As I was having an aimless walk in the neighbourhood, I lately bumbed into the Metanoia show (previously advertized on the blog) as well as Patrick Sullivan, the owner of the space, P.J.S. Exhibitions. An interesting meeting.

Patrick was born in Ireland. For the first two years of his life, Sullivan and his family lived on a farm in the small town of Kenmare. After immigrating to the U.S., the Sullivans resided in Westchester County, NY for four years then packed up and moved to New York City. Sullivan began his academic career at The Trevor Day School and finished at The Beekman School. Although he attended these institutions, both prestigious and educational in a conventional sense, Sullivan was also learning lessons from the city itself, continually drawing inspiration from street art around him. Around age 16, influenced by his family’s own collection and intrigued by the vibrancy of urban life, his interest in art evolved into passion. Since 2005, Sullivan’s been dividing his time between New York and Miami, mostly for buying and spectator purposes. His travels have awarded him the opportunity to not only meet and work with a handful of successful galleries, but to secure his relationships in the world of art dealing. For the past several years he’s been working with Art Watch, a program dedicated to prevent the over-restoration of paintings. After graduating from Christie’s Certificate Program in Modern Art, Connoisseurship and the History of the Art Market in June 2009, Sullivan has developed a keen eye for admiring and appreciating various media of artist expression. P.J.S. Exhibitions will be home to a series of exhibits, rotating every 45 days with a diverse selection of emerging artists’ work. Sullivan’s gallery will highlight work from photographers, tattoo artists and jewelry designers, amongst others, with every fourth exhibit aiming to benefit a non-profit cause.

METANOIA, ” a positive psychological re-building”, is constituted by a selection of works by Ryan Bonilla, Chris O’Donnell, Josh Egnew, Thomas Hooper, Jason June and Stephanie Tamez.
The show is taking place on 238 West 14th Street, between 7th & 8th Avenue, until August 29th.

While dropping out of the techno-age marathon is an ethical decision anyone could easily make, it also means giving up the only real outlet for subversion. But if there is a sadder case than the lonely, radical farmer-luddite who thinks the world noticed their conscientious desicion to give up the cell phone and the laptop, it is the person who cheerleads for progress, who excitedly feels like they’re relly on the cusp of SOMETHING each time they laud the newest techno-innovation, salivating on the instant opinion dispersers of the day over the i-whatever. Like the out-of-touch Hillary Clinton giving a commencement speech at Barnard College and shouting to the graduating class of women, “Get out there, girls! MySpace and Twitter! Social network your way to the top!” This kind of blind faith in the power or social networking betrays a person eager to be tapped into the “next big thing” in order to more efficiently wedge themselves in with the status quo, as we saw McCain try during the presidential debates when, looking like a child expecting to be given a cookie, he made some desperate and cringe-worthy comments about how he had been using Ebay.

It was easy to live without these things before we had them, but now we must not only have them, we must talk about them constantly. Was it really so bad to run to the corner in the middle of the night to use the payphone? How about when we, Europeans, left the continent to come to America, goodbye was goodbye, possibly forever? We cried, we felt sad, we committed suicide, we knew it was serious and didn’t want to fuck up.

Dear people of the future, this is how we lived, and how we will no doubt be re-enacted in your bizarre “period piece” movies: standing at payphones, writing letters, throwing rocks at windows, meeting up by chance, failing those things, weeing each other in dreams.

Cholesterol on the arteries, cancers in prostates, the joke is on us now. Especially on me.

Anyway.

Now give an ear to Akay’s flaring-up mixes!

(all vinyl, no computer wankery)
(and see blog for detailed playlists)

Mix9 100220 (nightXperience, Radio X 94.5, 2010-02-20) by Akay

Mix8 100206, 1/2 (Live at nightXperience, Radio X 94.5, 2010-02-06) by Akay

Mix8 100206, 2/2 (Live at nightXperience, Radio X 94.5, 2010-02-06) by Akay

Mix3 080504 > All vinyl (no computer wankery) by Akay

The Reality of the Virtual is a documentary with and about the Slovenian philosopher and Lacanian analyst Slavoj Žižek. Mis-en-scène as a lecture, Žižek deconstructs during 70 minutes the categories of thoughts through wich we are interpreting the reality…and the virtual…and demonstrates that these notions never exclude each others. It results as a brilliant exercise which I encourage everybody to watch.

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over tabletop scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now.

HERE, download “Scan This Book!” by Kevin Kelley in New York Times Magazine (May 14th, 2006)

The essay is divided into 9 rather appetizing sections.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries
2. What Happens When Books Connect
3. Books: The Liquid Version
4. The Triumph of the Copy
5. The Moral Imperative to Scan
6. The Case Against Google
7. When Business Models Collide
8. Search Changes Everything

Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World” and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.

Above: woodcut from Swift’s Battle of the Books.

I haven’t read the new Brett Easton Ellis book Imperial Bedrooms yet so this isn’t a review, but he’s been in London doing press for it this week. Inspired me to pick up the latest Interview magazine and read the Christopher Bollen feature about him. The main thing that stuck out for me was this quote:

“I really think New York is over, man. L.A. is the future. It’s much more cutting edge than New York, I’m sorry. Yeah, it has an immense doucheness to it. It does. But also, the cool parts are so much cooler than New York right now. I think New York’s really old-school. I can’t explain it. That’s just where I’m at. And also, I don’t believe that whole idea that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. If you survive L.A. and get over that initial hurdle, then you can make it anywhere.”

I’ve never stayed in either for longer than a month but I think it’s a pretty penetrating view and I wonder how many people share it.

This is a wonderful and little known extension to the amazing “Jungle Book” (not the pathetic Disney version, the original book by R Kipling!). Sorry for the long text.

Source: http://www.kellscraft.com/junglebook/junglebook06.html

THE KING’S ANKUS

KAA, the big Rock Python, had changed his skin for perhaps the two-hundredth time since his birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot that he owed his life to Kaa for a night’s work at Cold Lairs, which you may perhaps remember, went to congratulate him. Skin-changing always makes a snake moody and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look beautiful. Kaa never made fun of Mowgli any more, but accepted him, as the other Jungle People did, for the Master of the Jungle, and brought him all the news that a python of his size would naturally hear. What Kaa did not know about the Middle Jungle, as they call it, — the life that runs close to the earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and the tree-bole life, — might have been written upon the smallest of his scales.

That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa’s great coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a living arm-chair.

“Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect,” said Mowgli, under his breath, playing with the old skin. “Strange to see the covering of one’s own head at one’s own feet!”

“Aye, but I lack feet,” said Kaa; “and since this is the custom of all my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old and harsh?”

“Then go I and wash, Flathead; but, it is true, in the great heats I have wished I could slough my skin without pain, and run skinless.”

“I wash, and also I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?”

Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back. “The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay,” he said judgmatically. “The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful to see — like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”

“It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before the first bath. Let us go bathe.”

“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, to lift the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was thickest. A man might just as well have tried to heave up a two-foot water-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then the regular evening game began — the boy in the flush of his great strength, and the Python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the other for a wrestling-match — a trial of eye and strength. Of course, Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he played carefully, and never loosed one tenth of his power. Ever since Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful, statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. “Now! now! now!” said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand could not turn aside. “Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!”

The game always ended in one way — with a straight, driving blow of the head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the least use in trying.

“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing-place — a deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water.

“It is very good,” said Mowgli at last, sleepily. “Now, in the Man-Pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads, and made evil songs through their noses. It is better in the Jungle.”

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them “Good hunting!” and went away.

“Sssh!” said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. “So the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”

“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing; “else there would be a new and strong Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my own hands, asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep of summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel, all of us.”

“Thou hast no other desire?” the big snake demanded.

“What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favour of the Jungle! Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?”

“Now, the Cobra said —” Kaa began.

“What cobra? He that went away just now said nothing. He was hunting.”

“It was another.”

“Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them their own path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good — for they are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?”

Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. “Three or four moons since,” said he, “I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place thou hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the ground.”

“But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows.” Mowgli knew that Kaa was talking of the Monkey People.

“This thing was not living, but seeking to live,” Kaa replied, with a quiver of his tongue. “He ran into a burrow that led very far. I followed, and having killed, I slept. When I waked I went forward.”

“Under the earth?”

“Even so, coming at last upon a White Hood [a white cobra], who spoke of things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never before seen.”

“New game? Was it good hunting?” Mowgli turned quickly on his side.

“It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the White Hood said that a man — he spoke as one that knew the breed — that a man would give the breath under his ribs for only the sight of those things.”

“We will look,” said Mowgli. “I now remember that I was once a man.”

“Slowly — slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun. We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of thee, naming thee as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is indeed as old as the Jungle): ‘It is long since I have seen a man. Let him come, and he shall see all these things, for the least of which very many men would die.”

“That must be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us when game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk.”

“It is not game. It is — it is — I cannot say what it is.”

“We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to see the other things. Did he kill them?”

“They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all.”

“Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us go.”

Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the grass to dry himself, and the two set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may have heard. Mowgli was not the least afraid of the Monkey People in those days, but the Monkey People had the liveliest horror of Mowgli. Their tribes, however, were raiding in the Jungle, and so Cold Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight. Kaa led up to the ruins of the queen’s pavilion that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down the half-choked staircase that went underground from the center of the pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call, — “We be of one blood, ye and I,” — and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled a long distance down a sloping passage that turned and twisted several times, and at last came to where the root of some great tree, growing thirty feet overhead, had forced out a solid stone in the wall. They crept through the gap, and found themselves in a large vault, whose domed roof had been also broken away by tree-roots so that a few streaks of light dropped down into the darkness.

“A safe lair,” said Mowgli, rising to his firm feet, “but over far to visit daily. And now what do we see?”

“Am I nothing?” said a voice in the middle of the vault; and Mowgli saw something white move till, little by little, there stood up the hugest cobra he had ever set eyes on — a creature nearly eight feet long, and bleached by being in darkness to an old ivory-white. Even the spectacle-marks of his spread hood had faded to faint yellow. His eyes were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful.

Read the rest.

Fashion weeks are a fascinating thing. I love them. For a few days, you gather with friends and peers from all around the world in the perspective of celebrating creativity and elegance. It probably sounds naive, but I don’t care. Let me think that. I have similar feelings towards art fairs, but in the former, the commercial aspect is so natuarlly embedded and obvious that there is not even the somewhat uncomfortable double-bind one finds in the latter.


Still, there are two things that really disturb me about fashion weeks (and I know I am not the only one.)

1—The schedule/location management. I know there are some historical reasons for not revealing location of the shows and stuff, but this is 2010! Having 100+ people travelig from the Belleville to George 5 the back to Gare d’Austerlitz, during rush hours in the middle of the summer does nothing but annoy the public and pollute illegitimately.

And 2—Production people (Thank god, not all of them. A lot of people are very serious, reliable and honest.), especially at the doors giving you attitude, not knowing who is who, getting overwhelmed, losing control of a buch of fashion freaks, while it’s exactly what their mission is and what they are payed for. It is pathetic, unprofessional, but more than that: it can really make a show a bad experience and induce a certain amount of bad will in a fashion critic or journalist (not me because, as you know, I am too introspective and focused ;)).


Fashion culture and its players are not anymore in an ivory tower, and they are very happy about this, because—admit it—in an ivory tower, you dont have legions of customers either. There is a certain amount of self-suffiency and arrogance, but negligence too, I cope with as a inextricable correlate of fashion culture (not that I am any better than that, or even try to not be that way too!), but at the end of the day, we are all here to A:enjoy ourselves and B:make business.

Let’s accepts that times change and that we are part of a highly advanced industry, and behave accordingly. We’ll just make it better for everyone including ourselves!