Dark Park

My hero Troy Paiva is still out every full moon to catch his vision of Lost America. Between releasing two books ("Lost America" and "Night Visions") he is kind enough to share his amazing work on his Flickr-site.




His nocturnal journeys have recently led him to one of my favourite subjects: An abandoned amusement park! I posted a selection of a similar project by another photographer recently, but when Mr. Paiva clicks his way through a lost and dark fun-park, it is sure to be something special.



I would love to invite Troy Paiva to come to Berlin to pay a full-moon visit to the spectacularly creepy "Spree Park", the former East-German amusement park which is left to rot since 2001!


Click pics to enlarge!

Rear Projection

Busy bee John Waters has just opened a new exhibition of his hilarious work at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.



Brilliantly titled Rear Projection, John gathers another wild mix of his screen-shot collages and distortions (Children who smoke) and all new, giant pop-art sculptures of Ike Turner playing with a Tina marionette, leaking poppers-bottles (which he admits using not for sex but on rollercoasters only!) and ridiculously expensive Hollywood cosmetic.



Once more, Waters fiendishly turns his obsessions into an entertaining and acidic show of satire, art and consumerism that caters to film freaks, pop-art fans and hillbillies alike.



More pictures and details. ahd check out the private Tour below! It´s almost like being there...

Tone Matrix

Andre Michelle, the genius programmer who is also responsible for the fantastic Hobnox Audio Tool (I wrote about it frequently last year), has come up with a new, nifty audio-game: The Tone Matrix!



Tone Matrix is a simple flash-based sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. You have a square filled with more squares which you can activate and de-activate by clicking them. This way you can easily create "gamelan-esque" sequences or minimal rhythms that you can vary constantly. The pattern can be totally hypnotising and playing with this thing is seriously addictive.

After coming up with a bunch of geometric patterns I soon began to write words into the grid just to see how text patterns might sound.


This simple idea is apparently based on the fantastic Tenori-On by Yamaha. Thanks Andre for providing these amazing toys for free!

Buy Nothing! Pay Now!

It´s now three month after the Designers Republic closed their doors, and now CR Blog has published an article about the relevance and the dialectic dilemma of the influential company.


It´s an entertaining read that focusses on the different stages of tDR`s work, as they moved from logo parody to "digital baroque" and later to abstract and obscure pseudo-architecture, while the mainstream followed, copied and eventually even hired them.

Do It Yourself - The Story of Rough Trade

Do yourself a favour and watch this great BBC 4 documentary "Do It Yourself - The Story of Rough Trade", if you haven´t done already.
From its humble beginnings as a small record shop filled with records which owner Geoff Travis had brought back from America, to its rise as a major distribution force of independent music and one of the most influential labels of the 1980s.

It´s especially interesting to follow the rise and fall (and rise) of a couple of devoted people who never wanted to be part of the mainstream music industry but soon found out that they needed hits, "Top of the pops" and binding contracts to sustain their growing business.

It is a whopping 88 minutes, but there are lots of worse things you can waste your time on...

Flori 62

This is not a nostalgic post about a floral exhibition in the sixties, but a reminder that Florian Schneider, the recently retired founding member of Kraftwerk is 62 today.


Apparently, Schneider uses his new leisure time to walk around music-trade-fairs only to make occasional cameo appearances. Here we see him popping into a clip that shows sequencer guru Sebastian Niessen explaining his famous SAM-16. The guy that appears in the frame like Lefty, the Salesman at 1:18 is indeed Mr. Schneider himself.

Click here for the video on Sonic State News.

Of course this has only some very small entertainment value for a very small crowd of people, so don´t bother to watch if you landed on this site by googling for "pre-te3ns".

Overlit Chrome

American photo- or hyperrealism was a very successful art form in Germany during the 1970s.

I think that these ultra-realistic paintings offered many non-Americans a much more comfortable grip and understanding of the "American Dream". For many left-leaning critics Pop-Art embraced consumerism and the banality of art a bit too friendly and carefree.



Photorealism, on the other hand baffled with spectacular painting techniques and a completely irony-free, piercing stare into the American landscape. The shiny, glaring surface on many paintings was either over saturated with colours or so overexposed, almost bleached by the sun, that you´d reach for your sunglasses instinctively.



Suburban scenes of people standing in front of their houses and cars, sunbathing inhabitants next to the countless backyard pools, details of cars, reflecting showrooms, diners, close-ups of candy and dripping jelly-cakes, fractures of baroque neon-signs by day and crashed limousines rotting in high grass. You almost feel like a voyeur.




Like failed attempts of the perfect advertisement, glimpses into a mostly empty world that is filled with useless and decorative place holders.

I think that photorealism is still amazing because it managed to transform a seemingly banal picture into something worth looking at by subjecting it to imaginary sunlight.

Today, Photoshop allows us to create pictures that are so hyper-perfect that the unreal effect is nearly the same. It also allows us to create a picture in "photorealistic style" with the help of a filter. It makes it much more interesting to see what they saw.



I always loved photorealism because it pictured (and suggested) exactly what I liked and what I missed growing up in rebuilt but still scarred Germany: The vast spaces, the tacky colours, the bizarre chrome, the humming of air-condition, lonely palm trees and kidney-shaped pools.



The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin is currently hosting "Picturing America - Photorealism in the 1970s", which is the first extensive exhibition in Germany for 30 years, covering the most prominent works of Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Franz Gertsch, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleeman, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, Stephen Posen, John Salt, Ben Schonzeit and Paul Staiger

Doris birth Day

8 1/5 reminded me that the very funny Doris Day was born 85 years ago today! Happy birthday, Doris! You always looked great in the kitchen...

Mbube

"Mbube" is most likely one of the most famous melodies known on this planet. The history behind this haunting Zulu-song, which would later be known throughout the world as "Wimoweh" and/or "The Lion sleeps tonight" is as ramified and mysterious as the jungle it evokes with its chants and wailing, ghostly voice.


Salomon Linda, who conceived the melody one afternoon in South-Africa´s only recording studio in the 1930s, sold all the rights to the owner of the record company for a minimal amount of cash. In return he was "allowed" to work as a packer in the small company. During the decades, several people would take on the song and changed it until it became an enduring mega-seller. I found it quite surprising that the song, which is widely believed to be an ancient African lullaby, was written in the 1930s and that it was transformed by several composers who conveniently forgot to mention Salomon Linda as the original author.

For some downloadable versions of "Mbube/The Lion sleeps tonight" and a short write-up of the story head to Any Major Dude. The complete and riveting history of the song from it´s conception to the long law-suits during the naughties can be read in this fascinating story.

This is the original recording of "Mbube" by Salomon Linda and the Evening Birds.

Terminus

"Perhaps the ending state of the human race will resemble a well-run airport where no planes ever take off!"







(click pic: make big)

Quote: J.G. Ballard in conversation, 2003
Amazing night photography of abandoned terminal at San Francisco International Airport by 4Pizon.