AUSTIN
* Xiu Xiu @ Mohawk / 912 Red River, 9p/$12. Notable noise-rockers Xiu Xiu haven't toned it down, though their current mashups of 8-bit crunch with signature plaintive yowling has them at perhaps their most melodic post-Eau Claire.
TOKYO
* Jiro Takamatsu "Smashing of Everything" @ Yumiko Chiba Associates / 2F 4-32-6 Nishi-shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku (Toei Oedo Line to Tochomae Station, JR etc to Shinjuku Station, West Exit). An encyclopedic survey of the late, great master's alchemical grasp of sculpture, revealing relations and juxtapositions with works in glass, metal, plastic and more.
THURSDAY
NYC
* Adi Nes "The Village" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 512 W 20th St. Dramatically staged large-format photography reveals fictional village life and complex sexual connotations.
FRIDAY
NYC
* "Fake Empire" @ Mixed Greens / 531 W 26th St. Lee Stoetzel curated and is participating in this five-artist examination and hyperbolization of historical sites and monuments. Feat. Olivo Barbieri, Rob Carter, Susan Giles, and Dionisio Gonzalez in a cross-media presentation.
* "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" (dir. Bruce Beresford, 2012) @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St). Somehow the Academy Award-nominated director's latest film slipped by me, but I'll underscore its importance in two words: Elizabeth Olsen. She stars in this summer vacation of a family trip, generational coming-of-age film.
* DIIV + MINKS @ 285 Kent Ave , Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. So DIIV (formerly Dive) are so hot right now, swirling psychedelia with a garage-rock earnestness that puts be right back at 2007, when I really submerged myself in the Brooklyn indie scene. Plus MINKS (welcome back!) pull a glamorous darkness to their sound. w/ Life Size Maps
* DIIV + MINKS @ 285 Kent Ave , Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$10. So DIIV (formerly Dive) are so hot right now, swirling psychedelia with a garage-rock earnestness that puts be right back at 2007, when I really submerged myself in the Brooklyn indie scene. Plus MINKS (welcome back!) pull a glamorous darkness to their sound. w/ Life Size Maps
AUSTIN
* "Prometheus" (dir. Ridley Scott, 2012) @ Alamo Drafthouse S Lamar / 1120 S Lamar. It has arrived, my most anticipated film of the summer (and hell, perhaps 2012 for that matter)...and as I am currently in Switzerland, I won't get to see it for another 2+ weeks. The "Alien" not-entirely-prequel that needs no further introduction. Absolutely see it, just don't gloat to me about it.
* "Moonrise Kingdom" (dir. Wes Anderson, 2012) @ Alamo Drafthouse S Lamar / 1120 S Lamar. It's been hard living in not-NY and having Anderson's natty new film open like two weeks late. Precocious preteens and awkward elders, replete with Anderson's typically stellar ensemble cast.
* "Donnie Darko" (dir. Richard Kelly, 2001) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 11:40p. The creepiest rabbit in the history of cinema, at least in this writer's opinion. A truly mesmerizing, pitch-perfect doomsday film. ALSO SAT
SATURDAY
AUSTIN
* Prefuse 73 @ Beauty Ballroom / 2015 E Riverside Dr, 9p/$15. Scott Herren may have mellowed his sound from collagey hip-hop ("One Word Extinguisher") to Catalan cool (his work with Savath & Savalas), but no doubt Prefuse still brings unrivaled intensity to a party.
TOKYO
* Hisaharu Motoda @ Kido Press, Inc / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Toei Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). Disused sports stadiums take on the emotive light of crumbling architectural relics thanks to Motoda's compelling duotone printwork.
* Jon Pylypchuk @ Tomio Koyama Gallery / 7F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station). The Canadian artist's debut solo at the gallery, featuring his half-human, half-animal lifeforms moving through dreamlike landscapes, rendered in paint and mixed media.
* Osamu Kanemura "Human Noise Amplifier" @ BLD Gallery / 2-4-9 Ginza, Chuo Ward Tokyo (JR Yurakucho Station, Marunouchi Line to Ginza Station). Viewer participation is key in this performative exhibition, feat. a darkened gallery with slide projectors showing Kanemura's work AND the artist on-site photographing guests' shadows as they intermingle w/ the projections. The resulting exposures will create a photobook, to be completed about a week after his exhibition concludes.
* Kyotaro Hakamata "Hotei and Grape" @ Aisho Miura Arts / B1F 2-17-3 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku (JR etc to Shibuya Station). Objects stripped of their usual context, transformed into precarious surrogates by the Tokyo-based artist.
SUNDAY
AUSTIN
* "The Mission" (dir. Johnnie To, 1999) screening @ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz / 320 E Sixth St, 10p. A cadre of superstar bodyguards protect a threatened triad boss in To's thoughtfully violent gunplay film, feat. an ensemble cast of heavyweights incl Simon Yam, Anthony Wong, and Francis Ng.
MONDAY
NYC
NYC
* "Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom" (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFM to W 4th St), 8p. If you attend this screening of the late Italian subversive modernist's final film, you must have at least an inkling of what you are getting yourself into. If not, does a loose adaptation of the titular Marquis de Sade novel, filtered through a filthy post-Nazi Germany veil, do it for you? Even better: this 35mm print (!) comes w/ a special live intro by East Village legends Jack Waters and Peter Cramer.
TUESDAY
NYC
* Heliotropes @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. MAYJAH. My favorite Brooklyn-area doom rockers Heliotropes not only have a rippin' new single out ("Moonlight"), but they promise to rock the checkered tiles off DbA tonight, in this benefit concert for feminist punk band Pussy Riot, currently detained in Russia for "hooliganism". w/ Tinvulva and DJ AdRock!
TOKYO
NYC
* Heliotropes @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. MAYJAH. My favorite Brooklyn-area doom rockers Heliotropes not only have a rippin' new single out ("Moonlight"), but they promise to rock the checkered tiles off DbA tonight, in this benefit concert for feminist punk band Pussy Riot, currently detained in Russia for "hooliganism". w/ Tinvulva and DJ AdRock!
TOKYO
* TADZIO + Gagakirise @ Loft / B2 1-12-9 Kabukicho, Shinjuku-ku (JR etc to Shinjuku Station, Kabukicho Exit), 7p/2500. Dueling duos of the ages! Noise-rock cuties TADZIO share the same space as full-throttle metalheads Gagakirise. Sounds like music to this writer's ears. w/ Manga Shock
* パスピエ @ Shimokitazawa GARDEN / B1F 2-4-5 Kitazawa, Setagaya-ku (Keio Inokashira Line to Shimokitazawa Station, S. Exit), 7p/2800 yen. Tokyo electro-pop darlings channel Brooklynites Twin Sister with a hazy, nocturnal gloss. w/ Heavenstamp
CLOSING SOON
NYC
* Tauba Auerbach @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The young NY-based trompe-l'oeil abstract artist continues pioneering her "Fold" paintings, exhibiting the powdery works alongside new "Weave" paintings shown for the first time stateside. Auerbach's drawings appear in "Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language", on view at MoMA.
* Lucian Freud "Drawings" @ Acquavella Gallery / 18 E 79th St. The modernist figuratist's acclaimed drawing show at London's Blain/Southern (co-organized by Acquavella) now moves to NYC. The sheer range of styles and mediums here—from pencil and watercolor emotions of animals to crayon landscapes and Freud's signature gooey human studies in charcoal—well, it's all just incredible.
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Spare swooshes of color against arctic-frigid backdrops elevates Moser's latest series into possibly my favorite-est ever from the NY-based gestural abstraction painter. Stellar stuff, this lot.
* Anish Kapoor @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Yeah, I caught Kapoor's super-shiny show here like four years ago. He now trades some of that finish-fetish stuff for heaped concrete and looming Cor-Ten, a physicality all the more sinister.
TOKYO
* Daido Moriyama "COLOR" @ Taka Ishii Photography / 2F 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku (Hibiya/Oedo Lines to Roppongi Station). Moriyama-san is a photographing beast! I learned this when he visited Japan Society in NYC last November, kicking off Performa 11 w/ a reinterpretation of his "PRINTING SHOW-TKY". He photographs for hours every day, and he even espoused his delight of digital color photography. That may be at odds w/ your interpretations of his style, decades of contrasty b&w prints done the Leica way, but this new series of lush prints – a mix of digital prints and enlarged lambda versions – is as stunning, challenging, garish, emotive, and "Daido-ish" as Moriyama's earliest. Plus, the color really clobbers you, the whole sweaty, neon-drenched, sexy essence of the Tokyo I know best. The 99-odd prints on view are like a third of those in the cover-to-cover photographic tome "COLOR" published a few months ago, and a mere droplet of the 30,000 shots he captured in Tokyo.
* Yosuke Bandai "Disordered Bandai: His Unequalled Passion" @ Ai Kowada Gallery / 6F 1-3-2 Kiyosumi, Koto-ku (Hanzomon/Oedo Lines to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station). Heavily reconstructed and manipulated digital images, incorporating both stuff from Bandai's earlier work and Internet images, but they're so abstracted they more readily resemble discreet abstract paintings trapped in Plexiglas. Bandai was going for "the best visual experiences have a strange boringness and difficulty to understand"—you'll get that here. (ENDS SAT)
NYC
* Cindy Sherman @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/M to 5th Ave/53rd, 6 to 51st). A great element of Sherman's fine career retrospective is its nonchronological arrangements. For though the exhibition flows in groupings of key series–beginning with the wonderful, breakthrough "Untitled Film Stills" from the late '70s (and showing the American Sherman as a convincingly Felllni-esque ingenue)–there are intriguing temporal juxtapositions throughout. Meaning a few prints from the early '80s hung amid Sherman's millenial "Clowns" and still reverberating with energy and beauty. Though technology has changed, her "Erotic Centerfolds" and brilliant "History Portraits" (the latter hung salon-style in a burgundy-walled room, and featuring a few male roles) retain as much impact as her 2008 "Society Portraits" and the show-stopping mural installed outside the exhibition proper. Sherman has more creativity in her left pinkie than most artists' their entire oeuvres (not naming names) and she's got a helluva lot left. (ENDS MON)
