Saturday, March 25, 2006
and sometmes it reminds me of this auden poem, with food as usual replacing fucking:
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquorstraight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some , alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse,
The homeless played at keeping house.
Ther Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me, but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.
T’he nightingale are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquorstraight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some , alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse,
The homeless played at keeping house.
Ther Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me, but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.
T’he nightingale are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.
i ha ddinner last night with ray, and company, for his bday, an excellent peice of orange roughy and a medicore risotto, brilliant, tangly, mussels, a v. nice beloujois(sp) and a decent martini (gin, v. dry--apparently my love for a dry martini makes people laugh), a double espresso, and a disappointing cheesecake
alex is with us, and its strange, the rituals you replace things with--i love the taste of wine, mostly dry, mostly a little acrid, though this was fruity, florid, sweeter then most...
but the cork, and the pour and the swish and the boquet, the knowing what wine goes with what, the being okay w. red for mussells (cause the tarrogon, rosemary, rich tomato sauce, etc made it closer to a meat dish then a fish dish)
i like that rite, i like those skills, im proud of being able to like adult things, and i realise, growing up, that one of the lds fears about coffee, wine, gin, etc is a inate fear of not only pleasure, but of comforting, bonding rituals, that are unstable and outside control.
its also v. funny to see me hold an esspresso cup, these big meat hands with something so delicate.
alex is with us, and its strange, the rituals you replace things with--i love the taste of wine, mostly dry, mostly a little acrid, though this was fruity, florid, sweeter then most...
but the cork, and the pour and the swish and the boquet, the knowing what wine goes with what, the being okay w. red for mussells (cause the tarrogon, rosemary, rich tomato sauce, etc made it closer to a meat dish then a fish dish)
i like that rite, i like those skills, im proud of being able to like adult things, and i realise, growing up, that one of the lds fears about coffee, wine, gin, etc is a inate fear of not only pleasure, but of comforting, bonding rituals, that are unstable and outside control.
its also v. funny to see me hold an esspresso cup, these big meat hands with something so delicate.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Bio: Anthony Easton is a poet, critic, and photographer from Edmonton, Alberta. His poetry has been published in Kiss Machine, Jones St, Fat?So! and others. His criticism has been published in Xtra, Xtra West, Flack, and Stylus and has appeared in end of the year polls for both the Nashville Scene and the Village Voice. A paper of his will appear in an upcoming academic monograph on the Magnetic Fields. His photography has appeared in group shows in Toronto, and New York. He has had a solo show of Polaroids in Fort Saskatchewan. His interests include post queer theory, rural issues, the intersection of language and politics, the implications of non-art disciplines into high art, and critical forgetfulness.
Synergy:
It comes from Jung, doesn’t it? I always liked Freud more then Jung. I liked the dark muck of sex and death, Jung seemed to neat, healthy, happy. But Africa has had enough of that dark muck, especially from us westerners, its all over people like Haggard and Conrad. But the opposite is true as well, small wallet size studio portraits from Mali become giant, glossy silver nitrate photos, important ritual objects from Nigeria become trophies for European museums, and slave ports in Ghana become tourist traps. We note Palestine but ignore Dafur.
This tug and pull, of colonial and colonised, of who gets noticed and who gets ignored, of how we use ritual, art and purpose, of the theoretical matrix of negritude and the critics of that framework, all corresponds to the definition of synergy given to me: "the simultaneous action of correlated energies which together have a greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects."
The best example of this are the technocrats of corporations, some aid organizations and certain NGOs, who try to convince that anyone owning the world was a moral good, a deep necessity. It is used it as a word to describe how the parts intersect, like a robot, like how an octopus kills its prey.
Synergy is in 1905 splitting up Africa, regardless of historical patterns, from a Berlin Conference room. Synergy is how the Americans and the Russians fought ideological battles through ought the continent, battles that were less about the good of Africa, and more about abstract ideologies. Synergy is the SI folks in 1968 getting clues from the film Battle for Algiers, and the same movie dictating strategy for the Pentagon in 2006. It's a German theologian telling a billion Catholics that the south will have to re-evangelize the north, and it's having nothing on the television but starving infants and corrupt warlords, and nothing in the movies but savages and jungle drums, in this age of global media.
It is refusing the real geography of a place so large and diverse, that it is patronizing and exhausting to talk about it as one place.
But all of this is general. I kept thinking about were Edmonton fits in with all of this. It dawned on me, what we have in common with Africa is oil.
As a photographer, I am often concerned with beauty, with making things pretty, and then having the larger politics be hidden within. The picture I chose to share with Hands across Africa could be considered literally synergistic, but it is also symbolically so.
Like ancient monoliths, in a slick modernist white, these containers hold thousands of liters of petroleum products. They are a part of a large web that transports the liquid worldwide. They are then one part in a larger machine. How they work in that machine is synergy—how they hold oil that will go north or south or east or west.
But money flows faster then oil. The money that these machines make, will go back to Europe, like the money from Prince Rupert’s Land went back to England. It will join money from the Middle East, from South America, and Africa.
I consider this small, 5x7 photo, in a discount frame a way to remember the ebb and flow of global capital. To put a crude point on it all, this photo in its beauty and its silence, reminds that the Royal Dutch Shell that refines and pumps gas in this plant near Sherwood Park is the same Royal Dutch Shell that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Another Note:
I alluded to this print being 5x7 earlier. I wanted to remind the viewer of prints taken by Malian photog Seydou Keita. Keita's work has been stolen, imported, imperialised, and broken of a very intimate context, part of that theft was formal. The orginals are small, intended for household use, and remind us of how snap shots build communities. Made much larger and much more glossy, they become exotics artifacts, for rich collectors, who reuse to believe in a modernist Africa. This has happened to a number of photographers, from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Mali and other countries. Keita is the most famous, and the best documented.
Synergy:
It comes from Jung, doesn’t it? I always liked Freud more then Jung. I liked the dark muck of sex and death, Jung seemed to neat, healthy, happy. But Africa has had enough of that dark muck, especially from us westerners, its all over people like Haggard and Conrad. But the opposite is true as well, small wallet size studio portraits from Mali become giant, glossy silver nitrate photos, important ritual objects from Nigeria become trophies for European museums, and slave ports in Ghana become tourist traps. We note Palestine but ignore Dafur.
This tug and pull, of colonial and colonised, of who gets noticed and who gets ignored, of how we use ritual, art and purpose, of the theoretical matrix of negritude and the critics of that framework, all corresponds to the definition of synergy given to me: "the simultaneous action of correlated energies which together have a greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects."
The best example of this are the technocrats of corporations, some aid organizations and certain NGOs, who try to convince that anyone owning the world was a moral good, a deep necessity. It is used it as a word to describe how the parts intersect, like a robot, like how an octopus kills its prey.
Synergy is in 1905 splitting up Africa, regardless of historical patterns, from a Berlin Conference room. Synergy is how the Americans and the Russians fought ideological battles through ought the continent, battles that were less about the good of Africa, and more about abstract ideologies. Synergy is the SI folks in 1968 getting clues from the film Battle for Algiers, and the same movie dictating strategy for the Pentagon in 2006. It's a German theologian telling a billion Catholics that the south will have to re-evangelize the north, and it's having nothing on the television but starving infants and corrupt warlords, and nothing in the movies but savages and jungle drums, in this age of global media.
It is refusing the real geography of a place so large and diverse, that it is patronizing and exhausting to talk about it as one place.
But all of this is general. I kept thinking about were Edmonton fits in with all of this. It dawned on me, what we have in common with Africa is oil.
As a photographer, I am often concerned with beauty, with making things pretty, and then having the larger politics be hidden within. The picture I chose to share with Hands across Africa could be considered literally synergistic, but it is also symbolically so.
Like ancient monoliths, in a slick modernist white, these containers hold thousands of liters of petroleum products. They are a part of a large web that transports the liquid worldwide. They are then one part in a larger machine. How they work in that machine is synergy—how they hold oil that will go north or south or east or west.
But money flows faster then oil. The money that these machines make, will go back to Europe, like the money from Prince Rupert’s Land went back to England. It will join money from the Middle East, from South America, and Africa.
I consider this small, 5x7 photo, in a discount frame a way to remember the ebb and flow of global capital. To put a crude point on it all, this photo in its beauty and its silence, reminds that the Royal Dutch Shell that refines and pumps gas in this plant near Sherwood Park is the same Royal Dutch Shell that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Another Note:
I alluded to this print being 5x7 earlier. I wanted to remind the viewer of prints taken by Malian photog Seydou Keita. Keita's work has been stolen, imported, imperialised, and broken of a very intimate context, part of that theft was formal. The orginals are small, intended for household use, and remind us of how snap shots build communities. Made much larger and much more glossy, they become exotics artifacts, for rich collectors, who reuse to believe in a modernist Africa. This has happened to a number of photographers, from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Mali and other countries. Keita is the most famous, and the best documented.
The New Yorker really drank the Kool-Aid in John Colapinto's wet-kiss to big-money fast-action art-heroes who sell art works to the highest bidder. How can someone conscientiously write an entire profile on Tobias Meyer, the chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, and not mention, even in passing, that contemporary art auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater, and brothel? They are rarefied entertainments where speculation, spin, and trophy hunting merge as an insular caste enacts a highly structured ritual in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight. Auctions are altars to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of acquisition, places where artists are cut off from their art. At auctions desire is fetishized, buying and selling become a sort of sacrament, art plays the role of sacrificial lamb, and the Ponzi scheme that surrounds it all rolls on. For The New Yorker to publish an article like this and not raise one discouraging word about auctions is more than a little discouraging; it is a sickening.
Saltz
Letter to the New Yorker
Saltz
Letter to the New Yorker
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Free Form Outline for Papa Was a Rodeo…
Original:
1. 15 seconds starting
2. twisted point of view
3. who is mike, what gender is mike
4. the coyness, you’ve made it pretty clear what you like
5. the causal sexuality, the desire for bar room back room fuck
6. or is it something else
7. the kiss you puckered for me
8. plug it with a beer
a. first phallic signifaction
9. Papa was a rodeo
a. Not part of a rodeo, not a piece of the rodeo, but actually rodeo itself the personifiaciton of rodeo
b. The idea that identity was so infused
c. Ideas of transference, the power of parentage, et. al
d. Papa was a rodeo/mama was a rock and roll band wrt the Leonard cohen song
e. The brokeback scene, buckle bunnies, groupies, instability
10. mama was a rock and roll band
a. not a country band
b. away from the domestic
c. how common was the idea of mama, etc
d. the was questions again
e. can we make the argument that this was the second phallic signifaction
11. “play guitar and rope a steer/home was anywhere with diesal gas/love was a truckers stand
a. complications
b. he is in the middle of a gender non spec. seduction, he is talking about his parenting, explaining how he would like to stay, but cant—he has talked about who his parents are, how they affected him, but his role as a drifter becomes mythological, in that we don’t know anything of him before lets say 6
c. id/mirror stage/etc
d. the idea of truck stops as liminal places
e. the travellign trouboudour schtick
f. what is a truckers stand
i. literal defition
ii. last stand
iii. stand by your man
12. never stuck around long enough for a one night stand
a. does that mean that its all hand jobs at truck stops
b. truck stops as places for casual sex
c. or does that mean that there is a purity here,
i. asexuality and the cowboy
ii. celibacy and the cowboy
iii. cowboy as truckdriver
iv. Ie in the sense that I have too much to do, my tasks are too great, and my training as well, leads me to not have sex at all
v. Ie slut anthem or something else.
13. is he warning his paramour off, or his he seducing, what games are they playing .
14. semi-long sections o guitars, like lacunae, like pauses for reponses that do not come, like something stranger and less there.
15. the light refleting off the mirror ball/like a thousand seeking eyes/make me think that I should not be here at all…
a. a strange reference to the apropticon
b. what is he afraid of
c. where is here, why should he not be here
d. half ay thru the song and no specific geographic locator
i. and the mythic west
ii. na dhte lonliness contained therein
iii. and the implication that perhaps this is not a physical space, but an emotional one
iv. long tradtion of great traveling/trucker country that is v. atuned to geography, that knows where it is, and mentions names of cities, towns, highways (ie girl on the billboard, ive been everywhere, king of the road, find others)
16. everyminute someone dies/what are we doing in this dive bar/how can you live in a place like this/why don’t you get into my car/and ill take you away/ill take that kiss now/but…
a. unreliable narrative
b. unsure who is talking, whos car
c. why do I assume this to be a trucking song
d. it’s a great a/b/a/b call and response, vibe, but its merritt talking to himself, over thiese reptiive, turgid guitars
17. The shock of the last verse
18. 55 years later/and weve had the romance of the century/after years wrestling gators/ive still felt like crying…
a. the gender changes in the last chorus
b. its Claudia, and she sings, in a female voice, and we finally realize that there is a matched pair, and in all of the excesses of this, the lonlieness matches
c. jack and ennis moment
d. but also girl from the high country, and patsy montanna getting her own love
e. some interesting self relefexivity in the last little bit, in the last lines, (they sing together, songs entwine)
19. What A conincede Papa was a Rodeo.
Kelly Hogan
1. More Heteronormative, cause it’s a boy singing to a girl (is stepin playing a character, which gender is he speaking in, why do we assume its queer.
2. She emphasizes different parts of the text—she is more concise in her phrasing, of lines like I leave early in the morning, I wont be back till next year
3. When she says maybe, it seems less ambiguous, and beer bottle seems less like a replacement for cock
4. There is an elelment of biography, of Kelly being part of a rock and roll band
5. It’s a softer, less obnixous version, but its quicker, half a minute shorter .
6. The lacunae, the elements of musical intercession…
7. Everyminute someone dies, she deemphazies this, she doesn’t spend as much time lingering on it as she could.
8. Its truckers hand, not stand
9. She lengthens the vowels sometimes,
10. There, the first lacunae, the first instrumental break
11. What are the implications of her assuming this text, wrt gender?
12. Wrestling gators as metaphor
13. The dude comes in, and its shortened in, the third act marriage is not accompoined by some weird twisting in the second verse
14. I keep thinking, about this a roaming song, about a seeking out desire and sexuality, instead of watiting for it to come, in that way, it seems against the narrative flow of female country, with few exceptions, is a game of domesticity, her claiming this song, her claiming the raw desire, the strangeness of the road, the exhaustion and the sadness, is a different kind of raw desire et al then stand by yr man, coal miners daughter, I fall to pieces, I gave my wedding dress away, I want to a cowboy’s sweetheart, etc—even the fuck you Loretta songs (Rated X, Fist City ) is about protecting territory on yr own geographic space.
Original:
1. 15 seconds starting
2. twisted point of view
3. who is mike, what gender is mike
4. the coyness, you’ve made it pretty clear what you like
5. the causal sexuality, the desire for bar room back room fuck
6. or is it something else
7. the kiss you puckered for me
8. plug it with a beer
a. first phallic signifaction
9. Papa was a rodeo
a. Not part of a rodeo, not a piece of the rodeo, but actually rodeo itself the personifiaciton of rodeo
b. The idea that identity was so infused
c. Ideas of transference, the power of parentage, et. al
d. Papa was a rodeo/mama was a rock and roll band wrt the Leonard cohen song
e. The brokeback scene, buckle bunnies, groupies, instability
10. mama was a rock and roll band
a. not a country band
b. away from the domestic
c. how common was the idea of mama, etc
d. the was questions again
e. can we make the argument that this was the second phallic signifaction
11. “play guitar and rope a steer/home was anywhere with diesal gas/love was a truckers stand
a. complications
b. he is in the middle of a gender non spec. seduction, he is talking about his parenting, explaining how he would like to stay, but cant—he has talked about who his parents are, how they affected him, but his role as a drifter becomes mythological, in that we don’t know anything of him before lets say 6
c. id/mirror stage/etc
d. the idea of truck stops as liminal places
e. the travellign trouboudour schtick
f. what is a truckers stand
i. literal defition
ii. last stand
iii. stand by your man
12. never stuck around long enough for a one night stand
a. does that mean that its all hand jobs at truck stops
b. truck stops as places for casual sex
c. or does that mean that there is a purity here,
i. asexuality and the cowboy
ii. celibacy and the cowboy
iii. cowboy as truckdriver
iv. Ie in the sense that I have too much to do, my tasks are too great, and my training as well, leads me to not have sex at all
v. Ie slut anthem or something else.
13. is he warning his paramour off, or his he seducing, what games are they playing .
14. semi-long sections o guitars, like lacunae, like pauses for reponses that do not come, like something stranger and less there.
15. the light refleting off the mirror ball/like a thousand seeking eyes/make me think that I should not be here at all…
a. a strange reference to the apropticon
b. what is he afraid of
c. where is here, why should he not be here
d. half ay thru the song and no specific geographic locator
i. and the mythic west
ii. na dhte lonliness contained therein
iii. and the implication that perhaps this is not a physical space, but an emotional one
iv. long tradtion of great traveling/trucker country that is v. atuned to geography, that knows where it is, and mentions names of cities, towns, highways (ie girl on the billboard, ive been everywhere, king of the road, find others)
16. everyminute someone dies/what are we doing in this dive bar/how can you live in a place like this/why don’t you get into my car/and ill take you away/ill take that kiss now/but…
a. unreliable narrative
b. unsure who is talking, whos car
c. why do I assume this to be a trucking song
d. it’s a great a/b/a/b call and response, vibe, but its merritt talking to himself, over thiese reptiive, turgid guitars
17. The shock of the last verse
18. 55 years later/and weve had the romance of the century/after years wrestling gators/ive still felt like crying…
a. the gender changes in the last chorus
b. its Claudia, and she sings, in a female voice, and we finally realize that there is a matched pair, and in all of the excesses of this, the lonlieness matches
c. jack and ennis moment
d. but also girl from the high country, and patsy montanna getting her own love
e. some interesting self relefexivity in the last little bit, in the last lines, (they sing together, songs entwine)
19. What A conincede Papa was a Rodeo.
Kelly Hogan
1. More Heteronormative, cause it’s a boy singing to a girl (is stepin playing a character, which gender is he speaking in, why do we assume its queer.
2. She emphasizes different parts of the text—she is more concise in her phrasing, of lines like I leave early in the morning, I wont be back till next year
3. When she says maybe, it seems less ambiguous, and beer bottle seems less like a replacement for cock
4. There is an elelment of biography, of Kelly being part of a rock and roll band
5. It’s a softer, less obnixous version, but its quicker, half a minute shorter .
6. The lacunae, the elements of musical intercession…
7. Everyminute someone dies, she deemphazies this, she doesn’t spend as much time lingering on it as she could.
8. Its truckers hand, not stand
9. She lengthens the vowels sometimes,
10. There, the first lacunae, the first instrumental break
11. What are the implications of her assuming this text, wrt gender?
12. Wrestling gators as metaphor
13. The dude comes in, and its shortened in, the third act marriage is not accompoined by some weird twisting in the second verse
14. I keep thinking, about this a roaming song, about a seeking out desire and sexuality, instead of watiting for it to come, in that way, it seems against the narrative flow of female country, with few exceptions, is a game of domesticity, her claiming this song, her claiming the raw desire, the strangeness of the road, the exhaustion and the sadness, is a different kind of raw desire et al then stand by yr man, coal miners daughter, I fall to pieces, I gave my wedding dress away, I want to a cowboy’s sweetheart, etc—even the fuck you Loretta songs (Rated X, Fist City ) is about protecting territory on yr own geographic space.
at pompidou a show on la in art, from 1955 to 1985, review from the LATIMES:
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/knight/cl-et-pompidou15mar15,0,5708927.story?coll=cl-art-knight
(cut and paste, the link is too long)
admire, who have changed how i think about contemparary art, come from LA, and i think LA is more of a cultural capital then people think it is, and i think that we need to think about it as a capital for new art.
16 LA Artists from 55 to 85 for me.
1) Kienholz (for his horrors of the body, his fear of sex, his desire against accepted political boundries, etc)
2) Ruscha (i dont have to talk about this anymore)
3) Theibould (i dont like his recent landscapes, in fact my desire for him runs entirely from ca1963-1965, his most famous work, of candy, toys, cake, pastries, deli countersm etc, but his erotic tactility related to food, well it hits my belly)
4) Ramos (his pinups, his paintings of pathetic super heros, his awful kitsch remakes of high art, hes a bad painter, a limited one, but an interesting one, with good things to say)
5) Goldstein (his film work, and art movies, and making the mgm lion be about all lions in the world, and his sadness in the midst of all this glitz)
6) Deiborken (his colours, bonnard o the west coast)
7) Kim McDonnell and the rest of the painting and decoration school (the most underrated school of the 20th century, the one that gives birth decades after it was declared dead, and the school responsible for everyone from laura owens to carl fudge to
8) dennis hoppers photogs (he should have just quit acting)
9) judy chicago (esp. the mockery of slick minimalism she did before mensturation and quilts)
10) mike kelly
11) kenneth anger
12) john balderssai (he used to arange his 5x7 snap shots, up the walls of gallerys, in spirals, and arching curves)
13) nancy buchanan
14) martha rosler (rachel do you know her, esp her seires of photocollages called the body is beautfiul from 1969-1972, they might be a good place to look, because of how she works surfaces, beauty, commercem and industry, see if you can find one called cargo cult)
15) the work nauman did there, before he went to mexico, new york
16) paul mccarthy
and the vatican remixes the crusades, now with less islamic tolerance
here
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/knight/cl-et-pompidou15mar15,0,5708927.story?coll=cl-art-knight
(cut and paste, the link is too long)
admire, who have changed how i think about contemparary art, come from LA, and i think LA is more of a cultural capital then people think it is, and i think that we need to think about it as a capital for new art.
16 LA Artists from 55 to 85 for me.
1) Kienholz (for his horrors of the body, his fear of sex, his desire against accepted political boundries, etc)
2) Ruscha (i dont have to talk about this anymore)
3) Theibould (i dont like his recent landscapes, in fact my desire for him runs entirely from ca1963-1965, his most famous work, of candy, toys, cake, pastries, deli countersm etc, but his erotic tactility related to food, well it hits my belly)
4) Ramos (his pinups, his paintings of pathetic super heros, his awful kitsch remakes of high art, hes a bad painter, a limited one, but an interesting one, with good things to say)
5) Goldstein (his film work, and art movies, and making the mgm lion be about all lions in the world, and his sadness in the midst of all this glitz)
6) Deiborken (his colours, bonnard o the west coast)
7) Kim McDonnell and the rest of the painting and decoration school (the most underrated school of the 20th century, the one that gives birth decades after it was declared dead, and the school responsible for everyone from laura owens to carl fudge to
8) dennis hoppers photogs (he should have just quit acting)
9) judy chicago (esp. the mockery of slick minimalism she did before mensturation and quilts)
10) mike kelly
11) kenneth anger
12) john balderssai (he used to arange his 5x7 snap shots, up the walls of gallerys, in spirals, and arching curves)
13) nancy buchanan
14) martha rosler (rachel do you know her, esp her seires of photocollages called the body is beautfiul from 1969-1972, they might be a good place to look, because of how she works surfaces, beauty, commercem and industry, see if you can find one called cargo cult)
15) the work nauman did there, before he went to mexico, new york
16) paul mccarthy
and the vatican remixes the crusades, now with less islamic tolerance
here
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Sunday, March 19, 2006
10 stories for 10 photos
Taking photos out of moving vehicles:
(This is my attempt to move into another kind of artist statement, for a package of semi-unrelated photos, meant for the albertan bienal, its really bloggy, I don’t know if it works.)
1. Before I went away to school, when my grandparents were still alive, they used to take me to my great aunts cabin in the shushawp. I would have a drugstore 35 mm, and it would take blurry, awful photos. Because we couldn’t stop as often as I would have liked, I would point and shot from the Buick my granddad drove. They were often of similar things to what I take photos of now, trains, rocks, interesting buildings, factories, and various water features.
2. The two years I was away at school, I often did not have a camera, and so photos were taken for us. On parents’ day, a recent graduate would put up a table with lists of photos he took, and samples. Because they believed that nature was good for a boy, in the 19th century Canadian way of noble canoes and even nobler hiking, the photos would be a combination of the spectacular (pine trees, lakes, mountains, rock strewn moonscape like summits) and the snapshot (eating, walking, the big group show at the end.) The photos I wanted to take, were pictures of school bus wells, the hitch that held a dozen voyager style canoes, the pick ups that came to meet us on the shores, details that were missed, details that were less heroic. They wanted us to be like the boys in the novels we read for English (White Fang, She, Dog Runner, Mrs. Mike) I had enough danger, I wanted to avoid it, or be an arms length observer.
3. When I came back from going home to school, my dad took me to Vancouver for the first time. It was a place where he positioned himself as a bohemian, a place where he lived for a few years, and then left to go back to Alberta, to get married and eventually had me. It was the first time I ever fell in love with a city and I took photos everywhere, from another cheap camera. I lost or dropped things, and my family didn’t have a whole lot of cash, so need turned into a vernacular aesthetic. I remember most, the photos I took from the windows of the monorail, the sky train. Even the name seemed like something from Buck Rogers, and I liked being above everything else. Technically this was impossible, and I got rolls of interesting blurs. Bad photographs were as pretty as Good ones sometimes.
4. I took some photos during high school, with one use cameras. I wanted to be Warhol. They were cheap and disposable. I felt cheap and disposable. They ere high trash, like how high camp makes the aesthetic of unfulfilled desire into political theater, this made being broke into something similar. That, and they were easy to shoplift. Packs of 6, with a French name, just outside the photo department, in the Superstore in Claireview, it made me feel punker then Warhol. The interesting thing about this was that this was the first time I tried derive, though I didn’t have the word for it then. I wandered the city, on buses as far north as Castledowns, and as far south as Ellesry,to Millwoods, down stony plain road, I would spend weekends doing nothing but taking photos from the windows of buses, with these cameras I stole from the supermarket. Sometimes I developed them, I must have developed all of them, but I don’t remember that part of the process. It was shooting a roll of film, like shooting a load of cum, that relaxed me. The solipsism of adolescence, or something like that.
5. After High School, I went with a tour group to spend 3 weeks in London. I spent most of the time away from the group, in pubs, restaurants, galleries, and museums. I took loads of photos, snapshots and artshots, the two were less separated in my mind. My favorite was a picture of Scotland, from the air, just 45 minutes before landing in Heathrow. The ocean, and green land, white trees, an abstracted pastoral. I have failed to take anything as good from an airplane ever since—looking at Wolfgang Tillimans, much later, I realized that his were better then mine because they looked uglier.
6. I didn’t take pictures for a long time, after London, because of some failures, and general boredom, and other business. I met Raymond in a class, and after a while, he invited me to take his camera, and shoot at the railway yards. It was a nice machine, with lenses and a case, and he was much more of a tech junkie then I was. But I got the thrill, I remembered how much I loved trains, and how much it didn’t matter what other people shot. I learned about technical ability, and figured out that shooting a moving vehicle, from the outside, when you weren’t in it, had a thrill that was different then being encased in the vehicle. Ballard talks a lot about symbiosis with machines and bodies, in Crash and I re read it a few weeks after my encounter with Raymond and his camera.
7. About this time, I went to a conference for Canadian University Press, with an asshole of a photog, who shot for the Gateway. He wouldn’t take pictures of me, and played keep away with my camera, because I didn’t have an SLR. I managed photos of him, squished in the back of a Civic, and of things on the highway, sometimes when we went out for piss breaks, sometimes from the windows of the car. I figured out that it was the image that mattered and not the equipment, and that the linguistic similarities between equipment meaning dick and equipment being camera were not cocncidental.
8. A little while later, during my second or third year of university, Raymond and I lived together. We would often go shooting, trading shot for shot, then roll for roll, as our styles became closer and closer. I developed two kinds of language for talking about film, the visual language of composition and the verbal slang that devolped between he and I. We would travel, driving around the city, out to the coast, up to wainright, once. He drove a mid80s Firebird, and the thing would make noise—sometimes we would take pictures out of the window of this firebird, but the best thing was saying STOP and jumping out, suddenly, to take a photo of a sign, or a post, or a building, or something interesting/ ugly/ beautiful/sublime/pretty/etc. The movemovemovesSTOPmovemovemoveSTOP pull and tug of our shooting became a new way to think of bodies, vehicles and machines. I collected these in little blue books, showed people at parties, proud of the odd shot, but didn’t think of myself as a photographer. A writer writes and a photog takes pictures, though.
9. In the year after I flunked out of University, I spent two weeks in a monstary in Kentucky. I took some pictures there, with a digital camera my sister bought me for Christmas the year before. It was too dark to take photos on the trip there, and leaving early, I didn’t know how to be polite enough to ask the monk to stop, so I could take photos of certain things, it even seemed rude to take the camera out in the minivan and take photos of the highways. I still remember the list of things I wanted to take pictures of: Robbie the Worlds Largest Rooster; Various Baptist Churches, The Cathedral of Bardstown, proof that there was a Stephen Foster Avenue, The Jim Beam hand painted brewery sign, 30 foot signs on the interstate advertising truck stops, bait shops, waffle houses, and Girls Girls Girls; the signs for interstates themselves, and the minivan itself. The grammar of unspoken signals, of things not shot from vehicles, I think was stronger then if things were left in the open.
10. A few weeks ago, a friend and I went from my house in the suburbs to Millwoods, where he lived. We were going to toboggan. To get there we had to pass all sorts of industry, refineries, warehouses, and the supporting infastructure that happens on the edges of industrial towns. I took maybe 40 photos out of the window of his Honda, and he asked me if I wanted to stop. I didn’t, because the kid would be restless, because it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, because taking photos with someone is intimate for me, and I didn’t feel that way about Gerard, because I finally felt confident about my ability to take a good shot, with shitty equipment in less then ideal circumstances, because there is something transient that’s important about traveling down hiway 21 and having to be quick in order to take a photo.
Taking photos out of moving vehicles:
(This is my attempt to move into another kind of artist statement, for a package of semi-unrelated photos, meant for the albertan bienal, its really bloggy, I don’t know if it works.)
1. Before I went away to school, when my grandparents were still alive, they used to take me to my great aunts cabin in the shushawp. I would have a drugstore 35 mm, and it would take blurry, awful photos. Because we couldn’t stop as often as I would have liked, I would point and shot from the Buick my granddad drove. They were often of similar things to what I take photos of now, trains, rocks, interesting buildings, factories, and various water features.
2. The two years I was away at school, I often did not have a camera, and so photos were taken for us. On parents’ day, a recent graduate would put up a table with lists of photos he took, and samples. Because they believed that nature was good for a boy, in the 19th century Canadian way of noble canoes and even nobler hiking, the photos would be a combination of the spectacular (pine trees, lakes, mountains, rock strewn moonscape like summits) and the snapshot (eating, walking, the big group show at the end.) The photos I wanted to take, were pictures of school bus wells, the hitch that held a dozen voyager style canoes, the pick ups that came to meet us on the shores, details that were missed, details that were less heroic. They wanted us to be like the boys in the novels we read for English (White Fang, She, Dog Runner, Mrs. Mike) I had enough danger, I wanted to avoid it, or be an arms length observer.
3. When I came back from going home to school, my dad took me to Vancouver for the first time. It was a place where he positioned himself as a bohemian, a place where he lived for a few years, and then left to go back to Alberta, to get married and eventually had me. It was the first time I ever fell in love with a city and I took photos everywhere, from another cheap camera. I lost or dropped things, and my family didn’t have a whole lot of cash, so need turned into a vernacular aesthetic. I remember most, the photos I took from the windows of the monorail, the sky train. Even the name seemed like something from Buck Rogers, and I liked being above everything else. Technically this was impossible, and I got rolls of interesting blurs. Bad photographs were as pretty as Good ones sometimes.
4. I took some photos during high school, with one use cameras. I wanted to be Warhol. They were cheap and disposable. I felt cheap and disposable. They ere high trash, like how high camp makes the aesthetic of unfulfilled desire into political theater, this made being broke into something similar. That, and they were easy to shoplift. Packs of 6, with a French name, just outside the photo department, in the Superstore in Claireview, it made me feel punker then Warhol. The interesting thing about this was that this was the first time I tried derive, though I didn’t have the word for it then. I wandered the city, on buses as far north as Castledowns, and as far south as Ellesry,to Millwoods, down stony plain road, I would spend weekends doing nothing but taking photos from the windows of buses, with these cameras I stole from the supermarket. Sometimes I developed them, I must have developed all of them, but I don’t remember that part of the process. It was shooting a roll of film, like shooting a load of cum, that relaxed me. The solipsism of adolescence, or something like that.
5. After High School, I went with a tour group to spend 3 weeks in London. I spent most of the time away from the group, in pubs, restaurants, galleries, and museums. I took loads of photos, snapshots and artshots, the two were less separated in my mind. My favorite was a picture of Scotland, from the air, just 45 minutes before landing in Heathrow. The ocean, and green land, white trees, an abstracted pastoral. I have failed to take anything as good from an airplane ever since—looking at Wolfgang Tillimans, much later, I realized that his were better then mine because they looked uglier.
6. I didn’t take pictures for a long time, after London, because of some failures, and general boredom, and other business. I met Raymond in a class, and after a while, he invited me to take his camera, and shoot at the railway yards. It was a nice machine, with lenses and a case, and he was much more of a tech junkie then I was. But I got the thrill, I remembered how much I loved trains, and how much it didn’t matter what other people shot. I learned about technical ability, and figured out that shooting a moving vehicle, from the outside, when you weren’t in it, had a thrill that was different then being encased in the vehicle. Ballard talks a lot about symbiosis with machines and bodies, in Crash and I re read it a few weeks after my encounter with Raymond and his camera.
7. About this time, I went to a conference for Canadian University Press, with an asshole of a photog, who shot for the Gateway. He wouldn’t take pictures of me, and played keep away with my camera, because I didn’t have an SLR. I managed photos of him, squished in the back of a Civic, and of things on the highway, sometimes when we went out for piss breaks, sometimes from the windows of the car. I figured out that it was the image that mattered and not the equipment, and that the linguistic similarities between equipment meaning dick and equipment being camera were not cocncidental.
8. A little while later, during my second or third year of university, Raymond and I lived together. We would often go shooting, trading shot for shot, then roll for roll, as our styles became closer and closer. I developed two kinds of language for talking about film, the visual language of composition and the verbal slang that devolped between he and I. We would travel, driving around the city, out to the coast, up to wainright, once. He drove a mid80s Firebird, and the thing would make noise—sometimes we would take pictures out of the window of this firebird, but the best thing was saying STOP and jumping out, suddenly, to take a photo of a sign, or a post, or a building, or something interesting/ ugly/ beautiful/sublime/pretty/etc. The movemovemovesSTOPmovemovemoveSTOP pull and tug of our shooting became a new way to think of bodies, vehicles and machines. I collected these in little blue books, showed people at parties, proud of the odd shot, but didn’t think of myself as a photographer. A writer writes and a photog takes pictures, though.
9. In the year after I flunked out of University, I spent two weeks in a monstary in Kentucky. I took some pictures there, with a digital camera my sister bought me for Christmas the year before. It was too dark to take photos on the trip there, and leaving early, I didn’t know how to be polite enough to ask the monk to stop, so I could take photos of certain things, it even seemed rude to take the camera out in the minivan and take photos of the highways. I still remember the list of things I wanted to take pictures of: Robbie the Worlds Largest Rooster; Various Baptist Churches, The Cathedral of Bardstown, proof that there was a Stephen Foster Avenue, The Jim Beam hand painted brewery sign, 30 foot signs on the interstate advertising truck stops, bait shops, waffle houses, and Girls Girls Girls; the signs for interstates themselves, and the minivan itself. The grammar of unspoken signals, of things not shot from vehicles, I think was stronger then if things were left in the open.
10. A few weeks ago, a friend and I went from my house in the suburbs to Millwoods, where he lived. We were going to toboggan. To get there we had to pass all sorts of industry, refineries, warehouses, and the supporting infastructure that happens on the edges of industrial towns. I took maybe 40 photos out of the window of his Honda, and he asked me if I wanted to stop. I didn’t, because the kid would be restless, because it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, because taking photos with someone is intimate for me, and I didn’t feel that way about Gerard, because I finally felt confident about my ability to take a good shot, with shitty equipment in less then ideal circumstances, because there is something transient that’s important about traveling down hiway 21 and having to be quick in order to take a photo.
the boys had a house party, then v for, then frans...its not their fault, and its pretty constant contact, and its emails, phone calls, and we are as close as we can, and we are working my ass to get me out their, and yet, here, 2 feet of snow in the last few weeks, still snowing, cold and miserable, ive been really really depressed...
today is the lonliest, the most desperate ive been all winter, the closest ive gotten to the worst of the royal alex, toronto western days.
the perverse thing is that with sucidal ideation, it makes it easier, there is a way out, from isolaion, desperation, exhaustion, etc...there is a release to thinking about killing one self.
i havent engaged in sucidal ideation, its not an option, with mom being sick, etc, so it gets worse, there is less and less of a release, and i sort of fall into my own entropy/needieness/anger/depression.
i need to clean the house, i need to sweep, mop, pick up the laundry room and my bedroom, which are getting so bad that i cant move with out jumping, clean my sheets, all of that, and its just not happening, since the double funeral, and the next big snow dump, i do what i need to do, i keep working, keep skating, but i barely have it together, im crying right now, and gerard said he would give me a ride out tomorrow, to the city and i like gerard but i dont want to be a hassle, i never want to be a hassle,
i cancelled lettner 4 times this week, because of buses and also because i couldnt handle seeing new people, and gerard has gone out of his way to let himself in, which i need but yeah...
im depressed, not the low grade fever that usually moves thru, but a hard, cold, obilette kind of thing, a box w/o breath holes
today is the lonliest, the most desperate ive been all winter, the closest ive gotten to the worst of the royal alex, toronto western days.
the perverse thing is that with sucidal ideation, it makes it easier, there is a way out, from isolaion, desperation, exhaustion, etc...there is a release to thinking about killing one self.
i havent engaged in sucidal ideation, its not an option, with mom being sick, etc, so it gets worse, there is less and less of a release, and i sort of fall into my own entropy/needieness/anger/depression.
i need to clean the house, i need to sweep, mop, pick up the laundry room and my bedroom, which are getting so bad that i cant move with out jumping, clean my sheets, all of that, and its just not happening, since the double funeral, and the next big snow dump, i do what i need to do, i keep working, keep skating, but i barely have it together, im crying right now, and gerard said he would give me a ride out tomorrow, to the city and i like gerard but i dont want to be a hassle, i never want to be a hassle,
i cancelled lettner 4 times this week, because of buses and also because i couldnt handle seeing new people, and gerard has gone out of his way to let himself in, which i need but yeah...
im depressed, not the low grade fever that usually moves thru, but a hard, cold, obilette kind of thing, a box w/o breath holes
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Friday, March 17, 2006
Thursday, March 16, 2006
so im sitting in an internet cafe on jasper and 109th, handling some email, before my meeting with employabilities...and kitty corner to me, they are finally recladding an IS medium size office block, adn they do it with two people, one on the floor above and one on the floor below, with anchoring ropes to the ground, and some kind of mechaincal winch...the windows are huge, about 10x8 or so, and its windy/snow...so i cannot imagine the job pleasent in the least, but the corrdination, is breath taking--my inner 8 yr old wants tthem to drop the glass all over the sidewalk, but thats most likely why there is cladding on the ground floor, aside of course from security concerns, dont know how i could take a decent photo of this...
Proposal for a Book Chapter on the Magnetic Fields:
Cowboys, Cowgirls and Other Problems of Genre.
Gender and Rural Culture in Stephen Merritt's Papa Was a Rodeo (and Kelly Hogan’s Cover)
Cover versions crossing gender lines become complicated creatures, and performers alterations of lyrics is often a disputed site of resistance. Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Field’s 3 volume 69 Love Songs, is even trickier, because Merritt works so hard on disrupting any possible gender or sexual clue. The version of Papa was a… in 69 Love Songs, on the surface, is a gay cowboy love song, unusual but not unheard of. The cover, on the surface, is a straight cowboy love song, casual in its banality. Merritt has claimed that Papa…was a straight country song and Hogan introduces the song live, plainly, as one of the loneliest songs she’s heard. It’s even lonely with a lover of the proper place and gender emerging in the third verse. A marriage in the third act is supposed to set everything right.
There is something confusing in the interplay between these two songs. Some of it deals with gender and personae mentioned, but there are also issues of geography. The song mentions no geographic place directly, unlike the Magnetic Albums country album Charm of the Highway Strip, so it discusses a Middle America, filmed, photographed, written about, and mythologized as archetypal and not “real”. Though this could be explained by Meritt being the archetypal, decadent New Yorker, how does it leave Kelly Hogan who’s record label Bloodshot was founded in Chicago, and knows a bit about all that space in the middle.
Starting with those intersections of aesthetics, sexuality and geography is to begin to slowly tangle and untangle sign and signifier, in these two songs, and in other country songs that Merritt may have sang. Using the theoretical tools as varied as Lacan on lacunae and phallic presentation; Judith Butler on the performance of gender; Howard Zinn and Wendell Berry’s concepts of urban and agrarian; the American travelogues of Baudillard and Bernard Levy, but also branch out from that.
I want to talk about how these two songs fit into film (Johnny Guitar; Paris, Texas; The Last Picture Show; Brokeback Mountain); fine art photography (American Surfaces by Stephen Shore; Los Alamos by William Eggleston); and country music (Patsy Montana; Roy Acuff; Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie)
Like Wayne Kaustenbaum’s recent articles for art forum, and books like Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus and late Barthes, the article will be in numbered paragraphs. I am doing this for several reasons, including Merritt’s fondness for the list form, the spare minimalism of the plot, and to extend the songs loose web of referents. Think of it then, as a long highway, and the prose being the gas stations, hotels, honky tonks, truck stops, weigh stations and churches one sees on its highways.
Cowboys, Cowgirls and Other Problems of Genre.
Gender and Rural Culture in Stephen Merritt's Papa Was a Rodeo (and Kelly Hogan’s Cover)
Cover versions crossing gender lines become complicated creatures, and performers alterations of lyrics is often a disputed site of resistance. Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Field’s 3 volume 69 Love Songs, is even trickier, because Merritt works so hard on disrupting any possible gender or sexual clue. The version of Papa was a… in 69 Love Songs, on the surface, is a gay cowboy love song, unusual but not unheard of. The cover, on the surface, is a straight cowboy love song, casual in its banality. Merritt has claimed that Papa…was a straight country song and Hogan introduces the song live, plainly, as one of the loneliest songs she’s heard. It’s even lonely with a lover of the proper place and gender emerging in the third verse. A marriage in the third act is supposed to set everything right.
There is something confusing in the interplay between these two songs. Some of it deals with gender and personae mentioned, but there are also issues of geography. The song mentions no geographic place directly, unlike the Magnetic Albums country album Charm of the Highway Strip, so it discusses a Middle America, filmed, photographed, written about, and mythologized as archetypal and not “real”. Though this could be explained by Meritt being the archetypal, decadent New Yorker, how does it leave Kelly Hogan who’s record label Bloodshot was founded in Chicago, and knows a bit about all that space in the middle.
Starting with those intersections of aesthetics, sexuality and geography is to begin to slowly tangle and untangle sign and signifier, in these two songs, and in other country songs that Merritt may have sang. Using the theoretical tools as varied as Lacan on lacunae and phallic presentation; Judith Butler on the performance of gender; Howard Zinn and Wendell Berry’s concepts of urban and agrarian; the American travelogues of Baudillard and Bernard Levy, but also branch out from that.
I want to talk about how these two songs fit into film (Johnny Guitar; Paris, Texas; The Last Picture Show; Brokeback Mountain); fine art photography (American Surfaces by Stephen Shore; Los Alamos by William Eggleston); and country music (Patsy Montana; Roy Acuff; Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie)
Like Wayne Kaustenbaum’s recent articles for art forum, and books like Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus and late Barthes, the article will be in numbered paragraphs. I am doing this for several reasons, including Merritt’s fondness for the list form, the spare minimalism of the plot, and to extend the songs loose web of referents. Think of it then, as a long highway, and the prose being the gas stations, hotels, honky tonks, truck stops, weigh stations and churches one sees on its highways.
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