it was a fleeting thot when the priest dirtied my forehead yesterday, but in the last 24 hours, with new meds, and a meeting with the shrink, and some minor prayer, the instinct has grown louder--i want a priesthood blessing, depression and worry, and all of that, and i know it most likely wont help, anger too, and release, and i want a handsome man to push his hands down on my head, sanctified with oil, and let the lords words roll past his tounge.
but its 4 am, and i know no priests anymore.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS POSTMARKED APRIL 18. (If the deadline falls on a holiday, the deadline is extended to the next business day). CARFAC fees are paid in the gallery.
Please include all of the following when submitting your proposal:
- A brief description (maximum 250 words) clearly outlining the exhibition you are proposing
- Artist statement - maximum 500 words
- Curriculum vitae
- 15-20 slides with name and title. Video artists may submit a video no longer than 5 minutes
- Slide list detailing medium and size
- Self addressed, sufficiently stamped envelope
Incomplete proposals will not be considered
If sending digital images, please submit them in jpeg format on a CD compatible with Macintosh operating systems. Applications submitted by e-mail are not accepted. Label jpg images with number and title, for example: 01_title.jpg, 02_title.jpg etc. Jpg images must be 72 dpi, maximum 1024 x 768 pixels. 500 KB (0.5MB). Incomplete proposals will not be considered. Unsuccessful applications will be returned only if a SASE is included with the materials. Unsuccessful applications that do not include a SASE will be destroyed.
phillip jose farmer was one of the first writers i read, that introduced the concept of queering, and stretching texts, creating alternative realties, and strangeness, his work (esp. his works on tarzan, sherlock holmes, and zane grey) blew my mind at an age where my mind desperately needed to be blown, and i think he had the same effect as heinlein or card had on other readers of my same age...see if you can find the tarzan stories, not only are they gorgeous in the mirroring of burroughs original purple pulp, they are seriously deranged.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
- hugh jackman needs a hair cut
- but is charmingly, rakishly self depricating
- "ladies and gentleman the craigsliust dancers is the funiest of the cheap set peices.
- brad pitt should have kept the mustache
- i am confused about the montages, but meryl streepo is much less serious then she used to be
- tilda should talk to tilda swinton about avant garde fashion choices, and also draping
- amy adams morrocan imspired neckwear was corgeous and workjs well
- i was not expecting penlope cruz to win for woody, is the old auter desire?
- steve martin is making scientology jokes.
- with the first oscar for milk, are fags the new black?
- black has an expensive and fashionable hair cut, and io really do not think that the adaptation was that sophistacted, and he might be winning as an apologia for the prop 8 disaster.
- lds!
- i am a beautiful, wonderful creature of value!
- slumdog, milk, no run away winners yet
- teh academy keeps thnking animation is for kids, so things like walk with basir are ignored, there was no mention of other kinds of animation in the movie year book
- styx joke by the non english speaker, nice
- i think just for the ultra minimal bat cave, the dark knight should have won art direction, but button did (thanks it was not the duchess)
- if costume director is supposed to be about using clothes to indiccate narrative, and charachter devolpment, then milk deserved to win, if it is about excess...
- no gay or lesbians in the romance section of the hollywood anthology, not even a token shot of the preunctory sex scenes in milk
- portmans lipstick pink is the best colour of the night
- hasidic meth lab--natalie portman
- dark night is getting totally shut out
- did the slumdog cimenatographer, who was wearing clogs, really name his son klimt?
- jessica beil: satin sheets to lie on/satin sheets to cry on
- pot humour is only funny to potheads, but at least they made an oblique reference to bootlegging, and werent morally bankrupt
- nazis equal oscar gold
- beyonce can dancce, who knew.
- she has sung at last three times in the last 6 months, and frankly, what the hell is zach efron doing up there.
- the 5 suppourting actors are sort of random, joel grey is short, and phillip seymour is wearing a toque inside
- ledger was really a foregone conclusion
- bill maher looks like his suit is made of rubber
- herzog lost, again, which is nor horribly suprising.
- the man on the wire guy is the ultimate showman
- still no dark night, i think they are just going to give one to ;edger because he died
- sorry, it did get a sound editing oscar
- but then two techincal oscars for slumdog
- i am still not fond of jerry lewis, and have a complicated raltionship to his politics, and his getting a huminatarian award because they didnt have the balls to give him a writing or acting oscar, but he is really really sick.
- the scores meld into one goopy mess, and there is no differentation, causes some serious boredom
- tthere seems to be an interest in giving slum dog some serious awards
- John LEgend instead of Collins, and a hindi style dance number, i can surrive that
- i am disappointed MIA did not win an oscar and grammy in the same year, and the guy who won for slumdog is a cliched fool.
- they got the indian to give the foriegn language award, and i really need to see the class. (also, i wish genre films did better, i still think the best films from japan are horror in the last few years) (shockinglyu i thot the class would win it)
- queen latifah is too large to wear ribbons, spangles, and other nonesen, but she still outclasses everyone on the stage, and its the death montage, with some genuinely excellent singing.
- was heath ledger in the death monoloug?
- witherspoons dress looks like a late rothko
- it's a slumdog sweep, i suspect that van sant (who should have won for paranoid park, elephant, drugstore cowboy or my own private idaho) or david fincher (who should have won for zodiac, fght club or the game) will be like kubrick or hitchcock
- movies kate winslet should have won the oscar for: heavenly creatures, hamlet, jude, hideous kinky, quills, holy smoke, engima, iris, little children.
- it was a good performance, but van sant got the award because he was about the make a poltiical speech, though the commie homo was a good line (is pitt too pretty to win the award?)
- yep, slumdog sweep
On the 100th anniversary of Clement Greenberg's birth, and for about 5 years before it, there has been a sorting out about what gestural or abstract painting means, some of this is about an explicit grappling with his legacy in a historical sense, and some of this is about is figuring out what to do about his presence, with out naming him. The modernist in the room, like Chekhov's gun. These shows often are better about including women, people of colour, and queer voices into the mix, but rarely mention the problems of misogyny, homophobia, or racism in Modernism's methodology. I thought about this, while reading the catalogue of Action/Abstraction at the Jewish museum and seeing the show. Though it included some excellent work by female painters, it failed to discuss the legacy, and the history of women working abstractly, and failed to push and prod how much his formal obsessions revolved around the lacunae of desire.
To put it another way, to talk about fields, or all over spaces, or line work, or (rarely) colour worked as an obfuscating device, it allowed one to imagine being inclusive and liberal, while ignoring and often punishing those who disagreed. Though he has been dead for a decade, and art historians are starting to seriously re-evaluate women like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, or Alma Thomas, there are a half a dozen emerging and mid-career female abstractionists who are using the tools of non representational painting to explicitly critique the butch discourses of the Greenberg years, and the mid 80s revival of mess. (The most explicit, and narratively closest critique of the Greenberg legacy is the painting and decoration school of the 1970s, but that was such a small blip, and has been basically ignored, even the most decoratively in tuned of the new painters, have not found a legacy there)
So the 7 artists I would like to include Amy Silliman, Polly Apfelbaum, Karin Davies, Lisa Stefnelli, Rachel Lecowitz, Katy Moran, Beatriz Milhazes extend, critique, break, and restore the history of modernism, and do it in a way that explodes the carefully curated legacy of Greenberg. They point out his worst excesses, and refuse to correct his flaws. I cannot imagine a better person for 20th century art history's most aggressive ghost, to be pursed by this chorus.
To put it another way, to talk about fields, or all over spaces, or line work, or (rarely) colour worked as an obfuscating device, it allowed one to imagine being inclusive and liberal, while ignoring and often punishing those who disagreed. Though he has been dead for a decade, and art historians are starting to seriously re-evaluate women like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, or Alma Thomas, there are a half a dozen emerging and mid-career female abstractionists who are using the tools of non representational painting to explicitly critique the butch discourses of the Greenberg years, and the mid 80s revival of mess. (The most explicit, and narratively closest critique of the Greenberg legacy is the painting and decoration school of the 1970s, but that was such a small blip, and has been basically ignored, even the most decoratively in tuned of the new painters, have not found a legacy there)
So the 7 artists I would like to include Amy Silliman, Polly Apfelbaum, Karin Davies, Lisa Stefnelli, Rachel Lecowitz, Katy Moran, Beatriz Milhazes extend, critique, break, and restore the history of modernism, and do it in a way that explodes the carefully curated legacy of Greenberg. They point out his worst excesses, and refuse to correct his flaws. I cannot imagine a better person for 20th century art history's most aggressive ghost, to be pursed by this chorus.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
Feidilty, a video celebrating gay marriage, and an effective work against prop 8.
clinton is making noises allowing state department employees to have same gender partners.
atilier bow obw the radically democratic, super green, and hopelessly gorgeous architechture critics/practioners from toyko, have there first show in LA.
bath matt made out of moss
living doll made out of cancer cells, allows for testing outside of the body. (warren ellis says that people will sex with them in 5 years time, he is right)
barrack obama swears in his audio book, someone cuts these exceprts and makes them into mp3s--i for one, am glad to have a president back in the white house who knows how to use the word motherfucker in a sentece.
soderbergh directs pitt in an adaptation of moneyball, maybe, possibly? might be good.
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Middle aged daddy Matt Damon, why wont you love me.
brad gooch on the realtionship b/w rberg and johns, and the implications of how it was reported.
matt lee collects
indian matchbooks, the link goes to 117 of them., kind of remind me of loterria illustrations in places.
Bob Rae finally defends himself, shits all over harper, in a letter to the national post.
the moron who published the one study about MMR that suggested it might have an effect on autism (Which has been disproven dozens of times) has been found to have fudged his numbers.
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Introductory sign. Deerwood Michigan, life sized, plaster over chicken wire.
the metro has fired all of its writers, and replaced them with unpaid interns.
kwan kin clan are bejing street artists, who combine the traditions of LA wildstyle murals, and native landscape painting, into something fascinatingly postnational.
discussion of the literay merits of john updike (i am not a fan, but have not read rabbit at rest)
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Mexican poster for the Wrestler.
65 photos and 5 videos of an incredibly cute rat.
pennslvenyia judges took 2.6m in kickbacks from private prisons to imprison children. (why are private corperations running prisons for children?)
some beatuiful images of japanse knifemakers, making blades by hand. they do include really annoying, really large watermarks, just to warn you.
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Still from Goddard's Masculine and Femminine.
sorry these are a week late but deadwood valentines.
watch an hour pbs doc, about whitman, for free online--does not skimp on details of his desires, his politics, his faith or lack there of, his problems and his radical successes, also not boring or polite.
marbled paper custom marbeling kits, and other paper craft.
Of nearly 2.2 million immigrants deported in the decade ended 2007, more than 100,000 were the parents of children who, having been born in the United States, were American citizens, according to a report issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security.
But the department lacks data that might have addressed questions left unanswered by the report, like the number of American children who were left behind in the United States or, alternatively, exited the country with their deported parents. Nor could the report say in how many instances both parents of such children were deported.
story here .
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Anglo pulp illustration, ca 1920.
discussion and interview with the knitter for coraline--a movie who's plot was utterly conventional, but who's visuals were mindblowing. (stopmotion, 3d!)
ontario superior court says that police can trace isps w/o a warrent.
wiki article on kayfabe, or the realism of fake wrestling.
steve klien brad pitt, and angelina jolie, in some really quite creepy, sublimated violence.
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Student design for sugar container, based on Day of the Dead motifs.
C Monster does a narchitechture tour of miami.
the 50 most prolific prostitutes of Las VEgas.
Cake Puppets sing Superstar, about Karen Carpenter.
the clash sing English Civil War.
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Michael Kors new look this week at NY FAshion Week.
8 billion dollar mini madoff winds its way thru texas.
10 women from the ages of 89-96, have their bat mitzvah in Beechwood, Ohio. It is never too late to correct previous eras mistakes, their slips in understanding justice.
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Someone posted photos from sjsa on facebook, none from my year, but a few from the homme d nor cermony, notice the spruce boughs, and the beating--the water would have been pretty fucking cold here as well.
Germermino's family has sued skulls and bones in order to give their bones back.
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Pink Iguana, I have no other informaiton.
Hey All:
Inside/Out is doing a fundraiser, where i have the honour and privilege of sitting through 9 hours of musicals from hell--spice world! Xanadu! Can't Stop the Music! in order to fund glbtq film and video. I love Inside/Out (esp. there commitment to marginalized communities within ours, there commitment to the creation of new films, and there digitally sophisticated understanding of archives), I love Ginger and Scary Spice (but not Posh), and I love Busby Berkley style choreography. The whole thing is set up like one of those things where you sponsor me to see how much I can endure, sort of like running, but with kitsch. Here is the link: http://www.gifttool.com/athon/MyFundraisingPage?ID=1783&AID=580&PID=59938, and there is no obligation what so ever to put any money in the kitty, since none of you are bankers or lawyers, and it is a recession besides, but i am sure we can get a little bit of dosh together.
Inside/Out is doing a fundraiser, where i have the honour and privilege of sitting through 9 hours of musicals from hell--spice world! Xanadu! Can't Stop the Music! in order to fund glbtq film and video. I love Inside/Out (esp. there commitment to marginalized communities within ours, there commitment to the creation of new films, and there digitally sophisticated understanding of archives), I love Ginger and Scary Spice (but not Posh), and I love Busby Berkley style choreography. The whole thing is set up like one of those things where you sponsor me to see how much I can endure, sort of like running, but with kitsch. Here is the link: http://www.gifttool.com/athon/MyFundraisingPage?ID=1783&AID=580&PID=59938, and there is no obligation what so ever to put any money in the kitty, since none of you are bankers or lawyers, and it is a recession besides, but i am sure we can get a little bit of dosh together.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
from genre and hollywood steve neele, routledge
a womans film is a movie that places the centre of its univers on a female who is tring to deal wiht emotional social and pyschological problems that are spec. connected to the fact that she is a woman... 189 (qouting J Basnigers: A Womans View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women)
the woman's film found its mature form beofre the genres centering on goal driven males... 189
From Laura Mulvey's festishism and curiousity, bfi (indiania)
Social Hieroglyphics: Reflections on two films by Douglas Sirk
The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of smoitions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Holylwood that had tried to find a deceiphering mdode of reading the image on screen... (29)
...Preformance, appeareance, masquearde and their eortics shfit from the surface of the screen into the story itself... (31)
[Imitaiton of Life] seems to have stripped away the exterior accoutrument of social existence, to discover a phantasamtic scenorio solely conerend with the pysche, sexuality, amour fur and transgressive desire (31)
To Look Up
100 Westerns Edward Buscome
Melodrams: Genre, style and sensibility Mercer and Shingler.
Melodrama and Meaning Klinger.
a womans film is a movie that places the centre of its univers on a female who is tring to deal wiht emotional social and pyschological problems that are spec. connected to the fact that she is a woman... 189 (qouting J Basnigers: A Womans View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women)
the woman's film found its mature form beofre the genres centering on goal driven males... 189
From Laura Mulvey's festishism and curiousity, bfi (indiania)
Social Hieroglyphics: Reflections on two films by Douglas Sirk
The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of smoitions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Holylwood that had tried to find a deceiphering mdode of reading the image on screen... (29)
...Preformance, appeareance, masquearde and their eortics shfit from the surface of the screen into the story itself... (31)
[Imitaiton of Life] seems to have stripped away the exterior accoutrument of social existence, to discover a phantasamtic scenorio solely conerend with the pysche, sexuality, amour fur and transgressive desire (31)
To Look Up
100 Westerns Edward Buscome
Melodrams: Genre, style and sensibility Mercer and Shingler.
Melodrama and Meaning Klinger.
Our wisdom is all mixed up with that we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn't do an good to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing, rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we're doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves."
Pema Chodron
Pema Chodron
Monday, February 16, 2009
me: http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/searchresults.aspx?intSaleID=22294&CID=5447010010701a#action=paging&intSaleID=22294&CID=5447010010701a&sid=719dd5f7-c7a3-436f-9888-dc32c0d703cd&pg=7
Sent at 11:22 PM on Monday
Rachel: that corpse had taste!!!
me: i came to the opposite conculsion
Rachel: Seriously?
Sent at 11:24 PM on Monday
me: its all piss elegant middle aged queen stuff
none of the radical newness of the smoking, the safari, or other coture work
sp
Rachel: one sec: I want these:
http://www.tattydevine.com/boutique/product_info.php?cPath=121_106&products_id=554
but think of it this way: radical is great but its a distraction to live with sometimes.
me: but i mean, how many random 17th century silver do dads does one need
i mean the paintings and drawings are kind of interesting, but the knickknacks
are pathetic
Rachel: I aboslutely disagree.
me: and i mean pineapples, unicorns, asps, its the same things in the avon catalogs
unicorns?!
Rachel: they're salt servers right?
Sent at 11:28 PM on Monday
me: they have no real functional purpose
some are lamps, some are cellars, some are snuff boxes
but there is no function really
Rachel: why are you being such a modernist about this?
you dont collect for those reasons..
even if you do collect "practical" goods.
there are definate threads of fascination running through these bjects.
me: i dont know
because i think of him as a modernist, i think
Rachel: and he was, but the creative life and the internal obsessions of the professional artist aren't always in obvious corrolation
me: i like the random collections of rocks though
and that is a good point,
Sent at 11:32 PM on Monday
Rachel: ..theres a definate obsession with trade-based "collonial" (I kinda bject to the use in this instance, its too simplistic) objects (cellers with ostrich eggs and the like)
me: and that might be because he was algerian?
Rachel: possibly?
maybe a book he liked when he was a kid.
some wing of the museum he enjoyed ?
me: ch pasted
Rachel: huh?
me: 'but also an attempt to make francophile
or francophone his self,
his work was never about being french, but being other
and this work is v. much normaitve
this collection
Rachel: and dude, what modernist doesnt like crystals?
geometry?
naturally occuring structure?
me: there doesnt seem to be a cohesive narrative
a curated whole
Rachel: thats cause its a personal collection.
im sure he gave a toss about what this particular part of his life would mean when he croaked..
we're missing the key to the narrative, and that key is rotting 6 feet under.
i dont think its a worthwhile project.
me: but look at Wallis Simpson or JAckie O's collections post mortem
Rachel: Big deal.
He wasn't either of them.
me: true
and i would buy you the jospehine baker memorbillia if i had the money
Rachel: He has a lot more going on in his professional life than Jackie, whose art was self-creation (thus her collection would be better curated).
The cohesion is in his design and hot his home furnishings and little nick-nacks.
the man gave the world enough didnt he?
Sent at 11:41 PM on Monday
Rachel: and anyway, I disagree.. I think there is total cohesion in his aesthetic choices (and thematic even)
me: talk more about that
Sent at 11:42 PM on Monday
me: its about the classical naked dudes right
Sent at 11:44 PM on Monday
Rachel: first, the interest in objects arrived at through international trade (salt cellars, drinking cups, modernist furniture made from african wood in europe, snuff box and pillbox collections...) that flows into the picasso's and Brancusi's and that whole eras influence from African ritual objects and craft... linked in there is an obvious enjoyment of portrait (cameo's to paintings)..
Sent at 11:47 PM on Monday
Rachel: but visually... everything flows together: fruitwood, lapislazuli, boxwood, enamel, gold... the man loved classic items of luxury...
Sent at 11:51 PM on Monday
me: its a good point, well taken
even polychrome
you are totally right
Rachel: Its, I suppose Im not sure what need there is to beat a dead horse over what it chose to tatty-up the stable.
ye know?
Sent at 11:22 PM on Monday
Rachel: that corpse had taste!!!
me: i came to the opposite conculsion
Rachel: Seriously?
Sent at 11:24 PM on Monday
me: its all piss elegant middle aged queen stuff
none of the radical newness of the smoking, the safari, or other coture work
sp
Rachel: one sec: I want these:
http://www.tattydevine.com/boutique/product_info.php?cPath=121_106&products_id=554
but think of it this way: radical is great but its a distraction to live with sometimes.
me: but i mean, how many random 17th century silver do dads does one need
i mean the paintings and drawings are kind of interesting, but the knickknacks
are pathetic
Rachel: I aboslutely disagree.
me: and i mean pineapples, unicorns, asps, its the same things in the avon catalogs
unicorns?!
Rachel: they're salt servers right?
Sent at 11:28 PM on Monday
me: they have no real functional purpose
some are lamps, some are cellars, some are snuff boxes
but there is no function really
Rachel: why are you being such a modernist about this?
you dont collect for those reasons..
even if you do collect "practical" goods.
there are definate threads of fascination running through these bjects.
me: i dont know
because i think of him as a modernist, i think
Rachel: and he was, but the creative life and the internal obsessions of the professional artist aren't always in obvious corrolation
me: i like the random collections of rocks though
and that is a good point,
Sent at 11:32 PM on Monday
Rachel: ..theres a definate obsession with trade-based "collonial" (I kinda bject to the use in this instance, its too simplistic) objects (cellers with ostrich eggs and the like)
me: and that might be because he was algerian?
Rachel: possibly?
maybe a book he liked when he was a kid.
some wing of the museum he enjoyed ?
me: ch pasted
Rachel: huh?
me: 'but also an attempt to make francophile
or francophone his self,
his work was never about being french, but being other
and this work is v. much normaitve
this collection
Rachel: and dude, what modernist doesnt like crystals?
geometry?
naturally occuring structure?
me: there doesnt seem to be a cohesive narrative
a curated whole
Rachel: thats cause its a personal collection.
im sure he gave a toss about what this particular part of his life would mean when he croaked..
we're missing the key to the narrative, and that key is rotting 6 feet under.
i dont think its a worthwhile project.
me: but look at Wallis Simpson or JAckie O's collections post mortem
Rachel: Big deal.
He wasn't either of them.
me: true
and i would buy you the jospehine baker memorbillia if i had the money
Rachel: He has a lot more going on in his professional life than Jackie, whose art was self-creation (thus her collection would be better curated).
The cohesion is in his design and hot his home furnishings and little nick-nacks.
the man gave the world enough didnt he?
Sent at 11:41 PM on Monday
Rachel: and anyway, I disagree.. I think there is total cohesion in his aesthetic choices (and thematic even)
me: talk more about that
Sent at 11:42 PM on Monday
me: its about the classical naked dudes right
Sent at 11:44 PM on Monday
Rachel: first, the interest in objects arrived at through international trade (salt cellars, drinking cups, modernist furniture made from african wood in europe, snuff box and pillbox collections...) that flows into the picasso's and Brancusi's and that whole eras influence from African ritual objects and craft... linked in there is an obvious enjoyment of portrait (cameo's to paintings)..
Sent at 11:47 PM on Monday
Rachel: but visually... everything flows together: fruitwood, lapislazuli, boxwood, enamel, gold... the man loved classic items of luxury...
Sent at 11:51 PM on Monday
me: its a good point, well taken
even polychrome
you are totally right
Rachel: Its, I suppose Im not sure what need there is to beat a dead horse over what it chose to tatty-up the stable.
ye know?
Heidi Newfield has come to prominence quickly, and both of her biggest singles are about what it means to be married, in a fairly conservative and traditional way. Johnny and June is a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing (both in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour), that has worked as a corrective to the establishment ignoring his presence for decades. The song is not very interesting, and it should only be noted because it makes the chaotic narrative of Cash's life clean, and pedantic. The song ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville politics, it even (weirdly) does not discuss the profound protestant biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.
Newfield is a contradictory figure though—she is young, of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others. This is not a new thing, Country Music has a new wave every 5 or 10 years, from Patsy Cline in the 1950s, to Martina McBride in the 1990s, the only thing that might be new, is that the controversy about keeping country, or remaining a purity of voice, or avoiding the pernicious influence of Rock and Roll (a controversy that has been so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's Murder on Music Row—which includes the lines: For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”
Newfield's track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify the traditionalists like Jackson and Strait, so what makes it country, is then the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (ie Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck), the use of moral language (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.
Each of those can be critiqued widely, and delicately. The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but written in a way that is light hearted and jokey—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring the other options, to be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.
That she depends on a hand me down crib suggests that she is part of a culture of child raising, and that others have done the preparation for her. In her collection of personal essays, Dorothy Allison talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, and she succinctly talks about the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in traditional music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame, in order to prevent being bad poor, she gets married.
This use of moral language puts it into stark relief to the country history the song embodies. There is a history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. They get married against parental permission, and as Tanya Tucker writes “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. Unlike that song, or Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy, both of which mention the dangers that these lovers go through, Sander's dismisses the dangers of desire in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because she seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down.
Lynn wrote her work from a specific personal history, and so the song is a bit closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who are not mothers, or at least those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, everyone mentioned in the song becomes a cipher, there is nothing explicit, no details in Knocked Up. There is a granny, a daddy, a teenage mother, and a guitar picking boyfriend, but none of these characters have details needed, because the whole thing would become too dark, and too serious too quickly.
It is a problem that one also sees in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of humour is mediated by a more lyrically complex narrative. The text is sung in real time, with a teen age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting for the results; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
There are other similarities to the Newfield track. They are both rock and roll, though the Church track has a much more traditional, and much less studio based sound, and it is much less of a studio creation. The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child, there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together. That they manage to avoid having a child, there is no discussion of the complexities of giving birth as a child.
Though there is a noticeable relief to the Church track, there is much less shame, though in Knocked Up, Sanders has made the prescriptive depiction of love, and Church has only included details of anxiety and the natural consequences of the wildfire sexuality of adolescence. The narrator claims to be willing to marry the woman, but makes no real discussion of love, even in the most conventional, heterocentric, and obligatory usages of those terms. The ironic use of the conventional expectations of the desire—is that the music has a raw edge, it would not be outside what would be called Rockabilly, 40 years ago. Bill Malone wrote about Rockabilly, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints”
Quoted by David Shapiro, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, 30)
Eric Church has managed the emotionalism of Rockabilly, the roaring of sex, and the destabilizing pleasure of raw fucking, but he manages to contain it in a terror of the body, of the consequences of sex. So instead of maintaining the hegemonic requirements of musical purity, as was previously required by the Opry establishment, he decides his priorities, he is capable of discussions of class, of gender, of sexuality, and of morality, but his songs are very much grounded in a southern rock tradition. Or to put it another way, he is someone who is recognizes that the working classes, especially in the south and the Midwest who sing along to his songs, were raised not only on country, but a history of rock and roll—and there is an attempt to synthesise both of those instincts. (Eric Church sings about this instinct in the double entdre song, She Won't Leave My Willie Alone—where he talks about his love of Lynrd Skynard, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, the Beatles, and of course Johnny Cash, but “she keeps coming back, for the only thing that turns her on/she won't leave my Willie alone”--where a desire for musical purity is negatively contrasted with a musical profligacy)
To put it another way, Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic, one that is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localised space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in both Two Pink Lines, and in other Church songs, including Guys Like Me, and These Boots. Both are ballads, and both are less guitar driven, less formally clever then the real time structure of Two Pink Lines, but all of them are excellent examples of Watt's thesis.
His first observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women). The first is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...", the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifers, that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings “I spend saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings
We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.
The mutability of class is the other point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the Deer Run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys , increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” Though country is usually ex/suburban, and though increasingly those who are part of the working class function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and thats a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve.
This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and west, and is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's
Newfield is a contradictory figure though—she is young, of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others. This is not a new thing, Country Music has a new wave every 5 or 10 years, from Patsy Cline in the 1950s, to Martina McBride in the 1990s, the only thing that might be new, is that the controversy about keeping country, or remaining a purity of voice, or avoiding the pernicious influence of Rock and Roll (a controversy that has been so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's Murder on Music Row—which includes the lines: For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”
Newfield's track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify the traditionalists like Jackson and Strait, so what makes it country, is then the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (ie Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck), the use of moral language (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.
Each of those can be critiqued widely, and delicately. The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but written in a way that is light hearted and jokey—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring the other options, to be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.
That she depends on a hand me down crib suggests that she is part of a culture of child raising, and that others have done the preparation for her. In her collection of personal essays, Dorothy Allison talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, and she succinctly talks about the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in traditional music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame, in order to prevent being bad poor, she gets married.
This use of moral language puts it into stark relief to the country history the song embodies. There is a history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. They get married against parental permission, and as Tanya Tucker writes “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. Unlike that song, or Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy, both of which mention the dangers that these lovers go through, Sander's dismisses the dangers of desire in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because she seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down.
Lynn wrote her work from a specific personal history, and so the song is a bit closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who are not mothers, or at least those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, everyone mentioned in the song becomes a cipher, there is nothing explicit, no details in Knocked Up. There is a granny, a daddy, a teenage mother, and a guitar picking boyfriend, but none of these characters have details needed, because the whole thing would become too dark, and too serious too quickly.
It is a problem that one also sees in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of humour is mediated by a more lyrically complex narrative. The text is sung in real time, with a teen age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting for the results; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
There are other similarities to the Newfield track. They are both rock and roll, though the Church track has a much more traditional, and much less studio based sound, and it is much less of a studio creation. The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child, there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together. That they manage to avoid having a child, there is no discussion of the complexities of giving birth as a child.
Though there is a noticeable relief to the Church track, there is much less shame, though in Knocked Up, Sanders has made the prescriptive depiction of love, and Church has only included details of anxiety and the natural consequences of the wildfire sexuality of adolescence. The narrator claims to be willing to marry the woman, but makes no real discussion of love, even in the most conventional, heterocentric, and obligatory usages of those terms. The ironic use of the conventional expectations of the desire—is that the music has a raw edge, it would not be outside what would be called Rockabilly, 40 years ago. Bill Malone wrote about Rockabilly, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints”
Quoted by David Shapiro, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, 30)
Eric Church has managed the emotionalism of Rockabilly, the roaring of sex, and the destabilizing pleasure of raw fucking, but he manages to contain it in a terror of the body, of the consequences of sex. So instead of maintaining the hegemonic requirements of musical purity, as was previously required by the Opry establishment, he decides his priorities, he is capable of discussions of class, of gender, of sexuality, and of morality, but his songs are very much grounded in a southern rock tradition. Or to put it another way, he is someone who is recognizes that the working classes, especially in the south and the Midwest who sing along to his songs, were raised not only on country, but a history of rock and roll—and there is an attempt to synthesise both of those instincts. (Eric Church sings about this instinct in the double entdre song, She Won't Leave My Willie Alone—where he talks about his love of Lynrd Skynard, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, the Beatles, and of course Johnny Cash, but “she keeps coming back, for the only thing that turns her on/she won't leave my Willie alone”--where a desire for musical purity is negatively contrasted with a musical profligacy)
To put it another way, Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic, one that is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localised space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in both Two Pink Lines, and in other Church songs, including Guys Like Me, and These Boots. Both are ballads, and both are less guitar driven, less formally clever then the real time structure of Two Pink Lines, but all of them are excellent examples of Watt's thesis.
His first observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women). The first is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...", the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifers, that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings “I spend saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings
We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.
The mutability of class is the other point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the Deer Run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys , increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” Though country is usually ex/suburban, and though increasingly those who are part of the working class function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and thats a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve.
This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and west, and is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's
Saturday, February 14, 2009
do not descend unto professors or capitalists.
whitman.
i am the poet of the body, i am the poet of the soul
whitman
my aunt and i spent two hours hashing out what it meant to go to theology school, and i could not explain to her, because i know that she wants a practical reason, that i want to be whitman, or at least, i want to follow his advice from leaves of grass--i dont think barb ever really read whitman.
ase
whitman.
i am the poet of the body, i am the poet of the soul
whitman
my aunt and i spent two hours hashing out what it meant to go to theology school, and i could not explain to her, because i know that she wants a practical reason, that i want to be whitman, or at least, i want to follow his advice from leaves of grass--i dont think barb ever really read whitman.
ase
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Initial Outline for the Vanderbilt Book
Four Sectons: Music, Landscape, Sex, God
First Section:
Music
Reviews (5000 words):
Brad Paisley Play (Left Hip)
Brad Paisley Time Well Wasted (Stylus)
Kenny Chesney Road and the Radio (Stylus)
Tim McGraw Let It Go (Left Hip)
Jeremey Fisher Let It Shine (Stylus)
Lee Ann Womack—There Is More Where That Came From (Stylus)
Criticism: (13 500 words)
On The Aesthetics of Dead Babies (Poptimist)
Country Music Tells The Red States What to Feel (Stylus)
Failed Book Proposal for 33 1/3rds Book on Red Headed Stranger
50 Liberal Country Songs (Red State Reader)
Things Griel Marcus Got Wrong About I Wish I Was A Mole In the Ground (Poptimist)
Small pieces: (1500 words)
Occasional writing for the Nashville Scene and Village Voice End of the Year Polls, excerpts of blog entries for Freaky Trigger and from personal correspondence.
Landscape:
On the Survival of Agricultural Beauty Queens (Red State Reader) (3000 Words)
35 Thoughts on Grand Prairie Alberta (Unpublished) (2500 Words)
Brokeback, Wisconsin, Alberta, and Sacred Loneliness (unpublished) (1000 Words)
Why I Love Rodeo (2500 words) (Unpublished)
Toronto the Good has a shocking lack of Good Ol' Boys (200 words) (Unpublished)
Picnic, Pro Life, and Pilgrimage (Diary) (1000 words)
Assorted Reviews and Gallery Proposals for Edmonton Artists, including reviews of photographer Orest Semischer, a history of Edmonton Modernism, some thoughts on Rodeo Photographers, and some young (under 30) Edmonton Photographers (2000 words)
Sex:
Review of Willie Nelson's Cowboy's are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other (Unpublished) (1000 Words)
Oh, My God I Fucked Kenny (PCA/AA Conference Presentation) (6000 words)
Jake Gyllenhaal's Dick and Anne Hathaway's Tits: On the Necessity of Prairie Bisexuality (1000 Words)
Peniston's: A Post Grad Drag King, (or another kind of economic migration) (1000 words) (To Be Written)
Straighten you out: A personally Queer History of Saint John's School of Alberta
Occasional pieces on Tim McGraw's wrestling t-shirt, Joe Nichol's Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off, the erotic loneliness of I Never Liked Planes by Robbie Fulks, a gendered analysis of Reba McEntire and Bobbi Gentry's Fancy, and a deconstruction of the sexual aesthetics of the National Finals versus the Farmers Rodeo.
God:
An Interview with Lutheran Singer/Songwriter Johnathon Rundman (8000 words) (Killing the Buddha)
She's In Love With the Boy (5000 words) (PCA/AA)
William Kurelek: Prarie Visionary (2500 words) (Raw Visions)
14 Thoughts on Queer Catholic Bodies (1000 words) (Queer and Catholic (Routledge)
Occasional pieces on Dolly Parton's Stairway to Heaven, Brad Paisley's When I Get To Heaven, Chely Wright's The River, No Depression in Heaven, Iris Dement's God Might Forgive You (But I Don't) , and discussions of the LDS temple in Cardston, and the aesthetic plainness of LDS chapels, plus some small personal histories.
Four Sectons: Music, Landscape, Sex, God
First Section:
Music
Reviews (5000 words):
Brad Paisley Play (Left Hip)
Brad Paisley Time Well Wasted (Stylus)
Kenny Chesney Road and the Radio (Stylus)
Tim McGraw Let It Go (Left Hip)
Jeremey Fisher Let It Shine (Stylus)
Lee Ann Womack—There Is More Where That Came From (Stylus)
Criticism: (13 500 words)
On The Aesthetics of Dead Babies (Poptimist)
Country Music Tells The Red States What to Feel (Stylus)
Failed Book Proposal for 33 1/3rds Book on Red Headed Stranger
50 Liberal Country Songs (Red State Reader)
Things Griel Marcus Got Wrong About I Wish I Was A Mole In the Ground (Poptimist)
Small pieces: (1500 words)
Occasional writing for the Nashville Scene and Village Voice End of the Year Polls, excerpts of blog entries for Freaky Trigger and from personal correspondence.
Landscape:
On the Survival of Agricultural Beauty Queens (Red State Reader) (3000 Words)
35 Thoughts on Grand Prairie Alberta (Unpublished) (2500 Words)
Brokeback, Wisconsin, Alberta, and Sacred Loneliness (unpublished) (1000 Words)
Why I Love Rodeo (2500 words) (Unpublished)
Toronto the Good has a shocking lack of Good Ol' Boys (200 words) (Unpublished)
Picnic, Pro Life, and Pilgrimage (Diary) (1000 words)
Assorted Reviews and Gallery Proposals for Edmonton Artists, including reviews of photographer Orest Semischer, a history of Edmonton Modernism, some thoughts on Rodeo Photographers, and some young (under 30) Edmonton Photographers (2000 words)
Sex:
Review of Willie Nelson's Cowboy's are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other (Unpublished) (1000 Words)
Oh, My God I Fucked Kenny (PCA/AA Conference Presentation) (6000 words)
Jake Gyllenhaal's Dick and Anne Hathaway's Tits: On the Necessity of Prairie Bisexuality (1000 Words)
Peniston's: A Post Grad Drag King, (or another kind of economic migration) (1000 words) (To Be Written)
Straighten you out: A personally Queer History of Saint John's School of Alberta
Occasional pieces on Tim McGraw's wrestling t-shirt, Joe Nichol's Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off, the erotic loneliness of I Never Liked Planes by Robbie Fulks, a gendered analysis of Reba McEntire and Bobbi Gentry's Fancy, and a deconstruction of the sexual aesthetics of the National Finals versus the Farmers Rodeo.
God:
An Interview with Lutheran Singer/Songwriter Johnathon Rundman (8000 words) (Killing the Buddha)
She's In Love With the Boy (5000 words) (PCA/AA)
William Kurelek: Prarie Visionary (2500 words) (Raw Visions)
14 Thoughts on Queer Catholic Bodies (1000 words) (Queer and Catholic (Routledge)
Occasional pieces on Dolly Parton's Stairway to Heaven, Brad Paisley's When I Get To Heaven, Chely Wright's The River, No Depression in Heaven, Iris Dement's God Might Forgive You (But I Don't) , and discussions of the LDS temple in Cardston, and the aesthetic plainness of LDS chapels, plus some small personal histories.
From Art Incorparated Julian Stallabraas.
The wide window filled with a noisy outside world needs an outside full of attractive strangers, not full of nazis; the glass door down to the floor really presupposes sunshine that looks in and comes in, not the Gestapo.
Ernst Bloch
(net) works can be co[oed prefectly from one machine to the next, and much of the works are not merly reproduciable but freely distributable. Such works can be copied perfectly from one machine to the next, and much of the code that makes them operate is open for viewing, copying and rewriting. If the Net clture of sharing data threatens even those industries that have embraced industrial producitom methods, how much worse it looks for those that have not. Ownership in such circumstances means little, particually because the ethos of internet art tends tends to be more about dialouge then the production of finished works, little own obkects...125
The wide window filled with a noisy outside world needs an outside full of attractive strangers, not full of nazis; the glass door down to the floor really presupposes sunshine that looks in and comes in, not the Gestapo.
Ernst Bloch
(net) works can be co[oed prefectly from one machine to the next, and much of the works are not merly reproduciable but freely distributable. Such works can be copied perfectly from one machine to the next, and much of the code that makes them operate is open for viewing, copying and rewriting. If the Net clture of sharing data threatens even those industries that have embraced industrial producitom methods, how much worse it looks for those that have not. Ownership in such circumstances means little, particually because the ethos of internet art tends tends to be more about dialouge then the production of finished works, little own obkects...125
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Theda Bara, date unkown, collection of the NYPL
two paper models by Shin Takara.
the village voice is suspending cartoons.
how to write a sestina in excel
There is no one as Irish as Barack Obama
valtine makes collages, in a brooklyn hipster way.
FBI had knowledge of the Morgatge Crisis realtively early.
Casper Van Dien fights child abuse.
some nice design remakes, making 70s and 80s trash look like 60s trash.
black market capital hasd floated european bansk during the latest cash crunch.
a dozen or so images of squid by bryan skeeler from national geographic
Video for The Man Who Wouldnbt Cray by Johnny Cash, severe and formal, and also the song is a nice example of common tragedy and bathos that Cash internalises.
DAvid Wilkie Wynfield, Pre Raphelite photog, obsessed with costume, is kind of fascinating, anyone know anytihng?
George Eastman on flickr.
Nickel Creek, When In Rome, i like this, and i am not sure why (maybe how he works the vowels in the word rome)
medicore photos but nice navigating system.
ben wiener paints v. pretty almost abstract still lives.
felipe oliveria baptista coture work, hits the sweet spot b/w futuristic sexbots, logans run dystopia, and riding costume, it makes me horribly happy/
 |
| From Untitled Album |
The sexiest thing about this guy is either:
a) the insoucient exprression
b) how he holds his beer can.
strombo interviews munch.
rainbow cake
salt lake spent 190k, including sending missionaries to defeat prop 8 in California.
a billion dollars of GM american rescue money is going to Brazil.
nice review of a late bonnard show, concentrating on his colours, and less on his formns, i always thot he was a pretty profound formalist, and his lack of status as a calendar artsit is how melty everything is--and i like his candy/sodapop tones a lot better then monets pastels. (and she makes the point, but it must be stated again, that Bonard could handle the whites)
dubai cannot handle its own shit.
gorgeous vernacular housing in Porstsmouth, Dominica.
christian bale loses his shit
 |
| From Untitled Album |
the anglicans meeting in Alexandra now, have no idea what to do next, or at least, no wants to conclude the narrative that has been begun since the mid 1970s. (there are a number of conclusions, a number of resoultions, of course, but many of them require genuine, radical comprimise, something most primates spending their lives as beurcrats, seem unable to do.
after the glitter fades a mix tape for britney. lovely and beautiful peice of writing.
7 year old stoned out of his gourd after the dentist.
gene therapy for hiv/aids?
the founder of legionares for christ, the ultra conserative order of priests, had a child out of wedlock with one of his parshioners, and Ratzinger has tried to hide it. and a flordia anglican who affilated his church with kenya, suspended for similar things.
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| From Untitled Album |
Martin Pawley, Theory and Design from the SEcond Machine Age,
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
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