In response to that photograph of Maui Nui Botanical Gardens: I didn't make it, but I wish I had. 

I feel a deep affinity for that unnamed photographer's representation of space, and I would have properly credited him or her if I could.

Some pictures of that place and others forthcoming here in due course.
- posted by cjb @ 11:42 AM

 
And it took shape in the form of an image in the form of a living memory
The way her shadow used to walk by your side
In a different time, in a different city
- posted by cjb @ 9:59 PM

 
In the North Pacific for a week with L., Scat, Rose & various pieces of photographic gear.

Back soon.
- posted by cjb @ 9:32 PM

 

CJ (5), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:18 PM

 

CJ (4), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 12:09 AM

 

CJ (3), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 11:46 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Maui Nui Botantical Gardens
- posted by cjb @ 5:27 PM

 

Pacific Remote Island Area

"The Pacific Remote Island Area (PRIA) includes seven islands located in the Central Pacific that are under the jurisdiction of the United States. Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, and Palmyra Atoll lie between Hawai‘i and American Samoa and are administered as National Wildlife Refuges (NWR) by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) of the Dept. of the Interior (DOI). Wake Island, which is located between the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Guam, is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. that is administered by the DOI and the U.S. Air Force."
- posted by cjb @ 6:08 PM

 
INT. WAREHOUSE - LATER/BLUE HOUR - NIGHT

Barry is alone, closing up. He takes a look at the harmonium and presses it, makes a sound....a little bit more....makes a few notes. END SCORE QUE as it blends and fades into the notes that Barry plays.

BEAT. He closes its small cover, does something on his desk and then:

His face gets bright red, he holds back tears, opens his mouth and has a serious but small burst of overwhelming emotion and then it's over.
- posted by cjb @ 11:25 AM

 
"T.J. Clark, writing before Gandy, seems to agree that these 'exigencies of economic exchange' are the primary determining forces in the new form of spatial segregation, but argues that that occurs despite a sharp boundary between the city, which is now even more an 'autarchic' entity, and the banlieue, to which the poor are banished. He considers class—and not gender—to be the dominant force in the new spatial reorganization of the city: 'Economic representations [are] the matrix around which all others are organized. In particular, the class of an individual—his or her effective possession of or separation from the means of production—is the determinant fact of social life.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:37 AM

 

CJ (2), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:31 AM

 
" [A] form of writing for which there is no exact English term: fait divers. This is a French expression, in common use for centuries, for a certain kind of newspaper piece: a compressed report of an unusual happening. What fait divers means literally is 'incidents,' or 'various things.' The nearest English equivalent is 'news briefs' or, more recently, 'news of the weird.' The fait divers has a long and important history in French literature. Sensationalistic though it is, it has influenced the writing of Flaubert, Gide, Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. In Francophone literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture. But though a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English language as a literary form."

(via Raymond Boisjoly, and broadly applicable to most of the repurposed images found here)
- posted by cjb @ 9:25 AM

 

CJ (1), 2012

"I rest on these moments because they are actual and beyond question." (Charles Bowden)
- posted by cjb @ 10:31 PM

 
"[T]he categorical imperative of the search for and the transmission of truth."  (Claude Lanzmann)

"A kind of poetry falls out of the mouths of people as this new reality sinks in."  (Charles Bowden)

"We break it all down in hopes that you might understand."  (Curtis Mayfield)
- posted by cjb @ 9:24 AM

 

Tonight's soundtrack: Grant Green, Maybe Tomorrow
- posted by cjb @ 9:08 PM

 
5.4

"Pitchfork couldn’t develop intelligence on the individual level because the site’s success depended largely on its function as a kind of opinion barometer: a steady, reliable, unsurprising accretion of taste judgments. Fully developed critics have a tendency to surprise themselves, and also to argue with one another, and not just over matters of taste—they fight about the real stuff. This would have undermined Pitchfork’s project."

[....]

"I sometimes have the utopian thought that in a better world, pop music criticism simply wouldn’t exist. What justification could there be for separating the criticism of popular music from the criticism of all other kinds? Nobody thinks it’s weird that the New York Review of Books doesn’t include an insert called the New York Review of Popular Books. One of pop music criticism’s most important functions today is to perpetuate pop music’s favorite myth about itself—that it has no history, that it was born from nothing but drugs and 'revolution' sometime in the middle of the 20th century. But the story of The Beatles doesn’t begin with John, Paul, George, and Ringo deplaning at JFK. It begins with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1722 Treatise on Harmony, which began to theorize the tonal system that still furnishes the building blocks for almost all pop music. Or, if you like, it goes back to the 16th century, when composers began to explore the idea that a song’s music could be more than just a setting for the lyrical text—that it could actually help to express the words as well. Our very recent predecessors have done many important and wonderful things with their lives, but they did not invent the musical universe all by themselves. The abolition of pop criticism as a separate genre would help pop writers to see the wider world they inhabit.

Most of all, though, we need new musical forms. We need a form that doesn’t think of itself as a collection of influences. We need musicians who know that music can take inspiration not only from other music but from the whole experience of life. Pitchfork and indie rock are currently run by people who behave as though the endless effort to perfect the habits of cultural consumption is the whole experience of life. We should leave these things behind, and instead pursue and invent a musical culture more worth our time."

(via Jon Knowles, w/ thanks)
- posted by cjb @ 6:43 PM

 
"And if someone who or something that's not been previously taken seriously starts to be taken seriously, what causes that to happen, and who decides when?

Anomalies, town houses, being ahead of one's time ('obviously') and posessing no small degree of chic would seem to inhibit being taken 'too seriously.'

As would an art of schismatizing."

(Bruce Hainley on Sturtevant)
- posted by cjb @ 9:14 AM

 

Stonebreaker (Study for CJ), 2012

A vivid dissection that mocked
The strut of vivisection...
- posted by cjb @ 4:27 PM

 
"Carefully shaped and slightly fragile." (Sasha Frere-Jones)

"I was a man slow to mature, I was not afraid of the passing of time.  Something told me that my life would reach its full potential in its second half."  (Claude Lanzmann)
- posted by cjb @ 9:32 AM

 

Waste My Time, Please

YOUNG DUDE:  Is that all the Frank O'Hara you have?

CJB: Yup. 

YD:  But I don't want a collection!

CJB:  O'Hara only published collections of his poems, right?  Are you looking for something else, like a broadside?

YD:  No, a book.  Only, not a collection.

CJB: Well, I've never seen such a thing.

YD:  What's that supposed to mean?

CJB:  In my judgment, what you're looking for doesn't exist.

YD: Thanks for all your help!
- posted by cjb @ 2:39 PM

 

Metropolitan (54), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 6:18 PM

 

Metropolitan (53), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 9:33 PM

 

Metropolitan (52), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:05 PM

 
"I was thinking about Robert Adams’s images of the West, which are more contemporary landscapes. I like the high foreground and background that you get in the square and that you don’t get in the wide frame. I also thought the oval shape of the wagons and the bonnets look so great in the square. . . .[T]his whole thing now with all the TVs now being a rectangle, I’m not sold on it. I love a square. I mean, Anthony Mann used a square in Westerns. I think Yellow Sky is a square, the [William] Wellman film. But yes, it’s true that mostly you see widescreen. You have this landscape, and I guess you can try to get the vastness of a mountain range [with widescreen], but you can also get the depth of a mountain range with a square. And you can get your dry earth crawling right up to the edge of the frame. I mean, that stuff gets minimized in the rectangle."
- posted by cjb @ 3:14 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:37 AM

 

Metropolitan (51), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 10:09 PM