Photography courtesy of Kevin Mazur/Wire Image

Tuesday night, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I watched a 77-year-old woman perform a three-hour rock concert at full tilt. She danced, shook, shimmied, sang, screeched, howled, and cajoled and charmed the crowd, all while beaming with lightness and pixie playfulness — she even dropped some major doses of universal love and unity on us throughout the evening. Who was this enlightened septuagenarian banshee? Yoko Ono, of course.
     The occasion was a multi-pronged celebration: Yoko’s upcoming birthday; 2009’s release of Between My Head And The Sky (which marks a new beginning for her and John Lennon’s seminal Plastic Ono Band); a reunion with some of the original band’s members after nearly forty years (Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman!); her collaboration with son Sean; and life itself. Joining the celebration were the band’s new members — fairly evenly divided between cutting-edge Japanese noise pop musicians (Yuka Honda, Cornelius, Haruomi Hosono, and others) and downtown New York experimentalists (Erik Friedlander, Shahzad Ismaily, Michael Leonhart, to name a few) — along with a list of heavyweight special guests: Paul Simon, Harper Simon, Bette Midler, Justin Bond, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Mark Ronson, and Scissor Sisters. Needless to say, it was a memorable, possibly historic show.

Image via drury.edu

Howard Zinn was one of the great humanitarians of the 20th Century. His work had a profound influence on me personally and was a factor in shaping this magazine when I was formulating it in the late 1990s. We consulted with him for our Peace Issue in 2003, and wrote a piece on him in our Voices section in 2008. Also, click here for a link to the New York Times obituary. I haven’t always agreed with all his views, but his central ideas — that history should be told from the viewpoint of those its events have most affected, and that society’s duty is to organize our resources to provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people — are important principles to keep in mind as we hurtle deeper into this Global Century. May his vision endure, and may he rest in peace.

The other day, walking down the street near my apartment in the Lower East Side, I came upon a trailer park, right on the corner of Stanton and Suffolk, which hadn’t been there before. By trailer park I mean a trailer, parked. Not an expansive terrain of trailers. But also, inside the tiny, silver Coachman Travel Trailer was a park — yes, growing plants, shrubs, and trees, a miniature cascading waterfall and pond, wood and concrete benches, and skylights to let in sunshine. I stepped in, and enjoyed the natural park setting, the sound of trickling water, the dappled sunlight on the outstretched plant leaves.
     Originally commissioned in 2006 for an exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Kim Hollerman’s Trailer Park is not new. It’s been written about before, and some of our readers may have seen it when it first exhibited (parked?) back in ’06. But for me, it was a fresh slice of genius on a sunny fall day.

Currently parked at NY Studio Gallery, 154 Stanton Street.

Just released today, Between My Head and The Sky is a continuation of Yoko Ono’s musical and artistic journey, but also represents the return of her Plastic Ono Band — this time with son Sean Lennon in a major supporting role, on guitars and also with his new label, Chimera. The album also touts legendary Japanese “noise” musician Cornelius on numerous instruments, including guitars, percussion, and electronic programming, and his influence is delightfully present. Throughout her career Ono has been pushing boundaries in art, music, and, of course, in speaking her mind. At 76, she’s still a vibrant creative force that deserves to be reckoned with — and, vocally, she can still channel her inimitable inner-banshee. On this track, “Waiting for the D Train”, Ono perfectly captures the maddening energy and tension of waiting for most any notoriously late subway line. (For all you Brooklynites, just insert an ‘L’.) Next time you’re stuck on a  subway platform, make sure this is on your i-Pod, hit play, and…let go.

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Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band – Waiting for the D Train

Friendly Fire Recordings

The Phenomenal Handclap Band is a collective out of NYC that specializes in combining elements of every major musical genre of the last forty years — rock, soul, psychedelia, disco, prog-rock, funk, new wave, and probably a few others I’ve missed. It seems like an unruly soup, but somehow they make it work in a mostly seamless rollick through the decades. And not only that, they get you dancing. Members have been involved in numerous notable projects, from TV on the Radio to Calla to Mooney Suzuki and others. They also happen to be friends, so over the last few months I’ve sat by as everyone from Rolling Stone to NPR, Spin to Pitchfork have gushed over this band. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a way to get into the game — but haven’t been sure what other superlatives I could add. Alas, their first video provides an opportunity. All this time I’ve suspected they’ve been up to no good; now it’s confirmed.

We first wrote about Robert Geller Collection when it launched in fall 2007. Since then, Geller has gone on to become one of the most watched American Menswear designers. At the time that we about wrote him, he was drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, specifically Godard’s Breathless. As Geller explained to PLANET then, he wanted to portray a sense of masculinity that was free, playful, and hadn’t been hemmed in. Yet he also wanted to show a vulnerability, which, after all, exists in any real man at any age. In his clothes and in his models, Geller was unabashedly drawn to youth — proto-males that were still evolving, or, as I wrote then, “slightly unformed creatures who were not yet certain to turn out good or bad.”
     In his Spring/Summer 2010 collection, presented Saturday at Exit Art in New York City, Geller is still looking to the past for inspiration, but once again as a way of reconstructing the present. As we work through our own economic midnight, Geller says he focused on the German 1950s for his collection’s theme — not that men dressed like this then, but rather, he would have liked them to. It was a time when Germany was picking itself up after the devastation of the war and, through the economic miracle known as Wirtschaftswunder, began emerging from that haunted past. The bold use of color, more pronounced than in previous Geller collections, is a symbol of the renewal of spring and its potential for redemption.

Excerpts from The Incredible Machine, 2.1. Images courtesy of Leah Raintree

We first came across the art of Leah Raintree last year, when we were preparing a feature article on the artist Ernesto Caivano. At the time, Leah was working as Caivano’s studio manager – handling calls and requests, and delivering images – all the while working on her own oeuvre in the evenings and on weekends. Interestingly, in a way that seems fitting for the two of them to have crossed paths, there are a lot of aesthetic similarities between their work, something the two artists talked about openly before Caivano hired her. They both work in ink on paper and they both build elaborate constructs around their creations. But there are also distinct differences, apparently enough for the two artists to feel comfortable working together. For starters, Leah’s work doesn’t explore narratives the way Caivano’s famously does. And it’s abstract instead of figurative, rooted in deep thought around corporeal, technological, philosophical, literary, and artistic historical themes that are then explored in a process that is part deliberate, part accident and revelation. In the end, though, the work is still very much about Raintree simultaneously mapping out and discovering her own cosmology.

Photography by Matthew Scott

The following images are taken from an ongoing project, titled Observing: Venice, by photographer Matthew Scott. Venice Beach is, of course, one of a handful of mythic places in America – Haight Street, Coney Island, Times Square, Las Vegas, Hollywood – where the American experience has historically played out in larger-than-life and non-traditional ways. These have always been the magnets of America’s misfits, marginals, and “freaks”, places  of transience where anything could happen and something always does. Since moving to Venice, Scott has been observing his new, if temporary, home and its inhabitants. Or, as he puts it, “I’m trying to figure out my life and theirs.” What is revealed is an aspect of Venice’s eccentric myth, but only around the edges. More central is a peaceful quietness, a comforting, if banal, normalcy. Instead of training his lens on the boardwalk, he focuses on ordinary people living ordinary lives.

Hermas Zopoula is an artist we just got turned onto by our friends at Asthmatic Kitty, which is putting out his debut album this month. His music is simple, warm, and heartfelt. In this video, shot in the front yard of his home in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, he plays a song from his debut, Espoir, called “Attention”. What I love about this video is how naturally the music fits into his environment, with the sound of the wind rustling the tree leaves, the faint noise of children playing nearby, a bird squawking, a storm brewing in the distance. It’s about as authentic as things get. Hermas is set to play a show in New York on June 12, at Sycamore in the Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn – that is if the U.S. of A. comes through on his visa. Fingers crossed.