Perhaps we needed a publication like Showpaper to gather all of the evidence on one page, but we can sense it just by keeping our ears peeled when wandering around the industrial waterfront of North Brooklyn at night: more and more young people in New York are taking the city’s musical culture into their own hands, booking the artists they want to see in buildings that condo developers never cared about anyway and eschewing the institutionalized age discrimination that keeps people who can’t drink away from live music. And the increased police crackdown on semi-legal concert venues (founded, apparently, on completely wrongheaded suspicions of weapon and drug possession, in addition to under-age drinking) doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone. New all-ages performances spaces still seem to be cropping up every month, sometimes attracting critical masses in the hundreds, and upstart show promoters looking to realize their unique artistic visions are practically ubiquitous. We might even call it a new chapter in the city’s cultural history if some of the people who built it with their own hands were willing and able to articulate it as such–and to explain how it might cohere as a generational worldview. With Brooklyn curator Todd Pendu, founder of the first large-scale festival devoted exclusively to grassroots cultural production in New York, we may very well have our man.
Due to the high demand for tickets for our sold-out Muppet History 101 + Muppet Music Moments double feature at 8pm tonight, we’ve added a second show — of Muppet History 101 only — tonight at midnight!
Tickets will be available at the box office from 7:30pm onwards, on our website starting now…
an⋅i⋅ma /ˈænəmə/ –noun
1. soul; life.
2. (in the psychology of C. G. Jung)
a. the inner personality that is turned toward the unconscious of the individual (contrasted with persona).
b. the feminine principle, esp. as present in men (contrasted with animus).
ANIMATED ANIMA is an exhibition of artwork by Cadence Pearson and Lucinda Trask, two artists who explore the undefined area between your physical body and the anima. The opening reception will feature a performance installation by Genevieve Belleveau of the Queen Frostine Ice Cream Girls and live music by the soulful experimental folk duo Bow Ribbons.
Opening August 1st, 8PM – Music at 10PM PERFECT WAVE GALLERY
184 West St. #2 / Brooklyn, NY 11222 Free admission
On view through August 7th, 4-9PM and by appointment.
July 31– PRIMO LEVI
Italian-born chemist, Auschwitz survivor, writer… suicide?
JULY 31, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Always Live Better Than Yester Day.
ALSO ON JULY 31 IN HISTORY…
1777 — Marquis de Lafayette commissioned major general in Continental Army.
781 — Earliest recorded eruption of Mt. Fuji, Japan.
1703 — Writer Daniel Defoe, pilloried for seditious libel, is pelted with flowers.
1919 — Auschwitz survivor, chemist, writer Primo Levi born, Turin, Italy.
1944 — Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappears on flight over southern France.
1957 — Non-commercial radio pioneer Lewis Hill dies, Duncans Mills, California.
2006 — Cuban jefe Fidel Castro cedes state power to brother Raul.
“A rare exhibition of nearly half a century of Ed Sanders’ glyph-poems produced between 1962 and 2009 will be on display at The Arm from July 10 through July 31.
“Gallery hours will be Wednesday to Sunday from Noon to 6PM until the end of the month.
“Building on a long history of utilizing a highly visible language that continues into the present, Sanders’s glyph-poems fuse image with text, and image as text. Political, personal, ephemeral, historical, uncanny, and humorous— the glyph-poems on display at The Arm appear in several different mediums, including original drawings, collages, mimeographed pages from Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts (1962-’65), plus a number of collages, and an artist’s book. Over 200 Glyph-works will be featured in the show.
“In addition, Glyphs 1962-2009 will feature new letterpress prints and a limited edition catalogue produced on location at The Arm.
“Edward Sanders is a poet, historian and musician. He is at work, since 1998, on a 9-volume America, a History in Verse. The first five volumes, tracing the history of the 20th century, have been completed and published in a fully indexed CD format, over 2,000 pages in length, by Blake Route Press.
“Another recent writing project is Poems For New Orleans, a book and CD on the history of that great city, and its tribulations during and after hurricane Katrina. He has been granted a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in verse, an American Book Award for his collected poems, and other awards for his writing.
“The Fugs have recently completed a CD, Be Free, The Fugs Final CD (Part I), featuring 14 new tunes. Be Free will be released in late summer.
“Two of Sanders’ books, The Family and Tales of Beatnik Glory, are under option to be made into movies.
“His selected poems, 1986-2008, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War will be published by Coffee House Press in the fall of 2009.
“He lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues.
“Sanders will perform a section of America, the 17th Century, tracing the voyage of Henry Hudson up the Hudson River in 1609, at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstockon August 8, as part of the 400th anniversary celebration of Hudson’s discoveries.”
Deep-space excursions that reveal the dark matter of pop culture, absurdist mythologies that transcend into tear jerking dramas…all can be found in Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite.
This forthcoming show at Synchronicity Space opens on July 31st with a video screening including 19 unique artists. 2-D and 3-D artifacts from the videos will accompany the screening and be on display throughout August. Those looking to travel through a black hole and keep your boots on: look no further. Curated by Ben Bigelow
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yrQf5X3uvI
Opening Friday, July 31st at 7PM, with video screenings from 9-10PM Synchronicity Space
4306 Melrose / Los Angeles 90029 Free
July 30– THORSTEIN VEBLEN
Iconoclastic, sardonic theorist of profit, status and class, he probed the irrational forces of capitalist culture.
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
JULY 30, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Virginia: Crater Day. Civil War holiday.
ALSO ON JULY 30 IN HISTORY…
1857 — Economist and social theorist Thorsten Veblen born, Valders, Wisconsin.
1889 — Radical woodcut artist Frans Masereel born, Blankenberge, Belgium.
1925 — Rootless cosmopolitan Alexander Trocchi born, Glasgow, Scotland.
1938 — Hitler presents highest non-citizen award to Henry Ford in Berlin.
1958 — Left-wing coup in Iraq arouses Western fears of domino effect.
Fresh off their latest successful CARTUNE XPREZ tour, Hooliganship recently screened this new video at an outdoor party in Portland, OR. Note the colorful Bruce Bickford influence on the new stylez (Peter Burr has assisted Bruce in past years).
“The extra cuts [California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger] made today took nearly $80 million that pays for workers who help abused and neglected children; $50 million from Healthy Families, which provides healthcare to children in low-income families; $50 million from services for developmentally delayed children under age 3; $16 million from domestic-violence programs; $6.3 million from services for the elderly; and $6.2 million from parks.” — Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2009
“Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself ‘perfectly fine,’ despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. ‘Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,’ Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, ‘I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lay back with a stogie.'” — New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 5, 2009
Punishing the weakest members of any society—poor, sick children—in a time of economic turmoil is simply immoral.
Californians should think deeply about what they have allowed to happen. Maybe this excerpt from a song on Wolves in the Throne Room’s Black Cascade, released earlier this year through Southern Lord Records of Los Angeles, will give them guidance and strength.
July 29– JEAN BAUDRILLARD
French cultural theorist, media philosopher, art critic.
Our point is not to defend radical thought. Any idea that can be defended is presumed guilty. Any idea that does not sustain its own defense deserves to perish. But we have to fight against charges of unreality, lack of responsibility, nihilism, and despair. Radical thought is never depressing. This would be a complete misunderstanding. A moralizing and ideological critique, obsessed by meaning and content, obsessed by a political finality of discourse, never takes into account writing, the act of writing, the poetic, ironic, and allusive form of language, the play with meaning. This critique does not see that the resolution of meaning is right here, in the form itself, in the formal materiality of an expression. As for meaning, it is always unfortunate. Analysis is by its very definition unfortunate since it is born out of a critical disillusion. But language on the contrary is fortunate (happy), even when it designates a world with no illusion, with no hope. This would in fact be here the very definition of radical thought: an intelligence without hope, but a fortunate and happy form. Critics, always being unfortunate (unhappy) in their nature, choose the realm of ideas as their battle field. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing on the contrary are always a matter of illusion. Language and writing are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the misfortune of meaning operated through the good fortune of language. This is the only political or transpolitical act that a writer can accomplish.
From Baudrillard’s article Radical Thought, read more Baudrillard online here.
JULY 29, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Norway: Oslok, the festival of Saint Olaf the Fat.
*Quimperle, Brittany: Pardon of the Birds. Festive fair and picnic with a bird theme.
ALSO ON JULY 29 IN HISTORY…
1883 — Italian Socialist Party leader turned fascist Benito Mussolini born.
1890 — Dutch crackpot painter Vincent Van Gogh dies, Auvers-sur-Oise, France.
1921 — Adolf Hitler becomes president of the German Nazi Party.
1929 — French media theorist, art critic Jean Baudrillard born, Reims, France.
1979 — New Left theorist, radical hero Herbert Marcuse dies, Sternberg, East Germany.
2006 — French radical historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet dies, Nice, France.
Arthur Magazine 