Category: Culture

John Weir has a new book – finally!

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John Weir has a new book. It’s been a while, and although I can’t say I’ve been able to hold my breath all these years, I admit that I’m almost surprised that it won’t be called “Mr. Novel”. That’s the form of address, John jokes, which many of his friends have used to describe the long-awaited successor to “The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket”.
if you know John, the actual title bears its own promise. It’s “What I did Wrong” and it will be published by Viking Press on March 27.
The book is already on the top of my reading stack, even though I can’t see it yet.
Yes, there will be New York readings. I can vouch for John’s natural comic talents and I’ll probably be at the first event at the very least. This comes from someone who tries to avoid the form like the pest – unless its John Weir or Gore Vidal.
Monday March 27 at 7 PM
Half King
West 23rd Street between 10th and 11th Aves
Manhattan
Wednesday March 29 7 PM
Barnes & Noble
6th Avenue and West 22nd Street
Manhattan
Friday March 31 8 PM
[with two other authors]
The Lucky Cat
245 Grand Street between Driggs and Roebling
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

[image of cover from Viking via Amazon]

“Sophie Scholl-The Final Days”

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day? If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass – then, yes, they deserve their downfall.
– from the first leaflet of the White Rose

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Barry climbing the stairs of the light court in Friedrich von Gärtner’s 1840 main building of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität*

The German film “Sophie Scholl-The Final Days” will be at the Film Forum at least through next Thursday. I don’t have to draw too much of an analogy here (it will come naturally enough to anyone who sees the movie), but it should not be missed by anyone sensitive to what is going on around us today.
Sure, we don’t yet have a provocation equal to that which created the White Rose inside wartime Nazi Germany, but today the almost non-existent opposition to the current regime in Washington is still embarassingly out of proportion to the evil it represents.
Even without official government controls our press is dead, and even though they haven’t been put in a camp as a threat to the state, the Democrats have been voting Republican for years. Both “estates” have been doing the work of the regime unbidden, giving it an apparance of legitimacy it would otherwise lack entirely.
In Germany sixty-three years ago political opposition was punishable with death. At the university in Munich a handful of courageous students and one professor decided that even the record of their resistance was worth such a sentence. They had few illusions that their work might bring down the governement or impact it in any significant way.
Today in the U.S. we haven’t yet been complicit in the death of millions, although such big numbers are totally irrelevant to a single grieving mother or child. Our own political murders are real enough already. But are any of us be able to match the morality and the courage of Sophie Scholl and her friends? The overwhelming evidence of the extraordinary extent of our cooperation with this deadly, pathological White House gang, or at best our indifference, lethargy and even our incompetence as its opponents on any level, appears to give us an answer.

*
In 2002 Barry and I visited the university, where I had spent some time in the early 60’s. I lived on Willi-Graf-Straße. This image shows the central hall where Hans and Sophie Scholl stacked most of their leaflets and strew the remainder over the railing onto the floor below.

[the text at the top was taken from The Shoah Education Project]

“Do You Think I’m Disco” at Longwood Arts Project

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[the view inside the entrance to the show, with Carrie Moyer’s 2005 “Rock the Boat” silkscreen installed on the wall]

We visited a show at the Longwood Arts Project at Hostos this afternoon, just in time to tell about it before it closes on Saturday.
Because of the name, “Do You Think I’m Disco”, I expected it would be interesting and a lot of fun, but I wasn’t prepared for the quality of the work.
The exhibition, curated by the gallery’s director, Edwin Ramoran, is described as the first survey of its kind to focus on the impact of the dance music culture of the 70’s on contemporary art. To be honest, thirty years ago I was totally distracted by the ecstatic dancing, the drugs and the sex. It was all very, very good. Somehow I missed the art.
I got another chance today, to at least see what the culture had wrought, and anyone else who can make it to the Grand Concourse in the next couple of days can do the same. I really recommend stopping in. I want to upload some more images in the next day or so, but since the show is about to end I wanted to get the word out tonight.
By the time I got to The Bronx I had forgotten what the list of artists had looked like when we first heard about the show weeks ago. I really respect the fact that the art comes from older artists with a reputation and the very young and unexhibited, but most of the conversation inside the gallery was dominated by the generation in the middle. Only because Barry and I get around so much were we able to recognize a good number of them, but interestingly almost none of the works themselves were familiar.
Holland Cotter reviewed the installation early in February. An excerpt:

On the subject of gender, Larissa Bates, Christian Marclay, Edwina White, Megan Whitmarsh and the team of Jayson Keeling and Kalup Linzy have intriguingly varied things to say. And if queer culture is the show’s lingua franca, it takes many forms, with references to erotica (paintings by Boris Torres); H.I.V. and AIDS (a fine film by Derek Jackson and a conceptual piece by Iván Monforte that offers free H.I.V.-testing at the gallery); and spirituality.
This last element finds a voice in one of the exhibition highlights, Mr. Monforte’s short film titled ”And I’m Telling You,” in which a terrific gay gospel singer, Marcellus Ari, delivers an a cappella rendition of a love song from ”Dreamgirls.” Written to be sung by a woman to a man, the song is almost absurdly passionate; it leaves Mr. Ari vocally and emotionally exposed. And when he’s finished, he seems momentarily dazed as if pondering what he has just done.

A couple of teasers:

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Phil Collins The louder you scream, the faster we go 2005 video [still from video installation]

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Shirley Wegner Soldier Dancing on Ruins 2005 DVD [still from video installation]

Paul P. with Ropac at Armory, Selwyn at LA ART

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Paul P. Untitled 2006 watercolor on paper 27.5″ x 20″ [large detail of installation]
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Paul P. was represented during last week’s fairs by at least two galleries on nearly opposite sides of the earth. The image above, shown here with a pop-up detail, appeared at the Armory show in the booth of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac (Paris and Salzburg), the two paintings below were shown at LA ART by Marc Selwyn Fine Art (Los Angeles).
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Paul P. [details unavailable]

I’ve written about Paul P. before, so I don’t have to go on here about how much I like his work. Besides, these images speak for themselves, especially if you know the source of the artist’s inspiration.