Well, Happy New Year to one and all, and I hope the holidays treated you well. I myself have said my wistful goodbyes to the Tara Donovan exhibit at the ICA—it had to close sometime—but I’m still feeling the warm buzz from the Holiday Pops for the second year in a row.

For the next 12 months, I’m suggesting a three-part resolution:

1. To get more exercise…by walking around galleries and museums in the Boston area.
2. To be a better listener…by going to more concerts and plays at local venues.
3. To read more…not just books, but also subtitles at our arthouse cinemas and film festivals.

In that light, these resolutions don’t seem that hard, right?

And now we can progress with our first full cultural column of 2009:

G’day, Berklee!: Walk by Berklee any moment of the day and you’ll find dozens of hipsters with instrument cases and chain-smoking habits lining the block. But what locals may not realize is that 20 percent of these dudes and dudettes come from more than 70 countries. The music school manages to find these students by hosting a “world scholarship tour” from Accra to Athens, Sao Paulo to Seoul.

This week, auditions are taking place in Australia for the first time ever; they just had the auditions in Melbourne Tuesday, and Sydney’s turn will be on January 13. Michael Shaver, assistant director of International Admissions, cites AC/DC, INXS, the Bee Gees, and Men at Work as aspirational models for what they’re looking for Down Under. Depending on your view, that either sounds cheesy or awesome (I’m in the latter party). But it’s definitely Anglo, so in a rather PC nod, he’s announced that he’s also looking for “students who are versed in Aboriginal music.” May didgeridoos join flowing mullets, skinny ties, and Vegemite sandwiches on the concrete shores of Mass. Ave!

Of course, the school is saying that its expansion to Oz means that it holds auditions on every continent but Antarctica—clever, that. But the tour is really an impressive affair, with $20 million in funding and visiting 40-plus cities. Music is global after all, and it’s one good reason why Bostonians can still stubbornly claim that we live in an international city.

Bad day, rock pioneers…: It’s not high art, but I cannot ignore that Monday was depressing for any fan of punk or electronic music. Two of the most important (if not most popular) bands of the last half century faced terminal upheaval.

In tragic news: Ron Asheton, guitarist for the Stooges, was found dead at his Ann Arbor home. He was 60 years old, and while any notion of cause is purest speculation at this point, it doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, considering how hard that band lived in its early ’70s heyday. But think of any killer riff off any Sex Pistols or Green Day or Guns ‘N Roses album—especially the ones that blow the doors off all emo or indie rock today—and it really all started with Asheton.

Iggy Pop provided all the frontman charisma for the Stooges—Asheton was kind of schlumpy—but the sonic danger was in the snarling, deafening guitarricanes that managed to sound nihilistic, angry, and roughed up by bluesy Motor City scuzz. While Asheton’s work is really limited to the seminal Stooges albums (The Stooges, Fun House, Raw Power), all of which are more than 30 years old, we should be thanking him all our lives for practically inventing the concept of breathless catharsis we now know as rawwwwk.

On the complete other side of the spectrum (which is also much less awful news), the 40-year-old duo of Kraftwerk essentially announced their split yesterday too. This German electronic band is usually mocked for presenting themselves as actual robots in concert and for writing songs about pocket calculators and modes of transportation. Sure, they’re pretty darn German, but they also influenced every realm of non-acoustic popular music from David Bowie to Kanye West’s new album. Not one electronic song since 1974 has been created without their influence—and I refuse to yield on this point.

Notoriously reclusive perfectionists, Kraftwerk produced few albums over the past 20 years, but had recently picked up the pace with regular if limited world tours. But I guess even this was too much for Florian Schnieder, the particularly mannequin-looking co-founder, who quit Monday after 40 years. He leaves only longtime musical partner Ralf Hütter to (maybe) carry on the name. (The other “band members” you may see or hear about have almost always been considered secondary to this duo.) As per the typical Kraftwerk code of silence, no reason was given, and I’ll be shocked if we ever see any new Kraftwerk music again.

As with the Stooges—albeit very different music—go back and listen to 30-year-old albums like Autobahn, Trans Europe Express and The Man Machine, and just when you dupe yourself into thinking that this pristine, oddly danceable poptronica could be made today…remind yourself that these guys made this prophetic music when synthesizers were still made out of tubes. In fact, the Kraftwerk menschen are often cited as possibly the third-most sampled artists in hip-hop, along with James Brown and George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic.

So, perhaps I go on too long, but I can’t help it: artistic iconoclasts such as Asheton and Schneider come along ever more rarely these days, let alone these ones who had seismic effects on pop culture worldwide. Thus the ends of their eras, whether by tragedy or choice, must be honored.

Ringing in the Awards Season: Official accolades and the attendant bling are in this winter season, as they are every year, both locally and nationally. In this neck of the woods, literally, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park announced the winner of their annual Rappaport Prize. German artist Ursula von Rydingsvard now has this prestigious award on her CV and $25,000 added to her bank account.

Her life story is as interesting as her massive sculptures, as she spent her childhood in Nazi labor camps and post-World War II refugee zones. She specializes in outdoor art, constructing huge forms out of wood that evoke the liminal area between the natural and manmade, creating monumental structures that evoke everything from shelters to geologic mounds. Not many artists can say that their medium is 4-by-4-inch cedar boards rubbed with graphite, and only this one can use it to create incredibly varied works on such a grand scale.

The DeCordova Museum itself is actually closed until January 24th for the installation of a new exhibit, but the sculpture park remains open. If you’re up in Lincoln, stop in and check out her 1997 sculpture ence pence in the “Wetlands” part of the park. How von Rydingsvard managed to achieve that texture and patina is such an alluring mystery that you be hard-pressed not to touch it. Don’t do that, of course—they just finished renovating it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Notes on the Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted by Matthew Reed Baker on 1/7/09 in Notes on the Culture 1 Comment »