I must have been pretty desperate for distraction the day i went to see Island Stories: Fifty Years of Photography in Britain at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This Summer now seems like it was a long, relentless photo exhibition dedicated to London, England and/or Great Britain. I thought that even an anglophile like me wouldn’t stomach yet another exhibition celebrating the joys and wonder of the country. But Island Stories: Fifty Years of Photography in Britain is such a gem of a little show, i’m on my way to see it for the second time continue
Anote na agenda: Joss Stone vem fazer 5 shows aqui no Brasil, em novembro.
Dez anos de carreira. 6 álbuns no currículo. Uma voz que, lá em 2003, ninguém conseguia acreditar que saía de uma inglesa, adolescente e loura. Um disco de estreia que capturava o espírito dos clássicos albuns de soul dos anos 60 e 70, desde a sonoridade até a arte da capa. Onze milhões de discos vendidos até agora e uma ousadia muito bem-vinda para uma artista (que poderia muito bem ter só ficado no conforto de regravações de standards seguras, mas que graças a Deus não se acomoda) que tenta dar suas próprias caras em sua arte, como em Introducing Joss Stone e Mind, Body and Soul.
Mind, Body and Soul foi seu segundo disco. Foi o trabalho que fez dela a britânica mais jovem a atingir o primeiro lugar das paradas inglesas antes do lançamento de um CD. De fato, Mind, Body and Soul foi uma pérola que mantinha o conceito vintage de seu primeiro álbum, mas que apresentou também o lado compositor de Joss. Das 14 faixas, pelo menos 12 tinham sua assinatura. Aclamado por crítica e público, o disco conquistou status de platina em vários países do mundo, e elevou Joss Stone a um novo patamar de respeito e expectativas dentro do show business.
Do jeito que eu falo, parece até que eu faço parte do fã-clube. Na verdade, não. Mas, sim, admiro muito essa menina pelas escolhas que ela fez na carreira e pelo bom gosto que ela tem. Em tempos de pop tão raso e descartável, é uma bênção haver uma cantora jovem que faz música com tanta profundidade e bom gosto.
Em The Soul Sessions Vol.2, Joss volta às origens de sua estreia e homenageia mais uma vez alguns clássicos da soul music.
A grande dificuldade de um projeto como esse é justamente a de trazer frescor à canções já regravadas por tantas e tantas pessoas anteriormente.
Se regravar um clássico já é uma responsabilidade por si só, regravar um clássico e dar um toque pessoal e novo para ele é um feito ainda mais louvável.
O mais legal do disco é perceber que ela revitaliza esses clássicos com sua pegada moderna, mas nunca altera a proposta original da música. Um bom exemplo é High Roads – na qual se permitiu uma desconstrução aos moldes de Fell In Love With a Boy, música do White Stripes que ganhou uma versão genial no primeiro Soul Sessions – onde ela mostra que é deste século, sim, sem deixar de soar clássica. A performance é impressionante.
Joss vem ao Brasil agora no fim do ano para divulgar seu novo trabalho.
Mesmo para quem não é super fã, eu recomendo ir ao show, só pela aula de profissionalismo e musicalidade.
Dá gosto de ver músicos do mais alto calibre, que minuciosamente encaixam cada nota de um jeito milimétrico nas músicas, macacos-velhos que são profissionais inigualáveis em seu ofício, se divertindo como se fossem adolescentes, fazendo um som de causar inveja em 11 entre 10 músicos iniciantes e deixando a diva à vontade para deslumbrar o publico com sua voz poderosa e seu charme.
The show is no postcard pictures party. It is less about the parks and monuments than it is about the Londoners. The photographs selected in the exhibition depict the social history of the city in black and white. I guess i’ll never cease to be amazed by the photos of Shoreditch before the hipsters and by the sartorial audacity of Londoners (though i can’t imagine anyone nowadays loitering around town with ‘Destroy London” written on the back of their leather jacket) continue
Genk is a city almost entirely devoid of any grace but it is also the site of the 9th edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art. And who needs grace and glamour when you have an exhibition as sensational as as the one that Cuauhtémoc Medina curated in a disused coal mine at the outskirt of the city? continue
The exhibition page of The Bruce Lacey Experience show at Camden Arts Center filled me with embarrassment. There i was visiting a show dedicated to “one of Britain’s great visionary artists.” Lacey has been making art for approx 65 years, he participated to Cybernetic Serendipity (the now legendary exhibition of computer art which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968), worked with Peter Sellers, he had a show with The Alberts called ‘An Evening of British Rubbish’, etc. Yet, i couldn’t remember having heard of him before continue
For some obscure reason i haven’t been able to locate the wikipedia entry about Haus-Rucker-Co. but if you’re curious about their work, there is a lot to (re)discover at the retrospective of the Viennese group currently hosted by WORK Gallery, near Kings Cross: inflatables capsules for two, parasitic structures, breathing devices, utopian ideas, helmets and pneumatic prostheses. It’s critique of architecture and architecture as critique at its best continue
The museum of photography in Antwerp has a number of fascinating show right now. One of them is an installation by Zoe Beloff that takes as its point of departure America’s longest running comic strip to explore the influence of cinema on the movement of the body and the mind.
Beloff’s exhibition contains a number of historical documents. Some of them show intriguing photos of sportsmen and factory workers in movement. They are called chronocyclegraphs. I had never heard of the chronocyclegraph before… continue
Hexen 2.0 charts the coming together of diverse physical and social sciences in the framework of post-WWII US governmental and military imperatives. The art works represent Suzanne Treister’s research into the development of cybernetics, the history of the Internet, the rise of Web 2.0, mass intelligence gathering and the interconnected histories of the counterculture. Through her work she explores the implications of new systems of societal manipulation and the development of a ‘control society’ alongside historical and current responses to advances in technology continue
A few months ago, I read there was an exhibition of photos by McCullin at Tate Britain. I thought “That one can wait, it’s going to for ages and everybody knows the work of the award-winning war photographer anyway.” That was very presumptuous of me. I finally went to see the show and it is now clear that i had underestimated the impact his images would have on me. Especially his portrayal of the homeless living around London from the late 1960s to the ’80s continue
This exhibition examines Russian avant-garde architecture made during a brief but intense period of design and construction that took place from c.1922 to 1935. Fired by the Constructivist art that emerged in Russia from c.1915, architects transformed this radical artistic language into three dimensions, creating structures whose innovative style embodied the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state continue
I’ll never recommend enough a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. No matter what they are showing i will go and discover something exciting. Such as the statue of a Man-Shark or the Kachina/katsina dolls which are part of The Making of Images, an anthropology exhibition that deciphers large artistic and material productions of humanity to reveal what is not seen directly in an image continue
Une horloge originale intitulée “Segmentus Clock” avec un formidable mécanisme pivotant afin d’afficher l’heure. Un travail du studio de design Art Lebedev, en provenance de Russie. Conçu pour l’instant en 2 modèles prototypes, noir et blanc. Plus de visuels dans la suite.
Developed in 1972 to protect early microprocessors from dust, the Gesundheit Radio featured a sneeze mechanism that expelled dust from inside the casing every six month. A bellows system extracted dust from inside the unit, blowing waste from two outlets located on the front continue
30 black and white pictures from photographers who portrayed life at the time of the GDR, mostly in a way that steered away from the official GDR iconography continue
Chip music is low-key. Its scene is relatively small, its sound is raw and lo-fi, but more importantly, its tools are outmoded goods of mass consumptions. This obsolescence of the media was at the heart of curator Quaranta’s reflections for the exhibition continue
I can’t recommend the visit of Persona enough. First, there’s the museum, its colonial-era hauteur is so un-PC, it sometimes made me cringe but it needs to be experienced before the place is renovated to a modern, polite and friction-proof version of itself. The exhibition itself presents the most breathtaking collection of masks i’ve ever seen continue
Letizia Battaglia’s pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mafiosi found by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of the mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns continue
In the 19th century, despite the best efforts of body snatchers, the demand from medical schools for fresh cadavers far outstripped the supply. One solution to this gruesome problem came in the form of lifelike wax models. These models often took the form of alluring female figures that could be stripped and split into different sections. Other models were more macabre, showing the body ravaged by ‘social diseases’ such as venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcohol and drug addiction continue
This volume includes a monumental stash of documentary photographs, ephemera, documents, transcripts and original writings on all things related to the oil crisis–from Jimmy Carter to underground utopias. Reproductions cover everything from impossible traffic jams leading up to empty gas stations to board games with names like Energy Quest and Petrol continue
The Moon Goose Experiment (MGE) is based on an excerpt from the book The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin in 1603. Godwin was the first person ever to describe weightlessness – long before Newton’s theory of gravity. The protagonist in the book flies to the moon in a chariot towed by geese. These special moon geese migrate every year from the earth to the Moon continue
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