sounds like now

I’ll be doing two performances at the Metro Gallery this weekend as part of Videopolis, a totally free extracurricular activity presented in conjunction with, though not related to, the Maryland Film Festival. Stop by Friday night at 10 p.m. or Sunday afternoon beginning at 2:30 p.m. and say hello.

Yesterday I gave a recital/clinic at a high school in Burlington, VT, which meant there was no evening concert. This left me with the entire rest of the day free to go explore and acquire some new things. The first stop was a little used book store, where I found a hardcover copy of Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions. I was a bit disappointed that this was the only book I found to buy. I was hoping to make a killing. (A used book store in a college town. How could you go wrong?) There was also, however, a hardcover 1st (American) edition of London Fields, which I’ve been wanting to read for a while, but decided against picking up because it was a little too bulky for my around-the-city-reading-on-public-transportation bag, despite the price being more than right at $9.95. I was forced to satisfy my book lust at Borders, where instead of picking up the slim paperback London Fields, I opted for The Rachel Papers and 2006 Booker Award winner Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. (Sadly, they didn’t have in stock any of the three architecture books that I’ve been looking for.)

In lieu of an expensive architecture book, I bought a DVD of work by director Michel Gondry. I’d seen portions of this DVD before—Tim turned me on to it a while back. Gondry is probably best known for his work on music videos for artists like Björk, The Chemical Brothers, Kylie Minogue, and The White Stripes. And it’s not just the fact that the music is cool that makes Gondry’s videos so amazing. I’m not a huge MTV fan and don’t have cable but I’ve seen enough recent music videos to have a good sense of their look and atmosphere—crisp and clean, shiny, excess, etc. And the word I left out of the collection in the previous sentence: pretentious. Gondry is completely unpretentious. The film looks slightly aged. The synchronized dance moves are not executed with nauseating precision. People look real. It’s not trying to be bigger or more important than it is. It can be humorous and doesn’t take itself so seriously. But he is so slick. I found myself in absolute awe of Gondry throughout the entire disc. Things that in another director’s hands might seem overt Mickey Mousing, like at the “black cat” lyric in Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” become subtle magical moments within the scope of the entire work. There’s a good deal of coordination in Gondry’s videos but he does it so tastefully that it never cheapens the piece. Check out this DVD. It’s amazing.

A blast from the past. Clips from the premiere performance of Erik Spangler’s pastlife laptops and attic instruments. This was the opening piece on an integrated multimedia concert called whatWALL? (après Ken Ueno’s contribution) at the University of Michigan’s Duderstadt Center Video and Perofmance Studio on October 20, 2004. Johnny Dekam designed the stage set and provided the amazing multi-layered video projections; Dubble8 on turntables.