Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Short attention span, stop reading now. Corporate Americonskifreudenshaf cooks the books. Corporate responsibility my ass. The Pledge of Allegiance will now end with 'Hail Satan'. Does post modernism need a PR agent and even worse yet, a rebuttal. Is there a gay basis for Nietzsche's ideas, or would you rather just surf some hot porn...notice: no link given. What's with all the art from the lost and found? Can you please send me all the answers to these blind items? Oh and another thing, won't you download the new St. Etienne.


A twinkiless gotham? Nahhh never! In the seventies, villains weren't as deadly as they are now. All it took to be evil back then was a pair of bellbottoms with matching turtleneck and headband. Maybe an afro, maybe just some panties and a cape. One or two of them thought just being ugly would bring the world to its knees, and most times it almost worked. But there was one thing those evil bastards never counted on. Our heroes carry fruit pies. Fruit pies that they'll throw to you if you've been hoarding food or stealing national monuments. Fruit pies that are not only filled with delicious real fruit filling, but filled with the sweet taste of poetic justice. Seanbaby has compiled an interesting display of Hostess Snack Cake Ads featuring Super-heroes.
5:48 PM :

Monday, July 08, 2002
'Modern history invites nostalgia because it is increasingly about the lived experiences of work and leisure that people can identify with directly...No sooner has that happened than the displaced music, clothes, style or look can become a candidate for nostalgia. Fashions and styles are not discarded but stored, ready to be re-used.

Thrifting ain't what it used to be, blame 'Antiques Roadshow' and 'Ebay', those kooky treasures (polyester shirts, herb albert albums, bakelite dinnerware etc) are getting harder and harder to find. If you are so inclined venture down Lorain Ave. for a little shopping, this is definitely the hot spot for those retro-fabulous items. Cleveland is cheap hun, shop now. Two stores of note, specializing in modern mid century designs are:

Boom 7741 Lorain Ave/Cleveland/216.631.6088
Featuring modern and Scandinavian furniture and decorative arts, pottery, enamelware, paintings and other such oddities. A bit pricey, would bitch and dicker the price down a bit, shop owner looks like she's been sucking on a lemon too long, needs to loosen up, drop the attitude, but a nice array of wares. Drop the acetate business cards, serve coffee. Like your glasses. Need that couch. Best bet, go for the vintage table cloths and antique dumbbells upstairs. A short jog up and across the street is the Eamsey inspired...

Modern House 7924 Lorain Ave/Cleveland/216.651.3040
Modern classics, retro, vintage and some not so vintage but just plain fabulous and odd. Huge selection of Russell Wright. Posters and paintings are over-priced but lamps, ashtrays and tableware are reasonable. Bargain with the owners, make them work for it a bit, drop the dated house music ladies, again serve coffee, smile, talk, walk the runway. Best bet, the retro men's housecoats, not sure if they are authentic but stylish anyway-I plan to go bowling in mine. Call for hours

Not so much deeper as wider, a time before video killed the radio star, MTV, the web, cams, reality television, interactivity, plug n play the technology of the everyday embedded deep inside. I have this metropolis jerkin' back and forth, the mechanisms like replicas for a personal diorama. The freeze dried Cleveland Museum of Art thaws momentarily to present 'Into the Light-the Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977' Originally curated by the Whitney, the show traces the origin, of the video, 16mm film, artist/fashion video, monitors and wall sized banks of televisions that seem to be embedded into the psyche. Conceptual performance happening, pseudoscientific measurement, documentation, methodology art as research under a microscope, art as surveillance. Many of the installations have not been seen since their original showings and are a whirring retropolis of gallery and image, grainy jumping formats of film border on nostalgia-this is the abandoned future. The technology is so hopeful, innocent in fact, and perhaps all too secretly ushered into our popular culture, where the remote is replaced by the familiar. Yoko Ono's video piece 'Sky' is an omen/hilight of a super surveillance culture (ebay auction of SKY and FLUXUS). Andy Warhol's dual format/split screen 'Lupe' features a dazed Edie Sedgwick playing Latina movie star Lupe Velez, who committed suicide in the early 1940s. Warhol as ever, is irreverent, confusing and often hilarious. Many of the pieces, become percussive, like Paul Sharits 'Shutter Interface' and Dennis Openheim's 'Echo'. Trance like tedium gains momentum then falters as viewer dips in and out of artistic statements wary of being a captive audience. 10 years is, 20, even 30 is an infancy in the art world. The early science is fascinating but what of the continuum, where has the future gone?
4:12 PM :