Like a DJ playing a heavily requested jam, a jubilant Spike Jonze introduced his short film I’m Here to a cool crowd at the Tribeca Grand last night with, “It’s a robot love story, for all you romantics out there.” As we’ve come to expect from Jonze’s work the film was warm with a tinge of pain, strong on music and nostalgia. The DOS-era roboto-protagonist is loveable and the Eagle Rock setting lush with subtropical sunshine.

We won’t spoil for you here any specifics but suffice it to say that we are now highly intrigued about the sexual politics of robots (and their geek-chic auteur Frankenstein). Gind this film and enjoy the cameo by our friend the magician Chris Wonder.

Bong Joon-Ho is a fantastic filmmaker. His greedy revelry in icky and tense moments gives his movies a moody, panicky pace rendering them utterly enchanting. Add to that his almost slapstick sense of physical comedy–usually intruding into said tense moments–and you get this wonderful shimmering life that makes his characters human and his world entirely livable, no matter how bleak the scenario. For Bong does seem to like to put his players and his native Korea through a bad time–a serial killer campaign in Memories of Murder, a vile worm creature’s horrible campaign in The Host, and most recently a wrongful imprisonment in this year’s Mother, nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film.

In what has almost become a subgenre standard in the worlds of fiction and cinema, the eponymous mother in his new film must crusade against idiocy and all hope to reverse the wrongful murder charge against her simpleton son. She rages and writhes. She panics and wills to overcome. All the while traversing a familiarly Bongian environment via clunky and inane plot points–sudden disappearances, rememberings, and all too predictable character flip-flops. If not for the lush photography and odd ether trapped like a genie in this vessel the movie wouldn’t work at all. But one rankles at the drearily plotted bit for writing as intriguing as 2003’s zany and inspired Memories of a Murder.

That said, the last act will have you right on the edge of your seat until the denouement which will ether have you up in arms or groaning out the side of your mouth.

Thursday, March 18 at Milk, Fotorelief is throwing a benefit event for children affected by the Haitian earthquake. One hundred fashion and art photographers (myself included) have donated prints that will be auctioned. A limited edition book of all the works will also be available for purchase. All the proceeds are being donated to Rose Charities.

In case the possibility of buying my print (pictured above) didn’t fully entice you, or if you just want to drop some real cash, works from big guns like Patrick Demarchelier, Bruce Weber and Mario Sorrenti will be up for auction, along with many others.

A Picture Saves a Thousand Lives auction will be held tomorrow from 7 to 10 p.m. at Milk Gallery, 450 W. 15th Street, NYC. Suggested donation is $20.

Spellbinding songstress Alexa Wilding has released her very first music video: a completely mesmerizing three-minute 16mm film. Shot by frequent collaborator, fashion designer and Love Contemporary editor Paola Suhonen, the film features a simultaneously naïve and all-knowing Wilding as she sings Black Diamond Day, in a black-and-white world of pop-esque polka dots. The film is a dark, sweet and almost eerie reflection of the wonderland that exists in Wilding’s head, so who better to describe it than the singer herself?

“Black Diamond Day is a song exploring the theme ‘be careful what you wish for.’ A young girl is curious and has an object of her affection. She pursues him—ha, with her binoculars—gets him, and then is taken on a journey that is a disturbing mistake. Paola suggested polka dots instead of diamonds, since diamonds would be too obvious. I loved this, since polka dots hint back to ’60s pop art and cinema, and we both love the work of Yayoi Kusama, for whom the video is definitely an homage. My songs are innocent and sweet on the surface, but a dark current runs beneath them, so we were intrigued with using the polka dot—often a symbol of purity and girlhood—and having it take on a life of its own… Its like at the end of the “trip” our heroine—me—has been attacked by the very thing that got her in trouble, her innocent self in polka dots. ’60s pop art, Yayoi Kusama and a bit of Clockwork Orange, too, were our inspirations.”

Alexa will be performing with Mike Bones this evening, March 17th, at the closing of Paola Suhonen’s concept shop: the IVANAhelsinki and Love Contemporary Pop-Up Store at 9pm: 238 Mulberry (between Prince and Spring).

Alexa by Gustavo Marx for Dossier

This Thursday, Ryan McGinley will have his third solo show at Team Gallery. An exhibition of new work, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, will run from March 18 through April 17 and will be accompanied by a monograph published by Dashwood Book. David Strettell, the book’s publisher (also, of course, the owner of the New York’s only independent photography bookstore, Dashwood), spoke with Ryan for us to help us understand his segue from outdoor colors to black and white studio portraiture. Ryan also provided us with a preview of images from the new book.

David: When did you start this project? Was it a precursor to the summer road trips?

Ryan: Neville Wakefield asked me to do a project for a new magazine he was curating right before I was hitting the road in early summer of 2008. I’d always wanted to shoot in the studio, and then I thought, “Let’s make it totally different from anything I’ve done.  Let’s do black-and-white photography, and let’s do proper studio lighting and soft boxes and a seamless.” Just go in the totally opposite direction, and I did.

David: And some of those pictures survive in the book?

Ryan: Yeah, some of those pictures are in the book from that initial shoot. I fell in love with the studio. It was such a different way of working, you know. I’m so used to being outside—

David: Running around all over the country with a caravan of people.

Ryan: There was something really nice about having a rotating door of people coming in but I’d always be in the same place, spending two or three hours with each person,  and really having it be bare bones and removing the landscape. It’s just you and the subject and a backdrop and you have to figure out how to make that interesting.

David: And then, as a result, did the summer trip work become more like a studio?

Ryan: No in the studio I’m trying to recreate the same sort of energy and actions that I would have in my color work, so there’s a whole process of physical activities we go through. People are running and jumping and standing and sitting, and I have these flash cards with facial expressions on them that an actor would use, that say things like, “jealous.” Then in between that activity I also find very quiet moments that are very interesting.

David: They’ve become these three-hour marathons.

Ryan: It’s really fast, and it’s non-stop, and I have a hype girl, Brandy, who helps me, really gets people going. There’s a point where a photographer’s brain shuts off and gets lost in the camera. In the beginning I try to hold a conversation with my subject in order to pull emotions out of them and get different expressions or gestures. But at a certain point I really need to focus on the composition and start considering the picture, and that’s when having Brandy really comes in handy, because she keeps the person going, and she knows me so well that she knows what I want from them. She can see when it’s working and when it’s not.

David: And the subjects remain focused on what they’re doing.

Ryan: They‘re constantly moving and engaged which keeps them un-self-conscious and gives me a free flow.

David: Is this style something you think you’re going to continue to do, or is it over?

Ryan: I want to do some more of the work I was doing with people and animals together. I’ve made a few of those photos and it’s been really fun, because it’s so spontaneous. Animals are so funny that way. They’re just crawling and jumping on people, and the way that people interact with animals is really special too. A person changes so much in the presence of an animal and I love that.

David: Although I understand that you put a lot of work into all your projects, and it’s an exhaustive process, it does seem like it’s a very fun process, as well. And what’s interesting is that there’s no reference to what other people are doing right now, and I think that’s one of the reasons why you’ve become so popular, because you’re doing something where there’s no real reference to other people.

There may have been when you started, which is pretty normal, but now you’re doing something that’s an accessible approach, and you seem to have a lot of fun doing it.

Ryan: This chef in Mexico once said to me “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I definitely have a lot of fun making photos. Shooting in the studio is such a different way of working, you know. I don’t get that sense that everything can go wrong like you do when you’re on location, and you’re thinking, “Is this really going to work out?” I’ve had to bring that energy into the studio. I shoot in so many different places, all over the United States, places that I’ve never been to before, so there’s always a bit of fear of what it’s going to be like. Maybe I’ve seen some location pictures of the place, maybe I’ve researched this location on the internet, but you still have that gut feeling where you never know what’s going to happen. I guess that’s what’s exciting about shooting outside, but in the studio, there’s a comfort zone, and it’s this place that’s framed. It’s a real challenge to make something interesting happen. It’s like your home or something, especially since I’ve shot a decent amount of them in my own studio. I’ll shoot from 9:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m., literally with no breaks. I’m eating a taco in one hand and shooting with my camera in the other. Different people are coming all day long.

David: And I’m guessing you’re not meeting many of these people that come to the studio for the first time.

Ryan: No, actually, it’s the first time with a lot of them.

David: Really? So you have the whole dynamic of, “How are they gonna be when they get their clothes off?” Not only what their body’s going to be like but also how comfortable they are going to be.

Ryan: That’s the exciting part of my job. You never know what people are going to be like. One of my responsibilities is to make people feel comfortable very quickly. You have to learn how to do that very quickly, because you have to be comfortable too. If you’re not comfortable, they’re not going to be comfortable.

The hardest part of my day is the first shoot, because I’ve just woken up. I haven’t seen anybody nude yet. Everyone’s still kind of getting into it, and so to be the first model of the day is always really tough.

David: Probably very intimidating, yeah.

Ryan: But after one shoot, I’m into the groove, and then people come in, and I’m like, “Hey, what’s up? Okay, take your clothes off. All right, stand over here, do this, do that.” because we’re on a schedule, so there is no time to waste.

Sometimes it’s nice when people are awkward in the sense that you get that awkward energy from them and you can use that.

David: Yeah, some of the strongest ones in the book are definitely ones where you feel people breaking through some barrier. There’s one of a girl where you can feel her awkwardness with the process, but it’s very powerful at the same time.

Ryan: It’s a combination. Obviously, when I see something that makes me go, “Wow,” I really want to explore that emotion or that gesture or that expression. I’ll be like, “Okay, let’s work with this.”

David: I also thought Catherine Opie was a really interesting choice for the Q&A in the book, because obviously she’s known for the studio pictures and the nudes that she’s done, but her work is much more about identity and about gender, much more obviously political than your work. But both she and you, unlike many photographers, have done projects that are very, very different—the studio work and then those photographs of freeways, in her case. When you started shooting outside of the city in nature after your initial show at the Whitney, that was kind of a big shock for everyone to see, kind of, “Where did that come from?”

Ryan: Well, first of all, I feel like I didn’t have a normal artist career where you would make work and no one would really see it for a while, and you would have time to develop. I was lucky in some ways, but at the same time, I was just thrown in with the lions. So the work that you saw at the Whitney was literally the first work I ever made, which is pretty insane.

I’ve always wanted to be an artist that did different things. There are lots of artists that I look at, and I love their work, but they get stuck in a style, doing one thing, a comfort zone.

David: People keep asking them to do the same thing, and they do.

Ryan: I never want to do that. I always wanted to take risks and to have that sort of uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what to expect. I like to make mistakes and learn from them. I think my work evolves from making mistakes doing new things. If you’re not making mistakes you’re not doing anything, you know?

David: Well, it takes a lot of self-confidence to do that.

Ryan: One of my favorite photographers who I’ve always looked up to is Bernice Abbott. I admire her career. I’ve always wanted to kind of model my own path on hers. She fell into photography and started making these very beautiful portraits in Paris. Pictures of her crowd. Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Andre Kertesz. One picture in particular of James Joyce always comes to mind where he’s wearing his glasses, because the light hurts his eyes too much.

And then she just abandoned portraiture and moved to New York City, and started making photographs of buildings and neighborhoods. She chronicled New York City being built. The photographs are so amazing. She makes another beautiful body of work, and then she kills it.

Then she starts making all these scientific photographs about the laws of physics. I’ve always thought about that: You do something, and then you kill it, and then you just go and do something else. I feel like I can revisit things that I’ve done in the past when I want to, but I think it’s important to keep pushing.

David: Yeah, I think most photographers that I can recall that have had the immediate success that you had with the Whitney show, it’s been a kiss of death for them, really. It’s been very, very difficult for them to move beyond that, so obviously you have to make something really deliberate and go in a different direction.

Ryan: I’m so happy I’ve escaped that in the press now. I don’t really get “the young photographer” anymore, which I got forever. During the Whitney exhibition it was hearing “flash-in-the-pan” quite a lot, you know.

David: Well, there’s a lot of haters out there, aren’t there?

Ryan: Oh, my God, especially when they can be anonymous on the internet!

David: Yes, indeed.

Ryan: Be careful not to read the comments.

David: Right. Okay.

Ryan: Let’s talk about you. What was the first book you published?

David: The first book I did was with Ari Marcopoulos, and I talked to him very vaguely. I met him through the Dashwood Books store and he kind of bullied me into it, but it was a really good decision. I was very happy to be bullied into it, I was so thrilled, and am now looking at all these other projects, but I have to be patient.

Ryan: Do you think that you want to get into book publishing now and have it be full-on?

David: I want it to be semi full-on, because I like the idea of the store. It’s a good community, and everything builds from that.

Ryan: That’s why I wanted to do a book with you, because of that sense of community and the sense of doing something with someone in New York who is in my neighborhood. That was really important to me.

David: Yeah, that’s also where you’re really on top of the whole process, and I’ll do what I did with other books in the past—sell your book directly into the hands of 500 people that I know.

Ryan: I love that. Keep it grassroots, baby!

David: Exactly. It’s a very old model. A lot of the original publishers were bookstores, so it’s like a Dickensian model.

Ryan: Can we talk about our book and how fancy it is?

David: With our book, we could have done something that was much more like a catalog, but in the end I thought you’ve got such a big following in publishing in your photography anyway.

Technically our book has a 300-line screen, where as most publishers have 150, 175. So the reproduction will be unbelievably good.

Ryan: So you’ll see all the details, beautiful tones and it’ll be lush, right?

David: Yes, it will look like an old Irving Penn book.

Ryan: What do you think about book collectors in general? I’m really fascinated by the way that works, especially when I see one of my books on the internet, and it’s $500. Or sometimes I’ll see my first handmade book selling for $5,000, and that simply amazes me. Martin Parr just told me he bought one for $5,000!

David: Someone offered me one for $3,000 the other day.

Ryan: Oh, nice. That’s a deal! What do you think of that?

David: I asked them to bring it in and I photographed it for my website and everything, but I think it’s insane. I’m a little ambivalent about it, because I’m a book dealer, as well. The focus of what I do is not on high-end collectors, so I don’t sell that many books for that price really.

I kind of like dealing with new books, but also finding books that are not that well known. But, to go back to your question, I think it’s super-irrational, but it’s not the kind of thing you do unless you have disposable income, and it’s kind of a fetish for objects.

Ryan: Yeah. I can understand the obsession. Collecting rare art books is a condition. You can really get hooked on the glass pipe quick.

David: I find the problem about books and all of the recent interest in collecting books and the prices that books have gone up to is that when you start pricing your book at $3,000, $5,000, $10,000, you can no longer look at it, because every time you look at it, you degrade it. It’s like comic books. Okay, it brings more attention to the book form, but unless someone is right there to print a new version of the book, it kind of kills them, because all the books get bought up.

Ryan: Do you have a limit on the number of books that you’ll sell to a person?

David: I put limits on it all the time. In fact, with your last book, Moonmilk, I bought more than anybody else in the United States, because you’re a local artist. It was very popular. I sold 100 of those books in six days, and that was insisting on not selling more than one to anyone.

Ryan: Oh my God.

David: The idea was that I had something exclusive for a while, and I wanted to get it to as many people as possible, and I don’t want someone coming in and buying 50. There’s no point to it.

Ryan: Because then it becomes like ticket scalpers.

David: Yeah, and there are some pretty sleazy people around.

Ryan: Do you have some favorite photos in this book we did together?

David: I do. I like the cover very much with the big breasts and the inside cover picture we chose. It’s funny, I was expecting the pictures of men to be a lot stronger than the pictures of women, but I actually think it’s in reverse, in general, although I think most of my favorites are of women. And you?

Ryan: I like them all equally. I feel like with all the projects that I do it’s such a long process to arrive at one image. I’ve spent so much time shooting these people, and even more than shooting them I’ve spent so much time editing them. So I’m really investigating their bodies with the camera and then looking at every single minute detail of a finger flipped up or an eye to the left that I feel like I know these people so well. Once I have chosen it, it really just falls into this place where I have a very personal connection with all of them. And once they come together I feel like it’s kind of one big family. It’s really like they’re all like my children, like I’m the mother or something.

David: When I first met you, you referred to—I don’t know if it was just this project but maybe about the approach to a lot of your projects—thinking it stems from the fact that you come from a really good family, and you’re the youngest. And you’ve got like, seven siblings?

Ryan: Yeah, my mom had seven kids in seven years and then had me eleven years later.

David: Wow.

Ryan: All my work ties into my family. I feel like the all the models look the way that my brothers and sisters looked when they were younger, when we were growing up in New Jersey. I grew up in a middle class suburban town, about 30 minutes out of New York City. I was raised by my brothers and sisters. Obviously my parents were involved, but my brothers and sisters really wanted to raise me.

They wanted a baby, so I was around them so much, and there’s so many different kinds of personalities in my family, from the stoner to the mathematician, to the jock to the cheerleader, to the punk, to the drag queen, and I got all of that growing up. It’s had such an impact on me and my life that the people who I photograph really just look like my brothers and sisters did when I was a young boy. They’re my heroes.

David: Well, that is something that ties the work together, isn’t it? Your initial work was photographing what became your immediate family in New York, your close friends, and then you took a family on the road with you, and now you’re recreating another family in the studio.

Ryan: I like to be around lots of people. It makes me feel very comfortable.

It’s nice when you’re around a lot of people and you’re making photographs, because you can draw back, and let the chemistry happen between the group, and watch everything unravel. That’s what I spent so much time doing when I was young, watch all my brothers and sisters interact.

David: The family dynamics and all of that.

Ryan: Yeah. I remember one of my first shows where my mother came, and she was like, “Wow, all these people just look like…” and she named all my brothers and sisters. And she was right. In a sense it’s sort of a self-portrait.

David: And you’re still really close with your family?

Ryan: Yeah, with everybody.

David: Will they come to the opening?

Ryan: Yeah. Although my mom doesn’t like this body of work. She’s not really into up front nudity. She liked the cave work the most, because it was really about the landscape more than anything.

David: It was more formal.

Ryan: The caves were about abstraction and color. But with this, you’re removing the landscape, removing the color, and it’s completely about the person.

David: And your dad?

Ryan: Nah, he likes anything.

The good and wise philanthropists listening to Patti Smith Monday

This just in: Tools for Thought’s silent auction at Sotheby’s Monday night, featuring dozens of artists, most of whom were among the more than 600 hundred attendees who enjoyed Patti Smith’s very un-silent performance, raised more than $150,000 to put toward the reconstruction of Haiti. Bravo.

Photos from Dog Days Bogotá

Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth is fast at work at becoming a modern master. Since his big splash at the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the appearance of his sensational debut book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl, 2004), Soth has been a steady contributor for numerous glossy magazines and his languorous landscapes and still-waters portraits much ballyhooed. With another four monographs and several major exhibitions under his belt since he continues to do much more than fulfill the promise of auspicious beginnings–40 year old Alec Soth is officially (because I say so) one of the greats.

As he prepares for an exhibition at his hometown’s Walker Art Center–amid a zillion other projects–we found a moment to talk with the photographer about his process, the creative community and his new work.

Chris Wallace: Dog Days is incredible. Tell me about that experience.

Alec Soth: Dog Days Bogotá is a book that holds a very special place for me. In 2002 my wife and I went to Colombia to adopt a baby girl. We ended up staying for a couple of months while the courts processed our paperwork. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started taking pictures. But I had no intention of doing a book-length photography project. Mostly I was just photographing as a way to understand this place where my daughter came from.

CW: How did that change you, your eye?

AS: I ended up loving the work, but I was nervous to publish it. I mean, I still feel like I know next to nothing about Bogota. This is just a personal little series. But I’ve come to realize that there is something powerful about working in this very loose and personal way. I think about how I often prefer looking at an artist’s sketchbook than at their finished paintings.

CW: I first came in contact with your work when I saw Sleeping by the Mississippi at a Chicago Art Show and just flipped for it. The mythos, the iconography, the mise-en-scene gave me such a charge. I felt like I’d seen the work of a contemporary Robert Frank or Walker Evans–names that are almost always thrown around in your bio–but where do you come from, aesthetically? How did you come to photography?

AS: As a kid, I was creative, but not in a traditional way. I built forts and had a rich imaginary world with pretend friends and so on. Years later, after discovering contemporary art, I fell in love with British earthworks artists like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. I started doing very similar work to theirs. I’d do outdoor sculptures then document them photographically. This led me to photography as a medium. But this spirit of moving through the landscape and creating my own little story was the original impulse. And I think this is something you can also see in the American road photography tradition. So, yeah, I was really inspired by those iconic photographers. I’ve since been exposed to so many other photographic traditions that my horizons have really broadened.

CW: I’m intrigued by the structuring of the books Sleeping and Niagara–or, at least, their both having a wet geographical tether point. How did you conceive of these projects? Did you have an outline you were following or at outcome you were anticipating? I know you’ve called Niagara dark, and there is a really painful tone to both the books–do you think they have a common emotional thread? A Soth-ness?

AS: Soth-ness, yikes. Makes me think of the Sothness Monster. I guess I’m not comfortable making this kind of generalized analysis. I would say there is often a feeling of longing in the work, but then I’d say that is true for so a great deal of photography. There is something about the medium that is good about touching on feelings of voyeurism and yearning. I suppose that has a lot to do with my attraction to the medium.

Niagara is indeed a dark book. But I actually don’t think of Sleeping by the Mississippi that way. The making of that work was so liberating. And I think the book ends quite optimistically with a bunch of references to Spring and Easter. But I understand why other people might read the pictures a different way.

CW: It is obvious in reading your blog that you are a fan of the game and you can get as giddy and geeky as any wonk. As a fan what gets you really jazzed?

AS: For me, all of the energy comes from books. Along with loving to make them, I get a real thrill in collecting books. Lately I’ve been collecting photographically illustrated children’s books, most of which are 50+ years old. Most of these books are totally unknown and unappreciated. I’ve found some real treasures. More importantly, I’ve learned a lot about my bookmaking from these discoveries.

CW: Along those same lines, you have talked a bit about teaching photography, are you still teaching?  How does that feed you, your work?

AS: I don’t do much formal teaching. But I’m currently a mentor to two students, one from New York and the other from San Francisco. I really enjoy working one and one with people. It isn’t about grades and administrative bs. We’re really able to sink our teeth into a single project. I feel more like a doula than a teacher.

CW: I love that you’re not afraid to jump in the discussion and mix it up on controversial topics like Larry Clark’s Teenage Lust. What is that discourse like in your world? Do you get a lot of feedback from colleagues? Can you imagine Stieglitz and Frank talking shop on their blogs?

AS: Since I don’t work at institution, I don’t have much contact with colleagues. And, while we have an excellent community of photographers here in the Twin Cities, I don’t have much time to see anybody due to the demands of family and travel. So I guess blogs help fill that void a little bit. The critic Jerry Saltz calls Facebook his Cedar Bar. I sort of understand that.

CW: I know it’s difficult to talk about aesthetics but I’d really love to hear what you think about the dynamism of your work; are you constructing narratives with your subjects in Portraits, say, or is the work spontaneous…?  A combination?  I just did a feature on Jim Harrison and would love to hear about your process in shooting one of my heroes.  And the process of shooting one of your own in Eggleston.

AS: Most of my work is conceived and executed as a book. For me the Portraits functioned as a sort of vacation from that complicated way of working. The picture is meant to be the whole enchilada. These portraits came about in different ways. The Harrison picture was an assignment. I shot Eggleston while traveling on a personal project. Each one has a story. I remember having lunch at Harrison’s house. While we ate a magnificent lunch he received a huge FedEx delivery of wine and cheese. It really gave me a peek into the way the good life is lived. The peek into Eggleston’s world was something different. And I’m afraid it isn’t the kind of story I can share here.

CW: What’s running through your mind now?  What’s next?

AS: Most of this year is being consumed by the preparation for a big exhibition at the Walker Art Center. The show is going to focus on American pictures. Along with Mississippi and Niagara, there will be some much older work and about 30% new stuff. I’m waiting to talk about this new work until it is released.
 But while I’m preparing for that show, I’m still shooting. As we speak I’m preparing the first episode of a monthly slideshow I’m going to be doing for the The New York Times. These will be little first person stories about my various travels.
 On top of that I recently launched my DIY publishing venture: Little Brown Mushroom. This is a way for me to publish other people’s books and have some fun.

Last night Patti Smith rocked the house. The auction house. Sotheby’s.

The venerable ol’ East Side bidding grounds was the venue for a silent auction and cocktail benefit organized by Tools for Thought and Partners in Health to support efforts to rebuild Haiti after the disastrous earthquakes there. “This is good,” said filmmaker Everard Findlay. “The money will get to the people.”

Artists as far a field as Jeff Koons, Michael Stipe and Aurel Schmidt contributed works of art for the auction and Ms. Smith contributed a rock star performance, at the end of which, with fist raised high, she said, “This is for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. We’re with you.”

Photo by Fran Kiko

With Tulsa performing their soundcheck in the background we had the chance to catch up with musical artist Christina Rosenvinge. Blonde, graceful, and approachable. After exchanging a few pleasantries with her we became instant fans; not just of the music, but of Christina herself.

Vanessa Ceia: Tell us a little about yourself.
Christina Rosenvinge: I had my first band when I was fifteen.

VC: Here in Spain?
CR: Yeah, here in Spain. It was sort of a new wave band back in the eighties when the movida was happening, but I was too young and couldn’t go out at night until late, so I.. I had this band, Ella y los neumáticos, and that’s when everything started. Years later, I had a different band with another guy, called Alex and Christina. That was kind of a commercial pop band very inspired by French music from the eighties, and after that I started a song-writing career.

VC: You’re Spanish but you have family from—
CR: Uh, I’m Danish but I was born in Madrid.

VC: Do you speak Danish?
CR: I don’t, no, but…actually, it’s a strange family story because my father was a very conservative guy, so he came to Spain because he was such a big fan of Franco’s politics.

VC: Is this the first time that you’ve worked with Tulsa?
CR: Yeah. They’re opening for the show and we have a few musicians in common so that’s why we are going to travel together. We have about four or five more shows.

VC: Will you be doing any traveling outside of Spain as well?
CR: Mostly in Spain, but yeah I’m going to Chile, Buenos Aires and South America soon. That trip I’m going to be doing with my New York drummer, which is Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth, he’s the one I make records with and he comes to play with me when he has the opportunity.

VC: Is that where you normally record? In New York?
CR: In Hoboken, yes (laughs); in the Sonic Youth space. I’ll be there in May recording with Steve Shelley and Jeremy Wilms, who’s a bass player from New York—well, really, he isn’t from New York, he’s from London, but he lives in New York now. And he’s like my partner too and we’ve been playing together for ten years or so.

VC: Is your this new album going to be a similar style to what you’ve been doing over the last while?
CR: Yeah, it’s the same style that I’ve done in the lat one. We kind of have an idea of doing a project in English where the three of us are going to write songs together, but that’s been delayed for months and years but I hope that we’ll start on it again.

VC: You started off with three records in English, and then your anglophone phase seemed to have ended. Do you have any intention of working in English again?
CR: Not now, you know I live here in Spain and naturally my songs come out in Spanish now. Actually, I’m trying to write a couple of songs in English for this one project that I have and it’s kind of difficult for me, it’s not all that natural.

VC: What’s your emotional state when you produce your best work?
CR: I’m not sure, you know. Work comes out when I have a really steady discipline, like when I work everyday for several hours and start getting results. I try to do that everyday and have been doing that for the past five months. Not that I come up with something good (laughs) but I try to.

VC: What kind of crowd turns up at your shows?
CR: I get a very diverse crowd. There are really young people and there are people that are around fifty. It depends… there are people that have been buying my records for years and those that just discovered the last record and are into that one. The records in English weren’t all that known here (in Spain). People didn’t listen to them..I guess they were too experimental or weird or whatever. It was a different style, I was living in New York back then and it was a little more adventurous (laughs).

VC: What do you think of the music scene back in New York?
CR: For me it was such a big….you know, it was like going to school again. Being around all those people, not only the guys from Sonic Youth, but all the musicians and creative people there. All those people that just put out a record and work as waiters or whatever and are incredibly talented and wonderful…and that sense of community that everyone’s a part of. I thought it was really brilliant and refreshing. I got to play with people that were really great and it was all just for the fun of it. At that time I did a couple of shows with Tim Foljahn, and he was in my band, on the guitar, and he put out records with our same label, and Steve Shelley was in that band too.. Then there was hanging out with Smokey Hormel and playing in a band that did covers of Brazilian music with Sean Lennon and… It was just a lot of fun.

VC: Is there anyone that you’d really like to collaborate and one day get to work with?
CR: Sooner or later you get to meet everybody and play with everybody. That’s what I’ve done for years and it’s easier than it looks.

VC: You’ve played at an ATP festival. How was that?
CR: It was a lot of fun, really great and I was playing in between Television and Eddie Vedder (laughs) and it was so amazing.

VC: If you were to define your style of music how would you do it?
CR: It’s a cross between European pop…sometimes I’m inspired by Italian pop, like one song that I just wrote that’s very inspired by Adriano Celentano from the seventies who I really like. French pop too, but particularly sound wise it’s very inspired by New York pop music. So when everything comes together for me it’s very organic, but every time I play with American musicians they always say, “oh, you’re so European or Spanish” or whatever. They say that I have a different mindset. The way that someone who has listened to a lot of latin music will write a song… they tend to be more into the rhythm thing, more into different and adventurous patterns and mixing… At least people from Spain get all these crazy mixes, a lot of flamenco and sevillanas, but also Brazilian music and south American folklore, and from descent I’ve got the Northern European roots… I’m such a bastard (laughs). There’s nothing pure in me. I can’t point to just one place. In a way I’m a foreigner everywhere. That’s why I felt at home in New York. It’s like you can only become a New Yorker when you don’t belong to any particular land.