“I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. At every point society keeps you from doing what you have to do.”
“Oh, Indie!”
From the Los Angeles Times Review of Books: “Ontologically speaking, there are few squirmier genre descriptors than ‘indie,’ that colloquial shortening of ‘independent’ that rolls so easily and unchecked from the collective tongue and onto the cultural operating table. Lashed to music and films and fashions and haircuts and God knows what, it’s become a code for an increasingly mild-mannered aesthetic supposedly derived from seventies’ punk and the network of fan-run record labels that followed in its wake. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, it has meant a lot of things to be independent. And in the digital era, it’s become a catch-all genus for anything outside the granulating monoculture. Which is to say; it means everything and subsequently nothing at all.”
This is the beginning of a (poorly-punctuated) review by Jesse Jarnow of Always In Trouble, an account of the 1960s-70s record label ESP-Disk, by Jason Weiss.
Read it all: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type&id=851&fulltext=1&media
Vonski
Yay Science, Yes… But Everything Ain’t Science
“Every softer discipline these days seems to feel inadequate unless it becomes harder, more quantifiable, more scientific, more precise. That, it seems, would confer some sort of missing legitimacy in our computerized, digitized, number-happy world. But does it really? Or is it actually undermining the very heart of each discipline that falls into the trap of data, numbers, statistics, and charts? Because here’s the truth: most of these disciplines aren’t quantifiable, scientific, or precise. They are messy and complicated. And when you try to straighten out the tangle, you may find that you lose far more than you gain.”
Mr. Lewis’s Strategy
Where’d I get this (probably twenty years ago)?
“I witnessed a unique dramatization of the best service a John Lewis can render one afternoon last summer, when he coached three local saxophonists through a reading of his winsome “Afternoon in Paris” at a free workshop held in Philadelphia’s Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum. “You have to put yourself at the service of the melody,” Lewis kept insisting. “Your solos should expand the melody or contract it.” The young saxophonists initially approached Lewis’s melody as a succession of chord changes. To a man, they were haunted by Coltrane’s vigor but not possessed of his logic. (If Coltrane often sounded like he was clearing long rows of high hurdles, these Philadelphians—like most young Coltrane followers—sounded as though they were running in place.) but after an hour of tussling, they gave in to Lewis, and their solos gradually took on a lovely tone. Afterwards, they seemed visibly surprised that so simple and straightforward an approach to a melody could have put them in touch with such complexities of feeling, and the audience seemed to share their surprise. Only Lewis acted as though he knew it would work out that way all along. If every improviser were a Louis Armstrong or a Sonny Rollins, jazz would have no crying need for a John Lewis. But since few improvisers are blessed with Armstrong’s or Rollins’s intuitive sense of form, mediators like Lewis serve a crucial function.”
Viveos
Two short news features have made WTTW’s coverage of Vivian Maier into a little trilogy.
You’ve probably seen the first story, from last summer: http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2012/07/31/vivian-maier
The new material appeared last week, over two nights. The other important owners of Ms. Maier’s negatives finally get to flesh out the story and early results of detective research place her in locations and dates.
http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2012/08/01/meteoric-rise-vivian-maier
http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2012/08/02/searching-vivian-maier
Photoworks Ltd.
Does anybody remember this place, or know anyone who does? The brochure is probably from the late ’70s.
I always worked at The Darkroom (more on that anon), and I never saw this place. I suspect the building has been superceded as well.
Lemme know.
Au(rora) Cinema
As Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker last November: “There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice–preferably an exhaustive menu of it–pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of whar will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once the pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.”
…and then: http://jasonpaulroberts.tumblr.com/tagged/Aurora-Shooting
It’s An Art Exhibit Summer
As of this writing, it’s too hot to stay outdoors for an extended period–even for photographing–not unlike sub-zero blizzard weather. Fortunately, our major museums and galleries are air-conditioned, and there is an array of exhibits waiting for you and your mates to visit.
This is as good a place to begin as any: http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/now/2012/291 and the “Contemptible” is free to Illinois residents on Tuesdays. There are six or eight engaging exhibits; here is a page, containing 95 more theses, from the Molly Zuckerman-Hartung exhibit handout (this text is reproduced on one wall of the gallery):
Martha Schneider’s Gallery is featuring an important group show which includes Patty Carroll and Thomas Kellner: http://schneidergallerychicago.com/home.html
The Catherine Edelman Gallery has a major group show called Installed. http://edelmangallery.com/exhibitions/2012/installed/installed.htm
The ‘tute has Roy Lichtenstein, Dawoud Bey, and Film and Photo in New York: http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/film-and-photo-new-york
MCOP has Peripheral Views: States of America, which includes a contribution from Harry Shearer(!).
DePaul’s http://museums.depaul.edu/exhibitions/ show is called Drawn from Photography.
Don’t forget that Metra has a weekend rate, and you can always contact me for help.
Creative Camerawork 