I have a lot of love for Mark Gowing’s design. That’s probably because so much of the work I’ve seen of his is packaging for records I love. Records from his Preservation label by the likes of Sun.

He designed Cyclic Defrost #8 too. Here’s Bim’s interview with the man. Here’s the magazine PDF.

Mark Gowing - Oil Kills Peace

Mark won the Ideological Posters category (the prize is split into ideological, cultural and advertising posters) in the 21st International Poster Biennale for the above poster, Oil Kills Peace.

(Thanks She Sees Red for the tip)

What can’t hip hop do?

Here’s Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and all round amazing novelist of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, talking to Virginia Trioli.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Is it true you wrote some of this listening to rap music?

JUNOT DIAZ: Embarrassingly, I wrote it all listening to hip-hop.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Really?

JUNOT DIAZ: Yeah. I drive my girl crazy.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: You had it in your ears while you figured it out?

JUNOT DIAZ: Yeah. Play music loud enough so your neighbours call the police and hope the words come.

See the rest here.

I was down about missing Diaz - though being in the USA more than made up for that - but I’ve been loving all the second hand reports from sightings around town.

Have I got this right? Scan to the bottom of Jon Dale’s Real Time review of the Adelaide Contemporary Music Festival and you’ll find this:

for permission to link or reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net

First week back. I’d like to say doing radio’s like riding a bike, but the combined force of several thousand kilometres of jet travel conspired. My guests were great though.

Angie Abdilla and Canvas producer Jesse Cox.

Angie’s documentary Wanja debuts Wednesday at the Sydney Film Festival.

Nick Warnock and Emma Ramsay.

Emma’s one of the directors at Quarterbred, a regular thing at Erskineville’s PACT Theatre. Nick’s playing this Thursday and Saturday with his band Onani.

Barumba - Jackson Conti
If It Rains - Robert Forster
Dancing on our Graves - The Cave Singers
Sandshoe - Peret Mako
Go Go Go - Teki Latex
Shade Darker - Gatekeeper
Million Dollar Bill - D’Opus & Roshambo
What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome - Justin Townes Earle
Snake Bite - Wagons
Stay Tuned - Robert Wyatt
Karaoking - Plastic Palace Alice
Beat You Back - Dom
Let Love Begin - Roger Loves Betty
Only For the Heartstrings - Daedalus
Good Lies - The Notwist
The Author - The Rational Academy
Which Way to Go - Eddy Current Suppression Ring
Vision Bell - Dappled Cities
You Have to Dance - Noze
Let It Out - Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities
Who’s Dope - DJ Trip

Watching Jamie Lidell on stage it’s all too easy to see his thing as one gigantic piss-take.

The crazy outfits, the big soul numbers. He was dressed in Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat the first time I saw him, in early 2004 at the Sydney Festival bar. He’s got a band now, and at the Bowery on NY’s Lower East Side last weekend, they opened with an explosive version of ‘Another Day’ from new record Jim. Read the record reviews and you’ll see names like Marvin and Otis and Sly and Prince - it often feels he’s tilting an ironic brow to those guys, but it wasn’t always that way. Lidell was an IDM demigod, a hero among Wire critics - Super Collider, ‘media suits’ made from videos, CDs and 16mm film - so his 2006 blue-eyed soul record, Multiply, was something of a surprise.

A couple of years earlier I saw the beginnings of that record at the show in Sydney. I could not stop talking about it. I was blown away to the point that it left an embarrassingly black mark on my name. Lidell took risks. Along the way, his music alienated much of the audience, a crowd attracted by the promoter’s brand of smooth deep house rather than its headliner. Lidell’s live loops and heavily layered performance have since been co-opted by the likes of Final Fantasy and Dan Deacon, though their approach differs from Lidell’s uninhibited blast of the thrill of being there, playing live.

Back to that black mark. A Sydney DJ came to play at a party I organised in Canberra later in ‘06. I picked the DJ up from the airport, and he proudly shoved a demo CD in the player. It was works-in-progress from Multiply. I kept listening when he got out of the car at the hotel, and - to my eternal shame - ripped the disc. I was that excited. Thrilled, even, to hear this guy again. The recorded set was good, too, packed with messy, unmastered jams and Lidell’s playful voice.

A while later, Multiply appeared. Hints of those early performances remained, there were some decent songs too, but musically it was flattened. The spikes and mistakes replaced by grooves and polish. Like a turntablist, his thing struggled on disc. Jim, his latest, appeared this year. But I’d lost interest and only went along to the Bowery show because friends wanted to go.

Flaunting a spray-on beard, dark glasses, embroidered jacket and stripy pants, Lidell stepped out with a full band, including a bearded sax blower in a smoking jacket (and not much else). It was a skronking, funked up jam, taking in 12 songs and both records. The band took a break halfway, leaving Lidell space for a 20 minute knob-twiddling, tumbling beats jam that culminated in an extended version of ‘When I Come Back Around’.

Lidell’s voice is not of the calibre of the artists he emulates - it’s rawer, not quite as versatile - and his songs don’t hit the same heights either. But the thing you need to understand with the guy, the thing I’m beginning to understand, is that all that stuff isn’t the point. The point is the performance. And his band - part Muppets, part Zapp - has a by-the-seat-of-the-pants joie de vivre that’s exhilarating, contagious, and seeing Lidell just makes me want to see him again.

A month ago, out of the blue, I decided it was about time I had an ‘About’ section. I found them a bit generic in the past, but as I get to know favourite blogs, I’ve found a bit of bio information on the author adds a lot. Seems like I was on a micro-zeitgeist, with my friend Rozie doing the same thing (inspired by Oz bloggerati Daniel Boud). So in the spirit of blogging about blogging, here’s my backgrounder.

I’m in Denver, Colorado, and can’t sleep. So I’m catching up on reading, and this one, from Dan Hill, is a great read. It’s an interview with Steve Kulak, manager of Crown St’s lovely Title Film + Music shop. With that and the Melbourne shop, Title’s become a node in the local city scenes, drawing in people from local labels, bands and communities, and doing an about-face on the city’s classic record shops. I hear their next thing is a magazine.

SBS’s Insight program pits musicians against downloaders next week with the question, “Should music be free?”

Knowing how this plays out for independent artists like my brother Tim Levinson (appearing on the show) it’s pretty obvious it’ll won’t be as cut and dried as it’s often presented in the mainstream media.

Insight’s a great forum for frank, open discussion; host Jenny Brockie keeps things on track, and gives every speaker (young and old, those representing powerful interests and the less powerful, different races, sexes and so on) equal space.

This is a debate Insight’s been covering for a while now, and this time they’ve got artists as well as Stephen Peach (ARIA), Peter Coroneos (Internet Industry Association), Rebekah Horne (myspace) and others.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes, at best it could unpack some of the complex issues in this problem.

Aside from the best Hainan Chicken I’ve ever had (the waitress at MGM Grand warned, “You won’t like that, it’s just boiled chicken with rice on the side”), some art, and some bad comedy, I’ve learnt a few key facts from these two cities.

• LA and Vegas are party towns. Suspect both would be a lot more fun if you were partying, and with local crew
• Older women dress sexy in Vegas. Possibly because (a) that’s just how they dress, i.e. Vegas attracts a niche audience (pretty likely I guess) and/or (b) Vegas does it to them
• Hooters Casino is nowhere near as sleazy or tawdry as you might imagine
• The food scene is really not that hot (unless you’ve got Joel Robuchon type funds available)

New York New York, Vegas (who needs to head east?)

Next, the Grand Canyon. And as a sometime geologist that’s exciting.

Sydney’s been overrun by Hummers lately, but Americans know how to rock this stuff properly. Today I saw a Winnebago (a huge Grey Nomad caravan/bus that could comfortably carry Aerosmith around the country) towing a Hummer! It’s like the driver asked him/herself, “How can I burn through the most fuel per mile?” - the answer was all too obvious.

I’m in Williams, Arizona, at the moment - somewhere between Vegas and the Grand Canyon - but I might take a step back. A few days back, I visited the Hammer Museum in LA.

Kara Walker’s show, ‘My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love’, was all race and sex. The intense silhouettes were beautiful, witty, comical, tawdry, depressing and awkward. All that.

Kara Walker’s ‘Work On Progress’

Just (5000 or so numbers) up Wilshire Boulevard from the Hammer is the metastasizing contemporary gallery LACMA. Without a few days to explore we had to choose our targets wisely, which we may or may not have done in checking their contemporary collection and a Chicano show.

I’ve always found Basquiat’s work a bit kitsch. Too much backstory and not enough of the rest. Outsider, I guess. But up close - close enough to see how he’s sewn up the sheets of canvas, the shoeprints scattered over white material, the weird pull to the sheets - I’m amazed how much works like ‘Horn Players’ and ‘Eyes and Eggs’ (both 1983) affect me.

‘Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement’ on the other hand, confirms just how little idea I had before arriving in California of the state’s Spanish history. I’ve read plenty since. Eduardo Sarabia’s ‘Painted Memories’, ‘Tainted Memories’ and ‘Tetris King and Queen of the Monarch Butterflies’ (all 2008, gallery I-20 NYC) were highlights. Sarabia daubs his paintings - landscapes, portraits - with great smudges of colour that obscure or completely deface the subjects. Surprisingly, they don’t nullify the paintings. Instead, they buzz with a fantastic vitality.

Danny Jauregai’s series ‘Stage Set For a Riot (or Whatever Happened to Mt. Vesuvius?)’ (2007) too. Grounded in the frustrated furore following Rodney King’s beating in LA, 1992, by four police officers, Jauregai’s architectural images set rigid urban shapes against a swirling maelstrom. Spellbinding.

Stage Set For a Riot (or, What Ever Happened to Mt. Vesuvius) 2006 - Danny Jauregai.

I think we must have visited one of the world’s least trafficked tourist destinations when we went to the Las Vegas Art Museum. Completely worthwhile though, with a show that pulled together works from local (private) collections, including Jason Martin, and Gerhard Richter’s ‘Grun-Blau-Rot’ - I love Richter.

Otherwise, Vegas was a bit crazy. LA too.