THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

Okay, so I moved to New York City when I was eighteen having grown up and spent my real formative years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I started my life in San Francisco, California and spent my first four years in the Los Angeles area. When I was seventeen I managed to graduate high school. I got out a year early and used the year between seventeen and eighteen to plan and fantasize and get the dream together that I could take with me to New York City. By the time I moved to New York I set up some jobs, internships, and some other opportunities. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, maybe I thought I would go to college. Within those few months all my plans and my sort of initial infrastructure I tried to lay out for myself fell through or I quit at basically.

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Out of all the things I thought I was really going to enjoy I didn’t enjoy them as much as I hoped, which included working at an avant- garde fashion company, working at an art gallery and trying to get an internship at an art magazine. So in one hand I was a bit disillusioned and disappointed that when I was growing up back in Michigan all these opportunities of this sort that New York had to offer seemed so thrilling. I then realized that it wasn’t going to be my New York experience and my experience wasn’t necessarily going to come from these particular opportunities. It was going to come from my attitude and what I can do personally in the city, not what anyone else can do for me.

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So at that point I was still looking for some other job. One day I was reading the Village Voice newspaper and looked through the classified ads, this was before the Internet had really caught on so this was like ‘97 or ‘98, and there was always music jobs – drummers wanted, band members wanted and then occasionally something else that was more your day-to-day job that you could really rely on for the long term. I had grown up playing piano my whole life and felt pretty confident as a piano player. One day I saw an ad that said keyboard player needed for nightly performance at one of New York’s greatest clubs and it was like $1,500 a week and I was blown away. It might not actually have been $1,500, it might have been $500 a week but whatever it was it was more money than I ever even had. So I said I can play keyboard, I can learn any song they want me to learn, this will be great. I would get to play with the house band in a bar, it sounds amazing. For some reason I just seemed like a no brainer. I felt very relaxed about this whole idea and could really picture myself doing it, so I called up the club and there was a very nice woman that answered the phone and I told her I saw the ad and that I would like to come and see about the job. She said okay and that I could come down anytime and meet with the owner. He was going to be there that night if I would you like to come by. I said sure. This was good. This is momentum, this is the right kind of inertia and perhaps this is all meant to be.

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I kind of dressed up in what I imagined a session keyboard player in a nightclub would wear. I think I had a sports coat on with the sleeves rolled up a little bit I had jeans with dress shoes and whatever the cleanest T-shirt I had was underneath. That was back when my hair wasn’t very long. I kind of put it back and spiked it up a little bit. I had to look older then I was.

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I took the subway from my friend’s house in Brooklyn where I’ve been crashing on a cot in their living room and these people were kind enough to let me stay with them with what was supposed to be originally one weekend. It turned into about six months and I was living out of a suitcase. They had me sleeping on an army cot in their living room which I was fine with but turns out the whole time I was there it was very unpleasant for them. I don’t think I was very much aware how my presence was affecting them.

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Anyway, I went into the city around 8 p.m. to go this club and to meet with this owner and do what I imagined would be a brief job interview and it never really crossed my mind that I would even play for him but I was sort of prepared to play something on the piano if they asked me too. I really pictured in my head and had a very clear vision of what it was going to be. I imagined a back room almost like a little rehearsal room in the back offices of this club where they might have a piano and a desk or something and I can sit and talk with this guy and maybe play a little piano for him so he can see that I can actually play. I kept playing this over and over again in my mind of how it was going to go. When I got to the club I went inside and there was already a lot of intense energy, more then I had anticipated. The club was really thriving. In fact the whole area, Greenwich Village and the West Village of New York City, downtown, the streets were full of people. I think it was Saturday night. The club was completely packed and there was a lot of music coming from the inside of it. I went out to the coat check area where there was this hostess woman and I managed to find the lady I spoke with on the phone. She said, “Oh great, you’re here, come on in I’ll set you up at a table the owner will be with you in a little bit.” I thought this is amazing. I’m going to get to watch this band and hang out for a bit I was really feeling adult and very confident and very excited. I think I had a Coca- Cola or something like that. I didn’t drink alcohol at the time, I was too young anyway. I started watching this band and the band was really impressive. First of all, everyone in the band was at least twice my age if not three times my age and very accomplished musicians.

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The drummer had a very fancy drum set that even had one of those clear plastic plexiglass sound reducing enclosures around it. It looked like a TV show band, real professionals with really nice equipment. I never played with anyone like these guys before who were at this level professionally or musically. So I was really excited about that. I said, “Wow, I wonder if these are the guys I’m going to play with? I’m going to learn a lot from them.” I was checking out the keyboard player. He had an amazing keyboard set up and he was playing at a very high level. Different featured singers were coming out and doing cover songs primarily. In fact that whole area downtown Manhattan specializes in venues that have very high quality cover bands or tribute bands. This was sort of a mix of that and I was really enjoying it and getting into it. The crowd was getting more and more hyped up, more people continued to enter the venue until it was really completely at its capacity which was probably about 200 people but to me looking at it, it might as well been 2,000 people. There was so much energy.

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After I had been there for about fifteen minutes they brought up a Michael Jackson impersonator, who again, was operating at a very high level. He had all these moves down had an incredible likeness and spirit when it came to representing Michael Jackson himself and he went through a few numbers and finished with a huge bang where they even had synchronized lighting. The smoke machine was kicked on and I was really impressed and really inspired by it. It was amazing what they were able to do in the small space. This is what happens when you play music for 50 years. I was sort of looking at it as what a real adult can do when they commit to music.

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Anyway, I was wondering when I was going to go meet with the owner in the back. I was thinking about maybe getting up and looking for that lady again to ask her if I should keep waiting for the guy or should I just go back now but this guy on stage caught my attention. The main guitarist who was sort of the band leader who looked a lot like Bill Gates. He was playing a Fender Stratocaster worn very high up on a strap which I don’t feel as necessarily geeky in it self. I think this guy happened to look really geeky. He had on a blue oxford, khaki pants and gold wired glasses. He looked like he was about 48 and he just really stuck out as the odd ball kind of guy. The rest of these musicians looked much more like musicians. This guy looked like a weekend warrior who happened to get a kick out of playing guitar.

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So I was able to figure out by watching him play and listening to him as he hosted between songs that he was the owner of the club or at least the manager. It all made sense why everyone else was being so nice to him and letting him do what he did. I was wondering when I was going meet this guy. Then I heard this Bill Gates looking guy say on the microphone, “Alright ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for coming out tonight. Now I understand there’s a young man in the audience that’s going to come up here and audition for us. Somewhere there’s a young keyboard player out there who has come to play for you folks tonight and see if he can earn himself a spot in our house band.” I thought, oh that’s funny someone else came to audition too, that’s weird I wonder if this guy set it up to get on stage with them. I was looking around the room to see who this other keyboard player is. I felt a little lump in my throat just over the fact that there was maybe competition for this position. I said, boy I really wish I could go back and meet with this owner now. Then the man said again, “Hey if you’re out there, the board player, what’s his name?” The woman I had been speaking with earlier said “His name is Andrew he’s over there.”

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All of a sudden I realized he was talking about me. At that moment I had two choices. I could either not respond and sit quietly until they moved into their set and forgot about me, run out the door and never go back, or I could completely close my eyes and jump off a cliff so to speak. I came to audition I thought, I moved to New York City to have experiences, this is a New York City experience. No matter what happens this is going to be an amazing story. Nothing could have prepared me for what was happening. I went up on stage. The keyboard player that had been playing the whole night got up and gave me his spot. The Bill Gates guy said, “OK Andrew, what do you want to play?” I said, “Uh I don’t know.” I was already sweating bullets, my stomach felt like it was full of butterflies and going up and down rollercoaster hills. My palms and fingers were sweating, my face was beat red and burning hot. I said, “I didn’t expect to be coming up here on stage.” Before I could even get that out he said, “Come on now, what do you want to play, let’s just name a song we’ll do it.” Again, “I didn’t prepare a song.” I said, “What do you mean you didn’t prepare a song? Just call one out and we’ll play.” For whatever reason, at that moment when he said, “call out a song.” I said Rocket Man by Elton John, a song I never played. I have no idea how it goes and of all the songs it’s probably one of the more challenging songs to try to figure out on the fly because the chord changes are unusual, the melodies are advanced, let alone the fact that he’s singing at a relatively high range for any man. I think I might have been listening to it at home before I came out and that was the song that was in my head. He said, “OK, Rocket Man one, two, three.” I said, “Well I don’t know what key it is in,” and he said, “Folks, we got a comedian here tonight. Come on up here Andrew. Let’s do this OK?” And he started to get a little irritated like I was embarrassing him. And I said, “I’m serious I don’t know what key it is in.” He said, “OK, what key do you want to do it in?”

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At this point the audience is laughing but there was already this sort of tension going over the crowd of “What’s going on here, is this supposed to be funny? What’s happening? Who is this kid?” Then it happened again. The most joyous, rowdy crowd watching one of the most professional shows I’ve ever seen, and here comes this kid who’s making a fool of himself in the most intense way. He said, “let’s do it in C major.” That was the easiest key to play on the piano. There’s no black keys. “Okay, C major Rocket Man,” I said, “Well I don’t know the lyrics,” and he said, “Andrew, you’re a comedian right? Listen folks, we got a comedian here tonight. Andrew is pulling our leg. I hope you are all enjoying this.”
The crowd was kind of nervously laughing and maybe they were trying to understand what was going on. This guy, this Bill Gates guy who was interacting with me, generally seemed to be getting pissed off. He was trying to look at me out of the corner of his eye and be like what the fuck are you doing kid, you’re making a fool of yourself up here. He said, “OK, I’ll feed you the lyrics. I’ll tell you the lyrics as we go.” So we proceeded to struggle our way. I proceeded to struggle my way through the worst performance of Rocket Man that probably anyone has ever done, the whole time with this Bill Gates look alike guy saying “packed my bags last night pre-flight, packed my bags last night pre-flight zero nine a.m. zero nine a.m.”

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We made it through the song somehow. The band of course sounded great. They nailed it as though it was the album playing. It practically sounded like karaoke and when it got to the part of the song where it goes “and I think it’s going to be a long long time,” I was singing that and the Bill Gates looking guy said, “and I think it’s going to be a long long time till you ever play in this venue… get the fuck out!” He was serious and that’s when the tears welled up in my eyes and I lost it. The audience actually did this miraculous shift, this was a very powerful experience for me as a performer where I realized how an audience can work. They went from booing me to suddenly booing him. Somebody yelled out “Hey give him another chance!” and someone else said “Yea give the kid a chance” and then people started clapping, cheering and clapping like “go, go, go, go.” Then we did a blues jam in C which was much easier for me and kind of what I planned on doing. Then I finished it on a somewhat positive note.

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I did actually get a little dig at the guy. He said, “Ya know Andrew, you shouldn’t have come here if you didn’t expect to be able to play. I said, “Well I didn’t expect to have some guy that looked like Bill Gates yelling at me the whole time.” And the people loved that, they clapped for me. The bass player and the band came over and said “Hey kid you did fine don’t let him get you down, you did good.” I got up and I went back over to my seat for the absolute minimum amount of time that I felt I could sit there before running out without making a further fool of myself. It was probably about five minutes, once the lights went back down again. People forgot about what had just happened.

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The blood in my face felt like all my vessels and my veins were about to explode. I never blushed so hard in my life. I walked back out into the city street into the cold air and sort of came down from the experience, still with tears in my eyes and still a lump in my throat. This almost self conscience understanding that I had done something really important. I didn’t know exactly what it was, what it meant or if it would have any kind of lasting impact. I guess it really didn’t other then it’s this great story. If nothing else, what I learned is that experience proved to me that I could do something I had never done before, make a complete and utter fool of myself and humiliate myself to the core in the completely ego destroying way, and live to talk about it and be fine, possibly a little bit stronger.

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I didn’t realize it, but the name of this venue I’m telling you about was Cafe Wha?, which is probably the most famous venue in New York because it’s where Bob Dylan first went to get his start, the first venue he ever walked into. It’s where Jimi Hendrix was first playing and it’s actually an extremely notorious place for similar experiences to have happened. The fact that I was drawn there as this young musician with no concept of it being this famous place and to have that kind of primary, really early musical rite of passage ended up becoming very meaningful. But it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to see sort of the miraculous quality of that. I didn’t realize at the time that the people who play in venues like that are session players that memorized 5,000 pop songs and can play them on command with all the cord changes and have all the lyrics memorized, have all the backup vocal parts memorized as they are on the album, that’s how they get the big bucks. That’s what they do and what made them valuable over someone like me, someone who could make up something on the spot but couldn’t play a song that someone could name off the top of their head. They spent 50 years doing that.

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I ended up having a lot of respect for those people and for that situation. I think that it set the tone for me trying to maximize all I could out of New York City – all the experience, all the raw interaction with the legacy of the city, with the people of the city, with the energy of the city and that’s what you pay for. That’s why people go to New York City, for the opportunity and for experience. That’s why it costs so much more but it’s worth every penny.

Michael J. Dalton II

BUILDING VIOLENCE

JUNE 30, 2010- AUGUST 4, 2010

OPENING RECEPTION:

JULY 2^ND, 2010 5PM-9PM

The 3rd Street Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographer Michael J. Dalton II.

A select group of photographs and found objects from Dalton’s on-going body of work, Building Violence will be on display that provides us with examples of his landscapes, architecture and portraiture work. Dalton’s images uniquely portray a topographical documentary of the industrial northeast in constant flux.

By photographing creation and creator, destruction and destroyer, Building Violence examines the topographic effects of commerce, urban planning, gentrification, eminent domain and the result of man’s ability to totally affect the landscape as he sees fit.

This project directs the viewer’s attention to an overdeveloped industrialized and sometimes toxic part of a specifically American landscape. Coping with the cycles of demand, production and modernization, the landscape is caught in a violent destruction and construction process.

However, Building Violence seems to lack a formal critique on modern building practices as its author removes himself and allows for a more democratic way of seeing how the landscape evolves in all its subtle absurdity. With a stronger attention to formal elements and utilizing before-and-after comparisons, images like, “Tree Brace” soften the violence of the project as a whole, downplaying it as a critique.

Dalton also turns his lens towards the people who are involved in the building and destroying process. By creating portraits that mimic some of the structures found in Building Violence he acknowledges the human hand involved in physically creating and destroying, as well as the people who are influential in the changes that occur around the Northeast.

The found objects exhibited are items Dalton had encountered while working on some of the same construction sites he photographs. They serve as physical evidence along with the use of his 8×10 camera and personally printing on 30×40” chromogenic photographic paper mounted on plexi-glass.

The Industrial and commercial landscape that are shown in Building Violence are captured in moments of upheaval in both creation and destruction. Sometimes this change is caught in a standstill and is left to decay among the asphalt, concrete and steel, only to be overgrown by weeds. It is up to the hands of humanity to decide how The Northeast will appear—and it is up to the viewer to decide whether the evolution of the land is beneficial to its community or destructive in nature.

Michael J. Dalton II graduated from The School of Visual Arts with a BFA in photography and has been shown in galleries in Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York. Dalton currently lives in Brooklyn NY and works as a Construction laborer in NYC.

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We are running a one week only Ironlak Special, 6/20/2010 – 6/27/2010.  Visit our store at www.analogcartel.com and use coupon code IRONLAKPROMO to receive 25% off you entire paint order.  Don’t forget to pick up a copy of The Art of Storytelling DVD while supplies last.

I came across a really good interview that KAWS did for Interview magazine.  Toby Maguire conducted the interview and it is a nice read. Check it out.

The Williamsburg studio of the artist known as KAWS is neatly lined with racks of acrylic-paint bottles in primary colors and guarded by a cluster of standing toy collectibles—life-size 3-D comic book characters of his own design—like a platoon of robot children. By the window, there is a small-scale model of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Connecticut. KAWS, an unassuming, soft-spoken 35-year-old New Jersey native named Brian Donnelly, is plotting his first solo museum show at the Aldrich next month. It will serve as the unofficial grand induction to the institutionalized art world for the graffiti artist, painter, illustrator, sculptor, toymaker, and product designer. Yet KAWS has a long history outside of the white cube. His street-born cartoonish graphics—specifically spermatozoa-shaped figures with x-ed out eyes—have achieved a subcultural iconography. He has applied this KAWS signature to his street art, a clothing line, heroically outsize toys and sculptures, and countless cobranding ventures with labels like A Bathing Ape and Marc Jacobs.

KAWS was a teenager growing up in Jersey City in the late ’80s and early ’90s, where he spent his high school years graffiti-bombing trains, walls, and billboards. He honed his street-art act in New York City, hanging out with the spray can–wielding skate kids in downtown Manhattan. He graduated to a more covert form of interventionist street art in the mid-’90s, when he began unlocking the glass panels encasing bus stop and phone booth ads. He stole the posters, added his own graphics to them in acrylic paint, and then surreptitiously put them back. These hits were so skillfully executed—brushstrokes are never apparent in a KAWS painting—that often no one could distinguish the artist’s work from the original advertisement.

After graduating from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1996, KAWS traveled to Japan, pursuing his street-art projects with Tokyo subculture heavyweights Hectic and Jun Takahashi of Undercover. In 1999, KAWS made his first toy with Japanese company Bounty Hunter,a vinyl figure of Mickey Mouse with x-ed out eyes (as if Mickey just drank from a bottle marked POISON). Nigo, the tastemaker behind A Bathing Ape, asked KAWS to collaborate on a clothing line in 2001 and began collecting his pop paintings of cartoon characters like the Simpsons, the Smurfs, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Channeling the commercialist attitude of Claes Oldenburg and, more recently, Takashi Murakami, KAWS has produced everything from x-marked sneakers for Nike to an album cover for a special edition of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak (2008). To sell all the KAWS-mobilia, the artist opened a dazzling Masamichi Katayama–designed store in Tokyo in 2006 called OriginalFake. Although KAWS does not separate product from art or art from product, it was only a matter of time before the art world caught up with him. He found Los Angeles–based dealer Honor Fraser, who took on not only the paintings but the whole breadth of his work.

With a monograph from Skira/Rizzoli due out this fall and the Aldrich show at his doorstep, KAWS has gotten approval from an art-world establishment that he felt would never take his guerrilla act as its own. He bought a building not far from his Brooklyn studio, which his good friend, the interior designer Katayama, will convert into a massive studio that will become the creative hub of the KAWS universe. That’s all in the future, but it is one KAWS can see from the seventh-floor window of his current studio—which is where the actor Tobey Maguire, a fan, friend, and collector, interviewed the artist.

Click here to view the full interview

Some old friends just opened up a record shop in Brooklyn.  I missed the opening night but from what I heard the space, concept, and merchandise is on point.  Stop in and check it out the address is listed below and you can click here to view their facebook page.

BLACK GOLD RECORDS

461 Court Street

Brooklyn NY

11231

Open daily except Moday. 11am-9pm Sundays 11am-5pm.

F or G train to Carroll Street. WE BUY RECORDS!!!