Conversessions
Interviews: conversations, inner visions and verbose versions of sessions in the season of this semi-charmed life… I riff a bit, and sometimes, just sometimes, I’m granted creative company to share in said discursive exchange… below, records of said sometimes scenarios.
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Profiles in Pop: [… the other rhymes, the leitgeist zeitgeist monologues muses… beyond the break: scene styles and profiles in pop: click your heels three times here to jump, skip, hop to ahead said profilic space instead…]
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Interviews: Roaming Riffs with Scene Culture Creatives
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audiobiography: punk me tender
Contours clash in the active craft of empowered innocence, the valkyrie bildungsroman projects valor in vulnerability… the immersion in that panoramic spectrum of human identity, illustrating into fruition Rilke’s foreshadowed feminine being blossoming amidst the metropolis of celestial bodies… PMT’s signature aesthetic finds its tone, timbre, and apparent purpose in this new world mantra movement manifest. It speaks to a future age… echoing the savage beauty of McQueen… the fracture in formality establishing evolved canons, the unstructured precision of a punk’s renaissance. … So, below, Punk Me Tender’s very own signature soundtrack, the aural rhythm of rebel romanticism as scored by the maestro himself…
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The Thing About Trance on Stage… : Fool’s Gold
It’s more like there’s something very visceral to it, something very rock ‘n roll about it. At least for me when I’m playing it, it really registers as a trance, but you can still really feel some strong emotions and you really can feel yourself present in that music; as opposed to being transported to some numbing land like, maybe what traditional trance music is meant to do kind of like ease people out when they’re on shrooms. I feel like you can use your body to interact, to interact with the band, you interact with the audience, you connect and I feel like everybody’s alive when we’re playing music. And you know, maybe that’s like, maybe ‘trance’ isn’t the best word. (laughs) You know what I’m saying…
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Clarity in the Spectrum of Zedd
I felt like it was a musically undeniable song; and although it was different from the music I released before, people loved it. The clarity that song gave me was that it’s all about great music. It doesn’t matter what genre you make or if you feel like your fans wouldn’t want to hear a certain style; if you make sure the song has a soul, a face, a character and the music is great, they WILL like it…
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American Mythos, Birth of A Speakeasy Nation: Hello Negro, New Orleans Native Son
What we do in New Orleans, and this is going back to ‘the amalgam,’ what we do in New Orleans is we create, as musicians, we create music as a function of our environment. So, there’s not this ‘thing’ you can do to make your music ‘New Orleans,’ you either understand what that is because of the environment that you came up in – or you don’t. So, the techniques I use – whether it’s sampling The Funky Meters, or it’s a specific rhythm I’m using – none of it is overly … it’s not deliberate. It’s the only thing I know how to do, it’s what I came up around…
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Underneath the Skin: Chester French
I think there’s so much music and so many people in music feel like they have to constantly be following, either super-new trends or really established ideas about how music should sound at a given moment. For us it’s way more important to find a sound that’s unique to us, than it is to ‘fit in’ to any group, necessarily…
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Why New Blood, Why Now? Nine Minutes with Morgan Spurlock
[T]he people who kind of launched this whole ‘low brow’ art movement, this street art movement are now inspiring this whole new generation of artists; y’know these new kinds of Pop graffiti artists who are kind of coming up in their wake, and I find that to be really fascinating. You gotta think it wasn’t that long ago when low brow art and street art was being relegated to the lowest smallest of the fringe galleries, to now where these paintings are being put up in the cornerstones of the modern art movement. So I think to see where that ripple effect is continuing to affect, not only our generation, but the next generation of artists is really inspiring…
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RAINBOW BODY: A Miscellany with the Curator… : Nathaly Charria
[S]o, where is art going? And you see that right now we’re living in the most exciting times ever, because it’s a tipping point; it’s a change in paradigm; it’s a historical movement. … That’s why I say like, this is the last body of work of this particular period because from here – you know, Rainbow Body is a concept of dissolving into light – from here, Millie dissolves into light. That’s what the performance yesterday was about, that’s what the series is about, and that’s what the performance in May is about; Blinded by The Light where she’s bathed in light, and surrounded by nothing but light and just NASA’s recording of the sun…
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Like Vogue on Paint, Nick Lepard Serves Good Face
There is a confusion behind [Lepard’s] creations; but it conveys his signature style through muting the modern world’s constant motion within a frame: “Right now, images are not something we spend much time with. We look at something, then quickly move onto the next thing. To keep someone looking, to have them paused on a single stationary image for an extended period of time, seems almost subversive.” That sense of timelessness is apparent in his thorough technique, and resonates strongly throughout his work and stands at the core of his art: “Things move very quickly now. It is hard to know what to invest in. Something is here one minute and gone the next. Painting – portraiture specifically- is something I feel, based on its resume, that you can count on to persevere through all this growth and change…”
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Profiles (in Pop)
… and other times when I riff into the ether, with no other company than the atmosphere, those roaming words find their way onto a page… and so, that said, for this, the second set: styles and profiles on culture and a few of those figures who form and fuel said scene.
Pick a pic, any pic, beyond each clip, roundabout worlds… a medley miscellany of musings and mental meanderings, rhythmic riffs of sorts and shifts, cycling through scene culture’s cosmic bards and terrestrial stars as they live the tapestry of this tale we call contemporary human life… click a pic, they all actually lead to comparatively relevant literary pieces – it’s an interactive visual/verbal linguistic gallery; thus, fair warning: forever the work in progress… so, without further ado: the leitgeist zeitgeist
A Literary Lens on Muses in Orbit and Stellar Denizens
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About Her Inner Quicksilver Scene : Edie Sedgwick
Edie’s significance is apparently insignificant, if only because it was so superlative, but so temporally isolated; if only because of that fact: her obituary is a generational biography – those dying to live, and forever living under the shadow of that spectacular demise…
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Amy, Amy, Amy… Fare Thee Well, Immortal Parallel
Amy Winehouse liberated the industry from its falsified self; she resurrected a culture of humanity for the sake of humanity, and she lifted the individual from the impossible expectation to be anything and everything except what you are. She reminded us of the necessity of the melancholy, the need for the bitter in order to understand the sweet; she did not shy away from her shadows – we pulled her from them; she was an artist, perceptive and true, she was just a child through and through… and from the mouth of that broken babe, spoke truth so beautifully it was impossible to ignore – all she had were her scars… sung so beautifully blue… Our rehabilitation, Amy was the cure…
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The De Jure, The De Facto, The Glory of Britney Spears’ Tribal Gospel
[W]here Blackout saw Danja’s synthesized vocal levels filtering through the records’ darkest recesses; here, Britney is the aural consciousness ebbing and flowing throughout terrestrial percussion and electric reverb. It’s never any one thing, it is the panoramic collection of some of this contemporary condition’s most expansive sensory elements… the soundtrack of this human-robot-humanoid dialectic… the artifice and human intelligence. That is always our story, how to transcend above the inanimate – how to make this real now, and how to manifest the best surreal into an eternal reality…
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Supercharged Primacy on Display: Electric Zoo 2010
There’s so much light and loudness, there’s so much sound – the synth, the bass, the natural, the artificial… imagine a divinely-placed sun setting inversely beneath the rise of the treble, the drop of the bass, the pulse of the pit, the kaleidoscope of HD technicolor displays… all simulcast by a dictating force – a mute DJ delivering a sermon on the mount, wearing a well-tailored suit of sound, letting said wardrobe do the talking, while instrumental fingers walk along vinyl and invisible mp3; the real and fantastical blurring amidst sensory overload, with a synesthetic dictum delivered from the lone shepherd subwoofing their truth… not a word has been uttered, but from the depths of the deafening roars you relinquish any sense of self once claimed before this place – you let go… mute, but far from immobile you drop the world, and in the face of doubt you dance it out…
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Scene Canvassing: Greg Mike
Factory Pop Art with a bit more funk and fantasy, and graffiti with a thin layer of glitz over the grime: it’s street, it’s sweet, it’s a vibrantly tweaked teenage wasteland, it’s subterranean celebrity – it’s Popstars and Cokeheads…
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This is The Story… of a Cover Girl Named Sally TNGR
[T]he same hopes and dreams, tales of love gained, lost, and lamented, the same quarterlife crises as any and everyone else… but even though that life was lived on the wire, there was still some semblance of tangible human life behind that digital screen. This any-narrative is the story… of a girl named Sally; and this album is the electro-acoustic soundtrack of her self, and her TNG scene, from her highschool suitors. Music 4 TNGRS: Requiem for the Teenage Dream, courtesy of Generation Adamant Abbreviated Extended Adolescence…
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Britney Tweets 2007, Ep. 3
… because she was an independent publisher in the midst of corporate media, because she may not have spoken the King’s English but still scribed the siren’s hymn, because well-before she dropped the scheiße en route to new Britney’s mission she bathed in capital HIM, because we voted her to be nouveau royalty in the midst of GOP patriarchy, because she faced the fire for her fans while the Administration placed firearms and debt in their electorate’s hands… because she wants you people to know she’s not perfect, she’s divine #godspeed…
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Want to See a Daye Boy Smile? Pay Attention
Pop & Politics are alive and well-contented bedfellows in this world. The personal space stands as the preeminent public place of judgment. Shadows dance in rigid rhythmic formation with neon strobes. The entire world coalesces into a kaleidoscopic cultural landscape… where we are presented with our own selves from before the mass-mediated mirror of Pop life. It is arduous. It is bright. It is delusional. It is hidden in prismatic view. It is everything in one place, in distorted focus, for no other reason than for you to see it; because we’ve been blinded by the guided light, because we need to throw shade if only to stargaze again…
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The Masquerade de Maîtresse Nicki Minaj
[F]rom Roman Zolansky to Onika, Nicki stands somewhere in between. Minaj’s sarcophagus, that of shadows past, is what holds her back; she has yet to break past the hyperzeitgeist status of Don-Diva-du-jour. Du jour is of the fashion, du jour is here today and gone tomorrow, and for an artist the challenge is to make du jour last forever. Therein lies the battle ahead: between the character who performs in living color, and the one who is living color: #nickibewhoyouwannabe…
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Britney Tweets 2007: Ep. 1
… because pink wigs birthed millennial whiplash, because it’s the rhyme behind seasonal reason, because you’re not B and will never see it her way… because Britney didn’t have Twitter in 2007, because the traphaus was birthed in the wake of Kevin, because Miss Spears will remain the bad bxxch you’ll never know, because they shouldn’t have let her blackout the ‘net #work: nouveau decided to put on a show…
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Scene Canvassing: Olka Osadzińska
It’s guys and girls on parade, frills and grills from beneath blinding shade… it’s fast and young, and forever in its own world… it rings to a nostalgia hearkening to the lost-but-not-forgotten space akin to the imagined interior of that signature Blackberry Pearl…
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Sunset Below the Graffiti Guise… “Tupac Lagerfeld Dali” x Alec Monopoly
Media makes for a most marvelous canvas… when the world muses as such… Tupac Shakur… thug life, lime light, California love, Gotham in hindsight… muted magnanimity, press plastered prophecy… Karl Lagerfeld… Vogue, Chanel, pose, channel… shade forever thrown, gaze universally shown, the mind the shine, the face – so poker… the judge, the jury, la mode’s the joker… Salvador Dali… doesn’t do drugs, drugs are he… time melt, mind meld, paint the scene _–_~ surrealistically… motley crux c/o Alec Monopoly…
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Vinyl Mind Flow: RAINBOW BODY /// Millie Brown
regurgitation. vulgar might be the best word for it; it’s common. humanity is common, it’s all common. so millie’s journey becomes the collective journey … and it’s this dissent that speaks to the future age; it’s this dissent from assumed humanity, from assumed vulnerability, from assumed vulgarity that makes this such a beautiful prismatic display of the immortality…
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The Anatomical Zeitgeist, No. 8: Est. 2013
That said, this year, let’s acknowledge this once-in-life-beyond-the-lifetime year where the Pop canons shot for the stars and collectively crafted the constellation, the anatomical structure, for the new age’s iconographic Pop body #welcometoRADIOactive … #eightsoneightsoneights … unfinished symphonies play-on endlessly…
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Electric World Life: Sandbar 45
Amidst the scattered debris of yachts and planes lost at sea, there lies an island where lost celebrity lives. It’s a pristine parallel universe nestled in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. I’m sitting with Brittany Murphy; getting acquainted with the soft-spoken, but effervescent, starlet in a string of those gone-too-soon, chatting about how she’s nestling into her new paradisaical digs. ‘It’s amazing. Everyone’s here. It’s an island fit for only the most marvelous of misfits.’ Quarter after nine, I get the call every music journalist lives, kills, and dies for: ‘Michael’s ready.’ I get a ride up to Everland Ranch, and as I stroll up the walkway a strangely familiar voice catches my ear…
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(The) Epochauserie 