The Hammer Museum, July 23, 2009 -

The night began like most others in L.A.; we sat in traffic. My friend Krystof was trying to figure out why his iPhone didn’t sound right playing through my car speakers. I wasn’t paying too much attention – I was busy checking my work e-mail on my phone while driving and attempting to explain a lecture I’d been listening to during my morning commute on the nature of memory by some guy named John Steele (a random Pirate Bay download). Little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be. From Wikipedia, “While his work is often closely related to the psychology of fragrance, in talks and writings Steele also explores Buddhism, Vedic culture, the great yugas, geomancy and geomantic amnesia, geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces.” That could easily be a review of the new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record.

Part of a fashionable non-movement of “Hippiesters”, Edward Sharpe is a collection of ex-hipsters who have seemingly become spiritually enlightened, which only time will prove or disprove. If you’ve ever attended Agape church in Los Angeles – and if you’re plugged in to celebrity culture at all you’ve heard of it – then you’ll know the vibe (by the way, the “church” is very much worth going to at least once – http://www.agapelive.com/). There are lots of people in hippy-like fashionable garb driving home in Mercedes, Bentleys and on custom Harleys.

The band is fronted by Alex Ebert, of Ima Robot, and consists of members of various L.A.-based bands. It also has a former American Apparel chick Jade Castrinos…but I haven’t been able to confirm any American Apparel photos, just that she worked for them and was a fixture of the LA hipster scene of the mid-2000’s. But why all this background for a show review? That’s part of the deal, are they for real or not? Perhaps the suspicion arises because of the fact that Alex Ebert used to wear eyeshadow, or the connection to major Hollywood stars, or the fact that there were about a hundred onlookers behind the stage all wearing extremely expensive clothes and not dancing. Whatever the case the music is fun, a lot of fun, and that’s probably why at the end of the day none of the “why” actually matters. And to see it relatively new, before the flood, was a treat.

I won’t speak about the opening band Eskimo Hunter, it isn’t fair to them. I wasn’t there to see a cross between My Bloody Valentine and whatever else they are supposed to be so after doing my best to get into them I spent the rest of their set checking out the strange mix of people that Edward Sharpe had brought out. There were raver kids, hipsters, hippies, bro’s, adults, film industry people and an unusually large amount of high-school kids, which might have something to do with the Alex Ebert/Ima Robot connection. The place was packed – people were everywhere – but because of our connection with Capt. AKAK we were able to get right up next to the stage.

Once the one-man sound crew began setting up for Edward Sharpe you could see how fucking cool this show was going to be – piano, tambourine, a xylophone, an accordion, a trumpet, synths, 2 guitars, bongos, drums and several vocal mics. After a long time – there was one guy setting up the microphones – the band came on stage, all twelve of them. They began the set with “Janglin’” a quasi sing-along that essentially defines the band – feet stomping rhythm, lyrics about spiritual redemption, and a lot of ass shaking.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are if nothing else a great party band. Everyone in the group is into the music and into the feeling that it elicits in the audience – you can’t help but have fun. Any cynicism or coolness you came to the show with quickly evaporates – if you don’t believe me by the end of the show I was on the stage after someone shouted “Can we get on the stage?” and Alex said “Yes, just don’t break anything.” And I don’t do those things.

But this gets back to the question – are these guys for real? Do they mean what they’re singing about and the vibe that they put off? There is the definite feeling of a spiritual movement, of proselytizing, of doing things differently. They’re like a traveling religious show. Alex Ebert wears all white, is barefoot, and holds hands with people in the crowd while he sings. His first words to the crowd were the cryptic, “I had a paleolithic egg around my heart, I’ve broke it off.” The members of the band look at you in the eye and smile, after the show everyone in the band comes out and hangs out with the audience. Krystof was able to talk with Jade (although he couldn’t bring himself to confess his feelings for her). It’s like everyone was a member of some new-age church and decided to start a band; there’s a distinct lack of guile. At the end of the show we saw the accordion player getting picked up by her Mom.

Ryan McGinley is a New York photographer and the guy who took the photo above, you probably know who he is. When asked about his pictures he said, “My photographs are a celebration of life, fun, and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy in which freedom is real. There are no rules. They are of the life I wish I was living.” Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros probably fall into that category. They’re a mixture of the real and not real, of a staged experience and the authentic, they evoke possibilities beyond our own inevitable ones. And for that they point to the world we all crave.

PhotoLA 2009 – Los Angeles, CA

If you’ve ever wondered what really drives the modern art world, photography included, then you’d be hard-pressed to do better than spend a day at PhotoLA, one of the main photography events in the U.S. where famous dealers and galleries show up, all with lots of photos to sell.

Besides the overwhelming sameness of most of the imagery what you quickly feel is the undercurrent of highbrow voyeurism and an excuse to view a bunch of naked chicks while holding an expensive glass of wine, or a $4 Americano.

Actually, naked men are well represented too, although it’s difficult to find one over 18 in any of the photographs available for purchase. At one gallery’s booth a man in a motorcycle jacket that cost more than most people’s entire wardrobes listened intently while the twenty-something female gallery employee described the history of the prints she was leafing through. “All of the boys in this series are between 8 and 14,” she told the man. He nodded in understanding. All of the boys were completely naked as well.

At another gallery’s booth the main attraction was a set of prints based around the theme of women getting felt up in Japanese subways while supposedly not knowing their pictures were simultaneously being taken. Having come from the generation of Vice-magazine and virtually unlimited amounts of online pornography, the imagery wasn’t particularly disturbing. What made it feel odd was that it had been hung on a wall, along with the other galleries displays of pre-pubescent boys and girls, and called art.

Perhaps it began with, or ended with, guys like Robert Mapplethorpe picking up a camera and just going shithouse crazy with it. At this point, though, it seems we’ve reached the end of the road of photography as art. There’s simply nothing left to take a picture of. The form has descended to a kind of really expensive pornography, an excuse for people to get off on imagery otherwise taboo to the mainstream culture.

Landscapes, still life, portraits, everything has been done. Because of the restrictions of the form – lens, camera, developing, printing – once someone perfects a genre as a photographer you’re forever doomed to be compared with them. No landscape can ever be photographed seriously after Ansel Adams.

The human landscape is all that’s left and it too is rapidly diminishing as a viable subject. Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber have done youth culture as well as anyone’s going to do it. A thousand photographers have documented every niche and every sub-niche available in the human spectrum. Art thrives on the new, on uniqueness, and as a mechanical art photography is unable to deliver as it once was.

That’s not to say that photography is over and done with as an art form. People will still collect it and every once and a while a photographer will come out with something new, usually based on pushing the boundaries of extreme imagery. But honestly, after Mapplethorpe devolved into Terry Richardson, where does the form have to go?