The secularist lawyer John Rowe, wrote this on his blog 12/7
Romney's Speech:
I agree with Andrew Sullivan. The biggest problem I have with his speech is Romney seems to try and form an alliance with other religious conservatives, mainly orthodox Christians -- find common ground between them -- and gang up on secularists, atheists, and agnostics, in an us versus them mentality. America belongs to everyone, not just religious folks.
That said, I think Romney well-positioned himself by appealing to America's Founders and their inclusive civil religion. Now, they weren't Mormons; but neither were they "Christians" as orthodox Trinitarians understand their faith. In other words, the political theology of America’s Founding is every bit as inclusive of Christian heresies like Mormonism (indeed, it was established by unitarian heretics!) as it is of orthodox Christianity. And it also arguably includes non-Christian faiths like Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Native American Spirituality, and pagan Greco-Romanism as well. (If you haven't noticed, I use that list because each religion mentioned qualifies as one that America's Founders identified as "sound religion" or valid paths to God that could, like Christianity, support republican governments.)
Romney's appeal to America’s Founding political theology can show how Mormonism fits well with authentically American politics; indeed, given that Mormonism incorporated, after the fact, some of America's Founders' eccentric a-biblical theology, arguably Mormonism better complements America's Founding republican constitutional order than does orthodox Trinitarian Christianity. No orthodox Christian should believe the Constitution and Declaration are divinely inspired as is the Bible. Yet, this is exactly what Mormons believe. And if one believes the Constitution is divinely inspired, one is less likely to violate it.
[Some other eccentric non-biblical beliefs Mormonism incorporated from America's Founding include Jefferson's belief that God is a material being; Franklin's belief that each solar system has its own more personal, knowable God, the one he would worship, with some unknown creator/creation as the first cause; and Elias Boudinat's belief that American Indians were the lost tribe of Israel.]
However well Romney's Mormonism situates with American political theology, stressing such fact is not likely to score points with conservative evangelicals, mainly because too many of them have bought into the Christian Nation myth. Evangelicals may perhaps feel perfectly comfortable with a President who doesn’t have a real orthodox Christian faith, because, after all, neither did the first 5 or 6 American Presidents. But realizing so many early Presidents/key Founders were not really Christians, instead of making them feel better about Mitt, might actually leave a bad taste in their mouth and make them feel worse about America's Founders. For that, I would put the blame squarely on the "Christian Nation" crowd and the myth they've managed to peddle to too many conservative evangelicals.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Attempt at a last ppgh for the Kenny Essay
I think part of the reason why I wrote this essay, was that I love country music, and i think that it is a bellwether for the way that America sees itself. I am a Canadian, I have to keep track of the empire, like being in bed with a buffalo, it might roll over on you, it might crush you in the night. The thing is, reading about Cheseny, in the conventional press, they are all so surprised, at his success, and at how his normalcy--my friends accuse me of having a fetish for normalcy, but the thing is, things are never as normal as they seem. Griel Marcus talked about the Old Weird America, and how country about death, about anything but the sunbelt and the suburbs were, and there are all these movies and television shows and novels about dark things done in the basement of the suburbs...the thing is, i think the patterns of how we listen, how we create and how we consume reflect how the world runs, and i think that the more normal things are, the more anthropolgically, we can determine a culture---we know more about the romans via pottery shards, then we do via the states in the temples, to speak broadly.
I think that, then, Chesney's blankness, this complicated and intractable relationship with normality that we have talked about here reflects in finding meaning and pattern in the suburbs I grew up in. Growing up strange, not knowing the patterns, in a town whose industries were prisons and gas plants, growing up wanting to be an academic, a writer, an artist--growing up weird means that that which is normal is strange...Marcus quotes the roman historian Tactius all the time, I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me, but Chesney, Paisley, Keith and the like are strange to me, the middle America is strange to me...this was my attempt to make them closer, to find out why I loved that which I loved...
I joked, telling people about this essay, that it was about how much I wanted to fuck Kenny Chesney, and i think that not only do I want to fuck Chesney, but I want to transfer myself, to be a truck driver in Dubuque or a housewife in Phoenix. I would like to tell a story that illustrates this point, that talks about this longing. There is a Canadian singer named Jason McCoy, he's good--look him up--and I was in his concert at Bloor/Yonge in Toronto, at a Hard Rock Cafe. The most tourist spot in the most urban corner in Canada, and I am with these two women who work as cleaners, near Barrie. They are drinking Molson long necks, I'm drinking micro brew, they are talking about McCoy's ass, and I say, its a nice ass, they get a little drunk, and I'm a little drunk, its near Christmas, I'm alone, and the concert is good but I'm not having any fun, I go to the concert because i wanted some down home charm
But they start making fun of my beer, and then ignore me. They think of me as a city boy that is slumming, they dont think I understand the power of McCoy, and one of the reasons why I love the singer, is that all of his filth is oblique, references to being born again sexually being the same as born again religiously, or a sly node to swallows at capernstria and swallowing of oral sex...and he is also deeply religious, though he keeps his religion close to his chest.
I think here, I am a city boy who is trying to be a country boy, talking about Chesney as a post modern sexual ideal, because I want him to be, because everytime I think about Chesney this way, I think of that concert, the sexuality almost hidden, the casual lust and the home town values, the psycho-geographical land mines of class, taste, culture, and that which can be consumed. There is something comforting and unsettling simultaneously about seeing his body move through such metaphorical and physical spaces, just like drinking the wrong beer in the wrong crowd confirms and upsets social identifiers, and just like there is something subversive in getting a hard on during a jason mccoy concert.
I think part of the reason why I wrote this essay, was that I love country music, and i think that it is a bellwether for the way that America sees itself. I am a Canadian, I have to keep track of the empire, like being in bed with a buffalo, it might roll over on you, it might crush you in the night. The thing is, reading about Cheseny, in the conventional press, they are all so surprised, at his success, and at how his normalcy--my friends accuse me of having a fetish for normalcy, but the thing is, things are never as normal as they seem. Griel Marcus talked about the Old Weird America, and how country about death, about anything but the sunbelt and the suburbs were, and there are all these movies and television shows and novels about dark things done in the basement of the suburbs...the thing is, i think the patterns of how we listen, how we create and how we consume reflect how the world runs, and i think that the more normal things are, the more anthropolgically, we can determine a culture---we know more about the romans via pottery shards, then we do via the states in the temples, to speak broadly.
I think that, then, Chesney's blankness, this complicated and intractable relationship with normality that we have talked about here reflects in finding meaning and pattern in the suburbs I grew up in. Growing up strange, not knowing the patterns, in a town whose industries were prisons and gas plants, growing up wanting to be an academic, a writer, an artist--growing up weird means that that which is normal is strange...Marcus quotes the roman historian Tactius all the time, I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me, but Chesney, Paisley, Keith and the like are strange to me, the middle America is strange to me...this was my attempt to make them closer, to find out why I loved that which I loved...
I joked, telling people about this essay, that it was about how much I wanted to fuck Kenny Chesney, and i think that not only do I want to fuck Chesney, but I want to transfer myself, to be a truck driver in Dubuque or a housewife in Phoenix. I would like to tell a story that illustrates this point, that talks about this longing. There is a Canadian singer named Jason McCoy, he's good--look him up--and I was in his concert at Bloor/Yonge in Toronto, at a Hard Rock Cafe. The most tourist spot in the most urban corner in Canada, and I am with these two women who work as cleaners, near Barrie. They are drinking Molson long necks, I'm drinking micro brew, they are talking about McCoy's ass, and I say, its a nice ass, they get a little drunk, and I'm a little drunk, its near Christmas, I'm alone, and the concert is good but I'm not having any fun, I go to the concert because i wanted some down home charm
But they start making fun of my beer, and then ignore me. They think of me as a city boy that is slumming, they dont think I understand the power of McCoy, and one of the reasons why I love the singer, is that all of his filth is oblique, references to being born again sexually being the same as born again religiously, or a sly node to swallows at capernstria and swallowing of oral sex...and he is also deeply religious, though he keeps his religion close to his chest.
I think here, I am a city boy who is trying to be a country boy, talking about Chesney as a post modern sexual ideal, because I want him to be, because everytime I think about Chesney this way, I think of that concert, the sexuality almost hidden, the casual lust and the home town values, the psycho-geographical land mines of class, taste, culture, and that which can be consumed. There is something comforting and unsettling simultaneously about seeing his body move through such metaphorical and physical spaces, just like drinking the wrong beer in the wrong crowd confirms and upsets social identifiers, and just like there is something subversive in getting a hard on during a jason mccoy concert.
...we are clearly meant to understand that the opposite of love is killing, that, if we fail to love, inevitably we will perform acts of violence. Auden could have revised the line and made its real meaning more explicit by saying, "We must either love or kill each other", but that revision wouldn't fit the iambic trimeter in which the poem was written, nor would it rhyme with any of other line in the stanza. No doubt Auden could have found some other workable solution, but he didn't attempt to do so (aside from simp[ly excising the stanza in its first reprinting...
From The Normal Heart Condition, according to Auden, Alfred Corn
I wanted to be Moses, but I could only be Cassandra
Larry Kramer, In the Destiny of ME, from John M Clum Kramer vs Kramer, Ben and Alexander...201
The message of Faggots had been either "Sexual liberation is evil: or Put aside destructive pursuits and seek love: Either way, it was the mwessage that mattered. From the beginning of his writing career, Kramer, had been a "message queen". a term aimed at him derisvely but which he considers a compliment...
Michael Paller, Kramer and Gay Theater, 206
The grappling to understand despite a fundamental failure at empathy, a wish to reach out to each other over the gulf of misunderstanding, and messy past interactions, pervade...
David Wallinger The Abnormal Talent, 237 (i wish i could just link to this whole essay, its brillant)
I didn;t set out to write a play about AIDS, I set out to write a play about what it was like to be a gay, Jewish, Leftist man in New York City in mid-80s Reagan America. I really think I set out to write about Reagon, Id seen a few plays and TV films "about" AIDS, and with one single exception tehy were all terrible, in my opinion, disease-of-the-week weepies addressing something manifestly monumentally of another order--an order, i felt, like the Holocaust, the scale of which was incommensurable with representation on the tacky tawdry showbizzy stage...
We all know that the form, the public forum, the instant community of actor and audience, collective attendance, catharsis, can in the right hands, suit any subject of a vast shared grief and rage. We know that theater banished actor, once full throttle mimesis, representations and narrative had insinuated themselves into the Mass; not because of a food actors power to inspire idolatry but rather because the whole business started to smell of something dangerously cheap, risible, carnal; the ecclesiastical rabidly became the dialectical opposite of its Sacred subject. TRhe proximity of the Divine and the Preposterous, the infinitely grave and the Infintely Embarrassing, made the theatrical bits more exciting than the sacramental ritual and hence the theatrical became, ripe for, and deserving of anathema....
I struggle a lot with what Ive come increasingly to describe to myself as a dicvide between Wisdom with a capital W, which I am reasonably certain I do nto posses, adn the something that I do possess--opinions? In my opinons, my opinons are the correct opinons are to have, but having the correct opinons is not the same as knowing the truth, having Wisdom, some people have that but I ddont knopw where they got it any more more then I know, really why I'm gay....
Tony Krushner, Three Screeds For Larry Kramer, 192/3
From We Must Love One Another or Die, The Life and LEgacies of Larry Kramer, edited by L Mass St Martins, 1997.
From The Normal Heart Condition, according to Auden, Alfred Corn
I wanted to be Moses, but I could only be Cassandra
Larry Kramer, In the Destiny of ME, from John M Clum Kramer vs Kramer, Ben and Alexander...201
The message of Faggots had been either "Sexual liberation is evil: or Put aside destructive pursuits and seek love: Either way, it was the mwessage that mattered. From the beginning of his writing career, Kramer, had been a "message queen". a term aimed at him derisvely but which he considers a compliment...
Michael Paller, Kramer and Gay Theater, 206
The grappling to understand despite a fundamental failure at empathy, a wish to reach out to each other over the gulf of misunderstanding, and messy past interactions, pervade...
David Wallinger The Abnormal Talent, 237 (i wish i could just link to this whole essay, its brillant)
I didn;t set out to write a play about AIDS, I set out to write a play about what it was like to be a gay, Jewish, Leftist man in New York City in mid-80s Reagan America. I really think I set out to write about Reagon, Id seen a few plays and TV films "about" AIDS, and with one single exception tehy were all terrible, in my opinion, disease-of-the-week weepies addressing something manifestly monumentally of another order--an order, i felt, like the Holocaust, the scale of which was incommensurable with representation on the tacky tawdry showbizzy stage...
We all know that the form, the public forum, the instant community of actor and audience, collective attendance, catharsis, can in the right hands, suit any subject of a vast shared grief and rage. We know that theater banished actor, once full throttle mimesis, representations and narrative had insinuated themselves into the Mass; not because of a food actors power to inspire idolatry but rather because the whole business started to smell of something dangerously cheap, risible, carnal; the ecclesiastical rabidly became the dialectical opposite of its Sacred subject. TRhe proximity of the Divine and the Preposterous, the infinitely grave and the Infintely Embarrassing, made the theatrical bits more exciting than the sacramental ritual and hence the theatrical became, ripe for, and deserving of anathema....
I struggle a lot with what Ive come increasingly to describe to myself as a dicvide between Wisdom with a capital W, which I am reasonably certain I do nto posses, adn the something that I do possess--opinions? In my opinons, my opinons are the correct opinons are to have, but having the correct opinons is not the same as knowing the truth, having Wisdom, some people have that but I ddont knopw where they got it any more more then I know, really why I'm gay....
Tony Krushner, Three Screeds For Larry Kramer, 192/3
From We Must Love One Another or Die, The Life and LEgacies of Larry Kramer, edited by L Mass St Martins, 1997.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Nashville Poll
Top Ten Country Albums:
1. Golden Opportunities, Okkervill River. Not the one that was traditionally released, but the one that was given free over the net—for a variety of reasons, because I think this is the way for finding patterns, for figuring out how new sounds function, because the only way to sink the pirates is to go into the sea, and because it’s a great album. Aside from all the meta stuff about the net as delivery device, the aching vocals, the crystalline drumming, the wheezing harmonicas are uniquely them, which makes the claiming of a cover album an act of great self confidence.
2. Corb Lund, Horse Solider! Horse Solider! I think this album got me mostly, because of its deep moral ambiguity. In a world of convenience, pleasure and kowtowing, this album is unsure of where to fit in, and the deep discomfort about his relationship to G-d, to history, to war, and to the company of men, is profoundly discomforting. He knows what is wrong and what has ben wrong, but does to know how to fix it. Also, beautiful vocals, and a sense of dramatic irony and narrative construction that astonishes.
3. Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift. An 18 year old singing about how sad it feels to be 18, the Connie Francis of New Nashville, and I mean that as the deepest compliment.
4. Tim McGraw, Let It Go. Rocks harder, has more to lose, and more to gain then most of the other albums this year—longing when it needs to be, rollicking when it wants to be, gorgeous and triumphant.
5. Teddy Thompson—Up Front and Down Low. A clutch of second generation singer songwriters is emerging to make music that is both historically informed, close to their family’s, and if not radically separate, at least showing a new direction to folk and the like. Thompson’s country covers album is respectful of the source and the history, with out making a museum piece. It is also infused with a deep melancholy, a heartbreak that reminds me of Tammy and George.
6. Songs of America, Various Artists—Everyone had their bitchings about who was included and who was excluded, and all of that is fair, but there is something miraculous in someone so safe and so close to power, having the bravery in making a collection of American folk songs that is so diverse, and so weird. For someone who is Canadian, who lives with the empire in our backyard, and who is terrified of anyone winning the presidency, it reminded me of why I love the culture of America, why I still listen to country music, no matter how reactionary, broken and exhausting the whole system is. (That said, it could do with more Aboriginal and Hispanic work)
7. Wagonmaster, Porter Wagoner. Just as batshit as you would expect from someone who spent the last 30 years collapsing into all kinds of personal, spiritual, and finical ruin.
8. We’ll Never Look Back, Mavis Staples. I don’t know if this is cheating, but everything that I expect from country, a belief in G-d, a belief in history, a wonder at love, is all here. So I am going to include it.
9. Big Dog Daddy, Toby Keith. The album this year I listened to, as pure aural pleasure. Nothing much significant, but his voice is like being enveloped in something warm and tight and v. v. safe—not quite the erotic frission I find in George Canyon or Josh Turner, a little rougher, a little less safe, but of the same taxonomical category.
10. Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Miranda Lambert.
Top Ten Country Singles:
1. Dancing for the Groceries, Kenny Chesney. Like Honky Tonk Badonadonk, a song that I thought was so unbelievably stupid and slightly misogynist, that it surprised me how quickly I found myself singing along. Also contains the amazing rhyme: “in sequins and in laces/shes dancing for the braces”
2. Corb Lund, Calvary. Two Book ended, the first about the glories of war, the second about the pain of death and disease, a double punch of sophisticated self correcting historical views, works even better because the first one, with its fife and snare drum sounds like it should come out of the civil war, and the second one with its slower pace, and mournful guitar, sounds like Vietnam era Neil Young
3. Drive By Truckers, Dress Blues. A memorial ode to a friend who died at 18, as a marine. From the beginning, with the intoning of he was 18, to the clarion calls towards mother and family, w/o the rhetoric of the state, makes it one of the more profound anti war anthems in recent memory (esp. the line American boys hate to lose/but you never planned in the bombs and the sand/or sleeping in yr dress blues)
4. Nickelback, Rockstar. Chesney is rocking out with Hagar in Mexico, and John Bon Jovi is on the country charts, and the demographic intermingling is fascinating—put a cowboy hat on when the hair falls out—with John Rich helping to write this and appearing in the video, an artifact of that change at its best. (and I’m shocked that I am writing this, because like all right thinking critics, I hate Nickelback---if I start saying nice things about Hinder next take me out behind the bar and shoot me.)
5. Taylor Swift, Tear Drops On My Guitar. Lovely, teenage rebellion recast as an overwritten ode to real time nostalgia, reminds one of the importance of not only music, but noise—does so with a crystalline voice and a purity ramping up to an eventual corruption.
6. Fionn O Reagon, Penny in the Slot I have no idea why I love this, its self conscious, twee, tourist Irish for the mercury prize crowd, the hipster version of green beer on St Patrick’s day, but he can write, and he has a seductive lo-fi tenderness, and he makes you feel warm in the middle of December, and charmed in the middle of June, and charm is just this side of seduction.
7. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, I Need You. I love any song of marital fidelity that makes being married sound self destructive and unavoidable, and this one, with its overwrought melodrama sure does that.
8. Josh Turner, Me and God. Fireworks was limp, and devoid of the sexual energy that he can obviously deliver—he is a singer that works better with monogamy than with fury. Like all good, soppy and over emotional southern Baptists, the only thing that trumps monogamy is an erotic attachment to the saviour—it’s all here, a desire for discipline, attachment, to be broken and to be restored. A delicate and moving declaration of pure ego.
9. Reba and Kelly, Because of You. Kelly’s career collapsed this year, and her album is shit, but this single, when she returns to Nashville’s ever forgiving arms, makes me realize with the right studio magic, anything can be made to sound revelatory. I am on pins and needles for Jessica Simpson’s attempt at this.
10. George Canyon, Good Ol Boys. A Nova Scotia boy takes the Dukes Of Hazard and make it sound as much part of the canon as Johnny Cash, George Jones or Kris Kristofferson, a profound joke on the self important heritage preservers.
Top Five Country Reissues:
1. Nick Drake Fruit Trees. Cause its good to have everything in one place, and because it reminded me of how his orchestral and acoustic mixing and matching made his weak lyrics and odd voice sound like a virtue.
2. The Stanley Brothers, Definitive Collection. Good enough to convince everyone that Bluegrass existed before G-d and will be the primary music of the millennium where Christ reigns in peace.
3. Graham Parsons, Live at the Avalon Ballroom. Try to forget all of that Califorian mysticism, and just listen. It’s sublime, isn’t it?
4. Neil Young, Live at the Massey Ball Room. Like Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall, but Canadian, so more modest and less conceptual. (Also the origin of some of the best songs of the last 25 years, its good to hear where myths begin sometimes.
5. Vashti Bunyan, Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind. She has a tiny, whispering voice, almost imperceptible, and often on these just found tapes, she had to be asked to speak up, the intimacy and the calmness that are found in that voice though, are a folk classic.
Male Vocals:
1. Josh Turner
2. George Canyon
3. Tim McGraw
Female Vocals:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Reba McEntire
3. Miranda Lambert
Live Performances:
1. Julian Austin
2. Josh Ritter
3. Western Finals Rodeo
Songwriters:
1. John Rich
2. William Kenneth Aspin
3. Corb Lund
Duos, etc:
1. Duhks
2. Sugarland
3. Reba McEntire and Kelly Clarkson
New Acts:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Jason Michael Carroll
3. Fionn O Reagon
Overall:
1. Corb Lund
2. Taylor Swift
3. George Canyon
Top Ten Country Albums:
1. Golden Opportunities, Okkervill River. Not the one that was traditionally released, but the one that was given free over the net—for a variety of reasons, because I think this is the way for finding patterns, for figuring out how new sounds function, because the only way to sink the pirates is to go into the sea, and because it’s a great album. Aside from all the meta stuff about the net as delivery device, the aching vocals, the crystalline drumming, the wheezing harmonicas are uniquely them, which makes the claiming of a cover album an act of great self confidence.
2. Corb Lund, Horse Solider! Horse Solider! I think this album got me mostly, because of its deep moral ambiguity. In a world of convenience, pleasure and kowtowing, this album is unsure of where to fit in, and the deep discomfort about his relationship to G-d, to history, to war, and to the company of men, is profoundly discomforting. He knows what is wrong and what has ben wrong, but does to know how to fix it. Also, beautiful vocals, and a sense of dramatic irony and narrative construction that astonishes.
3. Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift. An 18 year old singing about how sad it feels to be 18, the Connie Francis of New Nashville, and I mean that as the deepest compliment.
4. Tim McGraw, Let It Go. Rocks harder, has more to lose, and more to gain then most of the other albums this year—longing when it needs to be, rollicking when it wants to be, gorgeous and triumphant.
5. Teddy Thompson—Up Front and Down Low. A clutch of second generation singer songwriters is emerging to make music that is both historically informed, close to their family’s, and if not radically separate, at least showing a new direction to folk and the like. Thompson’s country covers album is respectful of the source and the history, with out making a museum piece. It is also infused with a deep melancholy, a heartbreak that reminds me of Tammy and George.
6. Songs of America, Various Artists—Everyone had their bitchings about who was included and who was excluded, and all of that is fair, but there is something miraculous in someone so safe and so close to power, having the bravery in making a collection of American folk songs that is so diverse, and so weird. For someone who is Canadian, who lives with the empire in our backyard, and who is terrified of anyone winning the presidency, it reminded me of why I love the culture of America, why I still listen to country music, no matter how reactionary, broken and exhausting the whole system is. (That said, it could do with more Aboriginal and Hispanic work)
7. Wagonmaster, Porter Wagoner. Just as batshit as you would expect from someone who spent the last 30 years collapsing into all kinds of personal, spiritual, and finical ruin.
8. We’ll Never Look Back, Mavis Staples. I don’t know if this is cheating, but everything that I expect from country, a belief in G-d, a belief in history, a wonder at love, is all here. So I am going to include it.
9. Big Dog Daddy, Toby Keith. The album this year I listened to, as pure aural pleasure. Nothing much significant, but his voice is like being enveloped in something warm and tight and v. v. safe—not quite the erotic frission I find in George Canyon or Josh Turner, a little rougher, a little less safe, but of the same taxonomical category.
10. Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Miranda Lambert.
Top Ten Country Singles:
1. Dancing for the Groceries, Kenny Chesney. Like Honky Tonk Badonadonk, a song that I thought was so unbelievably stupid and slightly misogynist, that it surprised me how quickly I found myself singing along. Also contains the amazing rhyme: “in sequins and in laces/shes dancing for the braces”
2. Corb Lund, Calvary. Two Book ended, the first about the glories of war, the second about the pain of death and disease, a double punch of sophisticated self correcting historical views, works even better because the first one, with its fife and snare drum sounds like it should come out of the civil war, and the second one with its slower pace, and mournful guitar, sounds like Vietnam era Neil Young
3. Drive By Truckers, Dress Blues. A memorial ode to a friend who died at 18, as a marine. From the beginning, with the intoning of he was 18, to the clarion calls towards mother and family, w/o the rhetoric of the state, makes it one of the more profound anti war anthems in recent memory (esp. the line American boys hate to lose/but you never planned in the bombs and the sand/or sleeping in yr dress blues)
4. Nickelback, Rockstar. Chesney is rocking out with Hagar in Mexico, and John Bon Jovi is on the country charts, and the demographic intermingling is fascinating—put a cowboy hat on when the hair falls out—with John Rich helping to write this and appearing in the video, an artifact of that change at its best. (and I’m shocked that I am writing this, because like all right thinking critics, I hate Nickelback---if I start saying nice things about Hinder next take me out behind the bar and shoot me.)
5. Taylor Swift, Tear Drops On My Guitar. Lovely, teenage rebellion recast as an overwritten ode to real time nostalgia, reminds one of the importance of not only music, but noise—does so with a crystalline voice and a purity ramping up to an eventual corruption.
6. Fionn O Reagon, Penny in the Slot I have no idea why I love this, its self conscious, twee, tourist Irish for the mercury prize crowd, the hipster version of green beer on St Patrick’s day, but he can write, and he has a seductive lo-fi tenderness, and he makes you feel warm in the middle of December, and charmed in the middle of June, and charm is just this side of seduction.
7. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, I Need You. I love any song of marital fidelity that makes being married sound self destructive and unavoidable, and this one, with its overwrought melodrama sure does that.
8. Josh Turner, Me and God. Fireworks was limp, and devoid of the sexual energy that he can obviously deliver—he is a singer that works better with monogamy than with fury. Like all good, soppy and over emotional southern Baptists, the only thing that trumps monogamy is an erotic attachment to the saviour—it’s all here, a desire for discipline, attachment, to be broken and to be restored. A delicate and moving declaration of pure ego.
9. Reba and Kelly, Because of You. Kelly’s career collapsed this year, and her album is shit, but this single, when she returns to Nashville’s ever forgiving arms, makes me realize with the right studio magic, anything can be made to sound revelatory. I am on pins and needles for Jessica Simpson’s attempt at this.
10. George Canyon, Good Ol Boys. A Nova Scotia boy takes the Dukes Of Hazard and make it sound as much part of the canon as Johnny Cash, George Jones or Kris Kristofferson, a profound joke on the self important heritage preservers.
Top Five Country Reissues:
1. Nick Drake Fruit Trees. Cause its good to have everything in one place, and because it reminded me of how his orchestral and acoustic mixing and matching made his weak lyrics and odd voice sound like a virtue.
2. The Stanley Brothers, Definitive Collection. Good enough to convince everyone that Bluegrass existed before G-d and will be the primary music of the millennium where Christ reigns in peace.
3. Graham Parsons, Live at the Avalon Ballroom. Try to forget all of that Califorian mysticism, and just listen. It’s sublime, isn’t it?
4. Neil Young, Live at the Massey Ball Room. Like Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall, but Canadian, so more modest and less conceptual. (Also the origin of some of the best songs of the last 25 years, its good to hear where myths begin sometimes.
5. Vashti Bunyan, Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind. She has a tiny, whispering voice, almost imperceptible, and often on these just found tapes, she had to be asked to speak up, the intimacy and the calmness that are found in that voice though, are a folk classic.
Male Vocals:
1. Josh Turner
2. George Canyon
3. Tim McGraw
Female Vocals:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Reba McEntire
3. Miranda Lambert
Live Performances:
1. Julian Austin
2. Josh Ritter
3. Western Finals Rodeo
Songwriters:
1. John Rich
2. William Kenneth Aspin
3. Corb Lund
Duos, etc:
1. Duhks
2. Sugarland
3. Reba McEntire and Kelly Clarkson
New Acts:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Jason Michael Carroll
3. Fionn O Reagon
Overall:
1. Corb Lund
2. Taylor Swift
3. George Canyon
Friday, December 28, 2007
Dutch Condom Ad
typography of astreix
Wayne White Southern Daddy Shame Ray (Installation View), 2004
mixed media
72" x 34 1/2" x 74"
a blog that aesthetically critiques rock band logos.
a polutry nesting doll. (3 stuffings and 9 birds)
The reason why Mad Men is the best show on television, this 5 minutes about technology, nostlagia, and foudn photgraphs, is expertly written, subtle, and poltically aware.
the lakota have declared that the contracts they sign are null and void, they are no longer american.
the second church of christ scientiest, on adams blvd in los angeles, is for sale at 8m. I want it.
Kunstform de Natur, 1904, Ernst Haeckl is a book of illustrations brightly coloured, formally taxonomised, strange, of natural forms. The follwing link has most pages.
these 14 images by Simon Roberts, of Subarctic Russia, are very close to Edmonton, from the light, to the architechtual styles, to even the cars being driven--ray called edmonton siberia, and its pretty close.
this video of the jonsson shrimp peeling system is gorgeous, but the dude narrating has a lovely midamerican blankness to his voice.
The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier.
Lillendahl, 33, had planned to shop and sightsee with friends, but endured instead what she has claimed was the most humiliating experience of her life.
She contended she was interrogated at JFK airport for two days, during which she was not allowed to call relatives. She said she was denied food and drink for part of the time, and was photographed and fingerprinted.
On Monday, Lillendahl claimed, her hands and feet were chained and she was moved to a prison in New Jersey, where she was kept in a cell, interrogated further and denied access to a phone.
mexican death sqauds are killing country music stars.
good news for nepal, it will become a democratic republic
ashwroth university used one of my photos
roberta smith on matisse as a sculptor, with a fascinating anecdote, that the first major sculpture matisse completed as a student was one by the academic bayare, of a jaguar devouring a hare--i find the anecdote fascinating for a couple of reasons:
- i keep thinking that there is much less space b/w the traditional narrative of modernism and the salon academics then people think there is, and that matisse thot bayare was impt enough, while yong, while a student, sort of bolsters this
- i posted a few of the dozens of delacroix images of giant cats eating prey, it was a major theme for bayare, and for the others of that school, which makes me wonder about delcroix's realtionship with both the academics adn the modernists, plus i wonder what happened ca 1830 where giant cats eating shit were considered de rigeur
when is staying for 72 hours at a wal mart illegal?
the holkam bible in anglo-norman frnech, from the14th century, is a great example of how the bible intersected with folk texts, how the scriptures were always paratexts.
pretty pretty paper
Bhutto is killed by two gun shots in the middle of a suicide bombing
fascainting article on nrm in Brasillia, including a jewish post millenial ufo cult. (think jews for jesus cross faded with the raelians. more on the religion in question (that article is esp funny because its about ufologists who thot the brazillians were a little too crazy)
annual fist fight at the bethelem church were christ was born
(double novellas, 214, 232, 241, the largest is 6 by 12 feet)
Yek is becoming the Shanghai Drunk version of Noland (there is so much brilliant abstract painting going on lately, and i wonder why edmonton folks dont pay attention to it, i keep wondering what ahab or mccourt or scott think about yek, or amy silliman, or example)
Under Dress, American, 1894, in the Mets Costume Ball
1) Publish 12 articles, online or in print. (work hard on completing after pitching)
8 reviews at left hip, one article at sunstone, one book chapter, one presentation paper, and two articles waiting to be placed, so completed.
2) Find 5 Shows
of my own work: Buildings, Farm, Movie Stars (fail), upcoming at Mandolin, Fly, Sugarbowl,
curated the exposure shows, the aga show, and got working on a couple of others so completelted
3) Submit artwork to 6 contests, or the like.
paul petro, one time raiser, one aids toronto fundraiser, emails to other galleries, etc plus writing pitches completed
4) Look for Day Job
exposure counts
5) Go to Holden Village in July or August
didnt work.
6) Spend time away from Edmonton, but not nessc. in Toronto. (esp. Vancouver)
less time in toronto, time in calgary and grand prarie
7) read strunk/white, chicago, internalize.
still need to work on the grammar thing.
8) continue with the jesus goals.
what are the jesus goals. (ie did become more self aware of my realtionship or lack of with christ)
9) pay martin off.
have no idea how i am going to do this, fail
10) try to find my own place
need to work on how to function with landlords, etc. but worked on it for a few months
11) boyfriend
still have no idea about the script
12) work on being more calm and together
actually less crazy it seems, more ordered
13) pitch WK book, continue on american jesus book
failed.
14) be more social.
succeed.
26 goals for 2008.
8 reviews at left hip, one article at sunstone, one book chapter, one presentation paper, and two articles waiting to be placed, so completed.
2) Find 5 Shows
of my own work: Buildings, Farm, Movie Stars (fail), upcoming at Mandolin, Fly, Sugarbowl,
curated the exposure shows, the aga show, and got working on a couple of others so completelted
3) Submit artwork to 6 contests, or the like.
paul petro, one time raiser, one aids toronto fundraiser, emails to other galleries, etc plus writing pitches completed
4) Look for Day Job
exposure counts
5) Go to Holden Village in July or August
didnt work.
6) Spend time away from Edmonton, but not nessc. in Toronto. (esp. Vancouver)
less time in toronto, time in calgary and grand prarie
7) read strunk/white, chicago, internalize.
still need to work on the grammar thing.
8) continue with the jesus goals.
what are the jesus goals. (ie did become more self aware of my realtionship or lack of with christ)
9) pay martin off.
have no idea how i am going to do this, fail
10) try to find my own place
need to work on how to function with landlords, etc. but worked on it for a few months
11) boyfriend
still have no idea about the script
12) work on being more calm and together
actually less crazy it seems, more ordered
13) pitch WK book, continue on american jesus book
failed.
14) be more social.
succeed.
26 goals for 2008.
- Publish in Vue and See
- Pitch One Story a Month
- Write one CD Review a Month
- Complete Between 3-6 Grant Proposals.
- Send Proposals to Plug In, AKA, Stride, Gallery 44, Le, Works Gallery and YYZ
- Find Shows in proper gallery contexts.
- Find place for Post Modern Grid, Deer and Edmonton Erotica shows
- Write 1000 words a week.
- Save at least 100 dollars a month
- Get to Vancouver, Grand Prarie, Calgary, Saskatoon
- Only Spend 250/wk, write down spending
- Organize Books and Cds, other junk
- Do Taxes in a timely manner
- Finish or Continue working on, finding a place, etc the following projects: PNOG, Movie Stars, Lips and Nips, Fruit Project, Mirror Project, Utopia, Purity Balls, Catalog for the Ford Show, Pyschogeography of fort sask. lensculture, apartamento, sunstone, etc
- Tighten Writing
- work on drafts, using Norm's revisions for the poems, think about sonnets, learn how to write a sonnet
- Work on Controlling social anxiety, aggression, mood, etc
- ask 4 people out on dates.
- Read more conservative texts, esp conservative religious texts, read 25 books of poetry, take notes, write about them.
- Keep processing the radical/conservative split in yr politics
- attempt to get into the Fort Sask Collections
- Library issues
- avoid the baths (not for sex negative ways but because it makes me a little lonely)
- Continue work with exposure, and the edmonton arts thing
- learn how to say no
- SF in March
From a November 6th Stratfor report: "Pakistan and its Army" by George Friedman:
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency over the weekend, precipitating a wave of arrests, the suspension of certain media operations and the intermittent disruption of communications in and out of Pakistan. As expected, protests erupted throughout Pakistan by Nov. 5, with clashes between protesting lawyers and police reported in Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and several other cities. Thus far, however, the army appears to be responding to Musharraf's commands.
The primary issue, as Musharraf framed it, was the Pakistani Supreme Court's decision to release about 60 people the state had charged with terrorism. Musharraf's argument was that the court's action makes the fight against Islamist extremism impossible and that the judiciary overstepped its bounds by urging that the civil rights of the accused be protected.
Musharraf's critics, including the opposition's top leader, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, argued that Musharraf was using the Supreme Court issue to protect his own position in the government, avoid leaving the army as promised and put off elections. In short, he is being accused of staging a personal coup under the guise of a state of emergency.
Whether Musharraf himself survives is not a historically significant issue. What is significant is whether Pakistan will fall into internal chaos or civil war, or fragment into smaller states. We must consider what that would mean, but first we must examine Pakistan's underlying dilemma -- a set of contradictions rooted in Pakistani history.
When the British conquered the Indian subcontinent, they essentially occupied the lowlands and pushed their frontier into the mountains surrounding the subcontinent -- the point from which a relatively small British force, augmented by local recruits, could hold against any external threat. The eastern line ran through the hills that separated Bengal from Burma. The northern line ran through the Himalayas that separate China from the subcontinent. The western line ran along the mountains that separated British India from Afghanistan and Iran.
This lineation -- which represented not a political settlement but rather a defensive position selected for military reasons -- remained vague, driven by shifting tactical decisions designed to secure a physical entity, the subcontinent. The Britons were fairly indifferent to the political realities inside the line. The British Raj, then, was a wild jumble of states, languages, religions and ethnic groups, which the Britons were quite content to play against one another as part of their grand strategy in India. As long as the British could impose an artificial, internal order, the general concept of India worked. But as the British Empire collapsed after World War II, the region had to find its own balance.
Mahatma Gandhi envisioned post-British India as being a multinational, multireligious country within the borders that then existed -- meaning that India's Muslims would live inside a predominantly Hindu country. When they objected, the result was both a partition of the country and a transfer of populations. The Muslim part of India, including the eastern Muslim region, became modern Pakistan. The eastern region gained independence as Bangladesh following a 1971 war between India and Pakistan.
Pakistan, however, was not a historic name for the region. Rather, reflective of the deeply divided Muslims themselves, the name is an acronym that derives, in part, from the five ethnic groups that made up western, Muslim India: Punjabis, Afghans, Kashmiris, Sindhis and Balochis.
The Punjabis are the major ethnic group, making up just under half of the population, though none of these groups is entirely in Pakistan. Balochis also are in Iran, Pashtuns also in Afghanistan and Punjabis also in India. In fact, as a result of the war in Afghanistan more than a quarter century ago, massive numbers of Pashtuns have crossed into Pakistan from Afghanistan -- though many consider themselves to be moving within Pashtun territory rather than crossing a foreign border.
Geographically, it is important to think of Pakistan in two parts. There is the Indus River Valley, where the bulk of the population lives, and then there are the mountainous regions, whose ethnic groups are deeply divided, difficult for the central government to control and generally conservative, preferring tradition to modernization. The relative isolation and the difficult existence in mountainous regions seem to create this kind of culture around the world.
Pakistan, therefore, is a compendium of divisions. The British withdrawal created a state called Pakistan, but no nation by that name. What bound its residents together was the Muslim faith -- albeit one that had many forms. As in India -- indeed, as in the Muslim world at the time of Pakistan's founding -- there existed a strong secularist movement that focused on economic development and cultural modernization more than on traditional Islamic values. This secularist tendency had two roots: one in the British education of many of the Pakistani elite and the second in Turkish founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who pioneered secularism in the Islamic world.
Pakistan, therefore, began as a state in crisis. What remained of British rule was a parliamentary democracy that might have worked in a relatively unified nation -- not one that was split along ethnic lines and also along the great divide of the 20th century: secular versus religious. Hence, the parliamentary system broke down early on -- about four years after Pakistan's creation in 1947. British-trained civilian bureaucrats ran the country with the help of the army until 1958, when the army booted out the bureaucrats and took over.
Therefore, if Pakistan was a state trying to create a nation, then the primary instrument of the state was the army. This is not uniquely Pakistani by any means, nor is it unprincipled. The point that Ataturk made -- one that was championed in the Arab world by Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser and in Iran by Reza Pahlavi -- was that the creation of a modern state in a traditional and divided nation required a modern army as the facilitator. An army, in the modern sense, is by definition technocratic and disciplined. The army, rather than simply an instrument of the state, therefore, becomes the guarantor of the state. In this line of thinking, a military coup can preserve a constitution against anti-constitutional traditionalists. If the idea of a military coup as a guarantor of constitutional integrity seems difficult to fathom, then consider the complexities involved in creating a modern constitutional regime in a traditional society.
Although the British tradition of parliamentary government fell apart in Pakistan, one institution the Britons left behind grew stronger: the Pakistani army. The army -- along with India's army -- was forged by the British and modeled on their army. It was perhaps the most modern institution in both countries, and the best organized and effective instrument of the state. As long as the army remained united and loyal to the concept of Pakistan, the centrifugal forces could not tear the country apart.
Musharraf's behavior must be viewed in this context. Pakistan is a country that not only is deeply divided, but also has the real capacity to tear itself apart. It is losing control of the mountainous regions to the indigenous tribes. The army is the only institution that transcends all of these ethnic differences and has the potential to restore order in the mountain regions and maintain state control elsewhere.
Musharraf's coup in 1999, which followed a series of military intrusions, as well as attempts at secular democratic rule, was designed to preserve Pakistan as a united country. That is why Musharraf insisted on continuing to wear the uniform of an army general. To remove the uniform and rule simply as a civilian might make sense to an outsider, but inside of Pakistan that uniform represents the unity of the state and the army -- and in Musharraf's view, that unity is what holds the country together.
Of course the problem is that the army, in the long run, reflects the country. The army has significant pockets of radical Islamist beliefs, while Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the military's intelligence branch, in particular is filled with Taliban sympathizers. (After all, the ISI was assigned to support the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, and the ISI and other parts of the army absorbed the ideology). Musharraf has had to walk a tightrope between U.S. demands that he crack down on his own army and his desire to preserve his regime -- and has never been able to satisfy either side fully.
It is not clear whether he has fallen off the tightrope. Whatever he does, as long as the army remains united and he controls the corps commanders, he will remain in power. Even if the corps commanders -- the real electors of Pakistan -- get tired of him and replace him with another military leader, Pakistan would remain in pretty much the same position it is in now.
In simple terms, the real question is this: Will the army split? Put more broadly, will some generals simply stop taking orders from Pakistan's General Headquarters and side with the Islamists? Will others side with Bhutto? Will ethnic disagreements run so deep that the Indus River Valley becomes the arena for a civil war? That is what instability in Pakistan would look like. It is not a question of civilian institutions, elections or any of the things we associate with civil society. The key question on Pakistan is whether the army stays united.
In our view, the senior commanders will remain united because they have far more to lose if they fracture. Their positions depend on a united army and a unified chain of command -- the one British legacy that continues to function in Pakistan.
There are two signs to look for: severe internal dissent among the senior generals or a series of mutinies by subordinate units. Either of these would raise serious questions as to the future of Pakistan. Whether Musharraf survives or falls and whether he is replaced by a civilian leader are actually secondary questions. In Pakistan, the fundamental issue is the unity of the army.
At some point, there will be a showdown among the various groups. That moment might be now, though we doubt it. As long as the generals are united and the troops remain under control, the existence of the regime is guaranteed -- and in some sense the army will remain the regime. Under these conditions, with or without Musharraf, with or without democracy, Pakistan will survive.
via lorna
10 Photos, 1880
1. Diane Arbus, Germaine Greer, 1971
It seems a secret, these two fearless women in a hotel room in new york, sharing news about the oncoming revoultion, almost snapshotty, intimate, and not grotesque at all, Greer claimed later to hate the work, and consider the sittings deeply problematic, apparently she straddled greer, but the best thing about it, was that they werent vain. (and a lot of the arbus shots of later freaks, were vain)
2. Seydou Keita, Two Great Ladies, 1958.
Its the riot of pattern, the elephant dishkis, the almost paisley background, more then the post colonial slippages that are found in other work.
3. Louise Lawler, You Could Hear a Rat Piss on Cotton # Charlie Parker, 1987
Its emptiness, i think, mostly.
4. Helen Levitt, Button to Secret Passage, 1938.
Its a joke, and a kids joke at that, but it says more then the secret life of cities then most of debord.
5. F Holland Day Into thy hands I commend my spirit., 1898
Performance, Obsession, discreet rituals done in private for later public consmuption, spectacle, masochism, and homoerotic bodies--its ths 80s shock troops, done 90 years earlier (seriously, much of that list is what photography turned out to be, his images are profoundly moving, i think because they are prophetic)
6. Dora Marr, Pere Ubu, 1936
its the fetus of an armodillo, strange and cute, domestic and terryfing, and the print is so crisp, you can see every scale and every hair.
7. Gillian Wearing, I'm Despeate, 1992
the photograph is the eye to the soul, visual and writen language are intractable, people lie even when they are telling the truth, a series of visual cliches made simple and elegantly subversive
8) Eugène Atget, Hotel de Roquelaure, 1905
its luxurious, so its well loved by the fashion crew, but i love it because of that black chair, the observation of emptiness, and also because i wonder what people thot when he was taking it.
9) Araki, Polaroid, 1997
the warhol isntinct remade as an erotic phatasia of western taste and japanese politics.
10) Steiglietz, O Keefes Hands and Thimble, 1937
Techincally its his best work, and more intimate then the many nudes, the domesticity, i think is what does it.
photos upcoming
9)
1. Diane Arbus, Germaine Greer, 1971
It seems a secret, these two fearless women in a hotel room in new york, sharing news about the oncoming revoultion, almost snapshotty, intimate, and not grotesque at all, Greer claimed later to hate the work, and consider the sittings deeply problematic, apparently she straddled greer, but the best thing about it, was that they werent vain. (and a lot of the arbus shots of later freaks, were vain)
2. Seydou Keita, Two Great Ladies, 1958.
Its the riot of pattern, the elephant dishkis, the almost paisley background, more then the post colonial slippages that are found in other work.
3. Louise Lawler, You Could Hear a Rat Piss on Cotton # Charlie Parker, 1987
Its emptiness, i think, mostly.
4. Helen Levitt, Button to Secret Passage, 1938.
Its a joke, and a kids joke at that, but it says more then the secret life of cities then most of debord.
5. F Holland Day Into thy hands I commend my spirit., 1898
Performance, Obsession, discreet rituals done in private for later public consmuption, spectacle, masochism, and homoerotic bodies--its ths 80s shock troops, done 90 years earlier (seriously, much of that list is what photography turned out to be, his images are profoundly moving, i think because they are prophetic)
6. Dora Marr, Pere Ubu, 1936
its the fetus of an armodillo, strange and cute, domestic and terryfing, and the print is so crisp, you can see every scale and every hair.
7. Gillian Wearing, I'm Despeate, 1992
the photograph is the eye to the soul, visual and writen language are intractable, people lie even when they are telling the truth, a series of visual cliches made simple and elegantly subversive
8) Eugène Atget, Hotel de Roquelaure, 1905
its luxurious, so its well loved by the fashion crew, but i love it because of that black chair, the observation of emptiness, and also because i wonder what people thot when he was taking it.
9) Araki, Polaroid, 1997
the warhol isntinct remade as an erotic phatasia of western taste and japanese politics.
10) Steiglietz, O Keefes Hands and Thimble, 1937
Techincally its his best work, and more intimate then the many nudes, the domesticity, i think is what does it.
photos upcoming
9)
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Dave Hickey and Tyler Green both did their ten favourite paintings from 1880 onwards, here are mine: (difficult i found, because the work i really love are prints, photographs, bookworks installations, drawings, and mixed media work, there are v. few paintings i love, i will make seperate lists for photos, prints and drawings)
1) Warhol Ambulance Disaster, 1963
because of its formal innovation, its co-opting of the white-on-white minimalism, of making something (white, ambulances) frightening, of its refusal to be either a print or a painting, and because i think its the most reflective of warhols work.
2) Freud, Naked Man from Back, 1992
Painterly, and a belief in the corpulence of flesh, of the pleasure of flesh, but also reflective and sort of meloncholy, the colours are perfect, esp that porcine flesh and the crimson rug.
3) Noland, Magus , 1962
All of what we go to Newman for, but better, because he is decorative, and the lack of taking oneself seriously while still making paintings that ravish at 22 feet seems a high wire act (seeing him live, seeing those pencil lines, and how he makes the colour straight, ie his techinique is almost process oriented)
4) Ruscha, Stunt People, 1998 (no image)
not a drawing, or a photograph or a book work, not a peice about language or concept, fireflies in the dark green grass, reminds me of the best of hiroshige.
5) Klee, Angelus Novus, 1921
I like Klee because his super naivitee masks a deep and abiding spirtual sophistication, and this painting, owned by Benjamin, is so lovely, imperceptible with its joy--that something so iconicly hopeful could be made in this fetid century maybe the rest of us can be saved.
6) Cezanne, The Bather, 1885
the weight and the surety
7) Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt, 1893.
i was driving in the fog last night, with my friend ray, the former edmontonian and now torontonian, and we kept trying to explain the opressive force that the sky, the weather had on the praries, and so few paintings expressed it, and reading about this--everyone pointing out the obvious, the murder of crows circling the downed fox, and the ambiguity of who will eventually eat who, the whirling circular compostion that leads to a feeling of unease and fear, but its the weather in this painting, not the snow, but that tiny snatch of sky, that made me realise how close this was to the indescriable danger of the weather, of the landscape, that we albertans have.
8) Ryman
his entire ouervere is one work, about painting, and i cannot imagine 20th century mark making w/o it--he is my picasso.
9) David Hockney, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, 1967
erotic, arcadia, utopia. (its the social freedom, the absorbtion of pleasure, of painting because its fun, and its california, and yr friend has a new pool, and yr bf has one fantastic ass, it reminds me of rembrandt's best paitnings, the one of saskia, where some of it is wealth, and some of it is pleasure, and some of it is that he really loved his wife's tits)
10) Max Beckman, Man in Tuxedo, 1927
1) Warhol Ambulance Disaster, 1963
because of its formal innovation, its co-opting of the white-on-white minimalism, of making something (white, ambulances) frightening, of its refusal to be either a print or a painting, and because i think its the most reflective of warhols work.
2) Freud, Naked Man from Back, 1992
Painterly, and a belief in the corpulence of flesh, of the pleasure of flesh, but also reflective and sort of meloncholy, the colours are perfect, esp that porcine flesh and the crimson rug.
3) Noland, Magus , 1962
All of what we go to Newman for, but better, because he is decorative, and the lack of taking oneself seriously while still making paintings that ravish at 22 feet seems a high wire act (seeing him live, seeing those pencil lines, and how he makes the colour straight, ie his techinique is almost process oriented)
4) Ruscha, Stunt People, 1998 (no image)
not a drawing, or a photograph or a book work, not a peice about language or concept, fireflies in the dark green grass, reminds me of the best of hiroshige.
5) Klee, Angelus Novus, 1921
I like Klee because his super naivitee masks a deep and abiding spirtual sophistication, and this painting, owned by Benjamin, is so lovely, imperceptible with its joy--that something so iconicly hopeful could be made in this fetid century maybe the rest of us can be saved.
6) Cezanne, The Bather, 1885
the weight and the surety
7) Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt, 1893.
i was driving in the fog last night, with my friend ray, the former edmontonian and now torontonian, and we kept trying to explain the opressive force that the sky, the weather had on the praries, and so few paintings expressed it, and reading about this--everyone pointing out the obvious, the murder of crows circling the downed fox, and the ambiguity of who will eventually eat who, the whirling circular compostion that leads to a feeling of unease and fear, but its the weather in this painting, not the snow, but that tiny snatch of sky, that made me realise how close this was to the indescriable danger of the weather, of the landscape, that we albertans have.
8) Ryman
We have been trained to see painting as “pictures,” with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of “seeing” painting. An image could be said to be “real” if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This “real” or “absolute” image is only confined by our limited perception— Robert Ryman
his entire ouervere is one work, about painting, and i cannot imagine 20th century mark making w/o it--he is my picasso.
9) David Hockney, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, 1967
erotic, arcadia, utopia. (its the social freedom, the absorbtion of pleasure, of painting because its fun, and its california, and yr friend has a new pool, and yr bf has one fantastic ass, it reminds me of rembrandt's best paitnings, the one of saskia, where some of it is wealth, and some of it is pleasure, and some of it is that he really loved his wife's tits)
10) Max Beckman, Man in Tuxedo, 1927
sergio leone etc
1) Your favorite opening shot (Here are some ideas to jog your memory, if you need ‘em.)
Fight Club
2) Tuesday Weld or Mia Farrow?
For all of her obsessive child collecting, and the codependent incestuous mess that was woody allen, people keep forgetting that the woman could act--plus her first real role was peyton place, which seems prophetic.
3) Name a comedy you’re embarrassed to admit made you laugh
American Pie 4.
4) Best Movie of 1947
The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, Cary Grant and Jail Bait
5) Burt Reynolds was the Bandit. Jerry Reed was the Snowman. Paul LeMat was Spider. Candy Clark was Electra. What’s your movie handle?
The Moose
6) Robert Vaughn or David McCallum?
Robert Vaughn did a clutch of fantastic teen deliquent movies in the 50s, and some great cowboy tv, David McCallum is brilliant on NCIS, plus a few early 60s war films, finishing with the great escape--but both were on MAn From UNCLE so its a draw.
7) Most exotic/unusual place/location in which you've seen a movie
i saw pulp fiction in a time square grind house, in 1994, just before disney got a hold of it
8) Favorite Errol Morris movie
for aesthetics, his beer commericals, for politics, dr death--which has more to say about faith, eveidence, and the difficulty of history then almost anything else
9) Best Movie of 1967
a time for burning, barbara connells earnest and problemetic discussion of how religion intersects with race in midwestern america, the failure of the social expriement seems to be a metaphor for america, but in a way taht is too slippery to be more specific.
10) Describe a profoundly (or not-so-profoundly) disturbing moment you’ve had courtesy of the movies
watching early de palma after reading rape and reverance, and trying to sort out the differences between the violence i enjoyed watching on screen and the violence that i felt an aboherence to in real life.
11) Anne Francis or Julie Newmar?
julie newmar
12) Describe your favorite one sheet (include a link if possible)
its a lousy movie, but the optimism and madness found in the one sheet of the billy bob thorton astrounaut film, with the perfect twilight sky, his striding foreward in that suit, and the farm receding, about the technological, science and hope--says more then the movie ever does, in fact. the fact that he is on the horse, just seems to be the pulp surrealism that the movie lacks http://www.britfilms.tv/images/news/astronaut%20farmer.jpg
13) Best Movie of 1987
Withnail and I
14) Favorite movie about obsession
F is for Fake
15) Your ideal Christmas movie triple feature
silent night, deadly night; don't open until xmas, black christmas
16) Montgomery Clift or James Dean?
Clift (he took his shirt off more)
17) Favorite Les Blank Movie
i dont have one
18) This past summer food critic Anton Ego made the following statement: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” Your thoughts?
hes right, and in the age of the net, of the dvd revoultion, where everything is available, the ability to f ind culture, to remix it, to make it new, to connect it to the expereicnes of yr patricualr place, is so easy, that to do it well seems a miracle
19) The last movie you watched on DVD? In a theater?
marie antoinette, lars and the real girl
20) Best Movie of 2007
lars and the real girl
21) Worst Movie of 2007
bobby
22) Describe the stages of your cinephilia
i dont think im a cinephile
23) What is the one film you’ve had more difficulty than any other in convincing people to see or appreciate?
Crossroads--the britney vehichle, which was more honest about family and about teenage sex then anything john hughes could have come up with
24) Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth?
Rita Hayworth singing put teh blame on mame when she removes that glove, in teh piano scene in Gilda, is so wonderfully iconicly fetishy, that no matter how good GEne Tierney is (and i think she has had more films that were interesting than Hayworth), she cannot be beat---let me put it this way, those five minutes encompass almost anything that Tireney tried to do.
25) The Japanese word wabi denotes simplicity and quietude, but it can also mean an accidental or happenstance element (or perhaps even a small flaw) which gives elegance and uniqueness to the whole. What film or moment from a film best represents wabi to you?
Bresson, Diary of A County Priest
26) Favorite Documentary
Harlan County War
27) Favorite opening credit sequence
Anatomy of a Murder
28) Is there a film that has influenced your lifestyle in a significant or notable way? If so, what was it and how did it do so?
too many to name.
29) Glenn Ford or Dana Andrews?
30) Make a single prediction, cynical or hopeful, regarding the upcoming Academy Awards
w/ the writers strike, it wont happen
31) Best Actor of 2007
Patton Oswalt, Rattouie
32) Best Actress of 2007
Patricia Clarkson, Lars and the REal Girl; Amy Adams, Enchanted
33) Best Director of 2007
paul greengrass
34) Best Screenplay of 2007
Portal
35) Favorite single movie moment of 2007
the ending sequence in rattatoie
36) What’s your wish/hope for the movies in 2008?
i see more of tehm
1) Your favorite opening shot (Here are some ideas to jog your memory, if you need ‘em.)
Fight Club
2) Tuesday Weld or Mia Farrow?
For all of her obsessive child collecting, and the codependent incestuous mess that was woody allen, people keep forgetting that the woman could act--plus her first real role was peyton place, which seems prophetic.
3) Name a comedy you’re embarrassed to admit made you laugh
American Pie 4.
4) Best Movie of 1947
The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, Cary Grant and Jail Bait
5) Burt Reynolds was the Bandit. Jerry Reed was the Snowman. Paul LeMat was Spider. Candy Clark was Electra. What’s your movie handle?
The Moose
6) Robert Vaughn or David McCallum?
Robert Vaughn did a clutch of fantastic teen deliquent movies in the 50s, and some great cowboy tv, David McCallum is brilliant on NCIS, plus a few early 60s war films, finishing with the great escape--but both were on MAn From UNCLE so its a draw.
7) Most exotic/unusual place/location in which you've seen a movie
i saw pulp fiction in a time square grind house, in 1994, just before disney got a hold of it
8) Favorite Errol Morris movie
for aesthetics, his beer commericals, for politics, dr death--which has more to say about faith, eveidence, and the difficulty of history then almost anything else
9) Best Movie of 1967
a time for burning, barbara connells earnest and problemetic discussion of how religion intersects with race in midwestern america, the failure of the social expriement seems to be a metaphor for america, but in a way taht is too slippery to be more specific.
10) Describe a profoundly (or not-so-profoundly) disturbing moment you’ve had courtesy of the movies
watching early de palma after reading rape and reverance, and trying to sort out the differences between the violence i enjoyed watching on screen and the violence that i felt an aboherence to in real life.
11) Anne Francis or Julie Newmar?
julie newmar
12) Describe your favorite one sheet (include a link if possible)
its a lousy movie, but the optimism and madness found in the one sheet of the billy bob thorton astrounaut film, with the perfect twilight sky, his striding foreward in that suit, and the farm receding, about the technological, science and hope--says more then the movie ever does, in fact. the fact that he is on the horse, just seems to be the pulp surrealism that the movie lacks http://www.britfilms.tv/images/news/astronaut%20farmer.jpg
13) Best Movie of 1987
Withnail and I
14) Favorite movie about obsession
F is for Fake
15) Your ideal Christmas movie triple feature
silent night, deadly night; don't open until xmas, black christmas
16) Montgomery Clift or James Dean?
Clift (he took his shirt off more)
17) Favorite Les Blank Movie
i dont have one
18) This past summer food critic Anton Ego made the following statement: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” Your thoughts?
hes right, and in the age of the net, of the dvd revoultion, where everything is available, the ability to f ind culture, to remix it, to make it new, to connect it to the expereicnes of yr patricualr place, is so easy, that to do it well seems a miracle
19) The last movie you watched on DVD? In a theater?
marie antoinette, lars and the real girl
20) Best Movie of 2007
lars and the real girl
21) Worst Movie of 2007
bobby
22) Describe the stages of your cinephilia
i dont think im a cinephile
23) What is the one film you’ve had more difficulty than any other in convincing people to see or appreciate?
Crossroads--the britney vehichle, which was more honest about family and about teenage sex then anything john hughes could have come up with
24) Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth?
Rita Hayworth singing put teh blame on mame when she removes that glove, in teh piano scene in Gilda, is so wonderfully iconicly fetishy, that no matter how good GEne Tierney is (and i think she has had more films that were interesting than Hayworth), she cannot be beat---let me put it this way, those five minutes encompass almost anything that Tireney tried to do.
25) The Japanese word wabi denotes simplicity and quietude, but it can also mean an accidental or happenstance element (or perhaps even a small flaw) which gives elegance and uniqueness to the whole. What film or moment from a film best represents wabi to you?
Bresson, Diary of A County Priest
26) Favorite Documentary
Harlan County War
27) Favorite opening credit sequence
Anatomy of a Murder
28) Is there a film that has influenced your lifestyle in a significant or notable way? If so, what was it and how did it do so?
too many to name.
29) Glenn Ford or Dana Andrews?
30) Make a single prediction, cynical or hopeful, regarding the upcoming Academy Awards
w/ the writers strike, it wont happen
31) Best Actor of 2007
Patton Oswalt, Rattouie
32) Best Actress of 2007
Patricia Clarkson, Lars and the REal Girl; Amy Adams, Enchanted
33) Best Director of 2007
paul greengrass
34) Best Screenplay of 2007
Portal
35) Favorite single movie moment of 2007
the ending sequence in rattatoie
36) What’s your wish/hope for the movies in 2008?
i see more of tehm
before toronto
- confirm meetings (bulger, npm)
- BUY TICKET
- confirm resturant
- list of people in the arts thing (invites, place to have it, etc)
- revisions on the chesney peice
- get the art back
- work on the pnog budget
- first meeting of exposure in the new year?
- write country music poll by the second
- confirm with marcus about take down and about scanning
- get list of address together for returning the work
- list of cards to send out with cheques
- lunch with joe
- money budget for to
- passport office
- call consulate
- tobaggan
- prints for ted
- prints for anne
- prints of any bulger project
- birthday
- gallery stuff (including 44, whippersnapper, bulger, le, and others)
- yyz
- pres musuem/pnog
- zoo
- rachel for grant, wig, and others
- anne dean
- richards work back to him
- fly gallery work
- see writing work possibly
- HAVE FUN
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
one of several clio award winning rebuses for level 42 vodka.
black panthers are going to trial for a police man's murder committed in 1971
sometimes when steve misel forgoes shock, his formal sense overwhelms, look at these patterns on patterns, from Vogue Italia, Dec 07.
the vatican rethinks its use of condoms. the washington post also writes about how birth control is more effectie in preventing AIDS then retrovirals.
square america finds and curates a selection of photos taken of a tv showing jfk's assination and funeral.
116 mad cover photos.
Walt Whitman Mall, in NJ, they use his works in the mall (its almsot as funny as when the NJ Dept of Education handed out volumes of leaves of grass at a notorious gay rest stop)
dozens of early medeival danish wall paintings--i didnt find it really interesting, except for the earliness of teh sources, and the general interest in northern european art.
brian davis joesph has a new box set, and its cheap (xmas idea)
Jason Neico, Digital Composite, 2007
i wonder how jack eaton gets such amazing colour in his work (the artless/artful composition also gets some points. similar work from jason nocito, but his work seems to be more of a curatorial thing, with two or three photos carefully peiced together to suggest formal and psychological connections is a french online journal that collects these works. maybe two dozen foto dudes, my favourite are a collection of post mcginley, post clarke portraits from middle america by a guy called brad tromel in chicago. these people really make me want to keep shooting.
Joshua Callaghan, Lots of Future Shock, copies of Alvin Tofler's Future Shock, dimensions variable, 1995-2007
the nations on the great plains at the edge of their genocide, would take ledger books from the europeans, and draw over them, these iconographic depections of the death of their culture--but their is something agressive about these works--about using the tools of the opressor, etc, but also of weapons, of guns, of fights, of new techonologies, new livestock, et. al. The Historical Society of Nebraska has digitzed a bunch of them, and it is well worth going through them, not only for history or politics, but for things like information transfer using imagery as opposed to words, colour choice, and composition--the composition, somewhere between an infographic, a map for ritual, and a pure aesthetic force, is something to write about. (useful to compare it to the inuit illustrated pilgrims progress from the mid 50s, below)
tacky xmas yards
jennifer mae raection draws a mammal a day.
Dan Grey Pin For Boico--reminds me of Richard Hamiltions Slip It To Me
Monday, December 17, 2007
Albums:
LCD Soundsystem:
The Grind, the sadness, and the exhaustion, the tale end of a party city told in the language they would understand, splits the difference between the qaulaade and coke camps of disco. Through all of that, it provides enough material for the build up, the dance floor, and the come down afterwards.
Britney Spears:
This is her breakdown record, like Judy at Carnegie Hall, like Lou Reed and Berlin, like Bowie during Low...the only problem with the analogy, is that this one is so dissociative and they were hyper aware, her voice is lost perilously in noise, production effects, and chaos. There is a too easy metaphor there, and when you reach for it, yr heart breaks with the brittleness of it.
Rufus and Judy:
There is something delicate in the negotiations between boys and their divas, and what could have been a cold and ironic joke, becomes one of the great interpretive texts. I keep thinking of his reading of When Yr Smiling and Judy's, there is something there, in the ignoring the realism for a sunny optimism that is so desperate, and so oddly political--Rufus unpacks (to use Obama's phrase) the audacity of hope, only buying it as far as it is functional--a lesson we need to absorb.
Spring Awakening:
The wise crack is that Broadway is always ten years behind, but who knew that a washed up out pop star could create a time warp (Goethe, Wiemar, Elvis, Fosse, Kurt Cobain) so strange and so sexually exciting--proving that adolescent angst is always universal.)
Mavis Staples:
I wonder what Richard Dawkins thinks of this?
Horse Soilder! Horse Soilder!
A Edmonton Boy, used to be a punk and is now a cowboy--he is as ambiguous, dark, and historical as ever, but this time with songs about the Contras (or America as covert empire) and Brigham Young (about what it means to believe and to fuck in a theocracy). I doubt he is known outside of Canada, which is a shame, because he makes anthems every American should internalise.
Jay-Z
The only way to go forward is to move backwards, into spectacle and historcizing, more of a useful history on gangster and celebrity then that incredibly dull 3 hour Jesse James movie that came out a bit earlier, but to the same aims.
Taylor Swift:
There is something refreshing in 18 year olds singing about 18 year old things--like sneaking around, or the longing of adolescent desire, and that she does it in a crystalline soprano that reminds me of early Dolly, makes this the most exciting debut in years.
Singles:
Paper Plane:
Kala was a disappointment, but this song made me love her voice again--that was why Piracy Funds Terrorism and Arular were so important, not the politics, the violence, the geography, but her flow, her skills as an instrument.
Mother of Pearl:
A po-faced, post ironic novelty song about feminism, redone as a Ed Sullivan ready cabaret jazz joint. Think Stephen Colbert's run for president in South Carolina, but redone by Ti Grace Atkinson.
Rehab:
Entirely for the discourse outside the text.
Hey There Deliah:
Oddly misogynst, and mopey in the worst of the straight boy ways, but i found it moving, and i sang it for three months this summer--which must have meant something.
Penny in the Slot
Gorgeous brouge, Paul Auster reference that was shockingly unpretentious, and he couldn't really sing--but the Silver Jews always told me that all his favourite singers couldn't sing, and I agree.
Lip Gloss--Lil Mama
Similar to Taylor Swift--the pure pleasure, the radical changes that can occur when costumes move or make up is applied, the gendered deconstruction of drag, or glitter or pen and pixel or krumping or all of that, but done by the cutest 14 year old girl who wants to retain being 14. Also saved the painfully earnest Avril.
Big Wheel
Tori comes back from the pixies, who taught her how to shake.
One Inch Badge Pin
3 AM, drunk after a good night dancing, but not quite pulling, you need an anthem you can scream loudly and quite out of tune--that used to be Pushing Drugs, Now its this.
Going To A Town:
He is theatrical and melancholy enough that he should narrate every western nations tragedies. I would kill for him to record something deep and witty about the concept of Eurabia for example.
LCD Soundsystem:
The Grind, the sadness, and the exhaustion, the tale end of a party city told in the language they would understand, splits the difference between the qaulaade and coke camps of disco. Through all of that, it provides enough material for the build up, the dance floor, and the come down afterwards.
Britney Spears:
This is her breakdown record, like Judy at Carnegie Hall, like Lou Reed and Berlin, like Bowie during Low...the only problem with the analogy, is that this one is so dissociative and they were hyper aware, her voice is lost perilously in noise, production effects, and chaos. There is a too easy metaphor there, and when you reach for it, yr heart breaks with the brittleness of it.
Rufus and Judy:
There is something delicate in the negotiations between boys and their divas, and what could have been a cold and ironic joke, becomes one of the great interpretive texts. I keep thinking of his reading of When Yr Smiling and Judy's, there is something there, in the ignoring the realism for a sunny optimism that is so desperate, and so oddly political--Rufus unpacks (to use Obama's phrase) the audacity of hope, only buying it as far as it is functional--a lesson we need to absorb.
Spring Awakening:
The wise crack is that Broadway is always ten years behind, but who knew that a washed up out pop star could create a time warp (Goethe, Wiemar, Elvis, Fosse, Kurt Cobain) so strange and so sexually exciting--proving that adolescent angst is always universal.)
Mavis Staples:
I wonder what Richard Dawkins thinks of this?
Horse Soilder! Horse Soilder!
A Edmonton Boy, used to be a punk and is now a cowboy--he is as ambiguous, dark, and historical as ever, but this time with songs about the Contras (or America as covert empire) and Brigham Young (about what it means to believe and to fuck in a theocracy). I doubt he is known outside of Canada, which is a shame, because he makes anthems every American should internalise.
Jay-Z
The only way to go forward is to move backwards, into spectacle and historcizing, more of a useful history on gangster and celebrity then that incredibly dull 3 hour Jesse James movie that came out a bit earlier, but to the same aims.
Taylor Swift:
There is something refreshing in 18 year olds singing about 18 year old things--like sneaking around, or the longing of adolescent desire, and that she does it in a crystalline soprano that reminds me of early Dolly, makes this the most exciting debut in years.
Singles:
Paper Plane:
Kala was a disappointment, but this song made me love her voice again--that was why Piracy Funds Terrorism and Arular were so important, not the politics, the violence, the geography, but her flow, her skills as an instrument.
Mother of Pearl:
A po-faced, post ironic novelty song about feminism, redone as a Ed Sullivan ready cabaret jazz joint. Think Stephen Colbert's run for president in South Carolina, but redone by Ti Grace Atkinson.
Rehab:
Entirely for the discourse outside the text.
Hey There Deliah:
Oddly misogynst, and mopey in the worst of the straight boy ways, but i found it moving, and i sang it for three months this summer--which must have meant something.
Penny in the Slot
Gorgeous brouge, Paul Auster reference that was shockingly unpretentious, and he couldn't really sing--but the Silver Jews always told me that all his favourite singers couldn't sing, and I agree.
Lip Gloss--Lil Mama
Similar to Taylor Swift--the pure pleasure, the radical changes that can occur when costumes move or make up is applied, the gendered deconstruction of drag, or glitter or pen and pixel or krumping or all of that, but done by the cutest 14 year old girl who wants to retain being 14. Also saved the painfully earnest Avril.
Big Wheel
Tori comes back from the pixies, who taught her how to shake.
One Inch Badge Pin
3 AM, drunk after a good night dancing, but not quite pulling, you need an anthem you can scream loudly and quite out of tune--that used to be Pushing Drugs, Now its this.
Going To A Town:
He is theatrical and melancholy enough that he should narrate every western nations tragedies. I would kill for him to record something deep and witty about the concept of Eurabia for example.
| Artist | Title | Label | Points | |
| 1. | LCD Soundsystem | Sounds of Silver | DFA | 10 |
| 2. | Britney Spears | Blackout | Jive | 10 |
| 3. | Rufus Wanwright | Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall | Geffen | 10 |
| 4. | Duncan Sheik,Steven Sater, Cast | Spring Awakening, Original Cast Recording | Decca | 10 |
| 5. | Mavis Staples | Never Turn Back | Anti | 10 |
| 6. | Corb Lund | Horse Soilder! Horse Soilder! | Stony Plain | 10 |
| 7. | Rhianna | Good Girl Gone Bad | Def Jam | 10 |
| 8. | Jay Z | American Gangster | Roc-A-Fella | 10 |
| 9. | R Kelly | Double Up | Jive | 10 |
| 10. | Taylor Swift | Taylor Swift | Big Machine | 10 |
Singles
| Artist | Title | Label | |
| 1. | MIA | Paper Planes | Interscope |
| 2. | Nellie McKay | Mother of Pearl | Hungry Mouse |
| 3. | Amy Winehouse | Rehab | Republic |
| 4. | Plaine White Tee\'s | Hey There, Deliah | Fearless |
| 5. | Fionn O\'Reagon | Put A Penny in the Slot | Lost Highway |
| 6. | Lil Mama | Lip Gloss | Jive |
| 7. | Tori Amos | Big Wheel | Sony |
| 8. | Vera Serduchka | Laisha Tumba | Eurovision |
| 9. | Muscles | One Inch Badge Pin | ? |
| 10. | Rufus Wainwright | Going to a Town | Geffen |
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
I have not yet chosen which photos I would like to use, but they would come from your Jesus set.
The book is going to be a compilation of our pastor's sermons this year dealing with the 300th birthday of Charles Wesley, the Methodist hymnist. He did one sermon a month dealing with a Wesley hymn, and want to put them together in one volume, for Preacher Bob and for the church. I think that several of your photos, along with a couple that I have on my Flickr page, would make for good atmosphere for the book.
Chuck Fisher
The book is going to be a compilation of our pastor's sermons this year dealing with the 300th birthday of Charles Wesley, the Methodist hymnist. He did one sermon a month dealing with a Wesley hymn, and want to put them together in one volume, for Preacher Bob and for the church. I think that several of your photos, along with a couple that I have on my Flickr page, would make for good atmosphere for the book.
Chuck Fisher
Corpael Acts of Mercy:
- Feed the hungry
- Give drink to the thirsty
- Welcome the stranger
- Clothe the naked
- Visit the sick
- Visit the prisoner
- Bury the dead.
- To teach the ignorant
- To counsel the needy
- To chastise the sinful
- To comfort the sorrowful
- To forgive enemies
- To suffer tribulation
- To pray for all fervently
Country Singles 2007:
- Kenny Chesney Dancing for the Groceries
- Corb Lund--Calvary
- Drive by Truckers--Dress Blues
- Nickelbakc--Rockstar
- Fionn Reagon--Penny In the Slot
- Taylor Swift--Our Song
- Merle Haggard--Lets Rebuild America First
- Reba and Kelly--Because of You
- Tim and Faith--I Need You
- Me and God--Josh Turner
- Corb Lund--Horse Soilder! Horse Soilder!
- Teddy Thompson--Up Front and Down Low
- Okervill River--Golden Oppurtunties
- Taylor Swift--Taylor Swift
- Alaisdair Roberts--Amber Gatherers
- Dewey Cox--OST
- That Janet Reno 3 CD America thing
- Crazy Ex Girlfriend--Miranda Lambert
- Wagonmaster--Porter Wagoner
- Big Dog Daddy--Toby Keith
- Josh Turner
- LCD Sound System--Sound of Silver
- Brit--Blackout
- Beyonce--B Day
- Jay Z--American Gangster
- Rufus--Judy Live at Carnegie Hall
- Spring Awakening Original Cast Recording
- Grindhouse Original Sound Track
- Mavis STaples--Never Turn Back
- Nellie McKay--Obligatory Villagers
- Corb Lund--Horse Soilder! Horse Soilder!
- Rhianna --Shut Up and Drive
- Taylor Swift
- Kanye West--Stronger
- Dragonettes--Galore
- R Kelly--Double Up
- Animal Collective--Strawberry Jam
- Tori Amos--American Doll Posse
- MIA Kala
- Winehouse Back in Black
- Im Not There OST
- Tom Smith Itom
- Rhianna--Shut Up and Drive
- MIA--Paper Planes
- Nellie McKay--Mother of Pearl
- Rehab--Amny Wine Hosue
- Plain Whtie T's--Deliah
- Yo Gabba Gabba opening theme
- Nick Cave Grinderman
- Finn O REagon Be Good or Be Gone
- Lil Mama Lip Gloss
- Pit Bull--Go Girl
- Tori Amos Big Wheel
- Eve--Tambourine
- Vera Serduchka--Laisha Tumbai
- Feist-1234
- Aly and AJ Potential New Boyfriend
- Rugus--Going to A Town
- White STripes--Icky Thump
- Kylie--Two Hearts
- Get Around To It--Tracey Thorne
- One Inch Badge Pin--Muscles
- New York I Love YOu, etc--LCD
Spleen
I'm like the King of some damp, rainy clime,
Grown impotent and old before my time,
Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachers
And bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.
Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed, or chase:
No, not the mortal plight of his whole race
Dying before his balcony. The tune,
Sung to this tyrant by his pet buffoon,
Irks him. His couch seems far more like a grave.
Even the girls, for whom all kings seem brave,
Can think no toilet up, nor shameless rig,
To draw a smirk from this funereal prig.
The sage who makes him gold, could never find
The baser element that rots his mind.
Even those blood-baths the old Romans knew
And later thugs have imitated too,
Can't warm this skeleton to deeds of slaughter,
Whose only blood is Lethe's cold, green water.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire
I'm like the King of some damp, rainy clime,
Grown impotent and old before my time,
Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachers
And bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.
Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed, or chase:
No, not the mortal plight of his whole race
Dying before his balcony. The tune,
Sung to this tyrant by his pet buffoon,
Irks him. His couch seems far more like a grave.
Even the girls, for whom all kings seem brave,
Can think no toilet up, nor shameless rig,
To draw a smirk from this funereal prig.
The sage who makes him gold, could never find
The baser element that rots his mind.
Even those blood-baths the old Romans knew
And later thugs have imitated too,
Can't warm this skeleton to deeds of slaughter,
Whose only blood is Lethe's cold, green water.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire
Thursday, December 13, 2007
French Knotted Embrodiery, Inspired by Anna Atkins cyanatypes, by oakland artist Jessica Polk
Rover and Bolten held in contempt
Beautifully Edited super hero footage of a family from 1968-1979, set to the Zombies this will be our year.
tiny houses made from buisness cards
paddington bear suffers some hiccups with immigration.
Dr Semeatuarchbishop of york cut up his dog collar on english national television, as a protest against mugabe's presence at this years pan african conference.
Feist has a great voice, but once you've heard Ms Simone singing this, its like a day on the beach meets tsnumai.
a court room in the bronx forbids people from using the stairs and has elevators that are constantly broken, resulting in people waiting hours, and sometimes being given warrants for failure to appear when they are downstairs.
Sally McKay, Collage Study for Larger Installation, Newton and the Peaceable Kingdom, I really really hope that she makes this as a small scale edition print, because it moves me both formally and religiously.
this story about a group of people in iraq who refused to go on patrol, to prevent a my lai kindo f situation was deeply moving, and made me reconsider honour.
two large car bombs kill at least 60 in algeirs.
Santa's Baby by Jackie Beat
San Joquin is ithe first diocese to secede from the Episcopal church.
i am wondering why bush is revealing embarrassing things about himself right now. (there is a book to be written on the connections b/w american masculinity and tears in a religious context, that he is willing to cry for god has an explicit inter weaving with everything from muscular xianity and Roosevelt to the Promise Keepers)
Snowmobile on Fire in Northern New Hampshire.
yong and privleged men and women away from home are reported to drink, fuck and shoplifting and other scandals
beautiful acorn shaped wooden mp3 player.
Selections from the Spitzer Collection, a group of wax antomitaical models that toured Europe from the 18th Century. These are now held in the national medical museum in Brussels.
KBR worker in iraq was gang raped, left in a storage containert, and other nastiness.
boston review of mental illness and sucide of prisoners, is as depressing as you managed.
Sawkorski Hello Kitty Bike.
haunting photographs from the military hospital in Afghanistan.
collages
great colours, good instincts towards placement, and composition.
the dutch give tens of millions to queer orgs locally and internationally.
Skull Helmet made by Santigo, for Harley Davidson
Speculum Romanae Magnificentia, a collection of 16th Century prints of ancient roman artifacts, is digitized says lots about the italian realtionship to its ancient history.
internet archive copy of The Priest in absolution : a manual for such as are called unto the higher ministries in the English Church, a fascainting document about the realtionshp b.w the catholics, anglo-catholics, and the anglicans in the 19th century.
my photo used on a portugese math blog. and another used on a xian minsitry site.
"...I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen, I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it..."
neil gaiman, american gods.
these amused
Chris Kenny does almsot magical things with maps.
blog of record envelopes
apparently jeff koons had a large silver rabbit in the macys parade.
footage of the parade.
Rhyinan, X Factor, Contestant
Monday, December 10, 2007
Anthony Easton's Top Ten Aesthetic Events, 2007 (posted on sally mckay)
1) Lars and the Real Girl, 35 mm Film, 2007
There was an article earlier in the year featuring discussion about whether to make costume design into two categories, one for modern films and one for costume films. I think they should do this, if only because the costumes of Lars, the fair isle sweaters, chinos, barn coats and of the real girl, cast offs, polyester knits, sensible twin sets combined into a pas de deux of unrelenting melancholy. The rest of the set design, from the books in the town doctors library, the bed spreads of Lars' brother, the church basements and even the exteriors also made this a film where the objects were infused with memory stronger then the people.
2) Ted Kerr, Photographs, Mandolin Books
Ted's a new friend from Edmonton, and has had at least 3 shows this year in the city. They were all good but the show that he had as a stopgap, for two weeks at the end of November was great. Ted is unrelentingly positive, and optimistic. He thinks the world will be all right, but he makes this optimism palpable. The images at Mandolin, were black and white, blurry, printed big on vinyl, all of the marks of student laming—and if they were of snow bedecked trees, sunsets at dusks, and one lone raven, they would have been a disaster. But they were of this dance troop he is part of, people dressed in black dancing in public in the squares and markets. They are a contemporary and postmodern recreation of mummers, with all of the messy bodies and firsting/lasting that accompany that word's history.
3) Robert Rauschenberg, Cardboards and Related Work, Menil Collection (image: Reynolds Wrap (Cardboard), 1971)
LCD Soundsystem finally wrote the last hymn of nostalgia for 70s New York, and "New York I Love You But You Are Bringing Me Down", was released around the time that this show was put up in the Menil. It is a useful corrective, that the city was better before money. That Rauschenberg was able to create works of great visual sophistication, that he was able to document and (literally, physically) deconstruct, combine (pun intended) and then stitch together the history of his own falling apart, simultaneously as the cities falling apart, with greasy trash, and then have them reproduced 30 years later in a high end hard back, with gorgeous printing and monumental essays, touches the feelings of worship, awe, and exhaustion that mark the frayed edges of work being made today. (Not only music, it also reminds me of the work of Dash Snow, in a bunch of ways)
4) Mark Wallinger, State of Britain, Tate
Unofficially he won the Turner for this, officially he won it for that piece where he dressed as a bear and wandered around that Berlin museum for a few nights. State of Britain, with its recreating with much care the work that has been de-facto limited or banned by the state, and then have the state pay for it, is a brilliant end game…but what makes it even more moving is that he actually cares, that someone is basically without irony, in a post ironic age, might be the last refuge of the avant-garde.
5) Chuck Close, Portraits, AGO, Toronto
I like how its about the reproducibility and the distribution of images, how the jacquard loom is so very digital, and I loved how formal it was, how image durnk I got on those black and white daguertypes, how almost in a daze I was, in how they become clear and blurred like a stone in a pool of water. Shame the writing wasn't very good.
6) Jason de Haan, When the Ocean Meets This Guy, Stride Gallery, Calgary.
20 foot boat, 20 foot room, narrow stairs, the boat is white and looks more like a Judd then someone that will actually float. It will have to be destroyed at the end of the show but he has marine maps on the walls just in case it somehow makes it to the ocean. Not only was it a gorgeous refutation of the modernist instinct towards size, colour, heroics and form making—it had an almost mystical hope, but not in the hippie wank way that the phrase mystical hope suggests.
7) Nokomis, Found Fabric in Embroidery Rings, Retail Establishment
Nokomis is a fashion company in Edmonton that prints images on t-shirts and makes the occasional cute skirt. It has a look. They moved to a much bigger space this year, and as part of it, they now have 20 foot walls with giant windows. They used this space up not by making one huge piece, but making termite art, a slow building up of visual metaphors. The strongest of these are maybe 60 embroidery rings with vintage fabric, carefully calibrated according to colour, form, pattern and line. There is the pink perpendicular lines that moves past the edge of the frame, a couple of pucci rip offs that curl into a kind of infinite circle, and others. Better then almost any of the clothing.
8) Chuck Liddell Fan Art
I can imagine teenagers drawing Zac Efron for Teen Beat, I can even imagine (and have read) the erotic epics written by middle aged, middle class, middle American housewives about House/Wilson, Logan/Green, or Potter/Snape. But what I didn't imagine until I saw it on the website, was truckers and red necks carefully and lovingly recreating the best fights, the facial ticks and the bulldog body of UFC's own Liddell. There is something in the barely sublimated hero worship that slips out from the usual readings of homoeros/homosocialism into something more saintly.
9) Alexander McQueen's Collection in Memory of Isabella Blow
Her death was a major loss, and McQueen told us that working was a better cure then mourning.
10) Bridget Riley, Red with Red 1, 2007, Oil on Linen image via art fag city
Edward Said asks, in On Late Style "Are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?" Riley answers, the colours become richer, the lines become fatter, but the movement retains its affect over the body. He goes on to say that some work has a "special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity". The pistachios, ice blues, and sea foams of her new lithographs have this serenity, but this painting manages to extend her practice, making it resemble viscious fluids and offal. It maintains the security of pattern and line, while still being "intransigen(t), difficult, and unresolved.." Riley is deeply under rated as a painter for a lot of reasons, her control, her wrestling with the decorative, her beauty and sublimity, her print work, her gender, her refusal to become gestural, maybe even her Englishness, but this is a last, brilliant, and important work, one that should convince us that she is one of the, if not the best English painter of the 20th century. (Those better then her maybe: Hockney, Hodgkin, Freud, Spencer or Bacon)
1) Lars and the Real Girl, 35 mm Film, 2007
There was an article earlier in the year featuring discussion about whether to make costume design into two categories, one for modern films and one for costume films. I think they should do this, if only because the costumes of Lars, the fair isle sweaters, chinos, barn coats and of the real girl, cast offs, polyester knits, sensible twin sets combined into a pas de deux of unrelenting melancholy. The rest of the set design, from the books in the town doctors library, the bed spreads of Lars' brother, the church basements and even the exteriors also made this a film where the objects were infused with memory stronger then the people.
2) Ted Kerr, Photographs, Mandolin Books
Ted's a new friend from Edmonton, and has had at least 3 shows this year in the city. They were all good but the show that he had as a stopgap, for two weeks at the end of November was great. Ted is unrelentingly positive, and optimistic. He thinks the world will be all right, but he makes this optimism palpable. The images at Mandolin, were black and white, blurry, printed big on vinyl, all of the marks of student laming—and if they were of snow bedecked trees, sunsets at dusks, and one lone raven, they would have been a disaster. But they were of this dance troop he is part of, people dressed in black dancing in public in the squares and markets. They are a contemporary and postmodern recreation of mummers, with all of the messy bodies and firsting/lasting that accompany that word's history.
3) Robert Rauschenberg, Cardboards and Related Work, Menil Collection (image: Reynolds Wrap (Cardboard), 1971)
LCD Soundsystem finally wrote the last hymn of nostalgia for 70s New York, and "New York I Love You But You Are Bringing Me Down", was released around the time that this show was put up in the Menil. It is a useful corrective, that the city was better before money. That Rauschenberg was able to create works of great visual sophistication, that he was able to document and (literally, physically) deconstruct, combine (pun intended) and then stitch together the history of his own falling apart, simultaneously as the cities falling apart, with greasy trash, and then have them reproduced 30 years later in a high end hard back, with gorgeous printing and monumental essays, touches the feelings of worship, awe, and exhaustion that mark the frayed edges of work being made today. (Not only music, it also reminds me of the work of Dash Snow, in a bunch of ways)
4) Mark Wallinger, State of Britain, Tate
Unofficially he won the Turner for this, officially he won it for that piece where he dressed as a bear and wandered around that Berlin museum for a few nights. State of Britain, with its recreating with much care the work that has been de-facto limited or banned by the state, and then have the state pay for it, is a brilliant end game…but what makes it even more moving is that he actually cares, that someone is basically without irony, in a post ironic age, might be the last refuge of the avant-garde.
5) Chuck Close, Portraits, AGO, Toronto
I like how its about the reproducibility and the distribution of images, how the jacquard loom is so very digital, and I loved how formal it was, how image durnk I got on those black and white daguertypes, how almost in a daze I was, in how they become clear and blurred like a stone in a pool of water. Shame the writing wasn't very good.
6) Jason de Haan, When the Ocean Meets This Guy, Stride Gallery, Calgary.
20 foot boat, 20 foot room, narrow stairs, the boat is white and looks more like a Judd then someone that will actually float. It will have to be destroyed at the end of the show but he has marine maps on the walls just in case it somehow makes it to the ocean. Not only was it a gorgeous refutation of the modernist instinct towards size, colour, heroics and form making—it had an almost mystical hope, but not in the hippie wank way that the phrase mystical hope suggests.
7) Nokomis, Found Fabric in Embroidery Rings, Retail Establishment
Nokomis is a fashion company in Edmonton that prints images on t-shirts and makes the occasional cute skirt. It has a look. They moved to a much bigger space this year, and as part of it, they now have 20 foot walls with giant windows. They used this space up not by making one huge piece, but making termite art, a slow building up of visual metaphors. The strongest of these are maybe 60 embroidery rings with vintage fabric, carefully calibrated according to colour, form, pattern and line. There is the pink perpendicular lines that moves past the edge of the frame, a couple of pucci rip offs that curl into a kind of infinite circle, and others. Better then almost any of the clothing.
8) Chuck Liddell Fan Art
I can imagine teenagers drawing Zac Efron for Teen Beat, I can even imagine (and have read) the erotic epics written by middle aged, middle class, middle American housewives about House/Wilson, Logan/Green, or Potter/Snape. But what I didn't imagine until I saw it on the website, was truckers and red necks carefully and lovingly recreating the best fights, the facial ticks and the bulldog body of UFC's own Liddell. There is something in the barely sublimated hero worship that slips out from the usual readings of homoeros/homosocialism into something more saintly.
9) Alexander McQueen's Collection in Memory of Isabella Blow
Her death was a major loss, and McQueen told us that working was a better cure then mourning.
10) Bridget Riley, Red with Red 1, 2007, Oil on Linen image via art fag city
Edward Said asks, in On Late Style "Are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?" Riley answers, the colours become richer, the lines become fatter, but the movement retains its affect over the body. He goes on to say that some work has a "special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity". The pistachios, ice blues, and sea foams of her new lithographs have this serenity, but this painting manages to extend her practice, making it resemble viscious fluids and offal. It maintains the security of pattern and line, while still being "intransigen(t), difficult, and unresolved.." Riley is deeply under rated as a painter for a lot of reasons, her control, her wrestling with the decorative, her beauty and sublimity, her print work, her gender, her refusal to become gestural, maybe even her Englishness, but this is a last, brilliant, and important work, one that should convince us that she is one of the, if not the best English painter of the 20th century. (Those better then her maybe: Hockney, Hodgkin, Freud, Spencer or Bacon)
four sentences that encapsulates the previous entry:
1) i want my work to disappear. these great artists from the 70s made their work disappear in galleries, my work doesnt disappear in galleries.
2) how do i make my work handle the same intangibles that bell, irwin, ryman or sandback manage, while still asking questions i find valuable.
3) do those questions always or even mostly center around the gallery system, being careful to realise that there is mroe then oen system and more then one work.
4) how does my attachment to tradition and art history function in relation to the above questions?
1) i want my work to disappear. these great artists from the 70s made their work disappear in galleries, my work doesnt disappear in galleries.
2) how do i make my work handle the same intangibles that bell, irwin, ryman or sandback manage, while still asking questions i find valuable.
3) do those questions always or even mostly center around the gallery system, being careful to realise that there is mroe then oen system and more then one work.
4) how does my attachment to tradition and art history function in relation to the above questions?
My feeling persists that all of my sculpture is part of a continuing attitude and relationship to things. That is, sometimes, I don't see various sculptures so much as being discrete objects, but rather more as instances of a generalized need to be in some sort of constituting material relationship with my environment. The sculptures address themselves to the particular space and time that they're in, but it may be that the more complete situation that I'm after is only constructed in time slowly, with the individual sculptures as its constituent parts.
Fred Sandback, from Fred Sandback, Sculpture 1966-1986 (Mannheim: Kunsthalle 1986).
Ryman, Midlands, 1976
I think that this is the strongest of Ryman's instincts towards making the process and practice of painting--showing the stretchers, hangers, and frames as part of the work, reducing painting to its mechanics. i have been thinking of this painting for a week so, because i had an image taken down from Cafe Mosiacs, because it was not formal enough in its presentation--made on poster paper and taped up, like i usually do, so the casual hanging of the work becomes part of the work itself, the thing is Ryman talks about the end of art, and the beginning of something new here, while still maintaining a respect for the craft and history of western image making. Though I know my history, I am worried, or at least my instinct is to not put it in galleries, not to worry about how it hangs, or to hang in in ways that are inherently critiques of the gallery space--to make conceptual working thrus more then object making. Ryman manages to do both, but the thing that i have never been able to figure otu (and this is the question im asking) is how did he make his work look so proper in gallery settings, it is elegantly reductive that mantains its presence not by large gestures but thru refusal...i keep thinking of the artists that do that, and they are mostly american, and mostly came to light in the 70s...
Here is Richard Tuttle:
3rd Rope Peice, 1974,
Robert Irwin, Light Column, Acrylic, 1970
Larry Bell, Untitled, vacuum-plated glass with metal binding, 1969
Fred Sandback, Large Scale Sclupture, Date Unknown
there are artists i love, deeply, but this is the group of artists that i want to be, i mean informed by photo work, and less performative, but graceful in the acceptance and refusal of the white cube. i think thats why i am more comfortable with work that is small, intimate, and why i feel more comfortable putting work in bars, stores, baths, and even outside and it explains i think why i am proud/happy of the late installation of the movie stars peice, outside, against the weather, and why i was so exhausted/frustrated by its presence at the cafe, and why i am unsure it belongs in a gallery.
here us an image of the movie star peice from the cafe:
and here from outside (taken by ted, who makes me angsty and artsy)
Movie Stars I Would Like to Fuck, Composite Digital Banner, 19 feet, 7 inches long and 4 inches wide.
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