Brain Damage
I feel the need to write a post that is not long and not about politics. I was dismayed to hear WFMU DJ Kenny G. (not that Kenny G. but WFMU's own chanteuse of French criticism
Kenneth Goldsmith - Wikipedia) is rotating off their schedule for a while. Busy guy I suppose. Kenny G: making radio the way
BauBike makes bicycles. Kenny's show figures in a little story I want to tell. It happened one day at the library a few weeks back while I was working. It involved Kenny playing then back announcing a piece by someone named Paul McCarthy. At the same moment I was in the middle of a processing a book by an artist named Paul McCarthy. In the trancelike semi-hypnotized state of mid-afternoon copy cataloging, worlds collided and entangled. At first I sensed only a vague confusion which returning full consciousness could not make go away. After some effort realizing that what I was listening to and what I was working on were both about someone with the same name. Nearly as I can determine the same person. The book
Paul McCarthy : central symmetrical rotation movement : three installations, two films, I recall from memory and a cursory examination was a description of a series of installation art pieces. These consisted of a room, with walls and windows, built within a gallery space. The rooms were built on turntables and spun around. In addition there was a closed-circuit video system consisting of a number of cameras and one or more monitors. The monitor would switch between cameras through a special circuit, but was synchronized so that it would never reflect the vantage point of any hypothesized viewer of the monitor. The song was called Finito
Kenny G playlist | 05.20.09. The problem really was having portions of my mind running autonomously under only a simple rule set that these separate things should not be the same. Nothing seemed right the whole rest of that day after that. I had a strange echo of this a few days later while flipping through an issue of biking magazine I found myself reading about Andrew Bird. Turns out Andrew Bird rides a bike. Keeps one on the tour bus, tools around between shows. Can one whistle and ride a bike at the same time? Yes, I tried it this morning with only moderate bodily damage.
While I'm here considering WFMU I should give thanks to WFMU dj Diane Kamikaze for mentioning the Art of Pompeii exhibit that was at the National Art Gallery back earlier this year
National Gallery of Art - Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples. I live here in DC I didn't know about it. On the strength of her recommendation I went through it with my sister and nephews the next weekend. I liked the statue of Silanus, All these years I missed the fact that Bacchus had a regular drinking buddy. On the way out of that I was thrilled to find as special bonus a Robert Frank Exhibit down the hall
NGA: Looking In Robert Frank's The Americans:. I wish I had seen the companion exhibit on Photography as narrative in the post-war period Reading the Modern Photobook
National Gallery of Art - Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans: (bottom). My nephews were flagging a bit by that this point, though.
I enjoyed that little coda to the trip immensely. Frank, particularly with his book the Americans, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson form my photographic touchstones. Robert Frank later made a movie about the Rolling Stones. h5ntgj9eim
11:52:55 PM  ;;
|
