Appearing to break through the steel bars that surround them, these characters represent the “free passage of all populations, and appealing for a world without borders,” said creative foundation Brilliant Minds, which organized the installation.
This is a beautiful sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The foundation Brilliant Minds was created by the man who became unfathomably rich by founding first Pirate Bay and later Spotify. Someone should put a sticker on the Arch that says paid for by musicians everywhere.
I am reading Ai’s book “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows”. For me the book became really interesting after he arrived in New York, in February of 1981.
There were tens of thousands of artists in New York, but only a few dozen who were making money. For a certain subset, art had become a
target of speculation and just part of the race to find the next new thing.
Art had long been a consumption commodity, a decoration catering to the
tastes of the rich, and under commercial pressures it was bound
degenerate. As artworks rise in monetary value, their spiritual dimension
declines, and art is reduced to little more than an investment asset, a
financial product.
and
Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover. If they were not going to behanging on someone else’s wall, they didn’t count as anything at all.
I uploaded the March slideshow. You can find it here. Please click on the fullscreen symbol for maximum enjoyment. I have been looking into html slideshows, so that the photos can be viewed on mobile devices that don’t support Flash, but they either don’t advance automatically or they don’t dissolve nicely…
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I added a page for the new album. The official release date is June 15th. ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• New York, New York. I love the city, but playing there with the band became a drag last year, when a new law was issued: a bus pulling a trailer is no longer allowed in Manhattan. As a result we have to leave the bus and trailer in New Jersey and drive into the city with the gear in a rental van and the musicians in a couple of taxis. Not fun.
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Behold, wild custom scooters from Japan. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
William Gibson The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can’t be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed.
The music worth keeping can’t be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out… ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Track number 4, “On the Road to Shiraz”, starts with the sound of dawn on a dusty street. It’s a gritty sound, gritty like the sand on both sides of the road. At the end of the road beckons Shiraz, the Persian garden city, home of the Sufi poet Hafez. The gritty sound returns at the end of the piece, when we realize that we are no closer to Shiraz, because we whiled away the time dancing and talking.
I was having coffee at Cafe Angelique with Frank Louis, who took photos of me in New York, and while we were talking I noticed the Erhu playing softly over the sound system. I have always enjoyed the sound of that Chinese violin, the most human sounding instrument it is said, and thought that we were hearing a soundtrack. But, as we got up to pay and exit I heard a guitar solo and realized the song was Golden Lotus, from the album Monsoon by Asiabeat. Sadly the album is out of print and not even available online. I found a couple of entries in my diary from 1994, when I was in Singapore to record with Asiabeat: one and two.
Since the recording is out of print and not available and since I am only giving you one song from the album, I feel fine about doing this. Consider it advertising. Consider it trying to remind folks of an album that used to be available. Why albums that are out-of-print can’t at least be available in download-formats is beyond me. There are almost no manufacturing costs! Anyway, enjoy this piece, which was also available on the third Buddha Bar compilation at one time…
