Ronnie Rocket Blog: December 2008

Andaz West Hollywood

Sébastien Archambault has been appointed Executive Chef for the Andaz West Hollywood (the former Hyatt on Sunset) slated to reopen in January. He was previously the Chef de Cuisine at the Michelin One-Star restaurant on Corsica, Le Pirate.

More about the hotel and the restaurant in LA Times here.

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W Barcelona - Opening October 1, 2009

Silken Hotel Berlin

Spending the next two weeks in Berlin with two ballets, "The Nutcracker" and "Caravaggio", and Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 on New Year's Eve!

Can't wait for the new Depeche Mode album? Listen to snippets of 2 tracks from the press conference in Berlin here http://ping.fm/eUc5P

Listening to the Music of the Night

YUICHI HIBI moved to New York from Japan in 1987, when he was 22. He was an aspiring actor, but spoke no English. For him, the city was bleak, grimy and alienating, the New York of “Taxi Driver” and “Midnight Cowboy,” gritty films he had watched as a teenager in Japan. He spent many late nights sitting in bars, watching people and wanting to be seen as one of them.

In 1992, Mr. Hibi began walking the streets from midnight to dawn with a point-and-shoot camera, recording the Manhattan he had come to love. Intoxicated by the silence and the solitude of the night, he took marathon strolls in the city’s darkest corners, an activity that inspired in him a mental state akin to meditative ecstasy. His photographs of nighttime Manhattan capture the dreamlike romance of these all-night journeys.

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He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died

Jamie Livingston (October 25, 1956 - October 25, 1997) was a New York-based photographer, film-maker and circus performer. Between March 31, 1979 and October 25, 1997, the day of his death, he took a single picture nearly every day with a Polaroid camera.

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ALSTOM AGV (360km/h), successor to TGV

Leonard Bernstein at 25 in November 1943

Shard of Glass by Renzo Piano

UNKLE "End Stories... Redux"

‘End Titles... Redux’ is a limited collector’s edition of 3000 CDs that will only be available via UNKLE’s online stores. The release will feature seven re-interpreted tracks from the album ‘End Titles… Stories For Film’, two new tracks and ‘Trouble in Paradise (Variation on a Theme)’. The exclusive package is a 6 panel soft-pack with a 12 page booklet with images by Robert Del Naja.

UNKLE has always worked with classical musicians. In the last four years this has happened more frequently. For ‘End Titles… Redux’ UNKLE felt there was an opportunity to further work with the orchestral parts of ‘End Titles… Stories For Film’ by adding new arrangements and remixing to allow a more ambient sound to come through. This has resulted in a predominantly classical body of work. [Buy from iTunes here].

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If you are in New York City on New Year's Eve make sure to catch Lady Gaga @ Webster Hall. Download free MP3 here! http://ping.fm/jNQap

Baby hippo makes first appearance at Berlin Zoo

“Looking at Music” @ MOMA

John Cage and Steve Reich opened new directions in music by foregrounding processes of composition and production. But their approaches were quite different: While the chance operations Cage used to compose are impossible to discern in the sounds that they yielded, Reich’s method of concatenating minimal phrases is explicit in his music’s pulsating physicality. “Looking at Music” features the composers in separate rooms, each in the company of works by artists with similar sensibilities. A 1966 Cage score—gridded sets of numbers pitted with pen marks—hangs near Otto Piene’s partially aleatoric Untitled (Smoke Drawing), 1959, a sheet of paper that captured the residue of burned pigment. In the next room, Bruce Conner’s Mandala April 1–9, 1965, where palpable detail manifests the artist’s method, makes an analogous pair for a recording of Reich’s Come Out (1966). In her video Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, 1972, Joan Jonas chants and wears masks with a mystical opacity reminiscent of Cage, while Lip Sync, 1969, shows Bruce Nauman repeating the words of the title as he hears himself in his headphones saying them, producing a shifty beat like the one in Come Out.

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Cindy Sherman @ Metro Pictures

Her skin is creased, haggard. The wrinkles move in unnatural patterns, running laps around her face. That the real Cindy Sherman actually looks nothing like this—that she seems, in fact, to grow younger every day—is hardly the point, though it is certainly one of the more superficial observations about a show that takes as its subject the very terms of superficiality.

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Labels: Cindy Sherman, New York City

Jim Dine: Poet Singing (The Flowering Sheets) @ Getty Villa

Dale Vince of Ecotricity

Dale Vince may be a dreamer, but he has a history of turning his dreams into reality.

The former hippy traveller, who admits he dropped out of society for ten years, dropped back in when he started Ecotricity in 1995 with a single wind turbine that he had used to power his home at the time — an old army truck parked on a hill near Stroud, Gloucestershire.

From these modest beginnings, he has built one of Britain's most successful small electricity companies, taking on industry leaders such as British Gas and EDF to sell renewable energy from Ecotricity's windfarms direct to consumers, and ploughing the profits straight back into new turbines.

Despite the downturn in the economy, the company is going from strength to strength. It now has nearly 40,000 domestic and business customers and is adding about 1,000 every month.

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Manchester United arriving at Narita Airport, Tokyo, 15 December 2008

"Big Scooter Style" by Susuma Yokota

When things go really bad, people turn to disco. Fan Death! Miami Horror! The Sisters of Transistors! Heartbreak! http://ping.fm/KmALk

Ennio Morricone Soundtracks

Samuel Fuller's "White Dog"

Samuel Fuller's throat-grabbing expose on American racism was misunderstood and withheld from release when it was made in the early eighties; today, the notorious film is lauded for its daring metaphor and gripping pulp filmmaking. Kristy McNichol stars as a young actress who adopts a lost German Shepard, only to discover through a series of horrifying incidents that the dog has been trained to attack black people, and Paul Winfield plays the animal trainer who tries to cure him. A snarling, uncompromising vision, White Dog is a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being.