Monthly Archives: November 2016
Steve Reich :: It’s Gonna Rain
On January 27, 1965, composer Steve Reich premiered his piece It’s Gonna Rain in San Francisco. The piece consists of the manipulation of a taped recording of Brother Walter, a charismatic Pentecostal preacher in Union Square. Brother Walter’s fire and brimstone sermon begins to mutate into echoes of itself forming a constantly changing, pulsing canon made of human speech woven into an interlocking rhythm. Continue reading Steve Reich :: It’s Gonna Rain
Karl Benjamin: West Coast Hard Edge Abstraction, Pt2
Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA) auction on May 6, 2012 of Important 20th Century Modern Design and Fine Art
20th Century Art & Design Auction
Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA), 20th Century Modern Art and Design auction, May 19, 2013
Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA) auction on May 6, 2012 of Important 20th Century Modern Design and Fine Art
Untitled, 12/20/03, 2:57 PM, 8C, 3414×4514 (580+936), 75%, bent 5 stops, 1/100 s, R93.9, G62.7, B65.4
Chicago native Karl Benjamin found his way to California to go to college on the G.I.Bill after serving in the Navy during World War II. With no formal education in art, Benjamin who was an elementary teacher, began working with crayons in the course of developing art lessons for his students’ curriculum. He became enthralled with the way in which colors appeared to change when in juxtaposition with other colors and enrolled in classes at Claremont Graduate School, ultimately earning an M.A. degree in 1960 and developing a serious art practice as a painter who worked rigorously with color.
‘His principal started it all by asking him to add 47 minutes a week of art instruction to the curriculum.“I bought some crayons and paper,” he said. “And the kids drew trucks, trees, mountains. That was boring, so I said, No trucks, no trees. And they said, What should we do? I said the right thing, even though I didn’t have any background in art. I said, Be quiet and concentrate.” – Jori Finkel, Karl Benjamin’s Colorful Resurgence, New York Times, October 7, 2007 Continue reading Karl Benjamin: West Coast Hard Edge Abstraction, Pt2
Appalachian Sunday Morning by Danny Hensley, 11.13.16
A fantastic 4 hour program of tunes ranging from Bluegrass to Southern Gospel produced by the SBBradio Network.
America. You’re soaking in it. via Mixcloud
Yutaka Takanashi
Yukata Takanishi (Feb 6, 1935, Shinjuku, Tokyo).
- •first camera:Canon IVSb 35 mm rangefinder.
- •first exhibition: work from his series “Somethin’ Else”, in Ginza Garō, May 1960
- •commercial photographer, Nippon Design Center, 1961-70
- •member of the collective that produced Provoke magazine, 1968-69
Leon Russell, r.i.p
We lost Leon Russell (born Claude Russell Bridges; April 2, 1942 – November 13, 2016) yesterday. Saluting and waving goodbye to a talented and influential musician, composer & producer who helped shape an era in rock and popular music.
Here is a clip from the documentary The Wrecking Crew in which Leon’s early days as a session player are remembered:
Leon as part of the Mad Dogs and Englishmen band, 1969 -70
An excerpt from the Homewood Sessions, 1971
Leon & Elton John, performing a song from their album, The Union Pt2, 2012
According to a statement on his website, Leon died in his sleep at his Nashville home November 13, 2016, at the age of 74. He was convalescing from heart surgery in July.
Mighty Sam McClain :: When The Hurt Is Over
from his 1996 album, Sledgehammer Soul & Down Home Blues
Helen Lundeberg: West Coast Hard Edge Abstraction, Pt1
West Coast (Los Angeles) painter Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) turned to abstraction in the 1950’s after having spent the two previous decades working in social realist and post-surrealist styles of imagemaking. Her precise compositions with their restricted palettes hovered between abstraction and figuration, but always remained rooted in reality, referring to still lifes, landscapes, planetary forms and architecture.
“I was interested both in the pattern and the three-dimensional illusion created by these very flat geometric forms. At first I confined myself to angles and straight lines. Then I got a little tired of that and began getting some curves.” -Helen Lundeberg
Helen Lundeberg’s paintings have been exhibited widely in prominent museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University and the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. Her work was most recently included in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970, and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition titled In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.–wikipedia
Digestif
Welcome To The Incubator
Welcome to Incubator, a new blog/zine devoted to the worlds of music, art, the performing arts, the written/spoken word, technology, new thought, old thought, trash culture, highbrow culture and the divergent vectors that pierce, intersect and somehow unite them all. This is a living experiment and I truly hope it serves the tastes of a viewership who are interested in not only the things of our culture but are also informed by the glints, the refractions and the shadows cast by the collisions and convergences of divergent ideas and works.
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pic: names scratched into bathroom wall, Japan.
The Incubator 