The list-making impulse doesn’t strike me often, but I thought it might be worth running down a list of books, albums, art, events, and miscellany that in one way or another fired me up creatively this year. I tend to have a shoddy memory and periodic reviews like this help keep things all wired up in my head - a useful side benefit.
Here you go then, in no particular order. (This is part one of a list that turned out kinda long! Here’s part two.)
Bill Fay, “Time of the Last Persecution” LP
It snuck up on me, this grey, morose, apocalyptic, utterly British, and relentlessly melodic record. There are a number of great reviews of “Time of the Last Persection” scattered around the web; no need for me to rehash all those fine words. I’ll add only that this album manages to evoke the richest and most complex reaction in me of anything I’ve heard in years, possibly ever: it’s chilling, fragile, beautiful, loose, prophetic and sad and surreal, and it somehow bridges my obsession with the apocalypse and my love for psychedelic pop. I can’t believe it took me this long to find out about it.
Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”
We know a fellow who once told me that he’s read nothing but Melville since he graduated from college (over five years ago now.) At the time I thought it was a sort of affectation on his part, a willfully arbitrary narrowing of his literary horizons on one great American writer, but then I read “Moby Dick.” There’s a whole universe inside this book, inside the very white whale that consumes it (and Ahab, and presumably the author as well.) It’s the deep weirdness of this book that really got me into it — the endless lists of technical data about the ship and whaling and whales and whale heads and spermaceti and all the rest. All the interesting obsessiveness aside, however, this is an honest-to-god epic novel that requires the biggest possible canvas to contain its gigantic insights about mankind.
Jonathan McCabe, “Nervous States” and “The Origami Butterfly Method” DVDs
I encountered Jonathan McCabe while reading the great computational art blog dataisnature. He’s a visual artist in Australia who specializes in algorithmic and generative approaches to the visualization of data. He was kind enough to send me DVDs of two of his pieces, “Nervous States” and “The Origami Butterfly Method.” I’m lucky that I was able to view them before the DVD drive on my laptop kicked it. They’re unearthly, fluid, organic, and definitely psychedelic constructions that seem to follow a kind of alien logic all their own. The “Nervous States” piece visualizes the output of a neural network, and the “Butterfly Method” uses a simple, iterative fold-and-copy process (described at generatorx) to create a trippily reflective image evoking butterfly wings.
BIACS2: “The Unhomely” (Seville, Spain)
An old friend of mine, Jim Thomas, is the assistant curator for this international art exhibition in the south of Spain that opened in October. Becca and I flew over during Thanksgiving and made our way through each of its beautiful venues (a monastery and an ancient shipyard.) The art was world-class, highly political, mostly stark and often confrontational; it was a demanding journey for a visitor, but definitely rewarding. My personal highlight reel: a video from Olivo Barbieri, a collection of gripping b&w photos from Chris Marker, and installations from Thomas Hirschhorn and Mike Kelley. Most impressive of all, though, was seeing the culmination of a project that Jim has poured his heart and soul into over the past year, and which he likened to producing a small motion picture: a level of passionate dedication and perserverance to which I can only aspire.
Sixpoint Craft Ales Brewery Tour (Brooklyn)
In a delightful goodbye to New York City, we traveled down to Red Hook on a Saturday afternoon and waited in the rain for the tour guide to take us on a tour of the Sixpoint Brewery. The tour guide turned out to be one of the two founders of the brewery: an awesomely techie chem nerd who let us drink half-fermented beer from the fermenting tank (chewy and good.) The Sixpoint operation is so small (we could have fit it all into our old loft), quirky, and customized, and the proprietors obviously love what they do so much, that it rapidly becomes obvious why their beer is so damn wonderful.
Part two to follow tomorrow…