The performance by Lichens, one of the artists playing before Pit er Pat on Friday night, altogether rejected my expectations for a Market Hotel show. In fact, I felt like the scene was part of a thoroughly different narrative.
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Brooklyn singer-songwriter Dave Deporis organized tonight's musical lineup at Glasslands Gallery, in which he plays third. Wielding a versatile voice as distinctive as Antony's or Tom Yorke's, Deporis performs with reckless intensity as he strives to bring the room to tears or epiphanies or a puzzling sense of despair, depending on the song. His tonal range runs from gritty lows to eerie highs. Though Deporis can venture into strange sonic and lyrical territory, he never retreats into irony. Avert your ears if artistic nudity makes you uncomfortable.
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I had a fantastic time at Paper's show at Cake Shop, but the friend I came with retreated upstairs soon after their set began. I don't think most people I know would like this music. Your body has to hum at a certain frequency. Those of us who were digging it still had a hard time achieving the proper speed at which to dance. We'd have just vibrated if we could. I saw one woman give it a go up by the stage. Her movements were sort of tribal, with sudden lurches and lunges.
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Ah, the school protest. It begins with a few extremely earnest and hard-nosed idealists with some usually noble demands. Then emerge the hippies, who hibernate all year in preparation for moments like these. They remove their shoes and shirts and boogie down while someone plays the djembe. Then there's the guy who was just on his way to class and thought better of it when he saw that achingly hot girl from Brittany Hall holding a cardboard sign by the front of the building. Eventually it blossoms into something like Take Back NYU!'s occupation of Kimmel dining hall, which went on for more than 40 hours. Power was recently cut off to the wall outlets, depriving the students of vital iPod and cell phone rejuvenation. According to Take Back NYU!'s blog, is that university administers offered negotiation meetings with five of the protesters, only to serve them expulsion papers as soon as they stepped out of the fray. Just a few minutes ago, the group declared the occupation finished.
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Yoko Ono's art has always been propagandist. Take songs like "Give Peace a Chance," or performance pieces like the reassemblage of shattered ceramics, or the Imagine Peace Tower near Reykjavik, Iceland. Her clear and simple messages haven't changed much since the 1960s.
Ono's continued calls for peace and unity are of a kind of one-note optimism, uncluttered, insistent. I want cake. But there's no flour. I want cake. We have no sugar. I want cake. If you're famous enough, someone will eventually provide you with cake. Yoko Ono, who since childhood has been something of an aristocrat, does not contest the simplicity of her work.
Is this a flaw? Simple messages, after all, like those of Ghandi or Jesus or whoever, are the way to inspire masses of people, and that has always been Ono's goal. Her recent call for remixes of "Give Peace a Chance" yielded dance tracks from DJs all over the world, including India's Karsh Kale, Russia's Kimbar and Greece's Alex Santer. The album becomes available, digital-only, on Feb. 18. This comes on the heels of her success in 2008, when the Billboard year-end chart listed her as the number four “hot dance club play artist.” I got Ono on the phone yesterday to talk about the remixes, dance music and the unfortunate state of our world.
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According to his artist's statement, David Foote wants to deepen the relationship between art and viewer "beyond the realm of an affair." Essentially, he's saying, you've come to see his eerie, stark, goth-chic "New Girls" paintings in the gallery for long enough—they want to move in with you.
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