The Seinfeld Collage

seinfeld-colage

Well it’s more like “art”, definitely low-brow but for a Seinfeld fan like me definitely amusing and worth a look! (click through for the full size plus the answer key!) Found on the you fail blog

Yessified! – Sally Silvers

sallysilvers_yessified

<! — No Comment –>  Maybe later, but for now I’m speechless and not in a good way.  As usual, maybe I just didn’t get it?  I’m not a dancer after all, I don’t even know that much about dance, I come from perfomnace art, but art is art isn’t it? 

Anyway, The New York Times liked it. Maybe you will too? LMK, what you thought.

March 22-29, 2009

P.S. 122
150 First Ave.
New York, NY 10009
www.ps122.org

Friedman and Nilekani @NYPL

friedman_nilekani_nypl

Last night, I attended another NYPL Live event. The evening was, once again, stimulating and a good way to learn some new things about the world. Thomas Friedman was in conversation with Nandan Nilekani. Who is Nilekani? I didn’t know either, but after the evening was over I was surprised that I was so ignorant before.

For one, Nilekani is the one who gave Friedman the idea for the title of his book, The World is Flat. For another, he is someone who came from modest beginnings to being a founder of a huge multinational corporation, and a personal net worth of over 1.3 billion. A great American success story if I ever heard one, except all of this took place in India, and the company is headquartered there. I think Nandan may be something of national hero there because of this.

Maybe it’s just PR but I was surprised by how honest Nilekani was about what it takes to run a business in the 21st century, especially in light of the recent global economic and climatic changes. For example, he was very clear that companies can no longer afford to do business with the kind of disregard for the environment, that companies in the west, had up till now. He has many ideas on how to make India competitive in today’s world. He seems very pragmatic and he doesn’t overlook India’s many problems but is instead very aware of them, and seems to have solutions for them.

We should all pay attention because, as John Stewart said while interviewing Nilekani on the Daily Show, India will probably be our new overlord soon.

some interesting facts from the evening:

  • india has one sixth of the worlds population, about 1.15 billion people
  • infosys, nulakani’s company, gets 1.5 million job applications a year
  • there are only about 25,000 positions
  • India has more cellphones than the US has people
  • India is very diverse religiously but these religions are able to generally coexist peacefully.
    Nilekani hopes India can become a role model for other countries in this regard.
  • a demographic dividend is a good thing, India has one right now
  • global climate summits are essentially unfair for developing countries like India, because developed countries got to reap the benefits of not worrying about polluting and now they want to share responsibilities in the repercussions
check out Imagining India, Nilekani’s book
or check out future NYPL LIVE events

La Didone – The Wooster Group

wooster_ladidone

Maybe it was just where I was sitting, I finally had a clear view of the source video, that is part of every Wooster group show, as it was playing in the tech booth, or maybe it’s just that I’m not a big fan of opera, but I felt extremely detached from this production. It felt like the whole thing was going on autopilot and it made no difference to the people on stage whether there was an audience there or not.

I felt the opera half of the cast connected with the audience slightly more, but they, and the story they were telling were constantly fighting the set, costumes, and the myriad of set gadgetry, which, because of their typical Wooster high tech, really seemed to all support the sci-fi half of the story. Nothing about these elements seemed there to support La Didone, which after all the whole production is named after.

After a while I found myself drawn to following the sci-fi story, which was more immediately accessible to me, it was in English and the set seemed to be made for it, while the opera part of the production was wandering around lost, running on it’s own track in the background, and distracting me (from finding out how the sci-fi story would end!).

Sure the Wooster group took great pains to intertwine the action of 1960’s sci-fi film Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires) with the baroque 17th-Century opera La Didone. They tried very hard to switch it up, to alternate focus between the two stories, and to intertwine them, and they managed to make something, in true Wooster fashion, very complex.

But, once you figured out the key, once you unpacked it, once you started to see glimpses of how the different elements on stage, including crew and orchestra, worked together, was it still complex or just very complicated?

Usually, the Wooster group formula of taking, two or more, seemingly disparate elements and stirring them together, creates something new. This time, though, I think the ingredients didn’t synergize, nothing happened, and nothing new emerged from this experiment.

MAR 17 – APR 26
ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE
38 Water Street
DUMBO Brooklyn
stannswarehouse.org
p.s. if you’ve never seen the wooster group at all, you should really check them out. They do some amazing things that will leave you bewildered, and should be experienced by anyone who is a theater and performance fan, just so you can see the possibilities. I think they fit the definition of experimental quite well.

p.p.s. the image is from this papermag writeup

Quote

Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.

— Sol LeWitt

SOS – Big Art Group

bigart
Seizure inducing (in a good way). The finale had the best costumes I have ever seen in a live production. Amazing bold video art and creative videography. I would highly recommend it. Although all of the calls for Realness by the ultra hyper techno lusting product placement in hypercolor overdrive characters, made me wish for some more of the realness myself. So much of what we see as the performance is mediated, physically and psychologically by a wall of cameras that the liveness of the whole thing is almost lost.

March 19-21 &
March 26-28, 2009 at 8pm

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.thekitchen.org