wolf chat nanog
stanley brouwn; baudruchage; i had an uber driver turn out to be an incredible dj
A very special thank you to Jackson for this week’s bar review for the hotline. If you’ve never dialed the hotline, or if you’ve never listened to previous hotline recordings – you can press play below for the hotline recording from last week. Our brother Nate left a review of Close Up. You can reach the hotline at 915-97-LOBOS, or 915-975-6267. You’ll always be fellowshipped to the hotline by our wolf brothers, Nikai and Silas, who live at the Wolf Conservation Center.
I purchased a number of tickets to the Mariano Llinas trilogy at MoMA. It is an all afternoon/early evening affair – if you want to join, though – let me know! I don’t have an infinite number of tickets, just a solid number.
There are a number of solid parties Friday that I’m looking forward to going to. I also think a number of us are going to see Thomas Melchior and Daniel Bell on Saturday night for free / almost free. I think basically everyone came out to see Daniel Bell last time? It was a really good time. Somehow one of my favorite Daniel Bell podcasts is still online. Yes, it’s tempting to go see Dygas and Brawther at PR – just – don’t do it!
French mega-label and distribution network Yoyaku announced that they’re ditching all digital music and going strictly vinyl-only. I guess go ahead and download all that Varhat now while you can. In their statement to RA, Yoyaku says that this decision is reflection of the market’s demonstrated interest in “more meaningful listening” and that the ethos of various streaming platforms conflicts with theirs. I’m rolling my eyes at that. I have a few thoughts on this – I’ll save them for next week. I’ll send the WhatsApp ping to those of you I need to ask about this.
Related? Contra my last line: Our friend Ryan has a new essay in world picture, “Embracing the Clutter of Collections” – “there can be no meaningful material nor structural pushback to the techno-feudalism of the present moment without a psychical way of reorganizing our relationship to objects […] a collection of inconveniences and obstacles may make ours a life worth living.”
I know people will read this week’s essay in The Cut and think “wow another essay where someone embarrasses themselves.” I thought it was nice, though. “I Opened My Marriage. Maybe I Should Have Tried an Affair Instead.”
Last Friday was of course the Olympics of perfume. Did any of you wear anything interesting? I wore an 80’s Mitsouko extrait, which you can for sure buy for under $75 if you set an alert. Of course, baudruchage is a very Valentine’s idea… (the best to do it).
I finished my yearly re-read of Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai last week. Her blog is worth bookmarking for days when you don’t feel like reading the news. It’s interesting seeing how my feelings about the book change with each successive re-read. At the end of 2023, my fifth re-read, I found the first narrator frustrating. This time, my 2024 re-read, I still found the first narrator initially frustrating, then I noticed that they make a subtle change not long after they stop narrating – and it was really effective this time.
Maybe give Outa De Box Radio a try.
stanley brouwn at Portal 5
On Saturday, three of us visited two shows in TriBeCa. The first was the stanley brouwn show at Portal 5, which I mentioned last week. Yoshi Hill, an antiquarian bookseller, organized the exhibition, which consists of four drawings from the This Way Brouwn series. The drawings came from last year’s Kasper König auction. The show also includes Art & Project bulletins1 and brouwn’s Portrait of Mickey Cartin—one of the few, if not the only, portrait commissions he ever accepted.
Yoshi requires appointments to visit because he wants to keep the crowds small. He’s friendly and easy to talk to, giving visitors as much time as they need with the work. Afterward, he was happy to discuss with us the portrait, the drawings, and the bulletins. I found going to a really small show with nobody other than the three of us to be a really engaging experience, especially with this work in particular.
The show runs through next Friday, so I’d recommend going this weekend if possible. If you email Yoshi, he’ll reply right away with the available time blocks. Seeing a focused selection in such a small space is an uncommon opportunity. Spencer appropriately suggested that going individually might be best to avoid splitting your attention between the work and your friends. Meanwhile, I am chatty…
Additionally, it seems like two rooms of his work that are currently on view at Dia: Beacon will be up until April this year.
Some more links re: brouwn: an are.na collection of images, a Frieze feature, an obituary by Andrew Russeth, and a 1977 article by Antje von Graevenitz.
In the Gravenitz article, she cites an interview he gave previously in which he says “It is the search for the awareness we have of wide space, and the discovery of the city before we discover space. With these events I am trying to make something of what is going on have an effect on the spectators in terms of an action.”
After we visited the Portal 5 show, we walked a block north to 15 Orient for the Jilaine Jones show, which also closes on the 22nd. Here is a talk she gave for the New York Studio School – she includes a very good slideshow of her work. She gave a talk on Thursday at 15 Orient – I missed it, they said the talk will be uploaded.
