be there

Two opportunities to see my nearest and dearest perform: Tonight at the Million Poems Show season-finale, with Chris Toll, Sina Queyras, and the usual suspects; and tomorrow at Don't Tell Mama, per below. Please click to enlarge if you're interested in attending (full info is on the "card."), or just to get the impact of the picture. Don't know what to tell you about the extended haitus here, other than that I seem to be in good company.

Jeff Wall show, MoMa: Dude loves a diagonal. Disappointed that the selection doesn't include some of the irreal stuff (The Vampire's Picnic, The Giant), or the Odradek photo. Obvious but not-much-remarked feature of his turn from big-C conceptualism: very little written language in his pics. "PIZZA SLICE 93c" in the recent nightclub-scene is one of the few legible instances. (Though there is that early diptych Stereo, also not shown here -- fairly evident how different that piece is from just about everything else.) Interesting, the devices that he uses exactly once: the inset of a "detail" from a few minutes later in the b&w scene of a drug deal in progress; the date on the framing lightbox in the '40s children's party reconstruction (not shown as part of the work in reproduction). Also "glaringly" obvious, though I hadn't made the connection until skimming Galassi's catalog essay -- the "invisible" reference to Flavin in the flourescent tubes behind the transparency, forming part of the work's support (in what I think is a fairly technically precise sense). Again, this element of the work isn't really relevant when the pieces are reproduced as photographs. Galassi doesn't say so (though I'm sure someone has), but the bulbs in the Invisible Man "illustration" relate directly to this. [Meanwhile, Wall's one-time bandmate (see above) Rodney Graham has released a songbook.] *** Amused to learn (NYT, Sat.) that Stargate's managers are two black Britons who are often initially taken for the producers by clients and execs at meetings. Most accurate name for a peepshow/video store: Mixed Emotions, near B'way at 51st. Best trickle-down hype: the sax-busker who's always near Colony Records playing the "Spider-Man" theme. Best name for an open wireless network: my roommate sleeps around.