Sleep and Sabbath

The perfect music can enhance even the most mundane situation last night I had one of those musical awakenings. The perfect music for this grey, cold, slightly hazy New York fall evening was Sleep. It is quite similar to Black Sabbath, and in case you do not know the pleaseure of Black Sabbath go here ASAP. So it is down tuned, slower in tempo, accentuated bass with chugging guitars and these amazing, melodic guitar parts in the back, all very uplifting despite the cold and grey."Ozzy himself was impressed, saying Sleep were the closest band he'd heard to Sabbath's original 70's style and feeling." Praise most high, coming from the prince of darkness himself.

Math

For those of you who love math and moviesthis website should be bookmarked. It is now my favorite site and I consider it an invaluable reference I mean nothing is more disheartening than a movie with unreal or fake math!

Notes From Chelsea Part 1

A very dear friend and colleague loves Dana Schutz's paintings very much and I have tried desperatley to catch this enthusiasm for the work but to no avail. Saturday was the first time I had the experience of seeing the paintings in person at LFL Gallery in an exhibit entitled "Panic".

Walking into the first gallery I felt that sense of relief that comes from walking into contemporary art gallery to see paintings, actual paintings with moments of thick paint, moments of exposed underpainting, brush stroke marks thick and thin. Schutz's color choices are for the most part spot on, very well informed and satisfying, however, moments of muddiness are very distracting. Her, personal, odd spaces delineated by color and light start to become chunky and two thumbed much like the style the figures are handled in.

At this point the actions of these figures becomes clear and little bit of their magic dissapears. I was more interested in the idea of rendering those cannibalistic and macabre images with that luscious color. I then retreat into those smaller areas where her colors do sit next to each other with intese, vibrant energy and I try to forget the poorly drawn figures and muddy color. What I really want to look at are very small pieces of her paintings and I am not sure if this retreat is enough to redeem the paintings and then a little more of the magic dies.

Preachin' to the Choir

I think I might be old fashioned and this is probably where I will lose many readers but, when I go to an exhibit of visual works in a gallery I expect, well, visuals not text. Even though I enjoy reading quite a bit there is a time and place.
I went to an opening tonight of photos, snapshots taken by Gulf War veterans while they were in active duty during the original Gulf War conflict. The photos read like snapshots not "art photos" and were only about one fourth of the story, the other three fourths of the story was retold via text of transcribed conversations with the veterans. So the text gave a context for the snapshots and it was, over all an interesting project but I kept wondering if the gallery space was the appropriate venue for the project. There we were, educated art consumers being informed about the intracacies of this particular war mostly by the text with a bit of backup from the accompanying snapshots and it was great. I love reading about this because of my politics yet I wonder if that might be this project's downfall as an artistic endeavor or am I just pissed that I had to read too much, in a gallery setting, with very, very little pay off.

Mix Tape as Art

It is time for Broken Glass to get interactive. After a long Thanksgiving weekend reconnecting with very close comrades I am posting a call of sorts, for mix cd's. The idea is to trade mixes, and then respond to the traded mix. If you have not been, there is a great website which one can use for inspiration or influence whichever one feels more comfortable with. Please email me and we can get this project going. I have a mix that is ready to go.