Anodyne: 04/01/2011 - 05/01/2011

Berkshire 2010 AGM, underway as we speak. Some gems:

BUFFETT: I feel like you don't want to make important decisions in anger.

MUNGER: You can always tell a man to go to hell tomorrow.

And:

"Munger goes so far as to pillory a 'really God-awful' culture, modern Greece, which he dislikes on many levels. Tax evasion being one of them, and the habit of impertinently closing tourist attractions often apparently being another."
- posted by cjb @ 8:48 AM

If you're in the neighborhood, I'll be speaking (briefly) on Brad Phillips' paintings and photographs today at 2:30pm at Monte Clark Gallery, Granville Street, and (again briefly) on CSA Space @ CSA Space at 4:30pm, as part of Canadian Art's Vancouver Gallery Hop.
- posted by cjb @ 7:46 AM

"They Spent So Much Money On It That It Should Have Worked" : The Lost World of Sid and Marty Kroftt (huge PDF file, takes a while to open)
- posted by cjb @ 8:28 PM

- posted by cjb @ 8:07 PM

"'I'll do anything to get one photograph,' Evans said. 'Stieglitz wouldn't cut a quarter of an inch off a frame. I would cut any number of inches off my frames in order to get a better picture.'"
- posted by cjb @ 11:21 AM

MINE OURS YOURS
- posted by cjb @ 9:34 AM

Long detailed interview with hyper-analytical ex-Buffett biographer Alice Schroeder
- posted by cjb @ 3:15 PM

Facing Up To Our Challenges

"Only Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have shown the leadership, the bullheadedness (let's call it what it is) and the discipline this country needs. He has built the Conservatives into arguably the only truly national party, and during his five years in office has demonstrated strength of character, resolve and a desire to reform. Canadians take Mr. Harper's successful stewardship of the economy for granted, which is high praise."

That pompous, droning Central Canadian voice. Let's weigh everything. Reason, compromise, don't-rock-the-boat. The bland plaid world of the Bank of Montreal lobby or the Power Corporation boardroom. Officialese.

Fuck you, Phillip Crawley, and your sanctimonious condescending unsigned editorial. And you wonder why no one will pay for your "content" any more, and why no one cares.
- posted by cjb @ 1:22 PM

C.D. Wright via John Latta: "Everyone should be favored to know one person of courage [at a critical moment] and genius [of accident and design], though that person arrives with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us, sometimes in disproportionate abundance."
- posted by cjb @ 9:50 AM

Relevant to My Interests

http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/research/62full.pdf
- posted by cjb @ 1:43 PM

Pinus pinea, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 3:25 PM

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Frederick Horsman Varley, Fire Ranger's Look-Out, c. 1932
- posted by cjb @ 8:46 PM

Willamette Falls in 1918
- posted by cjb @ 8:37 PM

Diana Kennedy, autodidact, cultural anthropologist, food writer:

"Perhaps not everyone will feel like making the wasp’s nest salsa that Kennedy collected in the Puerto Escondido area of the state, but what an astonishment it is to read a recipe that seems to come through the millennia straight from the time of the hunter-gatherers. Step one: find your wasp’s nest. Step two: munch on a few of the grubs. Step three: invent corn, develop the tortilla, grind the nest—the part with the wasp eggs in it—in a hollowed-out bit of volcanic rock, and roll yourself a few tacos. 'Interesting and delicious' is how Kennedy cheerfully describes the result."
- posted by cjb @ 8:07 PM

Fairchild, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 10:06 PM

YVR -> SEA -> PDX -> YVR

Photographs; bookstores; restaurants; Helpsy; the Waffle Window

Back soon.
- posted by cjb @ 9:31 PM

Donald Fagen on Roger Nichols, via NPR
- posted by cjb @ 11:56 AM

Text Message From Pennsylvania, by Abigail Guay

"This way of knowing a man is born of proximity and repetition, of the sort of business practice where goods are exchanged for goods within a closed and basic value system. Here there are none of the abstracted and symbolic values of the art market, or the complex push and pull of the various networks of art makers, dealers, and collectors. When I told Pete Vandewater at Clearfield Machine about my relationship to the Dotts family, he immediately and frankly noted that my grandfather had been a good man.

There was a similar assuredness in Vandewater's equally positive assessment of Koons, an acknowledgement of a basic accord between two people working together to solve a problem—far afield from the typically ironic or gushing takes on the famous artist that I hardly pause to read anymore."
- posted by cjb @ 9:05 AM

Homestead, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 11:17 PM

Possible sources for SDFKW (& others):

Only The Wind (Tennant/Lowe, 1990)

This is Not America (Bowie/Metheny, 1985)
- posted by cjb @ 10:58 PM

Ghost Dance, c. 1994. I moved my friend and editor David, now Karen, back from Edmonton over the Yellowhead Highway with this tape on near-continuous loop in the cab of the rental van.
- posted by cjb @ 10:37 PM

Roger Nichols, artist among sound engineers -- NYT obituary

"I was working on a Johnny Winter session on the weekends, with Steve Barn all day and with Steely Dan all night, so they had me going 24 hours a day. They tried running me into the ground, but it didn't work. Then there was the time when we were working at Cherokee Studios when two of the tape machines were grounded improperly and I touched both of the machines and everything shorted out. The face plate on one of the machines was completely melted but I didn't feel a thing. They figured something weird was going on."

- posted by cjb @ 9:55 PM

Eiger speed record, via my friend and fellow mountaineer Arnold Shives
- posted by cjb @ 9:48 PM

John Krakauer on Greg Mortenson: required reading, and pretty damning.

"Anxiety over whether a happy ending would take place in time for Stones to arrive at bookstores before Christmas created considerable suspense in the offices of Viking Penguin."
- posted by cjb @ 8:47 PM

Donation seeking robot. Pretty sure a small army of these is high on Rose T. Cat's current wish list.

(via Bruce Sterling)
- posted by cjb @ 1:01 PM

Farewell Roger Nichols, originator of that super-lacquered round sound.
- posted by cjb @ 11:26 AM

Borders bankruptcy, 2011. I didn't make this photograph, but I sure wish I had.
- posted by cjb @ 7:31 PM

Punctum, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 5:34 PM

Magnolia for Brad, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 9:21 AM

Anodyne HQ haz new 24" color monitor, new 64-bit GIMP, new hard disk. Coming soon: new pictures, real objects in the world.
- posted by cjb @ 6:51 PM

Kits, natch. Guest photo courtesy the long-suffering Keith D.
- posted by cjb @ 12:37 PM

Showdown in the Sunshine State, by Megan McCardle, from this month's Atlantic

A well-written account of how two different investors can reach vastly different estimates of intrinsic value. I don't agree with McCardle's conclusion -- "Markets have become more efficient; the inefficiencies that the value discipline thrives on are being squeezed out of the system" -- but her article is a good window into the kinds of business problems that occupy me more or less daily.
- posted by cjb @ 8:57 AM

Purity, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 4:51 PM

Rackstraw Downes interviewed by Philip Lopate

"I remember Katz looking at a geometrical painting I had on my easel. He said, Oh, that’s very interesting, it looks like an early Winslow Homer!

There was no barrier there between figurative and abstraction at all! He meant that it had a sweet feeling to it. Like Sir Homer would crack the whip and took all those little boys in the field, you know? It had a sweet feeling. It was grey and yellow and white, and it was a sweet abstract painting. There was no division at all there. Fairfield’s house was full of beautiful de Koonings actually."
- posted by cjb @ 9:13 AM

NYC Soundboard

Live versions of some of my favorite songs not originally recorded c. 1972-82, including a beautiful extended Arc-style intro to Suicide Demo For Kara Walker.

(Thx Tower of Sleep)
- posted by cjb @ 9:20 AM

& just for the record, a theoretical/conceptual/contextual shortlist:

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition
Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp
Marcel Henaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer

Once again: fun at parties, all appearances to the contrary.

[Re-edited to add Adorno, embarrassing but true. The only guy reading Teddy on the Westjet flight to LA]
- posted by cjb @ 8:01 PM

Reading:

Marcel Henaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money and Philosophy (Stanford UP, 2010). The most important book to me since Thierry de Duve's Kant After Duchamp (MIT Press, 1998). An excellent theoretical account of the conceptual impulse behind the photographs that appear here, and a good explanation of why I'm no longer an "art journalist." Short answer: inequality; service economy. For those who miss my writing, I'll be speaking on Brad Phillips' work at Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver on Saturday April 30th at 2pm. But the text of that talk is, in Henaff's fine phrase, evidence of a reciprocal social relationship, and not art criticism per se.
- posted by cjb @ 7:28 PM

Metropolitan (29), 2011
- posted by cjb @ 6:50 PM

Arroyo, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 6:17 PM

Latta's Hocquard

A light brought back Objects
settle in for the long run within
the frame Fragment of
characters laid out
Read and arrange

"Photographic writing." Pertinent to many images that appear here.
- posted by cjb @ 9:46 AM

#28's men are waiting along Foothill Boulevard, at the farthest northwest end of the LA Basin. Yesterday was a total writeoff, with the exception of discovering Foothill Boulevard via the new Street View camera's high-res images. If the few miles I scrolled along are anything to judge by, FB deserves a sequence all of its own. Endless curving streetscape, mostly shot in December -- flat grey light; mountain snow; pop-up Xmas tree lots -- with wrinkled brown hills behind. A beaten-down place that reminds me of Kingsway and Nanaimo and Everett, Washington: a place just waiting to be picked up and examined.
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 AM

Daybreak: pigeon shits in my open cappucino. Splash.
- posted by cjb @ 9:28 AM

Metropolitan (28), 2011
- posted by cjb @ 6:59 PM

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Dan Graham, Untitled, 1989
- posted by cjb @ 3:26 PM

- posted by cjb @ 11:35 AM

Metropolitan (27), 2011
- posted by cjb @ 6:39 PM

- posted by cjb @ 9:22 AM

To Hop, a new animated film by the writers of Despicable Me. Unclassifiable. Nods to Gene Wilder's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; to Harvey; to Despicable Me's little yellow minions and breathless clockwork pacing; to ninja movies; Blake Edwards; A Charlie Brown Christmas and to every bad live action holiday special ever recorded. Guest appearances by Chelsea Handler, Hugh Hefner, Russell Brand and the Blind Boys of Alabama. Also The Hoff. The kids around us loved it. So did the extremely stoned woman five seats over. Not the best film I've ever seen, but one with a good heart, a highly idiosyncratic individual vision made from inside a system that discourages the production of same, and one that held our attention all the way through.
- posted by cjb @ 9:17 AM

Farewell Peter B. Howard, legendary US bookseller, exemplary role model

"This often brusque and cantankerous (yet supremely sensitive) individual..."
- posted by cjb @ 7:42 PM