15 things normally meant for twitter:

 15 things normally meant for twitter: 

1. Joe Ruby, creator of Scooby Doo died. Doo yourself a favor and dance to the Scooby doo theme today.

2. I put Nesquick chocolate mix into my Irish Steel Cut Oatmeal this morning, and I am forever changed.

3. DOT/NYC just cut down all the beautiful wild flowers along the belt parkway. WHY? ANND!! AND!! They didn't bother to clean up the garbage at Plum Beach (well, some of it, they did)... WTF? Pay me. I'll do it. 311 Plum Beach trash.

4. Piping Plovers are back. It's been a long, terrible struggle for them! I think they're a "canary in a coal mine" species... if they go, everything goes. 

5. Lake Charles

6. I don't know if Joy Reid wanted an atheist on her show. Joy/Bill just now was the best EVER.

7. Anchovies mix GREAT in cream cheese. There're recipes out there, but none for sale. Let's make money. 

8. Or on this (photo from train). I only mulled this idea over about 5 years ago. dammit. 

8. We're Not Worthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6BxAtc5cd0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2LSqdw9QsOxbL99Fxk_7Az1jDZuiyZbQWOkBe102tX33Ckiw1jJXlhL7Y

9. https://www.feelsgoodmanfilm.com/trailer really. watch. This from my basketball buddies in Park Slope:

Just thought current and past Camp Friendship friends might find it cool that one of our founding members ARTHUR JONES has a documentary coming out this weekend. If you're curious to see it, now would be a good time, proceeds from this weekend's sneak peek go to local bookstores/theaters and pre-sale numbers help make their opening box office look bigger.

10. I heard Dionne Warwick sing "Always something there to remind me" on Star Search, but I thought she was singing the Naked Eyes' song.

11. a leading motivator in my life right now is to figure out how to use all the spinach in the huge plastic tub it comes in before it goes bad.

12. The military and sports are often lauded for their early racial integration. But they did it out of necessity. Not because they wanted to. For music, it was because musicians WANTED to find other music, other styles. Black and white musicians in the south SOUGHT each other out (forget about Elvis and money for a second. Obviously whites profited immensely off of black music for centuries...)... This is in OPPOSITION to the military and sports where they HAD to integrate. This is obviously a much more complex conversation than a tweet (or a post), but trying to parse a long-held inaccuracy about organizations. Attali doesn't really address this in "Noise: the political economy of music." Though... maybe insofar as his discussion on violence, and murder... sure.

http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/aesthetics%20of%20music/attali'snoise.htm

13. Another leading motivator in my life is balancing NOT watching the McCann's oatmeal before it boils over, as long as I can. 

14. The cloud ceiling in New York has been very low over the last month. It almost feels like you're INDOORS. Especially weird on the beach.

15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGLaYUQF9Fw I never thought of this perspective. Vancie Flowers

16. Never a fan of Amy's organics. If I want "good" I'll make it myself. If I want a 7-11 burrito, I'll get it from them. HOWEVER, Amy's chipotle salsa is a game-changer. Yum.

17. https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1299074699385663488?s=20 this rules.

18. https://theawesomer.com/whats-the-name-of-this-song/587236/ this is why we need to get weirder music going. (I thought it was "Isn't she Lovely, by Stevie Wonder)

Beeple at Jack Hanley 2022

 Ben Davis, just wrote, at artnet.com about Beeple (about a work not in this current show):

Here’s what I found. Essentially, there are four different Beeples at play in “Everydays”. None is likely to age well.

Ben, if Raymond Pettibon and Candy Ass and Joel Otterson and Richard Estes and Lynda Benglis and Jenny Hozler and Heidi Fasnacht and Mark Tansey (both did illustrative explosions), and Sue Coe and George Grosz and Alexis Rockman are artists, then so is Beeple. 

Did you go see the show? Did anyone who thinks they can see the show by knowing what a Beeple jpeg looks like, actually GO SEE the show? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/arts/design/beeple-jack-hanley-gallery.html

Guess who didn’t print the master work in the gallery? Yeah. Those guys. 

Beeple’s endless labyrinth of imagery, graffiti, abstraction, semi-fictional technological hodge-podge is dizzying. Sometimes 3D printed (presumably on giclée) sometimes painted and sometimes drawn by colored pencil, these works each have an uncannily traditional palette: Dutch landscape, or by contrast, Goya’s macabre tenebroso. This is not to make a flippant contrast for argument’s sake. The works are grounded in traditional illustration in a way that allows a meditative gaze onto all the slowly-revealing elements. Where’s Waldo like inside jokes MUST be hiding there. I was only in the gallery for 15 minutes. I’ve looked at art for 40 years. I know there was more hiding there.

I’m certain that the critique of Beeple as “bro-ey” culture poking only semi-fun at Bezos or Zuckerberg, when he himself uses the tools of digitized industry (3D/CGI software and printing) will be out there. There’s little discussion of race. There’s little discussion of gender roles. But that belies the truly… WILD… paintings that these are. Certainly with Bezos’ heads behind a zoned off technological waste-field with the sign “Jeffery B. Bezos Excess Testosterone Dump” points to some level of class critique. But these are hardly protest signs.

These are foremost, his ruminations. Sometimes sardonic, sometimes playful, but always complex and multi-layered. Just the “bathroom wall” graffiti on the side of a warehoused container is enough to decipher in one work. I’ve seen things similar to this show. HR Geiger has drawings up down the street. I’ve seen things more banal than this show. I’ve seen things more graphically “obscene” than this show. But I’ve never seen anything quite like this show. 

 

Review of The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

 Synopsis: Tammy Faye leaves her strict midwestern home with a traveling preacher and winds up starting a religious television show with puppets, and eventually builds the familiar empire that lead to their downfall, through marital woes, struggles with drug abuse, and an ever-present need for her stoic mother’s love. 

———

I’m not sure if I was supposed to see Wet Hot American Summer before The Eyes of Tammy Faye, but I didn’t. Whatever pall that might cast over this sweeping expanse of the fall of the Bakker empire, I feel somehow Jessica Chastain absorbed and personally forgave Michael Showalter his sins. They stepped back from his farcical work, found it in the real Tammy Faye's mascara, and applied it thickly in this compelling biopic of one of America's most grotesque celebrities.

If there’s ever been a character portrayal who so utterly “gets” bathos, it’s Chastain’s. Maybe William H. Macy in “Fargo” or “Happiness”, but both are basically bad guys, and there’s no subtlety about knowing which side Macy’s characters are on. Chastain threads the needle like nothing else in recent memory. 

From an atheist’s perspective, I’ve been disgusted with the Bakkers since I’ve been aware of them, and I was disgusted with the constant apologetic tone towards Tammy Faye’s turning to “the lord” in the movie, and yet, by the end, I was completely absorbed in her motivation, the way Dexter or Nurse Betty made you side with them. Gripped. 

The schism between the Bakkers and the older, more conservative preachers (Falwell, Robertson), regardless of reality, irked the historian in me even more: Tammy Faye was in no way a feminist. Tammy Faye was in no way an AIDS activist. There was nothing redeeming about their political positioning, their simonizing (see Dante) and commodification of religion purely for profit. Ever. And yet, as the movie started, you could sense that was what the director was up to, and you were going to fight it, but by the end, you were practically singing “Glory Glory” with Chastain spinning me along, until the creepy ending, reminiscent of “Requiem for a Dream”.

There’s a lot of logic gaps: Why did nobody kick the mother out of church when Tammy went into spasms? Why didn’t Jim remove his ring in jail? Why was she even interviewed later on (Tammy’s Terrific Teens”), which further tries to absolve Bakker in her criminal enterprise? But again Chastain makes it so tense in the room, that I didn’t quite care. When you thinks she is going to feed the dog, maybe with her own mouth, she doesn’t. But I could hear a drum roll in my ears.  

Shout out to the goofy 80s font in the captioning, and shout out to costuming, make-up and D’nofrio as Falwell! (That “fat Baptist” Bakker says. Nice touch). I bet Philip Seymour Hoffman, summoning his performance in Doubt (2008), would have been a great Falwell. 

Sadly, in the end, Bakker’s cold-hearted mother (absolutely nailed by Cherry Jones) may have embodied the movie’s final message, and gives a complete pass to the real sicknesses in America: the PTL Club, the 700 Club, ORU, and Liberty University. 

And yet, for two blissful hours of Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield, I was a believer. 

Notes on Chelsea Knight's Lost Time

 The minstrel, a functionary, only played what his lord commanded him to play. As a valet, his body belonged entirely to a lord to whom he owed his labor. If his works were published, he would receive no royalty, nor was he remuner­ated in any way when others performed his works. – Jacques Attali, Noise

Chelsea Knight’s latest work, Lost Time, reverberates through a loosely-threaded “meta-narration” of what music might mean to the performer itself, at varying degrees of engagement, and how that might reflect on a larger understanding of our own identities. 

In similar fashion to other work, she fuses semi-autobiographical elements: the recounting of a Ray Bradbury story from youth (“The Long Rain”) the intimate hymnal quatrain performed ad hoc by her and her father, with varying degrees of performance, of viewing performance, of editing performance, and in doing, meditates on a kind of musical caste semi-system of that hints at, and sometimes stabs at the heart of an insight: we all want to be seen. 

She opens on a rainy day in New Orleans, and depicts a long-distance duet of herself and one of her many subjects singing a Prince song. This opens a cascade of performance: amateur, child, professional, staged, unrehearsed, that casts a wide net of possible meanings. Are they all aware that we’ll be comparing them at the end? 

Repetition offers another challenge to the analysis of the behavior of agents in classical economics and Marxism: musical consumption leads to a sameness of the individual consumers. One consumes in order to resemble and no longer, as in representation, to distinguish oneself. What counts now is the difference of the group as a whole from what it was the day before, and no longer differ­ences within the group. This socialization through identity of consumption, this mass production of consumers, this refusal of what in the recent past was a proof of existence, goes far beyond music. – Attali

Ms. Knight occasionally pokes fun at her characters, but not pejoratively. She observes with an inquisitive lens. The bad karaoke singer, the slightly off R&B singer, the virtuoso pianist, none is taken more or less seriously, (although, to me, the highlights happen to be the karaoke singing of the artist’s mother, and the aforementioned duet with her father).

This implied hierarchy, or at least this observation of various types of music, is concretized when children are contrasted to Megan Gale talking about “The currency of cool being so stupid.” In the relative references Ms. Knight displays, (80s, 90s, to some extent, the super-popularity of the Nutcracker), it indeed IS stupid (“vapid” is a word Gale uses as well). Music, while never really having left a type of tribalism, became acutely weaponized by an industry that quickly absorbed smaller, new types of music. 

The purposeful non-conformity of, say, 60s free jazz, and the political non-conformity of 70s and 80s punk were cottage-industry level, (independent) production of music, which slowly led to a larger “alternative” music, which then gave way to an actual radio platform with a large, mainstream audience, on large corporate labels, called, ironically, “alternative”. Non-conformity began as political, sometimes left-leaning, sometimes right, but always to pivot away from an already-done style. To critique the “Currency of cool” is to critique the middle-class nature of a mediocre dialectic, and to criticize the struggle to avoid being overtaken by a hegemonic industry. And it often did get overpowered by the 80s and 90s. But the point/counter-point “anti-aspirations” didn’t go away. it was simply whittled down to New Wave, then heavy-rotation “alternative”. 

And that’s where the glimmer of the opening character, applying literal face glitter, while singing a Prince song, sheds that small beam of Bradbury’s ray of light in the “Long Rain," and, it must be said, there is a quiet poise in her work, shed largely by avoiding over-arching discussion of the politics of music. For the performers, for Knight, and for us, what's perhaps the richest insight: in a life filled with constant rain, no matter how good, or bad, or amateur, or virtuoso our performance may be, it can shine in all of us.  

KAWS was a Lost Cause

 This is the first art review I’ve written in years and it pains me to announce, but the world needs to hear this: KAWS at the Brooklyn Museum fucking sucks. 

I walked in hoping for the snarky subversiveness of a Murakami, a de St. Phalle, or a (good) Koons, and I wound up realizing that those artists spawned some lame-ass touristy Soho bullshit. 

KAWS-type paintings were a great reason to leave Soho in the 90s. They were everywhere. Appropriations of the Simpsons, maybe a Warhol reference, and then the artist’s little whimsy (in this case, pathetic X’ed out eyes, which look better on the fucking Social Distortion logo than they do on any of his waste of paint), all gooping up Broome Street, or West Broadway, while rich people laughed in lofts above with REAL Warhols and goobers picked up some dumbass canvas wasting space on a crowded street corner. Hope the fake-ass cartoony fru-fru looks good in your Fredericksburg townhouse, Virginia. 

Now, whereas, there might have been a touch of humor in his early “detournement” of GAP ads, or an awareness of hippy comix in his early drawings (and gosh, do I need to cleanse my eyeballs now with some R. Crumb or Fritz the cat), that ship sailed AHEAD OF SCHEDULE in that career. Then it became one lame thing: the Simpsons. And what are you saying, KAWS: you’re just a x’ed out victim of too much awareness in one TV show? There are other shows besides the Simpsons, and there are other records besides your lame Sgt. Pepper’s appropriation. And viewing it for more than 30 seconds revealed zero more layers of discovery for me. (note: cleanse eyeballs by looking at Sgt. Pepper’s cover online). 

I guess if it bores, the price soars?  

The only saving grace was the shamed, head-in-hands sobbing character that, I assume is a metaphor for the desperate state of affairs KAWS must see in contemporary art, in a generation Z(?) that will never see the wealth that their Boomer ancestors saw (news for ya KAWS, neither will gen x, bud), and possibly a reference to Bart crying or something. I did actually stop a moment to witness a guy photoing that piece with reverence, and a solemn gaze. Maybe that’s the empathy that I am missing. Maybe that’s the point? 

But I think the shame really ought to be in your goo-goo doll exploitative Nickelodeonism, and that guy with his camera can simply jump on the 4-5-6, go back to some third-rate Hello Kitty store in Soho, and buy a toy. 

There is nothing in a Hello Kitty store that demands the scrutiny of a museum piece, no matter how colorful and boisterous, like a multicolored Lenape clay pot, or a heightened coloristic portrait of George Washington, or the lushness of the Judy Chicago piece, all of which can be witnessed in an otherwise great museum like the Brooklyn Museum.

And yet, I feel like, were I to walk into the Hello Kitty store in Soho, there are things in there that demand more of my attention than KAWS.