Sonic Youth Gossip - The Club in the Shadow

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SHELFLIFE #18B: CLUB IN THE SHADOW CARD

Kim and Jutta curated a radically organic project at Kenny Schachter’s conTEMPorary in the far West Village–the Club in the Shadow. I had a ton of films on a loop upstairs. Kim and I collaborated on a series of videos of artists dancing in the spare, curved steel-mesh, Vito Acconci designed gallery. I shot Alan Licht, Jutta Koether, Karen Finley and Kim each performing to music of their choosing and cranked out a hyper-slow, meditative abstraction of those performances as an edition for the show. Double Leopards, Charlambides, Magick Markers, Alan Licht and a number of other phenomenal bands did sporadic sets. Electrophilia played what I seem to remember being one of their final shows before Steve Perino’s fatal motorcycle accident. The space was more about sitting on the cold concrete floor and enjoying the ephemerality of whatever it was that would soon no longer be contained within it than it was about absorbing the few things that remained inside it as constants.
Kim printed up a box of membership cards for the club. I think Kenny was giving them away. Maybe they were for sale. I can’t remember. The image on the front is of Monica Lewinsky shuddering at the girth of Thurston’s tip-nibbled, unpeeled banana. It was taken in a trailer backstage at one of the Central Park Wilco/Sonic Youth shows. I have video of this…going down…somewhere. Somehow, though–neither the tropical cock, nor the gash at the end of the Clinton Administration are what make that picture. Thurston’s shirt… The thing people who’ve never been in or toured with a band don’t understand is that the access you gain to incredible t-shirts by driving thru every po’ dunk town in the many armpits of this globe is a luxury few torso’d mortals can really fathom.