In news that should make Phish jealous, The New York Times reported yesterday the long-brewing Fugazi live archive will finally on launch on Dec. 1. The site boasts a complete list of all 1,100-plus shows the band played, along with audio for 130 of them. That number should steadily climb as Dischord Records continues to upload the 800-plus board tapes the band compiled over the years. Each show is available for a suggested $5, but in the true spirit of the Internet, the site also offers a pay-what-you-want system, with a minimum cost of $1. For the serious fanatic, there's a $500 all-access membership that will get you a download of every future addition to the site.

Dischord employees are still scanning and uploading a seemingly endless supply of posters and photos to post alongside each show, providing an impressively exhaustive document of the band's career. The site is soliciting material from fans as well, in hopes of eventually closing all the gaps in content. The band provides ratings of audio quality of the shows, and an integrated commenting system should help fans guide each other toward the best recordings and offer them a chance to document their own recollections.

It's possible all of this has to do with MacKaye's need for more closet space—he's a well-known archivist of things related to his bands and his label. Nevertheless, the site is sure to stand as one of the largest digital repositories of a single band's music. I'll have more thoughts on this in a feature in Thursday's paper.

Nam June Paik's "Electronic Superhighway"

Given the recent opening of an exhibition of Nam June Paik's work at the National Gallery of Art, as well as the long-term commitment to media art the Smithsonian American Art Museum has made its Watch This! exhibition, I thought now would be a good time to talk with SAAM's senior curator for media arts, John G. Hanhardt, about the Nam June Paik archives. SAAM acquired the archives in 2009 and plans to dedicate an exhibition to them next year. We discussed the institution's commitment to Paik and the history of the moving image, the difficulties of presenting media art, and the upcoming show.

Washington City Paper: Since a personal relationship often springs from a professional relationship, how well did you know Paik?

John Hanhardt: I knew him very well from the early 1970s, and I was privileged to be engaged in his work and to include his work in numerous exhibitions. I traveled with him to Germany where he introduced me to many of his colleagues and friends. I would visit him and his wife, Shigeko [Kubota], in his loft and studio. We were in active personal communication and spent time together. After his stroke I visited him very shortly thereafter in the hospital, and flew down to Miami, frequently, to see him. I spent time with him regularly until the end. A lot of our conversations were about projects, because he was always working on things: whether it was developing a satellite television project, or a video tape, or a sculpture. Some of those projects were discussed because I was involved in them as a curator and some of those things we discussed were because he wanted me to know about them.

WCP: Now that you've been looking through the archives for the past few years, I was curious what you may have learned about Nam June Paik in terms of his work, and about him, that you might not have learned otherwise from your professional and personal relationships with him.

JH: That's an interesting question. As I said, I used to visit him in his studios. When I organized his retrospective at the Whitney in 1982, we pulled a lot of material together. He was an artist that really didn't take care of his papers; they were in piles and in corners. I was aware of a lot of this material. Toward the end of his life he told me many times that he wanted me to organize a new edition of his writings.

From looking at his archives I could see that he was very aware of how he was being viewed and interpreted. He kept clippings, correspondence with curators, museums and galleries. One of the things that keeps coming up is how favorably he was reviewed at that time, by the TV critic of The New York Times, John O'Connor. He appreciated Nam June's work. And Nam June kept clippings of his reviews. John O’Connor passed away a little over a year ago, and his partner put a little show together of Nam June's letters and notes to him! I spoke to Seymour Borofsky and he is donating those papers to the archive. So, the more people that hear about the archive, as a generation passes on, these materials are coming to light and are being brought to the Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Nam June collected lots of toys, antiques: He was constantly buying things that he could imagine incorporating into his art work. We are also finding a number of audio tapes and video tapes, and the big issue for us is archival preservation and organization because it is a vast trove of material that needs to be organized in order to be really looked at in a meaningful way. And, that's really what's been occupying us is making order out of this. We're close to getting there and it will become the center of a Nam June Paik Media Arts Center where his work can be studied by scholars, artists, and curators. It's a very exciting plan.

And, if you'll allow me to jump around, we have the recently opened Media Art Gallery and the Watch This! exhibition, and American Art is making a real commitment to time-based art, not only to representing Nam June, which they have done spectacularly with the exhibition and preservation of Megatron/Matrix and Super Highway/Continental US, but also with videotapes and installations, as well as contemporary directions in the art of the moving image.

WCP: How many of the pieces currently on view Watch This! are a part of SAAM's collection?

JH: All of them except two, which have been loaned into the show. There's a second Jim Campbell piece that I thought added an extra dimension to his work, and the Bill Viola piece. We had Bill here for a lecture, and we are very much interested in his work, and we have an extended loan to represent him. The gallery itself will change over time; my goal is to add more depth to the collection and to circulate those artists into the gallery as well as the other gallery spaces in the museum.

WCP: One thing that strikes me is that I cannot think of a lot of major galleries that are dedicating this much space to multiple works of the moving image.

JH: There aren't many museums that put work like this together in a single exhibition. There may be  temporary shows but it is the American Art Museum’s sustained, serious and long term commitment that is so exciting. Betsy Broun, Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, made a real commitment to Nam June Paik and wants to recognize the importance of the moving image in late Twentieth Century art by expanding the Museum’s collection. The rewards have been enormous attendance, interest from students in the area, as well as from colleagues around the country, and we have gotten nice response in the DC press. So it is very gratifying.

WCP: What are some of the challenges of presenting an exhibition like this?

JH: The exhibition required an enormous infrastructure designed to make this work: a false wall to put wiring behind, a non-visible door that leads to a whole tech area. It all turns on automatically to make the thing operational. It was an enormous effort in the wiring and designing the space and we have on staff some terrific people—Michael Mansfield who provides invaluable support of my program through his technical knowledge and the Museum’s  exhibition designer David Gleeson.

I had a very clear concept of the exhibition and how I wanted work to be placed in relationship to each other and in that space; I didn't want to make it a dark chamber. I'm really tired of these dark spaces. Sometimes it's necessary, but I wanted it to be light enough so that people could feel like they could walk around and could look at different kinds of work next to each other. The Kota Ezawa 3-D installation really pops, and brings you into the gallery.

My goal was to create a dialogue between historical pieces and contemporary work. So we have Cory Arcangel near Nam June Paik,  Peter Campus next to Bill Viola. These are very deliberate juxtapositions. And the medium—that maybe the custom electronics of Jim Campbell or the restored early television which is from the Paik Archive on which  Nam June's video tape is being shown, and flat screens of different types. It's an effort to look at the artist's work and its relationship to the medium on which it is exhibited.

WCP: Returning to the Paik archive, you're preparing an exhibition for that in 2012.

JH: Yes. Its working title is Nam June Paik: Art and Process, which identifies what I like to represent, which is both the materials the artist worked with, from the archive, as well as texts of writing that will relate his work to his ideas: that there was an idea and a process he went through to create his pieces. And we will have loans of his pieces not seen so often in this part of the United States: some from Europe, as well as other parts of this country. So, it's going to be a very focused show, with clusters recognizing groups of work: video for television, video for essays, performance and music. We want to create a mix of all of this to show his working method. I want to make it a very inviting show. I don't want to make it overly pedantic. It's sort of a process of discovery going through and seeing his different ways of working and realizing that what a large accomplishment his work was, how it embraced so many facets of the moving Image.

You know, I really do feel that 20th century art history is going to be rewritten through the moving image: from film to video and television, to video games, interactive platforms, the Internet. All the arts—whether literature, poetry, dance, sculpture—have changed because of these media as art forms. The whole telling of stories has changed remarkably through the impact of cinema and television and all of these moving image discourses. And they've also become art forms themselves, not only as classical cinema but as avant garde film practice, documentary, narrative, video art, installation and performance  all throughout the 20th century. The very exciting access to a global history of the moving image through the Internet as well as the mobility of the artist to work and create digitally in a variety of forms and through diverse media platforms. It is really the new paper, the new printing press. However you want to look at it! That changed how we saw information. I do think that artists give us new ways to see ourselves and see the world around us, it is at the center of art history. And Nam June certainly achieved that transformation of video through his art making. Making in the process a lasting contribution to art history.

And, I think the big challenge for museums is are they going to become how they can exhibit and represent that history of the moving image and place it alongside the other arts. As we look to the future of a global media culture how will the museum become a  living, changing place for seeing this complex variety of art practices. In a small way, I think that's what American Art Museum is trying to address with its major commitment to Nam June Paik—there is no other museum that has on display work of such scale that has been restored by the museum. Those two big pieces! [Megatron/Matrix and Super Highway/Continental US] We take it for granted in Washington, but it is really stunning. And it is very important. And that is what attracted the archive here to the American Art Museum.

WCP: It is interesting how you mention the function of museums. There are always arguments stating museums are supposed to be the arbiters of taste. Do museums still function as taste-makers and how does the incorporation of the moving image add to that discussion of good taste or what is aesthetically pleasing?

JH: Well, the conditions of what is culturally seen as aesthetically pleasing are changing ones, as we can see across the history of Western art and across the 20th century. The roles that art plays, what it addresses, and the communities it serves is not a single univocal discourse. And, the museum, one must remember, is a recent invention. Its roots go back to the Wunderkammer of the Renaissance as a place of collecting oddities from a world that people were exploring, to a fashioning of the great museums of the imperial conquests of states in Europe, to the formation of museums in the West around the great industrial capitalists (Whitney, Guggenheim, and so forth), to the formations of the art-world marketplace in recent years. The art museum has become increasingly an educational place where ideas in relation to changing interpretations and representations of art history circulate. Over the past art museums have become large cultural attractions. One of the great assets of the Smithsonian is that they are free to the public. Really! People from all walks of life can come. It doesn't cost $20 a head to go to the museum. It's one of the things that drew me here: a great educational institution devoted to preservation and making art and culture available to the world at large. What a great ideal!

So, I think I'd like to answer this in a couple parts.

The Smithsonian in terms of being a great national resource is a place for a work to be preserved and understood, and that is part of what a museum does. You can go and see a film as a film; you can go and see a painting as a painting. In other words: you can go to see the original work. And if there is a true curatorial process of representing history, genre, and movements, it is a place you can learn by seeing what those genres and movements were, and are. It is a place of education, which is certainly an increased role the museum has played – is playing – it's a place where people can see work, and learn about the ideas that inform art. Art just doesn't happen; an individual or group of artists are informed by ideas and they are exploring ways, through diverse media and materials, ways to express those ideas. That is a role that museums can and should play.

There is also the great tradition of connoisseurship. The great collections of the 19th century, like that of the Frick, were teaching and establishing a tradition of aesthetics and quality. In the late 20th century, the post-modernists and the great avant-gardes began to question institutional norms and art historical discourses and art market values. And as artists they wanted to return more to the everyday material world that people, in fact, inhabited and lived in: you know... everybody is not rich! Art is not just for and by elites. Art engages ideas, gives expression to stories of knowledge. It questions conventions and gives form to our worlds of diverse ideas. This leads one to be open to the variety of art practices and to rethinking the histories that compose and too often regulate our views of the past and of daily life.

These are all part of the epic issues of change. I think we are about to enter a new one—the museum space: What is it? The virtual one? How do we represent copies and originals? How do we place time-based work in a situation where it can be seen and appreciated, and shown in relationship to the other arts? Increasingly with the flat screen, the mobility and definition of projection, this is becoming more and more feasible. You can imagine individual pieces in Watch This! being in a gallery alongside paintings. Bill Viola has done this with his work. Major museums have opened their classical collections to his work. He gave a lecture at the Frick, the great repository of a past tradition. So this is all a part of the changing perspective that recognizes convention and tradition are limited. If you only say art is part of a particular tradition or convention, that is a very limited view, and that's where the museum can play an important role because people expect, and the curator has to make transparent the informed curatorial process that goes into the selection and exhibition of artwork. The museum can become a true laboratory of art and a resource that brings ideas into the public sphere.

WCP: You're working for a government institution. I'm curious what kind of effect a shut-down would have on your research, your access to the archives, and the progression toward the Paik Archive exhibition in 2012.

JH: I don't know! I've never been in this situation because I have never worked for a government agency when this has happened before. I've heard from other colleagues who've been there that apparently when there is a government shut down, it stops. It all stops. You can't come into the office. So, all the people that are working on the (Paik) archive and my access to it… and depending on how long it is... It is sort of hard to imagine. I just don't know! Everybody is wondering. The last time this happened I wasn't there; I was off in private institutions.

There was an article in The New York Times’ arts section this past Sunday that I only just got around to reading—but have become completely enchanted with. The story is about pop-up arts performances that are occurring in cities around the country, courtesy of the Knight Arts Program, which is part of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The video above (which, by the way, has been viewed 31 million times) gives you a sense of what it’s about: unsuspecting shoppers/coffee drinkers/diners are caught off balance as seemingly “normal” people suddenly burst into song in the middle of a public space. The people, of course, are professional artists—opera singers, symphony musicians, and the like—who give a high-quality performance to a charmed audience. The upshot? Excitement, a feel-good vibe, on-the-spot contributions, and that holiest of holies, increased ticket sales for conventional performances. Everyone lives happily ever after.

To their credit, mainstream performing arts organizations are making use of the flash-mob concept, something that's been growing in popularity over the past five years. Whether or not you believe that arts audiences can be boosted with a quick fix like this one, it’s hard to deny the appeal of bringing really good art to potential consumers who haven’t yet had the opportunity to discover that they like it. That’s the long term payoff, but to me at least, the biggest plus is the delight factor—adding an unexpected arts experience to someone’s quotidian routine.

The Knight Foundation doesn’t operate in Washington, so don’t expect to see these mini-performances occurring in this city anytime soon. But how cool would it be if someone else initiated it here? Imagine: you’re shopping for kale at the Dupont farmers market when suddenly a soprano with the Washington National Opera pipes up with a romantic aria. Or you’re perusing shoes at Tyson’s and realize, looking to your left, that the entire Washington Ballet is doing jetes and pirouettes near the food court.

The New York Times' Cathy Horyn examines the gown Michelle Obama wore for Hu Jintao's state dinner. She seems impressed by Obama's choice of the festive red dress with streaky black petals by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen. I think it's overly on the nose for the Chinese president's state dinner, and that it's also not her most flattering look. Wonder what Vera Wang and Anna Wintour, who were also in attendance, thought of the dress.

Iconic buildings rendered in Legos may abound at the National Building Museum, which is cool. But "Brick Artist" Nathan Sawaya's gone and made himself a life-size Conan O'Brien out of Legos, which is infinitely cooler. Is that a life-size model of the Empire State building? Didn't think so.Over at TBD, Sarah Godfrey writes about the "amazing image" R&B singer Tyrese Gibson painted of Malcolm X administering healing to Tupac Shakur. "Amazing" is a bit hyperbolic, I think–it looks like something you'd find on the side of a van. Tyrese: Just because you've got some musical talent doesn't mean you have any painting talent.

Google "Anne Hathaway" right now and the top term that follows her name is "Catwoman." That's right, she's going to play the role immortalized by Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Hathaway reportedly beat out the likes of Keira Knightley and Jessica Biel for the role in the next Batman film,The Dark Knight Rises. I'm on the fence about the choice; I think Hathaway will be suitably slinky and bring a certain cerebralism to the role, but it's also hard to deny the athletic prowess of Biel.

If you read the story Ted Scheinman and I wrote for Washington City Paper or the Washington Post's coverage, the Times story won't tell you much, save this: While Ari Roth, Theater J's artistic director, told me in May that he planned to open the 2011-2012 season with Imagining Madoff, he now considers a Theater J production of the play to be "indefinitely postponed." But he says he'll see the Stageworks/Hudson production and will consider Inagining Madoff for a Theater J performance in the future.

Margolin offered no thoughts on the matter, Healy writes: "The playwright, meanwhile, sidestepped most questions to which she might have said something critical — about Theater J, about First Amendment protections for playwrights and especially about Mr. Wiesel, whose name did not cross her lips during two hours of conversation."

*À propos of EVERYTHING, here's Anthony Burgess on the Beatles, the Youth, and the dangers of trusting "pop prophets." (Keep an eye out for Zappa in the last frame):

*The New York Times asks, and Christopher Hitchens responds to, questions about 1) memoir vs. autobio; 2) "male hero worship"; 3) "confusion" vs. "punctuated consistency"; 4) the telephone number he most covets; and 5) whether we're all "a little bit gay."

*The Life of Brian, they tell me, was once banned in Norway.

*Nicely written review of the new Teenage Fanclub record by erstwhile City Paper fellow-traveler Aaron Leitko.

*Tonight in City Lights: The Dave Rawlings Machine at the 9:30 Club. I will be there, and if that's not enough enticement, I'm pretty sure Gillian Welch will be, too. (For a less rhapsodic take on Rawlings' current doings, check out Ben Ratliff's recent analysis, in which he gives due props to the fellow's inventions on the guitar but cluck-clucks at his singing voice. "A misuse of resources," Ratliff says of having Welch back up Rawlings, rather than the other way 'round. Ratliff's parsing of the duo's eerie, sinuous harmonies is certainly evocative. I nevertheless happen to enjoy Rawlings' voice...but different strokes, &c.; and, as Perelman says, "De gustibus ain't what dey used to be.")

*Hey, here's a YouTube video that I get a kick out of. Go, Dave, go!

Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse died this weekend, and initial reports gave his age only as being "in his forties." Caryn Ganz, who broke the news late Saturday for Rolling Stone, told me that Linkous' publicist/manager, Shelby Meade, told her his age "wasn't released."

Entertainment Weekly went with a very similar formulation to Ganz's: "Linkous, who was in his forties but whose exact age is unknown," Missy Schwartz wrote. The information replicated itself.

Linkous' Wikipedia page says he was born in 1962. I'm not good enough at figuring out when that got added, but it also says he was born in Arlington and narrowly avoided a career in coal-mining, so maybe that's not important. The New York Times reported he was 47; Ben Sisario, who wrote the item, says he "found his DOB on public records, and I also got it from the police."I don't know where Ben Sisario, who wrote the item, got that. I've e-mailed him, and I'll update when he replies.

I went on Nexis this morning and found out Mark Linkous was born in Sept. 1962. When I e-mailed Meade to ask her why so many people reported such a vague age for her client, she wrote back: "Andrew he was 47."

Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City is one of the best books of the year. So sayeth me; so sayeth the sage critterpoos at the New York Times, who include Lethem's eighth novel in their holiday gift guide. (Speaking of guides, check out ours!) While a good friend of mine alleges that Chronic City, which is about a group of pot-smoking friends who live in an alternative-universe-like Manhattan, is slow out the gate, she concedes that it paid her back ("with interest," as the bankers say). In honor of the book's goodness, Washington City Paper asked Lethem to create an annotated playlist for his novel's most compelling character (and a nerdy simulacrum for Lethem himself): former rock critic Perkus Tooth.

Ladies and gents, we give you "Perkus's Fugue State: Ten songs for rewiring your limbic system while surfing the Web for chaldrons."

Nico "I'll Keep It With Mine"  (3:20)  Chelsea Girl

Lethem says: "A brief overture to a suite of looooong songs, the most nurturing song Dylan ever wrote echoes in the abandoned gothic cathedral of Nico's voice. What's "it", and who'll keep it where? The answers to these questions have yet to be determined."

Al Green "Beware"         (13:39)  Living For You (long version)

Lethem says: "Paranoia rendered suitably seductive by the Reverend. Note how he begins a call and response with himself as the song progresses. I also like the giggles at the end."

Mahmoud Ahmed "Tezeta"        (12:32)  Ethiopiques, Vol. 10

Lethem says: "Sometimes a language you don't understand is the best way of expressing what you don't know how to say."

Van Morrison "Try For Sleep"  (6:06)  The Philosopher's Stone (Disc 1)

Lethem says: "The keyword here is "try". Good luck with that, once you begin to stumble through Van's hall of gender mirrors."

Animal Collective "What Would I Want? Sky"       (6:46)         Fall Be Kind

Lethem says: "Sure, sky is what I would want, but I'd settle for a persuasive simulation."

Cat Power   "Willie Deadwilder"   (18:18)               Speaking for Trees

Lethem says: "Very much in the tradition of Bob Dylan — not to mention Thomas Pynchon–in this apparently endless song Cat Power spins a meditation about everything and nothing at once."

Kraftwerk  "Kling Klang"        (17:30) Doppelalbum (rare)

Lethem says: "Then again, sometimes better to focus on the bass and drum. Early Krautrock is a sublime alternative musical world, like a whole rock-nation of Brian Enos. Sometimes a language you don't understand, etc."

Red House Painters  "Make Like Paper"   (12:04)         Songs For A Blue Guitar

Lethem says: "The opposite tack from Cat Power; The Red House Painters don't need a million lyrics to carve an epic. The guitar figures do it instead, until the brief written lines resound like a waker's dream."

Gillian Welch "I Dream A Highway"  (14:40)             Time (The Revelator)

Lethem says: "And now Gillian Welch splits the difference between the Cat Power and the Red House Painter approach: the refrain resonates, while the verses are like the proverbial river you can't step in twice."

Fripp/Eno  "Evening Star"       (7:50)          Essential Collection

Lethem says: "Night is falling at last for you — the night of the mind, I mean, since it's been dark outside for hours already. Fripp and Eno bring the healing, at least until tomorrow."

2,160: The number of wheels on which the 2009 U2 360 tour is currently rolling across this great nation. Divided by 18, that’s 120 trucks, carrying only the lights and stage for the tour. Who knows how many tour buses it takes to cart around Bono’s Prada support team.

7,400: A rough, and conservative, estimate of the number of miles the North American portion of the tour will have traveled when it stops in Vancouver on October 28.

126,857: At an average of 7 miles per gallon, this is the number of gallons of diesel U2 will have sucked down by the end of the month just to transport its stage from venue to venue. This isn’t even counting the 24 European dates earlier this summer, which I had to leave out of this calculation because the whole metric conversion thing just made me even angrier. NASA can’t even figure that shit out.

0: The number of times the New York Times editorial board should let Bono, that smug Irish twat, even mention, without an asterisk*, the fact that severe climate change, along with extremist ideology and extreme poverty, is one of the three biggest threats this planet faces right now.

*Carbon offsets be damned. The damage is done, dude.

Photo by Brandon Wu

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article about Jim O'Rourke, an underground overachiever who, in addition to recording his own solo music, has played in Sonic Youth and Gastr Del Sol, and worked in various other capacities with Wilco, Joanna Newsom, and Superchunk.

His latest project is the new solo album The Visitor, a recording that, at times, features as many as 200 tracks of instruments.

As one might imagine, an album such as this would require quite an intricate mix, which is perhaps why The Visitor will only be available on CD and vinyl—no digital download.

Here's part of the Ben Ratliff article from NYT:

He’s taking a stand against the sound quality of MP3s; he’s also taking a stand in favor of artists being able to control the medium and reception of their work.

“You can no longer use context as part of your work,” he said, glumly, “because it doesn’t matter what you do, somebody’s going to change the context of it. The confusion of creativity, making something, with this Internet idea of democratization ...” he trailed off, disgusted. “It sounds like old-man stuff, but I think it’s disastrous for the possibilities of any art form.”

He's not the first artist to attempt a download pushback. But is he a part of the vanguard or a dying breed?