In the project room, William Cordova unleashes a new video. An homage to authentic beginnings as well as a spoof on empty gestures and compromised successes, Dondi and The Band of Gyspsies’ Greatest Hits, 2004, brings together Air Supply and Hendrix, graffiti gods and white boy guitar thrashing. Dondi, the first graffiti king, like Hendrix’s own Band of Gypsies’, never got his due. Props and fortunes went instead to Futura 2000, Zephyr, and other Bronx types that outlived poor Dondi. JH’s Experience got credit where it wasn’t due, even Jimi thought so. If Cordova romanticizes the beginnings that take place in living rooms and street corners, the bands that you organize with your friends when music matters more than money, its because things get sticky down the road. Gestures begin to loose their meaning. Smashing guitars on stage becomes schtick. Singing love songs to girls that have been stitched together out of marketing research is a little more than deadening. Of course zero solemnity is attached to Cordova’s slippery denunciations of pop’s entropic dive. He’s still serving up that weird confusion that governs the immigrant mind. Just think about about it: Air Supply and Hendrix. Huh? Yeah, that was our reaction as well.