Blog, Blog, Blog
Last weekend, soul-music outfit King Kahn and the Shrines played the Music Hall of Williamsburg. A friend had a spare ticket so I went.
What a great performance! There was not a single person in that wasn’t moving and/or shaking. The US tour continues into June and July.
Further to yesterday’s post about Nick Zedd, where I called Zedd a “Cinema of Transgression icon,” it reminded me of one of my favorite strategies for playing trivia games, such as bar trivia or even Trivial Pursuit. Whenever you’re presented with a question about a very specific and obscure topic, try to select the most obvious answer.
For example:
Which “Yippie” was expelled as a sophomore from Classical High School in Worcester, Massachusetts after questioning the existence of God?
This question, in the course of the game, seems like a brain buster. But once you realize that the question isn’t about who got expelled from school and that it’s simply asking you to name a Yippie, you’re set. The most obvious answer is Abbie Hoffman, as he is the most famous Yippie and probably the only one you’ll ever need to know as part of your trivia experience.
Similarly, I was once in asked, “How many sexual mates do swans have in their lifetime?” I answered one because it was the smallest number. It turned out that I was right. Swans mate for life.
I mention these tips because, should anyone ever ask you the name of a “Cinema of Transgression” filmmaker, you can safely ignore any part of the question that follows “Cinema of Transgression” and confidently answer, “Nick Zedd!”
Unless it’s Beth B. Then forget everything I just told you.
Nick Zedd, a seminal figure in a New York filmmaking movement he called “The Cinema of Transgression,” will be in Brooklyn’s Fire Proof Gallery for the opening of The Return of the End of New York: Paintings by Nick Zedd with works by John O’Grodnick. The opening reception is at the Brooklyn Fire Proof Gallery on Friday, April 25, 6:00 to 9:00 PM, and the show continues for one day only on April 26, noon to 6:00 PM, with a screening to start at 7:00 PM.
If you’re a film scholar and want to teach your students the films of Nick Zedd, please send them to this event because you might not be able to screen his films in class without someone asking for money. In 2012, Zedd, or someone claiming to be him, wrote me to ask that I pay him for screening some of his films in a class I taught in 2006.
Dear Sir,
I was flattered to see that my films were included in your course New York Independents.
I was wondering if I might be monetarily compensated for the screening of my work to the students.
Best Wishes,Nick Zedd
This remains the only time a filmmaker ever asked me to pay for screening his or her films in class. That’s probaly because instructors are allowed to screen audiovisual works in face-to-face classroom teaching without securing public performance rights, and copyright holders asking for payment is a futile exercise.
But because his request was so courteous, I might go to the show this weekend after all.
In the last two weeks, Long Island City has hosted at least two events attesting to the changes in the neighborhood.
The first was the April 5th opening at the Jeffrey Leder Gallery for Whitewashed, a show featuring the artists of the 5Pointz Aerosol Arts Center. In the middle of the night late last year, the owner of the property famously painted over the graffiti with white paint. The graffiti that adorned the building for years made 5Pointz a regular stop for visitors to Long Island City, but the owner feared that preservationists might make it impossible to tear down the building and block a pending residential development on the property.
The opening for Whitewashed was much more festive event than most other openings at Leder’s gallery. Visitors so packed the two-story brownstone building that about twenty people had to leave before I could squeeze into the gallery space. A good number of the artists were also selling some prints of their work, and the gallery staff were busy processing sale after sale of those works, affordably priced between $20 and $50. Adding to the dynamic energy of the evening were about a half-dozen of the featured artists making drawings on-the-spot. By the time I left, the room had an noticeable smell of paint, all coming from those ubiquitous paint pens.
On Friday night, the Center for Holographic Arts threw a farewell party in the bottom two floors of the Clock Tower Building at Queens Plaza. The space had been remarkably transformed from their previous show last month, which had to close early to make way for this farewell party and exhibition. Both the ground floor and the basement were packed with holographic and stereoscopic works, ranging from small postcard-sized still photographs to fifty-foot–long wall projections. The amount of work needed to stage this show was even more remarkable when you consider that this exhibition was for one night only. The “Holocenter,” as most of us have come to call it, has to vacate this space by the end of this month because, according to the Center’s staff, the space was sold to developers.
The two shows represent the changes in Long Island City that everyone with a stake in the neighborhood has anticipated for years. The abandoned industrial buildings had once allowed upstart artists to establish studios and gallery spaces. When I first moved to New York in 2001, I had heard of Long Island City emerging as an arts center. Although part of that was due to the Museum of Modern Art moving its primary gallery space to Queens in 2002[1], it was the artists who occupied the buildings that gave the neighborhood its excitement.
Today, the situation is different. The financial crisis of 2008 is a fading memory for real estate developers and well-heeled buyers. There are apartment buildings everywhere, and those apartments are fetching stratospherically crazy prices. At one time, I was able to name the high-rise apartment buildings on Center Boulevard: City Lights, the East Coast, and the Avalon. But now, I can’t do that anymore. There’s too many of them. After three decades of false starts as the “next big place,” the value of the land for residential development is forcing a fundamental change to the neighborhood. Over the course of a generation, Long Island City has evolved from industrial district to post-industrial desert to residential neighborhood.
At least it was nice to say good-bye.
If I recall correctly, MoMA QNS was to remain as a secondary gallery space after the midtown Manhattan location reopened. Today, it houses a research center. ↩
Speaking of art spaces in Long Island City making way for real estate developments, the Center for the Holographic Arts, which currently occupies the ground floor of the Clock Tower Building in Long Island City, will be leaving on April 13.
Before they vacate, they are staging one last party on April 11. There will be food, music, adult beverages, and, of course, holographic art. Tickets are available for a donation, via Eventbrite.
A notable highlight of this space is the subterranean lounge, located in an old bank vault, although the last time I was there it kind of smelled like pee.
Earlier this year, the owner of the 5Pointz building and site destroyed the work of dozens of graffiti artists by covering the walls with white paint. This was the final step in clearing the site of the artists for a planned real estate development project.
Beginning this Saturday, April 5, the artists whose work was destroyed will be part of an exhibition at the Jeffrey Leder Gallery in Long Island City.
Jeffrey Leder Gallery is excited to present Whitewash, an exhibit featuring 12 artists that worked on or photographed the 5Pointz walls for many years. They have created artworks that explore their reactions to having their and others’ art painted over – Whitewashed.
The gallery is located on 45th Road, in Long Island City, just steps from the 5Pointz site. The opening is on April 5, from 6:00 – 9:00 PM. Because it’s not a school night, I recommend making your own after-party at the Shannon Pot, a bar that relocated down the street to make room for this same development at the 5Pointz site.
Because we have the Internet, we can always lookup what days Easter and Passover fall. But since I like to know how things work, I wanted to figure out whether Easter will be in March or April. Also, when I used to create the schedule for the McCarren Softball league, I wanted to figure out whether I had to schedule a holiday for Easter weekend or for someone’s Seder.
As far as I can tell, there are three kinds of holidays that we observe in the United States. Although most of this information is well-known, I’m posting it should this blog survive the fall of the American Empire and of Google.
First, there are those that fall on the same day of the year every year. Those would include New Year’s Day (January 1), Independence Day (July 4), Christmas Day (December 25), Valentine’s Day (February 14), May Day (May 1), St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), and Cinco de Mayo (5 of May). Those last two are fun, not only because those are both days of intemperance, but because they always fall on the same day of week as each other. Yes, really!
Second, there are those holidays that fall on a certain day of the week of a specific month. For example, Memorial Day is always on the last Monday of May as Labor Day is always on the first Monday in September. We do the same thing with other federal holidays, such as President’s Day (third Monday of February) and Martin Luther King Day (third Monday of January). The only exception to this Monday thing, of course, is Thanksgiving, which is on the fourth Thursday of November, not the last one as is commonly believed. Retailers love it when November has five Thursdays because it extends the holiday shopping season.
Third, there are the kinds of holidays that require the help of celestial bodies. The start of each season is not on the same day as last year, although it’s pretty close. The start of the northern-hemisphere spring is on the vernal equinox, around March 21, as the northern autumn starts on the autumnal equinox, also around September 21. But it’s never the same day because the seasons are a function of our planet’s orbit around the sun. When it reaches a certain point in that orbit, a new season has started. Our calendar doesn’t measure this exactly, but it’s pretty darn close.
Once you figure out the March equinox, you can start to figure out Easter and Passover, but you’ll need to figure out when you’ll see the next Paschal full moon. You have some options:
With this information, you can determine that Passover begins on the first day before this full moon. The Seder will be on the evening of this first full moon.
Easter is trickier because the Paschal moon is calculated from a table, not the moon itself. This is presumably because the full moon might appear different, depending on your position on Earth. Either way, Easter is the first Sunday after this full moon. If the Paschal Moon falls on a Sunday, we wait a week.
As complex as this sounds, Easter and Passover are always in the spring and the moon above will be waning during your Seder or Easter egg hunt.
Last night at the NARS Foundation in Sunset Park, Brooklyn was the opening reception for Through the Vortex, a show curated by my friend Mollie Flanagan, and an open studio for the artists in residence.
One of the artists there who blew our minds was Sophie Kahn. She uses a 3D scanner to photograph people’s faces and bodies. Since the process is quite slow, it also captures their movements. She then prints those 3D photographs into sculptures.
As she explained her process to my friend Eileen, who I photographed admiring one of the Kahn’s sculptures, and I, three-dimensional photography captures the body in ways that run counter to our traditions of photographic the human body. My reaction, which she affirmed, was that her work evokes the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge for the three-dimensional age. She’s been doing this a while so she has certainly refined her work.
Speaking of Muybridge, Thom Anderson made essay film of his life back in 1975. It will be screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in mid-April.
On Saturday, Ten10 Studios in Long Island City hosted three music performances at its 47th Road studio space. As the show was literally around the corner from home, I went to snap about forty photos of the night’s performances.
The night was capped by a performance by Ken Butler, a renowned music instrument builder, who played about a dozen handmade instruments he built over the years. All of the instruments are built from found objects, as you’ll see below, and converted to musical instruments through the strategic placement of a contact microphone. He would also use a sound processor to loop percussive sounds as a back beat.
It’s both incredible and empowering to see how many possible musical instruments Butler made with the everyday objects.
Light Industry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, will be screening an early film by Jon Jost, one of the most under-appreciated filmmakers of American Independent cinema.
The screening is on Tuesday, February 18, at 7:30 PM.
