EDWARD GAUVIN

Though I have all the Innocence Mission albums from Glow to the present inclusive, I’ve only really listened to the latest, We Walked in Song, and to the much earlier Birds of My Neighborhood, drawn as I had been to them after hearing a single from the former, posted at a Pitchfork review that concluded they were still going strong: pursuing in their ambling way, along paths only they might see, a by-now distinctive sound into the further reaches of an aesthetic woods where, though few but fans might follow, their artistry continued subtly to refine itself—that is, vanishing from the scene, they had less and less to do with the world and more to do with their private muses, which is I imagine what happens to most artists, or at least how it looks from the outside, once the world is content to drop them and go nosing off somewhere else. Sights from these woods, as I imagine them when listening: birches, leaves that crackle underfoot, loons, sudden clearings like small meadows, still ponds full of sky where mist gathers by morning. In spare, limpid folk dispatches they report on this, back to the rest of us.

I have of late taken up residence. Photos of the building feature on a Newark blogger’s website. Both snob and dandy in me are deeply enamored of this apartment since learning that these towers (another mirrors mine across a common lawn) were designed by Mies van der Rohe of (at the very least, and nearby) Seagram building fame, one of the fathers of architectural modernism and a name on the lips of every 101 survey student. This only confirms my superficiality, since I’ve never actually loved a van der Rohe building: they all look like they were built in the 60s to me, bland and dated basic corporate towers. I haven’t the eye, apparently, for the simplicity and understatedness of his once groundbreaking designs. Truly, as Jean Nouvel remarked in the interview I recently translated, on the contemporary trend for starchitects’ buildings to be considered objets d’art, brazenly plonked down around the world with disdain for indigenous context, as though for admiration on a pedestal of the designer’s ego: “Les villes seront musées ou l’on vient acheter les grands artistes pour les accrocher dans la vie.” Completing the irony is the fact that the architecture major subletting the place to me never brought up van der Rohe, perhaps believing it not a feature to attract the ignorant masses of which he assumed me a member (certainly assuming he assumed my ignorance is more generous than my assuming his?)

Another San Diego Comic-Con come and gone. What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

Photo courtesy Poketo,  from whom I also bought this nifty tome.

Yes, this post has nothing to do with its title.  Add a little Dada to your day!

UPDATE: This just in from Evil Twin! Advance copies of the AWESOME! anthology may be ordered here at the AWESOME price of 45% off cover! That’s right: only $8.22 for 208 pages of pure comix AWESOMENESS. What’s more, your support goes to two AWESOME causes: all profits will be split between the Indie Spinner Rack podcast and a student scholarship for the Center Of Cartoon Studies. The more pre-orders, the more books are printed. You owe it to yourself to spend your money AWESOMELY. » Read the rest of this entry «