February 5, 1989. Beijing. The National Art Gallery opens China/Avant-Garde, the summing-up, the big one, a decade of work by artists who spent that decade being told there was no decade. Somebody hangs a no-U-turn sign on the banner outside. At about 11:10 in the morning a woman walks up to her own installation and […]
Continue Reading →December 30, 1994. Madison Square Garden. Phish, “Wilson.” The king was fake. The devotion wasn’t. I was there. I want that on the record before anything else, because what follows is going to be cruel, and cruelty from a distance is cheap and shitty. I was in the Garden that night with a friend. He […]
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Look at them. Four guys in suits that probably cost less than your cell phone bill, standing under studio lights in grainy black and white… they look like insurance adjusters. Like men who file their taxes early. Joe Morello starts that shuffle on the cymbal, Brubeck drops that chord on the piano and something cracks… […]
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Somewhere along the line, and I mean way back, before anybody thought to write it down, some guy got nervous and stuck a post in the ground. And then another one. And people looked at that and thought: now there’s an idea. We’ve been doing it ever since. Lines around countries. Lines around backyards. Little […]
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Kyoto, July 20, 1964. Yamaichi Concert Hall, on a program billed as Insound and Instructure, which tells you everything about the room’s appetite for a good time. A woman kneels on the floor in her best clothes. Her best, on purpose, because she wanted the cloth to be part of the offering. She sets a […]
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The sky looks like it’s thinking about violence. Not cinematic violence. Not the slow motion hero shot nonsense. The real kind. The kind that does not care if you are ready, if your leash is waxed, if your head is right. The kind that has been doing this since before our species figured out how […]
Continue Reading →There’s a moment when the body stops lying to you and starts telling the truth so hard it breaks something open. This is that moment. Yujin, caught in the gnarled throat of Golden Gate Park’s oldest arguments, those trees that have been twisting toward and away from each other for longer than any of us […]
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