Metropolitan (69), 2012
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The time of day is now felling some loose light from out of those trees.  They are becoming bluer and more solid.  The satellite dishes are clear and there.
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- posted by cjb @ 12:34 AM

 

Via Jamie Tolagson: The Wayward Charms of Cinerama.  Another filmic parallel for the Metropolitans, #63 in particular.

"Like any picture-making process, Cinerama captures the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. Unusually in the history of cinema, it does it with a semicircular array of cameras. The images from those cameras are projected on a corresponding semicircular surface, in the hope that they will simulate not only the spatial layout in front of those three lenses but also the way the world looks to us.

Fred Waller thought that his invention provided greater realism, because our vision subtends a horizontal arc wider than that of conventional camera lenses. Fred fell a few degrees short, though. Claiming that we take in about 160 degrees, he thought that 146 degrees was a good approximation, but our visual field is actually a bit wider than 180 degrees. (Without turning our head, we can roll our eyes.) More important, though, is the assumption that a faithful image of the world should try to capture the curvature of the image as it passes through the cornea to the retina. We see a bowed world, many have claimed, so our pictures should present the way things look.

Yet there’s a difference between visual sensation and visual perception. Even if the light from the world hits our photoreceptors in a partial or distorted way, what we see is regular and unified. On our retinas, near things loom large and distant things look tiny, but we’ve evolved to adjust to the distortions in early stages of vision and see things in normal size. A person ten feet away is twice as large on our retina as somebody twenty feet off, but that’s not the way they look. We don’t see our retinal image, any more than we see the wildly misshapen image of the world projected to brain areas. The eye is a part of the brain, and the brain reworks the stimulus–cleans it, enhances it, corrects it, straightens it out, and gives it a stability that isn’t there in the raw input.

For the most part, normal camera lenses approximate the way the world looks to us after our brain has processed visual signals. Most images show straight-edged walls and sidewalks, railroad tracks meeting at the horizon, proportional human beings. When Cinerama or other nonstandard image-making technologies present distortions to our eyes, we take them for what they are: not 'what we really see' but rather pictorial displays creating distinct effects of their own.

Hence the irregular appeals of Cinerama. Suppose we’re not interested in seeing the world as it registers on our sensory system. Suppose we’re interested in exploring uncommon pictorial effects."
- posted by cjb @ 8:53 PM

 

Metropolitan (68), 2012
- posted by cjb @ 7:58 PM

 

"Seven Apollo missions went to the moon, but only six landed. Six crates of 7-Up."

One of the greatest works of interpretive genius I have ever personally encountered.  Worth perusing at length, especially for its conclusion.
- posted by cjb @ 6:34 PM

 

"We see short chapters, sliced from Freddie’s time after the Navy, showing what it meant to be knocked aside, rather than swept up, in the nation’s postwar boom. Freddie becomes a photographer in a department store, making out with a model in his darkroom, where he brews a cocktail in a chemical beaker, and then, in one extraordinary passage, taking offense at a customer—a robust and portly type, who wants his picture taken—and laying into him, as though ignited by envy at such unattainable well-being. The colors here burn with the soft, civilized half-glare that we associate with the heyday of Kodachrome—a matchless example of Anderson’s period detail being driven less by fussiness than by his unfading avidity for anything that will saturate the real.

More startling still is the sudden cut to hard, unglamorous gray-greens, and the sight of Freddie hacking the heads off cabbages in a California field. We sense that he is drifting not because jobs are scarce but because no regular slot can hold him or stop him exploding from within; hence the catch-your-breath sequence that sees Freddie bursting through a dark doorway, which is framed like the final shot of John Ford’s The Searchers, and then sprinting and panting across the brown ridges of plowed earth, the camera travelling beside him at a pace that would have left Ford in the dust. And so the Anderson patterns, familiar to fans of Magnolia and Boogie Nights, reassert themselves: elegy followed by convulsion, stasis interrupted by the chronic need for speed, nerves no sooner gathered than lost."
- posted by cjb @ 10:46 AM

 
Peter Matthiessen on nonfiction.  Broadly applicable to my brand of photography, too, especially with regard to fact captivity, objective reality, & placement of details.

"Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts—or predetermined forms—it cannot fly. Excepting those masters who transcend their craft—great medieval and Renaissance artisans, for example, or nameless artisans of traditional cultures as far back as the caves who were also spontaneous unselfconscious artists.

As in fiction, the nonfiction writer is telling a story, and when that story is well-made, the placement of details and events is never random. The parts are not strung out in a line but come around full circle, like a necklace, to set off the others. They resonate, rekindle one another, stirring the reader with a cumulative effect.

A good essay or article can and should have all the attributes of a good short story, including structure and design, pacing and effective placement of its parts—almost all the attributes of fiction except the creative imagination, which can never be permitted to enliven fact. The writer of nonfiction is stuck with objective reality, or should be; how his facts are arranged and presented is where his craft appears, and it can be dazzling when the writer is a good one. The best nonfiction has many, many virtues, among which simple truthfulness is perhaps foremost, yet its fidelity to the known facts is its fatal constraint."
- posted by cjb @ 9:48 AM

 

Metropolitan (67), 2012

People keep asking about these little photographs.  Are they parodies, homages, what?  They are pictures of places I have never been in Los Angeles, a category which, partially because of them, keeps shrinking.

I started making them early in the morning and late at night because I felt overwhelmed at my job, and thought that I might never leave, or work "creatively" again. 

At first the pictures were unpopulated and then I thought that if they were to be an accurate record of the city they purported to depict that there should be figures.

I think about these photographs as abstractly as I can.  I like the tension in the figure's body and his hat and bags and glasses, but I also like the white crosses and dashes of the empty parking stalls, and the graceful curlicues of the windows' safety bars, and the "swarming" quality of the triangular tile wall, and the flat graphic quality of the painted sign and the long shadows that define the lower right edge of the frame.  All of these details are significant; all of these things have meaning.
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Metropolitan (66), 2012
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Metropolitan (65), 2012
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Via the Blue Book:

"If you want a vintage Dan experience like we had today load the Weather outro on a portable device and go to a field with a timberline where the leaves are changing before dusk on a clear nite. Leaves should be perfectly colorful [...] at this time for a psychedelic effect. Kick back with a nice 'pipe' and some brandy and loop the Weather outro as the sky turns azure behind those leaves, and the stars switch on."
- posted by cjb @ 8:41 PM

 
This guy's tone is a little too weedy & LRB for me right off the bat -- "I am not suggesting that I know better than he does what methods are appropriate for him, but I wonder what else he might have written if he had sought the company of writers such as Tolstoy or Dickens or Chekhov or Kierkegaard" --but I'm reading the same Neil Young book as him right now and he's not wrong about it.  And that's speaking as someone who both admires Neil and the reviewer's careful language, which steadily improves as he goes along, and makes manifestly clear, in an oddly melancholy way, how much he admires Neil, too:

"My longest encounter with Young was several years ago, when I wrote about him for another magazine. I had read Shakey, the fanatically specific biography of him written by Jimmy McDonough, and had encountered the remark made to McDonough by Young’s manager when McDonough had asked to spend time with Young. Neil doesn’t hang, McDonough was told. The magazine I was writing for had arranged for me to receive the engagement Young offers to journalists. A driver delivers you to the parking lot of a restaurant in the hills south of San Francisco. (The restaurant, when I arrived, was closed for the season.) Redwoods surround the parking lot and tower over the restaurant. Shafts of light come through the tops of the trees, and the trees are so tall that the scale of what you can see seems altered, so that you feel the disproportion of size that a child feels in a room where a table, occupied by adults, seems to loom above him or her. Eventually an old jalopy shows up with Young, who collects and restores old cars, especially cars from the period of his childhood, at the wheel. Over the course of about two hours, he drives you in a circle that goes down to the Pacific and along it, through a couple of small towns and back up into the hills, past the house where Ken Kesey lived in La Honda and the early acid tests were held and the sixties began, and a bar where Young used to play with his band Crazy Horse, where he would announce to friends in the afternoon that they would play that evening, and the place would fill up mostly with people the band knew. What Young is doing is driving you around the borders of his ranch, which run from the redwoods down toward the water.

On the ride Young told me that he didn’t read, but I might have guessed anyway. He was a reserved and slightly grave figure, and talking with him was like being trapped with someone whose mind had no reach. He could only talk about what he felt or had seen or thought. I couldn’t respond to one of his remarks by raising an idea it had made me think of and have him make some connection to some other thought and then respond to that. A part of him seemed to have been arrested at a very early age. I am, of course, accustomed to meeting people I don’t feel able to talk to, or who aren’t interested in talking to me. I hadn’t expected, though, to find that someone whose work had ranged so widely had no curiosity about such an obvious possibility for enlarging the imagination, or to have been so indifferent to it. He seemed like someone who had worked at the same factory for years and years without ever wondering what lay to the left or right of the gates."
- posted by cjb @ 8:06 PM

 
"There are always exceptions, there are always people who are serious about what they're doing and really want to express themselves in some sort of artistic way."
- posted by cjb @ 9:41 PM

 

Metropolitan (64), 2012

"You know what? Not everybody knows your rules, Larry. You’ve got your own set of rules and you think everyone’s going to adhere to them, but they’re not because nobody knows them.”
- posted by cjb @ 9:27 PM

 
"The relationship between various approaches to photography is never defined and people who try to define it always end up doing something less successful. I have every kind of camera – I have a digital one, I have a camera phone, I have an analog one as well – and I use them all. If I decide to be Cartier-Bresson, I do this. If I want to be Steven Spielberg, I do that. The photograph allows you to be anyone and, in a sense, to steal an identity, even if only for a few minutes."
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Larry David's House, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seasons 5-7, 537 Monero Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 2012

For Mr. Aaron Carpenter. Calling it.
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A Disturbing Tale

Like my colleague Michael Turner, the author of this post, I too have heard multiple variants of this story in the last few days.

If, as I suspect, the tale is true or largely true, Bob Rennie and Carey Fouks have much to answer for.  No one -- Kathleen Bartels, or any guest in any place -- deserves such abuse.  To be clear: the behavior reported by Bartels' fellow dinner guests isn't high spirits, or "spirited dissent," or the "natural reaction of a homeowner discovering an intruder," or WHY.  It's abuse, and misogynistic abuse at that.  Bob and Carey need to answer for it.

The comments section of Michael's blog is now filling up with the customary cowardly defenses from anonymous internet sources -- you weren't there; what do you care; she brought it on herself; can't we all just agree to love art and get along?

My experience as a business owner and a member of Vancouver's literary community is directly pertinent to this situation.  Several times now, PFB has hosted readings by authors that have attracted attendees with whom I have a tenuous, or highly contentious, personal relationship.  Yet in every case I have welcomed each attendee as warmly as I can, not because I thought that their presence in the shop would automatically ameliorate whatever bad blood was between us, but because he or she was, in a sense, a "guest in my home" and therefore deserving of basic courtesy and respect.

Bob and Carey have a lot to answer for if the story is true, or even mostly true.  If they feel blameless, victimized, or otherwise put-upon, too bad.
- posted by cjb @ 7:51 PM

 



- posted by cjb @ 10:07 PM

 
All of Sunken Condos available to stream here right now

"I'm most interested in people who are smart, funny people and are neurotic. Whether it's a man or a woman, it's about the problems that come with being smart and funny. Usually it's something creepy that happened to you as a kid. That's what makes you so interesting. On the other hand, because of the neurotic stuff, if you wanna be friends with them or if you want to have a romantic relationship, you just have to deal with that. That's fine with me. I'm used to it because most everyone I know is like that."

Also:

"For sale are FOUR SCOTCH 3M master reels labeled- Steely Dan, Outtakes / Rough Mixes. PLEASE SEE PIX- Two of the reels are 7.5ips 2 track and the other two are 15ips 2 track. Reel #1 (7.5ips) includes: "The Bear Got You", "Stand By The Sea Wall", and different mixes of "My Rival. Reel #2 (7.5 & 15ips) includes: several cuts of "My Rival" and several cuts of "Third World Man". Reel #3 (15ips) includes: 4 cuts of "Babylon Sisters", one master,and one safety. Reel #4 (15ips) includes: 2 versions of "Deacon Blues" Alternate mixes. All tapes aound A++ and are extremely rare and in great shape. Always stored in a climate controlled facility, and ONLY played on hi-end professional machines. Tape runs and sounds great when played back on my ATR-102, and there is no signs of oxide shedding, squealing, cupping/warping, etc."
- posted by cjb @ 9:52 AM

 
"The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding." (Iris Murdoch)
- posted by cjb @ 3:29 PM

 

Foreshadowing.  Not a "location picture," despite the site's uncanny resemblance to Passerby, 1996.
- posted by cjb @ 9:44 AM

 
"An outsize energy and determination drove him on to recover and rebuild after every self-created disaster that he faced."
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- posted by cjb @ 8:00 PM

 
Correspondent: "So you've never seen any good work at the VAG."

I didn't say that.  The VAG, like any large art museum, exhibits a range of aesthetic quality.  Recently I've seen and liked Carol Sawyer's time-lapse Every day I take the same photograph, Kika Thorne's Octave (which I wrote about for Pyramid Power), survey exhibitions by Isabelle Pauwels and Scott McFarland, the big Roy Arden retrospective and accompanying permanent collection survey show, and the Kai Althoff and Anthony Hernandez exhibitions co-curated by Kathleen Bartels and Jeff Wall.  But I don't think that, overall, the VAG is the best place in Vancouver to learn about, or to see, contemporary art.  It was once, under Willard Holmes and Judith Mastai. Studying the roots of its slow decline is instructive.
- posted by cjb @ 9:53 AM

 

Some correspondents want to talk about the VAG.  Advance apologies to anyone not interested in a discussion of local artworld politics.

1.  I was at the VAG for sixteen months as a curatorial assistant, meaning I typed and filed and was routinely overruled.  If by some miracle I had survived another sixteen months I would still probably have been typing and filing. Once I was asked if the "kids" might be interested in a show about skateboarding. When I mentioned my surplus curatorial energies I was lectured on something called the "career path," which apparently begins in St. John's, or Regina, or Whitehorse.  This didn't work for me, just as it didn't work for Kitty Scott or Melanie O'Brian, two ambitious occupants of positions almost identical to mine, who also left.

2.  Just before I left, I curated a tiny exhibition out of the permanent collection with Alfred Pellan and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and some other good artists.  It was called Change or Die!, a title not lost on my regular coffee crowd in the preparation department.

3.  My proposal for a one-room contemporary project space somewhere in the building was nixed by my boss on multiple grounds, one of which was that it would cost too much money.  Undeterred, I opened Anodyne Contemporary around the corner from the VAG in a second-floor office, where I did two years of exhibitions on a curatorial assistant's salary and my then-partner's patience.  After a brief hiatus, I've now done six years and counting of exhibitions with my friends Steven Tong and Adam Harrison at CSA Space, this time on a bookseller/photographer's salary, which is to say, even less.

4.  The VAG's current programming is largely irrelevant to anyone under 45, with the exception of the excellent one-offs co-curated by its director, Kathleen Bartels, and Jeff Wall. (A permanent collection exhibition curated by Roy Arden, as a counterpoint to a VAG survey of his own work, was also pretty terrific).

5.  Vancouver doesn't lack for youngish curatorial talent.  Jordan Strom, Liz Park, Lee Plested, Aaron Peck, Steven Tong and many of the UBC curatorial studies grads are routinely producing interesting exhibitions.  Yet the VAG seems totally uninterested in engaging with them.

6.  Kathleen Bartels' tenure as director has been linked, by Bob Rennie and others, to a move to a larger building.  Bob wants to torpedo the move for reasons I don't pretend to understand, other than to observe that I have less in common with him, the consummate salesman, "creative capitalist" and political insider, than with just about any other member of the Canadian art world.

7.  Somehow #6 has evolved into a George W. Bush-style axis-of-evil equation.  Either you're with Kathleen, and for a bigger building, or you're with Bob.

8.  Put me in the not-Bob crowd.  I have no time or respect for what Bob and his job have done to my city.

9.  I think that Kathleen Bartels has done a good job under difficult circumstances, certainly the best job of any director since Willard Holmes.  But admiring Kathleen doesn't mean rubber-stamping the monomania of the current VAG board, who want a bigger building, but have no clear plan for how the cash-strapped institution will pay for it.

10.  Money will always be found for buildings.  Donors love having their names on things.

10a.   No one likes to fund light and heat, curatorial research, preparation, conservation, exhibition installation, & etc.  These costs are necessary, but not sexy.

11.  Cultural institutions are always, in the words of one of my more frequent correspondents, managed disasters.  Point taken.  But upping an institution's financial exposure at a time of unprecedented economic turmoil is counterproductive.  It makes the institution more dependent on politicians of all stripes, who are no friends of sophisticated art to begin with, and on donors with smug taste.  There will always be corporate money for Emily Carr and Douglas Coupland and Gordon Smith and EJ Hughes.  But Paul McCarthy?  Lady Brute?  Yuxweluptun?  Paul Wong?

12. As I wrote this morning, "The solution to a long-standing institutional problem is to reform the institution, not to kick the problem down the road, naively pretending that it will somehow resolve itself in the medium- to long term, despite all evidence to the contrary."

13.  Kathleen's supporters -- and I count myself among them -- would do her, and the city, a favor by nixing talk of a bigger building, focusing instead on holding the VAG to a higher curatorial standard.  That institution might then consistantly produce exhibitions of high quality which would put Bob Rennie and his private vanity gallery to shame.

Some other illuminating contributions to the discussion here and here.

Fair notice: I will treat all future correspondence pertaining to this topic as public, eg., available for attribution, citation, & etc.
- posted by cjb @ 1:05 AM

 
Sidewalk couple discussing Animal Farm.

He: "I'm pretty sure it's fiction. I mean, talking pigs."

She: "So Babe is fiction too?"
- posted by cjb @ 9:52 PM

 

Everybody, Get in Line

The solution to a long-standing institutional problem is to reform the institution, not to kick the problem down the road, naively pretending that it will somehow resolve itself in the medium- to long term, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I left the institution because its administration and goals were in conflict with me, and to secure some independence.

Demanding unqualified support for that institution -- by pretending that it's the only game in town; by pretending that enlarging it will somehow miraculously reform its provinciality and poverty of curatorial imagination  -- is a 100% non-starter.  At least with me.
- posted by cjb @ 9:48 AM

 
"The world has moved outside of our vision; all that remains is the recognition of things.  We do not say 'hello' to each other, we say '...'lo.'

The entire world through which we pass, the homes which we do not notice, the chairs on which we sit, the women with whom we walk arm in arm -- they all say to us '...'lo.'"

(Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography)
- posted by cjb @ 9:17 AM

 

Choosing a Cat, by Ursula K. Le Guin

"The Humane Society’s Portland office is an amazing place. It is immense, and I saw only the lobby and the cat wing — rooms and rooms and rooms of cats. There’s always somebody, staff and volunteers, at hand if you want them. Everything is organised with such simple efficiency that it all seems easygoing and friendly — low-stress. When you are one of the huge number of people coming daily to bring in or adopt animals, when you see the endless incoming and outgoing of animals and glimpse the tremendous, endless work involved in receiving and treating and keeping them, the achievement of that easy-going atmosphere seems almost incredible and totally admirable.

The human-animal interface is a very troubled one these days, and in one sense the Humane Society shows that trouble at its most acute. Yet in everything I saw there, I also saw the best of what human beings can do when they put their heart and mind to it."
- posted by cjb @ 12:03 AM

 

"Garner, who was awarded an OBE in 2001, lives with bipolar disorder, and this slim masterpiece is in the tradition of mad kings Sweeney and Lear; a message from the frontiers of pain. More than any orthodox work of historical fiction, it was this weird fantasy novel which taught me to look beyond the walls of my own era, my own reality."

Best novel I've read since Hard Rain Falling, maybe since Light.
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