Category Archives: lectures
Friday Pictures – Hennessy Youngman
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0NIs1fOkQg]
ART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism (THE CLEAN VERSION)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yea4qSJMx4]
ART THOUGHTZ: Relational Aesthetics
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcBwUL6Y3UA]ART THOUGHTZ: The Sublime
HENNESSY YOUNGMAN’S ART THOUGHTZ - Artist talk and screening with Jayson Musson at the Drake Hotel January 31 2012
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Filed under lectures, margaux williamson, TV/video, visual art
Gleaming Eyes
by Chris Randle The academic journal Social Text just published a revised version of my 2010 Pop Conference paper, “Curtis Jackson and the Jeweled Skull.” It’s about 50 Cent’s last shoot-em-up, the history of music video games, war, money, and … Continue reading
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Filed under chris randle, lectures, linkblogging, music
Tuli Kupferberg: For Nothing’s Sake
by Carl Wilson
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtT7UFbyeHU&hl=en_US&fs=1]This weekend, I watched the Spanish not-so-gloriously defeat the Dutch in the World Cup, and figured that would be about that: Unlike the Italians, Portuguese, Brazilians, Italians, Koreans and other past contenders, whose victories bring masses of revelers into the streets of Toronto honking horns and waving flags, there isn’t to my knowledge an especially big Spanish-expatriate community here. So I bicycled down to the Kensington Market area to attend a panel discussion about the “avant-garde” (“old school and new school”). But when I arrived in the neighbourhood I found pandemonium had broken out and there were hundreds on foot and wheels jamming the streets with Spanish flags. It seemed anyone who spoke a Romance language had decided this win was fairly theirs to celebrate.
I watched for a little while, especially blown away by the fact that there was a stopped streetcar that had a crowd of some 40 people dancing high atop it, blowing vuvuzelas, rocking the vehicle on its tracks.
Then I went into the back of a bar, where for some reason in what was billed as kind of an open-discussion forum, the lights were dimmed to nearly black, there was a group of people on stage giving (very intelligent) semi-formal presentations, and the matter at stake was the survival of the “radical gesture.” This seemed like a strange juxtaposition. I wanted to shout, “Um, guys, there are people outside dancing on top of a streetcar!” Continue reading
Filed under carl wilson, dance, lectures, literature, music, other, poetry
David Antin’s “What It Means to Be Avant-Garde” (1981/1993), 2010 Scream festival edition
by Carl Wilson
I was having one of those swamp-thing weekends where you start crying in all the wrong places and to all the wrong people, and I needed a therapy. Not the sort to solve problems but the sort in which you invent an imaginative diversion machine to feed them into, to help you stop thinking explicitly about them, and hope that they return to you in some more intelligible form. Evolution might have invented dreaming for this purpose but there was no way I could sleep.
The first imaginative machine consisted of sitting in a bar full of people watching Spain and Paraguay play soccer, then a gallery show (Michah Lexier’s playfully arid numbers-game group show A to B), then a movie and wine at Margaux’s. These were effective but only till waking Sunday morning in much the same state as Saturday morning, so I had to invent something better.
That better thing turned out to be to sit, pace, stroll and stride around a park with MP3s of talk-pieces by David Antin on my headphones. I had downloaded them because in a couple of days I would be introducing Antin at an event in the Scream Literary Festival in Toronto and wanted to get in tune with his work, which I’d known only passingly. Continue reading
Filed under carl wilson, events, lectures, literature, poetry
The Bands that Don’t Reform, by Antony Harding and Darren Hayman
The Bands that Don’t Reform, by Antony Harding and Darren Hayman, by Carl Wilson
It could read as a pretty thin joke about a couple of those aforementioned nerdz realizing that they only have their petty music-fanatic dogma left in common, but there’s a second, more bittersweet layer: If they don’t think even the relatively minor business of a rock band trying to reunite has any hope of a good result, then why are they trying to glue together a couple of split-up hearts? Continue reading →
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Filed under carl wilson, lectures, music
Tagged as actors?, aesthetic rehab, Antony Harding now lives in Sweden with his wife and kid, Bill Hicks, drugs, Hefner, I'm a bit of a sucker for anything Darren Hayman does, Kim Gordon and Stephen Malkmus probably are hard to get along with, marriage, nerding about nerds, Pop Conference, the flicker of reality, trying not to use the word metacommentary