Music « Curious Affairs Of Atherton Bartelby

12 April 2009 • 06:12 0

Oh My Ears And Whiskers

Tod Kapke Foto Illustration Design - Bunnies

Very early this morning I remembered an Easter Sunday tradition in my childhood home. My mother would put some beautiful, moving piece of music on the record player (usually, in honor of springtime, Clément Philibert Léo Delibes’ Lakmé, and in particular its Sous le dôme épais section), and spend an hour or so introducing me to artists and art movements from her impressive collection of art history books, in the morning sunlight of our sitting room. This was not, of course, the only time of the year my mother did this, but for some reason, for me, it was always the most memorable. (Perhaps this had not a little to do with the anticipation of her expansive culinary presentation of the family’s Easter brunch, immediately following the seemingly endless Episcopalian Easter Sunday liturgy that always occurred after our early morning art history lessons.)

So I was delighted to stumble upon, this morning, while attempting to continue my little family tradition all by myself, the work of Denver-based illustrator / photographer / designer Tod Kapke, via one of my favorite art blogs, My Love For You Is A Stampede Of Horses. (Perhaps not only coincidentally, I discovered Kapke’s portfolio site just as Delibes’ Sous le dôme épais began playing on my Last.fm radio station.) Of course I knew immediately that the dark tones of one of Kapke’s “Bunny” pieces would be an excellent eGreeting from Curious Affairs for a, well, a “curiously” happy Easter to those who celebrate it. But I was also deeply impressed by Kapke’s creative process, which he illustrates in great detail on the Process page of his portfolio site. I always enjoy discovering fellow visual artists whose process is as involved as my own, so even Kapke’s process sketches were a joy to wander through.

It was a lovely way to spend this very early Easter Sunday dawn: continuing traditions begun seeming lifetimes ago.

I wish all of you the same kind of inspiration this morning, whether you celebrate Easter, or, like me, will once again be skipping the seemingly endless Episcopalian Easter Sunday liturgy, yet enjoy revisiting the traditions and memories that are invoked by the day, all the same.

Filed under: Art, Design, Music, Personal, Photography , bunnies, delibes, egreetings, family, history, linkage, love each day, memories, needful reminders, opera, process, tod kapke

16 March 2009 • 15:29 0

Imogen Heap: Doin It Rite

I am quite tickled that Justin decided to steer today’s “Justin Plus One” discussion toward music in his last post regarding the scorched ear phenom, as it will give me the opportunity to highlight a bit of news I discovered this morning about music and social networking. It will also rather nicely continue in the vein of comparing something done really well with something done not quite so well.

I have been a fan of Imogen Heap for many years, from her work as half of the duo Frou Frou during the early part of this decade, to her more recent lush, vibrant solo projects. What I admire nearly as much as I admire her amazing voice and her talents with a staggering array of musical instruments and post-production mixing is her consistently growing use of social networking sites with which to interact with her fans.

Imogen has been extremely active on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace for quite awhile, now, using all of the social networking services to broadcast news and new music and videos to her fans. But Imogen has taken a very significant extra step that most celebrity users of popular social networking sites do not often take: she actually interacts with her fans via social networking sites in a very genuine way. She even recently began using the video status updating service 12seconds in the same manner. A post by Ze Frank yesterday on his blog further highlighted Imogen’s work with fans on the social web, specifically in preparation for the production and release of her upcoming EP:

:: Her new blog will be collaboratively written using Twitter :: She recently released all the individual elements of a track and asked fans to remix them :: Her YouTube Channel remains charming and personal and incudes some snippets from the upcoming album as well as a call for album cover artwork ::

In a time during which most celebrities are using social web tools to simply broadcast information to their public, with little to no interaction with any other users beyond their small elite circles, Imogen Heap is utilizing the tools in such a way that those who admire her creative output feel more of a genuine connection with the artist. It is rather heartening to see celebrities using social networking platforms to communicate with their fans in this more genuine, meaningful fashion.

Ze Frank, incidentally, concluded his blog post with the admonition to search around YouTube for Imogen Heap gems, and includes a link to the embedded video below: fabulous footage of Imogen recording the soaring “Just For Now”.

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Note: Originally published at Justin Plus One on 16 March 2009.

Filed under: Blogging, Music, Net Culture , celebrities, imogen heap, justin plus one, linkage, social networking, video, ze frank

13 March 2009 • 13:23 6

Breaking: Not At SXSW

Welcome, one and all, to this, the first official and self-admitted throwaway entry of 2009 in Curious Affairs! We are exceedingly happy that you have somehow managed to remember to pay us a visit during these, the apparent dormant dog days of creative production here, and graciously welcome any hate rants toward us you may have been harboring due to our painful absence / silence since St. Valentine’s Day. You may leave them in the lively comments section of the Curious Affairs salon! (Again, please mind the alarming-looking short man in the too-large top hat wandering about our soirée with a drinks tray; he’s been known to spike the virgin Lime Rickeys with hallucinogens.)

We admit our embarrassing recent neglect of Curious Affairs, but would like to assure our audience that we have not been lazy in our dalliances of late. Additionally, although this is, as previously stated, a throwaway entry meant only to maintain our listings on our fabulous affiliates before they drop our shameful derrières because we have not posted any new content in 29 days, we would like to promise our readership that a bevy of new and potentially interesting / thought-provoking / emo articles shall be gracing the pixels of Curious Affairs over the coming weekend…just before we dash off to play guest blogger in another fabulous blog for the entirety of next week.

So! What have we been up to, then?

Writing: Remarkably, our intellects have been kept rather busy with a host of truly innovative writing and blogging projects over the past several weeks, and we are quite anxious to share them with you over the coming days. They involve love (*vomits a little, delicately, in mouth*), family, design, cultural relevancy, memory, and careers. So please look for these teasers with great anticipation over the next few days.
Careers: Speaking of careers, we are currently hiring! Or, more accurately, we are currently desperately seeking to be hired! We feel that we have prostituted our résumé to every media and creative outlet in Manhattan over the past several weeks, but please, if you feel that we have somehow shamefully overlooked your organization, please do contact us for an immediate review of our qualifications, portfolios, fabulosity, and just how much value we could add to your agency / studio / governmental intelligence organization!
Reading: We are currently obsessed with Razorfish’s Digital Outlook Report 2009; Joanne McNeil’s Tomorrow Museum; Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings; Art Fag City’s impressive coverage of the exhausting and ecstatic Armory Week in New York; and the achingly witty and newly discovered (by us) online journal Scallywag & Vagabond, “A Dissection of Popular Culture, Arts, Fashion, Manners, Etiquette and the Stimulants that Accompany Them.” All are truly marvelous picks.
Photography: We are currently addicted to playing with levels, exaggerating color saturations, and enhancing grungy contrasts. We are also addicted to TEN:15, the photo collective that exhibits what each participant is seeing at precisely 10:15 each morning. The lead image for this article is, in fact, one of the images on our photo stream for the project, all of which are available in higher resolutions on our Flickr stream.
Music: Sorry. Nothing much to report here. We’ve essentially been listening to Kalopsia’s The Blizzard on repeat. For weeks, apparently.

And that, my dears, is really about it! Aside from all of that and frantically not running all about the Austin Convention Center and not attending panels and not seeing exhibitions and not meeting up for lunch with @ryankuder because we are actually not, as previously anticipated, at SXSW, life is, well, pretty grand!

We shall return within the next 24 hours to begin the roll of unprecedented weekend coverage here at Curious Affairs. It promises to be as exciting as watching that live coverage of the not-Chris-Brown-driven white Bentley Hollywood car chase via myFOXla video feeds and Twitter all over again!

But, you know, without the suicide.

Filed under: Blogging, Music, Net Culture, Personal, Photography , a-list, being servicey, humor, linkage, pimpage

15 January 2009 • 04:40 9

The Bartelby Seven

The Seven - Photo By Flickr User Whose Name I'm Sorry I Forgot To Record

“But I’m a chronic internet oversharer! If there are seven things about me that have not already been vomited up onto my blog, I will be shocked, Darling, simply shocked!”

—Atherton Bartelby

Of course, I was tagged (ages ago, yes, I know, Darlings!) by the fabulous Damien Basile of The Cause Is The Habit to complete that infamous “Seven Things Most People Don’t Know About Me” meme that has been making its way throughout the more colorful and fabulous sectors of the internet over the last several weeks. Now, while I am no stranger to internet memes, I do try to keep their appearances in this blog to a minimum (although the Curious Affairs blog category “Memes Are Beneath Me” may beg to differ with me on that assertion). But I will not deny that I enjoy participating in them when they are interesting, when other fascinating people I admire are also participating in them, and when, despite my plaintive wailing in the epigraph of this piece, participating in said meme may just allow my readers and friends to get to know me a bit better. So, here we go.

[Also, I altered the rules a bit, and am not "tagging" anyone to complete it upon the its conclusion, primarily because I am so embarrassingly tardy with my own completion of it that I am afraid everyone I would tag would have already completed it for someone else. Instead, I am including links to seven Twitter friends whose own lists I found rather interesting. However, please do definitely consider responding with your own list of seven items, and consider yourself invited to publish them on your own blog; and if you do, I would simply love it if you linked me to your entry in a comment to this one.]

Right! Without further ado, I give you: the seven things you (hopefully) do not know about Atherton Bartelby.

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I was trained in classical ballet from about just as soon as I learned how to walk until I was thirteen years old. Dancing was my entire life throughout those years, and I had every intention and dream of growing up to become a famous premier danseur with American Ballet Theatre; I was even en pointe (although for men this is a rarity), like my idol Rudolf Nureyev, for the last four years of my ballet training. My years of dancing came to an abrupt and unexpected end, however, during a live performance of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” in which I fell onto my right knee after coming out of a grand jeté. The ensuing damage to my knee’s bones and tendons prohibited me from continuing my career as a dancer, but to this day the arthritis pain I feel there is still an almost 100% accurate predictor of rain.
My first language was, technically speaking, Latin. My mother, among other things a professor of English literature, was a vehement advocate of being multilingual, and this vehemence extended particularly to one’s knowledge of classical languages, as well. So, while as a very young child I was given cereal boxes and other packaging to read at the breakfast table, I was given Latin grammar books and flash cards at the bruncheon table, so that I was actually reading Latin well before I was reading or speaking English. Knowledge of French came soon after English, thanks again to my mother; a bit of German and Russian for good measure, from my father; and, for some odd reasons, Spanish, Italian, and Greek during my college years. But I will always thank that formidable training in Latin for my lifelong love of all languages.
I was a champion dressage rider for six years of boarding school: two in Switzerland, and four in America. I like to think that my success in this sport had much to do with my favorite childhood “pet” of all time: a black Arabian thoroughbred named Beauvais. A son of my parents’ respective Arabians, Beauvais taught me a lot about discipline and dedication from a very early age, in a way that caring for my family’s countless purebred Himalayan and Chinchilla cats, Dobermans, and Greyhounds did not. This drive and dedication were utilized and perfected when I began riding competitively at school, and although the horses I rode during competitions were not Beauvais, I always sensed an air of pride about him whenever I mounted him after enjoying a particularly successful term of riding wins. Sadly, Beauvais, like many possessions both animate and inanimate, was one of the casualties of my parent’s eventual divorce.
Despite the fact that I am a “Momma’s Boy,” and was raised by my mother to know and appreciate Latin, classical ballet and piano, fine art, higher-end literature, haute couture, and proper manners, my father was somehow surprisingly successful at imparting some of his rather alarming butch knowledge / fetishes onto his Mary son. For example, I do not jest in the slightest when I recall fond memories of my father teaching me to properly aim and fire a .22 caliber Beretta, a 9 millimeter automatic, and a .357 Magnum with fairly impressive accuracy. Also, although I may not know the functional difference between a muffler and a carburetor, I have an almost heterosexual-male-esque fascination with and love of cars (just nothing American, Darling, unless it’s the original Ford Cobra that Cheryl Ladd as Kris Munroe drove on “Charlie’s Angels”). And when I was, in my past, a two-fifth-a-day scotch drinker, my knowledge of said spirit was, as my father’s had been, shockingly encyclopedic.
I have one brother, and he is sixteen years older than me. Following my brother’s birth, and an unfortunate miscarriage eight years after that, my parents had all but given up having any more children when I just kind of…happened. As my brother Balthazar was just going off to undergraduate school when I was born, I really do not remember him as being much of a presence in my young life, save for terrorizing me on family vacations in Aspen and Martha’s Vineyard that resulted in my mother screaming hysterically and my father talking to my brother in stern and quiet tones. My brother, still a Midwest resident with his wife and my two handsome nephews, and I have grown much closer since the deaths of our parents, and although it seems odd that it should have taken nearly a lifetime to become as close as we are now, I am still thankful that we eventually arrived at this rather amazing space in our relationship, as he has become a man of whom I am exceedingly proud to call, “Brother”.
I began smoking cigarettes when I was 19 years old…three years after I started smoking when I was 16 years old. Yes, I was a “puffer”…for three years! I was so very proud of my two-pack-a-day Marlboro Red habit throughout my last years of prep school and first few weeks of undergraduate college. Until one brisk autumn day, when my college BFF Kramer and I stood waiting for an uptown 6 train at Astor Place, and she quizzically watched me “inhale” and “exhale” my Marlboro Red before exclaiming, “Holy shit! You’re not really smoking!” This, of course, resulted in us spending the rest of our train rides back to Westchester County and the better part of two packs of cigarettes with her teaching me how to properly inhale. Which, I am proud to say, I eventually learned, and have been smoking properly ever since.
I’ve saved the biggest thing people may not know about me for last, and it is this: for all that I may joke about and seem to be an internet oversharer? Surprise: I’m really not. Oh, sure, I may in the past have chronicled all manner of sexual escapades in this space, ripped ex-lovers new assholes with my irrational rage, and gossiped shamelessly about friends and colleagues. But even then and especially now, for every one secret (of my own or others’) that I have divulged to the online world? There are easily twenty more that are kept just to myself. And it’s all of those secrets, and my confidence that only I know about them, that make me smile late at night, when I’ve insomnia, and lean against my kitchen counter to flip through Vouge or Monocle, and eat saltine crackers spread thickly with strawberry flavored Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese…