NEW SUMMER MUSIC
It’s hot and everything blows and is old and stupid and rotten. . . except for these bands:
Have there been any particular bands/people that inspired you to perform as you do?
There are no influences in the music we make, we’re trying to do something completely new.
-from an interview with Fact Magazine
Total myspace plays 1555495. Just today: 1446. Make it one more.
Taking a name from She Ra cartoons and playing with old Atari computer chips may not sound like anything new, until you actually listen to the music being produced by this Canadian duo whose ‘Alice Practice’ EP on Merok Records sold 200 in two days and is now sold out. Also just check out all the bands on Merok. You really can’t go wrong.
Au Revoir Simone
Total Myspace plays: 684320. Today: 627. GO!
Triple keyboard action from three very pretty and hippie-looking girls from Brooklyn. Soft but driving. The band’s name comes from a minor character in Tim Burton’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, has nothing to do with being french.
Also you can type in their name on
BICYCLE HELMETS
People are wearing them. . . a lot. Nothing’s changed, they haven’t gotten any cooler looking, but people seem to make a game out of buying the dorkiest ones possible. All of the sudden people have become safety conscious. Must be on account of trans-fat bans and environmental scares. Responsibility will soon be the new black, or something dumb like that.
We think a hot tip on making a million bucks would be to design a bike helmet so awesome that all the persons still putting their image before their safety fold their hand.
EARLY BLOGGERS LATE(R) IN LIFE: LIBBY AND ROBERTA’S ARTBLOG
Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon have been writing Artblog since 2003. This is fairly early in the relatively short history of the blog. Though online diaries and early forms of the web-log have been with us since 1994, the actual term “web-log” wasn’t coined (by Jorn Barger) until the 17th of December, 1997. The renown blogging site Blogger.com (used by our ladies) wasn’t created till 1999, and Google didn’t think it relevant enough to purchase until 2003. Gawker.com is a popular Manhatten-based blog started in 2002, while its Philly equivalent Philebrity.com (Paper Magazine said it first. Blame them.) didn’t get into the game till 2004. As for us? We were fashionably late, crashing the party in 2005.
Blogger.com provides a free site to anyone who is interested; but not everyone has interesting things to say. Roberta and Libby are racking up the stats, ahead of the wave in a pool dominated by youngish hipster types. These old ladies of art (Libby is 61, Roberta 58) have their fingers to the pulse of the art scene and have inspired a loyal readership from all over the world.
Over lunch at Vietnam Palace (11th St. Philadelphia), we talked to Libby and Roberta about the early days of blogging; trying to make your online journal a cash cow; the death of regionalism in the art world; the overpowering shadow of New York City; and got the scoop on the ladies top picks (both for artlogs and artists).
BECAUSE PHILADELPHIA NEEDED IT AND BLOGS COST ZERO
The Vulture: When did you first start Artblog?
Libby: April 13th of 2003.
V: So it’s been four years. . . why did you feel the need to start an art blog?
Roberta: There’s not enough writing about art in Philadelphia. There hasn’t been for ten years, and over the course of our friendship, which has been many years we’ve always thought that was a problem. Blogging software came along, and we just thought “we can start up a blog and we can do it.”
Libby: Right. A blog doesn’t have distribution issues, we thought about doing it in print, but we couldn’t deal with the horrors of printing. . .
Roberta: And the cost! We would have had to hire an advertising person because we couldn’t bare the burden. We’re self-produced so we pay for everything that we do. A printed magazine would be beyond our interest.
V: But what made you really think “We gotta have a blog” ? Where’d that inspiration come from? I mean all of your previous work has been for newspapers. . .
Libby: Blogging software had been around for, three years or something?
Roberta: I think longer than that.
Libby: We started at a point where it was really taking off and we just. . . Roberta’s husband is a techie, and he said. . .
Roberta: “Start a blog,” you know, no-brainer.
Libby: So we did. We actually talked to people about doing it. We talked to Paula Marincola (head of Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative) to get her advice, and she said “just do it.” I don’t know why we needed her permission, but we did. (laughs)
Roberta: Well, we were talking to people, you know how you do, when you want to get money and you hope it will come up and they’ll offer you money but she didn’t say “here’s some money” she said “do it!”
So we said “Oh well.” We didn’t have any money and she wasn’t going to give us any.
Libby: Right, but the cost of blogging is zero. The only thing we really invest in is our techie guy, and now we hire someone to handle the advertising, because we can’t do that and post the blogs. It’s one or the other.
LIBBY AND ROBERTA = SPIDERS
V: How much does advertising bring in on a site like yours?
Libby: Not much.
Roberta: Last year it was $5,000. We don’t pay ourselves very often, only a hundred dollars here or there.
V: What attracts advertisers to a web-log like yours?
Roberta: Our readers. They call it a sticky web-site because people get stuck on it. They stay for at least a minute and a half and go several pages deep into the site, which is unusual for an online arts magazine.
Libby: Our ads have a high click-through rate.
V: Who’s reading your blog?
Libby: Everyone. Everyone we think. Everyone online, but not everyone is online. there are a lot of people out there who don’t spend anytime online. We have a lot of local fans, curators, artists, art students, art teachers. . .
Roberta: Collectors, writers . . .
Libby: We know this because of the sorts of e-mails we get.
V: I’ve actually often heard that you two are the only art writers in Philadelphia. . .
Roberta: Can we quote you on that?
IT’S CALLED THE WORLD-WIDE WEB FOR A REASON
Roberta: We have readers from all over the world, we found that out from the little stats counter we have on our site. 13% of our readers are from out of the country, we even have readers in Africa and Egypt. 13%! We’re in Philadelphia for crying out loud!
V: But you review things from outside of Philadelphia. . .
Roberta: Oh sure! We go to New York as heavily as we can. We know that’s where it’s all going on, at least from a U.S. perspective.
Libby: And people are always looking for stuff on those artists. It’s good for us to cover that from a reader’s point of view, we want to catch some of that sizzle and some of that interest.
Roberta: Plus who doesn’t love to go to New York and see stuff?
Libby: We also feel the need to place the art we’re seeing in Philadelphia into a larger context, and we think by going to New York and seeing the stuff there it helps us to have a sense of what’s going on in the greater world. We think it shows that Philadelphia is in there, it’s part of all of that.
Roberta: That was the goal when we started. To make Philly one with the global discussion on art. Philadelphia has had this rep as being a regional backwater for so long and what we were seeing here was not regional backwater. Philadelphians make art that holds up to what we see in New York, or Milwaukee, or wherever we go. Regionalism is going away. We’ve been beating that drum for a long time.
It’s all the same, whether it’s good or not.
Libby: It’s global.
Roberta: Equally good.
V: It almost seems like that’s an important part of living in Philly, going up to New York and trying to get them to share.
Libby: Absolutely, and we do have lots of New York readers. . . all the New York bloggers I know, know us, I think.
LOOK! ITS LIBBY AND ROBERTA
Watch in FLASH by clicking the picture above
V: Do you ever feel just a tinsy bit famous when you go to an art show? Do people recognize you?
Roberta: More so now that we started the videos. We used to have some really weird invisibility where we’d walk in and people didn’t know who we were, but since the videos went up people come up to us and say “Hey! You’re the artblog ladies!”
Libby: Even though we’ve always had pictures of us on the site, it’s not the same thing.
V: Why’d you want to start the video segment?
Libby: We’ve had this dream, of some kind of video or TV show for years and years. You know, “Come to the Galleries with Libby and Roberta.” This is more what we wanted from the beginning, a conversation about art and not just copy about art.
Roberta: David Kessler approached us to do this video, and it dropped in like bread from the sky. We would have never gotten it together to do this but for him.
A BLOGGER’S WORK IS NEVER DONE
V: How many shows do you go to in a week?
Libby: It varies from week to week. There will be weeks when I go to 6-7 shows, and then there will be weeks when I just seem to be writing, catching up, because I’ve seen so many shows that I’m just writing.
Roberta: It’s a cycle. You have to go out and see, go to shows and take notes and all of that and then you have to make time to write it. We haven’t done an inventory of the amount of blog posts, but if you look in the archive you can see the number of posts-per-year. . .
Libby: We do something like 500 posts a year.
V: I think I just read that you were up to 312 this year.
Libby: Right, and it’s only June.
Roberta: That’s probably due to our new correspondent, Andrea Kirsch, she’s a work-horse! And she’s so great. I love having different people write for us, they bring a different audience and a different perspective to the blog.
Libby: Yes. We’ve been working together for 18-19 years, so we think a lot alike. We’re fanatical.
NOT GENIUSES BUT AHEAD OF THE WAVE
V: How do you keep the energy working in the art world for so long and not being at all cynical or bitter about it?
Roberta: Who’s cynical and bitter?
V: Well it seems like a lot of the. . .
Roberta: Artists you mean? Not writers.
V: But you guys are artists too?
Libby: We’re “OK Artists.”
V: What’s that about?
Roberta: Well many years ago we decided that we needed a brand.
Libby: That’s it.
Roberta: I mean, we know what we’re talking about here when we look at our art and we look at everybody else’s art. I mean, come on! Not everyone can be a genius!
Libby: And we aren’t. Not in terms of art; we’re not geniuses, but we think we’re pretty smart on other things.
Roberta: We’re pretty smart, and I think we’ve been consistently ahead of the loop. Ahead of the pack.
Libby: Ahead of the wave.
Roberta: We were pretty early on the blog and then with the videos, hardly anyone is doing those yet, in terms of artlogs.
Libby: I will say one more thing we we’re ahead of the wave on was having an index, we figured out how to do it before blogger even offered it.
TOP PICKS
V: What are your top-pick artlogs?
Roberta and Libby: Zoe Strauss‘ and Rob Matthews’ . . .
Libby: . . . because their personal energy comes through, and they’re both very smart. It’s worth reading. Those are local ones. . . in terms of the big artlogs that are out there? They all, sometimes interest me, sometimes don’t. It depends on my mood. . .
Roberta: My blog reading has fallen off.
Libby: So has everyone’s.
Roberta: I think if you got a lot of blog writers together and asked them how their stats were now-a-days they’d say “our readership is down.” There’s definitely a saturation of blogs right now, and I’m sure people are trying some of the newer ones.
One blog I really like for the pictures is James Wagner’s. There’s not a lot of commentary, but the pictures are so great.
V: Who are your favorite artists in Philadelphia?
Roberta: On the Record?!? (Seems a little outraged.)
V: Gotta ask.
Libby: Everyone. We love everyone.
The Vulture has it First.
We may not wax poetical on our “stories” for multiple paragraphs (or sentences. . .) but we have it first. The Vulture consistently trumped the New York Times on all the important coverage of last week:
We beat them to the punch on The Renegade Craft Fair, they even copied our picture of crafter Sue Eggen!
We covered the TMZ posting of OJ’s book first as well. . .
So stay tuned to us and reading the New York Times will seem like review.
HOW TO TELL YOUR JOKE IS ANNOYING EVERYONE:
You Know you’re Not Online Enough
When online gossip site TMZ can post OJ’s manuscript of the controversial “If I Did It” in its entirety for ten whole minutes without getting into trouble and you didn’t even get to see any of it.
Check it out:
“In the court papers filed today, the lawyer for the trustee wrote, “…during the time that the Manuscript was published on the TMZ Website, literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, downloaded the Manuscript, and now hold [the] property on their hard drives, property that is now freely transferable around the globe at the click of a mouse.”
Life is so not fair. We hope to see a street vendor slugging copies off Canal (NY) or Market Street (Philly) in a couple of days though. . .
Fashion Report from the Renegade Craft Fair, Brooklyn.
Sue a crafter. Her company is called Giant Dwarf.
The Renegade Craft Fair started at the start of the craft boom in 2003, Chicago. It now takes place annually in both Chicago and New York. It’s a place for crafters to ware their DIY goods, but increasingly, as sites like Etsy.com have made it easier for craft-personages to sell year round to a wider audience, it is also the place to see and be seen as part of a growing scene of arts and crafts.
McCarren Pool
This year’s Brooklyn fair took place in the burnt-out shell of an old enormous pool (McCarren Pool). There were 200 booths, curated from a sea of 400 applicants, and if you couldn’t catch a clue to trends in fashion from the vendors themselves, it was impossible not to notice how well-tressed the customers were. The Vulture was there to take note of some of the highlights:
Bloomers.
EXTREME HIGH WAISTS. Women (mostly) are beginning to tuck in their shirts again. Shorts and jeans are becoming higher in the waist and showing off a skinny waistline competes with the simultaneous trend of the FORMLESS HIPPY DRESS. This dress was a winner for vendors at the fair, as most crafters either don’t have a pattern for waistlines or just can’t sew one. The formless hippy dress is usually worn very short, which may account for the re-emergence of very-old fashioned underwear. BLOOMERS! A lacy almost short, could be seen peaking out from under some of the ladies short balloon-clothing (not that we were looking). A conservative trend, but none-the-less apparent was the use of a PARASOL to ward off the extreme summer sun.
Parasols.
Crafters sell anything that can be screen-printed on and the total number of tote-bags and t-shirts for sale was a little nauseating. However, it was impossible not to notice a similar motif among the prints; super-eight cameras, owls (the icon of the Renegade Craft Fair), and sea creatures (both octopuses and jellyfishes). Here we see wolves, another Renegade favorite:
Tote bags and t-shirts.
Felt tacos.
The Onion is a sponsor of the fair
With printing being as over-done as it is it was easy to see why a noticeable number of young men seem to be donning an age-old classic: the plain white t-shirt and jeans, to the extent which it appeared, almost like a uniform.
MORRISSEY: Yesterday and Today.
“Shoplifters of the World”
Okay, so you have to add three years to this 2004 performance:
For the Love of God it’s freaking ugly
We’ve been trying to ignore the hype around Damien Hirst’s new piece of work, a $100 million dollar diamond encrusted real human skull, because frankly what can you say besides “Aw shucks those crazy artists have done something shocking again” and you can’t even shout foul play because supposedly the diamonds are all “ethically sourced” (?) It’s like trying to ignore a $100 million dollar diamond encrusted real human skull, though, you just can’t.
We can’t wait to find out who buys the thing (how embarrassing for Damien if no one does!), imagining it behind a lazer field protected by guards with big guns is a scene outta batman. If only the skull had magical powers. . .
Those in Philadelphia should flock to the Philadelphia Art Museum in order to see a semblance of this new piece of skull art in a much older (did it in 1997!) and budget piece by Gabriel Orozco: here.
JOY DIVISION IS THE NEW BEATLES, BUT WAIT. . . SO ARE THE BEATLES.
Just a little note to point out that the music of Joy Division has a classic vibe and dead star that assures that it’ll be listened to for a very long time. Many people have told us that Joy Division’s music is too dark and will never be played in bars and in elevators to the extent that the Beatle’s music is, but we beg to differ. It’s going to happen, it’s already reached that level in the areas owned by the slightly younger and hipper and as those members of society grow older what was dark about JD will only be forgotten and what is singable and danceable will be hummed. Skeletons in the closet will assure a cult following even as the music moves mainstream. Books and books and movies have been made and are being made as we speak.
Related news is the reemergence in interest in The Beatles themselves, as well as groups like The Monkees and The Turtles. (That’s going to happen every couple of years for the rest of your life, suck it up.)
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