Keep Your Eye on the Bali

SO much going on.

Covfefe distracts, while the Climate Agreement may actually be abandoned in a few minutes.  I mean, it's not a surprise, it's what he's said all along, and his policies - such as they are - have eroded environmental protections and will continue to no matter what momentary lip service the president ends up paying to international scientific rigor.  And the noise is such, that people seem not to be noticing that department after life-saving department is atrophying from neglect (or crumbling under abuse).  Not least - lest we forget - millions of our Fellow Americans continue to view such things as worthy of very slight consideration, if not cause for celebration.

This state of affairs has been, is, and continues to be intolerable, and I condemn it.  So there.

In other news, we lost a giant of world music this week.  David Lewiston, whose name might not be at the front of your mind, but if you are have listened to indigenous music of Asia, Africa, or South America, to Gamelan, Tibetan chants, sacred song from around the world, there's a good chance he recorded it, or inspired the person who did.



Photo: NY Times/Nonesuch Records

Weight of the World

Since the recent reports on Global Climate, and the not-coincidental Civilians show The Great Immensity at the Public, I've been thinking a lot about the Adrián Villar Rojas exhibition we caught at the Serpentine last year, Today, We Reboot the Planet.

The floor of the gallery consisted (for this exhibition) of bricks fabricated from native clay in the artist's home country of Argentina.  The bricks were laid without mortar, which meant that they clinked against the sub-floor and each other when people walked on them, creating a constant descant of sound, and conveying the shaky ground we all walk in this pivotal moment of high-stakes environmental poker.

Clay was his primary medium throughout, most prominently in the central image of an elephant bearing the weight of the building - and, as I read the sculpture, bearing up under the weight of development (another kind of 'building'), industry and imperialism with their interlocking versions of environmental effrontery.

A central studio with stained glass gable windows contained dozens of smaller sculptures, also mainly fired clay, with other media, including found objects, mixed in.

Maybe you'll forgive me if I admit that this one, even with its explicit connection to the earth in the form of farm and gardening implements, reminds me of Marvin the Martian.

Happy May Day.

Nights in the Museum

Did a reading at MASS MoCA (which venue, in the larger sense, I've mentioned here many, many times) a couple Thursdays ago.  The American Premiere of The Interview, by Guillaume Leblon and Thomas Boutoux, to go along with Leblon's exhibition at the museum.

Photo by James Voorhies as far as I can tell

Photo by Art Evans

The experience provided me with a crash self-taught course in contemporary art, at the very least.  I sometimes feel like I know what I'm talking about when it comes to such things, then I'll run across a script like this one and realize that I don't know shit.  It was a great experience for me working on the piece with the artist, his wife, the other actor (plus the very game film intern we roped into being part of the show), and all the amazing, fantastic people at MoCA.

As if that weren't enough, we made a weekend out of it; I visited the museum exhibitions - most of them multiple times.  They're always good, you should go.  The Izhar Patkin work in the big room was especially moving, to me.

And we got to catch the residency/work-in-progress The Colorado, (also referred to as "Water Songs: Ha Tay G'am") a film and music project exploring the heartbreaking developments in the Colorado River Basin, and by extension the environmental catastrophes facing, umm, the entire planet.  Amazing.  Murat Eyuboglo is making the films; William deBuys is consulting on the science; a number of composers (Brittelle, Adams, Prestini, Worden, possibly others when all is said and done) scoring the music performed by the brilliant Roomful of Teeth; they all worked fast to put together the show we saw last Saturday.  I'm talking fast: they all showed up on Monday to talk, look at footage, write, and edit; the musicians arrived on Thursday morning; and the presentation was Saturday night.  The project won't be finished until 2015 (I think), keep an eye out for it.

Moving on from MoCA, I just want to mention the Cynthia Hopkins show A Living Documentary that happened at New York Live Arts this past Thursday.  Cynthia's one-woman theater/music piece about creating performance and trying to make a living (or even stay alive) doing it, in a universe where all the funds seem to go to production equipment and architectural 'improvements,' while shockingly little goes to the artists (arguably because the artists continue to give it away, or sell it cheap).  Lot going on there - funny, moving, creative, upsetting, exciting, inspiring, enraging.  It only played for a few days in that incarnation, glad I was able to catch it.

She Doesn't Care What You Eat

Gotta Love Natalie Dee.

Recyclerant

Ok, time for just a wee rant on the way the dayjob handles recycling. Not in any grand industrial fashion (I don't have the info on how that gets handled), just good ol' office-style recylcling: paper, bottles and cans, that sort of thing.

It's pretty much an open secret that the cleaning crew dumps the 'paper recycling' at the desks and the 'all round garbage' into the same bag, which then heads, presumably, to the truck to the barge to the landfill. My fellow cubicle-dwellers bitch about this from time to time, but I'm inclined to do a little finger-pointing of my own here: these same people can't manage to separate the 'garbage' from the bottles and the cans in the kitchen recycling bins (the contents of which, I allow myself to hope, actually find their way to recycling facilities). Came from lunch to see the food bags in which my peeps had got their lunch delivery tossed in the recycle bin (which even required lifting the lid that has the little bottle-sized holes in it.)

One especially self-righteous Greeny is among the offenders, which is extra-special annoying because he has a tendency to go off about how tiny his carbon footprint is (may not be the only tiny thing about him). This is the same guy who is pissed about the company's intention to phase out bottled water in favor of using filtered water from a cooler: "What do they expect us to do? Fill a cup? Then we're wasting cups?!" Um, dude, maybe re-use one of the 14,000 bottles you've gone through already. "Oh, so I'm saving old bottles, that are going to fall apart?" Well, I guess they will fall apart eventually, but... yeah. Maybe even wash them once in a while if you can live with the shame. Or, if they're really too flimsy for you, how 'bout one of those hard plastic Nalg*ne things: we've got those with one of our brand logos on the side, for fuck's sake. "What about when there's a conference? Do we get bottles of water for that? Or are we supposed to have our vendors go into the kitchen and fill up a paper cup?" I guess you're right, bro. Some people are too important to drink water from the same cooler as the rest of us. Sorry to have made you step down from the high horse (that somehow fits in your hybrid car) to have this conversation. Go back to Star*ucks, and whatever you do, don't bring your own mug.

Stupid thing to get upset about? Wouldn't be the first.

Ok - the company pays very good lipservice to environmental concerns, and is of the 'continuous improvement' school. They/we claim to be Greenifying at the industrial level, and maybe it's the case. They/we claim to have safe, fair labor practices, which is certainly true here in the States; I haven't been to the plants in Malaysia to check on them. And yes, yes, alright - I get the irony in the fact that I am perfectly happy to cash the paychecks this job provides. But it drives me a little bit nuts to wonder: if we suck so much at the easy stuff, how can we ever possibly tackle the hard stuff?

See, this is what happens when I am at my desk waaaaay too late on a Friday.

Maybe next week I'll write a few words about some of those 'improvements' that corporate has come up with...

Indicative solution

You've heard of greenwashing, yes? This tendency to make a company, industry, government, etc. appear environmentally friendly by using a small percentage of green materials and/or paying lipservice to energy concers, while pretty much keeping up the same destructive processes.

Well, they've taken it to a new level. Laoshu mountain in yunnan, china was looking pretty grim: it had been quarried heavily, and the trees weren't making it. So naturally the local authorities took action: by spray painting the mountain green.



Yup. They sure did. Evidently residents of a new government building now have a better view. Or something.

Read all about it in this article.

In other news, britney spears got a haircut.