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Dan Bejar Interview

Interview with Dan Bejar at AV Club:

The A.V. Club: When you record an album, do you start from scratch every time, or do you come into the project with some finished songs?

Dan Bejar: I always have words and vocal melodies. Usually a chord structure. In this case, there was no band, just in-house producers, and then people who trickled in down the road to shred over top of things. Some of the songs on Kaputt, I demoed. Crudely, but not without their charm. Others, I didn’t. I could sing them from beginning to end, but that was about it. No chords, no nothing. But those songs rejected structure. They turned out to be the poppiest ones. This is my first try at a pop record, by the way. I think it turned out pretty good. Though the elements were all taken from non-pop sources. Mostly film soundtracks I had in my head. Michael Mann or Alan Rudolph movies. The modal jazz classics. Certain ambient basics. I couldn’t play them on a guitar if you asked.

Generally, a Destroyer record begins traditionally, with a rock band laying down bed tracks and scratch tracks, some of which you keep, if you’re lucky. Your Blues was not like this; in fact, there’s a few similarities in the way things got started on that one and on this one. I’ve never just jammed and then tried to riff vocals over it, though every single Destroyer song starts from that kind of kernel. I knew I didn’t have it in me to figure out defined versions of the songs, in a way that you could play for a band. I also didn’t really want anyone to hear anyone else. I also wanted to be able to pull the rug out from any song at any given time and still be able to keep some of the work. So obviously the grid and MIDI played a big role. Songs like “Chinatown” benefited from this.  

AVC: Do the songs you write dictate what kind of album it’s going to be, or do you have a mood and tone in mind before you come up with the songs?

DB: I usually have a mood and tone in mind, independent of what the songs might be able to bear. But that mood and tone generally gets betrayed. I don’t really care about writing anymore. I don’t think pop music or indie-rock or whatever you call all this is a suitable forum for it, so I gave up all that. I’m now strictly interested in singing.  

AVC: It’s probably foolish to attempt to interpret lyrics, but there does seem to be a lot of imagery on Kaputt related to far-away places, both in terms of time and distance. Were you feeling especially elegiac when you wrote and recorded this album, or are any themes purely unconscious?

DB: For the most part, I have no idea what the lyrics of Kaputt pertain to, except for “Suicide Demo For Kara Walker.” Which is odd, because the writing seems really specific compared to all the other Destroyer albums, whose lyrics I happen to understand very well and can explain 110 percent and always have been able to. That being said, there is a colonial sound to the record, which maybe is playing off the lyrics. I was thinking a lot about dissolute officers and envoys with cushy posts, strung out on opium. By “a lot,” I mean I thought about that more than once, even if just as an audio reference. That’s what Roxy Music’s Avalon sounds like to me. I did have the instrumentation mapped out very strictly, and we really didn’t veer from it too much over the 20 months of working on this stuff on and off. I always had the players in mind. 

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Undermining of international law

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas W. Freeman, Jr. comments from last week's discussion on the Middle East:

"I do find it entertaining in a sense when the government of Israel
and its supporters claim that others are delegitimizing Israel.  It's
Israel that is delegitimizing itself by its own scofflaw behavior, by
its cruelty in the occupation, by its indifference to facts in certain
circumstances and by its brazen use of force against any and all in the
region as though that were a matter of right. . . .

. . . One of the pernicious effects that our relationship with Israel has
ended up having is the exercise of the veto on 47 occasions and the net
effect of this - and this issue is precisely at stake with the draft UN
resolution -  has been to suspend the international law in the Holy
Land. The Security Council was conceived after WWII as a means of
enforcing the UN Charter and the principles of international law and
it's become under the US veto on this issue the instrument for
subverting international law and preventing its application."

Koo Schadler

Egg Tempera Nature II

From Gage Academy of Art:

Master egg-tempera artist Koo Shadler utilizes the simple pre-Renaissance, pre-oil painting medium of egg yolks and powdered pigment to create astoundingly detailed, intensely colored, high-clarity paintings of the natural world around her. Her workshops in egg tempera, one of the oldest painting techniques, are internationally attended.

Used by artists from Botticelli to Wyeth, egg tempera is admired for its preservation of colors and brilliant surfaces. Egg tempera paint is generally applied in diluted, thin, often transparent layers of color with each layer building the image. The result of interacting colors creates the rich, luminous look unique to tempera paintings.

Schadler introduces you to three schools of egg tempera painting: Greek, Italian and Northern. Working on small, gessoed panels, you paint studies from life under the guidance of this celebrated artist. Workshop participants also receive Schadler’s acclaimed manual, Egg Tempera Painting.

Following her 1984 graduation from Tufts University (BA, Art History), Schadler traveled extensively throughout Europe. She eventually settled in Florence, Italy to pursue her studies in art history and painting. It was not until 1986 and her return to the United States, that Schadler was introduced to egg tempera through artist Chester Arnold.
Today Schadler works from her studio in a small town in southern New Hampshire. Her primary artistic pursuit is the study and creation of egg tempera paintings. She is a Master painter of The Copley Society of Boston and is represented by Twinhouse Gallery in Atlanta, GA. Her work is in over 80 collections and has been exhibited nationwide.

Arnold Odermatt

From lens culture:

From 1948 to 1990 Odermatt was employed as a traffic policeman in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden and took hundreds of photographs, mainly of his fellow workers and of the the towns and countryside where he worked and still lives. Surrounded by mountains and a large lake, Nidwalden was a fairly isolated place until 1976, when a major tunnel and bridge were built.

As a result, Odermatt's photographs bear witness to an environment gradually coming to terms over the years with various degrees of encroaching modernity. Roads figure prominently: snowy lanes and wet streets contrast with bright new highways, which appear like fresh scars across valleys and forests, slicing through picturesque village that huddle on the shores of photogenic lakes beneath leaden skies. These scenic detours, however, more often than not lead to the end of the road: a car crash.

Arriving at the scene of an accident, Odermatt would take one set of photographs for the insurance or police reports, and then take another for himself. His reasons for doing so are mysterious, but the results are often strangely beautiful.

Fischli/Weiss

 

From Art Forum, Rirkrit Tiravanija Interviews Peter and David:

DAVID WEISS: Did you go to the Biennale in Venice last year?

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA: No, I didn't get to see the project.

DW: It's quite similar to the idea of having the tape recorder running in real time during our conversation. Did you hear about it? It's not exactly real time but it is close to real time.

RT: The exhibition in the U.S. will start at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis?

DW: Yes. We will show older works as well, though it is not quite a retrospective. Not everything we have made will be in the exhibition. At the Walker it'll be shown in the room downstairs. Do you know this space? We'll try to show the works in a mellow light or spotlit. We'll have some works on the walls, of course, but we'll also have two videos which will be projected. For the piece we did in Venice we'll have ten TV monitors. A slide projection and a smaller piece with light, plus two sculptures. All in the dark!

RT: Like in the Holloch. When you made the videos for the piece in Venice, was there a specific situation you went around trying to tape?

DW: Well, it took us about a year or a year and a half to make it all. It started with one video, shot on the road we're driving on now, going back and forth, to and from the studio, in addition to footage shot of us in our studio. We took the bus. When we were asked to present a project in Venice, we felt there was more to this activity, more in reality, more in a place where there is no art. When the camera is on, you decide that this is a good situation. Like now [looking out the car window], there's something special about this moment. Sometimes we would take small trips, sometimes together, sometimes alone, without any destination, just driving and going out in the woods. Perhaps we found something, or not, while driving around. Sometimes we called ahead and asked if we could come and visit. For instance, we went to this factory where they make things like yogurt and milk. Somehow, the footage didn't turn out very well - it just looks like any other factory. So, in the end we didn't use it for Venice. Of course, it was fun when we were in the middle of it, but it looked too much like an industrial film, so we decided we couldn't use it. Altogether we had about 500 hours of videotape. Then we had to edit, just to take some things out - not to rearrange the sequences but to make some of it shorter.

RT: Does each segment have a specific running time?

DW: I think they're from ten or fifteen minutes to two and a half, even three hours. One of the sequences is a train ride somewhere around Zurich in the winter. This is simply very beautiful. There isn't much editing on this tape, but after three hours we had enough footage. In Venice we had 12 monitors in oneroom, so you wander around and you always see at least two to three monitors at the same time. Sometimes you could see five to six in the distance.

As we continue to drive through industrial parts of Zurich, I ask about Los Angeles, where David lived for a few years, and how he and Peter started working together.

DW: I lived in L.A. in 1979-81, about fifteen years ago.

RT: And this is around the time you started to work together?

DW: Yes, we made a series of photographs together here in Zurich. Then Peter came to L.A. and we made a short film, with rented costumes -

RT: The Rat and the Bear -

DW: We didn't have money. We lived in Hollywood, we couldn't act, and we didn't have any actors. So we decided that we could hide in those costumes - of course, you can't. Then we were invited back to Zurich and Peter and I made the exhibition with the clay figures. One show after another came, and I didn't think I could live in L.A. any longer. Once you've lived in L.A. for a year or two, you come to a point where you have to decide, "Am I a visitor still or am I going to live here?" L.A. is the kind of place where you can become a "Californian," because they don't care there! I couldn't just go to Italy and pretend to be an Italian!

We reach the studio, a modest-size room that once housed gas utility laborers who worked in the area. This is Fischli and Weiss' "clean" studio, the one they use for their photography and video work. There are exchange greetings with Peter.

RT: You are dubbing?

PETER FISCHLI: This is the work of art in the age of mechanical re-production.

DW: For about half of this year we have watched on two screens everything we shot. It usually takes about two to three hours, but it's nice to sit down and just watch this "everyday life," what's going on outside, useless things -

PF: It's not real time, it is edited -

DW: But not rearranged.

PF: It's a one-day trip which becomes an hour of film. We have long sequences in real time. It's an important aspect that using or spending time is "something." To spend time, to go to a place, to watch people, and then also to spend the time watching the video. It slows everything down a little bit.

DW: In editing we had to spend more time. Going through it again, you can't speed up.

PF: In the final installation in Venice, we had the piece on 12 monitors. You really had to watch one tape after another. But in fact we really didn't want this. Because we had a very large space, you couldn't watch all the monitors at once but you could watch maybe two at the same time. When we were sitting here in the studio we could have something to drink and cigarettes to smoke. In Venice, the minimum comfort you could offer somebody was a glass of water and a chair - it is a little bit more than nothing.

DW: The water was a big success. Many people came for the water, and they may have even seen the show as well.

PF: The themes of the films we chose - you could describe them as an encyclopedia of personal interest. We just filmed things that we thought we would like to go and see - what everyone is doing, the whole day. It more or less breaks down into three sections: people at work, sport and fun activities, and nature and daydreaming. Some of the things were chosen in a passive way. Because David had to go to the dentist, I said, okay, I'll come with you. It wasn't an artistic decision. Other segments are of places we had been before and wanted to go back to. And others were about going without any kind of ideas beforehand. Like our trips to the Egelsee, a little lake where David and I have made a couple of films.

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Two Fish

At Eataly in NYC

A good replacement?

Stephen Soldz has a good article at Common Dreams on the torture history of Egypt's new vice president, Omar Suleiman:

However, Suleiman wasn't just the go-to bureaucrat for when the Americans wanted to arrange a little torture. This "urbane and sophisticated man" apparently enjoyed a little rough stuff himself.

Shortly after 9/11, Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was captured by Pakistani security forces and, under US pressure, torture by Pakistanis. He was then rendered (with an Australian diplomats watching) by CIA operatives to Egypt, a not uncommon practice. In Egypt, Habib merited Suleiman's personal attention. As related by Richard Neville, based on Habib's memoir:

Habib was interrogated by the country's Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman.... Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before  9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.

That treatment wasn't enough for Suleiman, so:

To loosen Habib's tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib - and he did, with a vicious karate kick.

After Suleiman's men extracted Habib's confession, he was transferred back to US custody, where he eventually was imprisoned at Guantanamo. His "confession" was then used as evidence in his Guantanamo trial.

Blind leading the blind-no White House "Arabists"

From Helena Cobban's knowledgable blog about the Middle East about how AIPAC has managed to rid anyone in our government with any true expertise on things Arab:

So thorough-going has been the witch-hunt that AIPAC and its attack dogs have conducted over the past 25 years against anyone with real Middle East expertise that the U.S. government now contains no-one at the higher (or even mid-career) levels of policymaking who has any in-depth understanding of the region or of the aspirations of its people.

The campaign against anyone with regional expertise-- the so-called "State Department Arabists"-- was launched in the public sphere by the dreadful know-nothing Robert Kaplan, in the 1980s. It got a strong foothold throughout the federal bureaucracy-- and far more broadly than in just the State department-- with the arrival of Pres. Clinton in 1993. Clinton, that is, who brought along as his key advisers on the affairs of the whole region the two long-time pro-Israel activists Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk! Then, of course, under GWB, we had Elliott Abrams and rest of the neocons running regional affairs for the government.

And what was happening inside the State Department during all those years? Only hacks like Jeffrey Feltman or Donald Blome-- the list is endless... -- who could prove their unswerving loyalty to the pro-Israel agenda got promoted or retained. Throughout those 16 years of the Clinton and GWB presidencies, a generation of career diplomats grew up whose main mantra was to do nothing that might question or even upset Israel. (There were, of course, those heroic few who questioned the prevailing, AIPAC-fueled "wisdom" on the advisability of invading Iraq in 2003, who resigned their posts at the time.)

So now, in the Oval Office, we have the blind leading the blind and the blind advising the blind. No Chas Freeman, no Bill Quandt, no Rob Malley... (The list of those excluded on ideological grounds is pretty long, too.) No-one, in short, who can integrate into the advice the President desperately needs to hear any real understanding of how the peoples of the region think and how the regional system actually works. God save us all from their self-inflicted ignorance.

Alex Fischer

Santiago Sara Brown

Works for Sale at Art Barrage

Nathan Harger

Untitled (Overpass), Queens, NY 2007

From The Paris Review:

My process is different every time. Sometimes I stumble upon places, objects or spaces that I then go back and photograph. I also do research and travel to cities in the U.S. that are historically known as industrial, like Bethlehem and Bath in Western Pennsylvania. I’m not actually looking for anything specific; there’s no predetermined idea in my mind. I walk around these industrial sites until I find the shapes and structures that are rich in lines and geometric forms. I often travel to New Jersey, mainly to Elizabeth. It’s a heavily industrial city, a blue-collar working-class city. A friend of mine wanted to come shoot with me one day—he’s from Cleveland, which is where I grew up. He found it hilarious that I moved from Cleveland to New York, because I keep going to places that look like Cleveland.

As a photographer, I’m visually attracted to the same things I found compelling when I thought I’d be an industrial designer. When I started art school, I realized I liked the medium of photography and its immediacy more than drawing. When I take photos of these places that already exist I can then see them through my own perspective, instead of re-creating them through a sketch or a drawing. The photographs featured in the show were taken in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania.