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The Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative – Madison, WI

September 26, 2011 in bookstore, politics by Kim | No comments

My son, Kyle Allen-Niesen, particularly enjoyed this bookstore during our summer vacation and agreed to write a review.  Thank you, Kyle!

Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, is a lovely example of a community bonding together over literature.  Its placement, just off the main commercial street in Madison, is such that it still can attract the careful tourist or college student; yet mainly appeal to the local community and its own members.  The bookstore has two rooms, one entry where most of the new selections are displayed, and a second room with couches and gently used books sparely populating the shelves at substantial discounts.  It is extremely liberal, although the fact that it is a Co-Op might have given that away, (members pay 30 dollars to get a 10 percent discount on all their books as well as a vote in the direction and choices of the store).  The windows are festooned with “Recall-Walker” images and slogans, a common theme in the many bookstores of Madison.  Clearly, the literary types are with the unions (me too!).

The shop primarily deals in new books with a majority dedicated to and critical literature and various rights movement materials.  Never before have I seen entire sections dedicated to Empire, or Anarchy, and they had had more books on the Women’s Rights movement than stores with far more books.  I had just recently learned the debate topic for I will be debating for the next two months concerned animal rights, and straight away the staff were able to point me to Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, one of the core works in support of a fundamental equality for animals.  The staff seemed knowledgeable, and fairly friendly, with extremely evident loyalty to their operation.  We learned that most of the people behind the counter are volunteers from the members, and that the paid staff are the minority in the rotation running the store.  All in all, with the incredible array of bookstores in Madison, it can sometimes be difficult to know which to visit.  Of those, however, Rainbow is one to stop at.  Its overt political leanings and interesting selection make for a unique perusing experience.

Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative

426 W. Gilman Street

Madison, WI

T:  608.257.6050

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Museum Monday – Art Catalogues Store at LACMA and the Kienholz Discussion

September 19, 2011 in art, bookstore, politics by Kim | No comments

Great Store for Modern Art Books

Great museums have bookstores, MOMA, the Met, and the Chicago Art Institute all have wonderful stores.  The Hammer has two locations right now, it’s permanent store upstairs and the temporary Libros Schmibros in a gallery space.  The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is no different.  Situated in its own space just off the main entrance, Art Catalogues specializes in modern and contemporary art, specifically from 1913 to the present.  The store stocks current and past art catalogues, and not only limited to LACMA shows.  This is a good start for hunting down a rare art book.  Art history books, biographies, and general knowledge books also line the shelves.  Although situated off a passageway without windows, it’s white walls and shelves provide an airy atmosphere.  My primary criteria when looking at a museum bookstore is if it is worth visiting separate from the collection and if you’re looking for works on Modern Art this store passes muster.

A Magical Afternoon – the Kienholz Discussion

I spent a couple of hours in the store yesterday listening to a discussion about the Kienholz Five Car Stud, 1969 – 1972, Revisited exhibit.  I think this is the best bookstore event I’ve attended.  The sales clerk agreed.  I talk about the sense of community and exchange of ideas that occur in bookstores and I’ve experienced it numerous times, but this event glittered with ideas and shared memories.  Kienholz’s Five Car Stud is an installation piece about five white men castrating a black man because they found him in his pick up truck with a white woman.  The exhibit is part of Pacific Standard Time, a region-wide art extravaganza that examines the development of art in Los Angeles.

The discussion centered around Kienholz, the era, and political art.  One speaker, Joe Lewis, an artist and educator, said that political art didn’t occupy the footprint it deserved in the art world because it tended to be didactic to the extreme.  It tended to hit people over the head with its message.  He advocated that political art give people space to experience it and think about it rather than slap them in the face when they walk in the room.  I immediately thought of Robbie Conal, his political posters helped most LA liberals survive the Bush years, and there he was in the audience asking Lewis if by advocating political art with an aesthetic he meant art that was beautiful?  (Lewis wisely said ‘I’m not getting in that discussion with you right now.”)

If that wasn’t enough, Kienholz’s family was there to discuss previous installations of the piece in Europe and how it was received.  The gallery owner of Brockman Gallery, who exhibited the ultra controversial Noah Purifoy installation, talked about the upheaval it caused and the risk he took exhibiting it.   Ed Bereal, artist and performance artist from the 19602 and 70s, shared his memories, but then many in the audience added their experience of working with him in the ghetto. A well-respected civil rights advocate described the impact of Bereal’s Bodacious Buggernilla in the South Central area, he’d even kept posters from the performances all these years.

The discussion was better than traveling back in a time machine, it was getting a peek at a time forty years ago from people who lived it, survived it, and had evaluated it in their maturity.  It is my new favorite example of what bookstores provide to their community.  I promise you, it could never be duplicated online in any format.  To hear the thoughts and memories of these people and their interaction with each other and those of us who were learning about them was priceless.

Art Catalogues Store

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd

Los Angeles, CA 90036

T:  323.857.6159

 

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Printed Word + Art = Gaines’ ‘Manifesto’ at the Hammer

March 4, 2011 in art, movie, politics by Kim | No comments

As I walked through the Hammer exhibit “All of This and Nothing” I kept hearing music notes coming from deeper in the exhibition.  They sounded contemporary, with a bit a dissonance, but not jarring.  As I looked at the art, the music would float in and out of my consciousness.  I vaguely recall noticing the music was fuller at one point, and then back to single notes.  In the fifth room of the exhibition, I encountered Charles Gaines’ ‘Manifesto.’  I could have stayed in that room for ages.  I think there is a reason the museum did not put any benches there, people would be tempted to hang around for a long time.

‘Manifesto’ is a systematic musical interpretation of political manifestos from four radical organizations:  the International Socialist Congress, the Situationist International, the Black Panthers, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.  Gaines describes his work as exploring the relationship “between sound and letter or sound and word.”  He assigned each letter of the alphabet a musical notation, thereby composing a musical piece from a written document.

Visually, along one wall there are four black flat screens each placed on a press board cubed pedestal.  Other than the fact that there were four screens, the set up was reminiscent of many family rooms across the nation.  One at a time each screen scrolls through one of four manifestos with the accompanying music.  Once all four have scrolled and played alone, all four are played together.  On the other walls, a five foot tall sheet of music for each manifesto is framed.  The wooden frames provide a modern simplicity while the size gives an Old World monumentally to each work.  I felt a sense of tension between the warmth of the wood framed ecru paper and the cool starkness of  black technology.  Emotionally, I found the compositions charmingly dated with pencil markings and organic material while intellectually I wondered if the power of the words were subdued by their surroundings.  Do we lose some of their power to encourage us or enrage us in this setting?

Given that the notes aren’t composed musically (the relationship of one note to the next isn’t a product of it’s tone, but the result of the letter it was assigned to), the music is  pleasing.  When it’s played together, it sounds more like a mild Stravinsky than a jumble of notes.  I thought I was listening to a composition of stark contemporary music.  The text and the music fit together so well, Gaines wonders if people don’t believe him when he explains that he didn’t know how it would sound, he was working on the system, not the product.

I wasn’t that surprised, in one form or another the texts are about the same thing, a cry for the release from oppression of one kind or another.  Gaines believes that any text would sound the same, the content is irrelevant.  That may be true, but what sings to my heart isn’t Gaines’ system, but the experience of seeing these expressions of revolt and hearing the voices rise up in an entirely new way.

A live performance of Gaines Manifesto scores will occur at the Hammer on Wednesday, March 16th, if you’re in LA, it should be an interesting evening.

 

 

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Los Angeles Times Festival of Books – Part 2, the Biography Panel

April 28, 2010 in art, award, book review, history, Literary Event, politics by Kim | No comments

The highlight of the LATFOB for me this year was the first event I attended, the panel on Biographies of 20th century lives.  I’m actually not much of a biography reader.  I’ve had too many experiences of being 400 pages into a book, the subject is only 30 years old, and I realize I know more about the subject’s early life than want to know about my own.  This panel opened my eyes.

The panel consisted of three authors, Cari Beauchamp, Kirstin Downey, and Linda Gordon.  I was fascinated by two different Depression era women, Frances Perkins and Dorothea Lange, who had an enormous impact on our democracy.  (Cari Beauchamp was hilarious, I’ve quoted her numerous times since the panel, and her book on Joseph Kennedy in Hollywood looked interesting, but I’m not the one to write about another Hollywood book.)

The Woman Behind the New Deal:  The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins–Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and the Minimum Wage by Kirstin Downey (childhood dispensed with by page 20!)

  • Before listening to Kirstin Downey, I hadn’t heard of Frances Perkins, now she is my new hero.  Downey was a writer for The Washington Post and noticed that the Frances on the Frances Perkins Labor Building was spelled with an “e,” indicating a woman.  Frances Perkins was Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and the force behind much of the New Deal.
  • Perkins met FDR in 1910 when he was a state politician and she was an activist for working conditions even before the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.  By the time FDR won the presidential election, he and Perkins were close friends for over 20 years.  She agreed to join him in DC as Secretary of Labor if he would work toward unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, Social Security and universal health care.  With Frances Perkins the first three became a reality, and without her, the fourth needed another seventy years.
  • Frances was the largest single promoter of the ‘get to work’ programs, including the WPA that funded Dorothea Lange’s work.  In his first presidential race, FDR ran under a balanced budget plank and Read the rest of this entry »
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Urban Think! in Orlando Now, but Soon to be Gone!

March 4, 2010 in bookstore, essay, politics by Kim | 2 comments

I visited family in Orlando for the first time since starting this blog.  Game to get on the bookstore visiting bandwagon, each day started with “which stores are we going to today?”  Top of my list – Urban Think! I’d seen it pop up on Shelf Awareness and it was in an area of Orlando new to me.  We all stopped by, Dad, step-mom, sister and two squirrelly toddlers.  Urban Think! is located in a quaint neighborhood, one of the oldest in Orlando (which probably means it’s about the same age as Los Angeles, this isn’t St. Augustine).  Surrounded by blocks of old homes with wide front porches, a cluster of restaurants, cute shops and multi-use buildings, the store is airy, compact and comfortable.

The display that caught my eye, and my wallet, was a display of books on books and reading.  I wondered what shopping for books about book shopping would be called, meta-bookshopping?  I wanted the entire shelf, but I was responsible for lifting my suitcase up into the overhead compartment, so I settled on Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone (I wondered if they were thinking of me when they wrote this book, it’s not dedicated to me, maybe it should be, but we haven’t met) and  Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman.  Have I mentioned lately how much I love Anne Fadiman and want to grow up to be her?  It used to be Cokey Roberts that I wanted to metamorphosize into, now it’s Anne.

I stopped by the recent events table to see which authors stop by Orlando.   It’s not a city I see on many author tours, but with Disney World close by, I would have thought it would be top Read the rest of this entry »

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