dayvan cowboy

Musings on music, art, and culture from Los Angeles and beyond

[jermcohen-deactivated20191106]

Pokemon Go X NYFWM (part 2)

PhotogrÃphy by JERM COHEN

instogräm // tweeter // bookface

[dayvancowboy]

'I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper. I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,' and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. It was a disagreeable process, and a troublesome. But it was interesting, amazingly, she thought, stretching her legs out to her log fire (for no sailor was present), and she reviewed, as if it were an avenue of great edifices, the progress of her own self along her own past.

from Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

[dayvancowboy]

For years--just in terms of my pursuit of film, and trying to crystallize or articulate what kinds of ambitions and objectives might be worth pursuing--I had this thing I used to say: people think radical representation in terms of black people was gonna be like, black astronauts, or black doctors or something like that, but I had started making a list of words that you’d never heard black people say in a movie before, and the first one was always ‘sorbet

Arthur Jafa on black representation, the representation of blackness, and the performance of blackness, in conversation with Greg Tate at the Hammer Museum. Full convo here: http://livestream.com/accounts/5045103/events/5227875

[dayvancowboy]

From Aria Dean’s “Closing the Loop” in The New Inquiry: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/closing-the-loop/

[dayvancowboy]

1. Poster for Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Lobster,” designed by Vasilis Marmatakis

2. “Green Kiss/Red Embrace (Disjunctive)” by John Baldessari, 1988, four black and white photographs with oil tint; in the collection of The Broad

[dayvancowboy]

Last spring, the Walker Art Center hosted a conference called Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, which I enthusiastically livestreamed and followed along on Twitter. This talk by Claudia La Rocco was a highlight, and I find myself thinking about this quote pretty often:   “Is there a way to say that the island of misfit toys suits you more than the mirage of inclusivity? That you’re worn out by the evangelism game artists and writers are supposed to play. I have no appetite for convincing anybody of anything; also for lasting--we don’t last, why should the things we make be any different?”

[dayvancowboy]

@empressof has that perfect mix of great songwriting set to slick bangers, and @teragramla has to be my favorite venue in Los Angeles right now. Great production, sound, and sightlines. V into it. (at The Teragram Ballroom)

[dayvancowboy]

"I forgot my personal brand" (at Los Angeles, California)

[dayvancowboy]

Just How Food-Obsessed Is the Typical Millennial? - Bon Appétit

Millennials are forking over $96 billion a year on food. Here, a less-than-scientific look at their purchases.

Supes interesting to think about the media cycle of talking about Millennials transformed from Boomer anxiety to content that’s ostensibly “about Millennials” from an anthropological/demographic standpoint yet still catering explicitly TO Millennials. Anyway, here’s a fun graphic from Bon Appetit about ~Millennials~ and ~food~. Also, their insta is pretty fire tbh: @bonappetitmag

[dayvancowboy]

Can't remember the last time a book made me laugh out loud this much, and all of the descriptions of the built environment of Los Angeles are spot on.

[dayvancowboy]

Investor donates his gravity-defying John Lautner-designed home to LACMA - http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-lacma-lautner-house-20160217-column.html

[dayvancowboy]

And we were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/11/462653510/david-bowie-on-the-ziggy-stardust-years-we-were-creating-the-21st-century-in-197

[dayvancowboy]

A List of Albums, Shows, Films, Podcasts, Etc. that Brought Me Joy in 2015

Empress of - Me

Faye Driscoll’s - Thank You For Coming: Attendance @ Danspace Project

Darkmatter @ La Mama

Kristina Wong’s Wong Street Journal @ REDCAT

Public School at the Virgil

Joanna Newsom - Divers

Stromae @ Stubb’s

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts Book Launch @ Pieter Performance Space

Rebel Without a Cause screening/Majical Cloudz set @ The Cinefamily

Gueros @ The Cinefamily 

Call Your Girlfriend podcast

Song Exploder podcast

Deerhunter - Fading Frontier

Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness

Tangerine

Transparent, Season 2

Young Jean Lee’s “Straight White Men” 

Anomalisa

Carol

Spotlight

[dayvancowboy]

This Impressive Drone Video Is A Beautiful Love Letter To Los Angeles

With all of the controversy surrounding drones lately, it's refreshing to encounter a drone video that is both thoughtfully produced and beautifully shot.

Home sweet home

[dayvancowboy]

I woke up on Monday morning to the very welcome announcement of Divers, the forthcoming Joanna Newsom album. Since then, I’ve probably listened to Sapokanikan, the first song released off of the album, at least a few dozen times. 

At just 5 minutes and 13 seconds, it’s a gorgeous meditation on the human desire to create something of lasting permanence--and the folly of such an undertaking. Sonically, it sits somewhere between Ys and Have One on Me--with the former’s perfectly placed, lush flourishes, and the latter’s penchant for jazzy inflection--though it feels completely fresh. 

There’s so much that I love about this song. The specific imagery conjured up in seemingly unrelated vignettes, the dense allusions to everything from Western canonical painting and literature to the history of Manhattan, and the way that these elements all gel and add up in the song’s climax to the grand philosophical questions posed by Newsom herself: Is ambition futile? Does any one man or woman’s attempt to stay remembered by the ages ever amount to much of anything at all? Is there any difference between the hubris of Shelley’s Ozymandias and the more humble and sweetly sung lines “Do you love me? Will you remember?” Are monuments--basically any manmade creations of art meant to commemorate--only as effective as the hand of the artist? What kind of world do we want our successors to picture when they think of us, if they think of us at all? 

Newsom offers no simple answers, and the song ends rather bleakly with the refrain, echoed from Shelley’s sonnet, of “look and despair.” If the rest of this new album is rendered as beautifully as this song, then I look forward to more waxing poetic from Newsom. October 23rd can’t come soon enough. 

[dayvancowboy]

Hurray for the Riff Raff Brings Folk Into the Twenty-First Century

Wrote a piece about folk band Hurray for the Riff Raff, who perform this Thursday at the Skirball Cultural Center in LA. 

[dayvancowboy]

http://www.lamag.com/laculture/culturefilesblog/2013/05/23/singing-songs-in-the-key-of-la