i know obama will disappoint me, i know that he is not progessive, i know that he will not be as friendly to queer folks, to the poor, to artists, and to the working classes as i would like , i know that he will not be as forward about peace as he should be, i understand that he will be unable to live up to the weight of history, and i am profoundly nervous about the messianic energy that envelopes him, i know that it means something that he is internationalist, that he is young, that he knows the digital divide, and that he causes discomfort and xenophobia among the far right wing, and that he might signal the death of the american theocracy that has strangled the enpire for the last decade.

and pete seeger singing the fourth verse of this land is my land, still sends shivers up and down my spine.

two things for the resume

Profile: Anthony Easton is an innovative, solution based worker, who has been commended for his innovative problem solving strategies, his commitment to consensus based models, and his ability to problem solve and trouble shoot.

Objective: I am looking for a series of short term contracts or part time work, that allows me to utilize my various administrative and organizational talents and experience in a progressive work environment, in order to maintain a steadier work-life balance.


installation notes:

Because the project is partially about the proliferation of digital media, and the semiotics of a new image bank culture, the traditional Harbourfront collection of large prints in small series would be inappropriate for this concept. I am hoping to hang between 65 and 80 images in vernacualr frames, using a geometrically/mathemetically derived studio hanging system.

All of those are awful.

Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Verso

Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class Gender and SExuality in White Supremiscist Discourse,
Routledge

Analee Newitz, Matt Wray White Trash: Race and Class in America

Dorthoy Allison, Skin

Hudson and Inechihen, Taking it Lying Down:SExuality and Teenage Motherhood, 1991

Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty
James Broughton
Joan Jacobs Bromberg, the Body Project, An Intimate History of Amnerican Girls
Elizabeth Elliot Passion and Purity
Freud the Taboo of Virginity
Janice Irvine Talk about SEx
Judith Irvine: Sexualities: Identites, behaviours and society.


"the making and unmaking of whiteness"
sex informaiton and education council of the united states.

Dane Carr A question of Class: The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction.

Robert GG Henley

Aaron Fox, Real Country Music and Language in Working Class Culture, Appalachian Journal 25 (3) 1:6

ibid, southern cultures 1 (2): 144-66

All that Glitters, Country Music in America
The Minnesota Review 47 (Spring 1997) (61-77)

Lauren Carpenter: Gender and the MEaning and Expereince of Virginity Loss in the United STates (Gender and Society 16:3)

The ambigiouty of Having SEx Journal of Sex Research 38.2

Randall Kennedy, Nigger

qoutes:

From The Possum, The Hag and the Rhinestone Cowboy: Hard Country Music and the Burlesque of Abjection, Barbara Ching, from Whiteness A Critical Reader, NYU Press, 1992.

Along with creating a sorrowful rustic persona, these singers use the typically burlesuqe techinqies of imitation, allusion, and collusion to call attention to the fact that they are falling short of any number of cultural imperatives (118)

...the blues of white-trash tragedy--broken h omes, decript houses, blackout drinking, dead end jobs, and life sentences...
120

From Sexaulity in Adolsences Susan Moore and Doreen Rosenthal, Routledge, 1993

"Teenage Motherhood reamins overwhelmingly a working class affair" (qouting Hudson and Inechion), 147

From Virgins A culture History, Anke Berno, Granta Books.

Shame and the threat of ostracisim, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young womens sexual behaviour, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merley personal. (139) discusing the 16th Century text Instruction of a Christian Woman, by Juan Vies

In the 19th Century, this anxiety also extended to working class women, esp those who worked in the factories...145

This call for a return to an idealised childhood purity, made by an adult woman in the name of feamle enmpowerment seems to be oddly troubling, 195 (re: Wendy Shalit)

The idea...(that) what it means to be an invidiudal has become inextricablly linked from sexual identity (169)

dinner:

lisa, peter, leo, d, ray, pat, colleen, jackyn, shelley, laura, chris, chris, nadia, lon (sp), graham!, erik, alan,

side car, nicoise salad with ahi tuna, steak frites, and cheese plate, flowering tea, strawbery caracha, badass mojito, and picaso sour.

love

Ten Artists I Love That Clement Greenberg Loved:

1. Helen Frankenthaler
2. Anne Truitt
   
3. Kenneth Noland
4. De Kooning
   
5. Lee Krasner
6. Clifford Still
7. Morris Louis
   
8. Ray Mead
   
9. Hepworth
   
10. Jack Bush
    

Ten Artists I Love that Clement Greenberg Hated:

1. Agnes Martin
2. Donald Judd
3. Andy Warhol
4. Jasper Johns
   
5. Rauschenberg
6. Cy Twombly
7. Stephen Shore
   
8. Lewis Baltz
9. Faith Rhingold
   
10. David Wojoncawoiz
    

Carrie Underwood's "Just a Dream" was domestic melodrama at its redneck best, a Douglas Sirk mini-epic, with that heartbreaking voice that moves somewhere between singing and talking, that skates on the edge of total collapse. The one line takeaway "a pregnant war widow at 18," says more about the murderous and particularity inept American foreign policy than all of Nashville in the last eight years, and I am glad that someone as mainstream as Underwood is finally speaking angrily about such senseless loss. —Anthony Easton

one comment, nashville scene, not bad.

100 skills i have

1. synthesing information from disparate sources
   
2. internalizing contradatictions
   
3. constructing narratives from a wide variety of sources
   
4. maintaining diversity
   
5. finding historical precedents
   
6. shocking out of complacency
   
7. finding patterns in other peoples works, patterns they have not seen
   
8. finding the linguistic and substructural underpinnings of quotidian existence.
   
9. pattern recognition
10. visual skills
    
11. pointing out injustice and hypocrisy
    
12. self direction
    
13. working long and hard
14. general, misasmic passion
    
15. using large words in their proper context
    
16. colour matching
    
17. close reading using a variety of formal systems
    
18. deconstructing
    
19. using the LoC system
    
20. using the dewey decimal system
    
21. knowing how to retrieve information from non-standard sources
    
22. a variety of archival sources including universities, newspaper morgues, family history centres, and others
    
23. doing a personal interview
    
24. knowing how to find info in perodicals on paper, and on line, including the deep web, such as jstor or project muse.
    
25. conducting formal personal interviews
    
26. knowing who the proper resource person is in any situation
    
27. knowing how to go up the ladder
28. knowing how to use LaTex, the academic system
29. knowing how to use a semi colon
30. not taking no for an answer
    
31. knowing how to construct a phone tree
32. knowing how to do emts, online transactions, credit cards over the phone, and the like
    
33. knowing how to change the film in a canon a-70
    
34. knowing how to change the polaroid in a X70, 600, joycamera, and others.
    
35. knowing how to make a cyanotype
36. a basic knowledge of archival needs for paintings, works on paper, and photography
    
37. knowing how to castrate a bull
38. knowing how to birth a calf
39. knowing how to judge a bull ride
    
40. knowing most of the judging criteria for major rodeo events
41. knowing how to place contempary country music into it's proper historical context
42. knowing the uses and abuses of copyright, and the varities of creative commons liscenses.
    
43. an intimate knowledge of most of the liturgical systems of western christianity
44. knowing how to use drop io
    
45. knowing how to use word press, and blogger, and other blogging software
    
46. encouraging and fostering mentored relationships
    
47. point and shoot photos
    
48. list making
49. a general instinctual understanding of taxonomic systems
    
50. how to create a media contact list, and go thru it in a systematic way
    
51. meet deadlines
    
52. write basic grants
    
53. write artist statements
    
54. write essays for the web
55. write first person essays for newspapers
    
56. write academic papers for publication
    
57. write long form magazine peices
58. format a paper with biblography in APA, Chicago, and MLA styles
    
59. crop and correct colour in digital photos using digikam and iphoto
    
60. flickr (i am flickr master)
    
61. use google mail, google documents, google calendar, picasa, google book search, and google video, in all of their forms, and find information on the web quickly and thoroughly
    
62. identify mid century modernist buildings, fashion, furniture, and design
63. speak in public
    
64. internalize art history
65. trouble shoot a problem
    
66. i am good at finding everything that is wrong, worst case scenrioing something, knowing what the fatal flaw is in people and orginazations plans are
    
67. analyse thick theoritcal texts
    
68. network, at least when it comes to the art and the writing.
    
69. curate (ie finding work, following up on where work went, developing a variety of frameworks to see the work)
    
70. ace a media interview, performing
    
71. answering phones, using multi phone systems
    
72. professional protocal on phones
    
73. gaining access using non traditional credentials
    
74. conducting meetings using robert's rules of order
    
75. conducting meetings using non eurocentric/phallocentric consensus modelling
    
76. finding a wide and diverse collection of people to sit on boards
    
77. making sure that everyone is heard on boards
    
78. playing devil's advocate, making sure that everyone's voice is absorbed
79. big sky/big picture thinking
80. telling interesting anecdotes, and using those anecdotes to illustrate larger points
    
81. presentations
    
82. pretending to be interested in other people's children
    
83. Interac
84. Credit Cards (non phone/non internet)
85. Push A Mop/Broom
86. WHIMIS
87. Prompt
88. Can naviagate a transit system (have done so for New York, London, Toronto, San Fransisco, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver)
89. Readily find my way around immediately in strange cities and towns
    
90. know which kinds of stem ware goes with which beverages
    
91. know which kinds of flatware goes with which dishes
    
92. know how to mix the basic cocktails
    
93. know which wines go with which meals
    
94. can stock and track inventory
    
95. loss prevention training
    
96. innovate a broad variety of funding sources
    
97. can craft and analyse misison statements
    
98. can craft and alayse bylaws, making sure they correspond to official government guidlines
    
99. can write formal correspondance, both personally and professionally
    
100. large and effective vocab
101. fellatio
     

job club realization one:

all of the networking, the negotating, the asking, the not taking no skills i have at the arts, and i am good at the arts, do not transfer into money making enterprises, and i do not know how to make that happen, not only do i not know how to make that happen, i am convinced that the people who run this program do not know how to make this happen.

realization two:

my terror at these kind of beurocratic instituations suggests a general hostility towards people, and my discomfort at the process overlaps with a hostility with people, in social events, my usual gossippy, amusingly bitchy, geniunely warm tendencies fall apart in these kind of places, i think mostly because there is the assumption that one will immediately befriend everyone the first day---or perhaps it is the usual tension that i have in the liminal space between friend and contact.


realization three

i should not think of these things as a waste of time, but i do, because they intercede what i consider my real work (ie instead of this program, i would rather be researching the new orleans paper, sending emails about the nafl project, writing the letter of commendaiton to the haida manga artist, working through the housing list, and working on inital contact with the harbourfront show--but all of those are long shot gambles, that in my expereince cost alot more then they actually pay--and i still need to pay rent, etc) (but i also need a job that lets me for example, go to new orleans for 4 days in april, or poughkepise for a week in july)

realization four.
i would feel more comfortable with contract work.

From Untitled Album

Actual Graphic from Focus on the Family

maegan hill has four collections of photos on her site, mounds, mounds ii, rocks, and hedges. they are all excellent.

russia ends jury trials against enemies of the state, which is defined so loosely, that it could be anyone who democratically protests against putin and company.

while i like the EU i have no idea how it will maintain its structural integrity, this weeks example being Klaus, the czech PM who is now the rotating leader, and who is a fairly far right and is an avowed Euro Skeptic, though one wonders how much damage he can do in 6 months.

venture brothers do hard candy xmas, which is genius.

160 titles of b movies from the 40s to 80s.

sam sparro black and gold, anglo langorous disco, beautiful work.

From Untitled Album

i have no idea the context of this photo.

solar powered monkey


Guy Forsyth sings If I had Possesion over Judgement DAy, as part of a pretty awesome Asylum STreet Spankers concert

lynn yeager the village voice fashion columinist who wrote adroitly about the intersections of personae, class, money, the city, and clothes, never ignoring the political, has been fired by the VV

enema bags remade as art history classics. and a high fashion calendar from a german plumbing manufactuer.

From Untitled Album

New Washroom by Shingoro Ben, outside Kyoto

i really like chris bucks witty and sort of strange celeb photos

a bookshelf blog.

i have a much less of a problem with the states getting a trillion bucks from the federal government then i do AIG or GM.

the gaurdian goes to west virginia and interviews lynndie england, who comes across as both pyschopathic white trash and genuinely too stupid to have any idea what is going on, the story is a perfect encapsulation of Arendt's ideas of the banality of evil.

From Untitled Album

Which is the signifer, and which is the signifed?

70 Polaroids by Warhol, via Paul KAsmin--how do they keep them so crisp, and jesus do i love the colours of late 70s polaroids---interesting too, the intersection between his photos for photo sake, and his photos as studies for prints and paintings, plus his obsession with new techonlogies.

hunter thompson motivational posters.

greg owen was shot while handcuffed, and prone, by BART cops in Oakland. Here is local news reports using cell phones cameras.

6 photos of old pittsburgh photos, my favourite being the jefferson court.


6 minutes from Los Anglese Plays ITself, about modernism, LA, and how its iconic new buildings seem to be used by villians (does anyone have a torrent of this?)

the worlds sexiest supermarket

Palin manipulated her wife's husband

Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert John Divos, 1993-2001, charming and sweet LA photo conceptualism.

a visual history of moore's law

photos of the abandoned set of the wire

From Untitled Album

Aussie Cowboy, in the new issue of Tetu, the french fashion journal.

bob barr makes the liberterian arguement against DOMA

25 films on the 2008 national film perservation board list, including the killers, terminator, and 1950s home videos of disneyland.

Betty Parsons who died last week, spent four decades supporting new music, this list of who her grants helped is amazing, including but limited to Adams operas Nixon in China and the DEath of Kinghoefer, Harrison Bristwistle's piano concerto Antiphonies, an annual grant from 1965 until death to pay for John Cage's living expenses, annual grants from Merce Cunningham from 1988 to the present, grants for living to Harry PArth from 1964-1974, Annual grants to Steve Reich from 1980 onward plus money to help him record and compose Tehilim, Music for 18 Musicians and others, Morton Feldman's peice in memory of John CAge, Help to record early Glass recordings in the 70s,and major work by Terry Riley, Virgil Thomson, Le Monte Yonge, and dozens of others.

birthday gift idea another (rodeo and freud, hott)

From Untitled Album

Tom Gaugh is a genius.

48 beer matts

beautiful, incredibly comprhensive blog about monsters.

living up with star wars a collection of photos of children from the late 70s and early 80s interacting with star wars, say really interesting things about folk translations of massively popular high media texts.

From Untitled Album

i'm a fag, and i'm crazy, and im not paticuallry good at hiding either.

me to a job consuller when asked what my cheif problems finding or keeping employment

monday, 4, 1004 robards
friday, 6?, north york harvest

good news

new orleans is paid for.

bad news
i have to move

I continue my obsession with BRomance.

watching the documentary Weather Underground, i keep being surprised that the Underground continued to have this middle class belief that the police would obey the rule of law, even when they were violently opposing it.

that and they got 20k to break leary out of prision. (plus their comminques are hysterical, in the most literal sense)

. i went in to this program at 9, which means i got up at 7:30, after having nightmares, and waking up and being unable to sleep for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, and i missed the first street car, so i was 15 minutes late, and i got to the place late, which made me panic, and then i realised i was scheduled for thursday instead, which means i have four days where i am doing nothing, but they let me fill out the paper work--and its filled with the same questions i have no idea how to answer--like tell me about yourself, or what do we need to know to help you, or what do you want to do with your life, or all of that shit, and i mean, i have no idea, how they can help

i am wearing socks and uncomfortable shoes, and i am horribly nervous

From the “Quickies” section of the “Joy of Sex.” “If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on ‘The Joy of Sex,’ you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations,” Levy writes. Comfort and his mistress, Jane Henderson, submitted dozens of Polaroids along with the manuscript. “The artists Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss were charged with transforming those photographs into pencil drawings, although the couple they depicted looked nothing like Comfort and Henderson.”

From this weeks nyer

a) i would kill to see those polaroids.
b) i liked the mangey, hippie look of the 70s illustrations

listen to this and then go find the lacey dalton version.

1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?
Milk, My Architecht: A Son'S Journey

2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice?
I am fond of the horror movies, silent night, deadly knight or black xmas...is that naughty?

3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge?
Mercedes McCambridge, for her black clad villian in Ray's Johnny Guitar, plus the voice of Satan.

4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks
Lara Flynn Boyle, who did a string of sexually complicated heroines in the 90s and then sadly lost it, and this was an almost perfect noir performance.

5) It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films, Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time. Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum, name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion.

I keep wondering if films like Ishtar or Death to Smoochy, which were marketed in a way that undersold their considerable charms, and were odd enough that they needed to be explained, would do well not nessc. with remakes, but reissues, sort of like Criterion but on the big screen. I also wonder what would happen if you gave someone like Harmony Kormine or some of the mumble core fellows 20 millon dollars and told them to remake Waterworld or Superman:Returns, or even Titanic?

6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.

As a politican: Bamboozled (because loose limbed, burlesque that is so soaked with bile is a hard balance, and it was so meta it hurt). As a film maker, the remarkably tight, beautifully acted Inside Man, with Jodie Foster playing someone new, strong, and dislikeable.

7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?
The Scott Brady who was in an episode of the littlest hobo? Then yes!

8) Are most movies too long?
Most movies spend too long explaining, and too little time working out emotions, and realtionships--as a general rule, they are badly paced (Role Models is a good example of in/out with lots of good actors scene, so is Sarah Marshall)

9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.
Helen McCroy, who made the easily parodied, easily mocked Cherie Blair, into a modern, open, moral counterpoint to the cold and formal Frears.

10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown.
Godzilla vs the Cloverfield Monster but in North Dakota.

11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?
Sheree North. (for the episode while she was the hooker with Archie Bunker and for the weird, little seen, Schumacher riff on Altman Amatuer Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill)

12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?
If I was wrong, if people I trust tell me I am wrong, If what I feel is overwhelming what I think, if my dick or my heart gets in the way, if i am hungry or distracted while watching it, if i leave the film ambigiously

13) Favorite road movie.
true romance/crossroads

14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture.
i haven't seen enough.

15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies?
my mother, who made me talk about things when i left the cinema, my friend pat, who kept arguing about the movies with me, the art critic david hickey, who taught me to trust my love of pop trash and to treat pop trash as significant, as worthy of writing about, the english critic Mark Sinker who told me that academic criticisms were worthy of being in the same places as quatidian experiences, and David Thomson, because his reference books are so opinatned.

16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXrEptVgUnc&eurl=http://movieblog.ugo.com/index.php/movieblog/more/best_credits_sequences_the_taking_of_pehlam_one_two_three/ (font shot!)



17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?
John Agar, for working from the 40s, to 2002.

18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.

I am not sure that Goddard was in the buisness of making movies, as much as he was in the business of making essays...and i always distrust people who refuse to have catholic (small c) tastes---why can we not enjoy both alphaville and logan's run? (same themes, same aesthetics)

19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie.
silence of the lambs

20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair?
Tatum O'Neal--because of her unhinged, incenstous, drunken falling apart, in the last few years of rescue me, something that Blair never seemed to be able to do (as teenagers, O'Neal struck me as more of control of her talent)

21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)
How unresolved Zodiac was, how the whole movie was about finding a killer, about obsessional knowing for two decades and three charchaters, and how that knowing was impossible.

22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film.
i don;t have one

23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.
Role Models

24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson?
Robby Benson for his voice work as the Beast.

25) Favorite movie about journalism.
Zodiac

26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?
Deep Throat Catherinne McKinnon, Andrew Sarris, Susie Bright, Larry Clarke, Phyllis Schafler, Al Goldstein, and Caitlin Flannagan.

27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
NA

28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith?
Kurtwood Smith

29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.
It will bore me.

30) Your hope for the movies in 2009.
Actually Gays and Lesbians fucking on Screen.

31) What’s your top 10 of 2008? (If you have a blog and have your list posted, please feel free to leave a link to the post.)
1) Role Models
It was charming, and low key, and shaggy, and v. funny, and tender.
2) Wall E
the aestheics, the arguements against copyright, and finally feeling something for robots
3) Cloverfield
how do we make movies with DV? How do we create a movie about terror in new york, after real terror exists? How do 20 year olds process and disemaite information?
4) The Strangers
formally brilliant.
5) Death Race
joan allen, saying cocksucker.
6) Burn After Reading
a perfect little coen bros. confection.
7) Speed Racer
one of the ways to solve the uncanny valley, is to make things hyperreal, made me think the most about how movies are made in this post green screen era.
8) W
profoundly flawed, with wildly inapproite shifts of tone, but for james cromwell as papa and brolin's pitch perfect performance.
9) Paranoid PArk
Van Sant should only be allowed 1 million dollars to make a movie, any more then that, and he fails.
10) My Winnipeg
guy maddin pyschogeographically deconstructs what it means to be canadian.

BONUS QUESTION (to be answered after December 25):

32) What was your favorite movie-related Christmas gift that you received this year?
I received no movie releated gifts

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