Just read the second of a number of articles on Maria Schneider, the jazz composer, and the release of her new album. She’s up for a Grammy, which probably prompted these articles, as her lovely new CD — which isn’t actually a CD — is only available as a download through ArtistShare, her current “record label”. The album, Sky Blue, is a suite composed for a seventeen-piece jazz orchestra, so it must have cost something to record and mix.
ArtistShare offers yet another alternative to the traditional record label deal — another possibility to add to the ever-growing list of other possibilities. Again, it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but it certainly seems to be working for her. ArtistShare asks the fans of an artist to contribute to the making of a future record. (Obviously, this means the artist must have some fans to begin with, so emerging artists might give this one a pass.) A donation of $9.99 gets you a download of the album when it’s done, along with some texts, notes and images and a few other extras.
But then the deal ramps up in steps. A deeper investment gets you concert tickets and other perks and the highest you can go is 18k, which wouldn’t fund a mega pop record or a project in the cash only business of hip hop, but in this case it gets you a credit as a producer. You can attend the recording sessions, obtain tickets to live shows, and can even attend the Grammy’s with Maria and her producer or label guy.
I imagine that in Maria’s case, she spends a lot of time composing (with either a computer or with pencil and paper). And then the actual recording process might be fairly straightforward — some band rehearsals in any large room before renting a large studio to record the stuff more or less live over the course of a few days. Mixing and post-production could be done in a smaller, cheaper studio. So, though I doubt that 18k for example would cover it all — she works with a large ensemble — the sum would at least take a big bite out of the recording costs.
For the most part, distribution is through digital downloads, so those costs are kept under control (though I think the larger investors get signed hard copies as well as their downloads).
How did she do? Well, pretty good I’d say, though she didn’t win a Grammy this time (she got one in 2004). She got 200k from fan/participants for her record, of which 15% went to the “label”. The rest, 170k, went directly to the artist. (I suspect the recording costs come out of that as well, which must have been at least 20-30k). AND, she didn’t have to give up any of her publishing, which traditional labels often manage to get a big piece of.
Anyway, add this one to the list of possible distribution models.
(See the original article published in Wired Magazine here)
I pick up Malu, and we have breakfast at a funky, charming little place in Silverlake. As we eat, the couple next to us are chatting while busy knitting. Both of them! The coffees we have later at Intellegencia are incredible. This seems to be common knowledge — the place is filled with hipsters waiting patiently to order. The sun is shining, and the hyper-colorful exteriors of the Salvadoran markets and clubs remind me that this city has pockets where a wonderfully crazy mixture of all different kinds of people end up living in more or less in the same hood. I’m not sure the disparate layers of Angelinos actually mingle and cross paths very often — as sometimes happens in old NY neighborhoods in transition — but the visuals are great and the availability of authentic regional foods is incredible.
Afterwards, Malu and I go together to the Murakami show at the downtown Geffen Contemporary museum, notorious in some circles for having a Louis Vuitton boutique right in the middle of the museum — just for this show. Murakami designed some versions of the LV handbags a few years ago, and has also had his anime eyeball pattern printed on them alongside the LV logos. These designs are also presented on canvases, as works of art.
Other rooms display the copious amounts of merchandise that Murakami has produced — T-shirts, plastic figurines, toys, CD covers — so the mix of art and commerce is pretty fluid and seamless. To some of us, this mix is scandalous, sort of, but to M it isn’t even worth a mention. It’s a non-issue. I tell her that some people find the mix of art and luxury branding disturbing, and I get a strange look. There were lines to get into the museum and lines just as long to get into the Murakami gift shop. (NOT the LV shop, which has turned over a reported thirteen million in goods, no part of which goes to the museum. I’ll bet the curator who made that deal won’t work again in LA any time soon.)
It’s a hugely popular show, mostly filled with kids around Malu’s age and slightly older (in their twenties I’d guess) wandering around the museum-cum-recombinant psychedelic manga universe. Not everything he did is cute. As is common in the okatu and manga world, there is sometimes a pervy undercurrent of nerdy sexual obsession. Some short videos on a plasma screen show a CG character — an adolescent alien boy with no hair, a huge head, and beady eyes — obsessing over the uniformed Japanese schoolgirls in his midst. In one piece, he returns home after school and lying in bed he remembers a girl classmate and as a result his (plaid?) pants poke up. His face gets a look of confusion and horror.
Other fabricated mannequin-like sculptures show a manga boy spurting a massive steam of jism out of his hard on.
The front of a transformer girl’s body — her breasts down to her pinkish red vagina — flips forward on a hinge, and there are little dragonfly wings on her back. The rest of the stuff is pretty cute, though fragmented and freaky, as only the Japanese can do.
Some of the relentless merchandising seems out of control, like the infinite variations of the DOB character on t-shirts and everything else, its jellyfish eyes arrayed on any imaginable surface. But some of it is truly inspired — little teeny figurine versions of some characters were given away inside candy boxes sold in Japan. Like luxury arty Crackerjack prizes! And the carpet in the video screening room is a subdued pattern of flowers with his smiley faces in the middle of them.
Tonight the Grammy Awards will take place. They’re held at the Staples Center, a huge downtown sports arena, which, I am told, explains why downtown seems so lively today. The talk is all about Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse problems, and which megastars will give good moments on TV. The dire situation of the record business is never mentioned, not once.
We attend a gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a massive new wing of the County Museum here. C has many, many pieces in this new wing, so they flew her out for this. (Eli Broad has amassed more of her work than any other collector.) The County Museum is situated on a massive park site off Wilshire Blvd, which is also the location of the famous tar pits. As you approach the museum complex from the east, one of the pits is plainly visible — a small black lake can be seen just off Wilshire Blvd. A white statue of a struggling wooly mammoth sits within it. The animal is depicted lurching and crying out, so we can imagine the theoretical scenario.
When the rains fall, these bubbling ponds of tar and oil emanating from beneath the LA geology become covered in a thin layer of water. Long ago, prehistoric critters, seeing only the aqueous top layer, would wade in the pond thinking it was comprised of fresh water, inevitably becoming stuck in the black goo. Nearby, a covered pavilion houses a dig that has continued for decades, uncovering lots of bones and fragments. Somehow, the sight of giant beasts stuck in tar pits amidst the backdrop of LA’s extreme luxury and urban sprawl seems a too perfect metaphor: big lumbering creatures lured to their demise by what they think is a lovely sparkling fresh water pond…or something like that.
Outside the museum entrance, valet parking attendants await newcomers, systematically arrayed so that no one has to wait too long to be relieved of their car. We have a rented Prius, and I overhear one of the parking guys asking another if he knows how to drive it. (They don’t start like regular cars.) Guests are immediately dumped onto the red carpet and I ask C if she wants to let the photographers get some snaps or just run for it. Too late — a young woman quickly attaches herself to us and makes us stop every few yards, allowing pack after pack of photographers to get their snaps. I’m kind of game, up to a point. At each stop, I urge us on after enduring a minute of flashing bulbs. C is taken aback, blinded by the barrage of flashes, which I suspect she must have also endured at the various NY fashion shows she has attended; but this is more drawn out and structured.
The actual entrance features a collection of vintage cast-iron lampposts from LA County, painted light gray by Chris Burden. I read about these somewhere. He bought them when he heard that these and other bits of civic detritus were being sold or auctioned, and then he stored them on his Topanga Canyon property. Now he has declared them a “piece” and I assume has sold them to the museum, or to Eli Broad, the developer who funded much of this wing.
The elevation of an individual’s personal collection of curios to the status of an artwork in it’s own right seems increasingly common these days. Recently, a NY gallery featured an artist’s collection of kitsch sculptures of a monkey holding Darwin’s skull. It seemed like an eBay collection to me — charming and wacky if I saw it at someone’s house, but presented as a stand-alone artwork?
The artist Francis Alÿs did a similar thing last year at a museum in NYC, where he presented his collection of found paintings of the same Mexican Saint. Some were refined, some crude, and they filled the whole place — again, a sort of eBay collection as an integral original work. Or not. My friend Ford has some wonderfully eccentric collections: grotesque clown dolls and paintings, a whole series of bottles made to look like logs, yardsticks.
Jim Shaw, the LA artist, did something vaguely similar years ago when he presented his collection of paintings he’d picked up in thrift stores as “his” show. (This was pre-eBay.) It was great, and the book of these paintings was and still is inspiring. He picked out the weirdest and most disturbing, the creepiest and most surreal artistic attempts I’d ever seen. In a sense, the show was really about his eye and sensibility — and the objects had obviously been diligently accrued over quite a few years. Together, these paintings suggest a mass of dark, twisted creativity lurking beneath the amateur Sunday painter — a deep strangeness informing some “unprofessional” art making. The intimation is such that this unusual and powerful creativity also lurks beneath the country at large. It was a powerful show.
We wander around the throngs of black suited elderly men, and women dressed in unusual gowns. I comment that the age of the folks at this gathering made me feel young.
We aren’t yet allowed into the new museum wing — that prize would be saved for later. Instead, we are herded into a huge enclosed tent the size of the Parthenon, through a dark, covered passage, containing small, isolated pools of light.
The new wing is the pink and blue boxes seen below (shouldn’t those colors be reserved for Miami?) and the tent is the big gray thing behind them. The other wings of the museum are over to the right, and further over are the tar pits.
Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Inside the tent, huge white cubes the size of small houses hung from the ceiling, the BCAM acronym on their sides, and some abstract projections undulating on their bottom surfaces. We found our seats and were served some food as various speeches congratulate Broad, Renzo Piano (the architect of this extension), and others, one after another.
Afterwards, Lionel Richie, Nicole’s “father”, takes the stage and sings about being easy like Sunday morning. I head to the restrooms. Kind of shocking that a place purporting to support innovative and groundbreaking contemporary art plays such middle of the road music. Well, OK, if they’d asked me to perform while people finished dessert and networked, I’d have said no, so maybe it’s not that surprising. And maybe contemporary music requires an investment of time and a bit more focus and involvement — whether it’s academic, quasi-classical, post-rock or electronic — than the average work of contemporary art. So maybe that explains the disconnect as well.
Lionel and Co., leave the stage and a second smaller platform descends from the ceiling, hosting a piano player and a fiddle player — and maybe a third musician? — playing a version of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir! Duh duh duh — duh duh duh — go the grand chords, while the violin (it sounds like there is more than one) does the Indo-Arabic fills and licks that lend that classic rock tune its exotic identity. It’s a great song, but not what I expect to hear right now. And this slightly lounge version of it — though still powerful — is less than thunderous. It’s been somewhat tamed, even though it’s still a nicely weird surprise.
It’s not long before the little stage ascends once more to prepare for the coup de théâtre — the wall of the tent separating us from the new wing suddenly drops (a trick I’d seen in quite a few Kabuki shows) to reveal a walkway leading to the huge, illuminated buildings. On either side of the walkway there are some fiddlers made up like the blue man group, only these ones have bald heads painted red (to avoid copyright infringement?) They’re situated on either side of the walkway, on a lower grassy area, on a grid of little plinths, sawing away as the Zeppelin tune continues.
The museum wing is enormous. There is more space inside than in two of the major NY museums put together, or so I hear. On the outside it’s nothing spectacular — it will never be an architectural destination or a landmark like some other recent museum structures. But the building does its job. The large rooms are easy to understand and to navigate; they don’t distract or try to upstage the art, which is a relief these days. Even the stairs have been moved outside (a possibility in LA). So other than a large elevator, the whole building appears to be display space. Many artists, including C, have gigantic rooms devoted to (mostly) Broads’ collection of their work over the years. He seems to have collected some artists’ works in depth, seemingly ignoring others all together. Maybe, as is rumored, this is only a small sampling of his holdings, and this is just what he has decided to put on view here now.
In other cities, like Miami, some major collectors have built their own independent museums – separate from any city institutions — to display their private collections and curated shows of newly acquired work. They don’t have to contend with other board members or museum directors. Here at the LACMA wing, things are fuzzier — it is clearly a Broad showcase, but it’s also a county institution. Yet, the works don’t belong to the museum, they’re on loan.
The evening’s elaborate spectacle was, I suspect, the work of the folks who usually do “industrials,” its lavish fanfare the type usually reserved for trade fairs and at corporate shareholder events. I’ve always wanted to attend one of those, as they often employ the most advanced spectacle technology and money is generally no object. These things are deigned to hype the product, produce oohs and ahhs, and entertain the armies of shareholders and board members who have traveled from far and wide to attend. It’s true industrial theater: auto-ballets, smells, massive screens, sound and light are typical, so I hear. The public is never invited, but I still think maybe one day I’ll get to see one. I guess I am seeing one. (I had storyboarded my version of one for possible inclusion in my mid-80s movie True Stories, but that scene didn’t happen.)
I suspect that a spectacle on this scale can be ordered up pretty easily from one of those outfits, though I’d like to think that someday, someone might say, “Hey, why don’t we have one of the artists, or a contemporary theater director do the spectacle?” Julie Taymor is a no brainer. Or Robert Wilson (though the dinner might then go on for five hours). Or David Lynch. Or Peter Sellers or….
Same issue as with the music, I surmise. Why not make it as contemporary and groundbreaking as the art on display? Funny how things can be compartmentalized that way.
I finished (sort of) a 3.5-minute video during the tutorial. The video is comprised of shots of the weird concrete park across from the Javits Center, over which I inserted an improvised voiceover about some vague time and country where traditional religion is outlawed and human sacrifices are performed regularly in a concrete outdoor temple. I cobbled together some abstract footage I’d already had, and shot a little more during my stay, and the voiceover was an attempt to give a kind of narrative linkage. C and I read the narration and we’re seen in silhouette a couple of times. It’s crude, but it IS a little piece, so I’m pretty thrilled. On the last day I learn how to do little titles and how to output the “finished” piece. Good timing.
After four or five days of continuous snow — which kept the airport here closed — the sun comes out and we leave on time. We arrive in LA in the early afternoon and I text Malu who is anxious to meet up. She’s way downtown at her dorm, so I suggest that as our time is tight, she meet us at the hotel where I’ll order her some room service lunch, and then we can hang out.
We all head off to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and M loves the room with 3-D images of X-rayed flowers (i.e., The Floral Stereoradiographs of Albert G. Richards). Neither she nor C has ever been here before, so the mixture of the real (the stereoradiographs are comprised of a single image and don’t require the use of a special viewer) and the imaginary (dioramas and letters regarding an imaginary opera singer’s spectacular exploits, for example) is a bit of a head twister at first. “Wait, THAT is real, I’m sure, but does that mean THAT might be real too?” The answers to such questions are never given, and the succession of dark Victorian rooms with eccentric, spotlit displays creates a mood of time warp and possibility.
One room has a new exhibit of paintings of all the dogs that the Russians sent into space. Are these real? Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure if they are mid-century Russian paintings, or more recent ones. Laika is given pride of place, or course, but there are a whole slew of them, all mutts, posed for their heroic portraits. They were gathered from the streets of Moscow, we are told, and trained to wear doggie pressure suits and to withstand the G-forces during the launch. Many of them returned as well, one of whom later sired a litter of puppies. She had company on her voyage — another dog, two rats, forty mice, and some greenery.
C and I had booked a dinner at a place called the Pine Creek Cookhouse. A friend had told me it’s a thing to do here, as it’s up in the hills and can only be accessed by cross country skis or by sleigh — you drive to a certain point, after which you must switch to a more humble form of transport. It’s dark as we head up the mountain road and we notice that there aren’t many other cars headed this way. And the snow and wind starts to increase the higher we go. Hmmm.
A few miles further and the road is completely white — it twists and turns in the dark along what looks like a river created canyon on our right. The wind occasionally blows the snow from the surrounding fields and hills obscuring the road, and then we have to drive slower, as it’s hard, almost impossible, to see. After a few more miles we spot a small pickup tilted at a 45º angle into the snow bank on the ravine side of the road. A few more feet and it would have tumbled down. I stop and suggest that Cindy walk over and see if anyone is in there and if they need a ride or help. She returns trembling, and with a slight quiver in her voice says, “The truck seems empty…let’s turn around and get out of here.”
The road here is too narrow to turn around, so I continue slowly up the mountain. The blowing snow increases and we see either a couple of grey foxes or small wolves crossing in front of our headlights, but there is still no safe place to do a U-turn. By now C is really panicking, and I agree that if this weather continues, it could be really unsafe to drive back down after a meal and some wine.
Eventually I see a road branching off on the left and I use that area to turn around. We head back down and before we even reach the abandoned truck we see another vehicle — an SUV — dangling over the edge in a very similar way, it’s hazard lights flashing. I get out this time, but no one is in the car. So we drive on down.
When we reach the valley floor the clouds have lightened and the snow has stopped, but we both reason that given the weather pattern here thus far, the snow could begin to fall again in a minute — so tonight might not be the best night for cross country skiing to a fancy restaurant.
C is more of a skier than I am — I’ve only tried it twice — but this seems the ideal place for it. We decide to rent couple pairs of cross-country skies and some booties for the week. First, we attempt the trail that passes right behind our guest-house. I panic whenever we approached a descent, and I fall into the deep snow about four or five times, but we make it around the course.
Over the course of the week, we venture out on various trails about three or four more times, an hour or so at a stretch. On the very last day, during a few hours of sunshine, I begin to get the hang of it. I can glide along like I am skating or rollerblading, and it’s a nice workout and pretty exhilarating. Maybe it was the little grooves carved into these prepped trails that kept me on track, or maybe it was just my increased confidence — but at any rate, I get it, finally.
C and I are here to take a Final Cut Pro tutorial at a place called Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Years ago Mike and Doug Starn told me they took Photoshop classes up here and recommended it for intensive learning. The ranch includes ceramics studios, a large woodshop, a metalsmithing studio, darkrooms, and a full print shop that functions quasi-independently of the ranch center.
Normally, established artists come here to get help realizing a project, or to consult with the younger aspiring artists also taking the tutorials. While we didn’t have specific projects in mind, we were excited by the possibilities offered with these new affordable video and editing tools. With Final Cut one can edit professional quality, high-res video on a laptop if need be. No extra hardware, other than an external hard drive, is needed. And with the new high-definition cameras that have just come out in the last year or so, the image quality available for a relatively low cost has taken a quantum leap.
It reminds me of when Logic and other comparable softwares made audio recording, editing, and mixing available at a more reasonable cost than with Pro Tools, which required that you use their expensive hardware. Pro Tools eventually responded to the competition’s populist approach with more reasonably priced hardware setups, but the cat was out of the bag. It was possible to record audio at home, on a laptop even, at the same quality as in a professional studio.
As others have pointed out, the required gear — mics, headphones, A to D converters, amps, speakers, etc. — is far from free. And though the costs are significantly less than they once were, much of the gear still remains out of reach for many young artists. The investment need be made only once though, whereas the cost of using a professional recording studio must be shouldered every time an artist goes in. I continue to pay for a recording studio from time to time, mostly for the skills and the fresh, creative ears of the mixer, recorder or producer.
On the way to Aspen, in Newark Airport, I used the restroom, and there was a man in the neighboring toilet talking on his cell phone. Of course, everyone could hear what he was saying — not that it made much sense, as we all just heard one side.
Blocked
There’s free Wi-Fi at the Denver airport, which is a nice, sensible touch. But to my surprise, one of my habitual surfing sites has been blocked. I’m not totally shocked that alleged nudity might be blocked (if there is nudity on the Boing Boing site it’s pretty rare and likely to be arty or ironic), but I’m perplexed by the implication that all blogs and wiki sites are suspect!
Back in NYC however, Danielle explains that not all blogs and wikis are blocked, just those filtered by Secure Computing’s web censorware product called SmartFilter. According to Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin,
“[…]SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a ‘nudity’ site, which means that customers who block ‘nudity’ can't get through." (see blog post here)
Turns out, Secure Computing and other similar companies have sold their products to government-controlled monopoly Internet providers in places like Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan to name a few, effectively blocking access to filtered sites — like Boing Boing — for entire countries. Xeni wrote an op-ed in the NY Times on the issue, which you can find here.
We transfer to the small plane to Aspen. It arrives over Aspen about twenty-five minutes after takeoff, but there is low visibility, so we can’t land. The plane circles for an hour over the clouds and then we have to fly back to Denver. The airline people tell us the next available flight is twenty-four hours later, so we all scramble to look for ground transportation. A wild man with a van is outside soliciting passengers; as the busses aren’t leaving for hours, a group of us pile in and we leave as soon as the van is full.
As we ascend into the mountains the snow begins falling and the roads are increasingly covered in snow. After an hour or so it’s dark, and the road is a white path amidst a white landscape. The Vail Pass is pretty outrageous, with falling and blowing snow and pretty low visibility. Every time we hit a bump the interior light in the van blinks on and off. The kid next to me is getting restless — after about 3.5 hours, he routinely asks how much further and how much longer. It’s annoying, but he’s only articulating what the rest of us feel.
