First, next week will begin Kunstwollen’s first extensive coverage of an aesthetic event.  As we speak, hundreds of nerds, computer geeks, film geeks, music executives, musicians, music junkies, musos, PIBs, etc. are heading down to Austin, TX for the annual convergence of creativity and ridiculous fun known as the South By Southwest Music/Interactive/Film Conference.  Being an Austin native, SXSW (as it is colloquially know) is the highlight of every year for me.  This year, however, may be my last.  And to go out with a bang before I take London by storm, I have officially registered for the conference and obtained a coveted music badge.

Jarvis Cocker will grace SXSW with this pontification.

So what does this mean for you, people of the internet?  It means Kunstwollen will briefly shift gears into SXSW-freakout mode.  I’ll be locked in a condo in cold and rainy Port Aransas, TX for the next few days, so expect ample SXSW preview coverage.  Then, once the festival descends upon us, I will make an attempt to keep the good interwebs up to date on conference and festival doings.  Of course, Kunstwollen will retain its art historical focus, but now that will shift to skinny jeans, American Apparel, cheesy stage lighting, and the aesthetic nightmare known as Metallica.

However!  To begin the coverage!  I am getting increasingly excited about Late of the Pier, an act out of one of my favorite places on the island of Britannia, the East Midlands.  Upon first listen, back in my Sheffield days, I didn’t think too much.  Typical false 1980s nostalgia, I thought.  But, in recent days, I’ve returned to their debut album Fantasy Black Channel and realized my initial evaluation was horrifically flawed.  They’re more than the typical electronic fare.  In fact, their debut comes across as a full frontal belly flop onto a sticky disco floor on student night.  And that is a very, very good thing.  Here’s a track particularly illustrative of this phenomenon, “Heartbeat”.  And, as watching the video reveals, the kids have quite a sense of the visual.  Good on them.

Although Late of the Pier tickles my fancy for dance-electronica, the British import I am most excited for is none but Sheffield’s greatest, Jarvis Cocker.  Jarvis won’t be playing this year (though I haven’t given up hope on that one just yet), he will be delivering a lecture he debuted at the Brighton Festival last May.  It’s entitled “Speaking the Unspeakable with Jarvis Cocker” and tackles many different issues dealing with lyrics and apparently embellished with lots of examples and a slick PowerPoint setup.  Now, there are few musicians on this planet who I would want to listen to ramble for two whole hours, but Jarvis Cocker is at the top of that very short list.  Based on interviews I’ve read and Jarvis’ contributions to the Live Forever and Made In Sheffield documentaries, I expect nothing but intelligent, insightful, and downright brilliant musings from Britpop’s favorite creepy uncle.

I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for more SXSW coverage and if you’ll be at the conference or festival or any parties associated with either, I would love to run into you and discuss or swap Twitters or what have you.

Until next time.

Late of the Pier will be showcasing at La Zona Rosa at 10:30 on 3/18 and at Aces Lounge on 3/20 at 1am.  Jarvis Cocker will speak at the Austin Convention Center on 3/18 at 3:00.

Now, let me preface what I’m about to assert by saying I love Scott Hamilton.  He was and still is an uncannily fantastic skater as well as by far my favorite commentator on TV today.  But, as I said previously, the world of figure skating does not quite grasp the concept of a unified aesthetic.  On the Celebrity Apprentice, Donald et al. referred to this as Scott’s failure to understand branding.  You see, non-Apprentice viewers, Scott chose a not so clever name for an action hero advertising online retailer Zappos.com: EEE.  He missed the opportunity to capitalize on the “Z,” something that even a brief glance at Zappos.com will tell you is at the heart of their aesthetic vision for the brand.  And this missed opportunity cost his team the win and ultimately ejected Mr. Hamilton from the show.

So Scott confirmed my hypothesis.  Figure skating types just don’t “get” branding.  While obviously Scott Hamilton has enjoyed an incredibly illustrious career, his presence in the public mind has diminished greatly in recent years.  Perhaps, if figure skating could exhume itself from the entertainment afterlife of cheesy ice shows scored by Amy Grant or Kenny G and come up with a single, solitary image, a brand if you will, they could enjoy commercial success even in non-Olympic years.

But of course, all of this is just conjecture.  Conjecture backed up by testimony from Donald Trump, but still conjecture.

Costume sported by Weir in the 01-02 season.

While television certainly reveals the intricacy and importance of these costumes, only when waiting breathless in hopes of a clean program does the viewer grasp the true significance of the costume.  Case in point: Johnny Weir.  While Weir’s ascent to the top was quick and noteworthy, no one knew what a major player he was to be in the sport until 2003 (Weir has thrice claimed the National title and won medals at several major international events, including a bronze at 2008 Worlds).  Here I posit a guess as to the ascent: Weir created a visual signature for himself and the judging panel responded appropriately.

The previous year Weir donned traditional mens figure skating apparel: a puffy shirt with a few sequins, but nothing spectacular.  Although he skated well throughout his programs, he failed to garner a spot on the Olympic team traveling to Salt Lake City, or international attention.

2003 rolls around.  The Olympic season has come and gone.  Weir takes the stage at the 2003 National Championships (the same Nationals I attended myself) and a hush falls over the crowd.  Despite being only a small player on the national scene at this point, the crowd, and likely the judges as well, are captivated.  The power of aesthetic takes over.  In extending the same color scheme from the previous year all over his body and using himself as a canvas for creative fashion, he dressed himself into the spotlight.  Although a nasty fall in the long program caused Weir to withdraw from the competition, he returned in 2004, 2005 and 2006 to capture his rightful place at the top of the men’s singles ranks.

More aesthetically aware look of 2003

Now Weir made significant changes in the 02-03 season to his skating as well and I do not seek to reduce those accomplishments in any way.  Instead, I’m offering an additional explanation for this skater bursting into the upper echelon of international figure skating.  As such an aesthetically driven sport with scores for interpretation and musicality, certainly athletes who take advantage of the judging panel’s innate visual sensitivity should be rewarded?

Another athlete has recently taken advantage of this system.  My personal favorite of the 08-09 season, the 2008 Grand Prix Final Champion and 2009 US National Champion, Jeremy Abbott, has skated beautifully all season long.  The grace and quiet beauty of his skating recalls Weir, but with a heightened technical mastery and uncommon musical awareness.  And he, like Weir, burst out of the lower ranks of international skating in one season.  And in that season, he employed a bold color scheme and full-body design in his costumes.  I am particularly fond of his Eight Seasons Tango long program costume, which adds to both the hushed allure of his presentation and his brand of interpretation.

Figure Skating, if you can’t tell, is by far my favorite sport.  So on this Super Bowl Sunday, I submit to you another side of the athletic realm.  One that handsomely rewards the visually aware.

Abbott using the Weir-technique of style awareness

Soane

I began my Architectural Histories Methodologies essay today (as the title would imply).  At the moment, I’m still having difficulty.  I wrote five pages, my goal for the day, and got a bit further along with my total conceptualization, but I’m still sort of lost.  I’m writing on Charles Moore, John Soane, and their adherence (accidental or purposeful) to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime.  With Soane, the theory is impossibly easy to apply.  And even Moore said he felt “a greater affinity to Soane than any other architect in history.”  But what’s difficult is really supporting my case.  And supporting my case for twenty pages.  As always, evidence presents a significant hurdle.  Tomorrow morning I’m going over to the Moore house to photograph the siting (Thanksgiving’s the best day to be a creepy art historian with a camera, right?) and I know those pictures will help, but I still question whether or not what I’m doing will actually do any good.  Am I making a point no one’s made before?

What is encouraging is how much fun this whole thing’s been to research.  I knew I loved John Soane, but I had no idea to what extent.  He and I share a lot of the same views and his interpersonal relationships were completely bizarre and wonderful to study.  For any interested in Soane’s utterly riveting life and work, I highly recommend Gillian Darley’s John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (Yale University Press, 1999).  While the book could have a bit more contextualization in order to suit my taste, it’s a really thorough and impressive work of scholarship on a figure too often ignored in architecture.

Writing this paper is funny considering my own development as a historian.  I always thought I’d want to write on either Central/Eastern European high modernism or American postmodernism.  So here I am, smack in the middle of my first graduate seminar with my first paper truly on any topic of my choosing.  What do I choose but a British romantic classicist and an American postmodernist?  And I find myself lavishing far too much attention on Soane?  I would never guess the way these things would develop.

Watching the Peaks at night.

In writing on the sublime so much today, I found myself affected by it this evening.  I was at Bookstop’s going-out-of-business-sale and browsing a volume titled Britain from the Air or some such.  The book contained several beautiful aerial photos of Britain’s countryside, including a few shots from the breathtakingly gorgeous Derbyshire.  I spent the first half of this year in Sheffield in South Yorkshire (the county just north of Derbyshire).  My room gazed out into the peaks and I found my emotions utterly arrested by the rolling vistas of the Peak District.  I want to go back, I thought, I want to live in that sublimity once more.  It’s just sort of funny.  After all day long reading and the better part of this year living the sublime, of course I fall victim to it in an urban, badly lit bookstore.

Burke would certainly have something to say about that… especially the lighting.