Recently by Marilyn Cvitanic

John Kruth and I are producing a show called Tin Supreme: Homage to Tin Ujevic at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery in Manhattan) on Saturday April 21, 2007 at 6 PM.

This was part of the display in the gift shop in CBGB's Gallery remained open through Cct. 29th

Nostagia has never served me well. Perhaps that’s why until recently I’ve been ambivalent about the closing of CBGB’s, which has been a fixture on New York City’s Bowery for over 30 years.

For the last 11 years I’ve lived just a few blocks away from the club. And for at least as long I’ve listened years to the stories of friends who experienced a rite of passage at CBGB’s. Whether it was being pelted with spit from the audience while playing on a stage sanctified years earlier by the likes of the the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, or Blondie, or simply getting drunk and vomiting in the bathroom or on the sidewalk outside, where know your favorite punk rocker once did the same.

Even if her name isn’t familiar, her photographs are. Roberta Bayley’s photographs of the early New York punk scene have a wonderful ubiquitous quality. Sure, her pictures have appeared in magazines ranging from the original Punk magazine to Rolling Stone, and on album covers for artists such as The Ramones and Richard Hell. But Roberta’s images have also traveled beyond the usual print media outlets. For years now, her work has graced T-shirts for sale on St. Marks Place and most recently has appeared on the high-rent walls at Mary Boone Gallery. These pictures have a life of their own, surfacing here and there to remind us of a music scene that influenced so many but was witnessed by only a fortunate few.

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Flora II (det.) detail

Having grown up in LA I have a soft spot for cars. The right ride could take you through a variety of traumas, ranging from earthquake aftershocks to a stylist who just made your hair too blonde and too straight. For me, that ride had to be vintage. You can keep your GPS and fuel-injected blah blah, blah. I’ll take a 1965 Rambler over a 2006 anything. Form over function all the way down Interstate 405. That was my motto at least, until my most recent trip to LA.

At best, self-revelation creates legends. We can’t get enough of Frida Kahlo. The Mexican born artist who died over 50 years ago is a bona fide pop icon. At worst, confessional art tells us more than we want to know about it’s subject and is both boring and embarrassing.


Gad/Page/Madonna, 12"x24", 2005

Although I am a big Jack Black fan, I refuse to see the new remake of King Kong. I made this decision a few weeks ago after I first saw a poster for the movie with a close-up of Kong’s face. The ape looked an awful lot like my pug Louie. They both share the same loveable but domineering nature and pushed in nose.

Rauschenberg's Combines/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/December 30, 2005

Robert Rauschenberg's Combines are just that - combinations of materials and objects that forty-five years ago were not the stuff that large-scale art was made of. He includes bits of weather-worn signs that once graced shop fronts, old tires, cans, stuffed animals (most famously the goat in Monogram (1955-59) and a bald eagle in Canyon (1959). These materials challenged art audiences still trying to grasp Jackson Pollack’s aggressively enigmatic paint splashed canvases, to further question their concept of art and even more importantly, beauty. Other artists before Rauschenberg had created collages out of unlikely materials, including Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell’s elegant boxes. But by bringing collage to such a large scale, Rauschenberg’s intent and process of combining color and texture feels all the more arbitrary and perfect.