flag dimensions: 17.75″ x 29.5″, image: Jeff R. Bridgman American Antiques via 1stdibs
Speaking of sweet flags, Andy from reference library sent along this amazing, pre-Johnsian artifact from York, PA antiques dealer Jeff R. Bridgman.
It’s a salesman sample flag, seven parade flags in graduated sizes, sewn together for convenient comparison shopping. The 48-star design and textile quality suggests WWI-era; Bridgman’s description suggests that Jasper Johns must have seen one of these sample sets somewhere before. But then, that’s just what a guy charged with selling it to you would say… In any case, awesome.
48 Star Parade Flag Salesman’s Sample, POR [1stdibs via reference library]
Category: etc.
A de C
The first and last time I saw this truck, Donald Judd’s ranch truck, was in the early 1990s, in Marfa. I swear this logo for the ranch, Ayala de Chinati–or am I hallucinating?–used to be painted on the door of 101 Spring St.
Anyway, I’ve been looking for it again all these years because I’ve wanted to knock it off for myself, for my letterhead, if not for the door of my truck, and I couldn’t remember exactly how the letters-in-letters thing went. So I’ll get right on it.
An Artist’s Truck That’s No More Than It Needs To Be [nytimes]
We Go Now To Our Man In Donaueschingen
I’ve been listening to [relatively] a lot of La Monte Young lately, and [slightly less] Tony Conrad–which is harder to work to. And the Cage, of course, because he’s the composer this month in the kids’ school [!]. So it’s all so much that when the radiator kicked in the other day, the kid asked if that was my music.
But is there any other group who’s not so on board with the all-sound-is-music concept than classical orchestra musicians? Perhaps not. Which is a bummer.
Though I doubt a Cageian centennial revolution is the justification for the budget cuts to Southwest German Radio orchestras that have spawned several protests at the Donaueschinger Musiktage new music festival.
Like this amazing protest which New Yorker music guy Alex Ross posted on his blog. Oh, and on YouTube, he is the poster, not just the linker.
A violinist playing a continuous tritone as political protest.
Ich war ein Orchester [therestisnoise]
It’s A Mozingo Thing
My great great grandmother had an awesome name: Mary Argent Mozingo. She was married to the equally well-named Ruffin Sullivan. They were country people, farmers, I suppose, in Wayne County, North Carolina. I knew their daughter, my great grandmother, who lived to be 105, but I never heard her talk of her parents. We found their names when we were in the market for names, and were surfing through family history records. My wife vetoed Mozingo, and my grandmother nixed Ruffin with a swiftness that hinted at family stories that did not get told very often.
While I was still campaigning for Mozingo–just, you know, as a second or third middle name, a fun option, maybe? no?–my mother did say that her grandmother always insisted her mother’s name was Mozzinger. Or Mottsinger, and if it weren’t for some ignorant census clerk somewhere who couldn’t hear or spell right, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. In any case, it’s not Mozingo.
This was the woman who eventually edited out the stories of working in a cigar factory in Richmond as a young girl, where she won five dollars once for the quickest rolling. And who destroyed oral history tape recordings of her family’s history because of, well, I guess we can only speculate now, since those stories have been lost.
And there’s no chance that a lone census taker messed up, Ellis Island-style, on the Mozingo. If anything, my ancestors’ insecurity about Mozingo is one of the prime indicators of their true Mozingoness.
As LA Times writer Joe Mozingo found out, when he went searching for the origins of his name, which he’d always heard was Italian. Other Mozingos heard it was Portuguese, or Basque. Obviously, to almost everyone not named Mozingo, that is, Mozingo is an African name, brought to early colonial Virginia by one Edward Mozingo:
Edward had been a servant to Col. John Walker, a member of the colony’s legislature. When Walker died in 1669, his widow inherited Edward and remarried a powerful Virginian, John Stone.
Edward sued Stone for his freedom. Little is said about the lawsuit in the court record, only that there was an appeals hearing in the high colonial court, that “Divers Witnesses” testified and that the judges concluded “Edward Mozingo a Negro man” had served his term after 28 years of indenture.
Joe Mozingo’s three-part story of uncovering the Mozingo truth overflows with examples of hardship, racism, insecurity and denial that runs so natural and deep Americans have been soaking in it for centuries.
And that’s just the white Mozingos. People whose identity and racial worldview don’t have room for the complexities of rural intermarriage in 18th century America. For the Black Mozingos, meanwhile, the countervailing impact of generations of discrimination, opportunity, passing, and self-loathing still play out in a Goldsboro, NC barbecue restaurant–which turns out to be the same place we’ve stopped for lunch every summer on the way to the Outer Banks.
The ways family functions as a machine for transmitting memory are one subject of my set of 12 short films, The Souvenir Series; I think I have to add the way family desperately tries to keep things silent for centuries to the mix, too.
In Search Of The Meaning Of ‘Mozingo’, part 1, part 2, and part 3 [latimes via my cousin cara]
John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2, On Stage Now At The Ruhr Triennial
I’m done waiting. This Europera 1 & 2 post is apparently not going to write itself.
The Ruhr Triennial opened last weekend with what is only the third [production and fourth -ed.] staging of John Cage’s grandest* composition, the 1987 Europeras 1 & 2. It’s basically a chance operations tour de force that runs the entirety of the European opera canon–arias, stories, costumes, props, sets, lighting, libretti, staging, orchestra–through the I Ching wringer, which performance is conducted, so to speak, by the cues of a 2.75-hour clock. As Cage put it, “For 200 years the Europeans have sent us their operas. Now I’m returning all of them.”
All six performances in the Triennial’s home venue, the vast, repurposed industrial Centennial Hall Bochum sold out immediately. So far three have happened, directed by the director of the entire Triennial, avant-garde composer Heiner Goebbels.
So I’ve been monitoring the reviews jealously, and with some indignation. The scale and ambition and significance of the work is being respected—the work has only ever been performed in Germany [update below: not true]—but it seems that both critics and directors alike still struggle with the vocabulary and the very concept of Cage’s chance-driven work.
In the only English-language review I’ve found so far, The Financial Times’ Shirley Apthorp describes Europeras’ “extravagant evening of associative nonsense” as both “chaos” and “minutely choreographed absurdity.” Writing for FAZ Eleonore Buening criticized Goebbels for putting the “chaos Cage conceived a quarter century ago back in a Museumsvitrine.” If I read my German correctly, “The director placed too little confidence,” Buening writes, “in the expiration of the clock, the will of the participants, or even Comrade Chance.” And did Cage ever have a better comrade?
I have never seen Europera 1 & 2, but I’ve been studying up on them for the last year or so. The original staging, commissioned in 1985 by the Frankfurt Opera, was the dissertation subject of Laura Kuhn, who was involved in the production, and who has since become the director of the John Cage Trust.
Europera 1 & 2 strikes me as a simultaneous negation and celebration of opera as an art/theatrical form, but also as a cultural and historical institution. His chance-based composition removes narrative, character arcs, literary and stage conventions, and authorial intentions from the experience of a performance. Chance is not chaos or absurdity; it’s a different syntax. How does any opera performance seem if you don’t know the story or speak the language? Would you ever call it chaos or nonsense?
An opera diehard may want to identify the source of every passing prop, aria, or orchestral passage in Europera—did the Stump The Operahead trivia quiz during the intermission of the Met’s weekly radio broadcast ever tackle Cage? Just like a moviehound might try to flag the source of every clip in Christian Marclay’s The Clock. But that risks missing Cage’s point [which is not Marclay’s]: that the experience of the montage has quality and meaning and value in itself, apart from the original content and its juxtapositions, not because of them.
And maybe critics actually are better attuned to this now, and the problem [sic] is just/still the directors. In FAZ, discussing the “Children’s Jury” who Goebbels convened to award unconventional prizes during the Triennial, Buening found a new twist on the classic MTV Crisis when she worried that the media-saturated, “Multi-tasken” Kids These Days might be bored by Cage’s 1980s jump cut revolution. After watching a rehearsal of Europera Ruhr Nachtrichten writer Julia Gass said Cage foreshadowed the “TV Zapp Era”; actually, he was soaking in it. Cage’s vision of the future was surfing the 400 operatic channels of the past.
Europera may be Cage’s most ambitious and explicit appropriationist work. According to Kuhn’s firsthand account of the making of, Cage, relying on the collection of Lincoln Center’s library, determined to include only operas that were in the public domain. For the flats and sets, he had researchers in Germany compile engravings and illustrations of composers, architecture, and animals from pre-20th century books. With these copyright-free source sets established, Cage used chance operations and a time log to generate the content of the opera.
And this, apparently, is where Goebbels’ otherwise extraordinary production falls short. I’ll try to account for the differences—or more precisely, the changes—between Goebbels’ version and Cage’s, the immediately apparent one is his replacement of simple, graphic flats with actual operatic sets. Buening sees this as too deterministic, too willfully absurdist [in the mold of Robert Wilson, who, inexplicably, is the Triennial’s English talking head for Europera], and stuck to the cliches and one-liners of operatic theatricality. And too much of the director’s own indulgences, which runs diametrically counter to Cage’s purging intentions.
It’s a perennial problem with Cage’s interpreters, who take the indeterminacy of his compositions as license to do whatever they want. Not coincidentally, that sounds like exactly the criticism voiced in OMM by Sebastian Hanusa over the previous production of Europeras 1 & 2 at the Hannover State Opera. [It opened in October 2001, and I confess, I was not paying much attention to German opera gossip at the time.] According to Hanusa, Lowery kept the aria singers offstage, and instead of the chance-derived staging, he created various storytelling set pieces. It sounds almost as bad as Cage’s sabotaged NY Phil debut in 1964.
But it’s better than nothing? I don’t know. Is it the kind of thing you can watch on DVD? Will Europeras ever be staged in the US? [YES, SEE BELOW.] Frankly, we may still not be ready for it. Or maybe we’ve superseded it; with the right code and a few browser tabs on YouTube, we can generate our own Europera anytime we want. Man Bartlett’s #12hPoint, I’m looking at you.
UPDATE/CORRECTION: Thanks to DJW for correcting me; Europeras 1 & 2 was staged in the US. Christopher Hunt brought the original Frankfurt production to Summerfare at SUNY Purchase in 1988. According to John Rockwell’s bemused NY Times’ review, the New York version, which took place on a grander stage, was actually closer to Cage’s original vision, which the Frankfurt Opera had to rework after its main theater was damaged by arson just before the Europeras‘ premiere. Anyway, more to come on that.
* OK, the 639-year-long organ performance of As Slow As Possible, also from 1987, at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt is also pretty grand. But I’d argue its grandeur is more the performance, not necessarily the composition.
Thoughts On The Future Of Beef Husbandry In Grass Valley, Utah
American grain-fed beef will still remain the number one choice of Americans who dine out. Health food fanatics with bogus credentials will continue to slam producers and consumers of beef for destroying the environment and the health of children who are supposedly being poisoned by red meat when organic vegetables, tofu and soy milk are their answers to the world’s health problems. More and more pressure in the form of increased year around recreation demand by citizens cloistered much of the year in their Wasatch Front and Southern California neighborhoods will test the patience of ranchers and farmers in the valley who find their gates left open, livestock scattered, sprinkler pipes shot full of holes, crops trampled by four-wheelers and fences cut so hunters can get closer to that “real good hunting spot.”
…
One thing that won’t change is that there will always be some young men or women who are willing to sacrifice guaranteed vacations, retirement programs, forty-hour weeks and twelve holidays a year with pay, just for the challenge and satisfaction of being a rancher/farmer. The drive or motivation to be a provider of food and fiber for a nation is still alive in a few young people in Grass Valley. May that hunger to work with the soil and the beasts never be lost or destroyed.
excerpted from Verl Bagley’s extensively researched history and future of “Beef Husbandry in Grass Valley,” p. 222 of the impressive if not quite comprehensive Grass Valley History, Including the Communities of Box Creek, Burrville, Greenwich, Koosharem, published privately in 2005, which I saw a heavily used, duct-taped copy of near the register at the Koosharem Cafe the other day. And when I inquired about it, the lady helping me called down to the store to see if they had a copy. And then she called over to Carol’s place, and sure enough, Carol had a copy I could buy, did I know Carol? And that’s when I had to confess that until she said it on the phone just then, I was unsure how to pronounce Koo-SHARE-em, we were just on a quick, first family history visit. But Carol was right down the road, and sure enough, she answered the door with a copy, and was surprised to take money, didn’t I pay down to the store?
In any case, an unexpected and invaluable resource for my research into the contentious history of irrigation in and around Burrville.
Hot Mountain
So I’m walking to the lodge at Snowbird the other day, and they’re sealing cracks in the parking lot with tar on the ends of these long stick/wand things, and suddenly it’s all palimpsests and Brice Marden all over the place.
Cold Mountain 2, hirshhorn.si.edu
The Supernova, NASA (1976)
I stumbled across this teacher’s manual, published by NASA in 1976, part of a middle school curriculum that made the latest scientific understanding available to students.
Of all astronomical phenomena, supernova have been observed, if not understood, for thousands of years. Ancient Chinese astronomers apparently called them “guest stars.” So they make interesting markers for tracking the changing view of the vault of heaven/sky/space/universe.
It’s also kind of interesting to see how little was actually known about supernova, even during my lifetime.
But mostly, I liked this for the cover, which reminds me a bit of the London 2012 logo. The book was put out by NASA’s Educational Programs Division, but there’s no designer mentioned. The awesome, old “worm” logotype was, of course, designed by Danne and Blackburn.
PDF available: The supernova: A stellar spectacle, 1976 [ntrs.nasa.gov]
Mack & Stack
To Whoever Just Bought This Amazing 1977 Photo Of Founding Museum of Contemporary Art President Joseph Shapiro, Credit Card In Hand, Macking On His Lovely Wife Next To A Judd Stack,
Thank you. I’d been wanting it, but also not, being entranced but also slightly weirded out by it, and so hesitating over it for a couple of days now. I was about to cave. But tonight, I’ll give my extra $40 a little hug instead.
PS. If you ever Google your way across this, I’d love to do this photo justice with a better, watermark-free image, please.
Hövding Air Bag Bicycle Helmet Björk Björk Björk
I don’t know where to plot this fashion show for Hövding, the amazing, new Swedish air bag bike helmet startup, on the grid containing the Blade Runner chase scene, bike messenger tribe, post-triathlon hangout, Otakon registration, and Walter Van Bierendonck, but it’s definitely on there somewhere. [via @timoarnall]
Philip Glass! Philip Glass! Philip Glass!
Oh, will you look at that. Right at the epicenter of the continent’s financial crisis, Banco Sabadell, a mid-sized Spanish bank, commissioned a flash orchestra to casually assemble with their instruments in front of their closed building on the plaza and to just toss off the last, best thing the European Union’s got going for it right now, its anthem, the prelude from Ode To Joy, Beethoven’s Ninth.
That always gets me right h–oh, wait, what’s that? NPR and WQXR organized a flash choir to perform Philip Glass–and to sing a specially commissioned adaptation by the composer himself, no less–for his 75th birthday, in the center of freakin’ Times Square?
Hah, in your FACE, Europe!
Flash Choir Sings Philip Glass In Times Square [npr.org]
Two Ships Passing In The Night
It’s not that I feel a need to apologize for breaking some imaginary overall narrative flow, but I just need to put these here for current and future reference.
First, the SS Leviathan, as seized from Germany and as outfitted in WWI-era Dazzle Camo livery:
[boston public library’s flickr via proscriptus]
And then there’s the Lockheed Martin HALE-D, a next-generation military communications airship that obviously traces its design DNA back to the glorious Echo and PAGEOS satelloons of yesteryear. Unfortunately, like those ships, the HALE-D, and many of the inflatable, unmanned surveillance airships the Pentagon has burned $1 billion developing the last four years, have turned out to be an evolutionary dead end; the HALE-D crashed on its initial test flight, and the program is now on the chopping block.
Or Did Just Everyone Have A VW Bus And A Loft Back Then?
Seriously, people, maybe I should just start documenting the artists and avant garde music folks in the 1960s who didn’t roam around in a VW Bus. Here is composer Terry Riley, published in William Duckworth’s 1999 interview collection, Talking Music:
DUCKWORTH: When did you move to New York?
RILEY: I came to New York in 1965. After the In C performances, I went to Mexico on a bus for three months. I was actually looking for something, but I didn’t know what. I guess after In C, I was a little bit wondering what the next step was to be, you know. And I guess what I really wanted to do was go back and live in Morocco, because I was interested in Eastern music, and at that time, Moroccan music attracted me the most. I had lived there in the early sixties. In 1961, I went to Morocco and was really impressed with Arabic music. So we went to Mexico. My point was to get to Vera Cruz, put our Volkswagen bus on a boat and have it shipped to Tangier, and live in Morocco on the bus. We drove all the way down to Vera Cruz, but couldn’t get a boat; nobody would put our bus on the boat. So we drove all the way up to New York. We were going to try to do the same thing from New York, right? But I started hanging out with La Monte [Young] again and renewing old acquaintances. And Walter De Maria, who was a sculptor, had a friend who was leaving his apartment. THis guy had a fantastic loft on Grand Street. And he said, “Do you want to trade the loft for the bus?” So I did, and that began my four-year stay in New York.
Riley also had a wife and small kid at the time, and she supported the family by substitute teaching along their nomadic journeys. Amazing.
Previously: Walter de Maria’s stainless steel sculptures, including a musical instrument for La Monte Young, produced in 1965
The VW Years, Appendix: Living Theatre
Welcome to another episode of The VW Years, greg.org’s ongoing mission to seek out firsthand accounts of John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s VW Bus.
These are some mentions of John Cage in The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage,, John Tytell’s 1995 history/biography of Living Theatre founders Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which were compiled by Josh Ronsen and posted to silence-digest, a Cage-related mailing list in 1998:
“At the end of September, they visited Cage and Cunningham who had expressed an interest in sharing a place that could be used for concerts and dance recitals. Gracious, unassuming, the two men lived in a large white room, bare except for matting, a marble slab on the floor for a table, and long strips of foam rubber on the walls for seating. The environment reflected their minimalist aesthetic. Cage proposed to stage a piece by Satie that consisted of 840 repetitions of a one-minute composition. He advised them not to rely on newspaper advertising, but to use instead men with placards on tall stilts and others with drums.” –pg 72
…
“the only person Judith admitted caring about was John Cage, “mad and unquenchable” with his “hearty, heartless grin.” With Julian, she visited Cage in Stoney Point in the Hudson Valley. … Julian thought Cage was the “chain breaker among the shackled who love the sound of their chains.” Cage collected wild mushrooms, which Julian interpreted as a tribute to his reliance on chance as much as to his exquisite taste. … [Paul] Williams wanted to help them find a new location that Cage and Cunningham could share with The Living Theatre.” -pg 121
“In the middle of 1957, they saw Cunningham dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Cage’s music. At a party afterward, C&C laughed all night like “two mischievous kids who had succeeded in some tremendous boyish escapade.”” -pg 125
“[they] visited Cage in Stoney Point, where they made strawberry jam and gathered mint, wild watercress, and asparagus for dinner. Feeling a surge of confidence in his own writing, he [Julian] gave Cage a group of poems to set to music.” -pg 128
“With Judith, Julian, Cunningham, and Paul Williams, John Cage drove from “columned loft to aerie garage” in his Volkswagen bus, smiling despite the traffic and the fact that their search was now in its 4th month. Finally, they found an abandoned building, formally a department store on 14th st and 6th ave, which Williams declare would be suitable for sharing as a theatre and dance space.” – pg 129
“Early in December, with Cage’s assistance, [Cunningham] moved some of his backdrops into the space. Cage brought with him a variety of percussion instruments–he owned more than 300 at that time–which he donated to the theatre. Julian thought there was a distance about Cage that prevented intimacy and the fullest communication, but he felt Cage’s gift was a real sign of the artistic support that would be crucial to the success of The Living Theatre.” -pg 140
Is Shanzhai Still A Thing?
Its manifestations have been around and obvious for a while, but I can’t quite tell if shanzhai is played out, over, or still a thing. Shanzhai translates as “mountain fortress” when people want to emphasize its unregulated, somewhat pirate nature, but also “cottage,” when they want to highlight its backwoods, make-do lack of refinement.
In 2007, Wu Yulu was making awesome homemade robots.
The Wall Street Journal hung its 2009 Shanzhai story on a wedding planner’s homebrewed, online-only sendup of CCTV’s Chinese New Year broadcast extravaganza, but in the context of a larger shanzhai trend that celebrated hacking, ingenuity, parody, and knockoffery:
On China’s Internet, blogs, bulletin boards and news sites carry photos of automobiles jerry-rigged to run on railroad tracks (“shanzhai trains”), fluffy dogs trimmed and dyed to look like the national mascot (“shanzhai pandas”) and models of the Beijing Olympic Games’ National Stadium made out of sticks (“shanzhai Bird’s Nest”).
A property developer in Nanjing, hoping to lure business and buzz, set up storefront facades with logos such as “Haagon-Bozs,” “Pizza Huh,” “Bucksstar Coffee,” “KFG” and “McDnoald’s.” Images of what became known as “Shanzhai Street” spread rapidly online.
The blog chinasmack has been my primary source for shanzhai, both for classic examples of pirated brands and electronics [including shots from that Shanzhai Street], but also for just flatout awesome DIYness like this 2009 video of “Shanzhai Drifter,” a kid who’s making smoke in his tricked out Changan delivery truck. Good times.
In 2010, at what might be the first simultaneous zenith and nadir of the contemporary art world’s engagement with shanzhai, Cai Guo-Qiang curated “Peasant da Vincis,” the inaugural show at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The relentlessly corporate slickness of the monumental Shanghai World Expo was certainly ripe for questioning and deflation, if not direct criticism.
On the one hand, there were homemade planes and such. And Tao Xiangli did construct this insanely awesome scrap metal aircraft carrier, with shades of a folk art Serra or Burden. [image via the always comprehensive designboom]
And sure, it’s good that Cai turned over an entire floor to Wu Yulu’s Robot Factory. But then Cai also commissioned Wu to make robot re-enactors of modern and contemporary artists at work. Like Yves Klein’s Living Brush?
And Jackson Pollock, and seriously, Damien Hirst? Doesn’t having to put a headshot of the artist your robot is mimicking automatically count as a fail?
Designboom says the artworks these robots created were sold as limited editions. Which only exacerbates the apparently complete absence of Jean Tinguely from Cai & Wu’s Peasant da Vinci colabo. No excuse. [Wu Yulu’s status as the Peasant King of Export Shanzhai was cemented by his 2011 profile in Colors Magazine.]
Anyway, I grew concerned because in yesterday’s chinasmack roundup/translation of Hierarchies of Snobbery and Contempt by Chinese Netizens, the shanzhai option is consistently last in every category. Which, in one sense, sure, but in another, isn’t that the entire point?