Alex Robbins, 195 Lead Masks

Our first offering. An auspicious occasion indeed. More of Robbins's work can be seen here: ONE, TWO, THREE.

The Despair of Pierrot

By James Ensor (1892). What a stunning image. Ensor has some other Pierrot and related paintings, which I shall post here.

Konditorei

I'm sitting here in this Viennese Café in south Davis, drinking a cup of coffee, writing various things. It seems right to acknowledge this fact here, in the Carnival Tent, since I am also listening to Berg's Passacaglia. It's a very nice Konditorei. I am a huge fan of Berg's opera Lulu, which also has a circus theme, and I'm looking for good online adaptations of it to embed here.

A poster here reads Scharzenbergplatz Mai-Okt / Kuntschau, Wien 1908. Klimt showed some extraordinary things there.

Call for Offerings

Roll up, roll up! The carnival tent is open for performers of all kinds. Graham Harman and I would like to extend to you an invitation to submit work to the Tent. But who is you anyway?

You are a composer or a musician; you are a playwright; you are a sound artist; you are a visual artist; you do design; you make movies; you do philosophy, you are a poet or a storyteller or a novelist; you are an architect; you do dance;  you do experimental media; you create games; you write software. And so on and so on.

We shall be inviting some people we know too, in person. But we wanted to extend a friendly, slightly leering, clownlike invitation to you, yes you.

Your offerings need not be original or unique to this site. Of course, we would welcome that. But if you simply want to post a link to something, that would also be good.

Pierrot Lunaire on Video

I just got hold of Oliver Herrmann's movie of Boulez and Schäfer's Pierrot Lunaire on DVD. You can find a Vimeo version of this in “Pierrot Lumiere.” It's an incredibly fresh production. In particular I like very much how nonhumans come into the picture constantly: a plastic dinosaur, a corridor, a gigantic video display.

A New Recording of Pierrot Lunaire

As announced by the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.