So, i am excited about Agnes Martins new work--for the longest time nothing seemed to phase her, she still painted the same thing. She could live beside the grotesque and new fangled creations of Bruce Nauman (as she had been for almost forty years, until 2000 where she had to be moved into a nursing home), and have him over for tea but still put lines on canvases, she could move from Saskatchewan to New York to Taos and still put lines on canvases, she could be 90 and in the tate and sold for a million and have her book of writing out and still put lines on canvases. She could be a cult favourite instead of loved by everyone and still put lines on canvases. Sometimes the fields are a different colour, more bright or more dark, sometimes she uses yellow or taupe instead of lavender or mauve--and sometimes the lines are dark, sometimes they are almost Pace and sometimes they hum like power lines--but she has had a zen forbearance, like the man who spent 70 years painting bamboo. Then in her latest work, now at the Pace Wildenstein in New York--she has placed yellow tipped triangles and black trapezoids in the middle of her lines, and i'm ecstatic, its the most exciting, new and sexy thing i have heard in at least this year--and she did it in her mid 90s ... gives me hope, it does.

pitched my abu ghabi story to the walrus as an ape style essay. nothing from ed yet.

what ever happened to severe, abstract, meaningful monuments, the new wwii one at the mall is so cold, so obvious, so lacking in any subtlety, all about pounding the propghandic message of sacrifice and war and the greatest generation, that it forgets the dead and only remebers jingoistic symbols.

its like liebskiends memoiral for 9/11 w. the tower that is `1776 feet tall--so the arrogance of captialism, the phallic agression that was punished in the attacks will be restored, because we can no longer do horizontal spaces, open spaces, spaces that can be added to.

look at the flowers, flags, memoirs, the vetrans tents outside the gates, all of it cannot be done with a space that does the telling for you...it can only be done in a space that leaves gaps to plug.

there is nothing human, nothing small, nothing real in the 9/11 spave or the wwii space--even fischls copper nude, twisted in agony is more real, if we want real, and more human if we want human, then anything else.

another grand mal, scary losing my brain, computer fucked.
real live preacher recommends via email that i take serious hard core spirtual direction from the anglicans, which is something that i have been thinking about for a while, and said that i may be on the cusp of a spiritual breakthrough.

i think that the question i am asking though is the same question i am asking about particpory(sp) democracy--namely do i want to be part of this system, do i think that this system is worthwhile.

or is it so corrupt that i should burn the barn in order to see the sunrise.

drew stood me up.

someone needed to focus group this better

TURNER PRIZE ANNOUNCED AND ITS FUCKING GOOD

Yinka Shonibare reconstructs traditonal colional expereinces by recasting traditionally british instutions, costumes and landmarks in the clothing of his african home land--inculding wrapping traflagar sqaure plinths in kente cloth.



Jeremy Deller is a video artist and collagist who works with prime source material that most people over look, using cuts and ambigugities from the edges to the center, makin his subject off gaurd. For example, Memory Bucket--uses images of fast food, bats, cattle, slaughterhouses,photos at coffee joints, bbq resturants, etc to examine what it means to be texan. He also is deeply concerned with local spaces, he staged Memory Bucketin San Antonio and reenacted the huge yorkshire miners fight from the 80s as a noble video peice, The Battle of Orgreave.


Langlands and Bell recreated everything known and unknown about Osama Bin Laden and then installed it in the Imperial War Musuem, making a place that was ancient, nostagica and fussy dangerous, new and realvant.

Kutlug Ataman makes videos about people, and how they interact with other people...too simple but deeply profound.

Brilliant essay about Spiderman as perptual other, written by Johnathon Letham, who wrote Gun, with Occasional Music--one of the better genre fucks i've seen in recent years.

thnx to the inestimable and equally brilliant mr mcaw, who knows more about these things then i do, and is handsomer to boot.

New Billin california that proposes to censor anything that kids can see that may be considered adult, regardless of place. Jessica Crispin of Bookslut calls it the Bill that Killed Bookstores.

There is renewed interest in making sure that the draft is reinstated, and in many ways, if you are living in a world of perpetual war or at least intermittant war, then the draft is the most fair, and the most just way of finding soilders...it is the reason why the army was one of the first to intergrate african americans and one of the last to intergrate women.

this one is not allowing college deferments, which frankly makes the class distintcttons even less about class (you can afford to go to college...it doesnt matter.)

and it does allow for conc. objectors, so all of those yellow bellied peaceniks can get a free ride.

congress notice here

The offical Lydie England Fan Site

home of the brave/land of the free.

via mefi

in the hospital the last couple of days with many petit mal seizures, and at least 4 grand mals, do not remember any of them though.

bryan stayed up for days, and took care of me, and then this morning i made a crack about the dishes not being done, and i couldnt believe i did it.

coleen spent time in the sooke harbour house this weekend the lucky bugger.

Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hymnals and songbooks
occupy a unique place as sources of doctrine and theology. The Church has a relatively
small body of truly official doctrine, augmented by a large body of authorative
pronouncements accorded varying doctrinal weight. Precariously balanced between these
two poles is an enormous body of folk doctrine and unofficial exegesis. Mark Leone and
others have argued that the Church’s emphasis on continuing revelation renders it
essentially “atheological,” so that every member, besides being a missionary, is under
some obligation to be a theologian. Hymns and Primary songs provide a useful
common basis for this amateur theologizing, and are accorded quasi-doctrinal status.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks made this connection explicit in a 1994 General Conference
address: “The singing of hymns is one of the best ways to learn the doctrine of the
restored gospel.” Thus hymns and children’s songs published with the imprimatur of
the Church bridge the gap between official Mormondom and lived Mormonism.
Kristine Haglund Harris

found here while looking for could we hie to kolob lyrics

what would it take to convince bryan to go on these, all 50 states full of factory fun

is it wrong to have a sort of aesthicised nostalgia and desire for this kind of reptitive work, does it mark me as hopelessly a class tourist

remember the seasme street episodes with the sterolabbish soundtrack that showed factories...

v. early sequential art, claiming it as the first comic, no combo of words and images, no conflation of texts, so i would rule it out, but interesting historically.

So there is a website out there; it shows all of the images that Lichenstein cribbed his famous images from, and its making me rethink the whole comic book/benday dot thing.

I thought that the big and important thing about Lichenstein was his restructuring of high and low, working through this common images, rescuing them like a good and rich widow rescues orphans in Victorian melodrama. Now he seems like a common thief.

What was once abstract, archetypal, common to the American mindset has now moved to a specific object, and through that the images are more rarified. They are more rarified for other reasons, because the brunettes are turned to blondes, because the text is no longer integral to the images, because they are cleaner, brighter, larger.

I never realized this, but by taking these works out of an explicit narrative context he is not making a statement about how important comics are, but making a statement about how everything is transubstantiated into high end merchandise when the rituals of the gallerist are finished.

He is not the messy and chaos-ridden Rauschenberg, making dirty jokes with tyres, goats, clocks and Kennedy, and he is not Warhol, meditating between the Madonna and the Marilyn. He is a burgher who likes to go to the burlesque, in the words of the song by Pulp--where those comic artists "pretend you've got no money" and Lichenstien laughs and says,"Oh you're so funny."

I know that he rescued Romance Comics, that he made us realize the nature of the object, that the author is dead and the meanings multiply like carpet beetles on his corpse. But the original geniuses get screwed--and all of the theory doesn't put bread on the table.

(Maybe i am looking at issues of ownership and originality too narrowly, there needs to be a recognition that texts need to be played with, that texts are only alive when they are being used, when they are being mucked around, brought to the high shelf and then the low shelf--and the care of technical mastery over theoretical conceit makes Lichenstien a way to approach vernacular imagery formally, something that has been neglected--do we still think of these works as anything more then kitsch--does the issues of violence/gender/sex/social text/the blonde mean anything more here because we expect art to be about these issues, and is it not in the romance comics because we expect them to be silly ? )

thats kerrys daughter


on another note
i was a bit of an asshole to dee, and a bit too harsh, when she was defending the catholics on ilx in her usually eloquent and valiant manner.

we need people like her, but i worry that she will get knocked down in a melee and never come back--the thing with ilx is that its all elbows and knees, if you dont force yrself then yr ignored or dismissed.

but you have to force yrself under the table and around the barn.

my little pony comics editions

grotesque anatomy

Bush strips huge swaths of information on womens issues from its website...no one knows why.