Archives For Thomas

The man’s not been on a stage in 12 years… You would be hard pressed to find any musician of note who does not think he is the greatest soul singer and player alive today.  The master is back and in Philly with QuestLove July 3rd at TLA…. It’s gonna be amazing..

Update: If you told me D’Angelo on the keyboards with only Questlove on the drums was going to work I would of thought no way …Turns out D’Angelo really is a master keyboardist as well, playing a mean roving, funky baseline while singing and playing songs all night. There might be one or two other guys who can write amazing soul songs and play like this.. That would be Stevie Wonder or Prince…

Billboard Review

Dan DeLuca Review

Here is a taste of what a two master musicians  can do alone – from the concert in Philly.

 

(How good is D’Angelo? He played all the instruments on this album and that is him playing everything in this video…)

 

 

Music Break: D Angelo Questlove in Philadelphia

This should be a very good survey of Bartlett’s long and great career as one of our most intellectual and best living painters.

Interview with her by the painter Elizabeth Murry on Bomb here:

PAFA is pleased to present Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe —Works 1970-2011 organized by the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.  Jennifer Bartlett emerged in the 1970s as one of the leading American artists of her time and one of the first female painters of her generation to be both commercially successful and critically acclaimed. When her monumental painting Rhapsody was first shown in 1976, it was regarded as a tour­de­force postmodern pastiche of the history of modern art. In Rhapsody, Bartlett illustrated with unprecedented intellectual and visual acuity her groundbreaking vision, in which all painting styles and forms are equally valid and available for artistic appropriation. Often such early initial success will inevitably overshadow an artist’s subsequent development. In Bartlett’s case, however, Rhapsody became merely a point of departure for an exceptionally prolific and inventive career.

from the museum web site.

 

Kurt Schwitters called his collages Merzbilder and they are some of the best ever made….

Source: Oxford University Press

German painter, sculptor, designer and writer. He studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (1909–14) and served as a clerical officer and mechanical draughtsman during World War I. At first his painting was naturalistic and then Impressionistic, until he came into contact with Expressionist art, particularly the art associated with Der Sturm, in 1918. He painted mystical and apocalyptic landscapes, such as Mountain Graveyard (1912; New York, Guggenheim), and also wrote Expressionist poetry for Der Sturm magazine. He became associated with the Dada movement in Berlin after meeting Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Richard Huelsenbeck, and he began to make collages that he called Merzbilder. These were made from waste materials picked up in the streets and parks of Hannover, and in them he saw the creation of a fragile new beauty out of the ruins of German culture. Similarly he began to compose his poetry from snatches of overheard conversations and randomly derived phrases from newspapers and magazines.

via MOMA

 

Merz 50 Composition, 1922
Genre: Collage
Period/Style: Dada
Location: Museum of Fine Arts Budapest

Excellent overview at Spread Effect on Matt Cutts talk. If you have a web site and don’t know who Matt Cutts is, or what the heck SEO, or Link Building is, you better pay attention as when he speaks from his office at Google the entire web stops, looks and listens.

Michelle Frankfurter series Destino was a winner of the Arron Siskind Grant  and portrays the “perilous journey of undocumented Central American migrants along the network of freight trains lurching inexorably across Mexico, towards the hope of finding work in the United States.”

From the artists web site