03/04/2013

Taking Hip Hop Back to the Streets

Taking Hip Hop Back to the Streets

Hip hop has always been site-specific, but Jay Shells is taking things a step further. The New York-based artist is hitting the streets, taking famous rap lyrics and screwing them on street posts at specific locations all over New York City. “Alot of rappers call out their block,” Shells said in the promotional video below. “When you’re on a corner that’s called out in a song, I think it’s cool to know that.”


The ongoing project, “Rap Quotes”, consists of homemade but very official-looking bright red street signs. For example, you can find Busta Rhymes’ line “Yes, yes y’all, you know we talkin’ it all, see how we bringin the street corner to Carnegie Hall” outside the entrance to — you guessed it — Carnegie Hall. Mos Def’s boast that he’s “Blacker than midnight at Broadway and Myrtle” can now be found at that exact spot under the JMZ line in Brooklyn. Outside the Marcy Houses, a Jay Z lyric reads, “Cough up a lung where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothin’ nice.”

Shell’s big red street signs sport lyrics from New York legends Nas, Mos Def, Big Daddy Kane, Jim Jones, Big Noyd, Kanye, Kool G Rap, Capital Steez, KRS One, GZA, Redman, Guru, Capital Steez, and many others. You can follow Rap Quotes’s progress on Twitter. “It became sort of a scavenger hunt,” Shells said, before adding, “I think people will steal these. Within a week, they’ll be gone.”

Lane Koivu

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20/03/2013

The Believer Turns Ten

The Believer Turns Ten

The Believer celebrated its tenth anniversary at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village last week, and they’ll soon be having another party, this time at Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, on March 25th. The celebration at Le Poisson Rouge featured guest spots from editors Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, Ed Park, Sheila Heti, and a hilarious and insightful reading about the absurdities of day labor from noted author and Believer contributor Nick Hornby. It also included, to the delight of many, a dessert table overflowing with cupcakes, cream-puff strawberries, carrot cake, and free issues of the magazine’s 10th anniversary issue. It was delicious.

The Believer is ten. Woo hoo. So what’s the big deal?

Any print publication that can survive ten years in today’s publishing climate should give themselves a toast. But a literary magazine that routinely publishes things like reviews of forgotten foreign films, profile pieces on children’s books from the 1940s, innovative poetry and interviews, and an advice column by Amy Sedaris? They deserve the keys to the liquor store.

The Believer was founded by Dave Eggers and Vida, and it features regular columns by notable writers Nick Hornby, Daniel Chandler, and legendary cultural critic Greil Marcus. The magazine serves as something of a defiant reaction to a diminishing publishing industry and a diminishing demand for physical objects: it’s beautifully printed on heavy paper, in full color, thick at the spine, and full of thoughtful writing from serious writers who refuse to take themselves too seriously. “As you all know, the publishing industry is booming,” Julavits said at Le Poisson Rouge, “so we’re not going to sit up here and ask you to subscribe for a year, tell that it’s only $40, or that we’ll be throwing a raffle for those who sign up tonight.” The raffle included a week-long email conversation with Hornby, in which he agreed to answer any question about anything. Anyone who’s thumbed through “High Fidelity” has a pretty good idea about just how sweet that would be.

The night also found Interviews Editor Sheila Heti caught in a semi-awkward interview with comic artist Gabrielle Bell and author Amanda Filipacchi about the nature of creativity, habits, and where they would all be without an outlet for their artistic urges. “On the street,” Bell admitted, adding yet another reason to be grateful that The Believer continues to persevere against all odds.

Lane Koivu

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14/03/2013

Knitting Peace

Knitting Peace

“Is it possible to knit peace?” This is the question behind the new performance by Cirkus Cirkör: a Swedish contemporary circus that aims to promote the circus as a contemporary art form worldwide. Since 2005 Cirkus Cirkör has approached the contemporary circus as an art and pedagogical tool to promote and discuss issues of our contemporary society. Directed by Tilde Björfors, Knitting Peace follows this direction and proposes a parallel between the dangerous life of the contemporary circus artists and our condition as a human being. The performance asks: Why would anyone choose to spend their entire life walking on a thin line?

The answer is left to the emotional stage where each acrobat challenges his/her own aspirations by walking or flying on threads. Circus’ chains and trapezes are replaced by white knitted threads that resemble the thin-line on which we constantly live our lives.


The artists involved are five of the most world-renowned contemporary circus artists: the handstand and acrobatic dancer Jens Engman, the live-knitting Aino Ihanainen: the ring acrobats and rope equibrists Ilona Jäntti and Matleena Laine; and the aerial acrobats and singer Alexander Weibel Weibel. Knitting Peace is an astonishing performance and the artists look like spiders on a stage. They entwine themselves in knit-human compositions that seem to suggest that the only form of liberation for us is to be woven all together.


Knitting Peace will be held at the Dansen Hus in Stockholm on the 15th, 16th and 17th March 2013.

Marco Pecorari – Images Mats Bäcker, Mattias Edwall 

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12/03/2013

David Bowie Is Alive and Well

David Bowie Is Alive and Well

When the Flaming Lips released a song called “Is David Bowie Dying?” in 2011, they seemed to be highlighting what was in the back of everybody’s mind. Ever since suffering a heart attack onstage in Germany in 2004, David Bowie has remained more elusive than Thomas Pynchon, cropping up only for the occasional fashion show photo or Arcade Fire concert. No tours, no new songs, no albums, no interviews. For a while he seemed to vanish into thin air. Where was he? Was he ok? Was David Bowie dying? Until very recently, the question seemed appropriate.

The Next Day, his first album of new material since 2003, finds Bowie alive and as relevant as ever. “Here I am, not quite dying,” he chants in the title track, the first of the album, picking away at the inevitability of his own mortality, and the public’s fascination with it. The Next Day is deeply rooted in Bowie’s own eclectic past, from the bizarrely re-appropriated Heroes cover to “Where Are We Now?”, a deeply moving “Five Years”-esque ballad that finds the elder statesman looking back whimsically on his mid-70s Berlin heyday. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” doesn’t hit the same emotional high-water mark, but it works as a flashy radio single, and the Lynchian video finds Bowie and actress Tilda Swinton being stocked by celebrity vampires that look eerily familiar to Ziggy Stardust. For her part, Tilda Swinton looks like The Man Who Fell to Earth, and by the end it’s hard to tell exactly who’s who.


The Next Day has the air of a final statement, but maybe that’s because many of us had already written him off as long gone, retired, dead. In the last few weeks plenty of comparisons have been made to Bob Dylan, whose late-career resurgence seems to have no end. In addition to a new album, there’s also “David Bowie Is…“, an upcoming exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum that will run from March through August. But unlike Dylan, Bowie has no plans to tour, give interviews, or otherwise open himself up to the public. Maybe having a heart attack on stage has something to do with it, but either way it’s refreshing to see a guy who’s spent most of his life endlessly toying with the notion of celebrity identity seems content to step back from the limelight and let his work stand on its own this time around.


Lane Koivu

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08/03/2013

Clet – The Man on the Streets

Clet – The Man on the Streets

Have you seen them? Road signs modified with stickers. They’re works by Clet Abraham – an artist from Brittany, based in Florence – who has for few years been globetrotting the Italian and European cities with an unusual mission: attaching removable stickers to road signs, to modify their meaning without making them unrecognizable to drivers. From Bologna to Paris, passing through Valencia: Abraham’s nightly guerrilla changed “no entry” signs into pillories that imprison a man’s head and hands, the T indicating a “no through road” into a cross for Jesus Christ, the triangle that gives warning for the presence of an asymmetric bottleneck and the arrow indicating a one way direction, together, into two lovers and a pierced heart.


The 46-year-old artist declared that his art, rather than an hymn to anarchy, is a motivation for reflecting on the chains that tie modern society and its citizens, forced to do things because of the invisible road signs that give the obliged directions to everything. Judging by the presence of religious references, especially Christ and angels, Abraham seems also to attempt a critique to the religions, and gives life to a personal warning oriented towards local administrations, that often waste public space for useless buildings and architectural projects. You see, the ingredients for visibility are served: a smart, easy-to-use creativity spiced with messages of social, political and religious denunciation.


Abraham is, for definition, a street artist, but he considers his art less damaging and invasive than the graffitis, as an art form. Thinking about it, he is not much different from the Writers, especially from the most exhibitionist ones. He issues interviews, makes photos of his works and posts them on his Facebook fan page, followed by more than 25K fans. In 2010, he placed a self-portrait in the Loeser collection of Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, in place of a Bronzino painting that was previously moved. Just few years earlier, in 2003, an unknown english graffiti artist entered into the Tate Gallery in London and casually hung his painting as if nothing had happened. You can bet that beyond all his good causes, when he carried out this little act, Abraham desired for himself even just a little piece of the fame that the graffiti artist had gained with his deed. His name was Bansky.


Antonio Leggieri

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06/03/2013

Morrissey and the Media: What Difference Does It Make?

Morrissey & Media: What Difference Does It Make?

It’s been a tumultuous week for Morrissey, even by Morrissey’s standards. First, he issued a press release stating that his sold-out show at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 28th will be the arena’s first entirely meat-free concert. Pretty impressive, yes, only the Staples Center doesn’t seem to agree. He followed that up by canceling an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show after being informed that the program would also feature the cast of Duck Dynasty, a reality show about a family who sells duck calls and decoys to hunters. Morrissey referred to the cast as “animal serial killers”, Kimmel blasted him for canceling last-minute, and a feud ensued. And if that weren’t enough, he also gave an email interview with Rookie, a teenage girl’s magazine, in which he advised readers, among other things, that “Life is a very serious business for the simple reason that nobody dies laughing.”

Funny, nobody seems to remember Morrissey’s last single.

The Moz has been overtly controversial for most of his career, and pro-animal since the age of 11. He named The Smiths’ sophomore album Meat Is Murder and even forbade his own bandmates from being photographed eating meat. “The most political gesture you can make is to refuse to eat animals,” he quipped in that same Rookie interview. “It was so when I was a teenager, and is still the case now.” True to his word, he’s blasted Paul McCartney for allowing himself to be knighted by the Queen (due in part to her immense fur collection), refused to play in Canada because of their gruesome seal-slaughtering pastime, and often refers to Madonna as McDonna. For obvious reasons, of course.

He’s also a man of sharp contradiction. He toured extensively in the United States while the nation was engaged in two corrupt international wars, has made several racist comments over the course of his career (he once called the Chinese a “subspecies”), and said, in the Rookie interview, that “If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.” Right.

So . . . Morrissey loves animals, despises humans? Got it.

Confused? Don’t worry. The Pope of Mope allegedly has a memoir in the works, so there’s a slight chance that all of this might start making a little more sense in the near future.

Lane Koivu

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01/03/2013

Your Childhood at V&A

Your Childhood at V&A

If you’re in London and looking for a way to ‘awaken your inner child’, the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is the surest way to do it. Located in an airy, bright hall originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1855 and once part of the V&A Museum in South Kensington, the Museum of Childhood has an eclectic and delightful collection, bound to excite and inspire children both young and old.

Artefacts of childhoods recent and long-past are lovingly preserved in display cases. Within the permanent collection visitors can find treasures as varied as a doll from Ancient Egypt (1300 BC); a dollhouse from Restoration England; a complete Baroque puppet theatre; an unopened 1923 Christmas cracker (containing 6 different novelty caps, according to its advertisement); and a patchwork World War II party dress creatively made from scarps of material by its owner’s mother during wartime rationing. But be warned, you are just as likely to confront objects from your own childhood as from history, provoking all sorts of nostalgic memories. It is strangely reassuring to find your own treasures carefully labelled and artfully arranged in a museum, making you feel as if someone else cares as much about preserving your memories as you do.

In the middle of the first floor exhibit sits Sarah Raphael’s ‘The Childhood Cube’ (2000), a bright community art project created by Raphael and students from several schools. The cube is made up of 216 miniature rooms housing all sorts of mad-cap scenes and highlighted by dramatic optic fibre lighting. The effect is joyful and whimsical chaos, just as we would like to remember childhood. Mermaids lounge on sofas, the solar system hangs over black and white bathroom tiles and stairways shoot out in every possible direction.


However, the most disarming and affecting objects are currently to be found in the front room, where local community groups have been creating their own museum; exploring what it means to treasure something, what objects we treasure and why. Personal photos and objects are proudly presented: sometimes with accompanying quotes and stories, other times left enigmatically unexplained, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions. Appealing to your inner voyeur, the display gives the impression of rustling nosily through someone’s open drawers whilst they are in the other room fixing tea.

Best of all, you can enjoy the permanent collection and the exhibitions entirely free of charge. All in all, a great way to treat yourself and your inner child to some quality time together.

Jennifer Williams – Images courtesy of V&A Museum

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22/02/2013

Public Forum Duet: David Byrne and ?uestlove

Public Forum Duet: David Byrne and ?uestlove

What is music, exactly, and why does it exist? How do our individual experiences shape how we hear it, create it, interact with it? If you’re the kind of pseudo-intellectual who spends their free afternoons deconstructing krautrock and questioning the nature of the universe, then I advise you to tune in to David Byrne and Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson’s discussion on the nature of music on Tuesday, February 26th at the New York University Skirball Center. It’s part of the center’s on-going Public Forum series, and the two legends are sure to tackle some of those nagging existential questions – and leave you with plenty more to think about.

Both Byrne and ?uestlove have spent ample time pondering music’s place within today’s media landscape, and both have dedicated a good bulk of their careers to imploding the stale walls of the music industry and rebuilding it as they see fit. Their curiosity is endless. Byrne’s accomplishments could fill a couple encyclopedias. To name a few: He founded Talking Heads, wrote “Naïve Melody” and “Once In a Lifetime”, created Luaka Bop Records, got himself inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and recently turned a decrepit old factory building into a musical instrument. Last September he released How Music Works, a book that takes a look at how music is made, preformed and distributed on an individual, social, and cultural level.

?uestlove is no less accomplished: drummer and leader of The Roots, owner of the universe’s largest record collection, culinary expert, DJ. He’s currently teaching a course on music history at NYU. The discussion is guaranteed to both enlighten and provide endless cocktail party fodder. Show up early and be prepared to take some notes.

Lane Koivu

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21/02/2013

A Ball for All: The Rhythm of Vienna

A Ball for All: The Rhythm of Vienna

An active series of more than 450 events, and an insitution of Viennese culture, the ball season has been labelled by UNESCO as a part of the intangible cultural heritage of Vienna. White tie, floor length gowns and the enjoyment of classical music create an atmosphere of luxury, elegance and tradition at balls promoting different professions, industries and cultural prestige, such as The Doctor’s Ball, The Lawyer’s Ball and The Viennese Coffee House Owner’s Ball.

The events are ceremonialized with precise timing for the introduction and closing as well as different dances, such as quadrilles at midnight and at 3AM. Some traditions are less formal, guests of the Opernball often take away the decorative flowers as souvenirs, even if it’s not officially permitted. But as the events are targeted for the elite they are also highly politicized, gathering together people in society with power and wealth. In this sense they are an interesting window into the assets, interests and intrigue of Viennese society.

The beginning of the Opernball was also political as it began in 1814/1815 at the time of the Viennese Congress. The artists of the court opera subsequently staged additional events. The first ball at the current site was held at the Hofopern-Soirée on December 11th 1877 to raise money for pension funds; the reason that motivated the organizers of most of the balls at that era. After the end of the Donau monarchy the ball tradition began to flourish, as early as in the 1920s.

Theoretically the Opernball is accessible to anyone, with only the tea room reserved completely for artists of the Vienna State Opera and the official guests of the ball. This does not stop some people from rallying against its presumed elitism and profligate luxury. Between 1998 and 2004 on the day of the Opernball a simultaneous event called Opferball (a play on words meaning ‘victim’s ball’) was staged by the street newspaper Augustin. They gave free admission to homeless people, musicians were not paid, and any revenue collected was donated to charity. The Opernballdemo also takes place annually, a protest event mostly staged by students who use the visibility of the ball to obtain publicity for various causes.

The ball season is not simply a matter of the elite against everyone else. There are many types of ball events held by the different industries, associations and even nightclubs of the city, who are encouraged to uphold the cultural tradition and to contribute to the social life. The more colourful balls include the Zuckerbaeckerball (Sweet backers ball), the Blumenball (flower ball) – which turns the City Hall into a sea of flowers – and the Rudolfina masked ball. If this sounds exciting you may even try one, the Fête Impériale will be held on June 28th at the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, the Vienna International Spring Ball is on the 16th March at the Hofburg Palace, and at the Journalists’ Summer Ball held by the Presseclub Concordia on the June 7th you can hear unique press-themed waltzes like the Morgenblätter Walzer (Morning Paper’s Waltz) or the Feuilleton Waltz.

Philippa Nicole Barr

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18/02/2013

Capote, Revised

Capote, Revised

If he were alive today Truman Capote would be thrilled to know that his true crime novel In Cold Blood is still making headlines. First came the news that Florida prosecutors were exhuming the bodies of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock — the novel’s killers who were convicted and hanged for murdering the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 — for new DNA testing in connection to a similar murder that happened in Florida barely a month after the Clutter massacre. And now The Wall Street Journal has dug up an old legal document from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation that reveals what many of the book’s most vocal critics have suspected for years: that Capote altered facts and fabricated crucial elements in his story, in part to cast the novel’s protagonist, detective Alvin Dewey, in a more heroic light.

Along with the likes of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer, Truman Capote is often credited with the rise of New Journalism, a literary movement that boomed in the late 60s and gave birth to the idea that you could incorporate fictional techniques into fact-based journalism. “I got this idea of doing a really serious work,” Capote has said of In Cold Blood. “It would precisely be like a novel, with a single difference: every word of it would be true from beginning to end.”

With help from childhood friend Harper Lee, Capote spent five years meticulously researching and writing In Cold Blood, accumulating some 8,000 pages of notes in the process. During that time he and Lee struck up an unusually intimate friendship with Alvin Dewey, the lead detective on the Clutter case. Dewey gave Capote unprecedented access to the investigation, allowing him to frequently visit the murderers, view confidential documents, and even take a look at the contents of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter’s diaries. Dewey and his wife also persuaded many hesitant Garden City residents to talk to the famed author.

In return, Capote massaged a few key facts, one of which makes Dewey and the KBI appear more competent than they actually were. After nineteen days on the cold trail, Dewey and his men received a tip from Floyd Wells, a former cellmate of Dick Hickock, that eventually led to the murderers’ capture. In Capote’s version of events, Dewey acts immediately on the tip by sending a dispatch to Dick’s farmhouse that very night. In reality, according to the KBI document and Duane West, a former prosecutor in the case, Dewey initially dismissed the tip and waited five days before changing his mind and acting on it. “Alvin Dewey pooh-poohed the Wells tip,” West told the Journal. “He said Wells was a no-good criminal who made the whole thing up.”

Capote’s smudge is mostly inconsequential in that it didn’t change the outcome of the case. Dick and Perry were caught within six weeks, convicted in five months, and hanged in 1965. But the discovery makes fresh the central accusation that’s trailed In Cold Blood since it was published in 1965: that Capote changed the facts to suit his story. What’s more damaging is that the KBI continue to stand by Capote’s version of events, even though it’s now clear that his version contradicts their own department’s official records.

Dewey always maintained that he gave Capote the same treatment as every other journalist. “As far as showing him any favoritism or giving him any information, absolutely not,” Dewey said in an interview before his death in 1987. “He went out on his own and dug it up.” That’s not true. In their correspondence Capote frequently addresses Dewey as “Foxy”, expresses gratitude for being given Nancy Clutter’s diary entries, and even arranges for Dewey’s wife to be a consultant to the 1967 film version of the novel, which earned her $10,000. To say that their professional relationship was ethical is something of an understatement.

But Dewey did admit, in an interview with The Garden City Telegram, that the treatment people received in the novel largely depended on whether or not Truman liked them. Of those people, Dewey told the reporter, “I was the luckiest.”

Lane Koivu

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