jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is currently at MOMA and P.S.1. More Art with Strangers.

In no particular order: the guys from Babel, David Hudson of GreenCine Daily, Mama und Papa, the friendly proprietor of Absinthe Depot, Andew “Filmbrain” Grant, Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, Danny Kasman, Martin Scorsese, Charlie Watts, and a selection of medival statues from the Bode Museum, which you can also find in a flickr set that prompted my favorite flickr mail ever:

:: hi

I add you ass contact because I’m interessting about a trip
in germany and by your photo you make my day …….Ich bein
er berliner the Holy Germanic Empire’s rising again by your
art

Well then. From last year’s visit, more photos from the Bode and other Berlin museums.

Ecstatic worshipers in store-front churches, steel workers in their homes, the down-and-out inhabitants of Buffalo’s skid row: social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin was never interested in the well-to-do. Thus, the quote that serves as the title of Ezra Bookstein’s sharp and fully realized portrait of Rogovin, now 98 years old.

In the fifties, Rogovin was working as an optometrist when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to give any answers and was promptly named “the top red in Buffalo.” Silenced in the political arena, Rogovin turned to photography as an expressive outlet. His photos of poor Black church services were published in Aperture Magazine with an introduction by W.E.B. DuBois. For the next nine years, Rogovin and his wife Anne spent their summers in Appalachia to take portraits of miners. He went on to collaborate with Pablo Neruda on a book of photos from Chile and produce an ongoing series of portraits from Buffalo’s Lower West Side at ten-year-intervals.

Rogovin’s photos are a revelation: startlingly honest, they are as beautiful as they are unnerving. The unglamorous subjects are not usually the center of our attention, yet we can somehow see their personality before we see their dire surroundings. These are pictures that spark talk of inequality and human dignity. As James Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago explains in the film, the photos’ undeniable artistic accomplishment is a way of making a more effective case: the beauty comes bearing a message, and for Rogovin, art is only ever a means to an end.

• Official Site of the Film
• The Trailer
• Milton Rogovin’s Web Site
• Milton Rogovin at Wikipedia

The Rich Have Their Own Photographers. Ezra Bookstein, 2007. ****

Flickr Set - Slideshow

The first three installments of Major Cyrillus Mystical Trip to Mars are online at Es ist Mitternacht John, the blog of Commander Koenig a.k.a. my good friend Jochen Carbuhn. By way of introduction, here is his greeting:

Ich bin höchst erfreut Ihnen die Wiedereröffnung des Mad Scientist Memorial Theaters verkünden zu dürfen, die Bühne des gescheiterten Experiments, welche sich ausschließlich populärmetaphysischen Themen widmet, wie zum Beispiel: “Wer war nochmal der fünfte Reiter der Apokalypse?” Unter dem Motto “Schwarze Milch - aber sauer, bitte” versammeln sich Künstler, Autoren und Kiezgrößen, die unter Zwangsneurosen, Existenzangst und Schlaflosigkeit leiden, um Ihnen den “final Nightcap” zu verpassen: Es ist Mitternacht, James. Vorhang auf!

I use contemporary art like a day spa. In case I’m feeling out of sorts, a visit to Long Island City’s own art haven P.S.1 never fails to rejuvenate — it’s just slightly stranger than you expect, and I always leave in high spirits. This time around, there were endless video loops of cats tearing into rat carcasses, Liz Taylor, Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz story boards, a magical room without a roof we had never noticed before, and a polar bear made of feathers. A few more photos - and podcasts!

At muckworld, we’re so bleeding edge that some of what we do goes straight from experimental to museum piece, without ever hitting that crucial middle phase of widespread success. Der Brennende Busch, an German-language online lit mag I founded and edited sometime in the last century, has been archived at Deutsches Literatur Archiv Marbach — you can now search for and dig through the proto-blog design, artwork by Dusty Domino, and a collection of stories, essays, poems, and multimedia pieces I’m still proud of.

Speaking of art work: my uncle-in-law Frank Ettenberg, an artist living and working in Vienna, sent along this painting, which I liked quite a bit. It’s called ‘Sea Swoosh’, approx 8 x 10″, acrylic on enameled composition board, and you can click it to enlarge. Frank’s portfolio.

Finally, news from everybody’s favorite red-headed guitar hero, Trey Anastasio. After his recent run-in with the law, Trey’s been holed up at an upstate rehab facility, but he just came out of hiding last Saturday to play a show with the latest incarnation of Phil and Friends. Every song on the setlist somehow referred to his troubles, but the extended arrest joke suddenly gave way to naked sentiment with the second-set appearance of the heavyweight Garcia ballad “Wharf Rat.”

You can download the whole show via bittorrent or watch some shaky videos. Let’s hope Trey gets to go on another furlough when Phil comes to the City next week for an 11-night-run at the Nokia, starting on Halloween. Here’s “Friend of the Devil” from Glens Falls:

(photo: soupflowers)

It’s no secret that Marcy is a great connoisseuse of pools the world over — from the gigantic Moses-built Astoria public pool to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme, the Nerobergbad, and Stadtbad Mitte, this summer we dunked our tails in chlorinated waters from the Hell’s Gate to the Spree. So when we stumbled past this ancient-looking city pool all lit up event-like the other night, we just had to just stick our heads in.

Lo and behold, the pool wasn’t filled, wasn’t even operable, but on two balconies, an orchestra was performing works by John Cage (”Atlas Eclipticalis,” “Songbooks”) and Bernd Thewes (”Seufzer-Halde”), with a guy down in the pit doing choreographed movements along to the music. If you had to come up with a parody of a Prenzlauer Berg art happening, this would do — but the sounds, light, and motion did transform the dilapidated building into an eerie, subterranean dreamscape, a pagan temple perhaps, devoted to the Gods of Chlorine.

The Stadtbad Oderberger Strasse has had a bumpy history; the Trockenschwimmer Festival went on for the rest of the weekend with performance art, readings, and more music.

Here are a few minutes of footage from the event: