New album drops May 11th. I’ve heard it. It’s good. They even have a Twitter now, too. Man, how times change.

I was not paid to post this post. I’m just feeling it.

Also, mix engineers are very important.

And sometimes enigmatic is best.

Last week an actual credible record producer, Steve Lillywhite, went public with his go at auditioning for the show.

Having made records with a wide array of artists — artists with admiring constituencies of quite different types (i.e. U2, The Pogues, Dave Matthews, Phish) — he seems uniquely qualified to spot new talent. Maybe he wouldn’t be the best person to pick a flashy winner, but he could certainly narrow the pool. He is, however, not optimistic about his chances, telling the LA Times “I don’t think I have a chance in hell.”

Now why is that?

Well, it looks as if he’s taking his candidacy fairly seriously. Don’t you agree it looks as if he’s wearing eyeliner in the audition tape he sent to the show’s producers? This, even though he pokes fun at Bono.

Of course, let’s remember Lillywhite is competing against this pitch by the pastier yet more ferocious Perez Hilton:

Sigh.

When it comes to music culture, America prefers hair highlights to career highlights, the ability to dance over an insight into what gets people dancing. Well, okay, I guess Ellen gets people dancing:

Click above for larger sized image.

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Read this interview with Die Antwoord. Or this one. Or, better yet, catch up with them by reading this informative, catch-all post. Or just listen to their music here.

Where does it seem like their music belongs? South Africa where they’re all from? Or is it strangely Japanese in some way? Or proudly internationalist despite their talk of being provincial?

What is their cultural niche? Hipster parody? A one-note effort to garner crossover attention? Or something meant for mooks and simple rednecks?

Yes, Pitchfork has been on this for over two weeks. (I’m so behind!) But what’s the RIYL: Vanilla Ice? Kool Keith? “Weird Al” Yankovic? Zomby? Aphex Twin?

Laughing at them? Definitely not.
Giggling nervously about what it all means? Perhaps.

Like it? Hate it? Love it? Grossed out by it? Or do you find it poignant? Well, yes, the sidekick (?!?) has progeria. His name is Leon Botha. He is a painter, and one of the oldest living people afflicted with that disease.

Verdict: Completely dystopian yet hopeful, random yet specific, confusing yet compelling. WTF factor x∞!?!

And, as a sidenote, it also seems to encapsulate a mad, sad, quotidian set of South African cultural tropes and, at once, encompasses the thought of J.M. Coetzee and the imagery of Roger Ballen (that’s this guy!) while remaining resolutely pop, resolutely contemporary.

Before I continue, a bit more of that Roger Ballen guy:

If what they say is true and we live in a fallen world, what does it matter what is truth and what is fiction?

If you know nothing about Black Mountain College, where the above photo was taken, start here. Its teaching ranks were not populated by academics but practitioners. Among those who taught there during its brief, 24-year lifespan were Josef and Anni Albers, Alfred Kazin, John Cage, Harry Callahan, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, Aaron Siskind, and Robert Motherwell. (I’ll let you Google the unfamiliar names.) Guest lecturers included Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg and William Carlos Williams. (You better know them.) It wasn’t just a school, it was a community with a unique gravitational pull.

There was also fun with problems. To jump right into it, here’s a passage from Martin Duberman’s history of the place, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community

“Drawing on the familiar distinction between negative freedom from rules and restraint, and positive freedom to be constructive and creative, Wallen argued that Black Mountain had concentrated too much on producing the first kind of freedom (‘laissez-faire’) and not enough on the second (‘democracy’). The difference between the two hinged on the lack of structure and leadership characteristic of the laissez-faire climate. Their absence created insecurity and frustration, which brought passivity and confusion, which led to a reversion back to autocratic methods in order to restore some semblance of productivity and harmony.”

For evidence of that laissez-faire spirit espy these two photographs. At left, a 1951 picture of writer Francine du Plessix Gray next to poet Joel Oppenheimer. At right, a snap of inventor and gadfly Buckminster Fuller.

Bucky — as his friends knew him — was really into these things:

Not exactly well-ordered! Or, well, so extremely well-ordered, in such a specific manner, that there was inevitably static:

I wish to say we could always use more wonder in the world. But communities require more than that; and communes–which is more or less what Black Mountain was–require far more than wonder to survive and thrive.

Anyway, I digress.

It seems as if the dude who wrote the passage above, Martin Duberman, has touched upon some intense realms of experience in his time on earth, much like the institution he studied so closely. Wikipedia’s capsule biography describes him as a playwright, professor, gay rights activist, mohel (!?!), and Pulitzer Prize-nominated biographer.

I’m unfamiliar with Duberman’s work outside of his Black Mountain tome. But since I read it a few years back, I’ve held its lessons & flaws deep in my memory. Not so much because it’s a genius recounting. In fact, Duberman’s book is a bit a of a muddle. He used it as a forum to announce his coming out as a gay man. In and of itself that’s an awkward way of breaking the traditional academic boundaries between objectivity (good) and subjectivity (bad). But moreover, in crossing that boundary, the book bears traces of the loose-limbed experimentalism and narcissism-tinged, encounter-group creepiness that I associate with the “Me Decade” of the 1970s. As Tom Wolfe defined the time period’s governing mental aesthetic “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality–remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).”

Duberman put this mode of consciousness on open display at the conclusion of his Black Mountain book:

“Sunday, September 26, 1971: Alone in my apartment on a dank, gloomy day. The gypsy moth caterpillars, having stripped the trees in the backyard bare during the last two weeks, have almost disappeared, their transformation invisibly completed… I completed the book a few minutes ago. I’m strangely, idiotically, near tears. So many completions are involved, my own and Black Mountain’s, that they blend into some indistinguishable sadness. Is it really over; do I want it to be over — the place, my writing about it?”

Whoa.

Just whoa.

Okay, more than just whoa.

The good news about this book is that, published in 1972, little more than 15 years after the final incarnation of Black Mountain shut its doors, it is an impressive example of real time history. And, in a way, its topical rarity justifies its formal eccentricities. It’s hard to find good, accessible books which document communes, utopias, and collective living arrangements that have existed throughout history–or, as Duberman describes them, “explorations in community.”

Why is this? I believe the problem is twofold. One, collectives tend to drink their own Kool-Aid. Two, if they leave behind any documentary evidence, it’s quite likely it will prove impossible for an outsider to parse.

The very point of utopias, communes–and let’s throw in the word cults for good measure–is that they are insular, that they’ve turned their backs on the “real” world and created their own, that they do not have the needs or conventions of the larger society in mind. After they’ve wrapped up their affairs, there are rarely objective observers left to tell their tale. Chances are anyone not exhausted by the experience–anyone with an interest in dwelling on it–is going to have an agenda. The stories which former participants tell will be more than a dry recounting of facts. Rather any lingerers will inevitably be drawn toward subjective myth making, be those myths positive or negative.

Duberman’s book is especially valuable at a time like now, in a world increasingly obsessed with nanocultures. In the years to come, I believe it will become increasingly important to understand the practice and metaphor of the cult, the commune, the niche. Black Mountain College taught fewer than 1,300 students in its 20something years but the students who did pass through would understand it for what it was: an education as serious as your life. So, sure, Duberman’s writing is, at times, too deeply indulgent for a casual observer to bother with. But it’s my guess that Black Mountain was, similarly, a place too indulgent for casual observers to stand. In that way, the book does the place perfect justice.

Is there anything more one could ask?

Well, I’ll grant you some pictures, a form of storytelling that tends to depict reality not as it is, but how we want it to be, in that only the photographs people love tend to get preserved. Below, a young Cy Twombly (left) & a young John Cage (right) both photographed during their tenure at Black Mountain:

And Josef Alberts as teacher communicating wisdom to a student:

And, finally, Merce Cunningham as a younger man:

An image from last year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Kutcher’s in Monticello, NY.

This year’s curator & initial line-up just announced.

The above image: Classic? Classic!

“The art world, which used to be a community, is now part of the world wide visual culture industry, which includes film, fashion, television, and advertising, and works overtime to trample down the boundaries that used to keep them separate.”

And what are my thoughts exactly?

That Tomkins is on to something.

That you probably think it’s Gaga standing next to Alexander McQueen in the picture above when really it isBjork.

That it’s sad when these things happen.

That Damien Hirst might just suspect that celebrity is a death mask.

New York Times: Americans think of the Canadian center as socialism.
Douglas Coupland: Pretty much. To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
NYT: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
NYT: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

This past weekend I visited David Zwirner Gallery to see “Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970,” an informal survey of art from the mainly Los Angeles based visual art movement called “light & space” — Cali’s flaked out, completely lovely response to minimalism, a mostly east coast affair. The favorite notice I’ve read comes (as it often does) from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker. They won’t let you read him on the web unless you’re a subscriber, but they will let you see this slide show with audio. Take what you can get, I guess?

I feel the same about these pictures I’m sharing. They’re not the same as the real thing. But you’ll have to take what you can get.

These boxes, they’re by Larry Bell.

“Glass boxes” is a way to try and contain them in words but know that term doesn’t do them nearly as much justice as their presence.

Bell’s website, however, kind of does the trick. Here’s a screen shot.

If you can’t make out all the words it says “I am convinced that the best way to tell the world about my work is to use the internet.” It’s kind of batshit crazy, the website, and that message in particular, and I can’t tell if he’s joking, or not — and that makes it all the more awesome.

Anyway, minimalism is something of a problematic term in all the many endeavors it was used to describe in the 1960s & 1970s. The literary of minimalism of Raymond Carver turned out to be something of a fraud — or at least an editorial construct. The very notion of using some doctrine to compose music risks ruining it or mis-characterizing the nature of its actual sound. But I won’t argue that the means with which Bell creates his work is efficient; the ends, though, the ends…