Carl Warnick

Saxophonist Celia Whiren and Artist Jacob Christopher collaborated on a set of improvised electroacoustic music as a sonic response to the collaborative painting show "Hot Mess" by Peter Hoffman and Caleb Lyons at Green Lantern.

Painting is a thing full of difficulties, but bunnies are easy to love.

What does it mean to drop yourself wholeheartedly into a moment? To be out there on the edge, opened up for all to see. It means something, perhaps something hard to articulate, maybe something warm on a hard frozen night. Speaking of the rigid, the structural systems behind this event; collaboration, mirroring and cross discipline interaction fascinate me. These things have a way of pushing the raw emotional performative moments out in front and framing them. If you weren’t there you missed out!

Chris Vollan smoking in the parking lot at night on cardboard is the third Midnight video.

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.

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.

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.