I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: CHEYENNE MIZE-Tiny Desk Concert #289 (July 20, 2013).

Cheyenne Mize is yet another musician I’d never heard of performing behind the Tiny Desk.  The blurb tells us:

Behind Bob Boilen’s desk at the NPR Music offices, Mize — a multi-talented singer, instrumentalist and music therapist — reduces her band to a duo for three songs from Among the Grey. Naturally, this entailed showcasing some of the album’s quieter, moodier moments (the slinky “Raymaker,” the dreamy “Whole Heart”) before closing with the more forceful “Wait for It.” But along the way, Mize’s voice rings out assertively in every style and setting.

As it turns out, her voice was the problem for me and I can’t really place why.  I like her voice and I like her music I just feel like they don’t go together somehow.

For “Raymaker,” it’s just her on a 4 string guitar and her partner on a box drum.  I really love the sound she gets out of that little four string guitar and he gets some great sounds out of the box drum.  I can’t decide if maybe with a fuller musical sound I’d like her singing more.

For “Whole Heart” she plays a hollow-bodied electric guitar and the drummer plays an electric guitar.  The song is quieter (presumably because of no drums).  I like this song a bit more–the chorus is especially nice–and I feel like her voice works a bit better here.  The guitar interplay in the middle is really delightful as well.

For the final song, “Wait for It,” she switches to violin.  She says it’s both a blessing and a curse I’ve never been able to decide which instrument to play.  “Sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it just means I have to carry a lot of instruments around.”   She gets a great raw scratchy sound out of the violin.   The drummer stays on the same guitar and adds little background notes.  This song has a great rocking vibe.  And again, the chorus is a neat chord change.  And yes I think her voice works good here too, so it must have been that first song.

And yet for all that I really like the sounds her instruments make more than anything else .

[READ: April 27, 2016] A True Story Based on Lies!

I was unfamiliar with the artists McDermott & McGough.  But I really liked the cover and title of this piece.  I have since learned from Wikipedia that

David McDermott and Peter McGough are best known for using alternative historical processes in their photography, particularly the 19th century techniques of cyanotype, gum bichromate, platinum and palladium. Among the subjects they approach are popular art and culture, religion, medicine, advertising, fashion and sexual behavior.

This particular collection plays around with time–they create works that seems like they are older than they actually are.  And in fact, this is something the artists did in their daily life as well:

From 1980 through 1995, McDermott & McGough dressed, lived, and worked as artists and “men about town”, circa 1900-1928: they wore top hats and detachable collars, and converted a townhouse on Avenue C in New York City’s East Village, which was lit only by candlelight, to its authentic mid-19th century ideal. “We were experimenting in time,” says McDermott, “trying to build an environment and a fantasy we could live and work in.”

This collection looks at advertising from the 1950s and updates it with contemporary additions.  I assume that they are actually painting and re-creating the earlier ads and not simply using the originals.  In their titles they indicate the date that the painting could have been created and then the date that it was created.

So, Disguised for Modern Living, 1966, 2005 looks like a modern ad for a room from 1966, but on top of the painting are text boxes with phrases like “SEE The Whipping Scene!” SEE Strip Dice Game!”

The essay by Robert Rosenblum contextualizes these paintings.  I’m disappointed that his first line references Desperate Housewives,  otherwise I like his ideas, calling them the Merchant & Ivory of painting, always ready to waft us back,….to anything from the last two centuries.  Although unlike the creators of period piece movies, Mc & Mc “excavate what Freud might have called the id of mid-century suburban America.”

He talks about most of the paintings in the catalog beginning with Schlitz beer, the most dramatic of the lot.  In a pre-fab and modern house (cartoon style) we see a pristine room, but on the bed has been inserted a photographic image of a boy with a can of beer.  He is lying with his back to us, but you can see his testicles clearly.

There are several paintings that use images from the Charles Atlas ads in the backs of comic books.   Like Chump into Champ, 1964, 2005 which includes a full comic strip.  And Don’t Be Half a Man, 1964, 2005 which also includes a comic strip and a painting of James Dean.

Rosenblum speaks to a potential look at transsexuals with the painting Now They All Know What I Am, 1965, 2005.  After reading that I can see it in the painting but without that knowledge I never would have guessed that’s the direction they were going (the painting is a multi-paneled comic strip with empty speech balloons in every panel except the one, which shows a woman saying “I’m not what you think I am.”

The rest of the paintings are take-offs on comic book covers.  Like Bedtime Stories, 1958, 2005 and Superhero Np 4, 1952, 2005 in which a man ironing his pants appears to be dreaming about various superheros.

Some of the paintings are a bit more explicitly sexual, like “The Warm Friendly Feeling Embodied in a Red-ink One,” 1964, 2005 which has five old-time basketwork players staring at a basketball and various other scenes with text boxes that say CAUGHT IN THE ACT of illicit love! and then a comic book-type drawing of “The Flame and his Sensational Assistant The Flame Boy.”

Without a lot of context, these paintings are an interesting look at juxtaposition of modern and contemporary art, which I enjoyed.  With more understanding of the artists and their ideas, these painting would probably produce much more complex reactions.

You can see some samples from the book here.