Glenn Gould's Chair

Gould was renowned for his peculiar body movements while playing (circular swaying; conducting; or grasping at the air as if to reach for notes, as he did in the taping of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata) and for his insistence on absolute control over every aspect of his playing environment. The temperature of the recording studio had to be exactly regulated. He invariably insisted that it be extremely warm. According to Friedrich, the air conditioning engineer had to work just as hard as the recording engineers. The piano had to be set at a certain height and would be raised on wooden blocks if necessary.A small rug would sometimes be required for his feet underneath the piano.He had to sit fourteen inches above the floor and would only play concerts while sitting on the old chair his father had made. He continued to use this chair even when the seat was completely worn through.His chair is so closely identified with him that it is shown in a place of honor in a glass case at the National Library of Canada.

Bar Olivino Reading #2 in Fort Greene

Come join us this Wednesday for prose and wine!

Bar Olivino presents a literary reading with
LIZZIE SIMON**AUBREY LEVITT**LORRAINE MARTINDALE

Wednesday, September 23, at 7pm

**
Bar Olivino
905 Fulton St (near Vanderbilt)
Brooklyn, NY 11238
(718) 857-7952
1 block from Clinton/Washington Ave. C stop.

Also near Atlantic Ave B, Q, 2, 3, 4, 5; Pacific D, M, N, R; and
G to Clinton Washington

So Many Important Things

An Interesting Project in which I'm involved, created by Jason Grote and Karinne Keithley, for The Conflux Festival on art and technology.

CONFLUX
The art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space. Produced by Glowlab in New York since 2003.

Read the instructions below. Download link is at the bottom of the page.

This is a walking tour of anywhere. How this worked was this way: we approached multiple associates from around the world (novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, academics, visual artists, the unclassifiable, and people who are not writers of any stripe) and asked them for psychogeographical travelogues. In return we got texts from as close as Midtown Manhattan or as distant as Jerusalem or Port au-Prince. In one case we even got a travelogue of someone's dreams. We also dropped in a few small pieces of found text by authors we do not know, and wrote things to stitch the piece together.

Is this an exercise in accidental psychogeography and pattern recognition, sort of like when you listen to "Dark Side of The Moon" while watching The Wizard of Oz? Or is it, as one friend put it, an exercise in "the vertiginous cosmopolitanism that psychogeography is designed to avoid?" We don't know. Also, you are smart and will be able to figure out what you think without us telling you.

Do this: download the linked file to your personal listening device. If you do not have an mp3 player, email Jason at jason (at) jasongrote.com and he will mail you a CD. Then, choose one of the five paths below and follow the walking tour. Have fun!

1) Once you have finished loading the audio onto your mp3 player, exit via the nearest door. Take a right. Follow the instructions on the audio.

2) Walk towards a place that you find dangerous for whatever reason. Get as close as you can to this place without risking your personal safety. Without crossing whatever your own boundaries are, follow the instructions on the audio.

3) Extinguish all of the lights wherever you are and lie down on the floor. In your imagination, follow the instructions on the audio.

4) Walk to a place you have never been but have always been curious about. Once there, follow the instructions on the audio.

5) Look at this graphic, either on a screen or printed on paper, while you listen to the audio. Enter the world of the picture and follow the instructions on the audio.

Download the audio tour

If you have any problems with the download, email jason [at] jasongrote.com

CREDITS:
Conceived, edited, produced, and directed by Karinne Keithley and Jason Grote, and performed by Jenny Seastone Stern. Written by Annie Nocenti, Amber Reed, Carlos Murillo, Drew Haxby, Elana Greenfield, Guy DeBord, Jason Grote, Jen Collins, Jennifer Dumpert, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Karinne Keithley, Leah Souffrant, Lorraine Martindale, Matthew Burgess, Mimi Lipson, Peggy Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, Susan L. Miller, and Walter Benjamin.

Book Collage #1

Book Collage #1 (Clip)
Art on Paper
8 1/2 x 11

untitled (pharmacy) moma cut up #7

Cornell is desperate to sustain the network by spinning it out to the far reaches of the historical past and the astronomical future.
We all live in an enchanted forest.




His favorite colors suggest provincial European hotels: white, parchesi yellow, pink, and French blue gray.

Even the most severely Euclidean box by Cornell looks like an inhabited place--though its only resident may be the shade of a departed spirit. Minute variations of his ritual come to stand for all the richness of a fully lived life, especially since the ritual's contents are determined by the anxieties which drive him to loathe death in the first place. Yearning for wholeness, the picturesque grows more agitated amid the early modern period's numerous complementary agitations--social, economic, technological. Yet ruins come to rest.

Untitled (Pharmacy), ca. 1942
Box construction, 35.5 x 30.6 x 11.1 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 128
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, by SIAE 2008

MoMA catalog 1980 cut-up #6 (Medici Princess)

Cornell's was a dream voyage.
And yet for Cornell the hotel is ambiguous.
The night window also appears in connection with another theme:
the hotel.
Hotels often have names evocative of the sky
and imagination. His extensive library contained volumes complete with hotel and travel information. The hotel as a microcosm of life has been explored many times. At the same time it is hollow and lonely.
Partly through visits to monuments of Renaissance Italy, Roman and Florance Cornell established his link with Medici Princes and Princesses, cultural totems as precious to him as his Renaissance statues and paintings were to the expatriate American Gilbert Osmond. The hotel is infinitely alluring and rich in historical and geographical extensions, its grand facade often culled from Renaissance palaces, its very name derived from the great private residences of the past: the hotels particuliers.

setting for a fairy tale, part I

It’s as if the curtain has just come up. Voila! Cornell’s miniature stage. The play is about to begin.
His set is striking. A black frame, painted along the border of this box, reveals a grand chateau, which conjures up a feeling of the past. The chateau is set back from the border, giving the box an additional dimension, and making room for characters to act out their dramas before it. A forest, constructed from twigs, lies behind the chateau.
A Setting for a Fairy Tale.
Act 1, scene one.
Nothing happens. The tableau is frozen. No props or objects are moveable. Nothing will ever change. Yet there’s a magical atmosphere, as if much could happen, years could pass, or time could stand still. People could die and come back to life, or get lost in the forest behind the chateau. Who knows what happens in that forest? This box is all about the imagination.
Setting for a Fairy Tale asks me, the viewer, to create my own drama, becoming storyteller and listener for this stage.
The props: a mammoth Renaissance building, decorated with external galleries running between turrets. The building has a high-pitched roof and many windows. Yet this isn’t a three-dimensional miniature house that Cornell has drawn or built at a small scale. It’s a cutout engraving of a Paris municipal building, clipped from a book on French edifices entitled Les Plus excellents bastiments de France, published in 1576. The engraving by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau depicts the Chateau de Madrid, built for Francis I in 1549.
This clipped engraving, however, re-creates the feeling of an inhabited place. I experience a magical stumble back in time, and enter this symbol of the lost splendor of a Golden age, a world of princes and princesses, of chamber music, exotic banquets, trade, and romance. An enchanting world that no longer exists, except in its vestiges in the modern ballet and fairy tales. What might happen in this world, if I could imagine it?

Bébé Marie

Within her box behind glass Bébé Marie’s frail immortality could never be wrecked. Living further behind twigs, in a fictional forest, Bébé Marie is not only safe, away from air or elements or anyone who might touch her, but she is also a voyeur, always gazing at her viewer. A smiling evasiveness indicates that she has something to hide. What is it? The longer I stare at Bébé Marie, the more I want to know why she is in the forest, and why she is hidden. She entices me to come closer. Why is she so enmeshed in the woods? She stares and I imagine what she wants, and what she longs for, and suddenly, she knows! She knows all my longings and desires and fears, and inhabits them, and suddenly I am that doll in the forest, helpless and afraid—staring into myself. The exchange is an eerie one, fraught with complication. For I, the voyeur, have been caught by Bébé Marie. She has embodied all my desires, and knows that I am her, that object, lurking in the woods and I may never get out.