Chakaia Booker
       Foci, 2010, Rubber Tire, Stainless Steel

       Source for 1st picture: flickr user alexdanielletravelling
       Source for 2nd picture: flickr user researchgirl
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

       Hans Hokanson
       Helixikos Number 3, 1969, Bronze

       Source for 1st picture: flickr user dabvembarb
       and 2nd picture: huntersandgatherersathome.blogspot.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

       Alice Aycock
       Three-fold Manifestation II, 1987, steel

       Source for 1st picture: picasa user muriel
       and 2nd picture: flickr user janejai1000
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

       Ursula Von Rydingsvard
       LUBA, 2010, cedar, graphite, bronze
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Two new things for Art of the Day. First, my longest break since I began this whole daily (hah!) art-writing project. Sorreee. (But, as you’ll see, I’m trying to come out of the deep freeze tonight with a big proper ice-crackin’ thaw). & Second, instead of posting stuff I’ve never seen before and may never see in the flesh, today I bring you pieces I’ve actually beheld/beloved & basked in the presence of & belingered about & around. Namely, artworks I just saw last weekend at the gorgeous, sprawling Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York (about 1-1.5 hrs outside of Manhattan depending how you get there). The wealth of artworks (115ish or so) were integrated throughout the landscape in all manner of ways: nestled meekly in and among woody rambles, installed upon & boldly yawping from knolls & prospects, tucked behind cricket-strewn tall grasses, spanning burbly creeks, shooting up & out of the flatlands stark and mystical, serenely wave-carved into the earth itself. Even if the Storm King tract were art-less it still would’ve been a lovely Saturday full of upstate New York early summer breezy beauty. The addition of well-curated, occasionally breathtaking sculpture harmonizing (or playfully contrasting, and in fact creating a whole range of concords & even discords) with the surroundings made the whole day even more memorable.
      Some words about one the pieces shown above: Chakaia Booker’s “Foci”, the piece I looked forward to most. What a beauty. It dominated its surroundings with equal parts menace & firm earth-deity stewardship; sturdy & tall like a Zulu warrior shield, creepy like some ominous fire-blackened signpost, proud & awesome & low-voiced like some ancient spirit of the forest. I circled it carefully, watching how at all angles it revealed itself, its parabolas & barbs & scales & rubber sharkteeth, feeling that special humming joy you get in your gut & chest when you’re in the presence of art that moves you fully: in form and content, structure & spirit, architecture & emotion, texture & movement.
     I want to let the work of the stellar photographers cited above speak for itself, but I’ll just say two more things about the pieces I chose: 1) they were my favorites of the small portion of total Storm King artworks we managed to see (definitely looking forward to returning in the fall), and 2) as terrific as the above photos are, it goes without saying that there’s nothing like experiencing these pieces in the flesh (esp. in good weather), so make the trip, pay the $12, picnic at the cafe, get a little tipsy, & go enjoy the hell out of the treasure that is Storm King.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  
     Alice rides the crowd last night (source: YouTube user sdelin)



 
    C.C last night at the much-(& unfairly-)maligned Terminal 5. Early to the line, coat check, two shots of house vodka & I make my way downstairs about 15 feet back from the stage, same spot I had for Guided By Voices a few months ago. And that’s where I camped out the entire night — that is, when I wasn’t being absorbed into/flung about by the massive sweaty ultra-dense people-ameoba that formed once Alice & Ethan came onstage.
    Tension mounted right before they came on: people around me getting antsy, calling out for Alice. C.C. songs pumped through the P.A. were a nasty tease. Then the announcer came up to the mic, told the crowd that Alice had broken her ankle sometime prior, was advised not to perform, & told the doctor “Fuck you”. Good crowd-hyping, that. Then the show begins & all hell breaks loose. My shirt was drenched within three songs. Caught strobed flashes of Alice cavorting and shouting, her hoodie over her head, her “Male Bonding” half-shirt. And a word about her presence — I can’t imagine any other lead singer pulling off crutch-dancing with as much energy, edge & sex appeal as she did last night. Part of me was a little disappointed when I first heard she’d be crutchy: I’d wanted to see the Alice of countless youtube vids I’d eaten up in the weeks prior, flailing & writhing & channeling the jagged hunger and desperation of their songs, her naked intensity indirectly proportional to Ethan’s stoic+hooded presence in the corner. But seeing her vulnerable added a different dimension to her stage presence, and I’m glad now that I saw her hobbled. Being injured didn’t stop her from coming out in the crowd — I think I counted four instances where she sailed out on a sea of hands, iPhones and androids popping up like glowing periscopes, her limbs twisting, her eyes flashing, totally transported.
     “Baptism”, “Alice Practice” and “Untrust Us” were highlights for me, moments of crowd unity where you feel that collective upsurge of anticipation running like an electric cord through everyone. Another highlight was that opening barrage of cuts that had the crowd erupting & heaving in a tremendous block, all sweat elbows & arms raised high, some girl’s long hair stuck in my mouth, my shoelaces coming untied and my shoe half-off, my ankle scraped up, feeling the air crushed out of my lungs by people in front of and behind me, helping up people from the ground every third song, watching people lose their friends/partners in sudden crowd-shifts, epileptastic strobe lights stunning everyone. Those first ten minutes were total chaos-joy, yum.
     Another show highlight was simply the crowd itself. Completely intoxicating how the dancy ecstatic energy of everyone around me was spiced & made more complex by the aggro-melancholia inherent in C.C music. You wanted to pogo joyfully but also somehow act out the dystopic shadow-scrape that thundered out of the speakers — writhe around, rip someone’s clothes, whatever. I remember at one point near the end of the band’s first or second encore feeling someone bucking and knocking against my back and then shoulder. I looked over at this tall gothy woman just going at it with these inciting flails moves, clearly either wanting someone to knock back or just loving the feel of making harder, edgier body contact. I was initially a little annoyed, but soon accepted it: I can totally understand why anyone would want to dance like that at a C.C. show — frankly I’m surprised there wasn’t more of it.
     What else? I’m probably missing a ton, but I try not to capture everything when I write about live shows, just the moments that hit me hardest. Oh yeah, three fucking encores! I wasn’t prepared for that. Oh & near the end there was this gorgeous moment with the screaming+clapping crowd noise amplified and pumped back through the P.A. (or maybe it was C.C.’s own noise-loop?), hitting us in blissful noise-storm crescendo; meanwhile that enigmatic picture of the young girl from the cover of the second C.C. record flickered, flickered, her sad strange face looming over the dazed crowd.
     Damned good show. Magic spells, dark & lovely magic spells.

 
 
All writing © copyright C. Way / Snailcrow.com 2011

     Maybe it was breathless reads of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame or The Scarlet Pimpernel when we were young & impressionable. Maybe it was Toulouse-Lautrec, Henry Miller, Moulin Rouge! or An American in Paris. Hell, maybe it was Looney Tunes’ Pepé Le Pew. Whether our formative encounters of Paris came from the printed page, the canvas, or film, most of us, I think, arrive there with a little bit of extra luggage in tow: all the hopes, dreams, notions and misconceptions that we’ve built up inside us for years of what the City of Lights will be like. As for me, I lugged a whole separate cargo-plane’s worth of the stuff: hundreds of mini fantasy-Parises built up inside me, mini-Parises stuffed sparkly into little snowglobes, clicking around like marbles in my brain. The magic happened when all these Parises spilled out of my imagination and completely scattered across the tangly streets of the real thing, knocking into cathedral doors and falling down métro stairs and sewer grates — when my private inner Parises mingled with the city’s realities and together created a composite Paris. This is the Paris I came to love, the one architected by my long-nurtured fantasies and actual experiences.  (Read More . . .)

     The third bit of this travelogue (part one here; part two there) was originally set aside for the visual-arts. I had an idea to assemble, in a loose narrative essay, some of the most beautiful things I’d seen in Paris, whether framed & hanging in museums, pedestalled in the Jardin des Tuileries, carved into old buildings’ facades, wrought from iron in door-knockers’ visages and gates’ dense scrollwork, sprayed in graffiti’s curl and code, or arranged in the symmetry of the flower-lined paths of gardens. But then I got to thinking about gardens, how not all of them are so symmetrical and arranged, and eventually decided to take part three and change tack.
     A little backstory is in order:
     My girlfriend and I were in Versailles, walking towards the Petit Trianon, in search of Marie Antoinette’s charming faux-medieval hamlet. We were on a lush path, winding along a snaky stream, surrounded by trees and growth that felt different from what we’d seen on the main Versailles grounds. We drank in the view, and my girlfriend made some remark appreciative of the surrounding “English garden” style. I asked her what she meant, and she explained it to me: how the English style’s scaled smaller than the grander French garden style, is more relaxed, sweeping, less constrained and formalized; more about abundance & burgeoning & little ornaments called “follies” (think fake grottoes and bridges and little temples). I thought a lot about that, about how many of the gardens we’d been in so far in Paris were beautiful because controlled, with highly-defined symmetries & geometries, low sculpted hedges, stout cone-tree topiary. But this part of the Versailles garden, this was different, less grid than ramble, and it seemed to me to be gain in beauty and soothing aura from being allowed to breathe, stretch out and sprawl.
     There’s actual planning in an English-style garden of course — it’s not just a vegetal free-for-all — but the plan is to ensure one doesn’t notice the plan, or focus unduly on geometry & symmetry. The idea’s to create a calming simulacrum of nature untrammeled (this is just what I needed, having found myself vaguely disconcerted by the grand-scale formalities of the Versailles grounds: too much held breath and tense muscles, all those clipped branches straight plantings, like thousands of people ordered to stand perfectly still). Doing my own research later, I found there’s a subtype of English Garden know as the cottage garden, which is even more informal, featuring asymmetrical path-work and an encouragement of grass and shrubs to cross boundaries with flower-beds.
     And so in the spirit of the English cottage garden, here’s part three newly-conceived, not so much essay as seed-scatter of distinct Paris art-impressions offered in loose meander, circuitously pathed together and hubbed at occasional follies, weedy and a little overgrown, thick with hiding-places and benches & rogue veggie patches:
 (Read More . . .)

     If you travel to Paris an ascetic, you come back an epicure. If you go there an epicure, you come back a hedonist. And if, god help you, you go to Paris a hedonist, well, you’re not coming back. Come the hour of departure you’ll be gobbling ganache in the back-room of some confectionery, rifling through rues for one last macaron shop, or just sitting in some square, serenely feasting on the fresh memory of how a tomato or chanterelle or asparagus spear startled you into new recognition of a food you thought could not surprise you.
     Of course, we do come back — bellies full, livers bruised — but some part of us never really does in quite the same way; this of course holds true for any place we visit that deeply moves us. We come back with some faculty or sense transformed, and that changed part of us is perhaps the most satisfying souvenir we can hope for when we travel. Maybe it’s the texture of the pillars in the Place de la Concorde or the brocade wall-coverings in Versailles that gives us new eyes; maybe it’s a week of being balmed in the honey of spoken French that gives us new ears. Maybe some lingering walk through the medieval Ancien Cloître Quartier’s street-tangle awakens us to history, opens it within us like a nova, revealing to us the depth of ages, a gift of an awakened sense of what has preceded us. All these things and more were true to some extent for me, but the simplest way I’ve come to feel altered by Paris is in my relationship to food, drink, and all the collected table pleasures of texture, vision, taste and smell.
 (Read More . . .)

     I was in Paris with my girlfriend recently, first time for both of us. And yes, yes, every single thing that’s said is true. The bread, the wine, the cheese, the markets, the veggies, the haricots verts, the chocolate & desserts, the views, the history, the grands boulevards, the Art Nouveau, the monuments, the métro (I love living in New York, love its subways, but 468 stations and 24/7 don’t give license for running a broke, broke-down, filthy public transport), the museums, the fashion, the beautiful people, the ugly people, the chainsmoking hipsters, the prampushing families, the squares, the jardins, the light at 5pm, at 10am, at goddamned _:__ _m, the gutters, the homeless, the doggies, the birdshit — you fall in love with it all whether you want to or not, are jetlagged or not, are homesick or squabbling with your partner or nervous about how wretched your french is or not; christ, you end up falling in love with the spit hanging from a wino’s scabby lip by the time ParisLove is fever-raging in you. That city sexes you to pieces with both the myth of itself and the sensual richness of its actual substance and you get to where you don’t care where the line ends separating the ideal of it from the real of it. Somewhere between your first café dinner & your last pain au chocolat you fall headlong, succumbing to all the starry-eyed movie clichés with unembarrassed abandon.
     But before the love stuff, there are other stages. The fingernail-chewing what-if-they-laugh-at-our-American-asses stage. The mundane get-our-Euros-figure-out-Métro-ticket-machines-get-the-hell-out-of-Charles-De-Gaulle stage. The I’m-airsick-maybe-we-can-stay-in-and-watch-BBC-and-eat-cheese? stage. And because I’m sadistic, and I believe in build-up, I’m going to frog-march you through these stages (not all of them so ordinary, some in fact quietly thrilled or outright celebratory, just not that roseate Paris-Love) before I get to the sunset on the Seine in a snug rowboat (it was a big catamaran with tons of other folks on it, but still).  (Read More . . .)