Naked except for the 500 black bras wrapped pell-mell around him like a rubber band ball, a man saunters barefoot through the rain-soaked streets of Lower East Side Manhattan. He ambles aimlessly like some brainless bra-creature thrust into a strange new world, stumbling over obstacles, trying to ride away on chained bikes, climbing atop elevated vantage points to survey his surroundings. At one point he gets stuck on a fire hydrant and pulls, pulls, pulls until the strap breaks with a satisfying snap. He seems oblivious to the considerable attention he attracts, but the camera captures all, zeroing in unnoticed on the bewildered faces of innocent passersby, overhearing their confused comments, spending as much time dwelling on their reactions as on the bra-man himself.

Shakily filmed with raw, documentary feel on a cell phone, “Brascape” was shot, edited and premiered to a live audience in the span a single day. The film’s creator and star, Fritz Donnelly, is part of a growing movement of artists who seek to employ disposable media – the ubiquitous cell phones, digital cameras, webcams, point-and-shoot video cameras and mobile PDA devices that have become an essential part of our daily lives – in the name of bringing the elusive and expensive power of high art to the masses.

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O’Neill does not attempt to write a book from every New Yorker’s perspective. It’s obvious that Hans van den Broek, the Dutch banker whose thoughts give Netherland its voice, shares many life experiences with O’Neill, who also came of age in The Hague and England before ending up in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. It’s a strange decision at first to write an immigrant narrative from the perspective of a wealthy European banker, one who surely does not represent the average immigrant in New York City. But the book benefits from this deeply specific angle, taking on an authenticity that might have been impossible without the slow pile-up of so many personal details. The narrative follows Hans’s memory, which wanders into and out of nonlinear anecdotes, visual ephemera and poetic impressions following the thinnest of connective threads. A typical example of Han’s mode of thinking goes something like this:
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An action hero has to work for his victories these days.

James Bond has undergone a makeover that affects more than the color of his hair. Daniel Craig’s two Bond films, the most recent of which is currently obliterating box office records in theaters around the world, have made a conscious break with their series’ long-running past, completely resetting the Bond timeline and reinventing the character and his world. The most obvious innovation of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, the 21st and 22nd films in the iconic action series, is a strong slant toward hard-edged realism in both physical action and emotional psyche.

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In upcoming posts, I hope to cover concerts by the psychedelic Middle Eastern-influenced post rock band Grails as well as a double headliner by sludge heavyweights Baroness and Minsk. The latter should be an interesting show because its two bands come at sludge from pretty disparate backgrounds — Baroness has Georgian Southern rock origins, while Minsk is more rooted in grim, atmospheric, Neurosis-style post metal with tribal-drums.

In other news, I finally saw W. yesterday. I think it worked on the same level as a good political cartoon, with its telling caricatures of people and events. I had heard that it was more sympathetic to Dubya than most people would think, and I agree, but I think most liberals share Oliver Stone’s view that #43 is not so much an evil supervillain as a misguided, underqualified, easily manipulated soul unfit for presidency. Stone succeeds in conveying that, with the help of Josh Brolin, whose squinty-eyed demeanor is almost as good as Will Ferrel’s Bush impersonation.

-Derrick

Awakened from their defensive malaise, they rush out onto the streets. From the bars and the restaurants and apartments they stream, their cries of victory reverberating through the East Village canyons. They gather together in delirious exuberance, rushing toward one another in mutual camaraderie, slapping perfect strangers on the back, hugging neighbors, high fiving. They’re a young crowd, a hip crowd, but a diverse crowd, people of all different colors and sizes and shapes jumping and bouncing together with the rhythm blasted out of a souped-up car stereo. They meet in the street, this spontaneous nexus of celebration at the intersection of St. Mark’s and 1st Avenue, signs and buttons and t-shirts and pumping fists merging together in a final affirmation that yes, this has truly happened, yes, this day has really come and no, it’s not just some self-denying collective dream that promises to fade with the night’s crazed excitement.

The lights flash primary colors and the horns honk a sustained chorus from the traffic that backs up on the avenue as the crowd continues to clot the intersection like so many fish in an uncoordinated school. A woman blasts victory notes on a bugle, passing her instrument through the crowd; another produces an accordion and two wingmen wielding portable percussion to a tribal beat. The observers climb atop lampposts and newspaper stands, the flashes from their cameras and iPhones lighting up the intersection like a stadium night game. (more…)

5.) That beer keg costume with the pump hat – Please; it was never that funny.

4.) Sexy nurse – Enough syringes and fishnet stockings to create a new generation of sex-fearing trypanophobes.

3.) Whore – Sure, we all love seeing scantily clad women traipsing about in public. But you know that feeling you get when you’ve had a bit too much to drink and you’re stuck with no cash at the strip club just before dawn, surrounded by leering, dirty old men and entirely too much silicone and flailing cellulite limbs? Me neither.

2.) Heath Ledger’s Joker – You could have populated the entire Village Parade with all the carrot-topped, trench-coated clowns running around. Let the man rest in peace, already.

1.) Pirate – A tempest of eyepatches, dreadlocks, hand-hooks, tri-cornered hats, tall leather boots, faux-Victorian jackets, flintlock pistols, curved sabers and Johnny-Depp-as-Keith-Richards-as-buccaneer face paint. A city can only support so many swashbucklers, in my opinion.

In other news, it’s Halloween and I’m going as Buckethead.  Not because I’m a huge fan or anything, but because it’s an easy costume and I think he’s a pretty hilarious figure. I couldn’t find a guitar so I am going to be carrying a large, bloody sword instead. Maybe some pictures will follow.

Til then, Happy Pumpkin Day!

-Derrick

So, I had an idea. Rather than attempt to write blog entries just for the sake of having a blog, I am going to simply post my completed non-published journalistic work. This accomplishes two vital tasks: 1.) it pads my blog so that it seems like I’m updating regularly; and 2.) it offers a home for my non-published work other than my moldy hard drive. Expect to see plenty of boring articles about education initiatives, painting exhibits and even more thrilling subjects. I’m dating them according to when they were written, so you may have to go back in time if you’re itching to read ALL of them.

Of course, this does away with the whole “200-words-per-entry” idea, but I guess that was a dumb rule anyway.

-Derrick

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Smith, a 25 year-old photojournalist when he began following the Marines across the Pacific, is revered as a master of the modern photo essay. Although his World War II works precede his seminal photo essays for Life, they nonetheless treat multifaceted themes with the same consistency, nuance and development that he would later harness for his essays. His rapport with the military subjects he lived with and followed into battle lends his work an intimacy that threads throughout his photos, which portray the perspective of a participant, not an observer. One has the distinct feeling that Smith shared the emotions of the subjects he shot. These works immortalize their subjects in life and death; they speak like eulogies.

The dead hold dominion in Smith’s work. Bodies of soldiers both living and deceased play equal roles in his scenes, and the knowledge that even the live actors in these works would soon be dead lends his work a melancholy poignancy. The living and dead become one and the same; they are both victims of war, equalized by the onslaught of destructive forces Smith was so skilled at capturing on film. Smith’s photographs of subjects both living and dead carry an intense feeling of occurrence, catching motion-blurred movements or fleeting facial expressions and freezing these passing moments into infinity.

Two works from the U.S.S. Bunker Hill, the aircraft carrier on which Smith lived with his military comrades, convey this feeling of occurrence with nearly opposite effects. One shows blasts from explosions during a Japanese attack, white flashes of water bursting out from blooming black clouds of smoke, thrillingly transporting you to this terrifying moment. The other, the famous “Burial at Sea from U.S.S. Bunker Hill,” depicts a naval funeral from above. A falling, coffined body blurs downward to the sea, in stark contrast to the static figures of his living comrades standing above him on the deck of the ship. There is a sad sense of role reversal here – of the dead in active motion while the survivors stand inert.

At its best, Smith’s work imparts on viewers not just a feeling of “being there,” but of understanding what it means to be there. Exciting victory characterizes “Marine Demolition Team Blasting Out a Cave on Hill 382, Iwo Jima” (1945), which shows a massive explosion as Marines blast a cave from behind cover of the jagged, rocky wasteland of Iwo Jima. “In Their Church Which Has Become a Hospital, Barefoot Filipino Women Worship, Only a Few Feet from the Expressionless Mask of a Burned American Officer” (1944) points to the pathetic absurdity of setting up a makeshift hospital in a church, and somehow captures an overwhelming sadness in the officer’s blank face, which is completely covered by white bandages. Two other photos are twin memorials to the wounded and dying victims of battle, consistent in their titles, subject matter and melancholy feeling. There is no glory in dying painfully on a battlefield.

The lack of context in the exhibition sometimes bewilders. Two photos, both titled “Civilians Driven from Natural Caves in the Saipan Mountains by U.S. Smoke Grenades” (1944), contain palpable terror from their fleeing civilian figures, but there is also the sense of a story left untold. These people are also victims of war, yet Smith does not share with them the same sense of empathy he displays for the soldiers on either side. Inevitably, the emotional incompleteness of these pieces invites those perennial questions of medium: are these photos self-contained works of art? What do we gain by viewing them alone and out of context? Has Smith failed to capture something universal in these two photos because we want to know what’s happening in them? The answers to these questions will be intensely personal and divisive, but they are a large part of the exhibition because of the uncompromising lack of background information offered. One starts to wonder whether the impact of these works would be transformed if given historical context.

Yet Smith’s work is powerful precisely because so many of his pieces speak for themselves. “Japanese Defenders of Tarawa” (1943) contains no hidden meanings in its twisted mass of corpses piled amidst the stagnant puddles of a mass grave. The terrible revelation is that these are people, but people rendered literally faceless – bloated and rotting and stripped of individual meaning by war’s carnage. “Wounded, Dying Infant Found by American Soldier in Saipan Mountains” (1944) is perhaps most shocking because of its vivid contrasts: a soldier gingerly clutching the tiny, bloodied body of a baby, another soldier smoking in the blurry background and looking on as if to say “pity, but that’s the way it is.” The foreground soldier’s face is turned away from the lens and half hidden in shadows, but one sees in it the sorrowful disgust of a man who understands the meaning of war to the most innocent of victims.

These images need no context. The stories are contained within them, told with self-evident clarity through complex emotions. Smith may have had a message to tell with his war photography – he was a vocal critic of violence who hoped his photography would be remembered as an indictment of war – but the best of his photos convey messages of their own that turn out both deeply personal and universal. The first impression one takes away from the exhibition is that it’s disappointingly small and lacking in historical context, but the work as shown ultimately has an impact like one of Smith’s captured explosions, and curators at the ICP were right not to dilute it with repetition or historical minutiae.