Day: August 13, 2003

Junk Drawer

I’ve been menaing to write more about the many exciting or at least mildly amusing things going on lately, but it’s been hard to gather the will to sit and concentrate on the blogging thing. Here are a bunch of quick links that I’ve been meaning to pepper throughout a series of scintillating posts…

The Junk Drawer

  • Art Chantry, Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 is an incredible restrospective of the work of my all-time favorite designer, now showing at P.S. 1. I can’t rave about this enough. The work is fun enough to look at in reproduction, but he does so much with materials and printing tricks that seeing the stuff in person is about a million times cooler. (And they’re using the same title for the exhibit as I did for a fictional exhibit years ago. but I’m not bitter.)
  • Speaking of P.S. 1, I’d like to point out that it’s not the same place as P.S. 122 in the East Village. You really ought to check out what’s going on at P.S. 122, because they put on tons of great theater and dance and performance and such, and it’s their ticket prices are great for what you get. More on this later, because I’m starting to work on a number of projects with them.
  • And speaking of great stuff at P.S. 122, Heather Woodbury is kicking off their new season in September with her one-woman, eight-installment, 100+-character show, What Ever. You really ought to check out her web site, where you can listen to streaming audio of entire acts of the show, so go and whet your appetite.
  • Flaming Fire were one of the guest acts in the Devo Tribute Show I saw last week. They were pretty exciting, and the lead singer was pretty hot, but you must check out their site to see the progress they’re making on their project to have artists illustrate every single verse of the Bible (1079 illustrations complete; 35586 remaining).
  • The Grand List of Comic Book Cliches is funny because it’s true.
  • Typophile: The Smaller Picture is a project that’s building a typeface via collaborative effort over the internet one pixel at a time. (Thanks, Mike!)
  • Gilles Barbier is the artist of a fantastic, witty sculptural installation called L’Hospice that depicts elderly superheroes loafing around in a nursing home. (Better pictures halfway down this page.)

Devolution

I saw one of the best show’s I’ve caught in ages last Friday night: the Loser’s Lounge tribute to Devo. Brilliant, on all levels. Not only did it really capture the flavor and the impact of the material performed, but did so in a way that was totally fresh and original, rather than just a sycophantic rehashing of someone else’s work. I bought their bootleg CDs of their Bowie and Elvis Costello shows, and am more convinced than ever that the Devo show wasn’t a fluke: these guys (and it’s a core band with dozens of guest singers, so it’s not like a regular band) are not only supremely talented, but they’re more interested in really immersing themselves into the music they play to get to the heart of it, rather than just trot out some old pop hits as a gimmick. (Which is what I was expecting them to do when I bought the tickets. I love being wrong when the end result is so much better.)

The show was typical of what I love about entertainment in New York (I say “in New York” because it’s something I’ve never been able to come across anywhere else): rather than being just a rock show, or just a theatrical performance, or just one thing or another, the event itself crossed all these boundaries. They played heartfelt covers of New Wave songs, but also incorporated country, punk, and experimental electronic music. They played homemade synthesizers and traditional instruments. They featured a variety of singers and performers. They wore costumes. They immersed themselves in a kind of simulacrum of the music to which they paid tribute. MInd you this was all just for a $15 concert ticket, not an exorbitant theater seat.

And I seem to find genre-bending stuff like this all the time here: Kiki & Herb, The Three Terrors, the Qwe’re Music Fest, and on and on and on. I’ve gotten too hooked on these blends of pop, rock, drag, performance art, burlesque, and cabaret to get much out of a band just playing its songs, or some drag queen just miming along to a record, or someone just standing up on stage doing some schtick. There are simply too many alternatives out there that are more ambitious and more affecting.