Where The Pieces Fall

Cuban Pasteles and Croquetas by Havana On The Hudson Caterers

Maria Victoria de Bernard provided a feast for the palate, with her Cuban delicacies.

In this picture: Mary Ann Schmidt, Julio Hernandez-Miyares, and Maria Victoria de Bernard

Zipperhead Animation Beta from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

Sineparade is:
Alex Garcia: Drums
Ariel de La Portilla: Bass and Keyboards
J. Armen: Guitar and backing vocals
Javier Hernandez-Miyares: Guitar and backing vocals
Steven Pacia: Vocals and Keyboard

Photo By Javier Hernandez-Miyares

Rene Mederos Obituary and link to images

Rene Mederos on Wikipedia

Rene Mederos On Facebook

Shepard Fairy Appropriated a Mederos Image (Article)

In this short video, i page through a book of Rene’s iconic Vietnam silkscreens. He created these images in 1972 during his second visit to North Vietnam, and everything depicted was witnessed by him.
These images were first published as silkscreens in a large format, and later a few hundred copies of this book were produced: each image had to be redone in miniature form in a process that Rene described to me as something only possible – “because we were crazy!”
My copy was given to me by Rene, and he added a dedication, which i read whenever i want to feel his presence.

PB / Alex Itin Collabo (Pic By JHM)

The Following Pics Were Shot By Linda Yau On April 17th

Review By Christina Cromeyer (Encore NYC)

Zipperhead is a multimedia show about 9/11, the financial meltdown, adultery and brain cancer with live music, narration and moving images on three wall-size screens. Sounds like a recipe for too many ills, but somehow, it works. The music is the best part of the show, with local band Sineparade providing Pink Floyd-esque sounds (circa Dark Side) to an already dark story. Local filmmaker/painter/overall artist Alex Itin narrates the story of Andrew Sarchus, a Wall Street trader who is caught cheating on September 11, 2001 (being in a hotel room with his secretary instead of in his office that morning was a life-saving mistake). He stays together with his wife, Marla, but it’s a downward spiral of overspending, insider trading, religious fanaticism, and, eventually, cancer…

Read The Rest Of The Review Here

Transcript of interview conducted by Christina Cromeyer of Steven Pacia, and published here for the first time :

1. – I know it’s New York and all, but is there a specific reason for having 9/11 as the backdrop?

9/11 represented a new beginning for New York City, that is, in the way we perceived ourselves with regard to our vulnerability etc. It was a fitting time for the lead character Andrew Sarchus to begin his social and physical decline. The decline of the character Andrew Sarchus as a Wall Street Trader is also an allegory for the decline of our economy and the melt down of the banking system.

2. – Maybe I missed something, but I still don’t get the title. Any explanation? As far as I knew it’s a derogatory term for the Vietnamese.

Patients who have had multiple brain surgeries will sometimes refer to themselves as Zipperheads or make the statement ” the surgeon should have installed a zipper” for subsequent operations. It also refers to the ability to unzip the head and look inside to see the functions or dysfunctions of the mind and brain. I was unaware of the negative racial reference until recently.

3. – I can’t imagine how something like this, with video, image, music and written elements, would come together. Could you describe the creative process behind a multimedia show?

It started as a program that I was involved in at the New Museum in Jan 2009 together with the Raqs Media Collective and Arani Bose ( Neurologist and Gallerist). In short, the program was designed to throw out ideas about art and perception and relate it to the functions of the brain. As an art gallerist and Neurologist, I was invited as a participant. The art- interested audience was very enthusiastic. That spawned the idea of the Neuro-didactic section together with the visual art and animation. My love of music and of themes that deal with New York and the existential, added the third component, ie the songs and instrumental accompaniments.

4. – How did Sineparade become involved with Alex Itin?

Itin was a friend of one of the 17 Frost founders and Sineparade members, Javier Hernandez Miyares. Itin was given a solo show at the 17 Frost space. I saw his incredible animated video, Orson Whales and felt that his sensibility was right for the show. He offered to narrate also, and it evolved from there.

5- What inspired the songs? Frankly, I thought these were the best part.

Thank you, the songs were largely inspired by the energy of the city, both positive and negative, as well as my personal and physician- related experiences. Zipperhead, the song was written specifically for the show about Andrew’s funeral on a cold January day. Demon is about addiction and self destructive behavior. Andrew Sarchus was written before Zipperhead was conceived and was inspired by a friend’s “ordinary guy” neighbor on Long Island who was hauled off to jail for one year for insider trading. It is about how easily we all may be corrupted. Blastoff is about how arbitrarily we may have our fortunes changed. Closer now is about finding happiness or salvation in the midst of terrible confusion and pain.

Prog rockers Sineparade and video artist Alex Itin collaborate on a musical portrait of a trader who escaped death on 9/11, only to fall prey to a fast-growing brain tumor.
When:
Sat 8pm , Apr 24 8pm , May 1 8pm , May 8 8pm , May 15 8pm

Link to Zipperhead on Timeout Events.

Painting By Javier Hernandez-Miyares Based On A Drawing By Diego Rivera

We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous and comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of our planet. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of another world war that draws near. Even in times of ‘peace’ the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

In so far as it originates with an individual, in so far as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance; that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such creations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general knowledge (which interprets the existing world) or of revolutionary knowledge (which, the better to change the world, requires an exact analysis of the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place; nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically ‘artistic’ personality. The regime of Bush/Obama, and American idol, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen,brush, or mouse to the status of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions.
It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword, ‘Neither fascism nor communism!’ –a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the philistine, conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the ‘democratic’ past. True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time –true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture.

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, in so far as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral ‘ego’ and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the ‘ideal of self’, which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the ‘id’, which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity –the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. ‘The writer’, he said, ‘naturally must make money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money…The writer by no means looks on his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work…The first condition of freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.’

It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself and prescribe, in the guise of so-called reasons of state, the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations –these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.

We recognize, of course, that the revolutionary state has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this drapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between these enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the pretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called pure art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. It is only natural that he should turn to blogging, which holds out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralisation he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organisations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution, and of mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to the revolution; among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius .

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which all revolutionary writers and artists may be reunited, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here together with anarchists.

We know very well that thousands on thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small blog sites are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is marginilized by fascism as ‘degenerate’. Every free creation is called ‘fascist’ by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud the right to exist. Such a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.

We by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we ourselves consider only a first step in the direction. We urge every friend and defender of art, who cannot but realize the necessity for this appeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all those publications of the left which are ready to participate in the creation of the International Federation and to consider its task and its methods of action.

When a preliminary international contact has been established through the press and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local and national congresses on a modest scale. The final step will be the assembly of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.

Our aims:

The independence of art — for the revolution.

The revolution — for the complete liberation of art!

Art from all – to liberate us from our dialectical dilemma.

Andre Breton
Diego Rivera
Javier Hernandez-Miyares

While your mother wears the jackboot,
You have no time to lose.
Slip away in your rat drawn shoes
To live to fight another day.

With the students in the streets,
you’ll rain petrol on their heads.
The iron fist wants to bust your balls,
and make your brother eat some lead.

Your lips are dry and your eyes are burning
as the crowd starts to disperse.

It was the summer of your first love,
until the curfew fell.
Backstabbing bastards were wearing the necklace,
and burning in the fields.

Riot police smoking lucky strikes,
as they flirted with the girls.
While the president of some foreign country
told you everything was well.

I bet you felt very macho
all the time you were raising hell!

Jackboot summer you will never forget.
The sound of rubber bullets
as they pass by your head.

It was a jackboot summer.

You spent time in a closet
discovering what you need.
Then like the bulls of Pamplona,
you chased it in the streets.

Electronic eyes of nations
were present at the scene.
Recording every moment
for the folks that watch tee vee.

You never thought for a moment that
you were winning anything.

Jackboot summer you will never forget.
The sound of rubber bullets
as they pass by your head.

It was a jackboot summer.

lyrics and music by Javier Hernandez-Miyares

I wrote this song in praise of the first intifada, and it is deliberately ironic, because we were watching it on our distorted tee vees.
The style of the tune is tropical blues.
Jackboot Summer

Alex Itin Post Performance


Installation By Aakash Nihalani and Alex Itin

Great audience turned out

Aakash Nihalani and Javier Hernandez-Miyares

Random views of the Zipperhead premier at 17 Frost. Art Installation by Aakash Nihalani and Alex Itin.

View More Pics At This Photostream.

Zipperhead: A Live Multimedia Event

“Andrew Sarchus/King of the Markets/In a hell of a town…” Thus begins one of the songs in Zipperhead, a blistering live multimedia event about life in post-9/11 New York featuring Brooklyn-based progressive rock band Sineparade and video artist Alex Itin. Following a successful one night preview at Monkeytown in September 2009, the highly anticipated show will open a six consecutive weekend run at the newly renovated 17 Frost Art and Performance Space on April 10.

Zipperhead explores contemporary American life through the story of Andrew Sarchus, a prominent Wall Street trader who escapes death in the World Trade Center on 9/11 by stealing away to a hotel room with his secretary. His wife Marla’s anger quickly turns into concern as Sarchus becomes increasingly erratic, the result of a growing brain tumor. In order to cope with his feelings of guilt and loneliness, he becomes an obsessive collector of American art, convinced that he can see God in the paintings. Although later arrested for insider trading, and nearly destroyed by the deterioration of his brain and his marriage, Sarchus eventually manages to come to terms with his life and achieves a bittersweet salvation. His journey is told by a combination of spoken narrative and iconic video art provided by Itin and a set of songs and soundscapes written and performed by Sineparade. At 17 Frost Space, three massive screens and a state-of-the-art sound system envelop both the performers and the audience.

Itin delivers an explosive, almost manic performance, playing multiple characters with visceral conviction. He never plays to the audience for a cheap laugh or gasp. Instead, he dances so close to the edge of role-playing that a sense of danger is continually present throughout Zipperhead. The hallucinations of Sarchus become terrifyingly real in Itin’s moans and screams. The surreal stream-of-consciousness animation that streams across the screens creates a haunting sense of isolation.

The songs of Sineparade, however, pull in the opposite direction. Each is a musical gem that can stand by itself and all surge with life – a welcome counterbalance to the claustrophobic existentialism of Sarchus. The astonishing versatility of the band and the wide range of their songs are due mainly to the diverse backgrounds and styles of the members. Sineparade, which performs regularly at 17 Frost Space, is loaded with amazing musicians. Lead vocalist Steven Pacia combines literate and multilayered lyrics with gorgeous melodies. Although at heart a crooner, he stretches his distinctive voice at every opportunity. Guitarist/producer J. Armen and singer-songwriter Javier Hernandez-Miyares share driving guitar duties. Armen’s jazzy playing has a soulful, penetrating quality reminiscent of Santana while Hernandez-Miyares sounds more like a bluesman on a glorious acid trip. Ariel de la Portilla (bass) and Alex Garcia (drums) are also both members of acclaimed Latin Jazz ensemble Afromantra, so it should come as no surprise that they play as though joined at the hip. Garcia is supple, precise and always bursting with ideas. De la Portilla’s tuneful bass playing never falters and looks teasingly effortless to boot.

Among the songs that stand out in Zipperhead are the smartly crafted power-pop “Underground Man,” the evocative, serpentine “Blast Off” (featuring that rock rarity – a bass solo!) and “Closer Now”. The last of these is not only the best number in the show, but also arguably one of the most impressive pieces of pop music to emerge in recent years. “Closer Now” has an aching, addictive melody as beautiful as one’s first crush and lyrics that reward close listening. Sineparade’s performance of the song is as close to perfection as Zipperhead (or any show) gets, and Pacia’s phrasing in particular is exquisite.

Despite the subject matter of Zipperhead, the show is neither dated nor exploitative. 9/11 and the global financial meltdown are only the background. The real themes of the story are illusion and fragility. Nothing is safe or secure, no matter how impressive the appearance seems. A marriage, a brain or a banking system can crumble as easily as a building and most do so in the end. Interspersed throughout the show at key moments are short notes on neurobiology spoken clinically by Pacia, detailing the frailty of human nature. A brain lesion is simply another damaged piece of tissue. A seizure is an uncommon burst of electrical activity. Addiction and love are just synaptic communications. Even though such an approach may be startlingly cold at first, it actually humanizes Sarchus.

Much of the credit for the remarkable cohesion of Zipperhead must also go to a devoted technical crew led by musician/engineer Dave Scarborough. 17 Frost Space has gained a reputation among local bands as one of the best venues to play in Brooklyn and it shows in the sound and picture quality of Zipperhead as a whole.

The show will play each Saturday evening at 8PM until May 15 (running time 75 minutes). For tickets and additional information, visit Zipperhead: The Show.

Zipperhead Review In The Greenpoint Gazette.

Promo Video Of “Closer Now” From Zipperhead

Zipperhead Cast:
Alex Itin: Narrator
Steven Pacia: Lead Vocals, Keys
Javier Hernandez-Miyares: Electric Guitar, Backing Vocals
J. Armen: Electric Guitar, Backing Vocals, Bass
Ariel de al Portilla: Bass, Piano, Synth
Alex Garcia: Drums