Banksy @ New Orleans

Banksy's graffiti has been popping up in New Orleans over the last few weeks.

It's all pretty awesome, but this is my favorite:


In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was filled with these fridges. Can you imagine the smell that comes from a fridge after it's been sitting in water and sunlight for a few weeks? Cleanup wasn't easy, and you can still stumble on Katrina Refrigerators around the city, either waiting on a curb to be picked up, or still in flooded homes.

The Nola Rising blog has a great post on Banksy's recent additions to public art in Katrina. (I can't say enough good things about this blog. If you're at all interested in public propelled art, this is the place to look.)

Group Seven @ Whitespace

Patrick Toups, Matt Sigmon, Phil Proctor, Julia Hill, Kate Hannon, Don Dougan, Antonio Darden, Melinda Crider.

"Each artist's affect was not blind or random, but a thoughtful and challenging role in both creating and incorporating what had come before."

Also see Imagillaboration.













We find these enchanting.

More text by Tuesday.

Day After the Harold Group House Show

We are all pretty tuckered.

The Harold Group's myspace has artist links, and the best bicycle song since Queen's "Bicycle Race."

Two Pages from Troubled Souls

Written by Garth Ennis, illustrated by John McCrea. Published 1990.

Buy it here. Or email me for a digital copy.

Repugno Selects Blogzine

The Repugno Selects blog hosts "poetic work in the public sphere or work given away/left in public." Their first issue was published August 1st, and features mainly local poets: troylloyd, Scott MacLeod, James Sanders, and David-Baptiste Chirot*.

They're currently collecting submissions for issue 2, which should be out by early November.


Many of troylloyd's pieces rely on both written meaning as well as the aesthetics of placement and decay to create their larger impact. It's an interesting path for a author/poet to take, and a logical extension of what I've seen in his other pieces, which are usually along these lines:

Şunu mu aradınız:
legibility, legibly, legality, legerity, legible

Did you mean: legibility ?


Re: Neurofeedback

Legibilty is a measure of the writers sense of purposefulness.

(Right-Justified
Navigation
Menus
Impede
Scannability)

LEGIBILTY: The ability of the individ
ual elememts of an image to be seen

clearly.

But beware of the person whose
writing is impressively legible --
These wolves are people
in shepards clothing.

-----------



I'm not sure if it's easier or harder to decipher David Baptiste-Chirot's work. Many of his pieces remove the question of location - they're photographed so closely that the picture frame is filled by entirely etched and wheatpasted surfaces, giving no hint of where Baptiste-Chirot's placed his graffiti. As a person deeply interested in the physics of location (especially in The South), I was a bit disappointed that he hid the location of his pieces. Additionally, I've always thought that some of the most interesting elements of graffiti was the artistry behind getting to a wall and making art - the viewer of graffiti likes to be able to imagine police sirens, complex climbing rigs, and omnipresent danger when we're seeing these pieces in the light of day...

Anyway, removing location does narrow the viewers' focus, which is probably a good thing when there's such visual richness and layering in a piece.

*at least, I think those first two are local.

(all images from the blog)

Last Falcon Lords Related Post, I Promise

The Falcon Lords

They're playing Star Bar Thursday night with Tenth to the Moon, Missile Command, Rev Rebel and the Sound Supreme, and Ice Caps.

Really EXCITED.

Downtown

(text reads "Second Amendment"



(text reads "#1 in Sex Traffic," the scraps at the top read something like "Atlanta, GA")

Daniel Duford at The Contemporary

A few close ups of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Centers most recent main gallery exhibit. In addition to paneled comics on paper, Duford showed wall murals and sculpture, also part of the larger comic.

Speaking of paneling, Duford makes some pretty interesting choices in that department - along the lines of what you'd see in most good indie-comics, but with a more unified overall feel. If you're ignoring the images Duford uses, and only seeing the layout of his panels, you can still get a pretty good idea of his comics narrative path. The boxes swell and overwhelm each other on some pages, become rigid boxes within boxes on others, and, very occasionally, a box expands to fill the equivalent of a double page. Still, Duford is relatively rigid in his use of traditional comic panels - you never see an image without a black border around it, and each page of his comic is surrounded by a larger border.

If you don't get a chance to see the exhibit before it closes August 31, you can still check out Daniel Duford's webpage, which has extensive samples of Naked Boy and his other work.

Frisky Friday

Noot d'Noot's album release party tonight. It's a decent album, but nowhere near their live show. Check them out at The Earl tonight, or, if you can't make it, they play a show at Lenny's with Judi Chicago every Friday this summer. And they're playing at Whirlyball with Dark Meat this Saturday.

Here's Fire King, from the new album.
A lot of local bicyclists are getting together to hold a "Courteous Mass" at 6 pm tonight. The mass is an alternative to Atlanta's monthly Critical Mass; it follows a planned route and obeys all traffic laws. The pace should be slow enough for even the most novice cyclist, so try and stop by after work. We're meeting in Woodruff Park downtown, leaving at 6:30, and will be riding a total distance of 12 miles.

If you can't make it to the park in time, we'll probably be riding until around 8:30ish along this route.

Also, there's an interesting discussion about the Mass here.



There are a few promising visual arts exhibitions connected to the National Black Arts Festival opening this weekend. Dave McKenzie will be showing some video work at The Contemporary tonight (through August 30th). I couldn't find any of his videos online, but The Contemporary offers this description:

Dave McKenzie is best known for a performance documented on video in which he walks the streets of Harlem in NYC, wearing a Bill Clinton mask, shaking hands with area residents. Performed after the former President located his offices to the area but rarely was seen there, McKenzie became a surrogate, hiding in public but also being available. As an artist of color, he was clearly toying with the concept of Clinton as “the first Black President.”

Using materials including newspapers, cut metal signs, day planners, and basketballs, the artist will present variously interactive objects and events that continue his exploration of daily rituals, time, communication, and identity.

If you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you started salivating when you read the words "exploration of daily rituals."

The opening is from 7 to 9 tonight.

A Paradise For Couples Only at Beep Beep Gallery (Preview)

This is freaking me out:


I'm not sure why. But I am tremendously excited about seeing it in person this Saturday.

Rain On Our Parade

Not so much going on in Atlanta art this week.

There's the cool sculpture exhibit at Youngblood... but that's the only opening over this last week and the coming weekend, right?

Oh, and New Street Gallery's 4th Annual Vinyl show Saturday the 12th:


I'm looking forward to it - a big handful of artists I recognize and like, another even bigger handful I can't wait to see for the first time.

Speaking of vinyl...

I ran into this guy leafing through a box of records outside Star Bar last night, and asked him what was up. He told me that Wax n' Fact's owner tossed a box of records out every few nights. The records all play fine, they just don't happen to be selling.

(This is how the guy selling records in Little Five Point's concrete park finds his merchandise.)

We looked through the records for a bit, and I wished I still had a record player.

And, speaking of music...

Kiki Blood and Shana Robbins are playing the Masquerade Tuesday night. Check it out.

I Use Google News to Track World Beer Prices

All images by Tom Long. Grabbed from his interview on Fecal Face.

With little useful agricultural land, Japan can only produce around 40 percent of the food that its 128 million people consume every year—the lowest among industrialized nations.

That means the country is especially hard hit by fuel costs, which make importing a larger burden than in other developed nations.

In the past year, the cost of instant noodles has risen 17 percent, spaghetti is up 13 percent, and mayonnaise 10 percent. In April, butter practically disappeared from supermarket shelves as surging global grain prices made it impossible for Japan's dairy farmers to import enough feed to increase milk production.

"Japan's Thirst for Beer Quashed By High Price of Imports," National Geographic, June 3 2008



These last two might convince you to find a bigger monitor.

Corndogorama - Lost in the Funhouse

Phoebe Cates, leader singer of Attractive Eighties Women, performing at Corndogorama last Thursday night. (More coverage here.)

Lester Bangs writes:

...you're goddam right Iggy Stooge is a damn fool. He does a lot better job of making a fool of himself on stage and vinyl than almost any other performer I've ever seen. That is one of his genius's central facets.

What we need are more rock "stars" willing to make fools of themselves, absolutely jump off the deep end and make the audience embarrassed for them if necessary, so long as they have not one shred of dignity or mythic corona left. Because then the whole damn pompous edifice of this supremely ridiculous rock 'n' roll industry, set up to grab bucks by conning youth and encouraging fantasies of a puissant "youth culture," would collapse, and with it would collapse the careers of the hyped talentless nonentities who breed off of it. Can you imagine Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant conning the audience: "I'm gonna give you every inch of my love" - he really gives them nothing, not even a good-natured grinful "howdy-do" - or Jimmy Page's arch scowl of supermusician ennui?

From Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who's the Fool? written for Creem in 1970, reprinted in Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.