i have problems with shary boyle's work, and i think it attaches itself to a kind of irony laced, not as clever as it could be, kitsch reclaiming without much political heft, that marks some of toronto's landmines, but it's important enough and au courant enough, and she is young enough, that her as the VB artist makes sense and you know, it's not another man. (It would have been nice to have Faye Heavyshield or Brian Jungen though)

Fabric made from the Glitch patterns of a broken digitial camera

that working class as fashion style, is usually boring, but this one was shot at a llama farm, and well llamas!

not much new in this wsj  profile about John Waters, though a couple of good qoutes about Wall STreet, New Bad Taste, and a couple of fantastic portraits by Adam Gofler.

173 Photos of the Braun Pavillion, mid 60s

it's still the met, so nothing completely radical, but this history of the photographic nude, from the 1840s to the last year sends some interesting messages against the narrative of photographs reclaimed by high art, into the muddle/refusal of the same. One of the more interesting things, is its inclusion of anonomoyous studio shots into the canon (Brassai by Phyisque Pictorials, Muybridge next to 19th century french shots. I also wonder if naked/nude is still an unstated distinction, and if this unsettles it a bit.


The best thing about this live performance of Beck's E-Pro, Live, is Becks little kid dancing off to the side

Nunavat Food Price Blog

Actor, Model, and Pioneering Trasngender activist April Ashley, gets an MBE and Mexican transgender activist, found tortured and killed in Pueblo.

Linda Holmes on the class implications of foodies and the bacon sundae at Burger King

Paul Rudolph House for Sale in Sarasota.

dozens of examples of visual coding



A Spiritual Baptist Annointing, Brooklyn New York.

The Lancet calls out Canadian aborginal health policy, including the cutting of community resources.





Jared Poris, member of the senate for Colarado, makes mincemeat out of the DEAs  hypocrisy on Marijuana.

Kelly Hofer is a Hutterite, whose work as a photographer, caused him as to leave the colony. I don't quite understand the culture of photography here, I thought that (esp. post the Alberta decision in 2004) that there was a doubling down on the idea of taking pictures as graven images, and his leaving would suggest that was a problem, but the shots of people with small, consumer grade digital cameras, suggest that there might have been a loosening--the Hutterite ambiguity about technology as it relates to use function seems realvenet here.

9 drawings of Turtle Anatomy by Erenst Haeckel.

thousands of documents from Marcel Bruer's career have been digitzed and put online by the Univeristy of Syracuse 

eleven photos of cathedral cellings by David Stephenson

Jack Kirby's place in the art historical medium of Collage

i am Anderson's intended audience

Why doubt that there could be a coincidence between his and your cultural/aesthetic lodestones?

i am intellectually interested in the creation of taste as an identifying categories

and that this is v. much not a condience

also, he can spell better than i am

(not making a value judgement)

No marketer or demographer in his/her right mind would come up with Anderson's referents as a strategy. That's what seems to identify them as more reliably individual than anything focus-grouped. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're Anderson's. I think too much cynical marketing and manipulation has made us all suspicious of every kind of cultural product as something designed and targeted. It could just be that Hunsecker thought the fellow was funny, so he gave him a plug.

Jack Spade

Best Made Co

Glenn O Brian

Simon Doonan

there is an aesthetic of that kind of work

i dont know how accidental or delibrate it is

but you know

the question of why exactly someone decides to love francois hardy

and if that love is nostalgia, or hipster kitsch

or about the design of the record label

or if the love of the records preceded the love of the artist, or vice versa

is an interesting question

and if i love Francois Hardy as an aspritational gesture

as a signifer of taste and class (double meaning intended) or if i love Francois Hardy because she is a genuinly interesting musician

or because of her eroticism

Francois Hardy here is a metonomy

(or that the hank williams tone chosen is one that is mostly known as a 80s reclaimed kitsch classic?)

(it's also something i am concerned with re:madmen)

I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click


happy bloomsday

provisional acceptance for concordia this sept.

qoutes from the book of dead philosophers, simon critchley:

sexuality is part of our behaviour. It's part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. it is our own creation, and much more than the dsicovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of realtionships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatlity, it's a possibility for creative life...

mf

"The feeling of being attacked as a reactionary at least has a suprising note"
adorno to beckett.

We learn what it is to anticpate our own deaths from those others whose anticipations of their deaths we have in some significant way shared.
alasidair reynolds on edith stein

Gryogry Luckacs was not a great admirer of the work of Franz Kafka, whome he declared to be 'idealist' and a bad example of decadent aesthetic modernism. Lukacs advocated an aesthetic realism that rejected the Kafkaesque world of Angst and allienation where isolated individuals were arrsted for unkwon crime,s submitted to absurd trials and condenmed without reason. After the Societ tanks moved into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising...Lukacks was arrested in the middle of the night and thwon into a miliary lorry along wiht other givernment officals. The lorry that disapparered into the obscurity of the countryside for an unkonw but proably unsavoury fate. Lukacs was taken to a vast castle in TRanslvania and was told whether he was going ot be freed to prrmantley detained. So the story goes, Lukacs turned to one of the detainnd ministers and said, 'So, Kafka was a realist after all

We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of volputousness, we end in the dissoulation of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. Schopenhauer.

By understanding many things, I have accomplished nothing.
Groot

I suffer great disaster because I have a body. When I have no body; what disaster can their be. Lao Tzu.

shostachovich 11th, AMAZING.

chris d is getting married and has asked me to be a groomssperson, im chuffed

five notes on ryman from 80 to 89



a) a few return returns to the black or red fields of his younger work, so it's white on white on black or white on white on red--but he uses enamelc or latex so the colour is only visible on the edges. in a similar way, some of the later work rebels against flatness--so he has a flat surface of some transparency (say wax paper) and then a flat shiny surface (say latex) and then a set of visible, off white paint strokes, that have an explicit texture--and this texture is set on the edges.

b) some of it uses the colour of armature (the black of bolts, the tan or beige of frames, the silver of screws, the yellow/grey of fiberglass) in terribly promient ways--so they become a formal way of completely working against what he had done for the previours 30 years. sometimes they even have holes drilled straight in them.

c) some work is literally split in two--where the armature is visible as a straight line, or like the visble, slightly smaller space between two sperate fields,. and in one work credential from 1985, not only is the middle section smaller then the lower and upper fields, it is a different colour, and it is slightly recessed. (which reminds me of late 60s jack bush paintings--where much of the work is floating lines or colour on a overpainted field, but the field is painted until a few cm from the edge, so the raw canvas shows thru, there is something incredibly powerful about the absence there)

d) which reminds of how much i like the gaps in his painting--the places where work is not painted, the middle absences, the edges of some kind of rawness.

e) much of them are really glossy--what is it with tight, theoritical, often conceptual painters getting weirdly brassy or glossy in the 80s--was it a market thing?

I worry that I like Lisa Gidley's work mostly due to Vanity, but it's gorgeous. 

The birther and arch conserative Ken Bennett 's  son has an odd realtionship to younger members of a camp he belonged to, including some severe sexual violence.

The London design firm Pymlico, and the designer Roy McCarthy were upset at how rigid the laws and guidelines about London Olympics were, so they found an open source solution, that works both practically (now pubs can tell their audience they are showing the games, for example) and political (it becomes a critique of of the intersection between corpration and government). Plus, it's lovely and heavily adaptable.

Dana Schutz has a new show of paintings, i really am confused about how i feel here--they are less violent, less angry, with the compositon opened up, and the colours brighter---but the article suspects that politics are a bit more leached.

a few dozen photos by Russell Lee of the 40s, the colours are unreal.



Holy Modal Rounders, 1962, interesting how the edges of art music and the edges of folk music bleed into each other here, also quite other worldly.

16 photos of early 70s gay rights strugle

fascinating article on how Richter's work changed explicitly due to the concerns of the market. More discussion 
Speaking of Richter, these Denzler paintings from frozen VHS Stills are Richteresque.

smart little peice on how models have become ugly

Biola College, evangelical and conserative, has a radical queer underground emerging, of students and facility

Photos and Blueprints, with some explanation of the Morris Mechanic Theater, a brutalist masterpeice in Baltimore.


Rooney Doppleganger, one clothed and one half naked, gorgeously shot, plus you know, hottie Ronnie.

The best exceprt about this is the eucharistic potential of inuit shamanic walrus consumption

When Dolan was in Milwauke, he gave up to 20k to some paedophile priests to have them go away.

Chantal Herbert on the rise of the NDP and Conserative EI

Chronichle of Higher Education Article  on the problems of money and univeristiy presses, and why moving to digital presses might not be a solution.

Peanuts Tarot.



Col. Sanders on Swaggart's PTL Club, notable for any number of reasons, including but not limited to the set.