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12 February 2010
The world-wide visual culture industry
from Calvin Tomkins Lives of the Artists:
- “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? Read more »
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Alexander McQueen, Bjork, Calvin Tomkins, Damien Hirst, Death, Lady Gaga, Obituary, The Community Function, The New Yorker, The Problem With Glamour, The Problem With Nostalgia
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28 January 2010
Ultimate effacement
Indeed. His name is JD Salinger, and now he’s dead.
In some ways, it feels wrong to reproduce that picture, but let it underscore the mechanical age we live in, an age in which people’s likenesses and personalities are reproduced with the same brutal efficiency as texts and records and automobiles and television shows and microwave ovens. It was the exact thing Salinger’s life seemed a silent protest against. This Rick Moody tribute which appeared on NPR today encapsulated a number of my thoughts. His one time literary home The New Yorker is running a memorial, including subscriber-only access to his stories.
My main thought is about the work which might await us. Yes, there’s been speculation about boxes of unpublished work, recapitulations of Salinger’s statement in 1963, a few years before he went quiet…
“I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
…but there’s been little notion that maybe now (or at least soon) these writings will be published. Let’s remember it’s not publication that Salinger seemed to mind, so much as it was the dangerous, self-exposing, quintessentially modern phenomenon of widespread renown. He committed to staying away from the spotlight, and stuck to it like few others one can recall.
Greta Garbo said: “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be let alone.’”
Artie Shaw said: “Tell ‘em I’m insane. A nice, young American boy walking away from a million dollars, wouldn’t you call that insane?”
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: 30 Rock, Artie Shaw, Effacement, Greta Garbo, JD Salinger, Obituary, Rick Moody, The New Yorker, The Problem With Glamour, The Problem With Nostalgia, Walter Benjamin
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1 January 2010
Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard & other longing goodbyes
A longing goodbye to 2009, the year I acknowledged the greatness of Nick Cave. (Not that Nick Cave, though it’s also the year I fell in love with doubling.) Above is the video clip for what may be Cave’s greatest song “Into My Arms.” Try listening to it and not misting up.
Also, a longing goodbye to Cave’s former bandmate Rowland S. Howard who passed from this earth a few days ago, dead from liver cancer. (Obituary via Australia’s The Age.) Rowland’s song “Shivers” which he wrote for The Boys Next Door, the first band he shared with Cave, seems to have provided one of Cave’s main songwriting templates. If you don’t believe that peep the two versions of it I’ve embedded below.
Such are the winding paths of influence. Such is the complicated paths of accreditation and fame when a communal activity decays into “drug-related exhaustion.”
Nick Cave “People Ain’t No Good” (Live)
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Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Australia, Happy New Year, Into My Arms, Nick Cave, Obituary, People Ain't No Good, People Whose Work I'm Obsessed With, Romanticism, The Problem With Glamour
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6 November 2009
Albert York’s happy little trees
(Passage from The New Yorker profile via T&S’nKreps Gallery)
In a profile published in the mid-90s, Calvin Tompkins called the artist Albert York “the best unknown painter in America.” That’s a passage above is a quote from the piece. Last week Albert York died. I’m not quite sure what to make of his work: primitive virtue? Sketchy daubs? Creator of magic little, happy little trees? Like Giorgio Morandi, he seems a guy possessed of some witchy mystery I can’t argue with, a painter’s painter.
Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Albert York, Obituary, Painters, The New Yorker
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28 July 2009
Merce died…
I hope you will not consider it horn tooting to point out my earlier post about him, as brief as it was. I am so happy, now, that I saw him before he was found. And all I can say is at least he seemed to know what was coming. There’s a beauty in that, in preparation.
And, also, there’s a certain beauty in improvisation. So, in what I hope you’ll take as an experiment in what Merce himself might have called “chance procedures,” here are a series of images from the Black Lips concert I attended the day before he passed, along with quotes from the man himself. No explicit connection, but imply whatever you’d like.
Photos via BrooklynVegan.com by Bao Nguyen. Quotations via Bill Bragin’s Twitter stream.
***
Have friends both young and old.
Live and work in every direction, so that whichever way you face is front.
Have an old soul, but a young heart.
Make choices by chance procedeures, and regard all results with even mindedness.
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Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis
Tags: Chance Procedures, Dance, Death, Merce Cunningham, Obituary, Photos, Youth