If you weren’t one of the 6,000 people who saw this on the Ballroom Facebook page, here’s Prada Marfa caretaker and Valentine OG Boyd Elder sharing some thoughts with 60 Minutes about the controversial land art installation he looks after:

“I consider it to be hilarious, I consider it to be facetious, I consider it to be neurotic.”

Keeping things in perspective.

Ballroom Marfa’s New Growth Film Program concludes this Wednesday, 12 June 2013 with Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

Note: For this screening, viewers under 17 will require an accompanying parent or adult guardian.

All screenings are free and open to the public. Films begin at 8pm at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas.

The New Growth Film program is co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA.

Special thanks to Jennifer Bell, Rob Crowley, Tim Crowley, the Crowley Theater and Josh Siegel.

Poster designed by Rob Chabebe of EyeBodega

Descendants of Abraham Hill and Mary Ann Taylor

1But he joined a franchise that wants to lose, isn’t concerned about the present and has taken patience with the plan to an extreme.

Welker talked like a man who knows this could be his last season with the Broncos.

“These are good people, putting their names out over there at Marc’s horse farm for a good cause,” Pyle said.
Simone is going to be a brand beyond how she plays because of the beautiful, earthy, organic style she exudes.

“We have been aggressively contributing, for the sake of peace and to improve the welfare of the people of the Mideast,” Suga said.
He has done an absolutely tremendous job.

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Eleanor Friedberger recounts a surprise wedding performance here in Marfa during her Ballroom residency in this recent “Situation Critical” interview with Pitchfork …

“I actually performed Buddy Holly’s “Dearest” at a wedding once. I was in Marfa, Texas, doing a little residency and recording, and there was a wedding going on the same day as my show. The guy who I was recording with was also the AV guy at this wedding, so he had to take a break to go. I was like, “Well, if you’re going, then shouldn’t I go? Maybe they’ll let me sing a song.”

I was going to start singing as soon as they made their walk down the aisle together as husband and wife, but I did not know that they were going to stop and greet each and every one of their guests as they walked back. It took them so long. It’s only a two-minute-long song, so I just sang it over and over and over again– probably around 10 times.”

Take a listen to “I’ll Never Be Happy Again”, the single she recorded with a crew of Marfa players on iTunes, or order a copy of the 7-inch at the Ballroom Marfa store. (via Tim Johnson)

The Brother from Another Planet screens at 8pm on 5 June 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.

An Introduction to John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet

Last week’s film, Space Is the Place, extolled the virtues of a transcendent science fiction aimed at elevating the black population beyond its earthbound social state to the forgotten and immortal path beyond the stars through music. This week’s film, The Brother from Another Planet, inverts Sun Ra’s Afro-futurist and escapist rhetoric, offering a parabolic albeit comedic exploration of life in Harlem in 1984.

Written, directed and edited by independent filmmaker John Sayles, The Brother from Another Planet stars Joe Morton as an escaped slave from outer space, who resembles a black human being everywhere except in his feet. He lands in the ocean off of Ellis Island and blankly makes his way to Harlem where he must quickly learn about an abstract monetary system, class struggle and racial divide without using language, as he cannot speak. Sayles’ choice to make him mute turns the brother into a sort of mirror for society and leads to nuanced satire on immigration and assimilation.

Space Is the Place screens at 8pm on 29 May 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.

Like Shards From Some Vanished Civilization: An Introduction to Space Is the Place

In the 1970s, Sun Ra wasn’t yet recognized as the eccentric genius that he is understood as today. He’d been leading bands for almost three decades, placing ecstatic chanting alongside percolating synthesizer pieces, using improvisational percussion and cosmic expansions of big band styles to create a voluminous if obscure repertoire that placed classic jazz and swing in an extraterrestrial timeline. This destabilized polyglot sound was too conspicuously wacky to fit in with the jazz establishment or its free jazz fringes, and though he’d already graced the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969, his music seemed as equally confusing for the Anglo psychedelic music scene.

His canonization as one of the pioneers of Afrofuturism would have to wait until later in his career, though of course his work now looks right at home next to similar explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, and would help set the stage for Funkadelic’s Afro-cosmic psychedelia, MC5’s liberation rock, Sonic Youth’s deep noise grooves and the Boredoms’ melted drum ensembles.

One place where Sun Ra did find a home was as an artist-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley, where he delivered a series of lectures in 1971 under the heading “The Black Man in the Cosmos, Hyperstition and Fast-Forward Theory.” The course’s now legendary syllabus included the King James Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, work from 19th century occultist Madame Blavatsky, poetry from Henry Dumas, as well as texts about the pagan roots of the Catholic Church, Egyptology and African American folklore.

Someone in the Berkeley AV department had the foresight to record one of these lectures — archived at ubu.com — wherein Sun Ra holds forth in such a way as to indicate that he’s both serious about his cosmological thinking, while at the same time deliberately provoking laughter from the gathered students as he tsk-task-tsks his chalk across the blackboard.

Team Ballroom. Not pictured: Jennifer Trammell, who arranged the outing, and Carlos Lujan, who generously pitched in.

Yesterday we cleaned the two miles around Prada Marfa as part of the Adopt-a-Highway program, and we were lucky to have a cloudy(-ish), cool(-ish) day for our inaugural trash duty. We collected 14 bags of trash (!) and came across a few treasures, including a complete calf skeleton (!!) and a high-powered camera lens (!!!). Our tips: Wear boots, avoid white jeans, bring gloves, find camera lenses. See you next quarter.

Click here for more info on these free screenings.

For the 10th anniversary of her “arrival” at the Tom Dispatch online journal, Rebecca Solnit contributes “Too Soon To Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued“, a deeply inspirational essay. An excerpt …

“If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.”

It’s a moving piece of writing from a thinker with such a wide range of influence that she’s credited as one of the leading lights of the anti-war movement, contributed profound essays to photographic catalogs by Richard Misrach and James Evans, and is cited as possible inspiration for the christening of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter. She’s also the author of such modern-day classics as A Field Guide to Getting Lost, A Paradise Built in Hell and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

Solnit was a participant in the 2012 edition of Marfa Dialogues: You can listen to an interview with her while she was visiting us out here in the Big Bend at Marfa Public Radio. Her new book, The Faraway Nearby, comes out on June 13.

Marfalogical Exploration — a group “travelling Marfa to learn how to be successful as professional artists” — stopped by Ballroom back in March to take some snapshots of New Growth, and to chat with Rosa and Erin …

“Upon arrival in Marfa at 12:30 PM, we went straight to Ballroom Marfa to see Rashid Johnson’s show, entitled New Growth. Rosa McElheny, the Exhibitions & Programs Coordinator and Erin Kimmel, the Associate Curator at Ballroom were kind enough to to meet with us.

We were really inspired by our meeting with Rosa because she was recently in the same position that we are in now, since she completed her undergraduate degree in 2011. We chatted about reasons for attending graduate school and finding residencies- she recommended searching residencyunlimited.org.

Rosa also answered questions that I had about how they organized Ballroom’s Marfa Dialogues program. I was curious about how they recruited Michael Pollan (one of my heros) and Rebecca Solnit, among others in Marfa. Hamilton Fish, published of the Washington Spectator, co-presented Marfa Dialogues. The upcoming program this fall will be held in NYC.”

Fantastic interview with Eleanor Friedberger over at Rookie, plus they’ve got another song — “She’s a Mirror” — from her forthcoming album available for streaming. An excerpt from the Q&A:

“How does it feel to get attention for making something personal public?

Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s awkward. I like having anonymity, don’t like being the focus of attention.

The good part about attention I think is obvious, but what is the difficult part?

It’s never good to doubt yourself. I mean, for example, I like getting dressed some days, but it’s such fine line of deciding how much time you are going to spend thinking about what you are going to wear when you know people are going to be looking at you. That is something I do think about, but when you think about it a little too much it turns unhealthy. I am conscious of people looking at me, whether it’s in photos or while I’m performing. In those situations I try to be free as possible, because if you overthink it, it does your head in. That’s when people start getting a little goofy. Sometimes I think I should be more diva-ish [laughs], that maybe I am little too normal and balanced to make it in this industry.”

Personal Record is out June 4 on Merge. Can’t wait that long for new Eleanor jams? Check out the 7-inch she recorded during her Ballroom residency here in Marfa, available from the Ballroom store and iTunes.