Category: notebooks

The Art of Homage

March 11, 2018March 11, 2018 ~ Jillian Burt ~ Leave a comment

THE ART OF HOMAGE not FAN ART. The David Bowie Instagram account is posting images from the fan art section of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Nick Cave has booked “talk to the audience” shows on the East Coast of America. Within the photographs and videos she’s posting from backstage and during soundchecks for … Continue reading The Art of Homage

A NOTEBOOK THAT’S AN HOMAGE TO NELS CLINE’S LOVERS ALBUM : PART 1

February 3, 2018February 4, 2018 ~ Jillian Burt ~ Leave a comment

For 25 years Nels Cline dreamed of making the Lovers Album, an orchestrated portrait of the shadings on love’s spectrum from yearning to euphoria to regret. A mix of jazz standards, film music, rock songs and his own compositions. When it was released on Blue Note in 2016 it concluded with “The Bond”, composed for … Continue reading A NOTEBOOK THAT’S AN HOMAGE TO NELS CLINE’S LOVERS ALBUM : PART 1

Reflections from the intersection of rock music and architecture, particularly within living, evolving cultural buildings.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE: This vintage postcard is probably from around 1966, the year that Jorn Utzon left the Sydney Opera House project and Australian architects Peter Hall, David Littlemore and Lionel Todd were appointed to complete it. The building on the left is Qantas House, finished by David Littlemore’s firm in 1957. On the right is the Wentworth Hotel, by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, completed in 1966. . — Today is the Sydney Opera House’s 46th birthday. Being an inauspicious anniversary year, not divisible by 5, not ending in 0, the celebrations are low key, with a launch of the Inside and Outside gins by @archierosesyd in the newly opened event space on the northern broadwalk that’s advertised furnished with tables with Arne Jacobsen’s series 7 chairs pulled up to them. . — The Outside gin is salty, harsher, with a maritime sensibility. The Inside gin is wildly flavourful, drawing inspiration from the bright colours of the furnishings specified by Peter Hall and the richly varied performances within the venues. But the Inside Gin is also something momentous, the first significant piece of merchandise that specifically celebrates Peter Hall’s design contributions and the life of the building. — I took a tour of Archie Rose’s distillery in Rosebery on their open day a couple of weeks ago. Their distilling machinery is a mix of heritage equipment built by craftspeople in Tasmania and contemporary engineering innovations of their own, which reminded me of the cooling system of orange and green pipes spiralling around the basement and ground floor levels of the Opera House, devised by @steensenvarming . — Around the time of the Opera House’s 40th anniversary the Wentworth Hotel renovated its ground floor cocktail lounge, turning it into something of a petting zoo for mid-century modern furniture. A yolk-yellow egg chair was in a prominent place. It was the beginning of me noticing the increasing ubiquity of Arne Jacobsen’s furniture. It had a rickety base and is now gone, but there are still many Warren Platner chairs, and a high tea with canapés and cocktails made with Archie Rose’s gins. . @sydneyoperahouse #midcenturymodern #arnejacobsen #gin

THE AFTERLIFE OF EPHEMERA: The Paper Tigers exhibition at the National Art School Gallery closes on Saturday. The year of Friday strikes by schoolchildren around the globe reaching a crescendo with Greta Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations and the Extinction Rebellion protests beginning during the exhibition’s run connected with the environmental concerns and protests of the 1970s featured in the exhibition: a photograph on the cover of last Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph of 75 year old protester Martin Wolterding is almost a recreation of the famous photo of Builders Labourer’s Federation leader Jack Mundey being carried away by police during a Green Bans protest in the 1970s. . — But the materials in the exhibition … posters for rallies, concerts, protest marches … and the local perspective that Toby Creswell and Lesa-Belle Furhagen have reinforced by almost full human scale photographs of local cafes and restaurants of the era and abstract film footage of driving down streets in the area around the Art School in the 70s is a crucial, enduring guide to understanding the present moment: it’s the leaflets and posters and music percolating up from the street that define this era, too. . — A gravely beautiful procession of red clad figures on Monday, near Central Station in Sydney, local manifestations of the English performance group Invisible Circus, was incredibly moving and made me think about the strong, clear blocks of red in Martin Sharp’s theatre posters in the exhibition and the leaflets handed to me by calm and civil Extinction Rebellion protestors described the consequences of inaction in a way that made me think of Leonard Cohen’s song, “You Want it Darker”: “… “a million candles burning for the help that never came. You want it darker. We kill the flame.” . - @sedition_2019 @extinctionrebellionsydney #climateemergency @nas_au

CULTURALLY RESONANT MERCHANDISE: @annejwatson’s book “Poisoned Chalice” describes the artistry and ingenuity that Peter Hall brought to the design of the distinctive chairs in the @sydneyoperahouse ‘s venues, but they don’t lend themselves to being spun off and reproduced by Knoll or Herman Miller for use in other settings. Arne Jacobsen’s Swan and Series 7 chairs are the prominent pieces of Opera House furniture available on the market, but although they’re so ubiquitous that no exclusive connection can be claimed, their extraordinary cultural resonance is something that the Opera House may reproduce through their new makers program. .. — Christine Keeler, the woman at the centre of the Profumo affair in the early 1960s was photographed naked, straddling a knockoff of a Series 7 chair … Arne Jacobsen’s flatware was the in-service cutlery of the space shuttle in Stanley Kubrick’s movie “2001” … the interviewer in the documentary that chronicled Edward Snowden’s leaking of NSA documents was sitting in an Egg chair in a hotel room in Hong Kong … a silhouette of an Egg Chair is the universal symbol for “chill” in Spotify’s streamed playlists . — To date it’s a paradox that while the Opera House is featured on so many souvenirs sold in Sydney its own stores have no distinctive design pieces, with the exception of this lamp. @archierosesyd ’s Inside and Outside Gins are the beginning point of a new focus on culturally resonant merchandise that celebrates the Opera House as a living thing. . - #midcenturymodern #arnejacobsen

THE UBIQUITY OF ARNE JACOBSEN: Egg chairs in the front bar of the @theoldclare in Sydney and my first sighting, in the wild, of a Swan couch (swipe right for photo) in an internal courtyard of the hotel. It’s the most empathetically wonderful hotel I’ve stayed in: @paulkellyofficial band posters amongst the crusting of gig posters in the foyer, remnants of the hotel’s previous life. Heavy Le Crueset coffee cups in the rooms and a Bose sound system that pairs with my whole music library stored on my new iPhone XS Max and shuffles to find 1970s New Orleans music ... the Meters, Allen Touissant, Dr John. — #midcenturymodern #arnejacobsen

SHARP HIEROGLYPH: @sedition_2019 ’s t-shirt design would also make a fine embroidered patch to sew on a tote bag, a sticker to place on a computer, a bookplate to glue inside a notebook, but most especially the artwork for a library card. — — In involving @StateLibraryNSW the festival has great timing. Libraries are what’s hip in architecture right now, featured in TIME Magazine’s “100 Greatest Places of 2019” issue, celebrated in books by best-selling authors Susan Orlean and Zadie Smith, and Kengo Kuma’s Darling Square building, which houses a @cityofsydney public library branch, is on the cover of the developer Lendlease’s 2019 annual report, beneath the tagline: “as the world reinvents itself.” This wonky circular building produces a brilliant optical illusion, it appears to be spinning, illustrating the increasingly essential role libraries have in amplifying the voices of the communities they serve and archiving ephemera. . — — The word “agitate” in several languages, expresses what’s at the heart of Sedition 2019: to celebrate the rich cultures produced, pearl-like, from introducing small pieces of grit into seemingly closed systems. That Sedition 2019 and the global climate strikes, galvanised by the actions of the Swedish teenager @gretathunberg , are happening at the same time reinforces the value of libraries as places to access vital news. Sedition 2019’s references to the environmental concerns of the 1970s and protests led by the Builder’s Labourers Federation are more relevant than today’s newspapers in Sydney, which have had either close to zero or only derisory coverage of the current global climate strikes and UN summit. . — #publiclibraries #climatestrike #architecture #typography #climateemergency #protestsigns #graphicdesign @darlingsquare

These screen grabs are from the “Walking City” animation by @UniversalEverything that was projected on the southern wall of the Western foyers of the @sydneyoperahouse during Vivid Live in 2015. . —— A shaggy creature, more Yeti or Wookie than humanoid, with the kooky charm of the Addams Family’s Cousin Itt, loped along, its coat morphing into different building materials and construction styles. The animation was inspired by Archigram’s Walking City project of the 1960s that was a loopy psychedelic take on robotics and cities but at its heart affirmed the dynamism of cities, their ability to regenerate. . —— These frame grabs from Universal Everything’s Walking City are from the new book published by @uniteditions . It’s a treasure I won in a competition. It arrived in the mail last Friday and has already become an indispensable reference. There’s an extraordinary section on how the 2015 projection on the sails was conceived with @benmarshall_sydneyoperahouse. And I’m grateful for the descriptions of all the projects, the inspiration I can draw from the conceptual clarity of Universal Everything’s approach. . —— James Gleick’s book “Chaos: Making a New Science” published in 1987 had such a profound effect on me that it rewired my brain. Ever since reading it I wanted to write about cities in the same way, as dynamic systems: “Where chaos begins, classical science stops,”Gleick wrote. “For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuations of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side — these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities. But in the 1970s a few scientists in the US and Europe began to find a way through disorder. They were mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, all seeking connections between different kinds of irregularity.” . —— Universal Everything makes brilliant art from the connections between different kinds of irregularity. . — — #chaostheory #sydneyoperahouse #digitalart #vividlive #archigram

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