behind the looking glass

  those stripes actually work
What does the Bronx Zoo, the Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, a Banksy installation in Greenwich Village, and an actual pet shop with sweet pups in the window have in common? 

Well, yes, they all have animals—albeit exotic, domestic, and “other.” But that’s not the thought that kept knocking around in my head, while tracking down the giraffes, the gorillas and the big bears at the zoo, or while marveling at the ingeniousness of the Banksy installation, or while cooing over puppies tumbling around in shredded paper strips. The shocking realization was how we observers (myself not excluded) expect, demand even, some sort of performance from the animals. To happen upon a zebra grazing in a non-African-looking environment is startling.

she files her nails at the village petstore

Where’s the set? What about the children, I mused, is seeing the zebra here, like this, going to mislead them to thinking that zebras roam free in the wilds of upstate New York, when they see a like habitat? Elsewhere, crowds clustered around a gorilla sitting against the glass. She sat there, bemusedly inspecting us (with a little too much self awareness, I thought), sticking her tongue out, occasionally putting her hand flush up against the glass over where a child’s hand pressed against the glass from the other side.

At the Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, the “pets,” per se, are putting on a show—they’re acting human. A chimp watches animal shows on television, surrounded with the litter of human

You Haven’t Seen This China Yet

With the Olympics on my brain and in the culture, I can’t help but feel awe struck at the prospect of China: it’s size, it’s culture, the vast number of unknowns. It’s all so much deeper than the menu at Congee Village.

Like, why don’t we ever get to see the dirty pictures, the messy remnants of the building of these insane Olympic structures? Why is every angle so postcard perfect? And if there were thousands of Chinese working around the clock for months — years — to get Beijing all gussied up, where are they now?

All of which is to say that I was thrilled, admittedly a little excessively, to happen upon an exhibit of Stephen Wilkes’ photographs at ClampArt gallery in Chelsea, The Construction of the Olympic Stadium and Other Chinese Public Works.

The show includes several large format photographs of construction-in-action on the Olympic Village, as well as one of Beijing’s performing arts center (“the Egg”) from an angle I knew had to exist: There it rests, in all its gleaming glory, in the distance behind a cluster of drab, tile-roofed houses littered with the remnant scraps of life. It’s refreshing to see an architectural icon like the Egg from such an ordinary angle. It’s how city dwellers most often encounter them, that’s life.

For more China mania check out: Beijing 2008, a photography exhibit at the China Institute through August 17. And then, of course, there’s always Tiki, Phelps and the rest of crew who haven’t yet even hit the halfway mark in Beijing. Game on.

street haunting

Couples coupling, hands groping, bodies in various states of undress. On benches, behind bushes, tangled and horizontal on the grass. I would have believed it on blind faith, sure, but Kohei Yoshiyuki’s etheral black-and-whites certainly remove any doubt about the lively night scene of various Tokyo parks in the 1970s. Allegedly, after a gallery show in 1979, Yoshiyuki destroyed most of the photos and disappeared. (The plot thickens: supposedly Kohei Yoshiyuki is a pseudonym.) A first-rate sleuth at Yossi Milo gallery in Chelsea managed to track down the elusive artist and convince him to make a new set of prints. It’s the first time these photographs have been publicly shown since disco died.

Bemused, dreamy-eyed, nostalgic for a decade in the way only someone who’s never lived through it can be. Walking East on W. 25th Street, another instance of an unreal reality. Framed within the rolled-up gate of a corrugated steel facade, there’s a man in an off-white lounge lizard’s suit, playing a candy-apple red electric guitar, crooning that part of a song that isn’t quite words but always builds up to something… He is standing on dirt, on a narrow lot, underneath a rusted section of the future-fab highline park, accompanied by a mic and an amp, a spotlight, and a theatrical grouping of forlorn-looking leafless tree props. A small sign says that he’s an Icelandic performance artist, and he’s going to play the same riffs in the same spotlight for six straight hours a day, ten days in a row. It’s a project by CCS Bard, Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (and Art in Contemporary Culture).

English Lit classes brainwashed me forever: I see forest, actual or allegorical, any shape or size—hell, you could say I see trees and I have flashbacks to scenes from King Lear, Walden, the Scarlet Letter. But there is something to it, the forest being a place apart from a society of likeness, apart from conventional rules, apart from judging, peering eyes. To find two such escapes in the middle of Manhattan yesterday felt good because I, for one, need to disappear sometimes and it’s not easy here.

Post Script: I confess, I procrastinate. Meaning that the Yoshiyuki exhibit has closed and Kjartansson’s sun has set. I wound down my day at a screening of Helvetica. It’s an amazing documentary with the premise of being about a font but is really about the arc of graphic design ideology over the last fifty years (that I also blogged about in March). If you runrushgo!, you’ll probably still be able to catch Helvetica at the IFC Center—although it’s been there long enough that it’s due to disappear any day.

plastic bags: the new low-carb diet

Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une Pipe” has become latently popular, an anthem for the cool tastemakers of the early 21st century. The painter’s latest copycat—in his day he was a peer to such surrealists as Dali and Ernst—is British couture designer Anya Hindmarch. Her $15-dollar canvas totes, (read: nothing else in her store has ever cost so little), read, “I’m not a plastic bag.” The anti-plastic totes have caused such a fuss among the eager eco-consumers in Manhattan that they lined up 600 deep outside the new Whole Foods at Bowery and Houston this last Tuesday to buy the latest “limited edition” of Hindmarch’s canvas tote.

On the subject of plastic bags–you know, the sort they usually double-bag at your local grocer–I recently heard that plastic bags cost 2-cents to make and 8-cents to recycle. Which is why you have to take them, stuffed inside eachother again and again, to that specific deposit site at your local grocer. And they’re still not making money. (Don’t know the drop? Just ask a clerk.)

Wouldn’t the man behind the pipe have gagged at the idea of his playful masterwork being co-opted by a 21st century promotional campaign, stripped entirely devoid of its original intent? Eh, maybe not. “This is not a…” is ever receiving new meaning, guaranteeing Magritte’s name in the art history analogues just a little longer.

All of this makes me feel *slightly* less bad about posting on Laura Bush’s “Feed the Children of the World” burlap shoulder bag campaign–a la Spring Fashion Week NYC 2007. Sort of, but not really. That posting came from a period in my blog before I gave perimiters to my blogging form. (Which, for the record, will henceforth only on rare occassion link to a post that is not entirely my original thoughts.) !

this is not a(nother) post…

a.) I’ve been on a sabbatical of the soul. b.) I’ve been on vacation. c.) I’ve been in locations without internet connection. d.) I was overwhelmed. A-D above are all valid reasons **yes, excuses** for not having blogged for the last couple of months. But the point is, I love this burgeoning, creative forum, where I have virtually complete editorial control, even if no one is reading. Still satisfying (and non-navel gazing).

I had my first response to an earlier post just two days ago–that’s roughly seven months after I started this blog–but damn, it was a good one. I encourage anybody who’s read this far to check out the response to the off-the-cuff essay, which launched this blog back in January 2007, “Culture Is Not Dead.” It’s well thought out and intelligent, albeit contrary. And I have absolutely nothing wrong with that.

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I’m really excited about a lot that’s going on in my personal culturesphere right now. LA graf, the escalating debate over “authenticity”, increased Burning Man prep, sightings and musings on riffs of Magritte’s “ceci n’est pas une pipe”, the heat-inspired fragrance of the New York summer. Stay tuned.

pixel this

I love when two completely divergent signals from the universe converge and make a connection in front of my very own eyes. The topic of the day is: Pixelation. Within in 48 hours (albiet several days ago at this point. I’m a confessed latent blogger), I discovered both Anti-Advertising Agency’s culture jamming project, Pixelator, and Montage-a-Google, courtesy blog.FABRICA.

Now I open up the forum to you, dear reader: convergence or not? What, if any, is the connection between the two? Why are completely separate minds thinking alike?

Spoiler Alert: Read on only if you want to know the author’s opinion. Since quantifications such as “digital,” “megapixel” and “resolution” have crept into our laymen’s vocabulary, and since virtually every camera is now a camera phone, artists and thinking creative sorts have been toying with the aesthetic qualities of pixelation. Grainy, blurry, early video game-esque, and generally distasteful, blow-up that low-res image to the point that the original form is flattened and obscured, and what you get is pleasing, patterned squares, seemingly random, but with an inherent connection to the next. A la geometric, modernist art of the early-mid twentieth century. (I might do some research and throw in a couple of links, but I’m essentially referring to the movement that, given a protractor, a ruler, and some shades of paint, the intial response is “I could do that!”)