CIRCUIT CAST Episode 12 is now online, and you can listen to it here!
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On Kawara (1933-2014)
The great, but intensely private conceptual artist and painter On Kawara died recently and even leaves relatively cryptic obituaries....
The formidable writer and critic Thomas Frank has written a new piece for salon.com after visiting some new "presidential museums." You can get a sense of what's in store from the following quote: "Unfortunately, presidential libraries and historical scrutiny are not the same thing. They aren’t even in the same category, really. I visited three of the most recently built presidential museums a few weeks ago—the Bill Clinton Presidential Center plus two museums commemorating the administrations of men named George Bush—and found them to be, by and large, institutions of bald propaganda, buildings on which hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to cast, literally, in stone, a given individual’s personal war with reality." Terrific stuff!
It's so great to know that the great actor Don Cheadle will be portraying Miles Davis in an upcoming film that he's also directing. Cheadle has been using Indiegogo to crowdfund this film, which has been in pre-production stages since 2008. "Miles Ahead" has just met its funding goal, which hopefully will speed up the process of getting this terrific project completed. You can check out the campaign site here. Open for a coupla more hours folks in case you want any of the perks or to support this worthy venture.
Portraits of the avant-gardista circa 1967
I find it pretty interesting that the 81-yr old artist Yoko Ono is so active on social media that she answers questions posed to her on Twitter and Facebook each week. What I like about Ono's comments are that they are pretty much what you would expect, very positive, rather distanced, and almost like Zen koans or Yoko Ono poems. And I was pleased to receive a response to a query I posted via Twitter a few days ago:
Martin Patrick @DrMartinPatrick
What are your thoughts on Fluxus today and do you see a future for Fluxus art actions, performances, poems, writings?
Like any art, Fluxus will go on as long as it is in your head.
I recently watched the extremely watchable but extremely violent dystopian/class-struggle/sci-fi epic Snowpiercer and read an engaging critical analysis of the film posted over at Unemployed Negativity entitled "Hijacking a Train: Revolution and its Limits in Snowpiercer." A cool read.
The Johnnys, who bill themselves as the world's only all-girl, all-Johnny Cash band are getting talked about like crazy these days, with many high-profile gigs and events internationally, and high praise from Cash's daughter Cindy. They are playing at Bar Bodega in Wellington this weekend and it sounds like an absolutely fantastic way to (at least temporarily) replace the mid-winter blues with Folsom Prison ones.
A new book has just been published in English on the extremely significant Polish activist group the
"Orange Alternative" (Pomeranczowa Alternatywa) who created a large number of street performances and interventions, particularly throughout the late 1980s in the city of Wroclaw. LIves of the Orangemen by Major Waldemar Fydrych (and with a brief introduction by the Yes Men) is available as a free PDF from Minor Composition press' website, and a hard copy can be ordered for the bargain price of 10 GBP. Crucial historical info for the contemporary activist or cultural historian.
