Hysterically funny ad about women and yogurt.

fantastic call towards ecclectic science fiction.

internet winning anteater in sweaters.

joesters' brilliant essay on GTA 4. Speaking of GTA, apparently the subway map is a mash up of Vignelli's from the 70s, and the current one. and a flickr set indicating where the virutal real estate of Liberty City and the meat space real estate of New York overlap.


Monoply Graffiti, Oak Park

wolverineM found near lake tahoe.

howard bringham's photos of foreman and zaire do the almost impossible thing, of documenting the politics of the event, the sideshows a well as the show itself. the show was vital in the history of Americas realtionship with an emerging urban class of Africans. Wished he was at the Accra Gold concerts or the James Brown in Lagos as well.

also some shots of indie comic superstars, who knew jordan crane was so cute.

i am only linking to this story about SAG troubles on the set of NAiled, because it adds evidence to my David O Russell is an asshole thesis.


Actual T Shirt being sold against OBama

the lds group blog by common consent, delinates the subtle differences in practices b/w lds and flds theology.

alice goodman who did the libretto for ADam's Nixon in China and the Death of Klinghoffer, became an anglican priest and preaches at Cambridge (UK not Boston) the link goes to a poetic, and beautiful detanglign of the marys int he gospels, written on occasion of Magadelene's saint day. the exgesis she does on Hopkins, and the sense of history, is esp notable.


Still From Otto, Bruce La Bruce's new gay zombie film

wonderful furniture made from old bowlign alleys.

clinton is 20m in debt

claims a third of women are raped.

i have never seen the new yorker be this angry, this sarcastic, on anything--though these three dispatches frmo the drug war sure deserve it.


Matthew Lawson, One Life to Live

silver jewelery cast from octpi

a zoo forum, an italian blog called pink, and

obligatory ny times obit on Rberg, with two great lines:

1) No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.

Which posits, a new and all queer, four horsemen. (and cage becomes a pivot, about avant garde practice, poetic practice, as opposed to defacto image making) (reading Jasper Johns Work after 1974, a catalog for a 1989 show in Philadelphia, there is a qoute inthe preface, that seems to be about both groups:

...given the extraordinary richness of cross references and teh cumulative intellifence offered by a group of these paintings and works on paper...John's art has always had an aspect of intensely personal reflection, seemingly without ambition to persuade, to admonish, or even to address its viewers directly... (6)


Ann d'Harncourt

It is then the webs of ambigious signifiers, the visual noise, and the interlacings, the accumaltion of images, and the juxtaposition, the clash and the bang, rather then the synthisizing that combines the work, it also allows for the community to work together, not only the community directly (both the work, and the gossip after the work, and sometimes the gossip is the work) but the historical community as well. One example, in the 80s, Rberg, Johns and Warhol all used varations of a Skull motif, the Johns catalog claims it is an oblique reference to the art historian Ethel Scull, who was a mutual aquantice and owned work by almost everyone in that group--but it could be the start of middle age, or the mainstreaming of hiv/aids (rberg and johns is a poison sign), or something else entirely, and that is just one motif that they all share...the accumlation of konweldge, of interactions, of mutual surfaces, makes them forver almsot workingo n one opus. .

or if not one opus, then one project, the rejection of formal depth in western picture making

"a culture of surface is not simply a culture that declares its immunity to historical anxiety, it is also a culture that has become suspicious of history with a capital H, moving with awesome solemnity and depth through our lives, a culture which recognizes that history, for the most part, is also made out of the particulars by people whose every day acts do not always add up to the grand aggregates of canonical martyrdom that make for real politics"
Andrew Ross, The Death of Lady Day, qouted in Lyttle Shaw's Frank O Hara the Politics of Coterie (93)

the project of pop, was then an aggregation of found elements, not to drag them higher, but the opposite, to make history (art history, history history) an act of scrumble, gossip, lo fi, casual assemblage, heresey, personal narratives, informal faking incredibly difficult formal work, quirk, questioning, and queering...and making all of those things, solemn and deep. like 13 Jackies, by Warhol where she looks bearded, or the goats and chickens of the early combines, or Lstein;s mirrors, or the skulls of Johns...

but it is also, v. much about community, what Lyttle Shaw talks about thruout his book on O Hara, better as a poetry critic, he mentions art in the second half, and he has an adroit chapter on O'Haras complicated realtionship with Rberg (he liked the work, i think better then Warhol and Johns, because it was much more ambigious if the messes in teh combines, the gestural paintings over the collages were aggresive to the new pop movement or to the old abexers--seeing a couple of early 60s Rbergs at SF:Moma, what was shocking about them was how gestural they were, how much they were about the varagacies of putting paint on canvas, just like Franz Klines telephone paper drawings were much about reclaiming commonly found objects...

but one of the things that Shaw says in this chapter, is about Rberg's untitled from 1954:

"Untitled is no simple allegory for the queer reguasl of heterosexual narrative. If that refusal operates, in potentia, within the combines raw material, the peice as a whole problematizes the narration of a self more broadly--both by proliferating visual information beyond the possibility of any neat recuperation and by collapsing distinctions between interior and exterior registers of discourse. Thus one finds images of quiet lakes and quaint Victorian interiors, Rberg seems not to visit next to discarded wrapping papers, paint smeared fabrics and encrusted comic books framgments, reproductions of Da Vinci's drawings of cherubs, next to original drawings by Cy Twombly, Jack Tworkov, and Rberg's three-year old son, in combining these materials, Untitled elaborates not so much a particular background as an intersubjective struggle among several marked by evacuation's, revisions and impossible conclusions..." (Shaw, 212)

there are three lists that are important to note there--the list of materials found in the work, and the trinity of Evacuation, Revision and Conclusion... the list is full of people he loves, people he is close to, historical figures, and trash--there is the scribble aesthetic of twombly, and the automata of his history, tied into the three year old, there is the not really drawing comic books and designs attached to the real art, but only in reproduction, of Da Vinci, there is calling the child an art historical cherub, etc etc etc, the coterie of imagery, and the coetrie of fellow workers, become a way of intergrating ideas of family, history, and art historical practice. Evacuation (literally, the evacualtion of bowels, of blood, of liquids from the body) and of pyschic energies, are made one and he same, the mess of emotional blockages, become the start and stop of vertical and horiziontal progession. and revision, this is lifes work, the reworking of the same images--you see it well in johns, where cross hatches and flags, for two, intermingle prolfigatly throughout the canvases of the 80s...

The other qoute from the times obit:

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

I dont think that process is counter intuitive at all, i think that the opposite is true, we learn about history, about how to make narratives, about how to place images properly, of taxonomies and cultures, the finger painting spread, the copereal nature of mark making is much less academic--though the second half, is it a mistake, is learned, or a deliberate unlearning that comes from learning how to avoid the tricks they taught you in college

Playground, Ainsha Wilderness Area, Ohio,