Shooting Wide Open

Fusion: A Found Album

A couple of years ago, someone at KZSU found an album of promo and snapshots, song lists and expenses, from the ’80s, of a cover band called Fusion. I’ve finally gotten some scans up for fun. Take a look for some big hair and tight pants.

Turns out I’ll be going to China a little earlier than expected, which means, unfortunately, I’ll miss Bob Dylan in Monterey this August because travel plans changed, but in anticipation I had been reading the Essential Interviews, and came upon this, in an interview with Nora Ephron in ’65:

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

Hmmm.

When men dressed in pink and hopped like bunnies…

It’s my birthday and I’ll cry (sing) if I wanna! From the Thumbs Down webcast in ’07:

Wish I’d thought up this lo-fi video technique. Basically they’re webcams attached to bike helmets with a stick. Your head is therefore always perfectly upright in the video, while the rest of your body and the world teeters about wildly.

Someone should attach it to a dancer for maximum dizziness factor!

Marina Abramovic, Balkan Baroque still

Like the Pulse Room, Balkan Baroque has a sheer visceral simplicity that really works for me, although clearly in a very different way. Marina Abramovic, in a white dress, cleaned the meat and gristle off that huge pile of bones and placed the clean ones in a new pile. She continued for days until all the bones had been cleaned. I can’t say that I’d really buy any specific message from this piece, but I definitely get a sense of war and genocide from it that’s informed by what happened in the Balkans in the ’90s. I don’t like my art take-aways to be too clear-cut.

And then. I love music with a dose of melancholy and lyrical ambiguity. I plan to use this Liars song in my final light project because to my ears it seems so suited to the dark.

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I wonder what the Abramovic piece would feel like with this song playing in the room.

Seen in the Panorama: Joshuah Bearman’s “The Only Muscle I Can’t Control,” about the Mr. Romance bodice ripper cover competition. Check out an excerpt: “My Weekend Amongst the Fabios.”

Does this look like your misspent youth? Click if you want to read the short interview with photographer Alejandro Galiardo.

Either way, you can see actual prints of some of the photos in the photo issue of Maximum Rock & Roll at Needles and Pens, which is a little craft and zine store that has an intimate gallery corner. The issue release celebration is today from 6-9p, but you can pop in anytime over the next few weeks.