pocket music

Technology pushes everyone around it seems, especially artists I often think because there is so much to keep up with, adapt to and compete with and artists are a culture's innovators. However, in the end I feel artists get the last word.

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not but just as the piano evolved from dulcimers, our idea of what defines an instrument continues to change and include what began simply as a phone.   Mobile apps are redefining the idea of a music band and expanding our options to make music.  I haven't developed much of an ear for techno synthesized music yet, but I am pleased with the inventiveness of what people are doing to make music with what they are carrying in their pocket.  In some ways the technology levels the playing field, helping set a beat and letting someone without musical talent 'play' an instrument.  The spread of digital music is an undeniable fact, but for me reveals less about technology and more of the human desire to make art.   

Here is a video (2008) of iBand; two iPhones and a Nintendo D combine to play app instruments (apps by MooCowMusic) much like any band formed by using other instruments. 

What if you are rocking four iPhones?  Then you have the option of a one woman (or man) band like South Korean Kim Yeo Hee (a.k.a. Apple Girl). She can and does play 'real' instruments, too, as she does for "Half" with a full band and backup singers. 

Watch below as she covers Lady Gaga's "Pokerface" with only iPhone 'instruments' using T-Pain, Beatmaker and a fourth app that I could understand what she says (please help me translate if you can).

Here's a bit of Michael Jackson's Black or White on an iPhone using the app iShred. (Video by alychg 2011.)

Here is one more song with irony hopefully not lost, "Life Is Greater Than the Internet," also from iBand using two iPhones and an iPod Touch.

 

If you come across more music produced on the iPhone or the iPad (I didn't even start listing iPad songs but they are out there!), please share ones that you like with me. 

It will be interesting to see how the songs evolve with the assistance of mobile devices and how more artists own (or abandon) the medium.  Besides, I'm inspired by the ingenuity.

i love ME says Yayoi Kusama

Being an artist:

Refreshingly secure with herself and with a strong unique vision, it only makes sense that apparently there are two feature documentary films about Yayoi Kusama.  "Princess of Dots" by Heather Lenz is slated to finish this year.

!! If you only have time to watch one of these, I recommend the first one for its tone and insight if you are unfamiliar with her work.

This is the trailer for the 2008 Japanese (with English subtitles) movie "I love ME" about Yayoi Kusama by Director Takako Matsumoto.  You can rent this film to watch online for 48 hours through New People Artist Series. Or buy it of course. For more information on this film, visit www.NewPeopleArtistSeries.com or www.viz-pictures.com

For another post with my story of seeing a retrospective of Kusama in Paris, see "conquering the Pompidou."

double take

(belated) Friday Flick: 

Double Take
2010, Director Johan Grimonprez, Writers Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy, Hitchcock Double Ron Burrage and Hitchcock Voice Ron Perry.

"If you meet your double, you should kill him."



A crazy smart and unique movie.  Watch the trailer:

the interactive periodic table

App on Tap:

The Elements: A Visual Exploration

The Elements is a beefy educational iPad app with motion and interactive features that make studying the periodic table more interesting and more tangible.  

"If you think you've seen the periodic table, think again."  

The visual quality is high and appealing, and the technical information is supported by Wolfram Alpha.  Spending time with the app feels easy, either as a beautiful reference tool or a more pleasurable alternative to flashcards for rigorous memorization for school.  I didn't buy the 3D glasses to see the additional visual feature of the app;  I didn't feel I needed it.  

The downside:  the app is 1.71 GB so it takes a LOOOONG time to download (expect a couple of hours) plus it takes up a lot of memory space, which may very well be all fine if you expect and plan for it.

Here is a video showing how and why the creator (Theodore Gray), who authored the coffee table book and other periodic table related merchandise, decided to make the app. 

I learned about The Elements from another artist.  I read a review by Tina Hoggett on her blog, big ideas. 

Click here to Find the app in the App Store.   

from bored and lost to being an artist; Sophie Calle

Being an artist:

Sophie Calle explains how she started making art in the 70s.  (Video from EGS, the European Graduate School.)

the yellow handkerchief

Friday Flick:  The Yellow Handkerchief (2008)

A well put together, understated movie of human connection and healing with an outstanding performance by William Hurt matched by the formidable Maria Bello, plus Kristen Stewart and Eddie Redmayne.  This love story flows strong,  steady and ominous as the swampy Louisiana current it's set in.  The Yellow Handkerchief, symbolic of hope, while dingy and worn is still clearly held by the knot of its fabric.

See the trailer on IMDB (Click here).  

conquering the Centre Pompidou in Paris

Centre Pompidou front entrance

Centre Pompidou logo (the size of my hand) embedded in cobblestones of plaza

We visited the Centre Pompidou several times.  With just the right bustling vibe, it feels like the center of town to me even if not geographically the center of Paris.  I was really attracted to this neighborhood.  I kept wanting to go back to it and wander the streets. And we did. 

Riding the escalators up each floor along the exterior frame of the building gives a wonderful peek over the tops of buildings across the city.  The motion feels appropriate with the setting. 

On one of the balconies of Centre Pompidou

 Basilique du Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre in the distance

Jugglers, entertainers and passerbys dashing around the plaza at the entrance. 

 

We spent one visit to the museum in the Edvard Munch exhibit.  Munch is most known for painting The Scream (1890s) which is not there, but I don't think the exhibit needed it.  This exhibition, called The Modern Eye, runs until the first week of January 2012 and demonstrates the variety in the artist's work including his experimentation with photography in the early 1900s.  I was really glad to see his photographs.  While not as layered, expressive and well, obviously painterly, as his paintings, and well after his break from the current trend of Impressionism, they  show his effort to use photography as another medium for probing the psyche. Self-portrait after self-portrait trying to capture an image of  anxiety or an image of the tortured soul.  Munch made so many sensitive paintings in his pursuit of making the soul visible. He returned to the same setting to paint and repaint similar scenes.  He revisits girls on bridges repeatedly; figures flow like thick water, into ground, into sky.  One red-headed figure of a girl felt so present, you could feel her longing; she made me think of my red-headed niece for the rest of the day.   

Another day we spent combing the collection. Because it's a European museum, logically there are more samples of European artists in their collection than we  see in the U.S. I found this refreshing. The Pompidou's collection has great range, and for me it was such a pleasure to see pieces by so many avant-garde artists, Fluxus artists, and so on.  They have Plight, a Joseph Beuys installation of a pair of rooms lined with felt and a grand piano in it, that for all the pictures you ever see, standing in the room and feeling that installation can take your breath away. (They also have Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano (1966), a piano wrapped in industrial felt, which pairs with the room installation quite well.)

Mmm, and works by Andre Breton and Piero Manzoni. 

Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1959

I discovered a few artists new to me, including this sculptor, Dorothea Tanning.  

Dorothea Tanning, de quel amour, 1970

I could go back tomorrow and spend more hours.   I could spend days.


The first times we visited the museum, we always went up an escalator on the left side. According to the museum pamphlets it seemed all exhibits were reached by going that direction. One day, we ventured up the right escalator to see the small exhibit by the artist who won this year's Marcel Duchamp award, Cyprien Gaillard.  I couldn't clearly tell by the signage that any more exhibitions were up that side of the museum or particularly, how to get to them.   

Except, I saw a modest sign on a wall that said Yayoi Kusama. The polka dot artist! 

I thought there might be a little room of her paintings or a video behind that wall.  When I headed that way with my regular museum pass, I was turned away by the ticket taker. She didn't say much but I couldn't understand her French anyway. (Surprisingly, this didn't happen very often to me, by the way.  I usually got the gist of whatever French communications I had.) Anyway, wanting to see what else was up the escalator on the right side, I went to the main counter and bought more special collection tickets, this time asking specifically for Yayoi. It was our last day and I am so glad that I was so determined.  More than I even imagined, there was a whole half floor of art hiding over there.  It was a Yayoi Kusama retrospective! 

No. B. 62, detail, by Yayoi Kusama, from m.ariii's photostream

Many paintings, sculptures and installations were on display spanning her career.  I have only seen documentation of Kusama's work - never had I seen it in person.  The textures of the various obsessive mark-making and layers of materials are impressive.  Even though obsessive, her training comes through in the sense of pattern and strong use of form to command the eye.

When walking through one of her famous polka dot room installations, with mirrored walls and red and white inflated polka dot sculptures, I stood in the far corner to take it all in.  A french woman squealed at me in French.  I started with my clumsy, "Je ne sais pas..." to explain I don't speak French.  She quickly said in English, "You are part of the art!  You are an artiste!"  I looked down at my red sweater and a long black scarf with white polka dots.  We all laughed.

Here is a 2008 video clip of the same installation on display in La Villette, France.

The Yayoi Kusama exhibit is on view until January 9th of 2012.  (I didn't see this next piece from Gagosian while in Paris, but it's a good sample of Kusama's inflatable sculptures.  They really fill up the room.)

Yayoi Kusama [Installation view], Gagosian Gallery, a photo by 16 Miles of String on Flickr.

We never figured out how to get to a couple of floors of the museum where there is a public reference library (according to the website) and what looked like a vending machine cafe.  Plus verandas with sculpture outside that I couldn't get near. As fond as I am of libraries, it seemed fine to miss some things this time. Although, not knowing how to get around to those spaces, but seeing them through glass walls and locked glass doors, bugged the shit out of me.  You can imagine my nose pressed to glass!

It's hard to tell by Pompidou's website what exhibits cost what.  We bought some three day passes (you can get 2 day, 5 day or whatever you want) good at many museums around Paris at a vending machine in the lobby, but special exhibitions cost extra.  That's fine by me, I recognize these exhibits usually cost museums a fortune to rent the work from their home museums, have the art shipped and so on, but next time I plan to ask more questions about special exhibits when I buy tickets so I don't miss anything!

MORE:

Read an article on Munch by Tobias Grey in the Wall Street Journal.

Pompidou provides quality educational materials on their website.

Sources:

m.ariii's Photostream

Gagosian Gallery
Centre Pompidou 

*NOTE: I only have a couple of snaps for my notes because the Pompidou allows visitors to take photos of their collection but not borrowed works, like the Kusama show.  

Be sure to watch for Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Beuys features in my coming Being an Artist posts. 

Finally, this (akayheartsyou) person's fun little travel video of Paris that I found on YouTube gives a couple of glimpses of clever art installations at the Pompidou. 

  

stacking em up

Snaps: 

A scene from salty snack studios.  

Stacking 'em up into our tower of technology gear-head shame.  I'm all Apple (including an iPod and an iPad that missed picture day), but Bruce covers the gamut:  Three Blackberries, a Droid, and an iPhone.  Now he's simultaneously writing code for all three.  Fun times, eh? 

places to stay in Paris

Places to Stay: Paris.

Starting now, I'm creating a new category, Places to Stay, for keeping track of hotels, resorts, B&Bs, by-owner-rentals, and all. The category will be more like a list than proper reviews.  The goal is simple:  track places I have stayed and want to revisit, or places that someone recommended.  By posting them publicly I hope to get reports from others on these places, lists of other good places, plus be able to easily share it all with friends.

What better city to begin than Paris?

First off, we booked our trip last minute.  And booked our rooms even later last minute.  By simply Googling for recommendations, I found reviews of 'budget' hotels that looked perfect for college kids - how about a big dull room with four beds in it and a bathroom down the hall?  Or reviews for 'boutique' hotels, which were way out of my price range - 350 clams a night. Or their website was so fancy I was almost too intimidated to even ask the price of a room. My criteria was 1) good location, central for walking the city but a little south of the bulk of the tourist hotels if possible, probably the 5th arrondissment and maybe near Rue Mouffetard, 2) not break the bank, 3) have some charm and hopefully be a little independent place (rather than a big commercial hotel).

stairway at Hotel des Nations Saint Germain

In desperation, I went onto Twitter and did a shout out.  @LightbulbDesign from London instantly saved our bacon with a great list of places to try. (She saved our crumpets in the past, too!) To my regret, I have since lost that list and cannot even find the posts on Twitter, so I only have information on one place - the hotel where we stayed.  Losing her list is just more reason for me to collect such notes into a blog post!

Because it was so late in the game, we booked a hotel that had availability and would let us book online.  A couple of hotels required email exchanges for a reservation and I was too freaked out that we would be sleeping in the train station to wait for replies.

Cute Flower shop across the street from Hotel des Nations Saint Germain

We stayed at Hotel des Nations Saint Germain and liked it, especially the location.  Their website described the location well, "located on the left bank of Paris, near the Panthéon, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Luxembourg Garden.  The nearest metro station Place Monge (line 7) gives easy reach to the Louvre Museum and the Opera District. Also near the station Cardinal Lemoine (line 10) and several bus lines."  The room we stayed in was small and just fine by my standards, but I would warn people to not expect American scaled rooms (but I'd warn the same to people traveling anywhere outside the U.S.) and specifically, it's good to know in advance that the shower is smaller than a phone booth. Personally, I was totally fine with it.  

Phone Booth Shower

Our friends stayed at Hotel Saint-Jaques, also in the Latin Quarter.  Their location wasn't far from ours and I think they would recommend it.  They had a room on an upper floor which sounded worth a little extra for its added romantic feel and of course, a tad bit more sky in their view.  They also had a tub with a handheld shower feature rather than a shower, which they sounded fine (and even amused) to use. 

Since returning, a friend highly recommended a place that coincidentally I had tried to email for reservations for us, before I panicked and booked the other place. Hotel Grandes Ecoles looks good for its excellent location, also in the Latin Quarter very close to where we stayed, plus a wonderful courtyard to enjoy during warmer seasons. I'd like to try them next I think.

View from our hotel window. I can stare into details of shutters, railings and drainpipes for hours.

I'm not sure who to credit, but I bookmarked websites for Jardin de Villiers, the colorful Le Maison Montparnasse and Port-Royal-Hotel. A friend put a further southeast place on my radar, Cardinal Rive Gauche, which led me to these related hotels that I might try one day, too.  When (if) I come into a major windfall, I might try a place that has French designer flare.  

Can you tell I'm preparing for a return trip?

I would also consider a flat (or apartment) rental by owner, but I understand there are some laws that restrict those in Paris, so I'll do more research before booking one. A NY Times travel review by Marc Gross mentioned Studios Paris for short-term rentals, so maybe I'll start there.  (Studios Paris, 4, rue Androuet, 18th; (33-977) 219-888, paris-apartment-rent.com.)

what makes you free, gaga on abramovic

Being an artist:

Lady Gaga answers a simple question from Marina Abramovic.

a graphic Che falls flat

Che: A Graphic Biography by Spain Rodriguez

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Well this turned out to be disappointing. I'll have to disagree with Art Spiegelman's quote on the cover endorsing it as "Spain's take on Che is brilliant and radical." Unless I find why he thinks so, cause I don't see it. I support a graphic biography of Che Guevara, but this book lacked flow.



The cover blurbs boast "this dramatic and extensively researched book breathes new life into his story and struggle." Supposedly due to the powerful artwork, which one image at a time looks fine, but the sequences are abrupt and frequently confusing and the story structure is flat as well. Tacked onto the end of the book is a 4 1/2 page text (with no graphics at all) dissertation on the power of Che as an iconic image and how images of him have been used/exploited, etc., but even that text doesn't illustrate how or what is compelling about Spain's Graphic Biography of Che.



Sorry, I wanted to like it, but it fell flat.



View all my reviews

make your own challenges says Sherman

Being an artist:

Realizing what you can grow up to do, from Cindy Sherman.

the lady and the duke

Friday Flick:

I'm not recommending Sony Classics' The Lady and the Duke (released in 2001) for its story or directing (by legendary Eric Rohmer) or cinematography or performances.  I couldn't even watch the movie in its entirety.  I fast-forwarded.  And that is something that I hardly ever ever do.  I force myself to sit all the way through even the dullest of movies before I judge it.  Sadly, I could not do it with this one.  The tales of an Englishwoman's affairs during the French Revolution appeal to me, but this film did not bring that story to life with any strength. I didn't even hang onto the copy of the DVD to revisit the movie at a different time when I might be more in the mood.  I popped it right back in the mail to Facets.  And I feel vindicated for my disappointment by Stephanie Zacharek's review in Salon among others. 

All that said, I was attracted to the idea of using paintings as sets for a movie.  The painted backdrops have an impressive affect on time and motion, ripening it for sensuality and nostalgia.  In Roger Ebert's review, he describes it as, "a daring visual style in which the actors and foreground action are seen against artificial tableaux of Paris circa 1792. These are not "painted backdrops," but meticulously constructed perspective drawings, which are digitally combined with the action in a way that is both artificial and intriguing."  Unfortunately the action and story do not hold up to the set.  I don't really see how they could. Wow.  That's a hell of a set.  

In the end, even though the movie overall fell short for me, I'm grateful the French New Waver, Rohmer, experimented this way, especially so late in his career.  Apparently he was in his 80s when making the film.  He made something smart, elegant and tempting to the eyes that pushes the way we expect to see a motion picture.

To read more about the artist's thoughts when he, Jean Baptiste Marot, made the paintings for the movie and how they were incorporated technically (for example, note that the actors perform in front of green screens - not the actual paintings), follow this link.  

Sources:
SonyClassics.com

Salon.com

RogerEbert.com

Mubi.com
Facets.org 
Kamera.co.uk 
JeanBaptisteMorot.com