Mar 30, 2010

LONDON CALLING

emmasclass
RECEPTION.
MISS EDWARDS' CLASS, 1989.
FLORA GARDENS PRIMARY SCHOOL.
HAMMERSMITH, W6, LONDON.
floragardens
Extra points if you spot 87 Hamlet Gardens.

Mar 17, 2010

The Hook Upon Which Everyone Hangs


The new Joanna Newsom album, Have One on Me, is appropriately epic in size - 3 discs, 18 songs ranging from 1:49 to 11:02 - and scope - Bill Callahan! Gold Rush! Fame! Her voice has mellowed out, apparently from vocal nodes, but it is to our benefit: the brash grating ("dying babies") of Milk-Eyed Mender and the occasional wince-inducing shrieks on Ys have given in to softer, more gracefully sung songs that are no less unique in style. Similarly, the precociousness of the first album and the melancholia of Ys has yielded an audible wiseness from Newsom that is no less ambitious, and maybe even more beautiful. It's a little boozier, jazzier, sadder, stronger and more vulnerable at once. I feel like Joanna is in a strange way the female counterpart to Leonard Cohen for her poetic, lyrically dense style - music to listen to in the foreground, over and over and over.
There was a good piece in the NY Times Magazine last week here.
This stunner track so far kind of just kills it. As Matt said, YES:

There is no video yet, obviously... But that piano! Those backing vocals! Thank goodness for Joanna Newsom. I'm sick of looking backwards for good music.

Mar 1, 2010

WORKZ

I'm starting a workshop with Tahni Holt tomorrow that I am very excited about. Former classmates and teachers of mine will be in it, as well as people whose work I have admired from afar. Exciting! Tahni sent us these ten statements her friend Alice Chauchat wrote that she often returns to when thinking about performance and performance making. I like:

1. A work is not about its author. It is not about something. It is something.

2. Mental activity is a dance. A particular thought process is a choreography, and produces a dance.

3. Don't represent ideas, provoke ideas. Whatever ideas led you to do something, a piece is not there for the audience to understand your ideas.

4. Ideas are all types of experience which possibly can be reflected upon.

5. The coherence of a work is not dependant on a direct relationship between process and product. Coherence is produced by a constant oscillation between the doing of a thing and the observation of this doing.

6. There is not one way to justify decisions. The particularity of decision-making is part of the work's identity.

7. Each work demands a new definition of dramaturgy and defines itself through it.

8. Each work demands and defines itself through its own methodology.

9. Codes and conventions pre-exist work. But work also creates codes and conventions.

10. Be your own audience. Focus on what you want to do / show rather than on what you think others want you to do.

Also, I wish I could have been there for this:
raves_1

DARCELLE XV, bitches

I want to be a drag queen.
Think about it: It's the most amazing job ever. Wearing sparkly outrageous outfits and wigs, pounds of make-up and glitter, dancing and lip-synching to your favorite songs and getting tipped like a stripper without having to show anything at all. I don't care one-way or the other about gender impersonation, but you know, whatever.
I'd love to put on a revue!

The Mercury has a piece on Darcelle's, the legendary twice-nightly show in Old Town. Read it here. Also, you should go. It's fun. Look at my face! That's a face having fun!
Darcelle‘s
Crystal, Matt, Erin and I with Darcelle XV.
good show!

aunt charlies (SF) - aurora, baby dumpling, matt, ronnie
Matt with some of the ladies at Aunt Charley's in SF. Totally different, but you can't argue with a number that included roller skating down the bar to Melanie's Brand New Key.
IMG_5508
yes
IMG_5516