Posts tagged as performance
Failures
Last night Philip Glass told this story about how John Cage once emptied the house during a performance. Cage had gotten it into his head to do a spoken performance where he made a cut-up poem out of syllables or something? Man, it sounds like the worst thing ever, just being trapped in a room with John Cage endlessly making vowel noises at you, and so he achieved a 100% audience walkout. Glass' point was that there has to be a place to try and make things and achieve failure along the way (typical Buddhist!) and he was telling this story because this was at the 40th anniversary dinner for The Kitchen, which to its great credit still provides a space for young creative people in New York City to experience flop sweats. Then Sina Najafi, the editor of Cabinet magazine, told me a related story about Mierle Ukeles, which is at this point, with me telling you, really is something of a game of telephone and may range in accuracy anywhere from "apocryphal" to "entirely accurate," the failures being mine. READ MORE
Kanye Rocks Facebook HQ A Capella
Wow! Interesting things are happening at Facebook. First, the trailer for The Social Network, the movie about how Mark Zuckerberg started the website as a student at Harvard looks way, way more compelling than something with that title and subject matter seems like it would. (It stars Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake and was directed by David Fincher, who is most famous for making movies about serial killers, so, that's really funny!) Now, or yesterday actually, Kanye West comes to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, stands up in front of group of employees and gives what is probably the greatest rap performance ever staged in a corporate conference room. With a nice suit, too, and without any musical backdrop (and so a little too spoken-word style for my personal taste.) But it should really lay to rest any remaining doubts as to Kanye's talent with words. He is not just a good writer of rhymes. He is great one. As was indicated earlier this summer by the great single, "Power," the half a year he spent out of the public eye seems to have been a fruitful time for him, artistically. READ MORE
Beyonce Needs a Giant Sequined Cummerbund That Says "G.M.O.S."
Rap Radar points us to this youtube clip of Beyonce performing "Crazy In Love" at a recent concert in Singapore. It's amazing to watch someone so on top of her game. Her relationship with the song-which is already a generation-defining standard-and her horns, and her drums, and her guitarist, and her back-up singers and dancers, and the lighting, and the wind-machine and the audience: she has every element on lock. READ MORE
