06/08/2013

Summer 2013: Cultural Berlin

Just because it’s summer it doesn’t mean you have to ditch your art interest, at least not in Berlin where luckily many galleries, museums and venues keep their doors open with interesting shows or festivals. To guide you through the summer jungle, The Blogazine has made a selection of some of the best things to see in Berlin this month.

Tanz im August

If you’re even the slightest into contemporary dance or performing arts in general, Berlin is really the place to be in August. The annual festival Tanz im August will spread out across the city with a program of performances by young talents as well as legends who made postmodern dance history, such as Trisha Brown Dance Company that will perform Early Works from the 1970’s; a trio of iconic choreographies by the legendary choreographer. Another giant is Steve Paxton, godfather of contact improvisation technique and a member of the genre-defining dance collective Judson Dance Theater in New York since the early 1960’s, performing his work Bound from 1982.
On different locations in Berlin, 15th-31st August

Kraftwerk at Sprüth Magers

Electronic pioneers and musical history makers Kraftwerk have been performing and presented in gallery and museum environments since the beginning in the early 1970’s, but this exhibition at Sprüth Magers is the first solo show dedicated to the group’s work in Berlin. On view is a 3D video and sound installation entitled 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, specially developed by Kraftwerk for the gallery in 2013, relating to their album titles since 1974. Creating the soundtrack to the digital age of the 21st century already four decades ago, their complete audio-visual performances and “sound-paintings” still pin down the information era and the love relationship between men and machines today, something that the show at Sprüth Magers also proves.

On view until 31st August.

Bas Jan Ader at Klosterfelde
After 18 years and 104 exhibitions, the Berlin gallerist Martin Klosterfelde is closing his gallery due to personal reasons. Don’t miss the last chance to visit Klosterfelde and see the solo exhibition In Search of the Miraculous by Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975), the Dutch-born and California-based artist who mysteriously disappeared in 1975 when he set sail on what was to be the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic, during the execution of the second part of his project, entitled as the exhibition. The show at Klosterfelde includes rarely before shown vintage photographs of two of his most important works – In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), where dark and shadowy images show Ader walking all night with a flashlight, and studies of his work I’m Too Sad to Tell You, revealing the artist in the act of crying. Intense and personal, exploring the frailty and instability of humanity – perfect to prevent the approach of a sun stroke.

On view until 10th August.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg – Image courtesy Klosterfelde/Bas Jan Ader 
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05/08/2013

Summer 2013: In love with summer

“You fish, swim, eat, laze around, and everyone’s so friendly. It’s such simple stuff, but… If I could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, I think I’d restart it like this. For everyone.”

If you live in Italy, when the first days of August come and the thermometer reaches around 35 degrees, you can see everything slow down. The cities are emptied and life becomes a sort of a slow motion movie. Everyone moves to the beach. Some may search for quiet, remote, tiny places far from the hustle and bustle of pompous seaside resorts, while others enjoy populating those towns that in winter are as deserted as Alaska, but in the summer appear to become centre of the universe.

Even though probably the only thing on your mind may be just the beach and the sea, the summer can also become the perfect occasion to catch up with all those things you have missed doing throughout the year. This is why, for these lazy summer days, we have tried to compile a list of things for you to do. From the books to read to festivals to attend, from designers to visit in their creative hubs to fashion exhibitions you should see to catch up with your style, from places to visit to food you should share with someone you really like, The Blogazine’s gift for your summer vacations is a compendium of curiosities and hidden treasures. We hope you enjoy it!

Rujana Rebernjak – Illustration Karin Kellner 
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31/07/2013

Horror at work

Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland’s second feature film, is a behind-the-scenes tale of a middle-aged sheepish English sound engineer named Gilderoy (also the name of an awkwardly flamboyant character in the Harry Potter universe) invited to the Continent to work on an Italian giallo exploitation/slasher horror flick. The production delights in the gruesome torture of witches in every conceivable manner (red hot poker vagina insertion is one of many) for which our reluctant protagonist has the responsibility of producing the appropriate sound effects.


Strickland’s clever twist is that he never actually shows us any of these scenes, we only hear them. Watermelons are hacked open, cabbages are stabbed and sprouts are torn out of radishes. As our imagination is stimulated to conjure these horrific scenes we are reminded of the integral and often underappreciated role of sound in cinema but also in everyday life.

However, sound is only but one of many of Berberian Sound Studio’s accomplishments. The characters, story, dialogue and atmosphere, are all meticulously woven together with great care, sensitivity and sophistication. We sympathize with Gilderoy’s homesickness as he reads his dear mother’s letters, reporting on the chiffchaffs nesting near their home. We struggle with him to summon the courage to demand reimbursement for his flight ticket, a curious subplot that builds up tension towards the film’s erratic climax. And it’s difficult to forget Gilderoy’s studio partner, the uncompromisingly macho chiseled Francesco, or the mesmerizingly beautiful bitchy Greek secretary, Elena. Though awkward, his power play with these characters is surprisingly watchable and even peculiarly sexy (in a master/slave sort of way), capturing a psychological tension that’s as complex as it is subtle. The culture clash motif (a stereotypically ‘civilized’ quiet uptight English man pitted against the loud expressive ‘barbaric’ Southern Europeans) is here merely an excuse for rich character exploration.

“These things happen, this is history, and a film director must be true,” says Santini, the production’s suave director, in one scene where he justifies the violence in his film. Strickland does the same, only he does it by capturing the far more interesting subtle power dynamics and ‘horrific’ tensions of the working environment, and he does so with sonic precision.


Peter Eramian 
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24/07/2013

Maxwell’s: 1978–2013

Following in the footsteps of the legendary New York City venues it rivaled — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City — Maxwell’s will close for good on July 31st, capping an incredible 35-year run. The Hoboken, New Jersey landmark is leaving on its own terms, having had enough with Hoboken’s rising condos and over-saturated frat culture. “If you think of Willie Mays playing outfield for the New York Mets,” booker/co-owner Todd Abramson recently told the NY Times, “I didn’t want us to wind up like that.”


Founded in 1978 by Steve Fallon when Hoboken was a still run-down shipping town best remembered for being the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, Maxwell’s created a tiny alternative scene that would flourish over the next few decades. On July 31st, the first two bands to play Maxwell’s — by The Bongos and ‘a’, the band featuring Bar/None founder Glenn Morrow — will grace the stage on last time. In between bands big (REM, Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins), small (The Stations, The New Marines) and somewhere in between (Hüsker Dü, Pavement) have stopped by. Many acts continued to return even as their careers outgrew the venue’s 200-seat capacity. The Replacements nearly burned the place down when 400 people showed up to one of their shows in 1986. Yo La Tengo had a tradition of playing for eight consecutive nights every Hanukkah. The Feelies played regularly.

“Steve treated bands well,” Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan told Vulture. “That shouldn’t be a revolutionary practice, but it was.”

Others stopped by: comedians, actors, writers. A few years back I saw Eugene Mirman open for Handsome Furs; he spent most of the evening chatting with the front row and handing out handmade business cards with crude one-liners written on them. I felt like I was in my living room and the drinks were cheaper than a bodega tallboy on the other side of the river. At Maxwell’s anything went. There aren’t many places like that left in New York City. After this week there won’t be any left in Hoboken.

Lane Koivu 
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19/07/2013

Copeland Book Market

Even though our beloved cities are turning into steam baths and there is nothing we would rather do than soak in some sun while listening to the ocean somewhere far far away, we might still be stuck working behind our desks and, thus, find ourselves in the need to fill our weekends with something jolly to do. Well, even if this phrase makes you even more angry for being still trapped on your working spot, there might be something nice for you to do. Well, at least if you’re in London.


Copeland Book Market is an art publishing fair, which inaugurated its third edition yesterday. For four days, a curated group of book publishers, ranging from the established editors producing high-end monographs to small independent groups making zines and low edition artist books, will present their work and projects. Additionally, the project has set itself the mission of presenting publishers and works that are usually under-represented in London, hosting an International Table with projects developed by publishers who were not able to attend the event. Hence, among the participants you can find established publishers like Book Works, Four Corner Books, Gottlund Verlag or Morel Books, standing next to small and fairly unknown publishers, in an eclectic mix of products and ideas.


The event is tipped of with a series of performances, lectures and talks, held in a café, especially designed for this year’s edition by Rob Chavasse and Tom Saunderson. Named Central Café, it will be situated at the heart of the market as a “site for recording invited conversations and sound pieces, introducing a live performative element and animating the ideas exchanged in a market environment”. Even though spending another weekend in the city might not be your dream, if you do manage to check out Copeland Book Market, you might actually find a nice book to read when you finally reach your summer destination.


Rujana Rebernjak 
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12/07/2013

One Dollar Dream Project

Not everyone uses Instagram for publishing photos of painted nails, animals decorated like Christmas trees or more or less funny parties with friends. Even if it’s mostly populated by people that use it just for fun, Instagram, sometimes, is successfull in the increasingly arduous challenge of making us think about what’s happening away from the safety of our homes, catching the eye for a good cause. Some months ago we casually ended up on the profile of Pachi Tamer (@cachafaz), an Argentinian creative director with a thick beard and a smiling face. In his free time he walks the streets of Austin, Texas – where he lives with his family -, Los Angeles, Medellìn and Mexico City, taking pictures of the homeless with his iPhone. His tecnique is simple and almost always winning: he approaches them, offers them a cigarette and lets them share their stories.


Like this, his 15K followers discovered the story of Jim, a German-descent homeless person, who has the dream of going at least once in his life to Oktoberfest. After approaching him, Pachi understood that his work could be used for a good cause: to raise money with the One Dollar Dream Project, as he named it, for making the homeless people’s dream come true. As the dream of Alexander, addicted to “basuco” – a drug produced from the waste of cocaine and used widely in the ghettos of South America –, who wanted to stop with the drug use. Nowadays he’s in rehab in Medellìn. Or the dream of Bob, who bought a bike with the money raised thanks to Paki’s project.



One of the lastest shared stories is the one of Jaret, that Pachi used for an experiment: he published a post in which he made followers believe that this young, astute-eyed homeless person took advantage of his confidence and stole his car. In the next post, Pachi unveiled the meaning of his experiment, answering to the people that accused poor Jaret of the act: “I lied to you guys. I’m sorry. Why did I do it? For two reasons. First of all, to those who thought you can’t trust people from the streets, I have to tell you that you’re wrong. Sometimes the people you know well are the ones that let you down. And second, never trust what people say about others. No matter how much you trust that person. Usually we get the wrong idea and judge others for something we hear from someone else”.

A lesson for everybody. And, if possible, a trip to knowing people and lives we would otherwise never know. A trip that may be better than any other trip we will ever do.



Antonio Leggieri 
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10/07/2013

Welcome to The Talkhouse

Wading through the internet to find a solid music site can at times be like digging holes in water — tiresome, pointless, frustrating. So imagine our surprise when we stumbled onto The Talkhouse, a new artist-to-artist site that lets artists review each other’s work. It’s pure music-geek paradise: Kanye West’s polarizing Yeezus dissected (and admired) by the ever-polarizing and cantankerous Lou Reed, The Fiery Furnace’s Matthew Friedberger taking a jealous stab at Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, Andrew W.K. eagerly writing about Robert Pollard being a “cum engine” of American songwriting. In an online culture where any dupe with a wifi connection can double as a self-righteous critic, it’s refreshing to see a site devoted to cultivating an engaging dialogue between musicians from different genres, many of whom would otherwise never cross paths. The Talkhouse is engaging and worth every scroll. Where else are you going to get Laurie Anderson talking about Animal Collective?

The Talkhouse is helmed by Michael Azerrad, the author who wrote the book about the 80s American underground (“Our Band Could Be Your Life”) as well as the defining biography on Kurt Cobain (“About A Son”). The concept, he said, was simple: get musicians writing. Here’s how it works: An artist picks an album to review, and the musician whose album is being reviewed has the open invitation to respond to the critique. Sadly, few do. (Kanye West responding to Lou’s review of Yeezus? Yes please.) Many of the writers and musicians on board have never written a review, disdain critics, and write pieces too long to ever appear in print. Thankfully, there are no lists or grades. Often the writers get off topic, which is kind of the point. Randy Blythe, the singer from the metal band Lamb of God, summed up Talkhouse’s sentiment nicely in his recent review of Crime and the City Solution’s American Twilight. “This is my first stab at being a ‘rock critic,’ a profession that normally makes me think of stabbing in an entirely different way.”

Lane Koivu 
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03/07/2013

De Keersmaeker & Charmatz: Partita 2 / Foreign Affairs

This weekend the second edition of Foreign Affairs, the international festival for theatre and performing arts, kicked off at Haus der Berliner Festspiele in Berlin. Prior to the big opening party on stage in the beautifully light-flooded theatre building by Fritz Bornemann, Partita 2, a dance performance by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz turned out to be one of the highlights of the opening weekend, competing with other big names such as William Forsythe and Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

De Keersmaeker, the Belgian choreographer who founded ROSAS and has inspired a whole generation of dancers since her debut with the 1982 production Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich, is still considered one of the most influential contemporary dance makers. In “Partita 2”, she meets Boris Charmatz from a younger generation of dancers who work between dance and choreography, visual arts and literature, in a duet to Bach’s well-known Partita Nr. 2 performed live on stage by the leading Belgian violinist Amandine Beyer, surrounded by a minimal set design by artist Michel François (whom The Blogazine wrote about here).

Before any of the dancers enters the stage, Beyer plays the score for 15 minutes in total darkness, a powerful introduction that sharps the senses before the dancers enter the naked stage. Running, jumping, skipping and turning, their dance is playful, spontaneous and improvisational yet strictly structured – a follow-the-leader of everyday movements. After an hour and 15 minutes of a three-way constellation of music, movement and space, the ray of light that has been accompanying the dancers in a slowly moving roundabout over the stage, finally flicks and sharply moves across the stage. A small stroke of set design genius by François, to finish off a beautiful and interesting piece.

Partita 2 was performed from 27th to 29th June as part of Foreign Affairs, which is running from 27th June to 14th July in several venues.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg – Image courtesy: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker & Boris Charmatz: Anne van Aerschot, opening of Foreign Affairs: Piero Chiussi, William Forsythe: Dominik Mentzos. 
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26/06/2013

Doug Aitken’s Cross-Country Extravaganza

Americans love to use travel as a vehicle for reinvention. Riffing on that theme, multimedia artist Doug Aitken has announced his latest project, a self-described “nomadic happening” that he’s calling Station to Station. Over the course of three weeks in September, a mind-bending creative circus will travel by train from New York to San Francisco, making ten stops along the way. You can see the dates for each stop below.


The idea behind Station to Station is to connect leading figures in art, music, film, literature, and food. Musicians signed on thus far include Ariel Pink, Eleanor Friedberger, Dirty Projectors, Twin Shadow, and Dan Deacon. Visual artists Peter Coffin, Kenneth Anger, Olaf Breuning, Meschac Gaba, Liz Glynn, Carsten Höller, Aaron Koblin, Ernesto Neto, and Jack Pierson will all be along for the ride, as will writers Dave Hickey, Barney Hoskyns, and Rick Moody. Chefs include Alice Waters and Leif Hedendal. More participants will be announced later this summer.


Station to Station is partly inspired by the travel writings of Joan Didion and Cormac McCarthy, and American road movies from the likes of David Lynch and Wim Wenders. Each stop will feature a veritable plethora of creative types doing atypical things across a kaleidoscope of multimedia platforms. According to the press release, the train will be transformed into a “kinetic light sculpture”. All proceeds will go to fund multi-museum arts programs in 2014. For more info, including a trove of cultural artifacts that inspired the project, visit the official website.

Quoting Aitken: “This is a fast moving cultural journey, a constant search over the new horizons of our changing culture. Grounded in some basic questions: Who are we? Where are we going? And, at this moment, how can we express ourselves? Our intention is to create a modern cultural manifesto.”

Mark your calendars:

09/06 New York, NY
09/08 Pittsburgh, PA
09/12 Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
09/14 Chicago, IL
09/16 Kansas City, MO
09/20 Lamy/Santa Fe, NM
09/22 Winslow, AZ
09/24 Barstow, CA
09/26 Los Angeles, CA
09/28 Oakland/San Francisco, CA

Lane Koivu 
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19/06/2013

Color Me Impressed: The Replacements Are Back

Part of the charm of The Replacements is that much of their genius strikes listeners as unintentional, almost as if they’re discovering their own potential right along with you. That, and they always seemed to be having more fun. When news broke last week that The ‘Mats would be playing their first shows in 22 years this summer at Riot Fests in Toronto, Chicago and Denver, I started to laugh. I’m sure they did too.

Given their reputation as rowdy drunks who couldn’t even follow their own directions, what’s most surprising is that The Replacements actually managed to do anything, let alone emerge as one of the most influential American underground bands of the last half century. Paul Westerberg nearly single-handedly redefined the term idiot savant the second he strapped on a guitar. 1984’s “Let It Be” is by far their best album, far removed from the sloppy hardcore beginnings of “Sorry Ma”, “Forgot To Take Out The Trash” (a genius album in its own right, but even better when looked at retrospectively from the context of the rest of their catalog) and a million steps ahead of their previous effort, 1983’s “Hootenanny”. “Let It Be” found The Replacements incorporating elements of Americana, folk, and heart-on-sleeve balladry to play off of their familiar drunken shenanigans. When they strike genius on tracks like “I Will Dare”, “Answering Machine”, and “Androgynous”, it can feel as if they did it by accident, especially when nestled next to tracks like “Gary’s Got A Boner” and “Black Diamond”.

“Tim” (1985) and “Pleased To Meet Me” (1987) are both brilliant albums that could’ve/should’ve landed the band in the big leagues, but The Replacements were always better than anyone when it came to sabotaging their own career. Violations ranged from refusing to make a watchable video for their radio-friendly singles (“Bastards of Young”, “Can’t Hardly Wait”) to showing up drunk, in overalls, to play on SNL. Their shows increasingly frustrated and confounded viewers; most of the time they played terrible covers of songs by T Rex, The Rolling Stones, and Lead Belly. R.E.M. kicked them off of a tour after discovering that the band had drank all of their liquor. And on and on.


After “Tim” things began to really fall apart. By 1987 Bob Stinson was out, apparently for (of all things) out-drinking and drugging the rest of the band. (He died in 1995.) As Westerberg increasingly sought more mainstream appeal (unintentionally paving the way for 90s alt bands like Goo Goo Dolls and Fuel in the process, not to mention his own solo career) the rest of the band balked. The band’s attempt at mainstream play later in their career can be painful to listen to. “All Shook Down”, their last album, is by all accounts a Westerberg solo album, and is vanilla compared to what came before it. Don’t expect to hear many of those songs on this tour.

Sure, there’s room for worry: They’re likely reuniting because they need the money; Tommy Stinson has now been in Guns ‘N Roses longer than The Replacements ever existed; Bob is dead, no one even knows if Chris Mars is on board. But fuck it: how can you not root for The Replacements? For those of us who were barely out of diapers the first time they called it quits, this is something of a second coming.

Lane Koivu 
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