Smithsonian’s American History Museum.

Each is painted with quotes and factoids about Colombia, the country. They turn out to be part of Colombia es Pasion, an official [Colombian] government branding campaign designed, according to a regurgitated press release in the Examiner, “to educate and show the world the true Colombia.” In addition to the three we saw, there are 37 other giant fiberglass hearts which “appear along city streets in high-traffic areas. They will be hard to miss, standing eight feet tall, featuring colorful, hand-painted designs that showcase a particular aspect of Colombia that may surprise visitors.”
Visitors and locals both. Who the hell gave this thing the green light? The campaign was created for the Colombian government by BBDO Sancho, the Colombian subsidiary of the global ad agency, and was designed by another Bogota agency called Sistole. But there is absolutely no one–no agency or overseeing organization or authority from Washington DC or the US mentioned in the press release/article.
I can think of approximately one thousand art projects that would be better to see on the streets and plazas of Our Nation’s Capital before a bunch of South American heart-shaped billboards.
So the only way I can make sense of their presence is that Washington DC is now an open, international platform for sculpture, art, whatever! The way Houston has no zoning laws, and you can build whatever the hell you want next to whatever the hell is already there, Washington’s many complex, overlapping bureaucracies have thrown out the rulebook and thrown open the streets for whatever cockamamie scheme you’ve been cooking up. Bring’em down and set’em up!
An invitation to Discover Colombia Through Its Heart [examiner.com]
Colombia llegó a Estados Unidos/ Colombia came to the US [and just dumped their marketing bullshit on our street corners] [colombiaespasion.com, google translate]

Fall 2009 NY Events Calendar

For anyone interested in improving his chances of running into Brian Sholis at a brainy and/or arty event, he has compiled a rather awesome calendar of openings, symposia, talks, readings, screenings, and other happenings in New York.
Me, I just loaded it onto my iPod Touch calendar, so I can be reminded nearly every day that I’m missing something interesting. Though I definitely plan on going to James Welling’s talk with Jan Dibbets at MoMA on–well, it’s right there in the calendar.
Fall 2009 New York Events Calendar [briansholis.com]

Ruminations On The Immortality Of Art

Ryan McGinley in Vice:

[Dash] and Earsnot also loved to tag bums. They would give a bum $20 to let them tag all over his clothes. Bums never change their clothes, so the tags would never get buffed out like on a door or grate. And they just wander the streets. It was amazing advertising and such a genius idea that it still makes me crack up when I think about it.

Haha, good times.
Remembering Dash Snow [viceland]

Engraved On My Memory, Perhaps

After blogging about it the other day, I thought it was high time I get the real story on the mysterious Walter de Maria stainless steel edition I’d been watching for all these years, the one which has never come up for auction or resale because the artist engraved a restriction on the work itself that it could never be resold for more than $100.
So I called the collector, Charlie Cowles, and asked him about it. Which I probably should have done years ago, because I remembered the work completely wrong.
The piece is actually titled High Energy Bar, and the only thing engraved on it is the title, the artist’s name, and the date, 1966. And a copyright notice, because I guess that’s how they used to do it back then. [Any questions, just ask Robert Indiana what he thinks about it.] But a $100 resale restriction? Charlie said he’d never heard it.
That’s when I realized what had actually been engraved where. Turns out when I’d asked about the piece 15+ years ago, Charlie had explained that he’d gotten it in 1967 from de Maria’s Los Angeles dealer, Nicholas Wilder for $100, and that because it was an unlimited edition, it’d never sell out. That price number and the idea of perpetual availability had lodged in my brain, and over the years, had gotten conflated with the object itself.

Once I figured out the mystery of High Energy Bar, I realized examples of it have been shown and sold all over the place throughout the years. [Though Betty Freeman had one, too, it wasn’t included in the Christie’s auction of her collection.]
The most recent instance pretty much pokes a hole in my market-proof $100 de Maria delusion. In May, a High Energy Bar belonging to the late gallerist Eva af Buren was sold in Stockholm. It went for 220,000 SEK, nearly USD31,000, and more than ten times the pre-sale estimate.
af Buren’s de Maria, which she acquired in 1969, was no. 49 of what the certificate calls “an infinite series.” Not only is the certificate required “in order to be operative and authentic,” but the certificate–depicted below, and let me state for the record, that is one of the snazziest artist certificates I’ve ever seen–“will be incorporated as a part of the whole work of art, to be known as the High Energy Unit.”

Interestingly, though there are hundreds of mentions of High Energy Bar, there were only two mentions of the “complete” piece, High Energy Unit. [It makes me start to wonder about the underappreciated existence our poor certificates must lead, even as they’ve become so important to the authenticity and integrity of the work. Is anyone else making sexy artist certificates–or art about certificates, even–that remain ignored or unknown by everyone but the work’s purchaser? Will an artist make a work whose aesthetic or artistic payoff is actually the [secret] certificate itself? If you have or know of any awesome certificates languishing in any file cabinets out there, by all means, let me know.]
Next step is to check with de Maria and see if these High Energy Bars are still available, or if the series’ infiniteness has become, like infinity itself, more of an abstract concept. It makes me wonder what number it’s reached. And what it sells for.
It could be possible that even if the work is still available from the artist himself, collectors could put a premium on vintage examples with low numbers and historically interesting provenance. Like how On Kawara’s older date paintings sell for significantly more than newer ones, or how Flavins with “vintage” light fixtures sell for more than those with replacements. Frankly, it seems like a valuation system that’s explicitly at odds with the artist’s concept of the work itself. And maybe it’s something that the market will slowly process and correct for as conceptually driven work becomes better understood.

1,000 Fake Giacomettis Look As Shitty As They Sound

Three people–a 59-year-old phony aristocrat and an art dealer couple in their 60’s–were arrested in Stuttgart, Germany for fraud and copyright infringement [!] after police broke up an international Alberto Giacometti forgery operation. Over 1,000 fake Giacommetis were confiscated from storage space in Mainz, outside Frankfurt. The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeittung photographed a few of them [above] at the police’s invitation. Seriously, I don’t see how the copyright infringement charges will stick, because those things look like crap.
If I understand the Google translation of FAZ correctly, the forgers created an elaborate backstory to support the existence of so much unknown Giacometti material.
The main suspect, who hasn’t been named by police, called himself an “Imperial Count,” and claimed to have been entrusted the works by his dear, dear friend in Paris, Diego, Alberto’s sculptor brother, who died in 1985. According to the count, Diego accumulated a massive stash of Alberto’s sculptures–both casts and plaster originals–from the foundry they shared. The works were kept hidden from Alberto’s widow and heirs [Alberto died in 1966].
Why? Perhaps the answer is to be found in the 139-page book, Diego’s Revenge, which explains the history of the brothers’ rivalry and which supported the works’ authenticity. Because, of course, it had been written and published by the scammers themselves.
In their press release [pdf auf deutch, google translation], the State Crime Prosecutor in Stuttgart had some valuable advice for Giacometti collectors and other art collectors alike:

Prevention tips for the purchase of works of art:
Before you buy:

Avoid impulse buys and so-called “bargains”

Evaluate the offer for sale carefully

Find out on the basis of literature (picture books, work folders) on the Purchase

Überlassen Sie in Zweifelsfällen die Bewertung sachkundigen Dritten (Sammler, • Do not leave in doubt the valuation expert third party (picking, Dealers, museums, etc.)

Compare the offer and the prices on the art market

When buying:

Buy your art only against an invoice or purchase contract (§ 433 BGB)

Write down in a private purchase, the identity of the seller, its Address and possibly also his license plates [especially important if you’re buying a Giacometti out of the trunk of a car. -ed,]

Let the defining characteristics (originality, age, artists, etc.) be confirmed in writing.

So servicey!
Now that I think about it, there was a Giacometti Femme de Venise VI for sale last May at Santa Monica Auctions. It didn’t look like any of the published Femmes de Venise, which were numbered differently over the years, but it still has a foundry mark, and they still had a $25-30,000 estimate on it, even though SMA described it as “After Alberto Giacometti.” Never mind, I just spoke to the auctioneers, and that piece had been in a Los Angeles collection for over 40 years. Whatever it is, it’s not a German fake.
Die Gangster von Mainz [faz.net via artforum]

The International Prototype Kilogram, Or Le Grand K

Caught this on the CBC last night. I always assumed a kilogram is equal to the mass of a liter of water. But it turns out to be messy/tricky/complicated to measure water accurately enough, plus, some scientists decided to change the definition soon after it was decreed, so a kilogram is actually equal to the mass of the kilogram, the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, also known in France as Le Grand K. It’s the only unit of measure, says Wikipedia, “that is still defined in relation to an artifact rather than to a fundamental physical property that can be reproduced in different laboratories.”

The IPK is made of a platinum alloy known as “Pt‑10Ir”, which is 90% platinum and 10% iridium (by mass) and is machined into a right-circular cylinder (height = diameter) of 39.17 mm to minimize its surface area. The addition of 10% iridium improved upon the all-platinum Kilogram of the Archives [originally made and adopted in 1799. -ed.] by greatly increasing hardness while still retaining platinum’s many virtues: extreme resistance to oxidation, extremely high density, satisfactory electrical and thermal conductivities, and low magnetic susceptibility. The IPK and its six sister copies are stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in an environmentally monitored safe in the lower vault located in the basement of the BIPM’s Chateau de Breteuil in Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. Three independently controlled keys are required to open the vault. Official copies of the IPK were made available to other nations to serve as their national standards. These are compared to the IPK roughly every 50 years.

The IPK is stored under three bell jars, and its six sister copies are each stored under two.

The IPK and two other cylinders were manufactured in 1879 by Johnson Matthey, assayers and refiners for the Bank of England. [IPK is the third, KIII.] Johnson Matthey made 40 replicas in 1884, which were calibrated to IPK. 34 were distributed in 1889 to signatories of the Meter Convention for use as national standards. Two of this original batch, K4 and K20, are in the US. K20 was designated the US ~~standard~~ prototype in 1889.
The process and protocols for comparing these replicas to IPK, known as “periodic verification,” have evolved over the years. The BIPM was apparently not so distracted between 1939 and 1946 that they couldn’t develop “The BIPM Cleaning Method,” which involves a chamois, ether, ethanol, and steam cleaning with bi-distilled water. [Considering the Metric system itself was implemented in the midst of the French Revolution, and proceeded even as key scientists were being guillotined, I guess it’s not so surprising.] Models have developed to describe the rate of surface contamination.

What has become clear after the third periodic verification performed between 1988 and 1992 is that masses of the entire worldwide ensemble of prototypes have been slowly but inexorably diverging from each other. It is also clear that the mass of the IPK lost perhaps 50 µg over the last century, and possibly significantly more, in comparison to its official copies.

Given this variation and divergence, much of which cannot be explained, the CIPM [Committee &c.] in 2005 recommended redefining the kilogram as a constant of nature. So far, a suitably stable, reproducible constant has eluded metrologists.
One method is to define the number of carbon-12 atoms in a 1kg cube. Another, part of the Avogadro Project, is to create a single-crystal sphere of silicon, then measure the sphere radius and its internal crystal lattice with interferometry, and then polish it with single atomic level-accuracy to reach 1 kg. A sample is presented here with rather dramatic flair by a master optician at the Australian Centre for Precision Optics:

Its appearance might look familiar to regular readers of this website.
The human attempt to account for the world through exacting science results in a minimalist object that transcends other Minimalist objects, all while inhabiting a conceptual framework that transcends Conceptualist frameworks.
And I want some. And when I get my kilogram[s], I’ll put them on the shelf next to my satelloons and my photos of the entire universe from the Palomar Sky Survey.
Kilogram, Grave [wikipedia]
photos of the International Prototype Kilogram [bipm.org]
“The kilogram and measurements of mass and force,” Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Jan-Feb, 2001 [findarticles.com, PDF original at nist.gov]

And The Company That’ll Bring It To You: AT&T

Maybe it’s just me who figured at the time, everyone was caught up in the giddy, optimistic hype of the World’s Fair. I guess I hadn’t counted on E.B. White. His nonplussed review of the 1939 New York World’s Fair is included in Essays of E.B. White. Here’s the best part [of the fair, that is. The whole essay’s a short, pleasant read]:

Another gay spot, to my surprise, was the American Telephone & Telegraph Exhibit. It took the old Telephone Company to put on the best show of all. To anyone who draws a lucky number, the company grants the privilege of making a long-distance call. This call can be to any point in the United States, and the bystanders have the exquisite privilege of listening in through earphones and of laughing unashamed. To understand the full wonder of this, you must reflect that there are millions of people who have never either made or received a long-distance call, and that when Eddie Pancha, a waiter in a restaurant in El Paso, Texas, hears the magic words “New York is calling…go ahead, please,” he is transfixed in holy dread and excitement. I listened for two hours and ten minutes to this show, and I’d be there this minute if I were capable of standing up. I had the good luck to be listening at the earphone when a little boy named David Wagstaff won the toss and put in a call to his father in Springfield, Mass., what a good time he was having at the World’s Fair. David walked resolutely to the glass booth before the assembled kibitzers and in a tiny, timid voice gave the operator his call, his little new cloth hat set all nicely on his head. But his father wasn’t there, and david was suddenly confronted with the necessity of telling his story to a man named Mr. Henry, who happened to answer the phone and who, pn hearing little David Wagstaff’s voice calling from New York, must surely have thought that David’s mother had been run down in the BMT and that David was doing the manly thing.
“Yes, David,” he said, tensely.
“Tell my father this, began Dvid, slowly, carefully, determined to go through with the halcyon experience of winning a lucky call at the largest fair the world had yet produced.
“Yes, David.”
“We got on the train, and…and…had a nice trip, and at New Haven, when they were taking off the car and putting another car on, it was awfully funny because the car gave a great–big–BUMP!”
Then followed David’s three minute appreciation of the World of Tomorrow and the Citadel of Light, phrased in the crumbling remnants of speech that little boys are left with when a lot of people are watching, and when their thoughts begin to run down, and when Perispheres begin to swim mistily in time. Mr. Henry–the invisible and infinitely surprised Mr. Henry–maintained a respectful and indulgent silence. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I would swap the Helicline for a copy of his attempted transcription of David’s message to his father.

“The World of Tomorrow” was originally published in May 1939 in The New Yorker.

Rethinking Ai Weiwei, Who Was Just Detained And Beaten By Chinese Security

I’ve never thought much of Ai Weiwei’s work; despite some of its undeniable power, he’d been compared to Warhol a few too many times for me to take him seriously. Well, it’s time for me to rethink that.
First and second, there was Ai’s refreshing seriousness and political boldness as a counterpoint to the apparent insufferable Japanese superciliousness [Hiroshi Sugimoto, I’ve been a fan for 15 years, but I’m looking squarely at you here] at the opening of his exhibition at the Mori Art Museum at Roppongi Hills. From Philip Tinari’s report for Artforum:

Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, like Ai a self-taught architect, closed the day’s events with a lengthy encomium to his own recent projects, including a museum he designed and the first show–“naturally of my own work”–to be staged there. “Will there be a second show?” Ai rejoined.
Not surprisingly, the conversation often came back to Ai’s recent brush with the law that led to the closure of his much-loved blog in early June. He jovially recounted a tale of calling the Caochangdi village police station to report the secret agents who were staking out his home and studio and who refused to show him their badges. (One of the plainclothes turned out to be the brother of the local patrolman–so much for that plan.) Many speculate that the troubles owed ultimately to the “citizen’s investigation”–staffed by volunteers and mobilized via his blog–that canvassed the Sichuan disaster zone throughout the spring, collecting names and vital statistics on fifty-one hundred of the earthquake’s youngest victims. For Ai, the unresolved carnage–60 percent of parents have not been able to reclaim their children’s remains–owes much to shoddy school construction, and thus to party corruption. Under this pressure, the government released a figure of 5,335 dead schoolchildren just before the one-year anniversary of the May 12 quake. Asked point-blank by architect Shigeru Ban why he bothered to pursue this seemingly self-destructive personal campaign, Ai looked around at the hundreds of eyes fixed on him and replied bluntly, “If I don’t use my social privilege to do this, I feel ashamed.”

Wow, Shigeru Ban, I hope that wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
Now the AP reports that Ai and several other activists for earthquake victims were detained and “roughed up” by police in the Chinese city of Chengdu, in order to prevent them from attending and testifying at a trial of another earthquake protestor, Tan Zuoren. Tan, Ai, and others pushed for nearly a year to force the government to release the names of over 5,000 schoolchildren killed in last year’s quake.
I can’t think of another artist of Ai’s prominence–he was credited with the idea for Herzog & deMeuron’s Bird Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics–who has put himself and his reputation on the line politically to such an extent. It’s remarkable, but it also makes me wonder just what the comparable artist and political issue would be here.
Eye for an Ai [artforum]
Chinese police detain supporters of quake critic [ap/google via artforum]

Make The Motorcycles Run On Time

When you watch this 1950s newsreel footage of an [the?] Italian police motorcycle drill team, turn off the music [it’s not original anyway] and instead, just make motorcycle noises, and occasional exclamations of “Mama mia!” and “Magnifico!” maybe slip in a little reflexive, “Il Duce!” or two for old time’s sake. [via anonymous works]

And Now A Report On The Latest Trends And/Or Story Ideas From The World Of Architecture!

The funny thing is, I think my problem is I couldn’t have made something like this up:

Hi Greg,
Here’s a trend and story idea for the growing number of architecture company cars piling up from economic downsizing: The majority of small businesses and firms lease cars for tax purposes. However, owners must still make payments on those cars if the leases are stuck in park from staff cutbacks. But a new program is now helping small firms get unused car leases off the books giving finances a new lease on life.
–Small business owners have had to downsize staff, leaving many of these car leases sitting idle in the parking lot (but still requiring monthly payments).
–Owners can’t sell the lease and if they turn them back in to the bank they will get slapped with early contract termination fees upwards of $10,000 per car.
–A new Small Business Car Release program helps architecture firm owners ditch the lease by transferring the contract to someone else (most popular service being PressReleaseSender.com).
–The car lease company is involved in the program, it takes about 2-3 weeks for the transfer and removes the small business owner from obligations to make the monthly payments.
–Paying for unused car leases is salt on the wound considering rising health care costs and less credit available from banks.
Sources To Quote:
–Sergio Stiberman, CEO and founder of PressReleaseSender.com, to discuss the new Small Business Car Release program.
–Also speak with the executive director of Auto Fleet Leasing on industry trends and number of small businesses leasing vehicles.
Additional Story Titles:
Company Helps Small Business Unload Excess Car Leases
Small Business Help Allows For Immediate Release of Company Cars
Small Business Relief When Company Car Can’t Start Up
Program Helps Small Business Move Company Cars Stuck in Park
Program Offers Small Business Relief for Unused Car Leases
Unemployment Leaves Small Business on Company Lease Collision Course
Unused Company Car Leases Eat Into Already Thin Margins

So many wonderful titles to choose from, I need an intern to help me decide!

Sarah In The Sky With Diamonds

Hah, Shatner reads Sarah Palin’s exit speech on Conan.

I’d love to see this poem set to music. And then flash-animated.Holy smoking man, I’d forgotten about his “Rocket Man”:

[via felix]

Dance, Memory

I’m surprising myself by how much I feel the loss of Merce Cunningham, or more precisely, how much more acutely I’m feeling an appreciation for his work right now.
From the LA Times’ obituary by Lewis Segal:

“When you work on something that you don’t know about, how do you figure out what’s right for that moment?” he asked rhetorically in the 2005 Times interview. “Using chance can be a way of looking at what you do in another way without depending always on your memory. It helps something else to come out that otherwise you wouldn’t have known about.”

And from Alastair Macaulay, the NY Times dance critic who’s obviously been deeply contemplating for years having to write Merce’s obit at some point:

Mr. Cunningham often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence. “You have to love dancing to stick to it,” he once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

On the other hand, there’s always this hilariously insipid interview by R. Couri Hay from a 1974 Cunningham-Cage party at Louise Nevelson’s place to lighten the mood. My favorite “question” is around 27:00: “Perhaps, Mr Cage can tell- can we ask you about– can you tell us some of the–interesting things that happen when you were working with–Mr Cunningham–tell us all about some of the–incredible little things that must have happened when you were working out some, uh, new–fabulous things?”

Nam June Paik On Art & Boxing

Was watching this ancient panel discussion, “Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art,” from Pleiades Gallery in 1978 with Merce Cunningham, but then I totally fell for Nam June Paik all over again instead. A couple of pull quotes:

In any other profession like lawyers, dentists, sanitation workers, or teachers, if you do fairly well, slightly above average, you can make a living. But only in art and heavyweight boxing, you have to be top five to pay your rent.
[laughter]
It’s strange, especially because in heavyweight boxing, you know more or less who wins. The fight can be fixed, but not as easily as in the art world.

And this one, where Paik talks about peoples’ complaints that video art is boring, and that it would be hard to write a PhD on the history of video art, because all the material you’d have to sit through would take a hundred years. It’s not the random access of an encyclopedia vs the sequential access of video, though, that’s strikes a particular chord, but the realization that the panel’s participants–Cage, Paik, Cunningham–are now gone [stay healthy, Richard Kostelanetz and Dore Ashton!]:

Life, we cannot repeat. Life is sequential access. However, videotape is changing that: life as a sequential access.
If you freeze a time and retrieve them. So you keep certain access–1967, 1955–frozen. Like an icebox. You can go access cheese, butter, eggs. And you can go back to your twentyhood, thirtyhood, childhood, in random access. That, videotape is doing. So the beauty of videotape produced now will be appreciated in 2000. It’s like antique hunting.

On another note, it’s kind of comforting/ennervating to see that the medium of panel discussion is still sequential, often boring, and characterized by audience essays in the form of a question.
Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art (Part I) (1978) [ubu]