In Los Angeles for a week, photographing in preparation for an exhibition next year.
- posted by cjb @ 9:53 AM

 

Scott McFarland, Quality Photo Lab, 1300 Cahuenga Blvd, Los Angeles, 2008
- posted by cjb @ 9:36 AM

 
Strange and Wonderful Confiscated Plants Find Home at L.A. Zoo
- posted by cjb @ 9:42 AM

 

L., studying a red rock tower way up high: "Ever been there?" "Never, want to go?"

An hour later: perched on the peak's tiny spine. The khaki-colored desert spread below. A huge hawk riding a nearby updraft. A nest the size of a bathtub on a neighboring spire.

Climbing as a metaphor for relationship: constant surprise; the sense of your own possibility.

Happy 2nd., L.

xo CJB
- posted by cjb @ 10:40 AM

 
Flood in progress through the bookstore ceiling:

NOT CHUCK D. [holding self-burned CD]: Hey man! Are you into local independent hip-hop?

CJB: Not right now I'm not.

NCD: Man, you should really get that [GESTURING AT WATERFALL] under control!
- posted by cjb @ 5:38 PM

 
Emulation

- posted by cjb @ 9:52 AM

 

Desert Plants - A Curator's Introduction to the Huntington Desert Garden, by Gary Lyons
- posted by cjb @ 9:46 AM

 

Anyone in town this Thursday (September 21st) should drop into CSA Space for our fifth (!!!) anniversary show, a very tightly edited group of photographs by Mike Grill, organized by Steven Tong and I. Mike's pictures were also our first exhibition, way back in September 2005, a show originally planned for Steven and Sally Lee's old 69 Pender space, which was purchased, weeks before the show, by a certain condo flogger. Steve and Sally found themselves out on their ear. Steve and I felt bad for Mike, who had put considerable time and effort into printing pictures and building frames, and now had no exhibition. I relayed this tale of woe to Adam Harrison over mojitos. "You know there's a space above your bookstore for rent, right?" Several hours later we placed a drunken series of cellphone calls to Steven to inform him that he was now the co-director and co-curator of an as-yet unnamed independent art exhibition space. I think the results have been more than satisfactory for all concerned.
- posted by cjb @ 9:24 AM

 

Metropolitan (9), 2010
- posted by cjb @ 9:36 AM

 
On Metropolitan

Google's car-mounted cameras are really getting good; I'm amazed by the clarity of some of the recent Street Views, which has allowed me to remotely examine sites I never previously would have considered photographing. The source panoramas are full of strange blurs and mismatched edges, which I have deliberately retained. There are also minor differences between the thumbnails and the full-frame images (eg., #8, below), which I have left alone; they're probably best considered alternate takes, and equal in my judgment.

I still get occasional emails about my not showing these, or the pictures that appear here and over at that other website. I'm not opposed to exhibition, and, over the last two or two and a half years, have made sporadic attempts to get my photographs up on the walls of some local venues. But Vancouver and Toronto curators have not been very receptive to "just pictures." So, early next year, it looks like I'll be renting a display space, fixing it up, making a selection of photographs, writing a "curatorial text" and probably sitting behind the gallery desk, too. I had not really anticipated a 100% DIY practice at the beginning, but modern art's model of the artist emulating different kinds of cultural producers (Dan Graham as businessman; Walker Evans as "commissioning editor"; Ed Ruscha as publisher; Don Judd as engineer) provides a framework for much of what I'm doing. And as I look back on a string of comic book conventions; shoestring "independent nonprofit art display spaces"; used bookstores & etc. it occurs to me that this model, while more or less totally incomprehensible from the outside and about as far removed from the Belkin-Catriona-CAG model as it is possible to get in one lifetime, is faithful to my own experience and temperament. And art is always best when it singlemindedly (recklessly?) pursues its own path, without concession or apology.

Off to Los Angeles and San Diego in a week to make some more pictures.
- posted by cjb @ 11:22 AM

 

Metropolitan (8), 2010
- posted by cjb @ 8:25 PM

 
Waste My Time, Please

STAY-AT-HOME DAD WEARING SANDALS: I've got a hard one for you!

CJB: Yeeeeees?

SAHDWS: Oh, you won't have it!

CJB: Try me.

SAHDWS: John Masters.

CJB: It's true. Not if I'm doing my job properly.

SAHDWS: What about...Harry Crews.

CJB: Down the large format fiction aisle about three quarters of the way; it's alphabetical from the far end.

SAHDWS: No, I'm asking if you've ever heard of him. I don't want to buy any books!

CJB: Rosalind Krauss.

SAHDWS: What?

CJB: Ever heard of her?

SAHDWS: No.

CJB: M. John Harrison.

SAHDWS: What are you doing?

CJB: Making a point. Thanks for playing.
- posted by cjb @ 5:00 PM

 

Tangerine Cat, 2009-10


- posted by cjb @ 9:08 AM

 

Kinda handsome. Also $190USD, and consequently not being purchased any time soon.

"True vintage fit for flattering appearance, not the current-era sloppy, relaxed fit with droopy shoulder seams."
- posted by cjb @ 7:31 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Oldschool Fantasy Continent Map, by Dru

"Hand drawn on 22" x 34" hex paper and coloured using pencil crayons, c. 1990."
- posted by cjb @ 5:11 PM

 

Vancouver-based artist Rebecca Belmore, Canada's 2005 Venice representative, is being sued by her former commercial dealer, Toronto's Pari Nadimi.

According to a press release authored by Glenn Alteen, "The legal battle began over 4 years ago, when Belmore, after deciding to leave the Pari Nadimi Gallery, requested the return of her artworks, related documentation and the payment (and an accounting) for artwork sold by the dealer. These basic, legal rights are still being violated. Belmore recognizes the importance of the case for herself and others: 'If Pari Nadimi is successful in this claim against me, it would mean no artist would ever be free to choose to leave. Artists would be slaves to their galleries. This is a horrible precedent.'"

I have enormous respect for Belmore, and was very pleased when she agreed to show a new installation piece at CSA Space in September 2008. I will immediately be making a donation to Belmore's legal defense fund, and urge all of you in the readership to do likewise. Nadimi's shameful treatment of Belmore cannot be allowed to stand. Artists are not resources, like cattle herds or stands of corn, that commercial art dealers can automatically "cultivate" for a guaranteed return. Nor is it an artist's job to indemnify their dealer for the dealer's inability to sell their art, or for a general lack of business savvy. Even the suggestion of such an arrangement is repulsive to me as an art writer, photographer, gallery co-owner, collector and businessman.
- posted by cjb @ 3:17 PM

 

Restaurant Ghost, 2010
- posted by cjb @ 11:37 AM

 

"'There are days when 15 or 20 people pass by and might not even notice I’m here,' he said, as several pedestrians seemed to do just that. 'A decade ago, if you saw someone covering their ear and talking to themselves, you would have thought they were just nuts. Today that’s the norm. It’s as if they are totally consumed by their own world and have no room for the outside. It is complete immersion in self to the exclusion of all else. That has to have an impact on the rest of our lives.'"
- posted by cjb @ 11:21 AM

 
Metropolitan

Los Angeles community and demonstration gardens.

The Flower District.

1300 North Cahuenga Boulevard.

San Marino.

Claremont.

Pasadena.

Riverside.

- posted by cjb @ 6:26 PM

 
Waste My Time, Please

SKETCHY THIEF: Hey there! I'm just gonna leave my bag here while I browse, OK?

CJB: You've got to be fucking kidding me.

ST: Hey man, no need for language!

CJB: Dude, my girlfriend caught you stealing books last night. She threw you out, right in front of me. Why are you back here?

ST: She, uh, she did?

CJB: Right before nine. True crime. Two paperbacks.

ST: I didn't steal them!

CJB: The books were down your fucking pants.

ST: But what I'm saying, guy, is that I didn't steal them. [PAUSE] She made me put them back!

(ST then proposed to pay $5 for the not-quite stolen books -- our price: approx $14.95 -- and was promptly ejected)
- posted by cjb @ 6:04 PM

 
Today's soundtrack: Lee Fields and The Expressions, These Moments
- posted by cjb @ 12:09 PM

 

Last night's dinner: organic chicken with thyme and smoked paprika, fresh corn pudding. My riff on a recipe from Christina's Cookbook (Christina Orchid, Sasquatch, 2004), which I found remaindered down the road at Book Warehouse for $7.99. This little book is a revelation, full of high-flavor recipes made from only five or six ingredients, plus Orchid's idiosynctatic authorial voice, which keeps digressing from the recipes to childhood visits to her grandparents' Eastern Washington ranch; to explosives; to Russian thugs hunting wild sturgeon in Californian drainage ditches; to her eighty-year-old mother the botanist; to Douglas fir gelato; and, finally, to the mechanics of operating a small, French-influenced regional restaurant out of an old second floor apartment above a gas station on a tiny San Juan island. One of the very best cookbooks I have ever read.
- posted by cjb @ 9:44 AM

 
Sookie Sookie (instrumental by backup band; Don Covay, 1965)/ Heighty Hi (all three Dukes sing; Lee Michaels, 1969)/ Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing (McDonald & Russell sing; Fontella Bass & Bobby McGuire, 1965)/ Shakedown Street (Fagen sings; Grateful Dead, 1978)/ You Never Can Tell (Boz sings; Chuck Berry, 1964)/ I Got News for You (McDonald sings; Ray Charles, 1961)/ Green Flower Street (Fagen, 1982)/ Miss Sun (Scaggs, 1981)/ I Keep Forgettin’ (McDonald, Doobie Brothers, 1982)/ Rock Steady (Carolyn Leonhart sings, Aretha Franklin 1971)/ King Harvest (Fagen sings, The Band, 1969) Rag Mama Rag (Scaggs sings, The Band, 1969) The Shape I’m In (McDonald sings, The Band, 1970)/ Love TKO (Scaggs sings, Teddy Pendergrass, 1980)/ I Love the Life I Live (Russell sings, Muddy Waters, 1957) Cadillac Walk (Scaggs sings, Mink Deville, 1977)/ What a Fool Believes (McDonald, Doobie Brothers, 1978)/ I.G.Y. (Fagen, 1982)/ Lowdown (Scaggs, 1976)/ Takin' It to the Streets (McDonald and Russell, Doobie Brothers, 1976) ENCORE Reelin' in the Years (Fagen, Steely Dan, 1973)/ Them Changes (McDonald sings, Buddy Miles, 1970)
- posted by cjb @ 8:53 AM

 
"We were totally independent and have been ever since."
- posted by cjb @ 4:16 PM