Archives

Planet of the Pop Star Apes

GorillazThere must be some way I can tell you all about Gorillaz without coming across like a marketing lackey. The fact is, they’re a marketer’s dream — a multi-media collaboration between Damon Albarn (of Blur fame) and Jamie Hewlett (of Tank Girl fame), plus various hangers-on like the over-rated Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and the mega-cool Dan the Automator. How’s that for name dropping? Even the concept is too cute to be true: rather than front an absurd side-project, these pop stars have chosen to express themselves through an imaginary cartoon band. Whatever, the full-length release is a hectic, loopy collision of smart beats and dumb singing stunts, and it makes for a surprisingly excellent collection of tunes — especially for a super group.

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The City in Time/Space

Manhattan TimeformationsMaps are good. These maps are great — a staggering set of cartographic/temporal explorations of Manhattan’s urban-sedimentary layers by the architect Brian McGrath for the Skyscraper Museum.

There are four incredible views of the city’s physical growth mapped to historical contexts, all done with Macromedia Flash. But the one you must see is the last, “Perspectival Fly-Through,” which allows you to float through an onion-peeled Manhattan. In its sweeping motion and vectors-on-black aesthetic, this fly-through recalls piloting an X-wing fighter through the trenches of the Death Star in the original Star Wars arcade game.

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Shelf Life

Shelf LifeFor the past few nights, I’ve been helping to assemble these shelves for my apartment, which I hired my friend Oliver to build. From a simple sketch I made, he tracked down all the materials and came up with a custom solution to meet the square footage-challenged dynamics of my tiny Manhattan apartment. We’re using the ultra-cool Speed-Rail line of industrial slip-on fittings, which allows us to assemble the shelves in countless ways using a simple allen wrench.

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A Mile of Museums, for Free

Once a year, for twenty-three years now, the mile-long stretch of big-name museums along Fifth Avenue open up their doors to the public for one evening, free of charge — they call it the Museum Mile Festival. Fifth Avenue itself closes to automobiles and becomes a promenade, and the street floods with art lovers. I sound like I know it all, but I’ve only just come home from my first Museum Mile Festival after repeatedly missing them year after year. I got to see the Frank O. Gehry retrospective at the Guggenheim, which was great because it’s great and also great because it was free. My only complaint is that the festival, which runs from 06-09p, is too short — by the time I was done with Gehry, there was barely enough time to quickly peruse the “Aluminum by Design” show at the Cooper-Hewitt.

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Just in Time, Again and Again

Nina Simone at the Village GateBack on 08 May, I wrote that the recording of Nina Simone’s 1961 performance “At the Village Gate” was in heavy rotation on my CD player. That’s still the case. In fact, this past week, I became somewhat irrationally fixated on the disc’s opening track, “Just in Time.”

Simone’s performance of this small-scale paean to luck and love is sublime genius. She begins with her trademark casual precision, a subdued exuberance that quietly erupts towards the end into a beautiful, joyous crying. But these vocals are just bookends — after singing just a few bars at the beginning of the song she seemingly and suddenly abandons her audience to a quietly playful guitar, bass, drums.

The amazing trick she manages is this: defining the whole of the song by her very absence from its center, controlling that undefinable intersection of sound and time wherein the audience craves the form of her voice the most by not giving it over at all, withholding it almost cruelly. Yet, in spite of this absence, the whole of the song and every tiny detail in its crevices are clearly of her own design and volition — though the voice is gone, she’s not. She’s unmistakably there. It’s a brazenly confident gesture with which to open an evening’s performance, but her delivery and its effectiveness are immaculate. I’m left in wonder after each listen and I can’t get enough; since Thursday, I’ve had my CD player set to repeat that track without end.

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