1. Fuse Follow Up
2. Table Follow Up

Other Things:

1. Lunch with Joe
2. Nina to meet Mark
3. Lunch with Aaron
4. Calgary Scheduling with Wil,
5. Call Jason vis a vis SJSA
6. Geez pitch (or Xtra) to the WInnipeg Nuptial
7. Talk to the dude in Applachia about missed deadline and SF
8. if SF is still a go
9. Passport
10. buy ticket
11. book hotel
12. join society
13. rewrite the kenny peice
14. figure out tech for it.

things to do in feburary.

talk to:

1. Talk to Ted (Close idea, Erotica update, Frames, Film Screen, Salon, Photos)
2. Talk to Blair (Erotica idea)
3. Talk to Elaine (Erotica Idea, Funding, and Placement)
4. Talk to Steph (Erotica)
5. Stephen (about collages)
6. Rachels Contact about the Boxes
7. Heather at Toronto Free Gallery about the Grid Show
8. Mercer Union about the Grid show
9. Rosedale, Knox Spadina Pres. Bloor Street United, Canadian Bible Society, Pres National ARchives
10. Mandolin Books and Travel Alberta
11. Rest of the Salon Folks
12. Ashley
13. Ann (Timelines, Cheque)
14. Corb Lund

Install/Deinstall/Prints Made/Shipping/Etc:

Ford Show:

1. Find Press
2. Write Thank You Note
3. Scan Collages
4. Collate Addresses
5. Mail work to Artists
6. Follow up on Catalog
7. Follow up on that one sale.

Ann:

1. 10 Prints Made, Signed, and Numbered
2. Box, etc made

Sugar Bowl:

1. Shoot Images from 181
2. Print images, in the same size and style that you made ted's images or talk to ted about what he wants to do.
3. Install on the 20th
4. Call Press about the show

Mandolin:

1. Mylar:
2. If no mylar, then mirrored frames
3. drop off contract
4. talk to her travel alberta dude.

Green Portfolios

1. Call Type
2. Follow Up with Ballenford Books

Curatorial Tasks:

1. Confirm last three Grid Items
2. Send Package to Galleries outlined in Email to Lorna
3. Find Space for the Erotica show
4. grant seeking for placement and the like

Writing:

1. Long Camp Essay
2. Blog Entry about Art in Toronto
3. Cave 17 Entries on First Nation, Chuck Close, Abstract (cut and edit), Babara Rose, and Death of Photog Shows
4. Cat Power, Dwight and Buck Reviews
5. Alberta Vues
6. Edit Poems

Exposure:

1. Meeting on Feb 8th (confirm date)
2. Visioning Meeting, so prepare brief statements on western night and film sieres to do.

Email:

1. Photos to Lorna
2. Thanks to David
3. See/Vue about the Hidden Edmonton Column Idea

Happy About My Plate of Meat

Happy About My Plate of Meat
Originally uploaded by PinkMoose

Toronto Font Shots

These photographs of signs are an attempt to listen to the city in all
of her moods. Literally, they talk about the patterns of commerce,
transportation, population, and politics, the neighborhoods that rise
and fall, the immigrant communities that grow and move. Moving from
City Center to its outer boroughs, I take photos of text that I find
intriguing.

Sometimes the font is interesting because of its decay, or its
homemade crude charm, and sometimes it is interesting for its
commercial power, and the design element is an important aspect of
this project. I think that signage is the place where those two meet.
But it is not only aesthetic.

When Rem Koolhas' new library was opened in Seattle, information
workers had to put up Bristol board to show valuable information,
including location of washrooms, directions outside, and to the
checkouts. Koolhas' masterpiece was a failure because he didn't get
fonts. I think that the mark of a living city then, is that
understanding. Toronto gets it, organically flowing through its
citizens. (Think of it as that lurid and lovely two page spread of
neon in Scott Brown/Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas, except that is
now mostly a graveyard, and the fonts of Toronto are birds in a
thicket.)

The five here are intended to mark a bit of a history, and they are
100 years old, so it is not only a question of aesthetics or
information flow. Combining the history of a city with its aesthetic
qualities strikes me as a project of psycho-geographic desire that an
architectural bookstore might be intrigued by.

Installation Notes:
I want to paper the foyer with 4x7 drug store prints of signs,
providing a visual reference to the overwhelming number of signs and
signals that one get from living in a city on a daily basis. By making
them appear nicely in rows, there is also an attempt towards making a
visual taxonomy.

Art often feeds on that which is passing away, and in doing so, assits its passage. In Britian, with its precipate deindustraliaztion , much of tradtional working class culture has now aquired a nostaligc patina, celebrated in the cliches of a film like The Full Monty, in which social collpase is recast as what is meant to be bitter-sweet comedy. Similary in Sensation, there were curse kokes, kebabs, tabloid spreads, figments of pornography, confessional and lurid peices--in short artists trying hard to behave badly . The mere form, the shadow of working-class culutrre, is cleberated but only in the grosses and most cliched outlines (of course its silly for anyone to object, because this art is so knowing, so ironic.) The solidatry that those forms prodced and were produced by is forgotten, and the result has only the appeance of life. So this vampristic art draws life from its already anaemic subject. (233)

Pastoral , says Empson, can give expression to a critique of social injustice, at least in a limited way, since the exceuluded or those who have alittle of no stakje in society has less to risk by relatiing some hume truths about it. Now it has to be said that in Britian art thjat criticises social injustice has been thin on the ground for some years...but nevertheless contrempary pastoral art has conrained a critrique of the way things are, not so much in the wider society, as in the art world. The snobishness, cant and false high seriousness of the art world is at least implicitly criticised by an art that uses the form of high art to relay obsecnties, crudities and the detrius of modern urban life . Such art makred a sharp rejewction of hiugh theory, of the elite and autonomous concerns of art, and of the comventional pities of these artsits beloved byt he art establishment..( 252-3)

High Art Lite, Julian Stallabrass, Verso, 199.

brutalist architechture pool on flickr.

i really want this bearded man poster by keith shore, his combo of macho boys and twee aesthetic has a queer charm

a man has a bet where he has to spend a month at the bellagio.

21 condom wrappers including the amazingly named devils skin.

fantastic scrabble qoutes from the 50s onwards.

This is her breakdown record, like Judy at Carnegie Hall, like Lou Reed with Berlin, like Bowie during Low . . . the only problem with the analogy is that this one is so dissociative, while they were hyper-aware—her voice is lost perilously in noise, production effects, and chaos. There is a too-easy metaphor there, and when you reach for it, your heart breaks with the brittleness of it.

Anthony Easton
Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, CANADA

Village Voice, Pazz and Jop, 2007

Paragons
New Abstractions From the Albright Knox

i have kept an eye on the Knox for a while because their interests in abstraction, and Edmonton’s have a close history, in fact their weather, their industrial core, their general isolation, and even in a sort of poetic way, their relationship to major centers of culture, make Buffalo fairly close to home. (ie New York vs Upstate, Edmonton vs Vancouver).

Their aesthetic and their relationship to modernism all have a distinct parallel. They both took to modernism very early, and left it very late. Non representational abstraction was popular in both capitals long after it became personae non grata elsewhere. Greenberg was visiting Buffalo and Edmonton long into the 70s, where his influence had waned elsewhere. They even collected the same work including Noland, Olitski and Poons.

Now with a recent upswing in interest in abstract forms (ie the 2006 show at the AGO about Colourfield, the Truitt and Louis Retrospectives in Washington, Amy Sillman on the cover of Art Forum, and all along the Queen Street Strip dozens of painters working thru colour and form just like they used to, I wanted to see what was new about it vis a vis the Albright Knox, Edmonton has failed to keep with abstraction, they have not collected widely or deeply the new work that are near them, even with the oil money flowing in and a new building that will cost in the tens of millions. If this slight show, full of artists who are all basically post Warhol, tells us so much both about where non representational art is heading and where it has been.

Whoever coordinates acquistions for Buffalo is wise, s/he knows what to buy, and who not to, which work fits in their history, and which work will explode the assumptions of that narrative. It is a show that does not destabilize as much as it re-taxonomizes, choosing people who are less famous, but who work well within the corpus of modernism. Before I talk about the work in question, there were some artists missing, and that might be budget. If it is, I look forward to a show next year with work by Polly Apfelbaum, Yek, Amy Silliman, Anne Appleby or Grant Hamilton, just to name the Americans.

What is in there, though, is often difficult, often brilliant, and absolutely gorgeous, with 15 works by 15 separate artists, all working through the edges of what formalism, and abstraction can mean, there is a history here, and a tenderness towards material, not so much a fetish towards materialism, as a long, loving seduction, a marriage that refuses to end. Quick run thru of the work in question:

David Baechlor. He wrote the defense of decorative and cosmetic, Chromophobia, a book that is one of my favourites, and a book that has deeply influenced what I thought about art in general, and my practice specifically. In one page he decimated the minimialist narrative of purity, talking about how Flavin’s use of white was not pure, and how his use of colour was explicit—how it pooled around the cold cement of gallery floors: “(Flavins) work was more often than not made in pools of intermingling coloured light : red blue green orange yellow and white” (Chromophobia 12) Here, he took Flavin’s colours and medium (fluorescent tubes in purple, yellow, orange, plus green) and used them in a highly localized context. Called The Spectrum of Hackney Road, the tubes are hidden under ready made dollies, the rough dun coloured wood hiding and reflecting the flourscents, the floor slick, like rain sodden ashplat, the only way that one can see the work is thru reflection, misdirection…like a flanuer moving around the city, like how broken glass used to be called Cockney Diamonds. The work is abstract because of this reflective, it is a highly concentrated, highly formalist, meta-work, about seeing, and colour and about living in cities.

Tim Bavington—huge painting, 11 feet long and more than 5 feet high, a stripe work, starting with greens, with a middle of pink on black, and ending with orange on orange, sort of like creamsicle on crush. He grew up in England, spent time in Vegas and lives now in Pasedena, and worked with Bridget Riley, so the work is a California, Western American Noland, but more narrative, more pop and less pure.

Andy Collins weak work, black lines intersecting a mild field of sage and cream, polite, and slick. A Dentists Office Mangold.

Karin Davie—Neo-op painter, with those loops of muddled colour, oranges, blacks, browns, and yellows. Choleric. The most interesting thing about the work in question ,and the thing that I wouldn’t have noticed unless I saw her work live (And I have seen her work in reproduction several times, is that the work is very explicitly messy, there are drips, trails of paint into other lines, awkard transitons in the top of the loops, places where the works have been painted again, radical changes in brush stroke---its not quite gestural, and I keep wondering looking at the painting that was shown here, if the work was sort of a working out of what it meant to be an op artist, and like their work, it functions much more cleanly as a repro then a painting, (cf Rileys paintings in the mid 60s, vs Rileys prints). I like that shock of the messy, of the unpure, and I think the painting in a way that makes one wonder if the reach has exceeded the grasp is a bug and not a feature. (That the work is titled Pushed, Pulled, Depleted and Duplicated #7 suggests that printers terminology is v. much in her mind)

Jim Ismerman

It wasn’t one on the floor, waiting to be rolled around like some kind of toy. V. much about his craft aesthetic, and about his reclaiming high and low, the weaving was tight, and the foam core underneath was invisible, it was well crafted, and crafted in such a way, that you knew that his concern was a sort of showing off, a way to indicate how good he was at the manual dexterity required to (hand) braid something that large, that seamlessly.

Jim Lambie

It’s a leak painting, and I like anything that explicitly makes fun of the drip process, or the automatic writing fetish that comes thru with so much gestural abstraction. 6 plastic shopping bags, nailed very low to the wall, almost touching the flour, with 6 v. small lines of paint leading to a puddle on the floor—a humble, witty work, not only about gestural abstraction, but also about the workaday markmaking that occurs when we move about, in the kitchen leaks for example. They are so low to the floor, because they are meant to be about where the bag would be if carried home---in the hanging then, it becomes performative, or at least becomes the working thru of performance. I also like the pun of low, hanging low on the wall, hanging low on the arm, low to the ground, low as in hi/lo populism—the performative and the abstract, attached to walking, was v. similar to the Baechlor, and it was a nice theoretical matching, which susggests that Lousi GRachos, the curator was doing his job.

Roxy Paine:

Made by a machine, so t he work is the building of the machine and not the painting in question, and I think that showing the machine in progress would have been a more interesting show then showing the after effects of the machine---what I said about drips and Lambie applies here—though the fact that it reminded me of Whipped Cream and Other Delights made up for something.

Sue Williams

The reason why I went to the show really, and I am glad I finally saw a work of hers. It was as naughty as I was expecting, and as polymorphus, how a leg moves to look like a ducks webbed foot, how a arm becomes a streak of red, and the like—but the thing that amazed me was how careful it was, I always thought her work would be much messier then that—it is all carefully, almost drawn, the mark making delicate, and highly sophisticated, so that there is no splatter, and for example the drying of paint is attached to the opening of a white space. The colours—teal, crimson, peach, salmon, lemon, almost clashed, and their was no attempt to lead the eye—it was a cacophony of competing forms—which worked, because the unprimed linen canvas (normally brown) was painted a thick, creamy white, before the figures went on—the tension b/w the colours, the lines, and the shapes only pushed farther the tension between representation and abstraction in her work.

ChanSchatz

Two Artists, one Japanese, one American, both born in 1968, painting on silk. The tonal similatiries between the silk and the paint, the slickness and sheen of one and the other, were incredible, that it contained almost 40 colours (including everything from dusty rose to scarlet, from aquamarine to emerald, from swimming pool aqua to navy plus black and white), shapes blossoming and falling apart, and large s paces where nothing was happening except the taut fabric, suggests a intertextual historical envisioning—I could see wyld style graffiti, murakami esque backgrounding, anime landscape, English garden textiles, Japanese paintings on linen, kimonos, vasserly op art and others. This was a painting I could have spent hours looking at—and with the sheen of the silk, the reflection of the acrylic, and the utter (super) flatness) a painting that was so slick to be impossible to reproduce.

Mariko Mori

Her work, when it does not feature her, is sort of formless SF kitsch.

Lisa Stefenelli

Red abstraction, built up, like a pyramid, with plenty of white space, using delicately placed, and sinuous lines—arabesque and Arabic, reminded me of the painting nad decoration schools relationship to Arabic calligraphy, and how the long awaited revival (at least by me) of their work and their people will come to fruition—Its good that younger artists are paying attention to this work.

Jessica Stockholder

Standard Cady Noland assemblage, unsure why people considered it abstract at all.

Joesph Maroni

Green on Green, lots of building up layers, lots of dropping, like a morris louis as a monochrome, the surface tension between the rising of various green tones, and the scuttling on the last third of the painting, indicated an excellent technical painter, and that he is working on board makes the work seem much more rigious for some reason—overjoyed that the work is modest, 4x3, and that he has not moved into the 20 foot giant paintings of doom, what works as small and intimate on this scale becomes a tedius disaster on a large one.

Rachel LEckowitz

Red bumps rise t o the middle of the canvas, almost like latex, obviously fleshly, and sexy/creepy in a david lynch parasites taking over the body kind of way—actually one of the few artists that reminded me of flesh, and the only artist whos work confused sculptural and painterly conventions. One of them is just the latex, the other has stripes, that look like a circus tent, or something worse—I was really unsettled at the power of them. Held their own, in a quiet way, against the poppysch overdose by chenshan.

It’s worth a trip to Scarberia, though you missed the shuttle bus, and really an excellent tiny sequal to their under looked, and historically important Extreme Abstraction show from 2005

i am sitting at the library, and next to me is a man with a shaved head wearing a full hoodie, sleeves down. i can still see four tattoos on his neck, including a giant cross, the number 13, and four aces.

Voters sense this truth. It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Take a look at a map of the state of Missouri. A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.” These equality centers were located on the outer fringes of St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. Every single one of these highly egalitarian areas of the state voted overwhelmingly Republican.

Meanwhile, the most unequal parts of Missouri, the cities and especially the city of St. Louis, voted heavily Democratic. Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money. (DAvid FRum, Comeback Conserativeism, p. 37)

six things to do before i leave home, in addition to the schedule

1) go to yyz
2) go to toronto free gallery (for the grid show)
3) arrange books, papers, and clothes
4) go to gallery 44 for lips and mirror question
5) contact jennifer and savi
6) reschedule richard

The best thing about this video, is how it subtly alludes to how lesbian rumours were used to tititalte and degrade MA, and how the erotic, lesbian spectacle of MA's life was attached to her idleness, her cash, and her tennous realtionship to her father, from the beginning to post WWI. Castle writes about it in The Aspirational Lesbian.

ndian Rice Pudding Recipe courtesy Alton Brown, 2004 Show: Good Eats Episode: Puddin' Head Blues

1 cup cooked long grain or basmati rice 1 cup whole milk 1/2 cup heavy cream 3/4 cup coconut milk 2 ounces sugar, approximately 1/4 cup 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom 1 1/2 ounces golden raisins, approximately 1/3 cup 1 1/2 ounces chopped unsalted pistachios, approximately 1/3 cupIn a large nonstick saute pan over medium heat, combine the cooked rice and milk. Heat until the mixture begins to boil. Decrease the heat to low and cook at a simmer until the mixture begins to thicken, stirring frequently, approximately 5 minutes. Increase the heat to medium, add the heavy cream, coconut milk, sugar, and cardamom and continue to cook until the mixture just begins to thicken again, approximately 5 to 10 minutes. Use a whisk to help prevent the cardamom from clumping. Once the mixture just begins to thicken, remove from the heat and stir in the raisins and pistachios. Transfer the mixture to individual serving dishes or a glass bowl and place plastic wra

t it took me a while to get over my obsession with paper, with making prints, with framing things in terms of paper...i kept thinking about this in realtion to a work by sally mckay. at first i loved it for the negative black space, for how it collapses to the middle, the punctum of the giraffes neck or how the lion stares out at the viewer.

there are other things, the mysticism that occurs when order is created, the similar visual obsessions that we share, including the peaceable kingdom, blake, s/f kitsch, and also how "real" (ie photographic) and the "fake" (ie drawn or painted).

but when i had lunch with her a couple of weeks ago, she told me that it did not come from scissors, i thot that it came from paper, and was scanned, but it came digitally, and has never been printed, so it was a combined reproduction of a set of reproductions, intended as a sketch, to be shown on the web, as a predecessor' for a larger installation work. but that one image has an added profundity, by the empheraml nature of the web, and also the kind of updating of the future that occurs here.

these tintypes of current cowboys have a overly literal romanticism, and a nostalgia for a time not quite done, and would so, even if it didn't feature a method used v. heavily in the same geographic regions 120 years befoer these images were taken. all of that seems obvious though, and there is something tender and haunted, in the death of the west kind of way, that is well done.

i like to read this sermon by King, because it seems by making him a martyr with his own saints day (literally in terms of the ECLC calendar) means we break away the difficult and angry parts of his seeking of justice. this is his work against vietnam, and by extension, the problems he had with the state.

12 street murals of ML:K jr, photos by Camille Jose Verago here is his site

can you not hug me when im looking at the victoria secrets models

pat

Rhonda Vincent




Dengue FEver
Denuge Fever

Poem Count 24

Fredrick Seidel Area Code 212

Elegant, Debauched and committed to a super refined pleasure that only old money can bring, reminds me in many ways of restoration poetry, with its tight structures and formalist questions girding tales of fucking, violence, and sedition.

frank qoutes me here

1. i will do the giant art i saw thing in the next couple of days.
2. the movie stars and the holy/beautiful stamps will be at art met soon. the movie stars is an edition of 10, and the holy/beautiful is a paired peice, so only one not mine. i will talk to her tomorrow about timing.
3. the lips peice is not going to be at bulger, and bulger will not rep me, but he did say (in a nice hand written note) that he will keep me in mind if he has anything where they would fit.

so good day

things to do before dropping off portfolio

1. edit, prune, and tighten CV
2. print off artist statements for lips and movie stars
3. edit artist statement for lips , make it clear that it isn't quite anti consumerist
   
4. find proper box for portfolio (thinking one of the purple ones from ivory)

i am really scared ab out this, he knows im coming, but he doesnt offer advice, and i am less confident that these are "real" photographs, the move to conceptual is a big one, esp since i realise that almost everyone i know who is famous and who has worked conceptually except maybe emin, knows how to draw first, the tiny work, the ephemeral work is easier (though i had a crisis of concious about the holy/beautiful peices today) because it can be thrown away and so i dont have to think of it as really work--i mean thats not all of why i do it, but a large chunk of my fear/distrust of the gallery system is i think a self esteem thing.

(i have this fantasy, about the holy/beautfiul work that it will be found and treasured, a fantasy that was crushed when i saw one on the ground, underfoot and soaked by rain...if you want to be a situationist, you have to commit to the idea that there will be nothing left of yr work--and if you are willing to commit to that idea, then maybe engaging in galleries and musuems is hypocritical, but then engaging in musuems and galleries is the only way one can get paid)

it also is the core of my hanging situation.

on a side note, it was kind of a meloncholy, low key day, i'm 27 and i feel like i am spinning my wheels, frittering my life way, playing lady who lunches as opposed to doing annything helpful...i feel decadent, and broke which is not a good combo.

monday ray/8 pm
tuesday sort out the rest of the work, move to ray
wednesday install in the morning, 4 pm tea, AGO
thursday d
friday anne, ROM
saturday zoo
sunday pres.simone, 1 pm
monday tom waugh at cinema ontario, grahan 5 pm
tuesday BMV Eglington 6 pm D
wednesday ray, work, 1 pm
thursday Dinner w. David 6 pm
fri 2-3 pm, rachel, ocad
sat the boys, rachel qsw, then work day with racehl
sunday
monday laura brekkie, consulate
tues
wednesday

1) go to yyz
2) go to toronto free gallery (for the grid show)
3) arrange books, papers, and clothes
4) go to gallery 44 for lips and mirror question
5) contact jennifer and savi
6) reschedule richard
still to sort out: savi, ,, shara, jennifer, whippersnapper, gallery 44, type portfolio drop off

toronto is good. i saw some art, i had some meals, i went to a couple of movies, i bought books and compact discs.

quince, 13 people, a little tip angst, but brilliant meal.

david, michael, david jones, ray, pat, colleen, peter, danielle, adam, rachel, eric, laura

i had to eat: winter salad, with mesculun, avocado, grapefruit, dressed in walnut oil (a little bland), a v. good lamb shank with esclado(sp), a cheese plate (a cheddar from normandy, a bendectine blue from quebec, and two others), and a chocloate pot with four mandelines.
i had to drink: 1/3 bottle of argentine malbec from 2006, a cocktail made of pear, quince and midiori, and blueberry grappa.

excellent meal, excellent company.

Celine does AC/DC

gregory lind does gorgeous suburban landscapes from thread and muslin.

english royal post has stamps based on the covers of ian fleming novels.

wojciech kakowski, marcin mostafa and natalia paszkowsk's design for the polish paillion at the world expo in shanghai, with its qoutation of lace, is gorgeous pix here

fags banned as donors

all of the rhetoric about iran, is uncanny. i dont think bush&co can start a war in iran before 2008, but it looks like they are not only trying, but trying in order to enmesh the next democratic president in it.

there is something strange about this story about a french writer being accused of racist crimes in kigali, but i cant quite unpack it


Sally Mann, Night Blooming Catelisis, Date Unknown.

pullman on milton. choice qoute:

He was not without his supporters. When his books were ordered to be burnt, the Bodleian Library in Oxford managed to conceal their copies of such inflammatory pamphlets as The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. John Rouse, Bodley’s Librarian, had anticipated such an order years before, and arranged for their titles to be omitted from the catalogue. A similar concealment happened later in 1683, when a panic about a plot to kill the King stirred the Convocation, the governing body of Oxford University, into interdicting “all members of the University from the reading of the said books” and requiring them to be burnt in the Schools Quadrangle. That was not the university’s finest hour, perhaps, but it might have been one of the Bodleian Library’s.

lethem. interveiwed in this months gq, msotly about rock and/or roll.


Camp DAvid, 1977.

teller of penn and teller is directing a production of macbeth.

this new book on greek classicism and same gender sexual culture, apparently is controversial.


Taser and MP3 on the same machine.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08steinem.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin">steinem on hilary--it saddens me she was the one that won the who will talk for the women wars, as she is so enmeshed into the establishment, but thats why she won--isn't it? (the discussion of hilary and the crying thing is so brer rabbit sticky that i dont want to touch it)

a dozen dry point illustrations for a german translation of renee the fox.

free english maps

i am reminded of stalins line about voting machines and voting systems

a fascaitning expriment about pacifism and constructed war (world of war craft)

mikro credito deep fries random crap, making oddly effectiev, almost fossilized looking objects.

julie burchill wants the return of the bitch.


this video of bottles rollign around the f train from brookyn to manhattan, was moving peice of urban archelogy.

good riddence to bad rubbish.

doctorow again on copyright.

baltimore uses the word yo as a genderless third pronoun.

Majuahraf blames the victim.

fascintinagin articel wtih first person detail about living for decades with hiv/aids.

...The ideal body; without flesh of any kind, old or young, beautiful or battered, scented or smelly; without movement, external or internal; without appetites...perhaps this was a model of what the body should be like from within. Not a place of fluids, organs, muscles, tendons, and bones all in a hallow, whited chamber, scraped clean, cleared of any evidence of the grotesque embarrassments of an actual life. No smells, no noises, no colour, no changing from one state to another and the uncertainity that comes with it; no exchanges with the outside world and the doubt and the dirt that goes with that, no eating, no drinking, no pissing, no shitting, no sucking, no fucking, no nothing...
Baechelor
Chromophobia, 18

Cherry, vanilla, flavors its a virtue/
They, lovin, lip gloss universal
Lil' Mama

Lips (from the Lips&Nips Series)
6 8x10 glossies

Look at how plump and slick these fuckers are, these hyper pixelated point and shoot captures of wealth, aspiration and desire. The eyes are supposed to be the window of the soul, and it must be kind of true, because black out sunglasses exist, and are made iconic for their blocking powers. But lips, lips tell different stories. You walk by them while they advertise cosmetics, perfume, clothing, television. The desire is masked more easily, but it still exists. Though through printing and photoshopping the appetite and desire seems unattached to bodies. I want to notice how plump, how gorgeous, how pink, and how succulent they are in their artifice.

One of the ways of noticing this is the extreme cropping, and by concentrating only on one part, it becomes a literal fetishism. By making them 8x10 glossies, i am bringing the mythology of corporate Hollywood, and making it small, immediate, personal. In this way, it becomes a performative gesture connecting being immeresed in the culture of the street, and the waters of Babylon.

to do today:

1) laundry
2) call royal
3) call quince
4) pack
5) airport at 11

to pack
1) rays book
2) 3 books for pat
3) three cameras (film, polaroid, digi)
4) money
5) clothes, including black shirt, orange shirt and the two purple sweaters
6) camera charger
7) books to read
8) notebook w. d's info
9) rachel's gift.

poetry read:

25
The beauty of the husband a fictional essay in 29 tangos.

unlike antholgies and collected poems, or small lyrical excurusions, this was basically a novel, or a set of small essays, about the usual, husband/wife desire...the thing about it though, is that it managed carson's usual historicism with an incredibly nimble hand, based on keats, who wrote wonderfully, ideally about the beginning of a marriage, to talk about the end of a marriage, is a difficult and lovely trick, like the magician who pulls the table cloth and does not remove any dishes. she also has reticence, and great elegance, an elegance i admire immensely:

money, meetings, mistresses,
the birthplace of his parents,
the store where he bought shirts, the spelling of his own name
He lied when it was not necessary to lie.
He lied when it wasn't even convenient.
Ge lied when he knew they knew he was lying.

He lied when it broke their hearts.

i keep reading that in anne sexton's voice, except it does't seem autobiographical, every single line of sexton is broken and bleeding--we know that it is explcitly, clearly and deeply her.

we dont knwo that about carson, she uses her narrative skill as a dekeing manoveur, her knowledge of cattulus, of keats, her first and second and third hand greek, her parsing of texts and para texts as a way of being v. direct and v. cagey at the same time...and the indirectness sort of kills you.

here is sexton:
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

all of those shes sound like self aggrandizement, and even the title of tango vii (and to call them tango's a highly ritualized violent and sexual perfomrance made theatrical and safe:

But to Honor Truth Which Is Smooth Divine and Lives AMong the Gods We Must (With Plato) Dance Lying Which Lives Down Below Amid the Mass of Men both Tragic and Rough... it sounds like stein almost, but also carson, it sounds v. modern and v. ancient--the lacuane and the elliptical knowledge contained with in,

so a good start.

(thnx to maggie for reminding me of the work, her grad essay was on anne carson)

i just wrote this for fuse magazine, which might publish a seires of photos rachel and i took last winter, of us feeding various fruits to each other. i think its a strong peice of writing, and i think the work is impt (i didnt mention how it was meant to parody the recent food/fucking trend in lesbian erotica)

The pictures lead to a variety of questions, who is this boy and this girl, what are they doing, are they having a laugh, is it pleasurable, who’s home is it, why is this art, are they fucking, is this activity a metaphor or a euphemism or a metonymy for fucking or for pleasure or for more complex and difficult to answer questions of corporeality, how does the fruit taste, is it juicy, is it sweet, how is this like flesh, how do the flesh of food and the flesh of bodies work together, is this paradise, or is this religious at all, how do we sort out appetites, all sorts of appetites?

The boy is I, Anthony Easton. The girl is Rachel McRae. They are eating fruit in Rachel’s boyfriends apartment, in the late afternoon, when the light is perfect. Of course they are having a laugh, many laughs, they recognize the absurdity of the situation. Beckett knew how funny eating fruit was, he put it into Krapp’s last tape: “locks second drawer peers into it, feels about inside it, takes out a large banana, peers at it, locks drawer, puts keys back in his pocket. He turns, advances to edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he bites off the end, turns aside and begins pacing to and fro at edge of stage, in the light, i.e. not more than four or five paces either way, meditatively eating banana”.

What about the other questions? Is it pleasurable? Eating is always pleasurable, eating fruit is especially pleasurable: the slick skin pierced by teeth, the sticky juice, the varieties of textures, of tastes, of sweet, sour, tart. Eating it in the company of others, in the company of each other, adds to the visceral feedings. It is Rachel’s boyfriends house, knowing this adds a frisson of tension, because it is almost like adultery, isn’t it—with only half the narrative, it seems decadent, mid afternoon when someone works, ideas of adultery, always connect to ideas of ownership, the owning of a house and a human, and to transgress against one, is to be lazy, to be covetous is not doing the work. It is choosing pleasure over duty. But the thing is, (and not to put too fine a point on it), Rachel is queer and I am queer. Our presence destabilizes, all of those awkward covetous moments, because no one is owned, and everyone is free to leave. The conservative instinct against queers is one of duty versus pleasure, we should be furthering the human race, or capital, or something like that, but we would sooner eat fruit, in the sun, while watching other people scurry. We would sooner be in a nice apartment, with interesting things on the walls, laughing and gossiping, then do our duty, whatever our duty is.

Is this art? That’s the thing—art has to have a purpose, it has to MEAN SOMETHING. But this was just a brief moment of silliness, of fun, but fun is under rated, fun means something. Play means something, I keep thinking about Sharon Olds poem Sex Without Love:
Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies,

But the thing is, (and this leads to other questions) Rachel and I will not have sex, and we love each other deeply, and sometimes we fall through the ice. Pleasure is sex, and Family is biological, is the line—that maybe is what makes this political and profoundly queer, that we love each other, we fulfill the lines written from Ovid to Olds, from David to Dylan…but we are more then friends, or our friendship, with its entangling of family, of commitment, of work, and of love, is a communal thing, a tribal thing, and a thing mysterious and not quite explained. Olds talks about how sex without love, sex as surfaces, this work, with its joy, its pleasure, its fleshy juiceness, its camp, is surface, but layers upon layer, lacquer thin. Surfaces are difficult to maintain, and the cracking a smile is the cracking of the formalized placidness we aspire to.

The fruit is juicy, like Rachel’s tits are juicy, like my belly is juicy. Juicy is the opposite of the tautness of those surfaces. The pears were mealy. The oranges were tart. The cherries were liquid. The apple was sweet, but not as sweet as the mango. Food feeds bodies, makes it fat and complacent, makes it sticky and makes it loagy. Loagy, fat, complacent, sticky—these are not words of politics, they lack the rigueur of our cultural expectations…I think of memento mori paintings, Dutch, 16th century, at the rise of mercantile culture, where plenty lead to rot, and the red of a cooked lobster, and the grey of a skull jostled with fine things. There is a great one, painted about 1670, with the grey of mould and insects visible in the pink health of a salmon. I think, this is an attempt, to avoid the bugs, to eat the fruit, to feed our bodies, for the interlacing of flesh and food to be one, and to avoid that good protestant instinct to be afraid of pleasure, to think that plenty leads to rotting. That is the paradise, in the consumption of something ambiguous but desired with someone you love. That is why the gay meal is brunch, because it is superfluous. (and no one wants to get up before noon.)

All this flesh and food questions, remind one, of religion, or remind me of religion. That’s where we have to be careful, because being feed, or making food a performative ritual, for me, is explicitly religious, if not a parody of communion, has shades of it (like how Piss Christ, makes intractable sacredness and blasphemy). Eucharist is vital to how I understand this project, like we are developing new families, we are finding, through trial and error new rituals to celebrate those families. Rachel thinks differently, I think she views the families, pleasure, and the destabilizing queerness in this project that we share, but the pretty boy Jesus is foundational to me, and not to her. But it is the elephant in the room, and elephants need to be mentioned.

That is how we sort out appetites, for ritual, for flesh, for fruit…though. We go into a room with beautiful objects, with someone we love. Sometimes that room is the size of a coffin, sometimes that room is the size of a city. We take note of our material and our metaphorical hungers. And we feed them. We do not only feed our own hunger, but others as well. We feed until we have no more left, or until we are full. We refuse to fear excess. We risk the wondrous, mysterious enmeshment of love.

Mel Bochner, Repetion, Ink on Found Paper, Date Unknown.


Mel Bochner, Mental EXcercise: Estimating a Centered Vertical, Pencil, Coloured Pencil, and Ink on Paper, 1972.


Mel Bochner, Measurement Room, Tape and Letraset, 1969


Mel Bochner, Event Horizon (Paris), Oil and acrylic on 15 prestretched, readymade canvases


Mel Bochner, Plant Peice, Plant, Tape, Letraset, 1966


Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, Print (?), 1966


Mel Bochner, Riddle, Letraset, 1999

case study on one of the most important british modernsit buildings, the pimlico school, and how ti is in constant danger of being shut down.

6 photos of Arne JAcobsens ultra minimalist, ultra functional gas station in copenhagen (gorgeous)

new home for a mlps curator, is all dark wood and light concrerte, like a bunker for aesthes.

Here is the Side View.

10 photos of parking garages, from a new book by simon henley, i find the work to be a bit too self conciously monumental.

the best thing about these faded photos of 1960 rose bowl parade, are the crazy swans.

It won first prize, and was done for the occidental insurance company.

the best thing about the brother claus chapel, in germany, is how much it looks like a medevial keep.


Dan Flavin, For George McGovern, 1972.
This peice, it jsut circles, until it collapses, it doesnt do anything but fall apart, and eventually, the light will dim out, and if you pull the plug, you kill it, its a depressing, and oddly hopeless peice, an reminds me of Obama.

38 artsy digisnaps of mexico city, 8 of them worth something.

the top ten movie destructions of new york (the odd thing, is that how few of them feature the world trade center, the best part of garlic and sapphire, the memoir of the former new york times resturant reviewer is how contempous she was of window of the worlds, adn she came from LA< as a building most people never really never really seemed to like the building.

farenham shopping center bans photography on its premesises, so here are some photos of he interior.

new lift tower was built just to crash elevators, in japan.

these photos of california river mouths, by markham johnson, avoid any of the eco/spirit hocum that marks the genre, and also whisper how evoctive brown as a shade can be.

1. Robots couldn’t really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? “Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn’t possibly plug in the charger all on my own.” Shut the fuck up.
2. Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don’t have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they’re laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don’t get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.
3. What, you can’t count higher than three? We’re expected to save your miserable lives, suffer being dressed in cheap schoolgirl costumes while you pollute any and all cavities you can find and do your maths for you? It’s a miracle you people survived long enough to build us. You can go now.

Warren Ellis 11/7


Yo Mama's Last Supper, 2004, Renee Cox

Rodney Carrington, King of the Mountains, Album Cover, 2007.

Rey Ma, Shesus Christ, 2007





great feature on daniel day lewis. and a gaurdian feature on the return of big acting vis a vis his performance in there will be blood.


Judd, Childrens Desk, 1976 (his furniture looks like ikea)

corruption at the museum of the american indian, highlights include spending 250k on travel, not limited to 12 times to paris, and to "Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Athens; Bali, Indonesia; Sydney and Brisbane; London; Singapore; Florence, Rome and Venice; Paris; Gothenburg, Sweden; Seville, Spain; Seoul; Vienna; and Zagreb, Croatia." He should be going to Ohmaha and SOdak as much as he goes to Paris. The 30k retirement video is a heaping pile of overly romanticised bullshit, too. (WaPo Journalists Grimaldi and Trsucott deserve the pulitizer for this)


Elevator for Alder Wood Tube STation, now not used. That colour makes me hard.

Jefferts manages to out gay bishops, while not naming names.

if obama wins in NH it will be or the same reason he won in Iowa, namely that people forget how much contempt people on the left and right feel for hilary.

the gay marriage supporting, abortion law loosening, EU loving, internationalist Spanish PM takes chunks out the vatican.

the cheap computer revoution begins in Taiwan.

i have no idea whats happening here but it looks v. pretty in a hollywood spectacle kind of way.

i have become obsessed lately with mel bochner, here is a review of his work in frieze.

a wonderfully evocitive essay on the golliwog archtype, and alan moores use of it in the black dosseir.

new book of Shel Silverstein playboy comics, this time focusing on his travel work.

gorgeuos landscapes make this game, where you play the wolf, hunting for game, look both educational and aesthetic.


Found Image Bank, taken by Anaba.

colelction of medievial ivories shown at lodnon, including some beautiful memento mori prayer beads. i always found it deep that a reminder of ones death, was intended to be as small as yr palm, a constant worrying remidner, a constant villegance.


John Balderessai, I Saw It, Print, 2007, for a LA Children's art charity.

the gaumand medical model company has everything you ever needed, including testicles in a black velvet bag, one with a lump, one lump free (sort of a memento mori, no)

10 downing street is anti monkeyist.

fascinating article on a jewish cowboy pulp novelist beloved by the nazis--has anyone ever written about the textual reationship b/w karl may and the nazis, esp, in may's realtionship to the indians, and the nazis relation to the jews (i should ask jess nevin)

michael schanabels photos of empty zoo cages, have hat teutonic/taxonmic coldness, found in Candida Hoefers photos of libraries, for example, but i find their absence/presence launcae interesting. i also really like his formalism, the vertical and horizontal liens, the circles, the sheer geometry.


Still from JJ ABRAms Cloverleaf.

this obit of harold robbin by wayne kaustenbaum, isnt any more than 100 words or so, but it does have the perfect aspirational sentence: Robbins's material is smutty but his prose is clean. Simple, speedy and efficient, his sentences demonstrate, in a parodic fashion, what Roland Barthes called ''writing degree zero. Teh cover of Robbins the Pirate, with its gyspyeque burlesque queen, the modernist type, and the bright gold paper, sheeny like trash and treasure, is my personal high point for midlist, middlebrow, american culture, in the mid 60s, when the sexual revoutlion hit madison avenue.

i am not sure that kate moss is not aging well, but she sure is aging interestingly.




Three Canadian Cities as Depcited in this monts Walrus.

1) The colour of Edmonton is much more brown then they have indicated here, in fact, from the sandstone parliment, to the office buildings, to the slush on the streets, to the crude that finances everything, to the stadium and coliseum, to the colour of the lrt seats and carpets to the ashphalt, to the nsr...Edmonton is essentially Brown.
2) The NSR is the colour of silt, it is a muddy, fecal colour, it is no where near that blue.

The Street, The Original Hypertext, unsourced image, taken in DC, w/i the last week.

seattle has an important and fascinating show about japanese attiudes towards the west from the 16th to the 19th century, the website shows all works in question, and has a large chunk of explationatory text as well.

TE LAWerence's recenly rediscovered map of the mid east, a proposal for conquest, makes more sense then what we have now and also strikes me as eeriley presicent.

emory university has an innovative new program attaching a holistic set of treatments for post partum depression and issues of pregancacy and mental health.


Montogemery Clift taken by Ida Wayman, date and location unknown.

a set of german wall charts from 1912, esp note the colour and the detail of line in the cow and horse antomical charts.

more episcoplian messes:

Anglican conservatives angered by the liberal drift of the U.S. Episcopal Church are planning their own world meeting on the future of the global Anglican Communion.The meeting is set for July 15-22, shortly before the Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade gathering of world Anglican leaders that has become a focus of tension within the fellowship of churches.

the catholic bishop of Tenerife, blames sexual abuse of minors on the minors himself, using the pedophiles standard response they were asking for it---one of the great struggles i have had wrt my own abuse, is to realise that i was not asking for it, i was not attempting to seduce anyone, but i still think the profound ambigiuity in new adolscent sexuality, and its ease to be misused, is something that is not often talked about.

Althouse is usally a little too right for me, but this analyis of the Today Show when Bhutto was shot, was chilling.

women in india are meting out justice, when justice is nto given to them.

there is nothing new in Lina Petersons material choices, with her work in metal being combined with soft textiles adn slick plastics, but it is well thought out, the colours are amazing , and the formal working thru is interesting. excellent work.

library bot at the U of U

monety informant used one of my photos


Rules and Regulations, Rufus Wainwright, 2007 (love this video)

With the margin of error included, both the democratic and the republican primiraries in iowa are basically tied. the news week cover story this week is a good summary of edwards chances--but the fascinating bit are the photos, on the cover a stark black and white, from almsot the ground, edwards towering over the veiwer with his tie undone and his his sleeves roleld up, patricahly, powerful and basically fuckable, on the inside, rockstar tourbus with notriours leftie Tim Robbins, the exact opoosite message--the ambiguity is clear.
Here is the Newsweek Cover


tim flach's seires Equus, is monmuetal, and abstracting pictures of horseflesh, i dont know if it works though, if its too monumental, and too exacting.

180 examples of trucking staionary.

113 dutch posters in situ.

urguary allows civil partnerships for any two people living together for 5 years or more, including samge gendered couple, roomates, and spisnter sisters. a good way of doign it.


new Foster building in Moscow, apparently he biggest ever, i dont know if i love it or hate it.

mike huckabee suspected for sending anti lds mailer, qouting orson pratt on polygamy, against romeny.

romeny approved a 6m planned parenthood clinic in Worcester in 2006. also for someone so against immigration, his family sure liked loose borders when they had to move to mexico post polygamy.


Nee Couche, Dorthea Tanning, 1969, In the Tate Collection (i love this, deeply, but it makes me wonder two things
1) what ever happened to soft sculpture
2) was the cannonzing of Bourgeious in the 70s done as a token, as a way of not letting other women who were doign similar workin in, because Tanning might be a good test case for that thesis, work features similar issues, simialr time frame, same friends, same geographies, including paris and new york?)

harvard crimson obit of bhutto proves how small that world was

Everyone who has qouted ALi on Bhutoo always points out how unreliable he is in other parts of the world, you go to TAriq ALi for India, PAkistan an the near east, thats what he knwos--here he is talking about bhutto in the independent on sunday
adn here is talkign about here in the gaurdian on friday. the indepedent link has some unspoken truths about pakistan politics and succession. He also has a good article on her, before her death, in last weeks LRB, and a few v. realvent passages about her and al-qaueda in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, from 2002.



Shingura Ban makes my cock ache with desire.

sometimes the future is pretty

more on the episcolplian unpleasentness

Lucy Wainwright Louche is teh siblign to Rufus and MArtha, quieter, more pretty, but definetly with talent. (she livines in brooklyn but dont hold that agaisnt her.


Glitter is the Herpes of Craft, Glitter and LEtraset, 1/1, LEz Ives, 2007

great collection of current African photos, the text is in french, sadly.

alphabetical list of Cptn Haddock Curses.

Christvertising I think a parody of jesus oriented marketing, but i cannot tell anymore

There is a magazine in the southern unioted states called garden and gun.


The ORiginal Human tetris project, clever.

a body phantastic shall shed no blood...
william caxton, translation of the golden legend, 1458, quoted by Steinberg below.

1) that means, if christs body was fantastic, it would not shed blood, and since he was perfected, w/o sin, he shouldn't have bleed.
2) but christ bled, at the circumcision, at Gethsemane, on the cross, so his body was not phantasic, it was as real as my body or yr blood, the flesh was not perfected.
3) this is the central mystery of christendom, isn't it--the phantastic (in all senses of the word) and the real--or as yeats writes:
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

Crazy Jane talks to the Bishop

new year, 5:32 am, and the feast of the circumcision besides...i find it valuable (and wrote about it last year) that the two are twinned, one of the reasons why i cannot give up the liturgical, is because these poetic intertwinings...that christ lost his foreskin, was to make himself a jew, that god becomes flesh, not flesh in general, but flesh in a v. specific historical and social context, that small penis and its interaction with a large knife, an the exclusion, not only made him a jew, not only made him a human (as my lds brothers and sisters would say in a different context, a body of flesh and blood), but a human who was going to suffer, who was going to lose flesh, until he was pierced by the spear--to be human is to lose flesh, to lose skin thru suffering, in a physical sense but in a translated sense, so that suffering becomes all of us.

i have been struggling this year, 2007, with ideas of family, community, flesh, the body, and place, with tribal notions and how they fit into my (and i hate this word) realtionship with christ, and its been a hard, often isolating year for that--and i dont want this to be a martyr's thing, because the circiumcision is a feast day, it is a day to celebrate the joy of his incarnation.

i dont know how to end this, i think that i will end it with the art historian STeinberg, who I have qouted before this year, adn whos book on the iconography of xian sex was seminal (pun intended) for me this year steinberg on christ and cicumcison