Rick Santorum

Fiction

32 Water Method Man John Iriving

Still one of my favourite writers, though i dont know why, this one is smaller and more eliptical then epics like garp or cider house or hotel new hampshire, though the themes are similar, issues of masculinity, genital mutaliation, unfaithful women, and how exactly to sort out our place in the world. (the genital mutaliation is the central symbolic core of this book, and there are several places where surgery is mentioned--more explicit then anything else ive read, descriptions of scars, stitches, hospital rooms and drs offices)

i bought a multiple from paul mpagi sepuya, one of my favourite new conceptualists, a photographer from brooklyn, who's work manages to have a sort of distilled rawness...this work called the difference b/w a memory, a portrait and a resoultion, is a plain brown box, sqaure and small, which is comfortable to fit into ones hand, sliding the ribbon (paper, with the title and the artist) off the box, lifting its lid, is finding three small books, about the size of my palm--the books are yellow, not quite canary or goldenrod, but something one can get at home depot, all three books, have the smae images, of a blonde bearded man, with various sly smiles and insouciant glances--the looks are too self constructed to be seductive...there is also a title card and everything is weighed down with a thick bottom layer of cotton padding. i think the joke or the lingustic plays that is being constructed here is that there is no diffrence b/w a memory, a portrait or a resolution, all o them center on lingustic construcion of personhood, and so having them seperate, and yet together, in formal repetetion, the same images, the brown of the box and the yellow of the titles, and the blonde of the boy all working the same formal continum of colour, all of it is iconic and warholian--but there is something really distant and cold about warhol, a fear of being discovered, and there is nothing cold here at all

(yellow as a colour b/w gender signifers; yellow as a colour of both abjection and purity; yellow as a colour of organic growth; yellow as a colour of sexual decadence)
(the three, the naming, the memory, the box like aparatus, are they religious?)

im writing about this badly, because i really find myself having difficulty about what they mean to me, but im really pleased to have them, (art met and printed matter have some, or buy them off paul directly)

some links:

byu
fires a part time, non tenure prof, in philosophy, because he opposes the churches position on same gendered marriage and a story on Juan Cole not even being hired

thousands of examples of english being spoken all over the world, the same phrase over and over again, thinking of using garage band to fuck with it.

heatherm ills is in the middle of a shit storm of publicity, calling her a gold digger and a whore, the soft core shots and what she did in germany decades ago is biting her ass...rock star misogyny

the university of iowa is offering 100s of card catalog cards, to artists so that they can do projects wiht them--i will send off for my set tomorrow or the day after but no idea what to do aobut it ( i think that i am going to look for the copies of the books in the local libaries around town, photocopy the colophon, and then find a way to play with transperancies)

a brilliant la times article on how all history being revisionist

some magazine interventions by robert heinkien, from la in the 70s...

john derbyshire shits all over the far right fetus worshipping polemic party of death--a brilliant peice of gutting.

speaking
of that crowd, they are now bombing porn shops in fla.

a marines wife whos husband killed women and children in haditha comes out and talks of him in not very nice terms

the war tapes is a documentary made from dv that was shot by war ventrans in iraq, that digital, viral, documentary work by citizen soilders and citizen journalists, away from professional ethics--its something ive mentioned on this blog for a couple of years, w. the rise of sites like you tube and veoth, added to the usual cheap cameras, memory sticks, and fast, regular internet access, means that not only are we seeing stills, but video, and well edited video as well--i havent seen this doc, but add it as fuel to the fire



saltz on koons from a year or so ago, one of the better examantions of the ambguity most of his fans feel about his paintings, though this image:

is as powerful as almost anything else.

notes on anthology

compiled in ny
the idea of eccentricity, curratorial power, etc comapred against the lack of feeling in meritt and the overwhelming feeling in smith
smith/meritt as bricoulers
history?
(cf bluegrass, the bluegrass foundation puts its creation into 1600, arguement can (?) be made for the sui genersis creation of it by monroe in 45?)
wanna play the harry smith alan lomax wlg game?

qoutes:
So we needn't believe The Anthology of American Folk Music represents the "real" folk, much less the "real" America. It's one compelling and engrossing version of those chimeras--profoundly influential rather than the Rosetta stone. It would appear, after all, that the strains of '60s rock forged by Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman, and the Nuggets collective have their proximate sources in traditions peripheral to these at best. Xgau on his website.

In its it time it wrested the idea of folk from ideolouges and ethnomuscaloigists, by imagining a commerical music of everyday pleasure and alienation, which might have been concieved to merge with a rock and roll that didnt yet exist... xgau, consumer guide 90s, 13


A powerful catylst that contributed to the stimulation of interest in hillbilly folk music among urban folk fans was the anthology...
country music usa bill c malone 533

The anthology reissue project though a huge critical success in high boregoios media, and a big seller by folkways standards, did not cross over into mainstream popular culture because the historical recordings on the Anthology were too obscure, weird, and low fiedilty to be marketable as popular commerical music and because ...the boxed set was quite expensive...
Country Music Goes to War, edited by Charles K Wolfe, James E Akenson, 177

American Music still retained some of its regional qaulties, evident in the days before the phonograph, radio, and moving pictures had tended to intergerate local types (Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life,Geoffrey O'Brien
,viii)

From the website Biblical Child Training

DAve an anarchist, and anthropologist, fucking genius, he just got fired from yale for the latter, here he is on charlie rose, and the last bit is the most worthwhile i think.

(this and teh failure to hire juan cole, and d michael quinn, to use three radically seperate examples, suggest the incipent conserativism of the univeristy context i think--the right believes that the academy is filled with the radical left, but that was 40 years ago, and ony some compoenets of the radical left, academia has always had some tentecales in the halls of power, and now under threat, is purging any of the more batshit ends--the idea that you can get hired to teach, and live there to incapacity is not going to happen any more.)

hanging out with gerard, jason, jerome, et. al i realised that one of the things i like most of it, is that i dont have to be cool, or hip, or with it...i can be earnest and cheesy, and not worry about my status as an ironist or as a bitter son of a bitch.

thinking about jerome, who is about to become a benedictine, and the church, i still feel a call towards the priesthood, or some kind of preisthood, a calling towards the vocation, but talking to ray about this earlier today, we came to the odd conclusion that if god gives a vocational calling She in her infinite mercy will actually provide a way to go ahead and do it, since there isnt an option for maintaining that vocational call and being a catholic, it might mean that She wants me somewhere else. im slowly coming towards this realazation.

we also determined that staying in the church was a social/pychological equivlent to opus deis circe and flail, and so i really have no room to stand on...

which i guess makes me a serial monogomsit instead of a church tourist

fiction (33 in june!, 19 in 6 months, fuck im never gonna get this done!!)

33 Delillo's White Noise

The writing was amazing, he has this great way of anthropolically distancing expereinces that i thot could never be strange again, and hes funny. its more of that suburban apoclyptica, and so it starts like a parody of updike at his most collegiate, and ends in this really odd, tight, exploration of what happens after the great noise comes. it took me months to finish, off and on, it was ardous and difficult, in fact his prose was so rich that i sort of skimmed the plot, i had no idea what was going on for most of it, and though i went to the end, things i was expecting didnt happen, most likely due to my poor reading skills.

the thing i like best from them, of course, is that they are in the cusp of people learning how to paint, but not quite knowing how...thats impt, i think not because the painting afterwards was better (some of it was, some of it wasnt) but that it took us 400 years to lean how to stop painting like this, or more accurately, to value those who painted away from this...

so the small pink houses meant to be far away, or the undulating blueblack waves, or the claustrophobia of the waves, or the almost succeding but techincally failing at forced perspective, and the early paintings seems so different (more naive, thats the wrong word, because how well they fuck with how we think and how we look, how much they force us away from simple moral narratives and into something stranger, but "less well" painted) then the seinna paintings, you know that he put all of his knowledge, all of his expereince, into the love of the catherine work, and they fray towards the edges...compare how for example fra angelico frames dozens of angels in 1480, to how giatto did it in 60 years earlier and de paolo working in between...

there is something about this work, even on the web, that haunts me and i think its that space where i ask, what happened if people didnt progress past this...we wouldnt have had carvarggio but we could surrive 500 years of french painting

(maybe i like early flemish painting because its flatter--and the pure flatness of clare, esp, didnt see any body come even close till olympia--that was the triump of manets painting, was the belief that flat, surface painting, w/o any attempts towards realism or naturalism was more emotionally pure then anything else...its why olympia works better then lets say renoir, but it doesnt explain why urbino works as well as olympia, how manet didnt trump titian...)

Some More:


St Clare Calms the Seas


St John in the Wilderness


Portrait of Catherine of Sienna


St Stephen Suckled by Wolf

(there is a great one of st clare and the wolf, where the grid of the city goes into hars mountains, and the catherine there looks like a madonna, and i love the odd blockiness of the landscapes, in these works, and their obv pagan upbringings--he seems looser, weirder, less contained, and more haunting then his brethen.)

More Seinna Paitnings by the same artist



(look where she is looking, and look at the monk, though she may not be able to read or write (she could, there is work in her hand extant) it doenst matter, the connection to christ is direct, and the man is just an emissary, there is something to be said about mystics having a direct line to christ, but no admin/direct work (ie handling a parish) (this might not be true), its an illustration of that, in a round about way--its not as weird as the first one, and the use of visual space is pretty standard, and the gold is a little gaudy, it doesnt have the tension of the houses and churches in the first one, but the straight eye line b/w seinna and jesus and how it works a triange almost ignroing the monk is interesting) *the heads are isolces)



holy gang bang, seinna as bridegroom of christ (romantic/sexual implicaitons of he has my art came when?) mary as reverse of seinna, the black an white suggest that they are of the same person, its giatto, or angelico, etc i dont really like this one, i wonder who is the front peice of the triptych, there isnt a clear narrative here is there?

also it was painted just before or just after catherines cannonazation in 1460, and it was part of a tritech, and catherine dying of some kind of lung infection, after living with plauge victims--look at where the heart is flying, its almost like shes puking up blood, blood thats staining the front of her suplice (is that the word?)

its a fantastic painting!

actually the best thing about the painting is its provenece, staying for 1400 years in the same northern italian hospital since the 15th century, when hospitals were way stations for pilgrims, and places to die (hostel, hospice, hospital, hotel)...but it kept being moved out further and further, from the chapel, to the wards, to the cemetery, as it became out of favour, until it was sold to a wealthy american in the early 20th century, and then lived in this upper east side townhouse for the century, husband to wife, until she died just before the milenum...where it got donated to our equivlent of an artistic mausaleum.

Jesus and Catherine of Seinna Exchanging Hearts b/w 1417 and 1482 Giovanni di Paolo

one of the things i like best about some devtional art, is the literalism of it, give yr heart to jesus means ripping it out of yr chest (the colour is amazing, that spot of red in admist the white and black, and the idea of being good enough, perfect enough, to know the heart of christ enough that he exchanges it with you, the corperality, the physicality of christ, has an intensity unmatched.

this is the best example ive seen of it...

Jenny Holzer, From the Surrival SEries, 198?

I have equivalent genre distaste for almost all heavy metal (hip hop's culture-mirror equivalent), pastiche production pop music like Brintey Spears, Beyonce, Avril Lavigne et al, the REM-U2-Radiohead axis of millionaire dabbling, trash auteurs like Outkast, Beck and the Beastie Boys, teenager fake punk, and melismatic divas like Celine Dion. This is less in service of elitism than in making it possible for me to walk directly to the part of the record store where the good records are. I know what kinds of music speak to me the least, so I don't spend my energy combing through them looking for exceptions.
Steve Albini

Berliners are divided when it comes to preserving Communist-era buildings.

Many say they are architectural aberrations and scars of a regrettable past, while a sizable minority — many of them younger architects, artists and designers — argue that the 60's and 70's buildings have a gawky, historically particular beauty. For more than a decade a citywide debate raged over the fate of the boxy, copper-colored-glass 1976 Palace of the Republic, which served as the East German parliament building. Preservationists ultimately lost that battle and the building is being razed to make way for a replica of the Stadtschloss, a Baroque castle demolished by the East German government in 1950.

From this story: from a story in the nyt home section

Other Things:



Original Concept Art, Post Cereals, 1960s

more
stories about fake news being planted by the us government both nationally and internationally.

a flickr photo set of modifed trucks for civilian contractors in iraq, lots of pick up trucks with extra guns

laurakipnis,
the amazing femminist and writer, has a new book in nov. reading her bound and gagged, and against love are the most impt works on gender politics in the last decade, she has a new one in novemeber.

rafael plowmen makes a collage a day, like all american, happy, and low key schwitters...really strong, and cheap.

vvork is a photo blog of nupopart, etc. fantastic, fun, theortically difficult work, just photos no words.


jackie bouvier, 1959

Slim Arons is a really interesting case in the rise and fall of reputations, he made his career with a couple of coffee table books from the 70s, of parties and estates of the ruling american classes, often in miami, palm beach, and the like. the aspirational tendecy of the work, and the casual composition, made him popular in work like harpers bazaar for about 5 years, after the end of Studio 54, and before the hard edges of 80s capitalism. A number of professional nostaglists revived him in the late 90s, his work being an example of the anti avant garde. he was one of the few examples of ease, in both senses of the world, of ease in terms of money and ease in terms of composition. when one wanted the snapshoot look, but also wanted jackie o or cz guest instead of heroin addicts. the other thing was the colour, if you look at the other photo workers who emerged in the 70s, were washed out, ugly, or vulgar. slim arons was a master of light, bright, free, and handsome. the emergence of him in the late 90s, and the selling of his two books in the secondary market, before they were reissued then, is a narrative of class and taste, and i dont think its been written about in that sense. he died this weekend at the age of 89.

here is a collection of about a dozen of his photos

here here is an obit

here is a really excellent one from the la times

(i remember before his books a place in the sun and once apon a time were reissued in 03/04 they went for a couple of hundred dollars, they can now be found for about 50)