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Hang him on my wall
Today was really very nice. I spent most of it with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wind05 and his wife (who may or may not have a livejournal, but is formally cool: an architect, so someday I want to see the churches she designs) and after an unfortunate detour involving Boylston Street and an out-of-date GPS, we met up at the ICA to see the art of Shepard Fairey. It was good. I had seen everything from bumper stickers to parodies to online generators of the famous stencil-collage of Obama, but it is much more interesting in person than in reproduction, the way layers of newsprint bleed up through the lithography—a headline about bankers and Herbert Hoover is more ironically resonant than I imagine the artist even intended early in 2008—patterned throughout with little icons of Fairey's older work, stars and rosettes, Andre the Giant. There would be a snarkily high level of postmodernist discussion in the accompanying texts, except that one of the artworks is a Courier-printed poster which is full of snark and deconstruction, so maybe someone knew what they were doing. His covers for the new Penguin editions of Animal Farm and 1984 are right on the mark. Afterward, we wandered around the other installations on the fourth floor, some of which were neat, like a cement-floor shadowplay (which I'm not sure any of us realized was meant to depict the Rapture, but art is what's inside your head as well as in front of your eyes . . .) or an exploration not of the Loch Ness Monster, but of the ways in which stories are constructed around it, and others whose point went past me, like a waist-high block of compacted pins. On principle, I liked the one that included the last two lines of Yeats' "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven." When we ran out of museum, we foraged several blocks down Northern Avenue and came up with something between late lunch and early dinner at the No Name Restaurant, fish chowder and calamari and shrimp. The gulls on the pier outside were immense. Walking back to the car, I spotted a merganser in the harbor; we watched it dive with the kind of sleek rollover I associate with seals, not ducks, flurries of bubbles marking its passage through the olivine water. And they dropped me off in Harvard Square, and I came home and wrote some—researched more, because my brain lately has decided it wants a costuming and design department. Better than that it's on strike.
I am pleased to report that I quite like the Plastic People of the Universe. Night before last, I acquired Ach to státu hanobení (Oh, Dishonor to the State), a collection of live recordings from 1976—1977; a period when various pieces of the band were getting arrested for being politically subversive and freakishly weird, so I would have been disappointed if their music were not as strange as Tom Stoppard would have me believe. They're not heretics, they're pagans! Some of it is spoken-word, some of it is noise; much of it sounds improvised and I'm not sure I can distinguish between extensive jam sessions and totally making shit up. Lots of dissonance. There is of course a theremin. From the lyrics of the three songs I have crash-translated, I can see why they got shut down; politics aside, they remind me more of Pere Ubu than the Velvet Underground, and this is a good thing.
I could link these two paragraphs through the stylized portraits of punk figures we observed at the ICA, but instead I think I'll go to bed.
wind05 and his wife (who may or may not have a livejournal, but is formally cool: an architect, so someday I want to see the churches she designs) and after an unfortunate detour involving Boylston Street and an out-of-date GPS, we met up at the ICA to see the art of Shepard Fairey. It was good. I had seen everything from bumper stickers to parodies to online generators of the famous stencil-collage of Obama, but it is much more interesting in person than in reproduction, the way layers of newsprint bleed up through the lithography—a headline about bankers and Herbert Hoover is more ironically resonant than I imagine the artist even intended early in 2008—patterned throughout with little icons of Fairey's older work, stars and rosettes, Andre the Giant. There would be a snarkily high level of postmodernist discussion in the accompanying texts, except that one of the artworks is a Courier-printed poster which is full of snark and deconstruction, so maybe someone knew what they were doing. His covers for the new Penguin editions of Animal Farm and 1984 are right on the mark. Afterward, we wandered around the other installations on the fourth floor, some of which were neat, like a cement-floor shadowplay (which I'm not sure any of us realized was meant to depict the Rapture, but art is what's inside your head as well as in front of your eyes . . .) or an exploration not of the Loch Ness Monster, but of the ways in which stories are constructed around it, and others whose point went past me, like a waist-high block of compacted pins. On principle, I liked the one that included the last two lines of Yeats' "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven." When we ran out of museum, we foraged several blocks down Northern Avenue and came up with something between late lunch and early dinner at the No Name Restaurant, fish chowder and calamari and shrimp. The gulls on the pier outside were immense. Walking back to the car, I spotted a merganser in the harbor; we watched it dive with the kind of sleek rollover I associate with seals, not ducks, flurries of bubbles marking its passage through the olivine water. And they dropped me off in Harvard Square, and I came home and wrote some—researched more, because my brain lately has decided it wants a costuming and design department. Better than that it's on strike. 
I am pleased to report that I quite like the Plastic People of the Universe. Night before last, I acquired Ach to státu hanobení (Oh, Dishonor to the State), a collection of live recordings from 1976—1977; a period when various pieces of the band were getting arrested for being politically subversive and freakishly weird, so I would have been disappointed if their music were not as strange as Tom Stoppard would have me believe. They're not heretics, they're pagans! Some of it is spoken-word, some of it is noise; much of it sounds improvised and I'm not sure I can distinguish between extensive jam sessions and totally making shit up. Lots of dissonance. There is of course a theremin. From the lyrics of the three songs I have crash-translated, I can see why they got shut down; politics aside, they remind me more of Pere Ubu than the Velvet Underground, and this is a good thing.
I could link these two paragraphs through the stylized portraits of punk figures we observed at the ICA, but instead I think I'll go to bed.
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Next time I'm in a bookshop I'll try to remember to check out the new Penguin covers.
I hope you sleep (have slept, really) well tonight.
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They're the ones that look like Soviet propaganda posters. Very red.
I hope you sleep (have slept, really) well tonight.
Thanks. Some.
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Sounds appropriate. I'll have an eye out for them.
Thanks. Some.
You're welcome. And I'm glad it's at least some.
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Yes! And they're quite good.
"Ach to státu hanobení" ("Oh, Dishonor to the State")
"Píseň brance" ("Conscript's Song")
"Eliášův oheň" ("St. Elmo's Fire")
"100 bodů" ("100 Points")
The recording quality is sketchy, but given the very underground nature of their entire enterprise, I think that's understandable. I will be looking for more albums of theirs.
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I wasn't sure they were a real band! I saw Rock n'Roll in London three years ago (and saw Rufus Sewell hilariously flub his lines) and wondered. I'd like to see it again. I remember thinking it could stand to lose a third of its girth and be a tighter play as a result, but I really enjoyed it.
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I liked very much the version Eric and I saw at the Huntington, which I think may have been somewhat altered from the original script. And, yes, the Plastics are real. I'm pretty sure "Píseň brance" was one of the songs playing right before the curtain went up.
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Eric and I did the same! We saw all sorts of people we recognized, but not the two of you; probably we didn't overlap in time.
Also, we had a nutty waiter who clapped us on the back and tried to gaze soulfully into our eyes, in a manner somewhere between creepy and cartoonishly funny.
Awww, I think.
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Of course there is!
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There was a recent theremin concert in Boston and I missed it. I was sorry.
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I believe so. Yale Divinity School; he was one of my Latin students.
Anyway, I too would like to meet his wife and her churches, since that's a hobby of mine.
They are in Boston! You should come visit!