Category Archives: Art

David Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books

Art, books, Music, news, Writing, , ,

bowie

Dig this! Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, which is hosting a David Bowie exhibit, “David Bowie is,” has posted a list of Bowie’s 100 favorite books.

And here it is:

The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, 2008

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007

The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard, 2007

Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage, 2007

Fingersmith, Sarah Waters, 2002

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens, 2001

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler, 1997

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes, 1997

The Insult, Rupert Thomson, 1996

Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon, 1995

The Bird Artist, Howard Norman, 1994

Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard, 1993

Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, Arthur C. Danto, 1992

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, 1990

David Bomberg, Richard Cork, 1988

Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, Peter Guralnick, 1986

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, 1986

Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd, 1985

Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music, Gerri Hirshey, 1984

Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter, 1984

Money, Martin Amis, 1984

White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1984

Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, 1984

The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, 1984

A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1980

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980

Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1980

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1980

Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess, 1980

Raw (a ‘graphix magazine’) 1980-91

Viz (magazine) 1979 –

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, 1979

Metropolitan Life, Fran Lebowitz, 1978

In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan, 1978

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1977

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976

Tales of Beatnik Glory, Ed Saunders, 1975

Mystery Train, Greil Marcus, 1975

Selected Poems, Frank O’Hara, 1974

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Otto Friedrich, 1972

In Bluebeard’s Castle : Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner, 1971

Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Peter Sadecky, 1971

The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Charlie Gillete, 1970

The Quest For Christa T, Christa Wolf, 1968

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, Nik Cohn, 1968

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967

Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg, 1967

Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. , 1966

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965

City of Night, John Rechy, 1965

Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964

Puckoon, Spike Milligan, 1963

The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford, 1963

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima, 1963

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, 1963

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, 1962

Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell, 1962

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, 1961

Private Eye (magazine) 1961 –

On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, Douglas Harding, 1961

Silence: Lectures and Writing, John Cage, 1961

Strange People, Frank Edwards, 1961

The Divided Self, R. D. Laing, 1960

All The Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd,1960

Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse, 1959

The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, 1958

On The Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957

The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, 1957

Room at the Top, John Braine, 1957

A Grave for a Dolphin, Alberto Denti di Pirajno, 1956

The Outsider, Colin Wilson, 1956

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949

The Street, Ann Petry, 1946

Black Boy, Richard Wright, 1945

Deconstructing Station To Station “Nomadic Happening”

Art, Music, news, , , ,
Cat Power on the train.
Cat Power on the train.

Earlier this week, while lunching at a steakhouse in Barstow, CA, Los Angeles artist and Station To Station mastermind Doug Aitken said his art project “is kind of a living organism… I like encounters; I like randomness and physicality.”

In a a strong feature in the New York Times today, writer Melena Ryzik does a great job of getting at the heart of what Station To Station is all about. The three week traveling art and music exhibit which ends today at Oakland’s 16th Station with, among other things, performances by No Age and Savages.

Read Ryzik’s story in the Times.

Watch: CocoRosie Drop Hallucinatory Video For “Gravediggress”

Art, Music, news, Video, , ,

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CocoRosie make music that could serve as the soundtrack for a Luis Buñuel film (if only the infamous director were still alive). But since Buñuel is dead, Bianca Casady, one of the two sisters who comprise CocoRosie, has taken matters into her own hands. She’s directed  “Gravediggress,” the third video for Tales Of A Grass Widow, the duo’s latest album, which was released earlier this year. 

Writing about the video on YouTube, Casady says, “Shot in Southern France, spanning several different seasons, The Gravediggress emerges from the imagination of the clown. Played and danced by Biño Sauitzvy, The Clown oscillates between young and old, innocent and deranged. Our mother plays the masked Gravediggress who’s stuffed hands struggle at menial tasks such as picking wheat and taking laundry from the line. The narrative is a loose journey thru the psyche of a lonely outcast who finds ecstasy and company in nature. The filming was spontaneous though it took much more time than a typical music video and without the pressure of a studio and crew we were able to wander and shoot in this way. We let the work steep and revisited the project months later for another stage of development. My working relationship with Biño, a Brazilian choreographer based in Paris, who has also trained in circus and clowning, started in 2011 when we developed Nightshift, my first theatrical work. We also started then to discover in dance, the brokenness of the outcast. He played a homeless-drunk, clown called Hummingbird Man. I have worked on many videos over the last 14 years and have shot many of them in this same location but this is my most narrative attempt to date. I prefer to shoot intimately, just me and the other and the force of the elements. Some times our hands got frozen cold, or we got attacked by swarms of mosquitos, spiders crawled out of every hole and we truly marveled over the moon and pink sky.”

Thanks Stereogum.

A Reporter Rides On Doug Aitken’s Station To Station Train

Art, Music, news, Photograph, , , , ,
Photo by Robert Gauthier.
Photo by Robert Gauthier.

In today’s Los Angeles Times there’s a cool article by Deborah Vankin about Doug Aitken’s Station To Station project. The three week traveling art and music festival was heading from Barstow, CA to LA and Vankin reports on the journey. Musicians who have participated in Station To Station include Patti Smith, Beck, Thurston Moore and Cat Power. Savages and No Age will perform Saturday Sept. 28, 2013 at 16th Street Station in Oakland, CA.

Read Vankin’s story and see a great slide show by photographer Robert Gauthier here.

Watch: Savages Release Arty Video For “Husbands”

Art, Music, news, Video, , ,

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Savages, the London quartet whose retro post-punk debut, Silence Yourself, was released this past May, have a striking new video for their best song to date, “Husbands.” The video for the song that was inspired by director John Cassavetes’ 1970 film “Husbands,” was directed by John Minton, the Bristol-based filmmaker who previously worked with Portishead. His video for “Husbands” is an arty black and white work that hearkens back to ’60s experimental filmmaking and shows the influence of the late artist Bruce Conner.

Video: Beck Debuts “Wake Up” At Station To Station Event

Art, Music, news, Video, ,

beck

Last night (Sept. 24) Beck, backed by a choir, debuted a new song, “Wake Up,” at multimedia artist Doug Aitken’s Station To Station event in Barstow, CA. Station To Station is a three-week art project, a nomadic music and artists festival that began Sept. 2 New York and ends at the 16th Street Station in Oakland, CA on Sept. 26 with performances by No Age, Savages and others.

Watch Beck in this fan shot video:

Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein Loves Yoshitomo Nara’s Art

Art, news, Video, , ,

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Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein, formerly one third of the riot grrrl band Sleater-Kinney, digs the art of Yoshitomo Nara so much she once wrote a short story, “Light My Fire,” inspired by one of the Japanese artist’s sculptures, according to the Huffington Post‘s “The Blog.”

“I went to this giant show that was an introduction to contemporary Japanese art called ‘Superflat’ [in 2001] and I was drawn to Nara’s work,” Brownstein told The Blog. “I loved the almost haunting but also very exhilarating juxtaposition between the child-like quality of his work and an almost punk rock fierceness — with a wisdom beyond their years, and the threat of mischief that’s just bordering on malevolence.

“His work spoke to me in a way where I thought about how adults underestimate kids all the time,” she continued. “When you are a child, you feel underestimated. And as an adult, you underestimate the power and the acuity or the abilities of children in certain ways, especially for them to have a dark side, a mischievous side. I wrote a little bit about that with ‘Light My Fire.'”

For more of the interview, head to The Blog.

Video: Elliott Smith’s “Between The Bars” Covered By…Madonna?

Art, Music, politics, Video, , ,

Screen Shot 2013-09-25 at 10.52.18 AM

Apparently attempting to reinvent herself in the 21st Century, Madonna has launched something called “Art For Freedom.” And now she’s covered Elliott Smith’s “Between The Bars.” She kicked the whole thing off (whatever it is) with the release of a 17 minute film, “#SecretProjectRevolution” which you can watch here. Madonna wants everyone to participate.

On the “Art For Freedom” we’re all invited to: “EXPRESS YOUR PERSONAL MEANING OF FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION IN THE FORM OF VIDEO, MUSIC, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY. JOIN THE REVOLUTION BY SUBMITTING YOUR ART FOR FREEDOM BELOW, OR BY TAGGING YOUR POSTS #ARTFORFREEDOM.

Listen: Stream Melt-Banana’s Noise-Punk Extravaganza “fetch”

Art, audio, Music, news, streaming music, , ,

melt-banana

After a six year break, noise-punk weirdos Melt-Banana — vocalist Yako and guitarist Agata — have delivered a new work of exquisite pain, fetch. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had a tremendous impact on Melt-Banana, Yako told Spin magazine.

“It is hard to explain exactly how it affected me and what has been changed, but it affected me on a very deep level,” she said.

“I could not concentrate on writing music for some time for reasons I couldn’t explain,” Agata said.

fetch will be released on Oct. 1 but you can hear the whole thing now over at Spin.

 

Books: ‘100 Works Of Art That Will Define Our Age’

Art, Review, , , ,

art book

 

Expat Kelly Grovier, who contributes to the Times Literary Supplement, has attempted in this book to predict the future — not as risky as it might seem at first, since neither us nor Grovier are likely to be around by the time it’s possible to judge the success or failure of his endeavor.

“We lack the necessary perspective when it comes to judging what it is about our time that is most important or representative culture-wise, for which reason the work of drawing up grand lists – the creation of a canon of the moment – is best left to those who come after,” Rachel Cooke writes in a review published today (Sept. 21, 2013) in The Guardian. “The art world, moreover, moves so fast these days that such a volume will doubtless seem out of date even before it makes it to paperback (the earliest piece included is Marc Quinn’ Self, from 1991; the most recent is  Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds from 2010).”

For the rest of this review head to The Guardian.