Vintage Power Pop: the dB's

The dB's, who began in NYC but all hail from my homestate of North Carolina, were a pretty amazing band in the 1980s, synthesizing a wealth of 60s pop influences (Kinks, Beach Boys, Big Star) into a tight, compact, and highly listenable sound. They never had great commercial success at the time, but have recently reformed just as a style such as theirs seems eminently historical and somewhat distant. That said, with the resurgence of LP buyers and rekindled interest in underappreciated "cult" bands of the past maybe there will be some new attention paid to their fastidious, catchy pop songs. For more dB's info, you can check out their website. 

Assorted Fluxus video links

Here are some links to some pretty interesting Fluxus material floating around on YouTube, including Dick Higgins describing the origins of Fluxus and a (re-)performance of his piece "Danger Music # 17" by Australian scholar Geoffrey Gartner. There's some great footage of the early (1962) German Fluxus festivals here and experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas speaks of his friends Andy Warhol and George Maciunas here. Alison Knowles was interviewed on the occasion of MoMA's Fluxus Editions exhibition, and performance artist William Pope.L devised his own particular response. Nam June Paik speaks about his motivations to make video art in a vintage documentary, and another documentary focuses on his longtime collaborator and partner "the topless cellist" Charlotte Moorman.

Reposted from CIRCUIT: Andrew Clifford on Julian Dashper

There's a terrific analysis of Julian Dashper's video artworks by Andrew Clifford that Mark Williams posted about a week ago on the CIRCUIT website. An excellent commentary on a still-underrated New Zealand artist. I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Julian not long after I relocated to Wellington, and tragically, not long before the artist's death. Julian had made the effort to contact me largely owing to our mutual friend the American art historian David Raskin, who curated a retrospective of the artist's work. I have noticed in the past couple of years how enthusiastically my students have responded to Julian's writings and work and I imagine his influence will extend long into the future, particularly here in New Zealand, and appropriately for an artist who created so many projects that examined notions of both historical influence and temporality.