Waste My Time, Please

PHONE: Ring!

CJB:  Good morning, PFB.

MISS PERSONALITY:  WHERE'S MY BOOK?

CJB:  Excuse me?

MP:  MY BOOK.  Where is it?

CJB: Is this [CUSTOMER NAME]?

MP:  YES!

CJB:  It came yesterday.  You phoned, remember?  But then you hung up on my staff member, before he could tell you it was here.

MP:  HE WAS TAKING TOO LONG.  Also, he used peculiar diction.

CJB:  Well, he was trying to help you out by giving you accurate information.

MP:  I GUESS I'LL BE SHOPPING AT CHAPTERS FROM NOW ON!

CJB:  That works for me.  Give them my love.
- posted by cjb @ 11:31 AM

 
All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them came from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a "holocaust of flame," as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

(Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust)
- posted by cjb @ 3:02 PM

 
"I went to LA. I love the space and light and architecture and vegetation there." (Stephen Shore in conversation with the author, 2006)
- posted by cjb @ 9:38 AM

 

"A survey was made of BROADWAY between Fourth and Seventh Streets, to determine building use, occupancy, and square footage utilized. The long plan represents not the familiar building footprint, but rather the compression of BROADWAY buildings against the street. The solid black line indicates a vacant building. The most obvious example of this is between Fourth and Fifth Street on the west side of BROADWAY where a few buildings in the center of the block are bracketed by the empty Broadway Department Store and the recently closed Newberry’s. A perpetual clearance sale forced all products down to the ground level, escalators were boarded up sealing off the upper floors, and finally the metal gate closed, leaving only the inlaid terrazzo sign “Newberry’s” in the sidewalk floor. Instantly these buildings become voids in the city, the modern ruins of BROADWAY."
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 AM

 

Metropolitan (50), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:17 AM

 

Metropolitan (48), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 8:38 PM

 

Metropolitan (47), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 7:50 PM

 

Metropolitan (46), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 8:25 PM

 

Metropolitan (45), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 4:22 PM

 

Metropolitan (44), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:21 AM

 

Metropolitan (43), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:37 AM

 

Metropolitan (42), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 11:44 AM

 

Metropolitan (41), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 AM

 

Metropolitan (32), 2011
- posted by cjb @ 10:21 PM

 

Metropolitan (40), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 8:48 PM

 

Metropolitan (39), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 8:23 PM

 
More Metropolitan

Some of the early Metropolitans are gone.  The Google Street View cars are rolling through Los Angeles faster than I ever expected, and images I selected even a few months ago have now been erased and/or overwritten.  I had hoped to keep the images "live" as long as possible, so that they could be zoomed, panned, etc. by anyone.  But it looks like the price of keeping them live is permanently losing some of them, and while I like the freedom to examine, and maybe even criticize, my framing decisions, I also like specific qualities of specific images -- light, figures, etc., and don't want to lose those things.  I wouldn't be a photographer if I didn't.  So the images that appear here from now on will do so in a slightly different format, thereby achieving the same semi-permanance as paper prints or backlit display boxes. 
- posted by cjb @ 8:05 PM

 
And Speaking of Exhibition...

The Metropolitans are as much a part of my practice as my "autonomous" photographs.  My ideal exhibition would contain autonomous prints, appropriated prints, "location rephotography," backlit digital images, both appropriated and autonomous, and some new autonomous print works made with surplus Google Street View technology, which in spirit are about halfway between Scott McFarland's constructed multipart images and 19th-c. pinhole photographs.

New website for all of this stuff coming in due course.
- posted by cjb @ 9:27 AM

 

Metropolitan (38), 2012

Some of these are going to be exhibited later on this year.  They exist in two formats -- framed laserjet prints, and backlit projections in off-the-rack "digital media frames" -- but each image has a preferred form; in other words, an image is either presented as a print or a backlit projection, but not in both forms.  Editions of 1 + 1AP, except for an as-yet unproduced fundraising edition of 10 paper prints.
- posted by cjb @ 8:56 AM

 

Someone in NYC replicates a game that I enjoy playing with somewhat different material (what L. would call, only half-joking, "Another one of your 5 topics of conversation") in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and select overseas destinations.
- posted by cjb @ 8:35 AM

 
Farewell Lloyd Dykk: critic, journalist, curmudgeon, aesthetic judger.  I never met Lloyd, but he wrote a few kind notes about Anodyne and some of the photographs that appear here from time to time.  He was also a prime example of a combative public intellectual at work in a forum that wasn't really equipped in any way whatsoever to deal with him. LD always put me in mind of that other LD, a fellow "yeller for society."  (Some more recent LD notes here, "guest columns" sprinkled throughout like muffin raisins).
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 AM

 
Canon G10, check.  Google Street View rack mount, check.  Homemade software bridge, check.  Render engine, check.  Ladder, check.  Motif still unmolested, check.  Lawn chair, check.  Harsh bright winter sunlight?  Not today, evidently.
- posted by cjb @ 9:14 AM

 

Relevant to my interests, and found totally by accident.  If the source image was a New York Times crossword, it'd be a Saturday puzzle.
- posted by cjb @ 6:42 PM

 

Study for a photograph, 2012
- posted by cjb @ 6:30 PM

 

"Location: end of Tipton Way near Tipton Terrace off Figueroa Street in Highland Park - One block from M.'s home and studio."
- posted by cjb @ 9:31 AM