The World Was On Fire

by Emily Gould

"Pour Your Body Out"

Pipilotti Rist at MOMA

The summer I was 16 my parents went temporarily insane and let me go to art camp at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Ten years later, aka this past summer, I moved into an apartment a block away from the Pratt campus. The neighborhood has changed a lot in ten years; New York City in general has changed a lot. Also I have changed a lot, although possibly in some ways not enough.

At art camp I smoked pot for the first time, cheated on a boyfriend for the first time, and spent a lot of time waiting for the G train for the first time. I drafted a little template for my whole early adulthood in those two weeks, it now seems!

But one of my strongest memories from art camp is of going to a museum where I saw the video ‘I’m a victim of this song’ by Pipilotti Rist. My friend Bennett was visiting – he remembers things better than I do and he says it was the Whitney or the Guggenheim. All I remember is that we got obsessed and could crack each other up for months afterwards by singing Rist’s version of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ to each other.

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I1AV6hNi2Y"]

Or screaming it to each other, really, I am talking about the part at the end where Rist takes the song a million miles away from Chris Isaak and Helena Christensen rolling around getting weird bits of black sand all stuck to their pouty bottom lips territory and just shrieks every line: “NO I DON’T WANT TO FALL IN LOVE! WITH YOU!”

‘Victim’ is more than just hilarious Swiss whimsy, though, I eventually realized. Unlike Isaak, Rist telegraphs actual meaning with every line. The deliberateness of her pronunciation means you have to actually think about the lyrics. “It is strange what desire will make foolish people do,” you find yourself musing.

This song is also notoriously easy to get stuck in your head, as the video’s title suggests. Song stickiness is something Rist, who used to be in a band called Les Reines Prochaines, thinks about a lot. Here, in one of her first videos, from 1986:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgiSyCr6BY]

Rist jumps around with her breasts exposed and sings the first line of ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ over and over again, cranked up to double-speed. Whenever I watch it I’m reminded of how one little piece of a song will sometimes reverberate through your head just like that over and over while you do some kind of repetitive activity like swimming or biking, and you’ll barely even realize that you’re thinking of the song until finally you do and then you laugh at how literal your subconscious is being, like for example if you are spending a lot of your time missing someone and the song-bit is “Hey, what’s the matter man? We’re gonna come around twelve with some Puerto Rican girls who are just dyin’ to meet you!”

So yeah, Rist is not a girl who misses much.

"Times are tough and wild. Let’s hence look after the commonplace, the ordinary life. I’ll prepare something for you to eat; you watch TV, do yoga, smoke a joint." - Pipi Rist

The other brilliant thing about her videos -- besides their deft appropriation and repurposing and wild enweirdening of pop songs -- is how visually arresting they are, and how they manage to be visually arresting without recourse to being grotesque, which distinguishes them from just about everything else you are likely to find yourself unable to look away from.

I was reminded of this the other day when I went to see the video installation that Rist has built in a multi-story atrium in the new(ish) MOMA building in New York. But first I watched this video of Rist talking about how this “kind of useless big room will be made to enlighten the body.”

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89vgdELbVyQ"]

“Huge rooms always mean to honor the spirit in a way, like a church, like it’s the house of God,” she continues -- she’s wearing dorky thick-framed black glasses and a puffy bright yellow and orange jacket, as if she’s playing ‘wacky German-accented artist’ in an SNL sketch or something -- “ And this is one of my biggest fights, to reconcile thinking and body.”

Also Rist says on a placard outside the atrium that she wants visitors to absorb “spiritual vitamins” from the piece, which is called ‘Pour Your Body Out.’

Keeping all this in mind, I set out on a dark cold rainy Sunday afternoon, walking past the Pratt sculpture garden to the G train, which came fairly promptly. I transferred to the E but got off too early, at 53rd and Lex, so I walked – it was really pouring – through the luxury shopping and sad office district that surrounds the MOMA.

Am I imagining this, or do lavish shop windows just look especially pathetic and false to everyone right now, as if the sad hollowness of material culture has been revealed once and for all? Possibly I’m imagining this. Probably there’s still someone somewhere who’s still in thrall to the idea of buying a new wardrobe for ‘resort’ season.

Anyway I walked into the MOMA, paid my $20, stuffed my dripping raincoat in my bag, walked into ‘Pour Your Body Out,’ took off my boots (no shoes allowed on the carpeted area) and lay down in the exact center of the room, which is this carpeted ring surrounded by a raised carpeted donut. Immediately I was swarmed on all sides by wide-eyed, joy-filled children, who unworriedly ran around me and over and into my legs as if I was just another pink pillow or lump of carpet.

One eight year old girl’s mom was trying to get her out of the carpeted circle:

“We have to go back to the hotel.”
“Fifteen more minutes!”
“Maybe FIVE more minutes.”
“Fifteen more minutes!”
“Can you explain to me exactly what you find so fascinating about this place?”

She couldn’t. I can’t either, really.

It’s just three huge walls of projected oversaturated color, mostly landscapes and closeup views of grass and puddles and soft bodies which a camera zooms up and around and over, as if your tiny body is being astrally projected into these fantastical surroundings. Sometimes all three walls seem to display the same image and at other times they’re different.

One sequence captures the feeling you get sometimes in botanical gardens of wanting to grab the flowers and rub them all over your body and stick them up your nose and stuff. In another sequence, someone wades through a puddle full of shiny crushed aluminum cans and other bits of shimmering dross. In another, a warm pink body is rendered abstract by the camera’s swoops and dives.

At one point, as a green strawberry floated in viscous pink liquid across the screen, I surprised myself by having the clichéd though that it would be fun to come here on mushrooms, but then I imagined cranking up the intensity of the sound and color and the plush softness of the pillow-nest and the warm surrounding bodies just a tiny bit and realized, yikes no thank you.

Plus imagine if you were on mushrooms and you decided, as I did after half an hour or so of Pouring My Body Out, to poke around in the gallery right behind the atrium and you ended up stepping from the sepulchral warm pink to this small black grotto where Nan Goldin’s slideshow ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ plays for forty five minutes of every hour? You would be so. fucked.

Though I had seen most of these pictures individually or in books had never seen the whole ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ before and in some ways it’s like Rist’s videos’ perfect dark counterpoint, because while it’s also riveting it is emphatically grotesque.

from Nan Goldin's The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency

Goldin’s photos and the funny/sad music that accompanies them – ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ plays over a pastiche of drag queens and tarted-up East Village party girls, that kind of thing – do seem artlessly grotesque – it would be unforgivable if they seemed to strive for grotesquerie. They’re just shiny disgusting completely unignorable portraits of a particular world, which is gone.

There is a whole dead New York world that lives forever in this dark room, trapped and pressed flat in here, living in colors as rich and saturated as the ones on the walls in the atrium. This artwork doesn’t contain any spiritual vitamins. But both rooms are what I came to see.

Emily Gould is a writer living in New York, a sometime yoga instructor and editor of Emily Magazine. This is her first appearance on This Recording.

Les Raines Prochaines mp3 from WFMU's Beware Of The Blog

Der Urwald - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

Eating, Eating - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

Evening - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

I Like The Sound Of Your Car - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

I Wanna Be A Butch - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

Schoener Sonntag - Les Raine Prochaines: (mp3)

The Lady Is Hungry - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

Wicked Game - Les Raines Prochaines: (mp3)

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Art School Confidential

by Rebecca Wiener

At my job this summer I was given an intern who had three years more design experience than I did. He was also tiny and French, with appropriate glasses and a gold Casio watch. Luckily, I had a native English fluency and three years more office experience than he did, so I was able to maintain my position in the hierarchy. When I caught him looking at me askew from time to time, I would blurt out recommendations for good New York City restaurants and use words that are hard for French people to pronounce.

My intern had studied for a semester in San Francisco and he held some firm opinions on American education. Having studied abroad myself, I am no slouch when it comes to noisily enumerating the differences between pedagogical systems, but he studied at art schools and I had not. "Crits!" he shrieked adorably, "Critiques are all you do in American art school!" Well, I said, it depends. "No. It is only crit. You sit there for hours to hear the teacher talk about other people's work. It is a waste of time."

I started to point out the advantages of hearing how to improve even if it's not advice for you, but I was honestly surprised that art class could be performed another way. What do you do in France? "We come in and work and the teacher talks to us alone about what we're doing. You don't always have to come and you don't get bored talking about other people."

I guess I do get bored talking about other people, but I don't get bored watching them. My program has a high percentage of Asian students and sometimes I think that I am meant to feel scared about globalization when I look at them. They certainly seem impervious to fear. A guy in one of my classes never likes anything anyone does. He finds it all to be very far from the small bullseye of perfect beauty, and he expresses this with few words but generous squints of disgust. A girl in another class declared that after getting her degree, she would like to work in movie promotions. "Like billboards and movie posters?" my professor asked. "No. Like flyers in the mail," she said, stone-faced.

Our teachers have assured us we shouldn't be concerned about the tanking economy. "This just means that the bad designers will be fired! You will all be good designers." I think everyone finds this comforting, or maybe they don't need to be comforted. I have never heard my fellow students discussing the financial crisis and no one seems to read blogs. If I were to imagine their lives, they would be circumscribed little things spent reworking compositions and texting each other.

The American kids hang out together before class and so do the Asians. Everyone's in the same lounge area sharing couches, but each group is invisible to the other. "What's that girl's name again?" an American asked her friend unabashedly. "I can't believe you don't know her name. She's in all of your classes!" "So what is it?" "I think it's Esther. Maybe it's Chu-Ping." "No, Chu-Ping is that one."

Sometimes I wonder what art school is like in Asian countries. A lot of the Asians have worked as professional designers for years. When a teacher asked everyone why they chose this school for their graduate degrees, every single Asian student said, "I heard it is a very very good school." I like to think about who told them that and if they know that every dying magazine in New York is printing a themed issue about how Asia holds the key to the future of the universe.

Rebecca Wiener is the former senior editor at This Recording. She is a new student and a graphic designer open to working for free clothes.

from the debut album of jessica lea mayfield (above)

"Hold You Close" - Jessica Lea Mayfield (mp3)

"You've Won Me Over" - Jessica Lea Mayfield (mp3)

"Kiss Me Again" - Jessica Lea Mayfield (mp3)

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Our childhood series hit Dublin.

Five Hours of Sleep

by David Noriega

When I was fourteen I would stay up late every night numbing my brain at the family computer. Not unusual, of course, but it caused my mother great distress -- not because of the brain-numbing, or out of any fear of cyber-debasement or indoctrination, which would have been reasonable, but simply because she was afraid I wasn't getting enough sleep. One morning, as I poured tabasco on a bagel coated with melted cheese, she looked at my puffy eyes and said, in that crippling tone native to mothers: "Now David. How much sleep did you get last night?"

"Um... Like five hours?"

"Davey dear, that is simply not enough. You need at least eight hours of sleep every night," she answered, stat, citing that oddly ubiquitous figure that seems to enjoy the backing of the entire scientific community. (Why eight? I often wondered. Why not seven, or nine?)

The next morning, after another night of rigorous and purposeful e-research, I had an air-tight retort ready to fling like a paving stone through the drifting clouds of tear gas:

" 'COMRADES,' " I said, " '5 hours of sleep a night are indispensable. We need you for the revolution!' "

"Where the hell did you get that?" She was bewildered.

I told her. It came from a website listing, in blue comic sans font, scores of graffiti left on the streets of Paris after the riots of May 1968. (The site, charmingly antiquated, still exists.)

My romps down the information superhighway weren't usually this content-heavy. You can imagine. But two or three times a week I wound up image-searching shots from the famous and famously photogenic riots, or, if my handful of open IM windows stopped flashing long enough to allow it, actually reading about them. My main point of interest was The Situationist International, the band of Marxist, avant-garde artists, writers and political agitators who were the principal theorists of the uprising, and whose slogans comprised most of the graffiti I read like mantras.

I had just moved to an Upstate New York strip-mall suburb from a huge city in a different country; my street was named after a kind of tree; I lived three blocks (if you can call the spaces between suburban streets blocks) away from a Jo-Ann Fabrics; I hated mowing the lawn. Now I call this by name: alienation. Not really in the Marxist sense, given that I wasn't actually producing anything, but mostly in the teenage angst kind of way, standard and risible: I was generally happy and definitely comfortable, and yet things felt inauthentic. People seemed fake. School was run like a furniture factory. If I walked anywhere all I'd see was Blockbuster, Starbucks, houses, trees, Applebees.

Within a year or so I started discovering some of the requisite American-kid palliatives – punk shows in American Legion basements in neighboring towns and the like -- but before these things were known or available to me I spent a good amount of time thinking myself a little Situationist-in-Training. Never mind that I hardly understood the bulk of what they were actually saying: I bought a copy of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (arguably the founding text of the Situationist International), read five pages, underlined everything, and went right back to the computer.

There I found things adequately paraphrased and condensed. What I understood, vaguely: capitalism has made a deadening spectacle of everyday life, within which authentic, visceral experience is no longer possible; and yet we must try, deliberately and creatively, to generate such experience for ourselves - to construct, control, and live within our own 'situations.' Here lay the road to individual emancipation and, eventually, collective revolution. It made sense and the slogans were great: "You will end up dying of comfort," "Live without dead time," and my favorite: "Humanity won't be happy till the last capitalist is hung from the guts of the last bureaucrat."

The Situationists theorized the Spectacle under the belief that it could be resisted and eventually dismantled -- through art, mostly, and also critical thinking and political organizing, but more importantly through a practical and personal cultivation of a "radical subjectivity" in everyday life. This could be as simple as the psychogeographic dérive -- a drift, an aimless walk, a means of re-perceiving and re-imagining urban space and weakening the dead grip of routinized daily experience.

I never did much to apply these little revolutionary lessons. I wasn't a very good Situationist. I signed up for the Adbusters email newsletter, and I took aimless walks (which I was doing anyway), but that was about it. I did well in school, where I was obedient. Sometimes I watched movies at the local Loews, which was next to the Applebees. I slept five hours a night, but only on weeknights, and not because I was busy plotting the revolution.

It wasn't until college that I found a number of other guys -- always guys -- who'd been equally enamored of Paris '68 and the Situationists as adolescents. Our infatuations were comparably superficial: we weren't practicing daily acts of resistance and we certainly couldn't tell you much about Marxist critical theory, but we did think those guys in the pictures building barricades in the streets of Paris looked fucking cool.

How depressing: we went ahead and proved Debord right. The Spectacle appropriates all; we young would-be Situationists were entranced by images and slogans; the revolution was a bunch of dandies chucking rocks. (It's true: May '68 is in the books as a monument to disappointment, a major historical ice-on-the-boner, and all that's left is some cool posters.)

In my case, at least, those nights reading Situationist graffiti eventually led down some worthwhile roads, aesthetically speaking, even though those roads are populated almost exclusively by dead French dudes (Baudelaire, Tzara, Jarry). Moreover, there are a few of us, tattooed psychogeographists mostly, who've managed to take those youthful leanings and turn them into something good. And finally, no matter how thoroughly hijacked our lives may be by the soulless Spectacle, there's always this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pFv8CAniYQ]

David Noriega is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote about The Melvins in these pages. More about him here.

"The Amazing Sounds of Orgy" - Radiohead (mp3)

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Cool Impressions

by Will Hubbard

Van Gogh and The Colors of the Night
The Museum of Modern Art
September 21, 2008–January 5, 2009

An early farmhouse landscape, 1883. Dark hues, color blocks against the waning light; a motivation to veil the scenes of a youth in Brabant. To suggest that he’s embarrassed, wishes the drama of these places filtered, would be beside the point. To be given the name of a dead brother lends a pallor, but not a gloom. There is no feeling of morbidity.

Rembrandt’s effets de soir, but in the open air. The orange sun is an innovation, as if something valuable and striking were breaking through from behind the canvas. As though something had been overlooked. Pregnancy. The scene is set to break.

Beside me, an older couple fights about whether a painting in the first room is ‘early’ or ‘late.’ Turns out she’s right, it's late, a point of contrast for the darker scenes. Still, I blink looking at the dates; a mere decade between these two wildly different styles?

He writes to his brother of a walk at dusk: “I had forgotten myself in that symphony.” The handwriting fluctuates between small and large— small toward the end if the page when he wants to make a few extra sentences fit. The anxiety of an incomplete thought. And drawings set into the text, another vow of accuracy. These must have been delightful letters to receive—or maybe they were terrifying.

A traveling pastor passes an evening sketching Au Charbonnage Café, but drawing is still his hobby. His lambs "socialize, share a drink, and buy coal.” An interest in people staying up, getting what they can from the artificial light. Flames compose a scene of otherwise disparate, veiled activity.

A curatorial note reads: "the artist believed that rural laborers stood closer to nature than other people, and were more strongly linked to the cycles of life." Cycles of life? The artist believed…?

These are phrases meant for imbeciles, and yet they have purpose. The warmth of such early, puerile motivations allows distraction from the psychosis of his later years. Van Gogh’s “night paintings” without Van Gogh’s night—it feels like sitting over a glass of absinthe in the gaslight, tapping a foot on cobblestones. A deceptive comfort.

The Potato Eaters—are they human beings? The frame looks to have been scoured by the two thousand hands of a thousand people, acquiring the mysterious stickiness of long human use. Head of a Woman. It hardly emerges from the dark. She strains to be noticed, pulling away from something. A cell phone call beside me—she repeats " where are you, where are you, how are you faring?"

The Watch (After Millet) is literally a reworking of a Millet reproduction—an overlay of color and linear light that will make his style. And again with The Cottage, 1885, the sense that the sky is bursting at a spontaneous seam. Is it magma, hell, or a gilded salvation on the other side? Children are playing everywhere, they love the quality of the hardwood for sliding. How will they dream of these pictures (they will) if they never stop to look?

Then the sun comes out, a proper point of reference, rising above French wheat fields, casting the world and it's labor in discernible lines. Every aspect of a scene has a direction, a flow, as on a contour map. A contour map of visual perception, the directions themselves meaningless except in relation to those adjoining.

In the half-moon space the reverent have made in front of Starry Night, two girls are dancing. But they are not dancing; dancing is simply the only way I can describe it. They are doing something else, something more innovative. One says, pushing buttons on the strange device someone has hung around her neck, "I want to hear what that silly man says about this one.”

The Stevedores in Arles hung over my bed in a room I'd forgotten about. Three men, somehow oblivious to the violence of color crying from the harborscape behind them, engage in the labor of trade. One departs with a wheelbarrow, another pulls a wheelbarrow up a plank onto the boat, a third plays the guitar to make the task bearable.

Less emanates from the later work, despite its luminosity. It is familiar; it has been looked at by teenagers high on mushrooms for fifty years. So masterful that it dashes associations of its possible creation. It is as masterful as an advertisement: perfectly suited to the task at hand, undistracted as a set of arms plunging a shovel into soil.

The only late canvas that gives me pause is the Garden of St. Paul’s Hospital. It is a scene I know from a French film—Bresson maybe, or Lacombe Lucien. Or perhaps it's just the way of old French hospitals: there is a courtyard where the sick can be seen—they are alive still, and can breathe real air. They are not hidden away to die in an over-lit hallway.

Will Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the poet Ted Berrigan. He hardly ever posts anything of verifiable interest here.

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Koufax myspace

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The Two Sisters (Giorgio de Chirico, 1915)

Keeping It Surreal

by Melanie Strong

"To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been." - Rene Magritte

Cannibalism in Autumn (Salvador Dali, 1936-37)

Reflet (Yves Tanguy, 1959)

The Temptation of St. Anthony (Hieronymus Bosch, 1500)

"Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history. " - Andre Breton

The Lovers (René Magritte, 1928)

"Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical." - Paul Delvaux

Celebes (Max Ernst, 1921)

"Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality." - John Lennon

At the Risk of the Sun (Yves Tanguy, 1949)

"Surrealism is born of a consciousness of the derisory condition allotted to the individual and his thought, and a refusal to accommodate oneself to it." - Jean-Louis Bédouin

The Birth of Liquid Desires (Salvador Dali, 1931-32)

"The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood." - Andre Breton

L'Ange du foyer ou Le Triomphe du surréalisme (Max Ernst, 1937)

The Disquieting Muses (Giorgio de Chirico, 1916)

Close-up of The Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch, 1503-1504)

Ubu Imperator (Max Ernst, 1923)

"The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand." - Yves Tanguy

Through Birds Through Fire But Not Through Glass (Yves Tanguy, 1943)

La Thérapeute (René Magritte, 1941)

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.” - René Magritte

Metaphysical Interior With Biscuits (Giorgio de Chirico, 1916)

Soft Construction With Boiled Beans Premonition of Civil War (Salvador Dali, 1936)

Oedipus Rex (Max Ernst, 1922)

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"Comfy in Nautica" - Panda Bear (mp3)

Untitled (Wind). Sans titre (Il vent) (Yves Tanguy, 1928)

"Leaf House" - Animal Collective (mp3)

"Did You See The Words" - Animal Collective (mp3)

Hector and Andromache (Giorgio de Chirico, 1917)

"I Am The Walrus" - The Beatles (mp3)

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Melanie Strong is not the senior contributor to This Recording. She cannot be found at Assholes or Our Hell and she certainly doesn't create surrealism-inspired drawings on MS Paint and post them at Binge and Purge.

The Sensitive Layer (Yves Tanguy, 1933)'

“Psychologically speaking, to discover something mysterious in objects is a symptom of cerebral abnormality related to certain kinds of insanity.” - Giorgio de Chirico

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This Recording does not do drugs, it is drugs.

Pleasure Is Serious Business

by Yvonne Georgina Puig

Greek Taste and Roman Spirit: The Society of Dilettanti
through October 27th at the Getty Villa, Malibu

The impractical relevance of this exhibition, housed in a faux-Roman villa, atop a hill overlooking the Pacific, nestled far into the brush of Malibu, is startling.

Observing the work of these dilettantes past, the young, uncertain mind wanders from the actual paintings and statues and erotic curiosities into precarious existential territory. Am I a dilettante? And then, having considered the occupations and distractions of a handful of friends and acquaintances, the question is revised: Who isn’t?

As purveyors and consumers of the vagary known as “content,” it’s a question we’d do well to ask ourselves. Are we ashamed or proud to dawdle in a lifestyle that requires one only to be curious, and to simply, as the etymology tells us, from the Italian dilettare, “to delight”?

The Society of Dilettanti was formed in 1734 by some young British blue bloods, all veterans of the Grand Tour, looking to “encourage at home, a taste for those objects which had contributed to the entertainment abroad.” A sampling of their mottos: Seria Ludo (Serious Matters In A Playful Vein), Res est severa voluptas (Pleasure Is A Serious Business), and Viva la virtu (Long Live the Fine Arts.)

The Getty Villa has devoted three rooms to the fruits of the Society’s collecting and connoisseurship, and a dim corridor reserved for “erotic artifacts.”

There are portraits of early members by George Knapton, the Society’s first official painter. Francis Dashwood, a prominent member, dressed as a Franciscan Friar, head shrouded in an effulgence of gold, clutches a goblet reading “Matri Sanctoreum,” (To the mother of the saints), and stares off like a dope before the crotch of the Venus De Medici. Another member is dressed as a Cardinal, a filial of Pan, the Greek woodland god known for his naughtiness, perched on the back of his chair. An allusion to “sex vigor,” the curators tell us.

It’s easy to love these guys, so deliciously self-referential at time when most people were an unpleasant cocktail of anal-retentive and psychotically- religious. We are told that the Society “celebrated the interests of the amateur,” and that the “nominal qualification” for membership, according to the writer Horace Walpole, was “having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk.”

But the exhibition centers on the Society’s later study of Greek architecture, and Greek and Roman sculpture. The meticulousness of the architectural drawings, of the notebooks of the Society’s archeologists, suggests an interest in quantifiable beauty , a valuing of precision not in line with today’s understanding of the whimsy dilettante. These gentlemen may have indulged without restraint in life’s finery, reenacting the rights of Bacchus and the lot, but their humor was not entirely aimless.

Back then, to be a dilettante was to be delightful in a dreary society. Today, to be a dilettante is to be a narcissist and a hipster, a slight assuming an indistinct interest in self-expression coupled with a mediocre artistic ability. We are horrified by the thought of this dreaded combo, or else, lacking the attention spans to understand the cost of perpetual idleness, we prance our frivolity across the pages of photo blogs.

Can greatness be achieved without fire? Without a fear of failure seething in the gut, aiming itself at a specific target? It’s fitting to note that the word meticulous is derived from the Latin meticulosus meaning “full of fear.”

There’s little power in the mastery of pleasure, only release. But shouldn’t we also aspire to master our pleasures? David Hockney is the Society’s current official painter. A master of pleasure, yes, a dilettante, yeah right. Perhaps it amuses people who clearly aren’t dilettantes to play the part of the dabbling amateur, and I wonder if the Society of Dilettanti even admits dilettantes these days.

The fact is, a truly modern dilettante would likely not have much to contribute to a formal society other than a Xanax prescription. As for us sort-of dilettantes, we reel at the thought of being considered dilettantes, yet the old lifestyle of “delight” is alluring. Not as alluring, of course, as sweet, earned validation. In the meantime, however…

We leave the exhibition and stroll through a breezy colonnade into the Villa’s main courtyard, an ambrosial recreation of the real, Roman thing. There are ripe grapevines spilling over a trellis and fig trees in fruit. We pick a bunch of grapes and a few sticky, purple figs, and sit on the edge of the fountain. The water is cool, the sky is pale blue, the grapes are sour and pop in our mouths. The figs fuel the fire.

Yvonne Georgina Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. Her blog is here.

THE PARTING OF THE SENSORY

"Like a Monkey in a Zoo (Daniel Johnston cover)" - Vic Chestnutt (mp3)

"Speeding Motorcycle (Daniel Johnston cover)" - Yo La Tengo (mp3)

"Walking the Cow (Daniel Johnston cover)" - TV on the Radio (mp3)

"Parting of the Sensory" - Modest Mouse (mp3)

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The best of the Lambert.

It shocked us how much it never happened.

Who made you the boss?

david hockney

Great Art

by Damien Hirst

I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He's up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He's complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way though it by sheer will. That's what's inspiring to me, alongside the sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the human psyche.

If you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it's obvious that Freud is the more technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon couldn't do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they're bloody awful. He can't do boots.

But it's so bloody powerful. His work always veers into the imagination. There's always this raw, dark power, this visceral energy that is compelling. The paint is alive.

Great art comes from nowhere. In a way, I think Bacon said 'fuck off' to what went before. He didn't go the traditional route that the great painters went. He didn't have the patience to be like Velasquez or Ingres or whoever. He used to look to these guys, but he just didn't have the patience to be like them and do what they did. He painted from photographs, he stuck bits of corduroy in there, bits of glass, whatever it took to get there.

He talked about the brutality of fact. It's incredibly brave to take that on, to face up to the horror and stare it down. Over and over. I mean, I've made maybe four good pieces and the rest are, you know, sort of happy. He wasn't like that. He was his own worst and best critic. He pushed himself to the edge every time. They give you the shivers, his best paintings. He looks into the room that no one wants to look in. He looks in the mirror and he sees meat. He shuns tenderness. He wants to sleep on a hard bed. I think he saw the brutality early on and he decided to take it on.

I saw him a few times in the Colony but I avoided him, because he was my hero. And I saw him be cruel and abusive to people around him. He was a bad drunk. He was wrestling with the darkness all the time. The idea of putting yourself into your art is a weird one. It makes for a hard life. The fears, the dread, the hopes even; you have to stand naked. I once made this work called Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It's from a book I read.

I actually think Bacon lived like that. There's a nasty, angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror. It's like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the snow.

I went around to his studio one night when I was on the charlie. John Edwards took me around. John was really upset about his death and we were all off our heads, but you could feel this huge presence. And this huge absence. It was palpable.

I was obsessed with him as a young painter. I was into punk and I was into Bacon. He was out there on his own. You had the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the Pointillists and all the other ists, and you had Bacon. I gave up painting at 15 because of him. I was just doing bad Bacons. I saw his work and I stopped wanting to be a painter.

I stepped aside into sculpture. I've gone back lately, though. For the last two years I've been in the shed slapping paint on canvas. Big and small paintings. Skulls, crows, tryptichs. Dark blue. Baconesque. He's a supreme colourist. Beautiful colours. He seduces you with colour.

I have five Bacons now. They'll end up in the Manor. I have one on the wall by the TV. I watch it more than I watch the TV. You can't not look at it. It demands your attention, pulls you in. It's just unbelievable to me that I own them.

He popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said, 'Bacon's been in, he was here for about an hour.' I didn't really believe them but then here's this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter, where he says, 'I saw this Hirst fly piece and it really worked.' I still can't quite believe it.

Damien Hirst is a painter living in England.

IT REALLY WORKED

"Say" - Cat Power (mp3)

"No Sense" - Cat Power (mp3)

"He Turns Down" - Cat Power (mp3)

"American Flag" - Cat Power (mp3)

"Back of Your Head" - Cat Power (mp3)

"Metal Heart" - Cat Power (mp3)

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Rachael played where are they now with the cast of Freaks and Geeks.

Alex girled out with the superhawt Michelle Obama, the musical Once, and the weird world that is fashion.

Danish luvs glipsters Hot Chip.

This Recording Is The Skull Made of Candy In Your Soul

Minor Changes to a Formula

by Will Hubbard

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling
July 20–October 20, 2008
The Museum of Modern Art, sixth floor
West lot, exterior, first floor

The children build them first. Shaved pine, notched and sanded, "interesting playthings typifying the Spirit of America." On my grandmother's rug, amid incessant sneezing, I was given the use of my father's Lincoln Logs.

Cabins were boring, a castle or highway was more to the point; but only so much can be done with right angles, and after all, "the more logs a child has, the more things can be built." If the pieces don't fit together, they must be balanced upon one another. Imagination leads to instability, danger, and eventually a pile of rubble and a smile.

Older and richer, we turn toward customizability. The offer is familiar, communes of gently curving asphalt, white trim and light-hued siding. In being each one slightly different from the next, they achieve a paradoxically heightened, gross uniformity. Shallow matches of form and function parade as taste, suggesting that minor changes to a formula might satisfy the entire range of human needs.

Ipods were all exactly the same, no two iPhones will ever be. Which experience is more pleasurable?

And what if your house really did come in a box? I imagine long-stay travel, emergency housing, ephemeral communities in fields of hip-high, autumn-gold grass. How much variation could be found in the box, and could there be peace-of-mind—or better yet, release-of-mind—in your adult set of Lincoln Logs?

I wonder, too, if we are educating a citizenry that actually possesses the intuition, motivation, and time to discern what they could actually need in a dwelling? Doesn't part of our joy in buying anything derive from the very notion that it's just like the object other strangers are putting into their homes, into their mouths and heads? A remote though strangely intimate bond is created by the marketing of identical objects and ideas.

Frank Lloyd Wright got it right, of course. His American System-Built Houses were pre-cut in the factory; construction was assembly, pure and simple. And yet four drawings of these structures reveal little aesthetic uniformity—each has its particular elegance, and seems fitted to its site rather than to the drowsy whims of its financiers.

The poet and builder Robert Kocik once said something very interesting to me about his trade: that if it was very difficult to construct a dwelling, it would be very difficult to live there.

Sadly, it's raining when I walk out to tour the Saran Wrap house. I am allowed to seek a moment's calm shelter among its aluminum stilts, and the drops make no sound as they kiss the plastic windows above. I ask the guards, as though they're real-estate agents, if I can take a quick look inside. They laugh to each other; they say "no way". They say it is because of what might be tracked in on the soles of my feet.

Will Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. This is his tumblr.

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It made our whole deployment!

Evil jellyfish attack.