If you’re in New York on October 28, head over to Other Music before 8 p.m. According to a flyer, Lee Ranaldo plans a demonstration and discussion of… the guitar.
This is a cool way to let everyone know Ranaldo has a new album out. It’s a good one too, Last Night on Earth.
In an arty video/Nike commercial Boards of Canada’s awesome track, “Reach for the Dead” from the equally terrific Tomorrow’s Harvest, is the soundtrack as 1999 Thrasher of the Year Brian Anderson gets dressed (he puts on a Nike shirt, ‘natch), gets his board and skates through a very cool set before being splattered with pink paint.
Check it out:
With his latest art piece, a slaughterhouse delivery truck driving around New York’s “Meatpacking District” jammed with stuffed animals and what sounds like the fearful cries of animals, Banksy takes aim at meat eating. He makes the direct connection between living animals and how we kill them and eat their dead flesh. And our connection to the animals. A video posted on Banky’s site (see below) ends with a shot of a baby in a stroller crying.
“The Sirens of the Lambs, Banksy writes on his website. “A slaughterhouse delivery truck touring the meatpacking district and then citywide for the next two weeks.”
Audio guide to today’s artwork:
Be sure to check out this video:
As the weekend approaches Banksy follows his huge political work of Day #9 with this art work located in “East New York,” according to Banksy, which is more modest but chilling in its own way.
Banksy said this in his Village Voice interview:
“New York calls to graffiti writers like a dirty old lighthouse. We all want to prove ourselves here. I chose it for the high foot traffic and the amount of hiding places. Maybe I should be somewhere more relevant, like Beijing or Moscow, but the pizza isn’t as good.”
No audio today.
Body/Head pushes into the noise-rock frontier.
By Michael Goldberg
The bright lights shine on Kim Gordon. The New Yorker, which never profiled Sonic Youth during the group’s 30 years as one of New York’s most celebrated and influential bands, kicked things off by devoting six upfront pages to Gordon this past June.
Since then, as the early October release date of Coming Apart, the album she recorded with her current musical collaborator Bill Nace under the name Body/Head, came and went, other major publications devoted space to Gordon. From the New York Times and Rolling Stone to Pitchfork, writers have been more than excited to talk to Gordon about whatever she’s willing to talk about, including her new, challenging noise rock.
“I wasn’t trained as a musician,” Gordon told the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff. “But I did grow up listening to a lot of jazz records, and John Coltrane.”
Coming Apart’s opening song, “Abstract,” Gordon said, has a structure similar to Coltrane’s Meditations: “You have a theme,” she said, “and it falls apart, and then it comes back.”
To read the rest of this column, head over to Addicted To Noise.
More street art from Banksy. What a day. You can read some of his thoughts about his New York street art exhibit and check out the new work which is quite political.
Banksy provided some horrific audio today. Military in the middle east?
And some video:
This is a very cool hourlong concert that took place at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. on September 12, 2013.
You really want to check this out.
Following the first week of Banksy’s New York “Better Out Than In” street art show, the mysterious British artist has granted an email interview with the Village Voice.
“There is absolutely no reason for doing this show at all,” Banksy told the Voice. “I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.”
The artist says he is currently living in New York.
“The plan is to live here, react to things, see the sights—and paint on them,” he wrote. “Some of it will be pretty elaborate, and some will just be a scrawl on a toilet wall.”
Is Banksy defacing his own art? No, he says.
“I’m not defacing my own pictures, no,” he told the Voice. “I used to think other graffiti writers hated me because I used stencils, but they just hate me.”
And what about those audio clips that mock museum audio guides?
“The audio guide started as a cheap joke, and to be honest that’s how it’s continued, but I’m starting to see more potential in it now,” Banksy told the Voice. “I like how it controls the time you spend looking at an image. I read that researchers at a big museum in London found the average person looked at a painting for eight seconds. So if you put your art at a stoplight you’re already getting better numbers than Rembrandt.”
Most interesting is Banksy’s comments about maintaining credibility as a street artist. He said he made a “mistake” when, for his last New York show, he didn’t create the artwork himself.
“I totally overlooked how important it was to do it myself,” he wrote. “Graffiti is an art form where the gesture is at least as important as the result, if not more so. I read how a critic described Jackson Pollock as a performance artist who happened to use paint, and the same could be said for graffiti writers—performance artists who happen to use paint. And trespass.”
And more:
“I started painting on the street because it was the only venue that would give me a show,” he wrote. “Now I have to keep painting on the street to prove to myself it wasn’t a cynical plan. Plus it saves money on having to buy canvases.
“But there’s no way round it—commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist,” he continued. “We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it’s hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.”
My favorite part of the interview are these comments about surviving as an artist — and success.
“Obviously people need to get paid—otherwise you’d only get vandalism made by part-timers and trust-fund kids,” Banksy wrote. “But it’s complicated, it feels like as soon as you profit from an image you’ve put on the street, it magically transforms that piece into advertising. When graffiti isn’t criminal, it loses most of its innocence.
“It seems to me the best way to make money out of art is not to even try,” he wrote. “It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist—all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it. The thing people most admired about Picasso wasn’t his work/life balance.”
For the whole story, go to the Voice.
On Sunday Banksy uploaded to YouTube a satirical video, “Rebel rocket attack,” about Syria that makes fun of the YouTube videos that Syrian rebels have been uploading during the conflict.
Yesterday afternoon (Oct. 7, 2013) the Washington Post ran an opinion piece analyzing and commenting on Banksy’s video. It’s worth checking out.
You might want to take a look at the video, then read the piece which you’ll find here.
Banksy’s latest art work has appeared in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Typical Banksy.
No audio to go with this one.