Demian Repucci content

A couple days ago I had the pleasure of seeing the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in The Park production of Twelfth Night.  It was fantastic.  I mean that.  I will admit that I am a sucker for Shakespeare like I am a sucker for sushi.  Whether it is the omakase meal at a sushi bar a block away from the Tokyo fish market or a prepackaged ’sushi delux’ from the grocery store, a little soy sauce, lots of wasabi and I will be in Heaven.  Same goes for Shakespeare.  I love his command of the English language, his wordplay and textual twists, his humor, etc.  So I will find enjoyment in a good performance as well as a stellar performance.  But this Shakespeare in The Park was really really great. 

In 2007 we saw a favorite Shakespeare group of mine, Propeller, perform Twelfth Night at the Old Vic in London.  A very good show definitely.  But this Public Theater production had even more fun with the play.  The supporting characters especially.  Sir Toby and Sir Andrew were both great physical comedians. They and the fool pretty much ran the show.  Feste, the Fool also sang several songs that were excellent and added another layer of enjoyment to the play (musical?).  Maria even grew on me.  Oh and the main characters were good too.  All in all a superb performance. 

The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park performance of Twelfth Night runs only until July 12 so hurry and get to Central Park before the birds wake up, wait in line for hours, get tickets, go home, nap, come back to the park and see the show.  It will be well worth the effort.  Or you could be lucky enough to have a friend that is so kind as to wait in line for you (thanks Lori!).

Just got a look at the new campaign for Wrangler shot by photographer Ryan McGinley.  I have been a fan of McGinley’s for a while.  His images of guys on bikes riding around Lower Manhattan on the night of September 11th are haunting.  I always thought they sort of addressed the question of how the ‘cool crowd’, gleefully uncaring about anything other than themselves, responded to tragedy.  Answer:  They turn it into an X-Games race course.  Just kidding.  Although, now that I think about it maybe I like those images because it is my own memories and emotions that resurface when I look at them.  And the fact that maybe I was blissfully ignorant about anything but myself too…

Anyway, his Wrangler shots fit right into his catalogue of work.  His normally naked models now naked except for Wrangler jeans.  Really, it was only a matter of time.  These shots are not very different from McGinley’s typical work of skinny naked hipsters roughhousing in various settings.  All it needed was an art director to look at his images and imagine their clients’ product covering the model’s naughty bits.  Home run.  Interesting that it was those savvy guys at Wrangler that made it happen.  Now if they could just do something about their lame logo…

One question though in regards to the controversy surrounding the images… the people that are upset about them are falling unwittingly right into this typical advertising trap.  How is this much different than, say, the Abercrombie & Fitch adds a couple years ago of underaged underwear-clad models in wood-panelled suggestiveness?  Or anything that finds its way into Terry Richardson’s camera?  Or David LaChapelle?  These guys, and the brands they work for, know that sex sells.  There is nothing new or interesting about that.

I finally got to see the ‘Whole In The Wall’ show in New York put on by the Hellenbeck Gallery.  The New York Times wrote a recent article about the show which first caught my attention.  The show is subtitled ‘Old and New Masters: Largest American and European Street Art Exhibition in New York’.  Interesting claim.  The exhibit consists of about 12 artists along with a few photographers that focused on graffiti and street culture from the early days to the present.  The show also features an area populated by french estate furniture from the 17th and 18th Century juxtaposed with graffiti pieces.  The furniture was provided by Jean Gismondi, a Parisian antiques dealer.

My guess is that the show seeks to do a couple things.  First is to trace a historic line from the dirty, gritty, broke, intense roots of the beginnings of graffiti art to the monied, gallery-ized, culturally saturated, art-star graffiti of today.  The other is a sort of side project to draw parallels between baroque decorative detail and the detail found in the current visual vocabulary of graffiti.  Well… in my mind both fell a little short.

Though the show had many pieces it failed to attain the title of  ’retrospective’.  Too many pieces by the same artists.  And not enough variation of art or artistic style.  I think, really, it was more of a group show by the few graffiti artists that bothered to put some of their work on canvas or a panel that could be moved.  Of course Banksywas represented.  But Blek le Rat is very similar in style.  Maybe too similar.  But Banksy does not represent all of the variation of the London street art scene.  Where are pieces by the London Police, Dface or Faile?  And what about the artists in Spain and Italy?  Not to mention Eastern Europe?  Read the rest of this entry →

Friend and creative polymath Andrew Wilkinson is a master of eye candy.  To me eye candy is the best kind of candy.  Two reasons - It adds to the amount of beauty possible to be seen every day.  It doesn’t give you cavities.  What more could you ask for?  You can never have too much beauty (right?) and you can never have too few cavities. 

And nowhere is there a more efficient display of eye candy prowess than in Wilkinson’s latest project.  Andrew runs Art+Commerce Projects, a ‘media boutique’.  His latest project is called ‘A Photo A Day’.  Originally conceived as a Pantone assignment, he packs 365 photos, taken one a day for a year, into a 75 second video.  Some really beautiful images in there.  Wilkinson definitely has an eye for composition and an understanding of how to find beauty in the details.  Check out the video.  It is mesmerizing.  Also interesting to notice your brain registering all of the images even if your mind can’t quite keep up.  Think about that one for a minute!  And once you’ve snapped out of it be sure to check out Andrew’s other work which ranges from photography to video production, sculpture and garden gnomes.

No one is going anywhere this summer, right?  We all need to keep our heads down, nose to the grindstone and soberly manage our finances as we weather the current economic storm. 

Well…. not quite.

Just because you are staying close to home this summer does not have to mean that you can’t have a little fun while doing it.  To assist in helping you forget about that Portofino time share you were considering (for the moment at least) New York Spaces Magazine and New York Design Center are hosting a ‘Summer in the City’party on June 17th.  Not only is it an excuse to let loose and celebrate the season of sweating on the new mohair upholstery you just selected, but the proceeds will also benefit ‘Furnish a Future’, a Partnership for the Homeless program.  A little cocktail induced networking never hurt anyone either.  So invite that cute vendor you’ve had your eye on, get some tickets and go celebrate the start of the summer.

Last Saturday we were to meet some friends from Queens and some friends from Carrol Gardens for dinner.  So after having read an article in the New York Times that piqued my interest, I decided to pick the hardest location for all of us to reach and suggested we go to Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick, Brooklyn.  To top it all off the ‘L’ train was terminating at Lorimer with only a packed shuttle bus to continue.  But we braved it all and went anyway. 

Roberta’s has a nice art/slacker vibe with a casual dining room and ‘college bar’ beer garden out back.  The slight difference is that the beer garden is adjacent, or under, and actual garden.  The restaurant has planted herbs and leafy things on the roof of a shipping container that dominates the lot.  Having fresh herbs on hand at all times is a big plus in my book.  A good sign.  The Times article focused on the food other than pizza that Roberta’s chef Carlo Mirarchi was offering.  Specifically it mentioned pig’s tongue, mackerel, house cured bresaola and pork chops.  Mirarchi had me at the pig’s tongue.  While living in London in 2007 I had the insane pleasure of working at St. John Restaurant.  St. John, overseen by chef Fergus Henderson, is known mainly by it’s reverence for the whole animal.  The whole animal.  It could be described as an offal think tank.  There I learned how to work with such bits as pork kidneys and livers, venison hearts, lamb’s tongue, pigeon hearts and ox hearts to name a few.  I even deboned a big pig’s head and made the classic ‘Bath Chaps’.  That was an experience.  I loved every minute of my time at St. John.  So anytime I see an American chef working with less obvious parts of the animal I am intrigued. Read the rest of this entry →

Old friend Craig Welsh of Go Welshrecently emailed me asking me to do a fave for him and go pick up a poster he had just bought on Craigslist that happened to be located near my place in NYC.  The poster pictured here was done for the 1972 Munich Olympics by sculptor and designer Max Bill.  Until that email I knew nothing about Max Bill but it looks like I should clue myself in.  I love the poster.  It was hard to turn over to Craig.  Clean lines.  Super clean use of color.  It feels like Bill was taking the esthetic of ’Mid-Century Modern’ and pushing it toward the minimalism that Donald Judd and Richard Serra were seeking in their work.  Actually, it looks like the 1972 Munich Olympics had a full catalogue of great graphic design for the event posters.  It is always reassuring to see a large organization such as the Olympics that understands the value of good design and fosters it in building its ‘brand’. 

Thanks to Craig for the graphics history lesson.

We ate at L’Artusi in the Village tonight.  Owned by Gabriel and Katherine Thompson and JoeCampanale, L’Artusi is the little brother to their other restaurant, Dell’animaa few blocks away.  I am a huge fan of Dell’anima and their modern take on Italian food so was looking forward to L’Artusi’s interpretation. 

On the whole I thought the dinner was pretty good.  The room is fairly handsome with a long bar and the open kitchen featured as the focal point in the back.  The only inexcusable visual blunder were the fabric upholstered bar stools.  Something a mother-in-law might pick out for her McMansion’s ’kitchen island’ in New Jersey.  It would be super great if L’Artusi chucked them and just continued with the white painted stools that are used at the kitchen bar.  But come to think of it, I am wondering if the fabric stools were incorporated in an attempt to baffle some of the sound as the room was rather… loud.  Well, there are other ways to dampen noise than installing ugly padded fabric stools.

Anyway, the food was good… although…  I feel the need to make a blanket statement… Everything needed salt.  I am not kidding.  The only thing that worked for me straight from the kitchen was my vitello tonato as it had capers in it.  I tasted everything else at the table and it was all in need.  After requesting salt, all the dishes ‘opened up’ and tasted lovely.  In general the food seemed less complex and refined than the dishes at Dell’anima.  This, of course, is probably by design.  I am sure the owners were aiming to create a comfortable place with clean, comfortable food.  The danger in this concept, though, is that I walked away knowing that I could have done the tagliatelle pasta with hen of the woods mushrooms I ate in my own kitchen in about five minutes.  A simple food concept makes the divide between menu and home cook easier to jump.  The one other thing I will mention is that the ’small plates’ menu made ordering feel like an up sell.  The server informed us that the portions were small and suggested we each order three things.  Hmmmm.  Really?  If I need to be told how to order I start smelling something fishy.  And not from the kitchen. 

L’Artusi was good.  Although next time I will opt for wading through the crowds to get into Dell’anima.  Not sure if ’eating at one place makes you think of the other place’ is how the owners were hoping to bolster their restaurant group.  Not to mention I had an amazing bottle of white at Dell’anima a while ago which I haven’t found anywhere else since.

Last night I saw the Gregory Brothers play the Canal Room in New York.  In addition to their brand of funk they played a live version of one of their ‘Autotune The News’ clips in time to a video behind them.  It was brilliant.  Genius stuff.

‘Autotune The News’was created by Michael Gregory and put together by the Gregory brothers which consists of Michael, Andrew, Evan and Sarah Fullen (now Gregory).  They insert themselves into news clips and autotune their way through lots of stories that seem more understandable and palatable when rendered in their brand of broadcasting.  Katie Couric, Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney, among others, all lend their pitch-perfect vocals.

It looks like I am late to the game as there are now four clips on Youtube and not only has Katie Couric name-checked them but they have also been interviewed on the news they parody.  Time and New York magazine even did a piece.  Regardless, it is still great stuff.  I look forward to more ‘Autotune The News’ from the Gregory Brothers.  Anderson Cooper up next?

p.s. The song title above is my own creation.  Apologies if it inconveniences anyone.

I just saw the The Whitney Museum’s current Jenny Holzer exhibit ‘Protect Protect’.  I was very pleasantly r.  Prepared to see another iteration of Jenny’s typical irony spiked scrolling LEDs  about bourgeois consumerism and identity, I was met with something a bit different.  A large portion of the exhibit focused on a series of ‘Redaction Paintings’ Holzer has done which are large scale recreations of declassified government documents with subjects ranging from the build-up to war in Iraq to ‘Enemy Combatants’ to torture and detainee autopsy reports.  My first thought was that this was an artist distracted from her normal artistic direction by her anger at the government for its politics.  The product of her anger being the work in this show.  But then another idea struck me - how much of a departure is this, really, from the rest of her work?  Holzer’s art has always been about turning a critical eye on the consumerism that is woven into the fabric of our culture.  One of her best known slogans, ‘Protect Me From What I Want’, points to the collision of consumerist desire, power and identity.  So could that statement be applied to the wars that the United States has engaged in recently?  Read the rest of this entry →