CONQUISTADORS TOUR DAY 11
The Toledo Museum of Art is a ten minute walk from the Robinwood Concert House, and with a short drive ahead of me, I spend a good part of the day there. It's a totally manageable museum, mostly on one floor, with the collections not so expansive that you can't see everything. I skip the paid exhibits (Egyptian mummies on one side, Botero on the other) and dig in to most everything else. I am the kind of museum visitor who likes to read every name, title, date and description, which gets tedious, especially since I know I will forget 99 percent of it.
One painting I remember the details of is a Mark Rothko piece from 1960, Untitled. I am not on hallucinogenics as I stand observing it, but it appears as though the dark (purple?) areas on the dark red background are constantly expanding, moving outward toward the margins of the canvas. This is not happening, and I am observing it. I get lost for a while with that. Free improv.
Other favorites are the monumental Athanor canvas by Anselm Kiefer and the small portfolio of photographs of iconic moments in the African-American civil rights struggle (by Ernest Withers, who I later learn was an FBI informant!).
A lot of the famous guys from the 19th and 20th centuries are represented here by at least a painting or sculpture or two: Matisse, Rodin, Picasso, van Gogh, Monet, Calder, Guston, Mondriaan, Degas, Miro, Hopper, Renoir, Cezanne, LeWitt. Are there women? There's a benign Georgia O'Keefe painting. My friends, the composers Pete Harden and Kate Moore, have a great little poster in their house in The Hague, made by the Guerrilla Girls: a classic female nude with a gorilla mask and a text to the effect that the overwhelming majority of nudes in art museums are women, but the overwhelming majority of artists are men. Here in Toledo, the contemporary collection is bereft of the genitalia of either sex.
There are also small collections of African, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian art. These pieces must be considered differently than the art displayed from (western) Europe and the US, which fills up the majority of the museum. To me, the western art doesn't seem to objectify the makers of the works like the "exotic" art does. A large piece cut off from a Cambodian temple frieze constitutes South Asian art, but there is not a gargoyle from an English cathedral in here.
You know what? Great salad in the museum cafe! And not overpriced! Field greens with pecans, grapes, and feta. Happy healthy surprise.
I pack the car and make my way an hour north, to Ypsilanti, a small college town between Detroit and Ann Arbor with a history connected to the building of bomber aircraft. I play a house show in a suburban home called "The Pleasuredome". Sid Redlin, from Kalamazoo, starts off with a mesmerizing set: two ominous looped synth statements over which he "solos" with a collection of small gadgets, open circuits, and no-input mixer. Loopgoat is next, a captivating, understated solo act with Casio SK-1, guitar, effects pedals and voice. The Pleasuredome, hosted by musician, recordist and philosopher Thom Elliot, is generally a noise scene. I play a pair of songs before giving the floor to Helen Caldicott, speaking at high speed (because there is no time to waste on abolishing nukes) through my tape player over the Casiotone and a shit-ton of feedback.
Although I have other tapes with me, whenever I use the cassette player on this tour I've been playing the Helen Caldicott tape I bought at a library sale last fall. I know that most of what she says in my set is barely intelligible: high speed, dubbed out, distorted. So maybe I'm a mystic here. But goddammit I need to be close to the idea that ALL nukes have to go. There is no such thing as peaceful nuclear technology, because mining the shit, storing the waste, dealing with the accidents -- it's all part of industrial warfare against the species that inhabit this planet. There are no choices with this, and it has to go.
Recently, Helen Caldicott DESTROYED the otherwise excellent environmentalist writer George Monbiot on Democracy Now. It's really upsetting to me: Monbiot, who has written powerfully about a range of environmental and political causes that resonate with me, has decided to use the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan to argue, essentially, that "nuclear is better than coal". He sounds like an industry spokesman, or a politician. He certainly sounds like a bean counter. The committed environmentalist's job is not to make concessions, but to identify and speak and act out against the dangers of any threats to species survival and clean air, water, and soil. Monbiot, who presents himself as rational and under attack for an unpopular but necessary and "scientific" stance on nuclear energy, is off the deep end. Advocates of nuclear technology, and they are everywhere, are beneath contempt and deserve the harshest scorn. And should certainly be the ones dispatched to the scene to "clean up" when meltdowns occur.
SET LIST 4/1
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story
One painting I remember the details of is a Mark Rothko piece from 1960, Untitled. I am not on hallucinogenics as I stand observing it, but it appears as though the dark (purple?) areas on the dark red background are constantly expanding, moving outward toward the margins of the canvas. This is not happening, and I am observing it. I get lost for a while with that. Free improv.
Other favorites are the monumental Athanor canvas by Anselm Kiefer and the small portfolio of photographs of iconic moments in the African-American civil rights struggle (by Ernest Withers, who I later learn was an FBI informant!).
A lot of the famous guys from the 19th and 20th centuries are represented here by at least a painting or sculpture or two: Matisse, Rodin, Picasso, van Gogh, Monet, Calder, Guston, Mondriaan, Degas, Miro, Hopper, Renoir, Cezanne, LeWitt. Are there women? There's a benign Georgia O'Keefe painting. My friends, the composers Pete Harden and Kate Moore, have a great little poster in their house in The Hague, made by the Guerrilla Girls: a classic female nude with a gorilla mask and a text to the effect that the overwhelming majority of nudes in art museums are women, but the overwhelming majority of artists are men. Here in Toledo, the contemporary collection is bereft of the genitalia of either sex.
There are also small collections of African, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian art. These pieces must be considered differently than the art displayed from (western) Europe and the US, which fills up the majority of the museum. To me, the western art doesn't seem to objectify the makers of the works like the "exotic" art does. A large piece cut off from a Cambodian temple frieze constitutes South Asian art, but there is not a gargoyle from an English cathedral in here.
You know what? Great salad in the museum cafe! And not overpriced! Field greens with pecans, grapes, and feta. Happy healthy surprise.
I pack the car and make my way an hour north, to Ypsilanti, a small college town between Detroit and Ann Arbor with a history connected to the building of bomber aircraft. I play a house show in a suburban home called "The Pleasuredome". Sid Redlin, from Kalamazoo, starts off with a mesmerizing set: two ominous looped synth statements over which he "solos" with a collection of small gadgets, open circuits, and no-input mixer. Loopgoat is next, a captivating, understated solo act with Casio SK-1, guitar, effects pedals and voice. The Pleasuredome, hosted by musician, recordist and philosopher Thom Elliot, is generally a noise scene. I play a pair of songs before giving the floor to Helen Caldicott, speaking at high speed (because there is no time to waste on abolishing nukes) through my tape player over the Casiotone and a shit-ton of feedback.
Although I have other tapes with me, whenever I use the cassette player on this tour I've been playing the Helen Caldicott tape I bought at a library sale last fall. I know that most of what she says in my set is barely intelligible: high speed, dubbed out, distorted. So maybe I'm a mystic here. But goddammit I need to be close to the idea that ALL nukes have to go. There is no such thing as peaceful nuclear technology, because mining the shit, storing the waste, dealing with the accidents -- it's all part of industrial warfare against the species that inhabit this planet. There are no choices with this, and it has to go.
Recently, Helen Caldicott DESTROYED the otherwise excellent environmentalist writer George Monbiot on Democracy Now. It's really upsetting to me: Monbiot, who has written powerfully about a range of environmental and political causes that resonate with me, has decided to use the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan to argue, essentially, that "nuclear is better than coal". He sounds like an industry spokesman, or a politician. He certainly sounds like a bean counter. The committed environmentalist's job is not to make concessions, but to identify and speak and act out against the dangers of any threats to species survival and clean air, water, and soil. Monbiot, who presents himself as rational and under attack for an unpopular but necessary and "scientific" stance on nuclear energy, is off the deep end. Advocates of nuclear technology, and they are everywhere, are beneath contempt and deserve the harshest scorn. And should certainly be the ones dispatched to the scene to "clean up" when meltdowns occur.
SET LIST 4/1
Rocket Ships
What We Have
Helen Caldicott
The Love Story
Labels: art, Conquistadors, environment, music, nukes
posted by Keir at 7:38 PM
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