Sign me up for Fairey's 21st Century WPA

I talked to Obama poster man Shepard Fairey about a year ago and came away impressed with his clear thinking, unpretentious manner and fondness for street art stickers.

Reminded me of my Chicago heyday, when I'd tape flyers for my band gigs on Lincoln Avenue lamp posts.

Anyway, Fairey is now on a tear about some kind of WPA style artists initatiative for the Obama administration.

Sign me up!

Wozniak Interview + SXSW Music

Glued to Steve Wozniak's dorky-cool dancing - I interviewed Apple's super friendly geek billionaire co-founder a couple weeks ago for wired.com, and have posted a few stories about him and the show.

Also: had a blast editing Scott Thill's coverage of SXSW bands while boss Lewis Wallace blog from ground zero in Austin, Texas.

Valley Moment: amid the soot, the concrete, the rude drivers and stuck-up pedestrians, a glimpse of redemption yesterday: sprouting up from the 1/8-inch ridge framing the back window of my mundane Toyota: a tiny blossom, slender and pale green, reached skyward.

image courtesy votewoz.com

My Heath Ledger Interview

Posted a story for Wired.com yesterday about Heath Ledger (see the Twitter link at right). I used audio tape of an interview I did with Ledger back in 2004. Listening to the cassette after all these years: pretty sad, really. I remember after we finished talking at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, an hour or two later, I ran into Ledger at the curb where we were both waiting to get our cars and drive back home - me to Sherman Oaks at the time, him to Silver Lake, where he was living with his then-girlfriend Naomi Watts. We chatted for a minute or two, off the clock as it were. He seemed very low key and whatever the drug issues may have been, Ledger struck me as somebody who wanted to keep a low profile and got into show biz for the acting, pure and simple.

Anyway, Oscars are tomorrow. I'm rooting for Ledger.

Here's the audio clip

January Round-Up

This must be obnoxious for anybody living in the real world, aka east of Las Vegas, but the mail delivery lady in Studio City wore shorts on her rounds this morning. 85 and sunny. Meanwhile in the Old Country, my Chicago friends bundled up for the 18 degrees below zero Deep Freeze.

No love for Big Love. Rave reviewes induced me to watched HBO's first episode, season three the other night.

Over-rated.

Enough with the Mormons already. They've had two seasons already to get across the basics, but season three, they're still pounding away: don't judge us because we're different, we just want to be normal, ooh, the guy's got three wives, blah blah blah. Mediocre dialogue, one-note characters, Bible-driven soap opera . . . no thanks.

Digging American Idol in the early rounds, but the L.A. Times went way over the top in gushing about former runner-up Jason Castro. The guy's brother auditioned in Kansas City, and Castro was hanging out. He was likened to a "God from Mt. Olympus walking among mere mortals" or something to that effect. Really?

Take a sedative!

Happy new year. All purpose round-up: My former band The ODD (pictured) is being included in a documentary about Chicago's music scene. Details to come.

Another one of my bands, Huge Hart, will be featured in a history of Chicago's music scene being written by Dean Milano. The book, from Arcadia Publishing, is tentatively slated to hit bookstores late 2009.


And on the Wired.com front, you can link to a year's worth of my blogs covering all things geek including my favorite movie review headline of 2008: The Flesh is Willing but the Spirit is Weak.

www.hughhart.com/hoopla

Abolish ArtSpeak - - Please!

Why do some creative types feel compelled to express themselves like bureacrats?

Covering culture for the Los Angeles Times, I've interviewed curators and artists who spoke so much gobbledy gook I could not glean a single coherent insight.

Blame it on ArtSpeak. Here's a recent example (excerpted from a catalog for a Los Angeles area exhibition).

"I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delmitation that defines the respective parts and positions within it."

What the hell does that mean?

The image above, by the way, has nothing to do with ArtSpeak. It's from a pretty cool book of decals titled StickerBomb by an artist who goes by the name Drypnz.

R.I.P. Sunday Book Review

In his July 27th letter to readers of the Los Angeles Times, boss man Russ Stanton promised more book reviews will be published in the daily arts and entertainment "Calendar" section. That's cool, but the sad part, which Stanton left to Times' Book Reviews editor David Ulin to address in his note to the reader, is that the Times' Sunday Book Review is shutting down.

Gone with it, one of my favorite weekly rituals: slacking on the couch, finishing off cup of dangerous coffee and absorbing deep thought, don't laugh, that somehow survive drift outside of the 24/7 blah blah blah.

Books, good ones anyway, carry with them a sense of history and context, known during Luddite 20th century days of yore as the Big Picture. Taking a step back from the whirligig of pop culture, books, and book reviews, need to be contemplated in God damned tranquility and that's pretty much impossible to achieve on, you know, a Tuesday afternoon with deadlines looming.

So, thanks for not killing book reviews altogether, but no thanks for despoiling my source of weekend brain fodder.

More at L.A. Observed.