[contextly_auto_sidebar id="wRRw3JLQoSxprdFO5k1TrAn3nktFHxu3"] LAST night I had the pleasure of seeing of my favorite current indie-rock groups play at the Belasco Theater in downtown Los Angeles. They remind me of several bands of past and present -- The Velvet Underground, the Feelies, Luna, the Clientele -- and have these gently transporting guitar harmonies. It will be hard to hear on a … [Read more...]
“Warhol Films” and Eleanor Friedberger
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="4kKdYZoxCdDYt0tlY8PDmS0mVgEBCQX8"] The Brooklyn Academy of Music will soon host an odd hybrid performance recently put on at UCLA's Royce Hall, Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films. Curated by my friend Dean Wareham, the show, which included legendary guitarist Tom Verlaine and Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and others, was mixed-to-brilliant, depending on who was … [Read more...]
How Do Visual Artists Survive? A Conversation
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="bf0FrQh0qNpnPUaXjMY1eGrcVaOQV5gc"] IT’S never been easy to make a living as a creative being, and recent years have made it even more difficult for anyone without a trust fund. So I’m quite cheered by the recent appearance of a handsome, useful book, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. Edited by the Brooklyn-based, Yale-educated artist Sharon Louden, it's … [Read more...]
Artists Struggle For Studio Space
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="npP8u6de6KK3cPDVFRq7dyGjkAQtokuK"] OFTEN I wonder how visual artists -- most of whom are not rich and not famous -- are faring while the global art market booms and auctions hit new heights. Solid data is hard to find, and much of the market is opaque. But an illuminating new story makes clear: Rising rents make it hard for artists in big cities to hold their … [Read more...]
Rick Moody and the Wingdale Community Singers
HERE at The Misread City, we’re longtime fans of Rick Moody’s novels (The Ice Storm), short stories (Demonology) and music writing (collected in On Celestial Music and posted generally on The Rumpus.) His admirers include Lydia Millett, Michael Chabon and fellow Puritan Thomas Pynchon.But we’ve only recently caught up with Moody’s folk/modernist band the Wingdale Community Singers, whose latest … [Read more...]
Brooklyn Composer Gabriel Kahane
I'VE been hearing about the rock songwriter and chamber music composer Gabriel Kahane for a few years now, and was glad to have the chance to speak to the hipster hero about his new piece, based on Hart Crane's The Bridge, which makes its West Coast debut this weekend.I also spoke to the esteemed Jeffrey Kahane and got a sense of how Gabe's eclecticism grew out of family tradition. HERE's my … [Read more...]
Ozu’s Films vs. Adrian Tomine
It's one of the best and most natural aesthetic marriages imaginable: The nuanced, meditative Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu and the nuanced, meditative comics Adrian Tomine, best known for the Optic Nerve series.Tomine has designed some covers for Ozu's lesser known films, The Only Son and There Was a Father. Here is more info on the films, which the Criterion Collection will release next week. … [Read more...]
The Found Footage Festival
SO much of what's supposed to be really funny ends up being just crude, shocking and sophomoric -- sometimes all three. that's why i was so blown away a few years ago when i attended the first national tour of the Found Footage Festival, which came to Hollywood's M Bar, not only was it genuinely hilarious, it was an original turn on both indie/DIY and on the trash-can aesthetic that runs from … [Read more...]
Birth of a Wine Shop
ANYONE interested in wine, or how a small business gets off the ground, should check out this series of youtube videos about the birth of colorado wine company -- conceived as the dream of a restless young couple in brooklyn who left everything they had in new york to drive to eagle rock, LA, to build it from the ground up.HERE is the first of the four little segments of the show "radical … [Read more...]