Bibliostructures: Ballard and Calder
Like A Living Thing
Source Code: Architecture
Source Code: Music

Category: Music

Grinderman is the First Great Band of the Anthropocene Epoch

First published on the Huffington Post on 08/17/2010 Grinderman is the first great band of the Anthropocene Epoch. Their music is wild, primal, charming and funky and their lyrics are witty and clear-eyed observations of where we stand as a civilization at this moment in geologic time. “All of a sudden it seems impossible to…

Alexandra Lange and Rosanne Cash, heirs to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton

first published on the Huffington Post on September 9, 2010 In February, Alexandra Lange created a storm with an essay on Design Observer suggesting that the New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, is not good enough: Ouroussoff has an opinion about design, but his reviews offer not much more than that, opinion. His approach —…

The Return of the Laughing Clowns

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds invited the Laughing Clowns to reform to appear at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival they curated staged in Sydney on Cockatoo Island in January, 2009. It had been about twenty five years since their last performance. They were sublime. “I loved that band,” Nick said. All Tomorrow’s Parties looped back to…

“Artists are the real saints. You can never know enough about Duke Ellington.” GLENN O’BRIEN

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SOMEHOW, CONTINUE: (image reposted from @animalsofdistinction) FRONTERA is engineered with the exquisite precision of one of the pinpoint spotlights shone by @unitedvisualartists during the show. Each of its elements have a finely-milled clarity. The title, FRONTERA, is Spanish for border or frontier. A credits handbill quotes a psychological definition from a former International Relations professor I. William Zartman that begins “Borders run across land but through people,” and before the curtain goes up we hear testimony from people giving voice to their experience of the effects of border enforcements. The music, played live by @fly.panam, the lights and the dancers perform with a thrilling cohesiveness that comes from being developed along with Dana Gingras’s choreography. - Though not a narrative FRONTERA’s themes have a clear effect in the moment but are abstract enough for the performance to resonate subliminally. Dana was last here in 2007 at the @sydney_festival with a show called OUR BRIEF ETERNITY with her previous company The Holy Body Tattoo. That name is a description of her philosophy of choreography, that our experiences as we move through life mark us indelibly as if tattooed on our souls. My favourite writer William Gibson wrote an extended haiku for the production that included a line that’s stayed with me ever since I saw the show in L.A. in the late 1990s … “the loss of an individual utterly reconfigures the whole; be vigilant.” - Dana’s new company Animals of Distinction also has a name to meditate upon. FRONTERA was performed while catastrophic bushfires raged around Australia, making clear that the border between our comfortable urban lives and the natural world & other creatures is artificial. - Fly Pan Am’s score for FRONTERA hasn’t been made available as a recording yet so the music credit I’ve posted (swipe left) is a general one. But it shows the potential for @Jaxstamusic ’s credits to build upon the bedrock of reliable credits for recordings to also credit a rich array of musical works other than albums. - #contemporarydance #williamgibson #contemporarymusic #jaxstamusic

REMEMBERING ROWLAND: The poster wall in the @australianmusicvault at @artscentremelbourne has the quality of a sculpture borrowed from the neighbouring @ngvmelbourne, as if a slice had been cut out of the city and made art, as Gordon Matta Clark had done in New York in the 1970s. The posters, randomly assembled and overlapping, illustrate the vitality of an evolving local music ecosystem. - The Rowland S Howard poster advertises his final performances in Melbourne and Sydney before his death in 2009. The guitar and equipment he used to invent unique sonic effects are part of the archive that also includes artefacts collected throughout his career that provide a context for his extraordinary and enduring influence. - Songs from his final album POP CRIMES were previewed in Sydney at the end of 2008 when he performed in the Spiegeltent, set up on the forecourt of the @sydneyoperahouse. 2019’s Vivid Live, which takes over the entire Opera House, marked the importance of musicians of Rowland’s era: the Cure played their 1989 album DISINTEGRATION and the Dirty Three performed their first album, recorded in 1994. POP CRIMES was played in the bar in the northern foyer of the Concert Hall operated by Newtown club @themidnightspecial. Sharon van Etten (@sharonvanhalen) performed during the festival. A song from her 2014 album ARE WE THERE played as the audience waited for Lonnie Holley (@lonnieholleysuniverse) to begin performing in the Utzon Room. The liner notes for her album include Rowland’s music in a list of “Recommended Listening”. - Arts Centre’s archive is assisting in tracing how musicians leave a lasting impact on the creative life of the city: there’s now a laneway in Melbourne named for Rowland. @benmarshall_sydneyoperahouse’s inventively multi-faceted programming of Vivid Live is inspired by Brian Eno’s concept ‘scenius’, considering the arts as a fluid, interconnected ecosystem. - The expansive and reliable music credits being gathered by @jaxstamusic are helping me underpin my studies of contemporary music as a form of civic memory. - #rockandroll #contemporarymusic #architecture #rowlandshoward #jaxstamusic

# THE WARATAH No.2:Linda Jackson’s ( @opallindaoz ) @sydneyoperahouse dress led the first Flamingo Park fashion show in 1974. She and Jenny Kee ( @jennykeeoz ) designed clothing with fantastically bright colours, Australian flora and fauna motifs rendered as a kind of pop art on knitwear made by a community of local craftspeople that are excellent examples of the “spirit of the times” Peter Hall was intent on infusing into his designs for the interiors of the Opera House, and their respect for nature and the value of indigenous crafts and spiritual practices anticipated the building’s current commitment to indigenous programming and ecological concerns. - Jenny Kee adopted NSW’s floral symbol the waratah as her spirit flower, finding solace and hope in its ability to burst brilliantly into flower after a bushfire. The waratah’s awesome regenerative ability is obviously of symbolic value now but back in October, before the bushfires, at the @powerhousemuseum she spoke of the enduring relevance of their aesthetic and approach, now being passed onto a new generation. She was speaking specifically of their collaborations with @romancewasborn, but their exhibition STEP INTO PARADISE also includes a handover to the Opera House’s new generation. - The waratah was part of Andrew Thomas Huang’s ‘floral ballet’ projected onto the Opera House’s roof shells during last year’s Vivid Festival. Kelsey Lu composed the score for the animation. It’s her recording of 10CC’s “I’m Not In Love” playing in the room showing videos that’s a threshold from the autobiographical part of the exhibition into a recreation of the Flamingo Park store that was in the Strand Arcade. - I’m revising the book that I wrote about the Opera House as a living thing, partly because @jaxstamusic has launched a comprehensive and reliable database of music credits that I can use to strengthen my reporting. I’m trying to figure out how to use the credits in a print format, in the same way ISBN numbers link to a specific edition of a book in indexes. And for now I’m going to post screenshots of relevant music credits (swipe right). - #contemporarymusic #fashion #musiccredits #jaxstamusic #architecture

THE WARATAH No. 1 The undeniably glorious fireworks display in Sydney last New Year’s Eve while swathes of the state were burning was ultimately alarming not heartening. But as the solace and gratitude observed in people watching a simple photograph of firefighters projected on the @sydneyoperahouse ’s roof shells on Saturday night indicated, the impulse to light up the building that’s a symbol for the entire country to lift spirits and generate hope wasn’t misguided. But a reprise of the animation that @benmarshall_sydneyoperahouse commissioned from Andrew Thomas Huang for 2019’s Vivid Festival might have been more apt. Local flora, including the NSW state flower, the Waratah, had been motion-mapped onto a dancer, and this message of being intricately caught up in a dance with nature is what we need now. . - The Vivid festival began as a lure for tourists, putting a favourable marketing spin on light in the darkness of the bone-chillingly cold winter nights with stinging rain of its early years. The music / performing arts section and projections onto the Opera House’s roof shells, which first director Brian Eno seeded in 2009 with a mindfulness and respect for the natural world, considering the arts as an ecosystem and noting the threat of climate change, continues to inspire with its experimentation and warm sense of community. . - The other two branches, ideas and light, have stagnated from an early emphasis on local creative entrepreneurs and light shows that made art of low power and alternative energy strategies. Had that emphasis on innovative technologies continued, @arupgroup ’s 2011 Vivid installation ‘social fireflies’, a swarm of lights on tiny drones, might have blossomed into something like the drone light show at midnight in Singapore in 2019. . - #vividfestival #waratah #contemporarydance #music #brianeno #sydneyoperahouse #architecture #climateemergency

REGENERATION No. 1. We may look back on November 2019 as being the exact moment the @sydneyoperahouse phase-shifted into a new era. Perhaps we might mark the old era ending in September of 2011 when Allen Toussaint, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band & Jon Cleary placed their performances, metaphorically, within the bars, streets and recording studios of New Orleans to express how music was crucial to the city’s regeneration in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, alerting us to the increasing fragility of cities. — BLADE RUNNER was released in 1982. The story was time shifted forward into November 2019. The movie’s themes of environmental destruction, extinction of animals and the impact of robotics and artificial intelligence have proved sadly prescient. The @latimes obituary of Syd Mead, who died on New Year’s Eve 2019, commented upon the impact of the architecture, interiors and industrial designs he created for BLADE RUNNER, but was illustrated by a still from the sequel, a ruined Las Vegas, with a blood red sky inspired by a photograph of the @sydneyoperahouse blanketed by red dust in 2009, so much like now with fires turning skies red around Australia.. — Jorn Utzon’s design for the Opera House quoted ancient structures used for the ritual re-enactment of timeless myths … Mayan platforms, Asian temples, Gothic cathedrals. A new era requires a different approach to the transmission of myths, not being lifted up to release us from the concerns of everyday life and entering a magical, mythical realm. In completing the Opera House Peter Hall sought to connect it to the “spirit of the times”. The Concert Hall he designed is due to close in a few weeks for an upgrade, temporarily placing more emphasis on outdoor performances, metaphorically bringing us back to earth, taking the Opera House out into the world, and looking to the arts to help us sustain hope and find magic as we bear witness to the horrors around us and join together to renew the world. .. — #climateemergency #sydmead #bladerunner #jornutzon #neworleans #sydneyoperahouse #architecture

HIEROGLYPHICALLY: The @sydneyoperahouse ’s creation story has Eero Saarinen, at the time he was planning his TWA Building with curved roof shells, seeing the potential for a similarly brilliant building in the slightly abstract sketch-like quality of Jorn Utzon’s competition entry. The completed building retains a graphic power in sketch form: any trio of upended nestled shell fragments of varying sizes reads as the Sydney Opera House. . — This has been a boon for the souvenir industry where images of the Opera House are a kind of brand logo that sells Sydney and Australia as powerfully as the Nike swoosh sells athletic shoes. .. — Eras can be represented by powerful graphic symbols as well — the peace sign in the 1960s, the smiley face at the end of the 20th century, and the current climate change activists connected globally behind the @extinctionrebellion hourglass … — In choosing to highlight the work of @eggpicnic in the first merchandising residency in their souvenir stores the Opera House has celebrated graphic brilliance that has a cultural resonance with prints & a set of six greeting cards featuring birds that reside around the precinct, including the seagulls gently discouraged by the @maddogsseagullpatrol from stealing the food of patrons eating at the restaurants on the lower concourse. .. — The current horrific bushfires have highlighted the value in @eggpicnic’s process. Their charmingly warm portraits of birds and animals, often threatened species, are derived from information provided by scientists and part of their profits support wildlife research and rescue. Seeing their work on the hoardings of building sites around Sydney’s CBD connects us to nature. “We do not live on the earth, but with and within its life,” they wrote a couple of days ago. “Reasons to sustain hope, I can give you a million. Many people are grieving but many are taking action for the sake of justice for nonhumans and respect for their homes … What we need is the will to live in reciprocity with the more-than-human world and not at its expense. Sustain those who sustain others and the Earth will last forever.” .. #graphicdesign #wildlife #climateemergency

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