Wise While Cracking Wise

The story I wrote a couple of months ago about Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron’s relaunch of interview Magazine has had nearly 1,000 readers. Quite a few have come through searches for David Carson’s design work (which I mention), and a lot through a link from a design blog I’m unfamiliar with. But most readers are searching for news about Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron. There was a profile of Fabien Baron in the New York Times on Sunday and it struck me as thin and mean spirited.

 There’s no mention of the manifesto as a conversation between Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron (via their Blackberries) in the current issue of Interview, which talks about Andy Warhol’s inspiration to use the new-at-the-time portable cassette recorders to catch the creative sparks flying between artists. I forget which classic artwork they mentioned, it might have been Paradise Lost. Let’s just say that it WAS Paradise Lost. Glenn and Fabien say there’s nothing new about creative types getting together to shoot the breeze and if they’d been putting out their magazine centuries ago, using Gutenberg’s new-fangled moveable type device, it would have featured Milton and Galileo discussing astronomy. Their inspirations for the magazine are drawn from its traditions, what they refer to as its DNA. What’s radical is that it’s very sexy because it’s formal and cerebral. It’s new, pussycat, by not being novel.

I’ve always been baffled why the sum of Glenn O’Brien’s media skills and activities isn’t more widely appreciated. From him you can draw a line back through every great comic media tradition of twentieth century New York and he’s brought them alive in his own time. The Thurber / Benchley comic sentimental essays in the New Yorker, the droll absurdity Steve Allen brought to tv talk shows, his ads for Barneys had the wild wit guys like Charles Addams brought to ad campaigns. He’s part of a traceable heritage but still his own man.

Extra Armchair by Fabien Baron

My previous story talked about Fabien Baron warming up haute coute and making high glamour goofy, as Audrey Hepburn did in Funny Face. The story in the New York Times gave me a deeper understanding of Fabien Baron’s terrior: “A son of a Parisian newspaper designer, he also brings a journalistic clarity to his pages. That’s what was missing, he said, with French Vogue, where he was art director from 2003 until this year, when he took over Interview. In terms of fashion, French Vogue’s stilettoed editor in chief, Carine Roitfeld, and her team were unbeatable – “they’re killers,” Mr. Baron said. But he felt the magazine lacked order. “I think I sharpened everything,” he said. I think that the new Interview design has the order and elegance of a “serious” European newspaper, it can sit on newsstands with the International Herald Tribune. While newspapers are tending towards being fluffy and celebrity-hungry, Interview has staked a claim on smart features rendered conversationally. I hadn’t followed his furniture and packaging designs but I was interested to read that he’s had a house in a rural European setting designed by John Pawson. I read an essay by Deyan Sudjic talking about the subtle purity of Pawson’s architecture that had a section on stores Pawspn designed for Calvin Klein and their mutual interest in Donald Judd’s furniture and interior spaces. The alternate view to the New York Times’s assertion that Fabien Baron is spreading himself too thin is that he’s drawing multiple finely nuanced projects from within a collaborative community. The confronting of the uncomfortable question of the hazy line between art and business and editorial and advertising and between fashion as art and fashion as commerce is a territory Andy Warhol made his own.

The mainstream journalist’s general discomfort with complexity, easy boredom and obsession with trends is disturbing. Journalists didn’t initially comprehend Al Gore’s re-invention of stewardship or Nick Cave’s scholarly spirit. Now one of our important tasks is to try and understand the enduring value of art, its soul strengthening qualities, rather than be dazzled by its price. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the march to extinction of the newspaper, magazine and record industries is the loss of the collective wisdom of the best journalists and impresarios. Financial forces compel journalists to flash bright shiny new things continually before reader’s eyes and their stories are garlanded with video ads. The frame of reference has become the next five minutes. Journalism now provides a fast food sugar rush that has no nourishment.

The wondrous, exhilarating aspect of the revamped Interview is the sense of ballast that it provides. What’s exciting about the new is seen in the context of the vast sweep of human history. It’s wise while cracking wise. We’ve gotten ourselves into a fine mess, as a species, by embracing novelty unconditionally and being a bit too smug about our ingenuity. We’ve made a lot of bad music with our ingenious financial instruments, for instance. Interview (and Art in America) are taking a harder and longer but ultimately richer view of innovation. It was a smart and sweet gesture to acknowledge Robert Rauschenberg’s passing with his archival Interview conversation with the late Australian art critic, Paul Taylor. Paul’s knowledge was expansive but his heart was bigger. In Melbourne when he began publishing his magazine Art And Text during the punk rock era he recognized the emerging genius in art school dropouts like Nick Cave and folded them back into the art world. He recognised the respect for art that they had that was hidden by their youthful volatility. That generosity of spirit and the ability to be able to see unique connections across disciplines is something Glenn O’Brien has too.

The Internet has given us a faster longer reach as we forage for information but if we’re going to turn it into knowledge we have to resume rather than suspend our capacity for disbelief says the scientist and artist Ken Goldberg, now the Director of Berkeley’s New Media Centre. A navigational feature on Interview’s website encourages one to linger, not surf. The scrollbar moves in a liquid manner and bobs, maintining its place in a text like a buoy on a calm sea. It’s a charming metaphor.
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Treasure

In 1988 the Smithsonian acquired more than three hundred cubic feet of archival materials relating to the career of the great jazz musician Duke Ellington: sound recordings and original manuscripts as well as photographs, scrapbooks, and business records. The collection documents Ellington’s contributions as a composer, performer, orchestra leader, and an ambassador of American music and culture abroad. The Ellington Collection is both an aesthetic treasure and a historical one, used by musicians for performances and by scholars to better understand the man and his music.

 

Listening deeply

 

While I was waiting for my appointment at the Apple Genius Bar factoids were flashed on screens. You could drive from New York to San Francisco twenty five times with a 32 gigabyte ipod and never hear the same song twice, one suggested. This made me incredibly sad. As time goes on I find the patina building up on certain songs, and albums, that hearing them often (though not carelessly, as the aural wallpaper that obliterates silence in almost every public space) is a powerful and wonderful experience. The songs sink more deeply into my soul. I’m finding that about a week’s worth of music, total, is as much as I have room for in my heart.

 

When I was driving around with Nick Cave in Sydney last year, listening to the new Bad Seeds album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! I talked about encountering his songs as they popped up in shuffle mode in my itunes library. He mentioned finding it distressing that albums aren’t listened to in their entirety, in the order that the artist intended, at least some of the time. I saw the “shuffle” phenomenon from his point of view and I’ve made it a point to listen more discerningly to records, to pay more attention. The first sample bibliostructure in my new range is an homage to Nick’s album Nocturama. The play count feature in itunes shows that in the two years I’ve had my computer I’ve listened to Nocturama and the Grinderman album all the way through more often than any other albums. (Nitin Sawhney’s Beyond Skin, Everybody Digs Bill Evans and Bruce Springsteen’s Devils and Dust and Magic are high on the list, too.)