Culture

The NY Times has an odd obituary, including an entire paragraph of adjectives used to describe her.

I prefer Newsday’s coverage, with this obituary and this essay adapted from a speech she gave on April 7.

This post by a blogger I hadn’t read before is quite good. I found it via TBOGG.

I just realized something. None of the obituaries talk about her being queer, but she was in a relationship with Annie Leibovitz for a long time.

If the city can use eminent domain to take away people’s houses to build a stadium in Brooklyn, why can’t it use it to save an 1837 town house that the owners are allowing to fall part? This was a viable building in the 80s.

The Merchant’s House, on the left, is well worth a visit for anyone interested in NYC and historic houses.

Susan Sontag has died, aged 71. She was born in here in New York, and died here.

She was one of the only “public intellectuals” I regularly encountered in New York, as she was someone, as James and I are, voraciously interested in art of all kinds, especially when it was new, or rare. I would see her at a BAM performance of Frankfurt Ballet, or at an obscure play in the East Village, or at an art exhibit related to the siege of Sarajevo at the New York Kunsthalle on East 5th Street.

We have one signed book of hers, but I will let James tell that story.

He has achieved fame in the print media. He is one of twelve art bloggers in a write-up in the January Art in America. Joy Garnett (another of them) has the details.

Awesome. All 15 minutes, with choreography, as stop-action Lego animation.

You can download it for safe-keeping. It’s the link that says Tï¿œlï¿œcharger la vidï¿œo.

Bill Viola
The death of Tristan, from Tristan und Isolde
2004
Disney Hall, Los Angeles

artnet has a feature on The Tristan Project, based on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde involving director Peter Sellars, Los Angeles Philharmonic’s musical director Esa Pekka Salonen and the new artistic director of the Paris Opera, Gerard Mortier.

There are some great stills of the video work on the web site.

For those wondering what my favorite recording of the work is, it’s this one, recorded “live” (see the explanation on the Amazon page) at the 1966 Bayreuth Festival with Karl Böhm conducting, Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Wolfgang Windgassen as Tristan, and Christa Ludwig as Brangäne. It is dazzling. I would love to see a film of what it looked like. It was one of the revolutionary minimalist productions by Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson. If more people knew about his work, they wouldn’t be quite so ready to hail Robert Wilson as an innovative genius.

Orchestrally, this Bernstein recording is pretty fascinating too. I haven’t heard this Barenboim one, but it’s on its way in the mail and I’ll get to listen to it soon. We probably have at least 5 recordings of the opera already. I love it so much my web consulting company is called Tristan Media.

If you are an opera (and other classical music) fanatic like me, my favorite weblog for that subject is the DC-based ionarts. The site also covers a lot of other performing arts, plus visual arts, architecture, and interesting antiquities news.

[image from artnet

The web site just says “Coming Soon,” but I have a flyer for the opening event.

Last night we went to one of our favorite art benefits, the DUMBO Arts Center winter auction. We did quite well. You can click on the artist names on that link to see smallish images. We got work by Dan Golden, Federico Solmi, and Matt Dojny. We met the first two at the event.

Via Wooster Collective, I learned that the Animal Magazine show at Chelsea Market was shut down. Apparently this image (by Chris Savido I believe):

was too controversial. Our friend Eric Doeringer was part of the show.

—

UPDATE:

I asked Eric what he knew about the show. It sounds as if Chelsea Market reserved the right to veto some works, and did so, before the show opened. Therefore it seems odd (or stupid) that they then decided to close the show after having had a veto over art works in the show.

Many of the pieces from the magazine are currently on display at the ANIMAL Gallery, 437 East 9th Street (btw. 1st & A). Their hours (theoretically Tues-Sun 1-7) are inconsistent, so call them at 212-460-8125 to make sure they are open before heading over.

I checked this book out of the library today. If you’ve seen our apartment, you can understand why I’m trying to read more library books and buy a few less.

The previous reader had left some things in the book: The MoMA Nov/Dec 2004 calendar, and a press release from the John Baldessari show at Marian Goodman,