Happy New Year! I have scoured the Internets for you, which included twitter, and look what the cat dragged in. Jason Lazarus+Photography+Johalla Projects = all kinds of awesome.

Information below. Good luck!

 

Filter Photo Festival is pleased to announce an open call for photographic work for a juried exhibition, “Archetype Drift.” Filter’s 4^th juried exhibition will run concurrently with the Society for Photographic Education’s (SPE) 2013 National Conference. The exhibition will be held at Johalla Projects, a gallery located in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, and will run from March 4^th – March 23^rd, with an opening reception on March 6^th. Archetype Drift will be juried by artist, curator, writer, and educator Jason Lazarus.

Dates

• February 4^th: Deadline for submissions
• Mid-February: Entrants are notified of juror’s decision
• March 4^th: Exhibition opens
• March 6^th: Opening reception
• March 23^rd: Exhibition closes

Theme: Archetype Drift

“The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.” -Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Photography can be a painful mirror.

Because of its illustrative tendencies and mnemonic capacities, photography enables us to tell the stories we want to tell with a hammer that is the frame. What happens when the medium gets in the way of the most important narratives?

Photography can be a seductive enabler that, at its worst, allows us to fetishize, beautify, and conduct shallow investigations. Meanwhile, paradigmatic changes in history and culture metastasize alongside new technological ways to make, edit, and distribute images. Are photographers pushing envelopes of meaning and relevance? Are they even keeping pace?

With the ubiquity of images high and low, how does an image-maker create cultural value in 2013?

Archetype Drift is a call for new methods of photographic making, editing, and presentation.  It is a call for risk taking, chance operations, relabeling, and letting go of the comfortable.  It is in itself an experiment and a (momentary) mirror.

http://www.filterfestival.com/archetype-drift-juried-exhibition/

 

Michigan Avenue can be a frantic place, especially on the southwest corner of Michigan and Monroe. You have The Art Institute of Chicago to the south and the spectacle of Millennium Park to the north. But if you look up you will see that overlooking them both is the quiet oasis of the Pritzker Military Library. I walk past this sparkly new library everyday on my way to work, but it wasn’t until recently that I made time in my schedule to check it out in person.

The event that finally pulled me off the street and up to the second floor entrance was the exhibition Don’t be a Dope: Training Comics from World War II and Korea (through March). I have a deep love of training materials. They’re so reflective of their time and often more instructive about the culture than they are about their supposed subject matter. Many of the posters addressed the kinds topics you would expect, like don’t contract VD or get drunk in bars and spill military secrets. There were some surprises, though. One poster cautioned against carelessly spending all of your pay because you won’t have anything when you get home. The one I was most tickled by urged men not to fly foolishly to impress girls. Honestly, I didn’t really think that would be such a huge problem that the government felt the need to address it in a training poster. Many noteable names are featured: Will Eisner, Al Capp, and Arthur Szyk. Perhaps most famous is Theodore Geisel, our own Dr. Seuss. His poster warns us of the perils of the adorable little bug “Ann.” That would be the Anopheles Mosquito that spreads malaria. Despite the warnings and her lethal nature, I can still see a little Cindy Lou Who in her.

 

 

The second show currently on exhibit is She’s a WOW!: Women’s Service Organizations in World War II (through summer). This show highlights the role of women during WWII, a time when women were  consigned to auxiliary roles. Still, these jobs were pivotal and most all branches of the military had their own women’s corps. This history is told through a series of stories of individual women. Pictures, interviews, personal histories are all included to reveal the myriad reasons these diverse women chose to buck the prevailing cultural convention to join a service organization.

In addition to the physical space, The Pritzker Military Library has a sizeable collection of online resources. There’s a searchable gallery of military posters going all the way back to the 1700s. I lost an hour just looking at the posters from WWII. If after seeing an exhibit you’d like to know more, there is supporting material available. For example, Don’t Be a Dope has a downloadable bibliography that is particularly useful for those interested in learning more about the work. There are also oral history podcasts and recordings of library events.

The space is spectacular and the staff is friendly. There is a librarian with whom you can make a research appointment. As a bonus, there’s a military-themed movie every Saturday at 1 o’clock—films you wouldn’t expect like White Christmas (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). The library even presents new films. The documentary From Hell to Here (2012), which chronicles the challenges of a veteran battling post-traumatic stress disorder, screens January 26, and will be followed by a Q&A with director Rachell Shapiro. The next exhibit starting spring 2013, will be of iconic WWI posters. Think The Christy Girl and Uncle Sam. The Pritzker Military Library is located at 104 S Michigan Ave. There is a $5 admission fee, but is free with military ID.

 

On view currently at Chicago’s Thomas Robertello Gallery are 15 pen, ink, and gouache drawings on paper by local artist, illustrator, and author of the Gaylord Phoenix volume of comics, Edie Fake. Titled ‘Memory Palaces,’ the exhibition is a stunning showcase of Fake’s exceptional, and exceptionally idiosyncratic, formal skills in composition, pattern-design, and color, as well as a moving meditation on loss. Specifically, Fake pays tribute to the passing of five friends, colleagues, activists, and artists (Mark Aguhar, Nick Djandji, Dara Greenwald, Flo McGarrell, and Dylan Williams) in a series of drawings titled Gateway, and to ten real or imagined spaces of queer congregation no longer, or never, existent.

Put simply: depicted are places Fake, or the rest of us, may never go. They are hopeful spaces vividly imagined by those living in a contemporary urban environment largely ravaged and rid of countercultural nightlife by neoliberal vice and zoning laws, class-targeted antidrug policies, and corporate gentrification efforts throughout the late 20th century. As such, the collection of building facades Fake depicts – described as a neighborhood – can only be psychically located between utopian fantasy and interpretive research. Doing so foregrounds how the imagination and it’s shadow, desire, propels individual or collective searches for heritage, lineage, and belonging. What might be made possible for someone whose very personhood and politics teeters on the brink of unviability by the realization that, yes, La Mere Vipere (a burned down gay/punk venue in the now-gentrified Boystown), Killer Dyke (a radical lesbian periodical), and JANE (a clandestine feminist-led abortion service) did, indeed, exist here in the 1970s? Comprehension of these disappeared, criminalized spaces and services entails not simply an intellectual recognition, but something much more sensorial and perhaps even spiritual when translated through the prismatic hallucinations offered by Fake.

The flatness of the paper Fake has drawn upon is only a format, as his palette of offbeat hyper-colors and remarkable geometric drawing skills translates a deeper, pulsating dimensionality, like the embedded optic phenomena of a Magic Eye poster and a horror vacui painting. A handful of the places recreated here include dance venues, sex-clubs, and art spaces, all of which Fake has foregone a faithful architectural re-approximation of in favor of getting at something much more enigmatic – the mind-altering life practices they facilitated. Representing nightlife from psychedelia through disco and punk, up to rave, Fake renders his spaces with the fluorescent sensibilities and colors of escape developed via dance-floors and acid-trips. Neon hues that should clash, but somehow don’t, cohere in vibrant mosaic facades Fake has lent to 80s voguing-hub Club LaRay and former host of 70s gay anarchy nights The Snake Pit. Seeming inspired by the hypnotic, transportive potential of repetition and detail in geometric art, Fake’s designs are infused with a mystical content in the style of Islamic tile work or Huichol yarn and bead art.

The evocation of non-Western, nondenominational, and anti-representational spiritual aesthetics acquires political significance upon realization of for whom Fake has drawn a Gateway. Fake has imagined entryways into the hereafter markedly more colorful, robust, lavish, and peculiar than the pearly ivory luster of Judeo-Christian concepts of the afterlife. Those mourned are imagined as entering a kaleidoscopic, palatial elsewhere, rightly undoing inherited notions of heaven too tidy, too conservatively patriarchal, for housing the spirit of trans-queer-feminist artist of color Mark Aguhar, the anti-racist feminist dance parties of Dara Greenwald, or the critically outsider sensibilities of punk/metal-comic pioneer Dylan Williams.

It is here where Fake’s project best comes into full relief; it is only through the physical manifestation of improbable psychic longing that another world becomes possible, knowable, inhabitable. After hours, off the books, and after life; Fake honors such phenomena, and those residing there, with an informed, aspirational intensity apparent in the meticulous, strange, gorgeous labor of his drawing.

1. Studio Audience (WEATHER PATTERNS) at Johalla Projects

Work by Andrew Mausert-Mooney.

Johalla Projects is located at 1821 W. Hubbard St. Reception Friday, 8-10pm.

2. Returning to the Cave at The Mission

Work by Jeroen Nelemans.

The Mission is located at 1431 W. Chicago Ave. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

3. The Unreliable Narrator at threewalls

Work by Matthew Paul Jinks.

threewalls is located at 119 N. Peoria St. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

4. Exchange: Chicago—Detroit at Chicago Artists’ Coalition

Work by Taurus Burns, Design 99, Jessica Frelinghuysen, Scott Hocking, Chido Johnson, Nicola Kuperus, Faina Lerman, Adam Lee Miller, Clinton Snider, Vince Troia and Graem Whyte.

Chicago Artists’ Coalition is located at 217 N. Carpenter St. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

5. The Dead of Winter at PSA Projects

Work by Mike Schuh and Yuan-Chen Li.

PSA Projects is located at 2509 N. Lawndale Ave. Reception Sunday, 5-7pm.

2012 was a busy year!  Here are twenty of my favorite musics, foods, YouTube videos, and feelings that happened within the disappointingly non-apocalyptic confines of this year (I was totally ready for meeting Quetzalcoatl to top this list).

 

(This list is by no means complete and I will feel free to tack on anything I forgot to any future posts on B@S for the rest of 2013.)

 

 

Seaside Lovers – Memories In Beach House

 

So, this list is totally unordered with the exception of this entry which is unquestionably number one.

I discovered this album about halfway through 2012 and I’ve listened to it at least weekly since.  Originally released in 1983 as part of CBS/Sony’s “Sound Image” series of themed instrumental smooth jammers, it’s Japanese session players Akira Inoue, Masataka Matsutoya, and Hiroshi Sato doing vaguely tropical fusion and smooth funk with occasional sprinklings of prog for good measure.  Orion initially said this record was too smooth for him, but he came around.  A staple of almost every DJ set I’ve done this year.  Can’t remember where I got the MP3s, most blogs claiming to host it are suffering from dead links.  If you decide you want a hard copy, be prepared to pay upwards of $30 even for a CD copy plus shipping from whatever Asian country it’s currently living in.  This record goes from skittering jazzy post punk (played by a tropical fusion group) to teched out video game boss prog (played by a tropical fusion group) to slithering quiet storm verses which build into epic slamming Donna Summer choruses (as played by a tropical fusion group).  Potentially number one record of all time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tino’s Tacos

Living in Chicago, I was spoiled by my neighborhood taco options.  Born and raised in L.A., around the corner from places like Tacos La Flama and La Playita, I moved to midwest with high standards for what a taco should be and I was not disappointed.  In fact, I should specify that I was born and raised on the west side of L.A. and that my ideas about tacos were mostly oriented towards fresh seafood and the availability of a good coctel de pulpo.  In a Pilsen forever imbued with the spirits of Chicago’s meat-rich heritage, I was walking distance from a veritable panoply of birrierias, the giant suadero tacos, rich posole, free guacamole and exceptional salsas of Taco Bueno, and my favorite, as documented in Eric’s recent best 2012 food post, the ladies who cooked outdoors, under a tarp, even all winter, at the corner of 21st Pl. and Leavitt.  I still haven’t found a place in L.A. that serves cachete (pig cheek).  And if I may, buddy, I believe ’twas I who brought you your first taste of that succulent jowl when you had E-Dogz parked behind Lando’s place for a Halloween party or something.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  There are a LOT of great taco options in Highland Park, I currently live around the corner from a Yucatecan dream temple that serves the tenderest juiciest cochinita pibil I’ve ever had outside of intangible vision quests.  None of them compare, however, to Tino’s.

Tino’s Tacos is a bootleg operation with a vinyl banner for a menu that opens up in the parking lot of a used tire shop when the sun goes down.  They’re there every night until they run out of food.  There are two salsas: chunky green, creamy red.  There are white plastic buckets filled with guacamole, radishes, a mix of cilantro and onions, limes, and pico de gallo.  I usually get 3 tacos: tripe, cabeza, and al pastor, served up by a technician who effortlessly and usually without looking slices a long, narrow sliver from the pineapple perched on top of the juicing meat tornado, only to have it fall, often behind his back, into a waiting taco.  Each taco is a dollar.  For eight dollars, you can get an alambre, a giant griddled blend of al pastor, carne asada, melted cheese, peppers, and bacon with twelve tortillas to put it in.

I don’t know what I can say to really tell you just how good Tino’s is.  But, if you’re ever at the corner of Monte Vista and Avenue 50 after the sun goes down, don’t miss it.

 

 

 

 

C O I N 

COIN is a new nom d’musique of my dear friend Mike Vallera of Cleared and brilliant solo musickings.  This album has been on repeat for me since he uploaded it to Soundcloud.  Dark sparse thoughtful music from one of the deepest heads I know.  Essential.

 

Talking Funny

I hate Ricky Gervais when he’s not performing.  I know it sounds harsh and I’m sorry.  I can’t stand him.  Love all of his shows, hate when he’s being himself.  He did, however, assemble this casual panel of comedy’s upper echelon to sit around and talk shop about their craft.  For a glorious hour, Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K. talk about set times, swearing, touring, and various comedic minutiae, occasionally interrupted by Gervais’s spasmodic ego-puke…if you’ve got HBO Go, check it out there, or watch the whole thing for free on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yung Ho

Writing about my special (read: secret) food spots brings up a lot of conflicting emotions.  On one hand, I want to share the glory of the snacks I find, but I also don’t ever want to run into you there, sorry.  Nowhere is this conflict more present than in my telling you about Yung Ho.

My friend Sarah has been going to Yung Ho with her Taiwanese parents since she was a child and it was she who initially took me there.  Internet reviews never attest to Yung Ho being the best, or the cleanest, but you see a lot of stories of legacy eating like Sarah’s.

Yung Ho closes at 3:30 so I usually go for breakfast.  Taiwanese breakfast usually involves hot salted soy milk with lots of leeks and long golden crullers.  They’ve got great pan fried pork/seafood dumplings that remind me a little of the dumplings at Ed’s Potstickers but with the ends open and much much oilier.  The cold tofu is covered in cilantro, earthy funky dark vinegar, and pork floss, which was new to me, and kind of like the pork equivalent of bonito flakes if I had to name an analog.  The cold pig ears are great, the cookies are great, the tea is great, the waitresses are sultry and I have NEVER spent more than twenty dollars, even on a feast for four.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bernard Herman @ Pehrspace

So I went to go see Fielded play at a local weirdo-music haunt and was caught totally off guard by this brilliant human.  Barkev Gulesserian writes terrifying Residents/Renaldo & The Loaf tinged new-wave/new-age/furious minimal Peter Gabriel music.  A costume change for every song and this song about being a corrupt small town mayor with lyrics about hiding shirtless in your shed, shitting on the street, creeping through your windows, creeping around the basement of your condo, etc., all without any reprimand from the police because, duh, he’s the mayor.  A favorite of mine is “I won’t shake your hand or kiss your kid, but if you have a dog, I might fuck with it.  You voted for me in your sleep, I’m on the job every night of the week.” (Also for you Deleuzians out there, “Identity” is a great meditation on being lost at the center of intersecting lines of flight. )  Listen!

 

 

 

 

 

Famous Clam Pizza In New Haven, CT

On the recommendation of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, when I was in New Haven a few months ago I stopped in at the famous Frank Pepe’s pizzeria, expecting to be underwhelmed by the overhyped.  They don’t do slices.  Fine, I ordered a whole small pie.  The famous one with the clams.  I hoped they would hurry it up, I didn’t want to miss my train back to New York.

After the incredibly friendly old guy who took my order chatted me up about my Bulls hat, I was brought my pizza.  One bite in and anyone watching would have thought I had never eaten let alone seen a pizza before in my life.  I savored every bite, I held each slice up to the light to examine its intricate charring, and all my plans to save a few slices for the ride back fell through.  I ate the whole thing.

I know this place and that pie are old news for a lot of folks.  When I lived in Western MA, I would hear about it all the time.  But dang, seriously.

 

 

 

Fielded

Fieldedis Lindsay Powell, a friend of mine from my earliest days in Chicago and one who moved out to L.A. around the same time I did.  She makes bizarre brilliant pop music drenched in some kind of bizarre futurist de ja vu where the sounds of Steely Dan and Bonnie Raitt get blended up on a sad Blade Runner/William Gibson dancefloor with gurgling synthesizers and machinic bleeps and crunchings.  I had the incredible honor of playing guitar on her new record (she plays most of the other instruments herself) and to travel with her to Austin to play a South By Southwest showcase as part of her band.  Her record, 903030, which will come out this year on Chicago’s own Captcha is a landmark achievement in songwriting, grooving, emotion, and sonic texture.  I’m obsessed and have been obsessed since I got the MP3s a few months ago.  Lately, Lindsay and I have been writing songs together and it’s been one of most pleasurable experiences of my diverse music making journey.  Thanks for the record, thanks for being my friend, thanks for being born, etc.  I’m going to miss you when you move to New York!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kin Dza Dza

For a number of Thursdays now, my friend Alex Nicolau has organized what he’s dubbed “Stoney Sci Fi” night at his apartment in Hollywood.  We go, eat snacks, get loose, etc. and settle in to watch what are always incredibly rare feats of science-fictive cinema which Alex in his infinite filmic wisdom has procured for us.  My favorite so far has been Kin Dza Dza, an absurdist Russian flick from 1987 concerning two hapless comrades who end up on a perpetually shitty desert planet filled with moronic starving artists.  Laughed out loud from start finish.  Little bit of a Terry Gilliam vibe but with way more Eastern European, ahem, patheticism.  Watch the whole thing in two parts on YouTube with a sub-par subtitling.  The version I watched was painstakingly subtitled by Alex himself for maximum impact!  Holy smokes!

 

 

 

 

 

Summer Forum

For those unaware, Summer Forum is a week long residency spearheaded by Sara Knox-Hunter.  I was intrigued from the get go, as the full name is the Summer Forum For Inquiry & Exchange, and hey, there’s nothing this guy loves more than inquiry and exchange.  Anyway, I applied and was accepted and went and I’m not really sure what I should say next as the experience was, well, and experience, and a very personal one at that.  I can tell you I read somewhere around 1,000 pages of mostly social-theory in preparation for a week where every day, all day, I sat and talked about it with some of the smartest and most thoughtful humans I’ll probably ever encounter, cementing relationships with folks I already knew and being stunned by the concentrated shot of brilliance and love I received via some of the folks I hand’t had the pleasure to know previously.  There were artists, farmers, writers, curators, thinkers, teachers, golf carts, hedge mazes, the food was incredible, the setting (New Harmony, IN) was idyllic, and, to paraphrase The Troggs “love [was] all around.”  I am a smarter, better human for having attended.  Keep an eye on these folks if you know what’s good for you and keep an eye out for the publication coming out of this summer’s activities, Dilettante.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Tunes

Great Tunes is a Facebook group that I’m part of.  A sloppy message board started by folks I initially didn’t know.  I was invited in by my friend Joel under the auspices of bringing something other than contemporary minimal house to the table.  Sometimes I feel like electronic music is the one glaring area of my music geekery that’s especially lacking and so I was pretty nervous to join.  I’ve had humiliating experiences on music message boards before and wasn’t looking for another.

This, however, has been a beautiful experience.  Given that Megaupload is gone, Mediafire is on its way out, and most record stores won’t usually let you listen to records before you buy them anymore (shout out to the ones that do, thank you), Great Tunes has revitalized my music life.  I feel music-young again.  Constantly turned onto new stuff from all over, electronic, punk and hardcore, boogie, drone, you name it!  We also make bad jokes and Photoshop art for each other.  These are true music lovers and they love to share, WE love to share.  Great Tunes has totally energized my listening and music consuming practices this year, I don’t know where I’d be without it.  Love you Tuners!!!

 

 

 

Miguel, Jeremih, Frank Ocean

Finally!  Smart motherfuckers making smooth jams are selling records.  Gives me hope.

 

 

 

 

What a world, eh, folks?? See you next time!