ARTS

THE END OF CBGB

JON PARELES, NY TIMES - Just after 1 a.m. on Monday morning, the last
notes of live music rang from the stage of CBGB & OMFUG, the Bowery club
where punk-rock invented itself. Patti Smith finished the club's final
concert with her ballad "Elegie," growing teary-eyed as she read a list
of dead punk-rock musicians and advocates. . .

In some ways CBGB, which opened in December 1973, ended its life as it
had started. It never moved from its initial location, which was
originally under a Bowery flophouse, now a homeless shelter. It never
changed its floor plan, with a long bar lit by neon beer signs on the
way to an uneven floor, a peeling ceiling, a peculiarly angled stage and
notorious bathrooms. Through the years, the sound system was improved
until its clean roar could make any power chord sound explosive. Mostly,
however, CBGB just grew more encrusted: with dust, with band posters
stuck on every available surface, with bodily fluids from performers and
patrons. Ms. Smith did some casual spitting of her own during her set.

But in a historical long shot, CBGB got lucky. The concepts of bands
booked there turned out to be durable ones: Ms. Smith's blunt, visionary
and primal songs; Talking Heads' nervously oblique funk, and especially
the Ramones' terse, blaring, catchy rockers, which came to define
punk-rock. Having nurtured bands like those--and later post-punk bands
from Sonic Youth to Living Colour--CBGB became a rock landmark. Its
reputation grew strong enough to coast on. Even as its regular bookings
grew far less selective through the 1990's and 2000's, every now and
then a big-name band would play there as a pilgrimage. . .

"Kids, they'll find some other club," Ms. Smith insisted during her set.
"You just got a place, just some crappy place, that nobody wants, and
you got one guy who believes in you, and you just do your thing. And
anybody can do that, anywhere in the world, any time."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/arts/music/16cnd-cbgbnotebook.html?hp&ex=
1161057600&en=903590e7bd503594&ei=5094&partner=homepage


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PAINTING FROM MEMORY

ATHANASIUS KIRCHER SOCIETY - Franco Magnani spent most of the first 24
years of his life in Pontito, a small town in the hills of Tuscany.
Until recently he had not returned to Pontito or even seen so much as a
a photograph of the town. However, at age 31, he began to experience
vivid dreams of his boyhood home. He developed an obsessive
all-consuming fixation with his past, and could think of little else,
resulting in what Oliver Sacks calls "a sort of half existence in the
present." Though he had no experience as an artist, Magnani felt
compelled to paint the visions from his childhood that were intruding
compulsively on his consciousness. The paintings are astonishly accurate
- but also telling in their idealized distortions of this lost paradise.
After an exhibit of Magnani's work was mounted at the Exploratorium in
San Francisco in 1988, he had the opportunity to return to Pontito. The
town was practically uninhabited.

http://francomagnani.com/about.aspx
http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=987

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