Anodyne
Friday, August 31, 2012
 

The shop makes it into Spin magazine, briefly.
- posted by cjb @ 4:17 PM
 

KiTteH rEpOrt

dAD weNt OuT tO EaT.  hE hAd dUnGeNe33 CrAb wItH hEiRl00m T0Mat03s, BaRley ri30TT0, BiRd'3-eYe P3pp3r3 aNd FiG3.

i HaD tUnA & Ch33s3.

dAD sl3pT.

i bArf3d!!! (a HaIrbAll)

dAd sAid, "^&^&%&%&^&*^&^&&^%$%$^&%#^&#$#$#$#%$#%$#%$#%$!!!"

we Sl3pt.

KiTteH rEpOrt Ov3r
- posted by cjb @ 11:25 AM
Thursday, August 30, 2012
 
WB Blindfold Test

"The bass player seemed to be soloing through quite a bit of the piece, maybe it's his record. I think that especially in comparison with the stylish and soulful first track - we citizens of the musical present must have gone wrong somewhere along the line, to have ended up wherever this guy ended up. I wouldn't give this any stars. Boy, that was scary."
- posted by cjb @ 10:45 AM
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
 
"Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs."
- posted by cjb @ 9:44 AM
Monday, August 27, 2012
 
Shelving Monkey job description up over @PFB Van.
- posted by cjb @ 2:02 PM
Sunday, August 26, 2012
 

- posted by cjb @ 4:52 PM
 

One of my (friendly) competitors explains that parking in downtown Abbotsford is a breeze.
- posted by cjb @ 10:16 AM
 

"Everybody thought Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon were spending four-and-a-half percent of the federal budget each year to prove that America owned Science. This was all a fiction.

The Apollo Program was an elaborate demonstration of how even the blandest among us are under the heel of the spirit.

NASA needed astronauts to go plant a flag on the moon. For obvious reasons, the astronauts ended up being the most reliable type of man America makes: white, straight, full-starch protestant, center-right, and spawned by the union of science and the military. Every last one of them was the heart of the heart of the tv dinner demographic. But then they get shot into space, tossed from the gravity of this planet, across a quarter million miles of nothing, to be snagged by the moon after three days. Eighteen guys did this and twelve descended further to find out that moon dust smells like gunsmoke. Every single one of them came back irrevocably changed. America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans."
- posted by cjb @ 9:08 AM
Saturday, August 25, 2012
 
"'Nearly all human beings have unrealistically positive self-regard,' said Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford professor and the author of several traditionally published books on business psychology. 'When people tell us we’re not as great as we thought we were, we don’t like it. Anything less than a five-star review is an attack.'"
- posted by cjb @ 2:20 PM
 

Brandon Lattu, Building Obscured by Signs, 1999

"When exhibiting this work in public group exhibitions, Brandon Lattu has a smart-looking pairing of an identically framed black-and-white 1936 Walker Evans photograph of Houses and Billboards in Atlanta with his own 1999 color print of Building Obscured by Signs. By these means, he creates a dazzling and uncanny sense of architectural space that comments on the world of advertising and consumer culture as well as the history of perspective and spectacle."
- posted by cjb @ 9:51 AM
Friday, August 24, 2012
 

Scott McFarland, Former Photography Lab, Key Colour, 117 2nd Ave East, Vancouver, 2009.  Inkjet print, unlimited edition.

"In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the 'real thing'): theft without apology -- conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation."

(David Shields, Reality Hunger)
- posted by cjb @ 10:48 AM
 

Found study for a picture
- posted by cjb @ 9:44 AM
 

"During experiments on the axons of the Woods Hole squid (loligo pealei), we tested our cockroach leg stimulus protocol on the squid's chromatophores. The results were both interesting and beautiful. The video is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the caudal fin of the squid. We used a suction electrode to stimulate the fin nerve. Chromatophores are pigmented cells that come in 3 colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore is lined with up to 16 muscles that contract to reveal their color."
- posted by cjb @ 9:20 AM
Thursday, August 23, 2012
 

Foreshadowing. Terrible "impressionistic" resolution in the source Street View, a la Blackberry cameraphone.  The torqued figure at far right is a great gift, almost worthy of a picture of its own.
- posted by cjb @ 10:21 PM
 

- posted by cjb @ 10:01 PM
 

"The essential originality of Pissarro in his art--powerfully incarnated in this group of four works--is that [he] was a proponent of a kind of painting that was representational, but non-illustrative. No ulterior meaning, no symbols, no allegories, no aesthetic program, or even ideological manifestos were ever the 'subject-matter' of his work."

Out-of-print Christies catalog on this amazing four-part work arrived this afternoon, totally pertinent to several in-process photographs. 

Rackstraw Downes must know these pictures too.
- posted by cjb @ 9:57 PM
 

Mancini live in Edmonton, 1980
- posted by cjb @ 9:42 PM
Thursday, August 16, 2012
 
Off north by northeast.  Back in a few days.
- posted by cjb @ 6:37 PM
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
 
Letter to a TV Baby

"If you can't appreciate anything but the same old radio hits from the '70s, stay home and watch late-night TV so you can take advantage of those cut-rate anthologies they always advertise.

The other night, when we started a Ray Charles tune, some TV Baby yelled out, 'Fuck you,' and stomped out with his girlfriend. Only the ignorant, the incurious, the brainwashed and the brain-dead, not to mention the rude, and possibly the racist individual would do something like that. TV Babies, stay home and watch American Idol or whatever they're selling you these days."
- posted by cjb @ 6:47 PM
 
 
Waste My Time, Please

FRENCH CLIENT:  You have no editioned DVDs by Rodney Graham or Stanley Douglas.  Why is that?  I came all the way here from downtown because your...library...was said to have such things.

CJB:  What exactly are you looking for?

FC:  Well, from Douglas, Hors-Champs.

CJB [relying on admittedly sketchy memory]: That's an editioned copy of 2 or 3, all of which belong to museums or private collectors.

FC:  Well sometimes in an artist's birthplace one finds things.

CJB [spontaneously channeling Marlo Stanfield]:  Sir.  You want it to be one way.  But it's not.  It's the other way.

POSTSCRIPT:  FC did buy a $25 Rodney Graham catalog, but only after hyper-aggressive passive-aggressive price negotiation.
- posted by cjb @ 12:07 PM
Monday, August 13, 2012
 





Studies for a new sequence of photographs made within a 5hr 47m window of each other, 2012

Q:  Sequence?

A:  A "work in pieces."  11 photographs in total: one big panoramic composite, and ten smaller 35mm-ish ones.  Toronto, spring 2013.
- posted by cjb @ 10:29 PM
 

- posted by cjb @ 9:58 PM
Sunday, August 12, 2012
 
CSA Space still alive; website updated.
- posted by cjb @ 9:03 PM
 

Find me up at Red Cat October 16th
- posted by cjb @ 9:43 AM
Saturday, August 11, 2012
 

Once again, Mr. Gold susses out a tasty dining experience in an improbable location:

"From the outside, the former home of Mr. Cecil's California Ribs looks like a giant chili bowl in the shadow of the 10 Freeway. The bathrooms are outside. To exit the parking lot, you drive through a working welding yard. And, in fact, Chili Bowl was once the name of the place, built at the height of the Great Depression."

Depicted: Purple potato and blue cheese, ankimo (monkfish liver) with caviar and dried persimmon on top.
- posted by cjb @ 11:02 AM
Friday, August 10, 2012
 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing):Necessity, the mother of invention

"So what we have here is that downward pull anchor shown above, which I'm anchored into while building an upward facing anchor out of the Red Metolius cam in the lower left and a Gold Camalot and Green Camalot over on the right. Buried behind the power point of my upward facing anchor is a Black Metolius cam holding the power point up, keeping it from disengaging itself. Above the power point is my first piece of pro, allowing me to rest on my lead anchor to disassemble to top rope anchor used to clean the last pitch."
- posted by cjb @ 1:49 PM
 
Still extant: my Canada.

Today's contribution of deep humanity and good judgment via Madam Justice Prowse, BCCA (my italics):

"I conclude that the balance of convenience favours refusing a stay.  I am not persuaded that the harm to the public contended for by counsel for AG Canada outweighs the harm to Ms. Taylor if she is left without a remedy pending the resolution of this appeal, and possibly at all.  She may be a symbol, but she is also a person, and I do not find that it is necessary for the individual to be sacrificed to a concept of the 'greater good' which may, or may not, be fully informed.  The reasons for judgment in this case put squarely at issue the important public values with which this Court (and, likely, the Supreme Court of Canada) will ultimately have to grapple in determining whether, and in what circumstances, assisted suicide may, or may not, be in accord with the public interest, including the interest of that minority of the public in circumstances similar to those of Ms. Taylor.  It is apparent there are competing arguments and interests on both sides of the issue which will be elaborated upon as the appeal progresses.  The public as a whole will benefit from this process. In the meantime, if it should happen that Ms. Taylor is not present for the end of the story because she exercised her right to end her life in accordance with the exemption, I am not persuaded that the nature of any harm suffered by the public as a result offsets the likely final and irrevocable nature of the harm to Ms. Taylor if a stay is granted."
- posted by cjb @ 12:55 PM
 
"A week later he was somewhere in central Arizona. A rain had come down from the north and the weather turned cool.  He sat beneath a concrete overpass and watched the gusts of rain blowing across the fields.  The overland trucks passed shrouded in rain with the clearance lights burning and the big wheels spinning like turbines."
- posted by cjb @ 12:39 PM
 
A composite photograph I really wish I'd made
- posted by cjb @ 11:33 AM
 

- posted by cjb @ 9:11 AM
Thursday, August 09, 2012
 
TO: dAd

FROM: KitTeH

SUBJECT:  KitTeh RePorT

GraVIty. We HaZ It. I fIEld tESt A lOT In DarK.
MOm CRAnkY.

KitTeh RePorT OVEr.
- posted by cjb @ 9:24 AM
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
 

Did you really think
you could destroy this ship?

 She's defied space and time.

 She's been to a place
you couldn't possibly imagine.
- posted by cjb @ 10:40 PM
 

Lightning Storm Rips Across Metro Vancouver

"Grouse Mountain, on Vancouver's North Shore, was forced to suspend its gondola for about three hours, stranding several hundred people on the mountain top."

Including our man, who made it out of the trees and into the lodge approximately 5 minutes before the second most spectacular display of lightning I have ever seen.  Torrential rain; wind; gigantic horizontal lightning bolts.  Lights flickering constantly, huge clouds of mist boiling up from Cap Lake.  It got dark fast.  Thunder directly overhead. Conversation dying down.  Silence, broken by the drumming of rain on the chalet roof.  Then voices, picking up again.

Little Japanese girl with thick black glasses and a terrible bowl cut, maybe six or seven years old, sat opposite me for a while, holding a very realistic-looking kitten doll dressed in an ersatz Little House on the Prairie gingham dress and bonnet.  Huge flares of lightning turning the sky white, thunder breaking all around, and she sat speaking very slowly and firmly and low to what was obviously a loved friend in a language I don't have half a dozen words in, but whose gist I caught immediately: I love you.  You'll be fine.

High-speed download @ 10pm.  Then a long walk back through the pouring rain, thunder further off now, to the lonely red Subaru at the far end of the lot.
- posted by cjb @ 9:30 AM
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
 
#fuckyeahsalmontrim

A recipe of my own, spurred by the 6-for-$3 corn at the grocery store and a $2.20 box of salmon belly trim. 

Olive oil, big pot.  Onion, roughly chopped.  Medium heat. 7-10 minutes 'til onion browns.  Small 100km potatoes, cubed, skin on.  Heat slightly up, stirring frequently, until the potato edges turn clear.  Chicken stock.  (In my case, a frozen block of homemade chicken stock from the freezer, because I am one of those freaks who thinks that making stock c. 2-4am is a perfect cure for bookstore/photography-related insomnia).  Scrape like crazy to get the browned bits off the bottom of the pot.  Maybe a little water.  Salt, pepper.  Simmer 15 minutes.  Add kernels from 3 ears of corn, salmon.  Simmer 10 minutes, until the fish cooks through.  Half a cup of milk at the end.  Bowl;  spoon;  toast on the side. Garnish; I used celery leaves, but parsley or chives would work just as well.  There are still 6 1/2 cups in the fridge if anyone in YVR wants takeout.
- posted by cjb @ 9:39 AM
Monday, August 06, 2012
 

Nurse, 2012
- posted by cjb @ 5:43 PM
 
"Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work but never testing it in the world."
- posted by cjb @ 1:04 PM
 

Unrecommended approach, Mt. Slesse, North Cascades

"I have seen some / Unbeliveable things..." (Cat Power)
- posted by cjb @ 11:15 AM
Sunday, August 05, 2012
 

Dinner last night, via Herbie (scroll) and Mr. Batali.  Delicious; made enough for six, maybe eight people, and one ravenous 24-pound grey cat.  I altered the wine and milk quantities to a half-cup of each (eyeballed) to good effect.  Pork sausage takes a long time to brown; Mr. B. says 10 minutes, but mine took more like thirty.  Nothing says "done" like the smell of the Maillard reaction kicking into high gear.
- posted by cjb @ 12:21 PM
 

Generally, spamming me with anything Kickstarter-related is a pretty reliable way to get defriended or blocked.  This project, however...

"The construction and control techniques we're using will drop the cost of controlled hydraulics by an order of magnitude or two from where they are now, and will make giant robots affordable to small groups of enthusiasts everywhere."
- posted by cjb @ 12:11 PM
Friday, August 03, 2012
 
'"We pretend that meritocracies -- our favored word for modern competitions -- are contests of equals.  They aren't.  Some people can stay close only by making painful choices, and, as the standards of competition rise, those choices grow more painful still." (Malcolm Gladwell)
- posted by cjb @ 9:53 AM

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