Today at Flavorpill, we listened to the Walkmen cover Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” for the A.V. Club. We considered buying tickets to see Billie Joe Armstrong in American Idiot, where he’s back for 50 non-contiguous performances. We learned how the the Insane Clown Posse plans to celebrate Christmas this year. We looked at lots of photos of John Updike. We had some deep Art Thoughtz. We made a mental note not to wear heels if and when we check out Doug Aitken’s new solo exhibition, House, at Regen Projects. We needed to own very this very angry French bulldog puppy. We discovered that there’s a Maureen Dowd comic book, and that it involves sexy lingerie. We found out how to get student discounts forever. We wondered if Winnie the Pooh really had an eating disorder. And finally, we enjoyed this roundup of the very best font and typography humor — a little too much.
The Hirshhorn Museum in DC — institution of the three Hs and a spiffy new rebranding — has proposed the next step in its director’s master plan to Shake Things Up and Make It Relevant. Blake Gopnik for the Washington Post reports that Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek has pitched installation artist Doug Aitken to imagine a new museum shop. Based on the directive to make “architecture out of light,” Aitken’s proposal (barely out of the planning stages) would require moving the the bookstore into the basement, away from its current position at the building’s entrance. Illuminating the space would be a “broad shaft pierced through the museum’s Independence Avenue forecourt, bringing natural illumination” into what Aitken calls a “really oppressive basement.” (True, but what will be done with the Black Box Gallery video space?) Peep the initial rendering after the jump.
Read More »
Were you ever forced to watch D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation for a class? Considered Hollywood’s first “blockbuster,” the silent black and white film takes place before, during, and after the Civil War, and is controversial because of its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. It also clocks in at three hours.
Composer/multimedia artist DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) has created a cinematic deconstruction and remix titled Rebirth of a Nation that will be playing at the Museum of Modern Art from June 22nd through the 28th; he emailed with Flavorpill to explain what he hopes you take away from his post-Obama version of a 1915 classic. Read More »
