loud paper

virtual seduction

Thomas Wilfred at Clavilux keyboard

This afternoon I met up with Molly Steenson, Enrique Ramirez, and John Szot to hash out just what we are going to cover on our Meet the Architects panel at SXSW Interactive. Amped on good coffee and thick slices of grilled pita bread, we dashed from tangent to tangent. Somewhere in there, John, an architect who works for the media firm Digital Foundry in Brooklyn, noted that these days it is easy to get so caught up in what is flashing on the screen, and calling it architecture, that actual buildings become an afterthought.

I bring up the conversation not to (re)start any paper architecture debate, but because with this discussion in mind I came across a paper written in 1947 by inventor and light artist Thomas Wilfred.

Wilfred’s work has fallen into obscurity of late. Ranging from the surreal to the psychedelic, his career stretched from the 1920s until his death in 1968. His medium was light, manipulated into dreamlike compositions of varying colors and intensities. A practice he called lumina, it falls somewhere between music, painting, and sculpture. Trained as a musician, he would build complex contraptions, Clavilux, to play his works.

Describing this “new art form” he wrote:

The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.

In order to share his vision with others he must materialize it. This he may do by executing it as a two-dimensional sequence, projected on a flat white screen by means of a specially constructed projection instrument controlled from a keyboard.Seated before the keyboard he may, by manipulation of sliding keys, release white light, mold the light into form, add color and imbue the result with motion and change. But the original vision—the three-dimensional drama in space—is constantly before him and he strives to add, by optical means, an illusion of the missing third dimension to his flat screen image, and to perform it so convincingly in a spatial way that the screen creates the illusion of a large window opening on infinity, and the spectator imagines he is witnessing a radiant drama in deep space.

A couple visuals here.

I came across this article because a friend recently gave me a DVD of Wilfred’s work to check out. While I was dubious at first, picturing lava lamps and Sparkletts’ Dancing Waters, but then the jadedness washed away. Here was something proto-digital, which without bits or bytes and certainly not filmic, created space on screen. While I think the projections are pretty groovy, the projectors fascinate me. Unlike sleek laptops, the Clavilux were clunky boxes full of gears: objects desperate to escape the physical, but ultimately tied to their bulk.

For more images, the Yale University Library has an archive of ephemera related to the artist and the majority of Wilfred’s work is privately conserved by the Epstein Collection. 

the revolution begins at home

Punk House, Interiors in Anarchy (yes, that is really the title) landed in my mailbox last week. A thick, photographic tome featuring images by Abby Banks and a rather awkward introduction by Thurston “I never lived in a punk house, I never even heard of them until the mid-1980s.” Moore, makes me wonder if some coffee table books should be left unpublished. Banks traveled the country to some fifty squats, warehouses, and communal houses. Her photographs reveal what you would expect: crusty couches, milk crates stacked with mix tapes, compost bins, stenciled grafitti, a few pierced and patched-together denizens (the guy in the Jawbreaker t-shirt wins my heart), and scrawled flyers tacked to the walls in the spirit on one of my favorite books, Fucked Up and Photocopied, from which this volume certainly draws inspiration, if not market share.

Like Thurston, I’ve never lived in a “punk house,” and since my participation punk culture in generally is more about the zines and the music, rather than full blown peacocking or lifestyle, I am not sure I have much right to feel any indignation about the packaging of said subculture. In fact, I am not sure I even feel any indignation, this kind of commodification goes back to punks roots, like it or not. So why are my panties in a twist? I guess it is because I feel like Aaron Cometbus definitively captured punk houses with Double Duce. Meticulously handwritten, the pages spark with punk rock ethos, caffeine-fueled mishaps, and love-live-loss introspection as Cometbus tells his fictionalized biography of a flop in Berkeley. The narrative offers a better glimpse of these “anarchist interiors” than any shot of a dirty bathroom stained with hair dye.

sonic highway

Courtesy Brooklyn Vegan.

Harmonies, hula hoops, and honking horns. On Friday I caught Sufjan Steven’s performance of The BQE at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), joining some 2,000 fellow aging hipsters decked out in glasses and corduroy and armed with iPhones. If we all disappeared in a Moscow-type tragedy, would Apple sales dip? In the opera house lobby I nearly bumped into BAM regular Lou Reed, thrillingly and neatly bringing my Velvets/Warhol thread full circle. (Apparently Reed and Laurie Anderson attended the evening before, so he was coming back for a repeat performance.)

Sufjan’s composition, commissioned by BAM, is an ambitious addition to his geographic interpretations Illinoise and Michigan (two entries in his Fifty States Project). Sonically taking on Robert Moses’s gritty highway with a thirty-piece orchestra.

Clashing strings and horns evoke swelling traffic jams. Flutes zip through the score, changing lanes with ease. Sufjan paired the music with an abstract film and live hula hoopers. The result is equal parts beautiful, quirky, and a love letter to Brooklyn. With Super-8 shots of neighborhood landmarks and signs—there’s the bright yellow storage building near my house; look, the ugly new loft going up—recognition draws you into the piece.

The BQE is part of a history of orchestrated city interpretations. And there is certainly an Eamesian and Koyaanisqatsi quality to Sufjan’s footage, but I was reminded immediately of the 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which uses the railroad to track the daily life of the city in much the same way as the BQE organizes Sufjan’s Brooklyn. (See Mitchell Schwarzer’s Zoomscape.)

In program notes the musician muses on the mash up of car wheels and hoops:

Perhaps a creative exegesis of the hoop might begin to unravel the bureaucratic mysteries of the interstate roadway, the automobile, and the Hula Hoop’s unlikely nemesis: Robert Moses. A renowned critic of idle recreation, Moses often orchestrated his park projects around more competitive, athletic endeavors: mammoth swimming pools, diving boards, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. These hefty, utilitarian designs were modern responses to Frederick Law Olmstead’s romantic topography intended for less strenuous activities: afternoon strolls, Sunday picnics, and, perhaps, Hula Hooping. Of course, there was nothing natural, bucolic, or egalitarian about Moses’s park designs: blocky, boxy cement landscapes that resembled more prison yard than public park. Indeed, his roadways often took this aesthetic to the extreme. Like most highway projects of the time, the BQE was an execution of bullishness mixed with economic fastidiousness, a project that championed commerce, cars, and the commuter work force in spite of the “disorderly” charm of Brooklyn’s network of villages and neighborhoods, settled long before the automobile.

Although the triad is almost too much to watch at once, all parts came together at for one brilliant moment: five hula hoopers twisting their hips in unison, speedy road music, and film of driving at night. The conceit drops away leaving only rhythm and motion.

velveteen vitrine

Last week I was Googling for an image of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 classic, The Medium is the Message, and I came across an archival entry from Sam Jacob’s StrangeHarvest. The amazing post, partly cribbed from an essay he wrote for Volume, places Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground within the Philip Johnson’s terrarium-like Glass House. The same year as McLuhan’s treatise, the Factory tripped out to Connecticut for a benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Troupe.

Writes Jacob:

And somewhere between Lou Reed, Electricity, Marshal McLuhan, and Andy Warhol - I forget exactly the circumstances - I drew a comparison between the translucent walls of the Johnson Glass House, and the metallic-reflective walls of Warhol's silver Factory. They seemed like related opposites: spaces that were very similar, famous for the material surface of their walls that were both materials which both fascinated modern architecture. Both had qualities that embody modernity - transparency, reflection, flat and smooth, seamless, almost textureless, technological, industrialised, cold-to-the-touch and factory-formed into sheets from molten state. The Glass House and the Factory are like opposing twins.

It is amazing to think about these opposing scenes, lead by iconic figures (Warhol and Johnson separated at birth?), meshing for a summer afternoon. I am, of course, seduced by the photos, but am also starting to muse about the sexuality of both these men, especially as the 70s codifies the modernist (generally thought of as conservative) camp surrounding Johnson. Or should I say, their sexuality in relationship to how it is permitted or excluded by other parallel art scenes of the era. I was particularly struck by a quote in this weekend’s Times. In an article on Warhol’s films Manohla Dargis writes:

The dread that Warhol’s sexuality inspired is nothing new. On the first page of his memoir “Popism: The Warhol Sixties,” written with Pat Hackett, he explains that Pop artists “did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles — all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” About 10 pages later he adds one other item to the list of things that some Abstract Expressionists tried hard not to notice: homosexuality. “You’re too swish,” his friend, the filmmaker Emile de Antonio, bluntly dropped, when Warhol asked why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg didn’t like him. “And that upsets them.”

There is a curious correlation between a mess of quotidian stuff and gayness that I am still worrying over. It is all the stuff that is banished from Johnson’s manse, and from Ice Storm modernism in general. Is it as simple as a Manhattan vs. New Caanan polemic? I am not sure where I am going with this line of questioning yet, my guess that there is a wealth of texts covering this territory, so I’ll report back soon. Interestingly, around the same time as when Warhol visited the Glass House, he started filming the explicit and hermetic I, a Man, in which Valerie Solanas makes an appearance.

pop opt

A trillion years ago Mike was in the band Black Tambourine.

A billion years ago he co-founded Slumberland Records and went on to release Stereolab and Velocity Girl singles.

A million years ago Slumberland released records from my favorite San Francisco pop band The Aislers Set.

Now, after a little quiet period in the catalog, Slumberland is back with more catchy melodies: a new album, Grown-Ups, by The Lodger.

I am a shameless pop fan, so when analogies are drawn, I perk up and nod my head up and down in time to the jangle:

We don't know if it's something in the water or what, but England is fairly bursting with exciting guitar pop bands right now, and The Lodger are amongst the brightest hopes. Taking their cues from fellow northerners The Smiths and The Wedding Present, The Lodger's music is classic melodic pop, fueled by sparkling hooks and plangent lyrics. The tunes are sharp and timeless, a thoroughly modern distillation of great Britpop from the 60s right up to today.

The Lodger is on tour this month and you can download the hit "Let it Go" on the Slumberland site and stream the whole album on myspace.

re: retro

It’s been happening for a while now and, I suppose, I’ve been recalibrating and preternaturally bracing for the full-fledged revival of my 1990s. I say my because the dates and influences aren’t clean—I picked up on some late-80s stuff late and I’d be hard pressed to clearly call anything by a proper label such as riot grrl or grunge. My fandom has never been categorical.

Courtney Love was on Studio 360 on Sunday, babbling on about her fucked-up life and Kurt and Francis. I listened inattentively, my ears perking up only when the producers played a clip of Doll Parts off Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This. The sound is vinegary. Instantly, I am transported back in time, not to some show (although I seem to have a vague recollection of catching Hole on tour through Ithaca), but into architecture studio: headphones on, hunched over a drafting board, drawing lots and lots of lines. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that my thesis was bathhouse in San Francisco based on corseting and peepshows, seeped in feminist architectural critique, given my steady musical diet of Hole, Liz Phair, Belly, and the Breeders.

More time travel today. I walked into my local coffee shop, Outpost, a bright spot on a particularly run down stretch of Fulton Avenue in Brooklyn. The foppy server has the Pixies’ Surfa Rosa playing on LP. Kim Deal hollers “This is a song about a superhero named Tony It's called: Tony's Theme,” and wham, back at the drafting board marking time in graphite. I have to admit that it is not quite authentic to play that 1988 album on vinyl; he’s a twenty-something Pratt student, so I’ll cut him some slack on the record-playing pretension. For me it is all about cassette.

I was thinking about cassettes a couple weeks ago when Sonic Youth headlined McCarren Pool. They played their 1988 Daydream Nation start to finish: balls-out rock ‘n roll kicked off with the opening chords of Teen Age Riot. It is an unnatural way to present the music live. Bands always mix up the hits, otherwise it’d be like singing along in the car, but without tape hiss. Playing Daydream Nation in its entirety preserves something that never happened: it fictionalizes, makes an art piece. Is it Fluxus or an easy way to recontextualize and commodify Sonic Youth for a younger generation?

While my musings on retro have yet to really codify, they began while standing in the aquamarine pool, the remaining paint flaking off while luxury condos, in various states of construction, rise tall around the perimeter. The space is a vestige of 1936 Robert-Moses brand optimism, layered with 80s nihilism, and today’s narcissism, or is it apathy? Hard to say. The band sounded great, the people looked cool, and Kim Gordon danced around the stage with abandon.