a refreshing look at South Florida arts and culture
I’ve been thinking about formality. For just a minute, not long at all. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the effect of ‘Gonzo Journalism’ on non-fiction writing and also as a symptom of lost formality in general. Formality. Like ‘going out’ clothes:
Gordon Parks, At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. © The Gordon Parks Foundation
I saw it as soon as it opened in South Florida.
You don’t understand.
When I was in high school, Boca Raton got independent films – only at Shadowood – well after they’d been released in Los Angeles, New York, and other ‘major’ cities. Although every once in a while Miami was on the ‘major’ cities list, back then, for me to go to there to see indie movies was a logistical impossibility. So, I would read about a movie in Harper’s Bazaar or Spin and then I’d obsessively check for its openings and showtimes in XS, South Florida’s alternative weekly magazine.1 That’s how I found and saw My Own Private Idaho.
PJ Harvey performing England Live at The Troxy, London UK on February 28, 2011
PJ Harvey is, to me, the Platonic Artist. There’s a discipline to her work that I respect; experimental and rigorous and meaningful, no two albums are alike, yet I hear her fascinations and compulsions spiral out over years and songs. While my favorite album of hers is White Chalk, her magnum opus (to date) is Let England Shake.1 In it, she’s perfected an earnest voice and a sound that echoes the past even as it is raw and unvarnished in the way that’s expected of a certain type of contemporary music. Listening to the song England in the car today unlocked for me Polly Jean’s gift for songwriting.
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I’ve became obsessed with two music videos. Neither is particularly new; albums with both songs were released in 2014 and 2015 respectively. And, although I came across them this past summer, sometimes it takes a while for things to take root. So, it wasn’t until the fall, when culture revives, that these songs became my referents. Fall in South Florida is verdant, bright, humid.1 These songs are stark. Both videos deal with space, technology, and feature blank whiteness and voids of black. Both videos have a solitary man as protagonist. It was a strange fall, to say the least. It haunts me. Sometime around the autumnal equinox, something slipped/tripped/stumbled, changed course.
That’s why, I think, I gravitated toward Alabama Shakes’ song Sound & Color and its corresponding video:
Episode Three of Profiles finds two longtime friends in conversation about politics, what it takes to make art, and the power of… knitting circles?
Autumn at the Pérez Art Museum Miami for Now Be Here #3, Image: Autumn Kioti
I’ve known multi-disciplinary artist Autumn Kioti for the better part of my life which is, frankly, mind-blowing. We unexpectedly ran into each other on Saturday, December 10, 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; we were both there for Now Be Here #3, the South Florida edition of Los Angeles-based artist Kim Schoenstadt‘s “gathering and photograph of female and female identifying contemporary artists”. Continue Reading …