from CBC News

Slaves to the rhythm

Kanye West is the latest to pay tribute to a classic drum machine

Last Updated: Friday, November 28, 2008 | 10:57 AM ET Comments21Recommend20

By Jason Anderson, CBC News

The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, a programmable drum machine introduced in 1980. The machine has been used by musicians from Marvin Gaye to the Beastie Boys to Beyonce to Kanye West. (Roland/Drum Machine Museum)

It helped Marvin Gaye get some sexual healing. Beyonce and the Beastie Boys have sung (and rapped) its praises. The most revered makers of hip hop, techno and industrial rock couldn’t live without it. And now the most popular MC of our day pays tribute to it in the name of his new album.

Some may see the title of Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak (out this week) and assume those digits are just another of those cryptic numbers that musicians like to throw around (see also: Prince’s 3121, Nena’s 99 Luftballoons, Rush’s 2112). But the reference couldn’t be more specific — West has taken this opportunity to declare his loyalty to the Roland TR-808.

Soul singer Marvin Gaye used the Roland TR-808 for his 1982 hit Sexual Healing.(Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)

Introduced in the early ’80s as one of the first programmable drum machines, the 808 was surpassed long ago by more high-tech musical tools. And yet musicians of all stripes and styles have deemed it indispensable for its stark percussion sound. With its metronomic precision, it may have none of the swing of a human drummer, but the 808 can still provide a futuristic kind of funkiness, especially when it’s in the right hands. This special timeline reveals how this once-lowly machine attained its iconic status.

1932: Developed by Leon Theremin at the behest of composer Henry Cowell, the Rhythmicon makes its public debut. The most sophisticated of the early electronic drum machines, it can play 16 different rhythms with no need for hands or sticks. Despite its enormous promise, it is soon sidelined by Cowell; Theremin’s innovations are ignored for decades.

1959: Wurlitzer introduces the first commercially available drum machine, the Sideman. The company builds it into many of their organs. Manufacturers like the Italian company Bontempi gradually follow suit with their own versions, thereby ensuring that future generations of kids fooling around with dusty organs in their grandparents’ homes will have formative encounters with the bossa nova beat.

1967: Use of the drum machine begins to proliferate after the Hammond Organ Company incorporates a fully transistored rhythm machine by the Ace Tone company (later renamed Roland) into its products. Sly Stone is an early adopter of the technology in the rock world, using a drum machine on the loping hit Family Affair and throughout his 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Jimi Hendrix can also be heard using a drum machine on a demo version of the posthumously released Angel. Luckily, the Beatles’ breakup spares Ringo Starr the indignity of being replaced by a mechanical model.

1980: The Roland Corporation introduces the Roland TR-808, a programmable drum machine. According to Greg Rule’s book Future Shock, five percussion sounds characterize the 808: “the hum kick, the ticky snare, the tishy hi-hats (open and closed) and the spacey cowbell.” A Roland representative later credits the machine’s design to a Mr. Nakamura (responsible for the analog voice circuits) and a Mr. Matsuoka (who developed the software).

A 1980s advertisement for the 808. (Roland/Drum Machine Museum)

The 808 receives many poor reviews in the gearhead press of the day, generally being deemed inferior to the Linn LM-1, the first drum machine to use digital samples (i.e., prerecorded rather than machine-generated sounds). Nevertheless, it gains some popularity due to its relatively low cost of $1,195 US. Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering Japanese synth-pop band, is the first band to put the 808 to use.

[ click to continue reading at CBCNews.ca ]

from The Guardian UK

Photographer Hans-Peter Feldmann: Life for sale

Liz Jobey looks at German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, whose latest book collates a myriad of images - beauty queens, horses, cigarette cards - into a bittersweet reflection on consumerism

• Liz Jobey
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 27 2008 16.16 GMT
• Article history

Striking a pose … a page from Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Album

In the late 1960s, the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann produced a series of small books titled Bild (Picture) or Bilder (Pictures). Each book contained a number of black-and-white photographs of a particular subject - 14 mountains, 12 views of aircraft in the sky, 11 sets of women’s knees, six pictures of football players - and was titled accordingly. Each had “Feldmann” printed on the front cover in capitals, and though the women’s knees were credited to photographer Wolfgang Breurs, there was little else to identify the meaning of the pictures or the “author” of the books. In 1971 a portfolio of 10 books was published by the Galerie Paul Maenz in Cologne.

In their bland depiction of ordinary objects, and in their serial groupings, they were reminiscent of the small books made a few years earlier by Ed Ruscha. In 1962 Ruscha had experimented with paintings and collages based on photographs he had taken on a road trip through Europe the year before. His subjects were ordinary scenes and objects from his travels, but once photographed, they took on a more significant role as specimens of everyday culture – apartment buildings, shop fronts, restaurants, signs, posters, a car, a motorbike, a pair of shoes.

Soon after he returned to California he made a set of photographs of household products, which he called Product Still Lifes. Ruscha recognised that photographs were inherently indexical: they allowed him to compare and contrast similar structures or objects when placed side to side. They also had a flat, deadpan quality that reflected the banality and standardisation of post-war American life. Soon Ruscha was laying out his pictures serially in what would become the first of his now famous set of books, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, published in 1963. This small white paperback marked the advent of the contemporary artist’s book: it was cheaply produced, cheap to buy ($3 [£2] a copy) and, most importantly, it used photographs not as illustrations but as the visual expression of an idea.

In Düsseldorf, around the same time, Gerhard Richter began to use photographs as an aid to his paintings. “Do you know what was great?” he wrote in 1964, “Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture.”

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from the NY Daily News

Legendary American folk singer Odetta, whose powerful voice influced so many musicians, has died of heart disease at Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77. She was long-associated with the civil rights movement. Odetta called on her fellow blacks to “take pride in the history of the American Negro.”.

Credits: Davis, Clarence Published: 12/03/2008 10:48:37

[ click to view full slideshow at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the NY Times

Melena Ryzik writes:

Vivienne Westwood bondage pants, photographs of Lou Reed and Blondie, badges for the Buzzcocks and concert flyers from clubs like Max’s Kansas City went up for bid at the decidedly nonpunk hour of 10 a.m.

Photo: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

[ click to view full slideshow at NYTimes.com ]

from The Irish Times

The shining stars who burned out too soon

AIDAN DUNNE

Thu, Nov 27, 2008

VISUAL ART:A NUMBER OF ARTISTS who died fairly recently and prematurely but whose influence is still very much alive are featured in Now’s the Timeat the Hugh Lane Gallery.

It’s an interesting idea for a show, because there is, sadly, no shortage of potential participants. The reasons for early demise vary, but the usual suspects, including drugs and drink, certainly feature, though not as prominently as cruel illnesses and misadventure - the gifted Helen Chadwick, for example, was killed by heart failure induced by a rare virus. But there was much speculation that her infection with the virus may have been related to the micro-organisms she was using in her work.

Chadwick remains a highly significant artist, not least for the way she pioneered the idea of the body as the site of art rather than something to be depicted. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti artist turned art world superstar, and protégé of Andy Warhol, succumbed to his insatiable appetite for a mixture of heroin and cocaine. A victim of his own success and prone to depression, he was still in his 20s when he died in 1988.

[ click to continue reading at The Irish Times ]

from The Guardian UK

9 / 14

Wayne Smith in Jammy’s Yard. In 1985 he released the revolutionary track Under Mi Sleng Teng - the first fully-computerised hit

Beth Lesser

[ click to view full slideshow at The Guardian ]

from Stark Bro’s Nurseries and Orchards

from ABC News (Australia)

Whiteley’s Balmoral nets $990k for Cezanne fund

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has sold two paintings to help fund its purchase of a $16.2 million work by French artist Paul Cezanne.

Brett Whiteley’s Balmoral fetched $990,000 at the Sotheby’s auction in Melbourne.

John Perceval’s Pleasure Craft sold for $198,000.

Cezanne’s Bords De La Marne is the most expensive artwork ever bought by an Australian public gallery.

[ click to read at abc.net.au ]

from exclaim.ca 

Justice A Cross the Universe By Cam Lindsay     There are tour documentaries and then there’s Justice’s tour documentary. There is a difference. In documenting their 2008 North American tour, the Parisian production/DJ team (aka Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay) wanted everything caught on film — warts, arrests, drunken weddings, sexual romps and all. Using a blend of raw footage and nicely arranged jump cuts of their extraordinary life on the road, those expecting a concert film will be sorely disappointed, for the music is secondary to the hedonism off stage. Hiring their friends/video directors Romain Gavras and So-Me to shoot them, A Cross the Universe is a one-hour-long recap (accompanied by a CD recording of their live set) that plays out like a “greatest hits,” which from beginning to end becomes a lesson in shock and awe cinema. Since there’s no privacy, viewers are invited into their world to meet the duo’s gun-toting tour manager Bouchon (who’s arrested twice) and their Guinness-record-attempting cowboy bus driver, as well as witness them setting a drunk girl’s hair on fire, feeding aspirin to a squirrel, singing a piss-poor “Under the Bridge” to Anthony Kiedis, smashing a bottle over an overzealous fan’s head (and then getting arrested) and of course, getting married while drunk in Vegas. Anyone who’s waiting for the adaptation of Mötley Crüe’s The Dirtshould try seeking Justice, who’ve made the most decadent music doc ever. (Ed Banger/Warner)  [ click to read full article at exclaim.ca ]

Mike Solomon
Meteorological Watercolors

On view from October 18th to November 29th
Preview viewing Saturday, October 18th, 12 to 5 p.m.

36 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY 11937
P: 631.324.5561
www.johnmcwhinnie.com

Gallery Hours
Fri to Sat: 10am to 5pm
Sunday: 11am to 4pm
Closed Monday thru Thursday

forward to a friend

© 2008 John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. All Rights Reserved.

from the Los Angeles Times

For collectors Don and Mera Rubell, a bond with Palm Springs

Robert Gauthier, Los Angeles Times

PARTNERS: Don and Mera Rubell have collected contemporary art for more than four decades, beginning with a $25-a-week budget, and now travel the globe looking for more pieces.

Keith Haring works from their Miami collection furnish a Palm Springs Art Museum exhibition.

By Suzanne Muchnic
November 23, 2008

Reporting from Palm Springs — “The advantage of not being able to produce art is that you can spend all your energy looking at art,” said Don Rubell, whose family of self-confessed contemporary art fanatics is perpetually in search of the next addition to its 5,000-piece collection. Pleased to have uttered a complete sentence without being interrupted by Mera, his wife and collecting partner of nearly 45 years, he eased into a knowing smile as she jumped in to explain how their collecting obsession works.

“To do what we do, we have to go everywhere, with rolling suitcases that we never check and wash-and-wear clothes, usually black,” she said. “Here’s our schedule for about two months: Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, Washington, Los Angeles and here, then New York again and Abu Dhabi. We need to see what’s going on in the world.”

Miami is home to the globe-trotting Rubells, who are on ARTnews magazine’s international list of the top 200 collectors. “Here” is Palm Springs, where they traveled for a special occasion — the launching of a relationship between the Florida-based collection and the Palm Springs Art Museum with the recently opened exhibition, “Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection.”

[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]

from The Guardian UK

Go with the Flo

Florence and the Machine’s mad art-pop will be 2009’s most beautiful noise, says Sylvia Patterson

• Sylvia Patterson
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday November 22 2008 00.01 GMT
• The Guardian, Saturday November 22 2008
• Article history

Who’s that girl? … Florence and the Machine. Photograph: PR

It’s not every day you see a pop star standing on their head in the middle of a library in Lancaster but today is that very day. Florence Welch, 22, hoists her skinny, grey-denim-clad legs into the air above her grey and white striped T-shirt, ropes of peachy-red hair splaying outwards on the wooden floor. “Urgh!” she squawks, upside down, then keels over, gets up again and turns her manically wandering attention to her homemade multicoloured five-foot-long funeral wreath made of artificial flowers spelling out “FLORENCE”. Hoisting this into the air, she affixes it to the Large Print section shelves which provide tonight’s backdrop for her band, Florence And The Machine, comprising drummer, keyboard player and harpist, with Florence on howling vocals and a stand-up military drum. (Here in historic Lancaster, this is a winning council ruse to showcase new music, with other recent library sets from Bat For Lashes and Adele.)

First, though, we must go to a nearby pub and Florence knows the way; except she doesn’t, striding at a mighty clip for 15 minutes in exactly the wrong direction, gab-gab-gabbing all the way, until we’re almost out into the countryside. The pub, it turns out, is 100 yards away from the library and Florence is always getting lost (”In a wormhole, sometimes for days!” she laughs). Florence, of course, is not yet technically a pop star — her debut album isn’t due until May 2009 and probably won’t be entitled Fuck The Cake, Take The Ice Cream And I Think I Just Punched The Waiter (though that’s one of its joke titles) — but she will be soon enough and the pop world will rejoice.

The world hasn’t seen this kind of profoundly eccentric folk-art minstrel since Kate Bush trilled “Hello sky! Hello trees!” and skipped barefoot over the hillocks in the late-70s in a frock made out of fairy wings (though, in Florence’s case, this would be wings torn from mutilated dead fairies, with their eyes poked out). After Amy, Lily, Kate, Adele and all the idiosyncratic souls of the London chanteuse uprising, Florence Welch is a different kind of bonkers; a posho art school bohemian whose pulverising blues-pop contains no trace of a chirpy “innit”, more visceral Grimms’ Fairy Tales set in a Twilight Zone troubled by donkeys, birds and coffins.

This year, she’s released two singles on the independent Moshi Moshi label (once home to Hot Chip and Kate Nash). The first was the clattering skiffle-pop Kiss With A Fist — with lyrics about slapping and plate-smashing — a song that has been read as a comment on domestic violence. Florence is adamant it’s not, though. “If you’re a writer, you’re just expressing your perception of what’s going on,” she says. “These songs are all about highs and really intense lows …” Then there’s the thumping drums and yodelling yelps of new single Dog Days (a song Adam Ant would approve of). Now signed to Island Records, home of Amy Winehouse, Florence looks set set to skip barefoot through 2009 as a sort of surreal-folk PJ Harvey with lungs the size of the bellowing sails on an 18th-century ship.

[ click to read full article at The Guardian ]

from The New York Times

Grace Hartigan, 86, Abstract Painter, Dies

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Grace Hartigan, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist whose gestural, intensely colored paintings often incorporated images drawn from popular culture, leading some critics to see in them prefigurings of Pop Art, died on Saturday in Baltimore. She was 86.

The cause was liver failure, said Julian Weissman, a longtime dealer of hers.

Ms. Hartigan, a friend and disciple of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, subscribed to the Abstract Expressionist notion of the painterly brushstroke as existential act and cri de coeur but, like de Kooning, she never broke entirely with the figurative tradition. Determined to stake out her own artistic ground, she turned outward from the interior world sanctified by the Abstract Expressionists and embraced the visual swirl of contemporary American life.

In “Grand Street Brides” (1954), one of several early paintings that attracted the immediate attention of critics and curators, she depicted bridal-shop window mannequins in a composition based on Goya’s “Royal Family.” Later paintings incorporated images taken from coloring books, film, traditional paintings, store windows and advertising, all in the service of art that one critic described as “tensely personal.”

“Her art was marked by a willingness to employ a variety of styles in a modernist idiom, to go back and forth from art-historical references to pop-culture references to autobiographical material,” said Robert Saltonstall Mattison, the author of “Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World” (1990).

Grace Hartigan was born in Newark in 1922 and grew up in rural New Jersey, the oldest of four children. Unable to afford college, she married early and, in a flight of romantic fancy, she and her husband, Bob Jachens, struck out for Alaska to live as pioneers. They made it no farther than California, where, with her husband’s encouragement, she took up painting.

[ click to read full obituary at NYTimes.com ]

Hey Everyone!

Chris (my husband) is one of the ten finalists to be the new spokesperson for a local tv station here in Indianapolis, and he needs everyone to vote online for him!  Please go to this link and vote for Chris, and try to get as many people as you can to vote - they don’t have to live in Indiana! Please help us out and pass this on to people who you think would take the time to visit the website quickly and vote!

Thanks so much!

katy

CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

from The Guardian UK

Defiance of gravity

We know it takes toil to get fit, and yet the idea of upside-down yoga just seems too good to miss

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 19 2008 00.01 GMT
  • The Guardian, Wednesday November 19 2008
  • Article history

Upside-down yoga is sweeping America, soon to set the gyms of the UK afire with the defiance of gravity. I was just scanning the internet for what, exactly, was good about it. On the website it says: “The AntiGravity Hammock acts as a soft trapeze, supporting you as you master simple suspension techniques leading to advanced inverted poses.” So being upside down, in other words, leads to you getting better and better at being upside down. You can also get better at upside-down pilates, and the rather ominous-sounding upside-down dance.

On the one hand, I can’t believe it will take off in Britain, because it is so extravagantly pointless, but on the other hand, for the same reason, I can’t believe it won’t. Faddy exercises are reason-proof, recession-proof and science-proof, insulated against any consideration of consequence that might otherwise ever stop anyone doing anything.

The year before last there was a fad for heated pilates. It was just like the regular kind, only you did it in a heated kennel, while someone outside it enjoined you to “Lose! Tone!” It was more soothing than it sounds. Perspex has a muffling effect. I had a go. “This,” I thought, with a clarity that might have stopped my heart were it not for the lovely warm environment, “is the end of civilisation.”

[ click to read at The Guardian ]

from The Duke

from Ananova

Two abstract paintings may have been hung the wrong way round by curators at the Tate Modern in London.

The paintings by Mark Rothko, from the Black on Maroon series, have been hung vertically with bold stripes running from top to bottom.

However, Rothko is thought to have wanted the works - which he donated to the Tate - to be hung with the stripes running horizontally and the location of his signature on the back of the paintings is believed to reflect this wish.

Despite the artist’s signature, the correct way to display the works have never been agreed because there are no photographs available to indicate for certain how Rothko wished the works to be hung.

Further complicating the issue is which of the two possible horizontal displays is the correct one, creating a risk of hanging the paintings upside-down.

Although the Tate hung them horizontally for nine years, they were changed to vertical by the then director, the late Sir Norman Reid, on the advice of a colleague, according to reports.

In 1987, the works were returned to their horizontal hang for a special Rothko exhibition. The catalogue at the time stated that the artist’s signature on the back of the canvasses indicated that this was the correct position.

However, when the paintings were moved to the Rothko Room at the Tate Modern in 2000, they were once again shown on a vertical axis.

[ click to read full article at Ananova.com ]