Speed of Life

Woke up this morning to a haunting image of Mamadou Diallo and his young son walking by a mural of his deceased cousin Amadou Diallo. Amadou Diallo was mercilessly shot by the NYPD as he reached for his wallet in an attempt to placate the undercover cop's demands. More than once, because of this event, I have told my son, "If an officer stops you - Promise me, you always be polite. And that you'll never. never run away. Promise that you'll always keep your hands in sight." I stood up against the stage as Springsteen and the E-Street band sang these words in Bruce's homage to Diallo - "American Skin" - during the "Rising" tour. Clarence Clemons' face was streaked with tears as he intoned the refrain "41 shots". Enricsalas' YouTube video is a poignant mash-up of Springsteen and the E-Street Band's brave rendition from a series of concerts in Madison Square Garden, that some members of the NYPD naively picketed, overlayed...

Ingmar Bergman Opening Sequence of Persona

The Central City Opera is featuring paintings by Gregg Chadwick as images for each of the operas in their current summer season: La Traviata, Poet Li Bai, The Saint of Bleecker Street and Cendrillon. Details at: Central City Opera

Gregg Chadwick L.A. Sushi diptych 6" x 8" oil on linen 2007

Images by (left to right): Christian Nold, Lordy Rodriguez, Nina Katchadourian, and Joyce Kozloff. ARENA 1 is pleased to announce the opening of a group exhibition of work exploring space and meaning through the various devices of "mapping." Working in the USA, Britain and Australia, all 19 artists in the show employ maps as resource material, not as an exploration of actual geography or the time/space continuum but rather as a matter of charting, subverting or deconstructing the very idea of mapping as a representation of the world. The artists themselves are as varied in their approach to this process as the number of directions by which we can transverse any physical position in space. Each has plotted a uniquely personal route that is fanciful, interpretive or politically driven to re-form the map of the imagination. Like the telephoto function, ZOOM +/- references a familiar orientation, then moves quickly to a point of abstraction in the artists' paintings, photogr...

The role of the artist according to Jesse Malin is to put you "right there in a time and place so you can smell it." Ryan Adams once said of his close buddy. "He's a kick-ass storyteller," the wonder boy remarked when he had just finished producing Jesse's first album. "Jesse's songs are so good they hurt my feelings. He doesn't just sound like he's singing the songs. He sounds like he IS that person."

"The idea that it is some kind of calculated insult is an absurdity. The real insult - to the intelligence and decency of 'the world's 1.5 billion Muslims', for whom people such as Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq presume to speak - comes from the ignorance and paranoia of leaders who feel so threatened by a novelist that they'll call for him to be killed." -Hari Kunzru (author of Transmission & The Impressionist ) The noted author of The Satanic Verses , Haroun and the Sea of Stories , Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet has been knighted by the Queen of England and the newly minted Sir Salman has again become a lightning rod for criticism from extreme and irrational voices. Heinrich Heine's line from, "Almansor", is once again a call for constant vigilance: "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.") —Heinrich He...