Now offering video for your "electronic press kit"

Are you in need of some video for your electronic press kit? We are now offering video services that can be used for EPK's, such as an interview, footage from around the city, in the country and various locations.

More information coming Wednesday, December 31 so stay tuned to Webbspun Ideas!

Artists Collect: The Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong Private Collection at Cheekwood

Some of Red Grooms work





Internationally recognized artist and Nashville-native Red Grooms was made famous for his riotous paintings and installations depicting urban life. Over the years these two artists have amassed an incredible collection that reveals their lifelong passion for the arts and their personal connections to an international art world.

On display October 11, 2008 - January 4, 2009

Learn more about this fascinating exhibit at the Cheekwood website.

Amazing wall paintings

I found these cool pictures at Freshome

Art at the Arcade

Art at the Arcade in downtown Nashville has helped revitalize the Arcade and turned into into an attraction for more people. It is still an architectural beauty but this brings more to it then just restaurants and lunch time crowds. Be sure to visit them and enjoy the growing art community in Nashville.


"Percy" by Daniel Lai


"Seared Numbers Atoms Bright" by Ezra Kristian


"What We Are" by Jennifer Anderson


"Talk" by Akiko Hoshino

Moondog in New York

Bochum, West Germany.
For 30 years he was a landmark for New Yorkers. Decked out in a bizzare mock-Viking outfit, a horned helmet on his head and a spear in his hand, he stood on the corner of 54th Street and Sixth Avenue, majestically ignoring the giggles and wisecracks, selling his poems and copies of his sheet music and playing what one critic called "delicate Coplandesque rhythms" on weird instruments of his own design. He called himself Moondog, after a dog he liked, and was unfailingly courteous and patient with the curious. Although handicapped by total blindness from an explosion when he was 16 years old, Moondog wasn't just another one of the crazies wandering aimlessly through the metropolis, but a dedicated nonconformist who insists he pursued his unorthodox street life for the sake of his music. Over the years he acquired a lot of friends, some of them with real clout in the music world, like Artur Rodzinski, conductor of the New York Philharmonic. However, repeated attempts to get him off the streets and into a more conventional mode of life foundered on Moondogs's fierce protection of his freedom.But Moondog, whose real name is Louis Hardin, isn't standing on street corners anymore. At the age of 62, in an uninspiring little town in West Germany, Moondog has found a home.A Composer's Paradise"I am living in a composer's paradise"



"I am living in a composer's paradise," he says to a visitor in a sound studio in Bochum, where his music is being recorded. "I am surrounded by musicians, I get my meals on time, I'm warm, and most of all I'm free for my music." He speaks like a man who has suddenly realized the joy of no longer having to cope with the very problems of existence.Sitting next to him, watching fondly and proudly, is the architect of his new life, a slight blond woman of 27, named Ilona Goebel. She and the musician met three years ago in a small town in the Ruhr valley.Moondog (Miss Goebel calls him by his given name Louis) came to Germany in 1974 under the auspices of one of his early New York admirers, the organist Paul Jordan. Mr. Hardin had been invited to conduct a concert of his works played by Mr. Jordan in Frankfurt, and has simply never returned to New York."I felt at home here, in the country where so many great composers have lived and worked," he said. "I went to Bonn to the house where Beethoven was born. I sat at the spinnet where he composed some of his great music and I felt I was in spiritual communication with him.When Ilona Goebel first saw him, Moondog was standing on a street corner in Recklinghausen, dressed in his familiar Viking cape and helmet, selling copies of his poems. The somewhat startled citizens thought he was an out-of-work actor costumed as an "alt Deutscher"

Read the full story in Moondog's Corner.

~~~~~~~

Sidewalk Hero, On the Horns Of a Revival
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

Plenty of chamber music festivals have featured works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Or Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner.

But a festival that includes music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ives, Carter and Kirchner, all playing second fiddle to the classical works of Moondog?

''Moondog Rising,'' which takes place on Friday and Saturday at Advent Lutheran Church in Manhattan, is surely the first. The Viking of Sixth Avenue, as he was known, would be proud.



From the late 1940s to the early '70s Moondog was as recognizable in the New York City landscape as the Empire State Building, and nearly as striking. A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog's Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and ''Today'' to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.

''Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,'' Robert Scotto, author of ''Moondog,'' a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. ''And everybody had his own Moondog.''

Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-'90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog's idiosyncratic forays into their world, ''the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.''

Robin Boomer, a cellist and the organizer of Moondog Rising, said: ''Most of the people I know from the classical music world don't know Moondog at all. He hasn't made it into the canon.''

Part of the problem is that Moondog was so prolific and eclectic. Working in Braille, often composing under his cloak on the sidewalk, he wrote in an impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica (he made his own triangular drum-and-cymbal instrument, the trimba), avant-garde jazz, folkish madrigals, Bach-like neo-Baroque rounds and canons for chamber orchestra, symphonies for full orchestra, and a layered minimalism that influenced his young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (They can be heard playing with Moondog in the 1960s on a sampler CD included in Mr. Scotto's book, for which Mr. Glass wrote the preface.)

Read the entire article in the New York Times

A Zoned Hotel for the Arts?

Sherill Tippin's Op/Ed piece in the NY Times reminds us that when the Chelsea was built New Yorkers were facing a similar housing crisis. She writes, "The Chelsea was built to address this problem. A French-born writer, inventor, architect, and idealist, Philip Gengembre Hubert, introduced the cooperative apartment system to New York, specifically to free New Yorkers from the burden of overpriced housing and to encourage the cross-class intermingling neded to nurture a cohesive culture." Tippins also mentions how readers of this blog have responded with creative solutions as to how to deal with the recent hostile take over of the Chelsea. Here’s one of the more interesting.

Surely, if the Soho artists could get an entire neighborhood zoned just for artists, the Chelsea, with its landmarked status, could work with foundations, friendly investors, artists-with-money, the Bards, and residents to create a zoned hotel for the arts.


Read more about the ongoing struggle to save the Chelsea Hotel in NYC, HERE