Carl Warnick

The blocks and the chairs in progress.

This is the second video of the Midnight series. Following the same system of action on cardboard on asphalt at midnight.

The soundtracks to these videos are constructed deliberately using a similar systematic structure. Mixed live, old songwriters pitched down and enmeshed in more current dark beats.

One of it’s concerns is a misreading of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness” as “River of Darkness”:

Tears I never had before
Ribbon of darkness over me
Clouds a-atherin’ o’er my head

Which I misread and chopped/rearranged to be:

Fears I’ve never had before
Bound together in all my years
River of darkness over me

I dubbed out Run-DMC’s “Mary Mary” into a sratched echoy mess, and strung it into the intro for Rick James’ “Cold Blooded”, and held the whole thing together with L-Wiz’s “Girlfriend”. Then I mixed in and rearranged Gordon’s text.

This pulls from several sub-genre I am obviously obsessed with: Screwed and Chopped, Dubscape, Midwestern Hardcore, and Singers and Songwriters of my childhood.

The video above was made in the summer of 2005. It has become a substratum for our upcoming show.

In the video Dawn is working on the car at midnight in a parking lot. She has pulled out the left driveaxel shaft and is replacing it’s CV boots. At a pivotal moment in the film the metal fastener band snaps back and cuts her thumb, filling her glove’s thumb with blood.

Several things are happening here that are of interest to me. One, the video uses the traditional male gaze of painting. Two, I have given up the masculine privilege of auto work. Three, the climax is a bloody violence, which in the final tally is nothing more than a jump in the heart, a small bandaid, and Dawn finishing the job at hand.

Carl Spraying Blocks, shot by Dawn Reed from outside.

Here is a little glimpse into production for our show which opens at Dogmatic on January 6th.

I am putting down a layer of orange paint on one of our performative sculptures. We will ask people who come to the opening to carry around these orange [red to yellow] blocks for a bit so the sculpture can move around the gallery.

Dogmatic is at 1319 W. Lake St in Chicago

So the writers of Dexter are like:

… all right so we got this kid who’s damaged and a dad who is obsessing over him to the exclusion of his daughter. What damage does having Dexter in their life do to the daughter? Not the obvious stuff, a little subtler…

I know, she learns to see cold detachment as LOVE!

Great!

Lemon-Red was one of the first folks to introduce Bonde Do Role’s crazy new track “Funk De Esfiha” to the world. I got it from SUCKA, chronicler of the decadent life in Brooklyn. “Melo Do Tabaco” is the cdr promo this song comes from. It’s executive produced by Diplo, DJ Gorky, and Comunidade Ninjitsu. My copy came fedex from Turntable Lab the other day, and it has been in constant rotation ever since.

Funk De Esfiha is the last track on the EP. Built around a sample of the intro to “Summer Nights”; the John Travolta & Olivia Newton John song from the Grease soundtrack. The girl MC [whom I am assuming is Ribanceira] fucking tears it up over top of this munchy piano, bass, and snare loop.

Lemon-Red hints at the summer heat that leaks back lyricly from the “Summer Nights” track into “Funk De Esfiha”. Dawn sugested that Ribanceira was also copin moves from J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic” which I totally buy, in fact I would totally drop these two next to each other in a mix.

There is something about how easy and clean the ideas are in this EP. Any 12 year old kid should be able to follow the formula used here, but the sublime way these completely known ideas are applied makes these tracks just click. Click with a mind numbing fire.

Pitchforkmedia has a deeply uncool, and disturbing article that ends with this malevolent statement:

We are not scared that he has a message. It is the message itself that disturbs us.

We know the message and we know it is evil. We built this indie world to be far from that evil.

So take your crosses and your gods and go play somewhere else, some unhip sandbox.

The Justin Cooper "Middle Management" show opened last night at Monique Meloche, and looks like a very interesting piece. I recommend that folks catch at least one of the Performances. The mood afterword was even somewhat festive in spite of the dour Chicago people and the gray weather, Usama Alshaibi was even there looking fabulous while talking a young french girl into modeling.

Justin’s work left me feeling optimistic about the state of art *grin* in Chicago today.

FUMED opened at Polvo tonight.

The curator Jaime Mendoza had this to say:

Nino Rodriguez’s small paintings, especially the one pictured above center; have an elegant sense of line and color, which contrasts well with their somewhat brutal lyrical content.
In a mini-installation parallel to the Graffiti show Marcella Chaidez presented a wonderful sculpture resembling a small bustier with umbilical cord constructed out of dyed blue holes punched from books. Which of course raises the question, which books?

It is perhaps more proper to say that the sculpture resembles the shell of a torso, a shell representing a small child. However my first thought was bustier. That thought, mistaken as it might be, is infecting my read.

The thing about these blue punched paper holes is that they look like sequins. They look like sequins a lot! They also appear to be fused to the body. What we are left imagining is a child beauty pageant fire which fuses a blue sequin dress to a pageant model. Any critique which reaches Michael Jackson is then automatically complete.

These are in the context of cleaning/tagging 10-50 albums a day.

1. One window to confirm all changes.
It is too easy to make errors. You need to be able to see all your changes in one space so you can do sanity checks just once per album instead of having to pay attention to correctness at every step. Media Scrubber is close to this but it doesn’t have the capitalization tools and renaming tools that one needs.

2. Drag and drop is too clumsy for this level of productivity.

3. Needs the ability to automate.

4. It is too easy to tag the wrong album.
If you do not notice that the “Folder of Files to Change” is set to the wrong folder, you clicked to open it instead of dragging a folder on it’s button.

5. Early versions had better support for stripping filenames down to all english ASCII with no punctuation. So different OS’s/Devices don’t choke on the filenames.

6. If a track name has ? in it, the File Renamer won’t work. [or any other character OSX chokes on, I assume.]

I miss ID3-TagIT. But Media Rage is the best tagging tool for OSX that I’ve found.

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