Bill Randall

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Besides Walt’s, the karaoke bar, American Idyll features many fine works.  Some, like the rebuilt Korean karaoke room and the motorcycle race game, won by the loudest screamer, would fit in at an amusement park.  Just clever, they at least add to the carnival feel.

So does the installation.  The show’s better installed than any other I’ve seen at CAC. Many individual works, like Walt’s, boast elaborate setups, but the main room has works almost stacked on one another. Projected next to a balcony, at top is a fine documentary video by Mark Harris, sponsored by the Long March Project.  He has covered the same ground before, only here with more skill.  He tapes Chinese musicians of all stripes singing, in their own styles, Mao’s poetry, for a curious, gently ironic brush with the recent past.

Beneath it, a work I can’t judge for not reading music, a projection of a one-man power trio on pasteboard instruments, and an LCD panel of an artist playing a girl’s leg like a guitar.  It tickles; she’s kicking.  Gender roles and pop culture, sure, but mostly it’s funny.  All the competing exhibits make for a circus cacophony.  It’s fitting, given the source material.

My choice for best in show, Candace Breitz’s 2000 work Killing Me Softly, transcends cacophony.  Somehow, it recalls the only work of art I’ve ever seen bring several adults to weep openly, Janet Cardiff’s 40 Part Motet, showing at MoMA in 2006.  That work featured a speaker for each of 40 vocalists performing Thomas Tallis’ 1573 work “Spem in Alium.”  Arranged in a circle, you could listen in the center or visit each speaker.  Doing so was intimate, a direct link to another’s voice.  Its power didn’t come just from the source music, but from wandering in it.

Likewise, Killing Me Softly arranges about ten televisions in a circle, head-height, each with someone singing the titular song.  Nothing’s synched, so they wail and howl like a Charles Ives crescendo, unless you go close enough to listen to each one.  Then it’s almost private.  They’re all non-native speakers of English, so the work’s on about performing identities, I suppose, but mostly it’s this glorious howl.  No one wept, though I couldn’t hear the couple who walked in and right back out.  I was too busy cackling with approval.

(Breitz has a video sample & installation photos under “Video– Karaoke” on her site.)

I usually avoid karaoke’s chorus of horrors, especially outside east Asia, where we’ve rashly moved it from the private room into the bar, on the stage, before the beer-pickled hordes.  I’ve only ever worried about getting beaten up in such a place, when my friend Alice Mudd takes the mic and curdles the air.

However, in American Idyll, Cincinnati’s CAC has made karaoke a thing of joy.  Odd, that.  Many of the works caught my imagination, but Joel Armor’s Walt’s took over the museum.  Nothing, not the starchitect’s mailed-in chair designs upstairs or the mapworks down, could contain it.

Walt’s is an installation of a karaoke bar, with Sam Adams, Maker’s, and a bunch of people singing.  Being Cincinnati, lots of country drinking songs crowd out irony.  The joy of the thing– other than having a bar in a gallery, almost as great as a barnyard– comes from watching people disappear in performance.  Rather than comment on the art world, it saves karaoke from the bar.   I doubt I would give such attention to the performers elsewhere.

And some of them can really sing.  The night I was there, everyone seemed like they wandered in off the street, but the guy with the matching shirt-and-ballcap and the Parrothead both had pipes.  Armor and his art-partner both joined in, and served as magnanimous hosts.  In one sense, it was the ideal bar, a place you go to feel welcomed.  In another, it was human faces and voices lost in a certain, quite private, moment, transfigured on stage.

Walt’s has its last night on Monday, September 1st, next week.  It’s free, 6-9, I believe. Bring some friends.  (And if the music’s too much, you can hide downstairs by Qin Ga’s dual-screen work from The Long March.  Tucked away from the sound, the sight of the artist drawing a line across a snowy mountaintop with his naked body after getting all of China tattooed on his back might take your mind off the songs.)

Having been brutalized by the Beijing Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies:

(From Zhang’s Hero, rather birds’-nesty)

First, I’m not surprised that Zhang Yimou, long past his rebellious youth, has turned out closer to Busby Berkeley than the Neorealists. Zhang’s films have always tended to spectacle, if just for starring Gong Li, despite naturalistic acting and sets. His ceremonies recalled his films’ use of color. And the spectacle shows how far the (barely) commie musical has come since the days of films like Volga! Volga!, which so distrusted dancing they showed noble workers singing and pitching hay in time. (A documentary, East Side Story, showcases these films. It’s a hoot.)

The running of the pigs, no dancing allowed

Second, the whole thing will send me off to watch one of the three Olympics shaped by a major director’s vision, Tokyo ‘64. Actually, Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad. If Zhang’s Olympics was theatrical-spectacular, Ichikawa’s was particular, a great example of Susan Sontag’s “photographic seeing.” His crew shot the Games with 150+ cameras, seeing what eyes can’t. Slow-motion, odd angles, and closer to the experience of sport than ten thousand stringbeans in blinking jumpsuits, pretending to be the building that overshadows them all.

Tokyo Olympiad, not quite as busy

Still, Zhang’s op & ed were quite an achievement, on a par with the Babylonian sequence of Intolerance. (But among the 5th Generation films, I still perfer Tian’s The Horse Thief. And among the 6th, anything makes a nice riposte, especially, oh, Tie Xi Qu, about which– if anyone has a copy, drop me a line.)

I was just going to file the whole thing under “kitsch,” but the Ancient of Page on an astroturf bus set me straight. At least Becks remembered his lines.

1. Found footage, mostly.
2. Distressed, vinegared, bubbling and old, halfway between Decasia and Mothlight to the point of cliché
3. Closed loop running through the projector, but not a short loop– it should flop and coil on the ground, sweeping up dust onto the lens as it goes, tripping people, digging root vegetables
4. Keeping my own counsel, it runs without electricity, but on wind that turns a crank attached to a wholly compostable projector made of cereal box and gelatin lens, and the wind aerates the worm farm too
5. no bulb but candle to kill fruit flies

Not just sheet mulch, but other composts: worm castings. I feed table scraps to worms camped in a bin in the basement. After I’d had them for a few weeks, I noticed I could hear them moving, eating. For worms, they’re loud.

Artist Amy Youngs noticed the same thing. She’s an installer of heady systems, like “Intraterrestrial Surroundings,” which mics a bin of composting worms and amplifies the sound through what looks like an Ikea ottoman. Furniture becomes an entry to subterranean rooms; projected above, an image of what the worms see.

Youngs’ work applies electronics to plants and insects, often with a sense of humor. For instance, “Digestive Table” closes the culinary loop. Set and eat dinner, then push the leftovers into the table. Worms eat it, providing compost & tea for the plants at the base. You can watch it all on an infrared camera, or just build your own with the plans provided.

Another of Youngs’ works, “Farm Fountain,” created with artist Ken Rinaldo, creates an almost self-sustaining fish & vegetable farm. It offers little for the eye, and anyone familiar with John Todd’s Living Machines or Bill Mollison’s permaculture has seen it ages ago. (Along those lines, I might suggest a redesign that uses no electricity.)

But it lives in the space between sculpture, architecture, and ecology, and I applaud any work that makes the gallery a barnyard. What’s more, all her works point to an art not of lyrical emotion but ideas. There is an art to science, after all, even if we artistic types need to work on the art of appreciating it.

A large-scale Farm Fountain shows until January 2009 at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington. In September, Youngs also seems to be involved with a panel for Circuitastrophe, a circuit-bending exhibit at Cincinnati’s CAC.

Thoughts today, digging holes: three reasons newspaper comics yet reign over their digital brethren.

1. The gravenness of the image
2. Their utility for to deliver babies
3. The superiority of their sheet-mulchability:

Is it over? For me, maybe. I selected Achewood for my Best of 2007 in The Comics Journal. I was particularly taken by Chris Onstad’s Faustian gift for dialogue. His characters speak in erudite and profane two-percenters all the time, with more verve than most people I’ve met.

But the talk chokes out the plot. Onstad doesn’t weave together varied threads of story so much as hack them off right away. I had hoped that Roast Beef’s wedding, set up over a year ago, would crescendo with comic horrors. The storyline does have its moments, from the Police Blotter buildup to Ray’s dad for the denoument, but even in these Onstad defuses his own bombs.

For instance, when Roast Beef’s sleazy brother Showbiz appears, he promises to ruin the wedding, but is “disappeared” in just a few strips. Likewise, everything that should go wrong gets solved at the last minute, almost as an afterthought. Comedically, it’s like a nun walking into a sex shop and then walking back out the door. Achewood doesn’t have to be Tom Jones or Noises Off, but some structure would amplify the jokes. Even P.G. Wodehouse novels, carried by Bernie Wooster’s inimitable voice, have quite intricate plots. Achewood just has jokes, grounded in its characters, but not the progress of their lives.

I wonder, though, if Onstad’s disregard for plot makes for a valid aesthetic. After the wedding, Roast Beef and Ray are back to prank calling Dilbert, while Nice Pete is writing country-fried etiquette guides. In one sense, Achewood implies that nothing matters past the joke. After all, the strip often seems quite cynical, lifting Acme Novelty Library’s bleakness but none of its humanism. In another sense, the eternal present where these characters live, throwing one-liners into the void, either speaks to nihilism or the Internet, where everything’s just ether.

I want to see more of these films, videos really, that Phil Chambliss has made for years with his coworkers from the rock quarry. The easy one to find, “The Devil’s Helper,” appeared in the Oxford American’s 2007 Southern movie issue.  And it is a Southern movie: two ex-cons, jealous that they can’t get hunting licenses, go to burn someone’s deer stand.  Then Satan’s buddy shows up with a pitchfork, a filing cabinet, and a deal.

It’s hilarious and strange, and we would see more films like it if my neighbors would avail themselves of iMovie and cheap DV cameras.  Chambliss didn’t; he appears to have edited deck-to-deck at home, and did his music on a keyboard.  His movie feel handmade and warm: the only deer’s a still photo, and he reuses one shot three times in a row.

“The Devil’s Helper” feels like a tall tale with everyone in on the joke.  The actors can’t hide their smirks.  Rather than the precise compositions and craftsmanship people like me harp on, the camera just reveals personality. I could watch Chambliss’ ensemble all day.  It’s not unlike Hollywood movies: people watch for the actor, even if the movie sucks.  This one doesn’t, and I wouldn’t mind filmic locavores, hayriding to the multiplex for homegrown pone.

I normally write on images, but Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel The Lazarus Project entwines enough with photography to belong here. It follows a Bosnian writer and a war photographer through Ukraine and Moldova, one researching a book, the other acting cool and telling stories. It’s complex and hilarious. Hemon knows my language better than I do, enough to wipe Everything Is Illuminated from my memory, to my relief.
But the images, photographs, come at the beginning of every chapter. Hemon collaborated with Velibor Bozovic, who shot them on a journey with Hemon mirroring the book’s fiction. They’re poorly printed, but look great on Hemon’s website, where an interactive display shows dozens of them along with snippets of Hemon’s writing. I got lost in it for a while before reading the book.

And in the book, the snippets are usually funny, not as portentious as they seem with the photos. They remind me of my friend Fedja, who used to regale me with Montenegrin jokes of such power that we all laughed before he explained the stereotypes. In the book, all Rora’s jokes remind me of his best. Especialy the one on page 154, with its more immediate punchline.

So, would that I had more to contribute like the other three. God knows I tried, but putzing through Japan with rickety camera gear yielded neither video black or black leader. Just crows, on a seeming moonscape:

At least the light was nice later, in the train station, where I found out, from a paper in the trash, that the Tigers lost the series.

That’s it. Hours of footage I should probably do something with. Alas! At least, following Elsewhere, there’s always ample Engrish:

Actually, this was the only example I have. Ches, Eric, please don’t beat me up.