ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Jason Collins' bravery

"Some people insist they've never met a gay person. But Three Degrees of Jason Collins dictates that no NBA player can claim that anymore. Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who's gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who's out."
- posted by cjb @ 9:38 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 7:41 PM

 
"Imagine a roomful of people with these glasses on, some reading Yelp reviews to themselves, some making movies of themselves, and some making movies of the people making movies themselves. Others are taking pictures while still others are trying to navigate the menu by jerking their heads around, winking, blinking, and rolling their eyes in various patterns. Does anyone but me see this as overt insanity? It's like a scene that should have been in Woody Allen's Sleeper."
- posted by cjb @ 7:22 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:57 AM

 

Sign in Stranger

My friend and occasional collaborator Jamie Tolagson writes from Victoria, BC to alert me to Ms. Kushner's well-reviewed second novel.  "This seems almost ridiculously pertinent to your interests." AND HOW.  Nevada; Land Art; 1970s artworld politics; stripped-down sentences; an I-wonder-what-might-be-out-there sensibility that jibes precisely with mine.

"I had immediately wanted to see this thing [Smithson's Spiral Jetty] made by a New York artist in leather pants, who described more or less the slag-heap world of the West I knew, as it looked to me, and found it worth his attentions."

"Certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures."

For the Spiral Jetty, substitute various locations in the Lower Mainland, California, Europe, Israel & etc.  Dru and I once looked for the Spiral Jetty on the way back from Vegas sans map and failed to find it, though our experience did share many parallels with Kushner's artist protagonist's.

(Thinking, too, viz. Kushner's Spiral Jetty, of Heraclitus, via Smithson, via Latta: "The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.")
- posted by cjb @ 8:50 AM

 
Steely Dan
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Redmond, WA

Thank you, CHRISTOPHER BRAYSHAW, for your purchase
- posted by cjb @ 10:23 AM

 
"In 20 years people will say, there used to be poets & artists living in Mount Pleasant, on Commercial Drive." (C. Burnham)
- posted by cjb @ 5:01 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:19 AM

 
Via L., via our friend William J. Waffle, with copious thanks:

"The 'internet,' also known as the 'world-wide web' [sic] is a bi-polar electronic Leviathan that has erupted on the world scene in the past two decades.  In its benevolent manifestations, it has enormously increased and expedited access to useful information of all sorts, increased global awareness of myriad events, facilitated family and commercial communication across national boundaries in the blink of an eye and helped topple dictators; it is probably fair to say that its advent is of no less significance than the invention of the printing press.  However, just as the printing press has been put to odious use from time to time, the internet has its own Jekyll and Hyde nature: it is a near certainty that future generations will look back at these decades, obsessed as we are with the twin behemoths of  'reality' television and the 'ooh, look at me, I must tell the world what I had for breakfast' narcissism of social media and at the billions of hours thus lost to a near psychotropic electronic escape from any useful pursuit and wonder if Aldous Huxley only got a few details wrong in Brave New World.  For the purposes of this case, the relevance of the internet is its un-policed 'garbage in/garbage out' potential and its free-market-of-ideas potential to lure in otherwise pleasant and unsuspecting folk with all manner of absurdity and silliness."
- posted by cjb @ 10:10 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:57 PM

 

Making Pearblossom with strong coffee's kind assistance.

Cezanne, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and Jack Pierson are apparently this project's special friends.

"Lately, he says, he's been working like that: making instinctive decisions and following through on whatever idea he has, as long it's something he imagines he'll still want to look at and won't mind having his name associated with after the project is done. 'It's like a message to the one other chic person in the world who shares my taste.'"

Image: Jack Pierson, McCarren, 2010.  Folded pigment print.
- posted by cjb @ 9:59 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:27 PM

 
In Chinatown

En route to collecting an order from Arsenal Pulp Press.

Hon's on Keefer = hopeless, a shell of its former self. Maxim's = A++ pumpkin-and-walnut single-serve pie, deep funky forest-floor umami flavor.

Hon's lazy Dandanmian = overcooked noodles, hoisin, sriracha. Glop, glop, the end.  Scattering of green onions. My white ass can make a better simulacrum.
- posted by cjb @ 7:38 PM

 

This ends well:

"'We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,' Tyler Winklevoss said."

ROTFL ZOMFG

Also pertinent:

Scrip -- from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- posted by cjb @ 7:35 PM

 
Strategic Considerations

• US DRONE STRIKE POLICIES FOMENT ANTI‐AMERICAN SENTIMENT AND MAY AID RECRUITMENT TO ARMED NON­‐STATE ACTORS

• DRONES UNDERMINE US CREDIBILITY IN PAKISTAN AND THROUGHOUT THE REGION

• US TARGETED KILLING AND DRONE STRIKE PRACTICES MAY ESTABLISH DANGEROUS PRECEDENTS AND UNDERMINE THE RULE OF LAW AND US DEMOCRACY
- posted by cjb @ 6:29 PM

 

A Drone is Not a Bullet With a Name On It. A Drone is a Death Sentence Addressed to 'Occupant'
 
"'I have never seen nor am I aware of any rules of engagement that have been made public that govern the conduct of drone operations in Pakistan, or the identification of individuals and groups other than al Qaida and the Afghan Taliban,' said Christopher Swift, a national security law expert who teaches national security affairs at Georgetown University and closely follows the targeted killing issue. 'We are doing this on a case-by-case, ad hoc basis, rather than a systematic or strategic basis.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:11 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:59 PM

 

Listening: Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section (1957)

Reading: Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife (2013).  Anyone tempted to think of drone assassination as a bloodless, high-tech solution to conventional ground warfare needs to read this clear-eyed expose of the CIA and Department of Defense's adventures in Africa, Pakistan, and Afghanistan ASAP.  One logical extrapolation from Mazzetti: "covert" drone warfare appeals to Republicans and Democrats alike because it's asymmetrical; Al-Qaeda doesn't have Predators and Hellfire missiles and likely isn't getting them any time soon.  Thought experiment #1: How likely is this asymmetry to persist?  Thought experiment #2: Will attacking the 2055 version of the USS Cole and/or the US Embassy in Kenya be easier or harder with, a/ a boat or truckload of explosives, or, b/ a 3D-fabbed and printed homebrew drone and missiles?
 
Bonus Round: Thought experiment #3: Once again, it's 2055.  Some clean-cut young fellows, maybe Saudi engineering students in the US on a visa, unloading a black object the size of a river raft from the back of a rental van on Lakeshore Drive. Soon their strange buzzy machine wobbles into the air. Is this handbuilt technological marvel headed for, a/ a sightseeing flight over Lake Michigan?  Or, b/ the Sears Tower?
- posted by cjb @ 9:54 AM

 
The palliative care ward at Burnaby General is quiet, painted mostly in violets, pinks and blues, with light brown curtains over the windows to block the brightest sun.  Today, a light overcast grey spring is visible behind them.  White star magnolias in a little hidden courtyard. Beyond those, evergreens.

My friend J. lies drawn up in a narrow hospital bed, much thinner than when I last saw him. Without his thick glasses his eyes are a bright, bright blue.  The brown-grey stubble lining his cheeks looks good on him.  Dying, J. seems a younger, much happier man.  The worry lines that, for as long as I have known him, have deeply creased his forehead and the sides of his face have faded.  Now his skin is thin as paper, and smooth as a child's. Seated on the bed beside him, I want to reach out and stroke his forehead, as I might a baby's, or my cat's.  I don't, of course.  Instead I shake his hand, and am surprised, as always, by its warm strong grip.

It's a cliche to say that someone dying is "at peace" -- J. is vehemently not "at peace" -- "Fucking cocksuckers!" -- but he seems peaceful, and largely lucid, as Richard and I bullshit with him for forty-five minutes, trying and mostly succeeding in demonstrating our love by not discussing his cancer, preferring to focus on past book scouting trips, sketchy so-called "dealers" unloved by all of us -- "Cocksuckers!" -- and the mechanics of fitting several hundred boxes of booze, or surplus bookshelves, into the back of a rental van.

"When I'm gone..." says J., wistfully, contemplating the prospect of his widow moving out of the Lower Mainland and back to the community where she can be among friends, men and women she's known her whole life.  "She can go back to [SMALL BC TOWN].  Why would she stay? She'll be happy there.  When I'm gone...."  But he's here today and his eyes are bright and his hand is warm in mine.
- posted by cjb @ 9:52 PM

 
Saltz, via Steven Tong:

"At a Chelsea opening, a good Los Angeles dealer chided me for not going to art fairs, not seeing art in L.A. and London, and not keeping track of the activity online. He said I 'risked being out of touch with the art world,' and he was right. It got me down. As recently as four or five years ago, I could have crowed that because I see so many gallery shows every week, I know what’s going on. That’s slipping away, if it isn’t already gone.


- posted by cjb @ 9:22 PM

 

Bean Leaves 1, Bedbugs 0

"Using a casting process similar to one a sculptor might choose, the scientists replicated, with polymers from different epoxies, the geometry of the trichomes, the sharp point on their tips and their flexibility and strength. Sometimes the tips of the hooks broke off during the molding process, resulting in a hybrid of biological and fabricated materials.

On the natural leaves, bugs were snagged, on average, after six steps, or locomotory cycles. (In one cycle, each of the insect’s six legs moves once). Once stuck, they tried to free themselves, but they usually ended up just flailing in place around the impaled limb."
- posted by cjb @ 6:59 PM

 

David T. Alexander, Build Up Over Terrace Mountain, 2011
- posted by cjb @ 3:44 PM

 



- posted by cjb @ 8:44 PM

 

Study for Pearblossom, 2013
- posted by cjb @ 2:12 PM

 
Waste My Time, Please

FLAKE ON PHONE:  ARE YOU HIRING?

BUSY CJB:  Sorry, no.

FOP:  Why the hell not?
- posted by cjb @ 2:41 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:53 AM

 

The Williams Lake Song
Words & music by LJH

Williams Lake, oh Williams Lake
Is it my soul you seek to take?
I tried to escape your evil grasp
Travelling an hour and a half
By fleeing to Quesnel,
a different kind of hell,
And finding that I had to return
A three hour round trip journ...ey

Hotel rooms are few and far between
And everyone was very mean
A convention for concrete is in town
And so my fortunes have gone down
The Sandman's basement room
Cold as a deep dark tomb
I wish it wasn't beside the pool
I wish I hadn't been such a fool
To come to Williams Laaaaake.

I might fly on the 9 am
Or might go through this all again
Quesnel might be my only chance
I'm running out of underpants
The weather's supposed to get worse
Now I'm feeling really cursed
Please feed the waddling pussy cat
And at my house please hang your hat
(At least until I can get back)
From hideous Williams Laaaaaake.

So now I leave you, bid adieu
And hope you know your luck for true
To be at my place in the city
With that wondrous perfect kitty
Without the snow and with hot water
(I guess I sound just like a martyr)
I can't help it and as for your pity
Held captive in this city
The ugly Williams Lake.....
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 AM

 
This, exactly:

"In this sense, his pieces can be considered parallel systems that generate supplements or excesses of meaning that are superimposed on the work from which he has departed."

Also:

"Rather than 'trying to trace a unique originality' he strives to develop 'an expansiveness and productivity of readings.' In other words, he attempts to create a project that starts from a specific space or referent and may be extended in through time, thus giving rise to a combined process of re-contextualisation and translation; a project that at once questions and updates the traditions of institutional critique and site-specificity. We find ourselves before an 'iterable' concept of the work of art, where each successive presentation produces transformations, new meanings and interpretations and where the various aspects related to the dissemination of the work [...] become a key part of the artistic project."
- posted by cjb @ 8:27 PM

 


- posted by cjb @ 3:10 PM

 
Insert in My Obituary, Please

"[A] researcher, expert viewer, fan, performer and at times, an incorrigible multi-tasker."
- posted by cjb @ 9:49 AM

 

Dear JZ:  You are wrong; there are precedents.
- posted by cjb @ 9:36 AM

 

Push Comes to Love

"To be normal would be abnormal. To deliver easy-listening singer–songwriter material might just – like Monty Python’s comfy chairs – produce the greatest discomfort of all. The crowd could, of course, find some brainy relief in pondering how the performance rated alongside Prina’s eponymous sculptural installation, one version of which is currently on view in the Whitney’s galleries. But then there was the playlist: which were covers, and which were not? And did you dare admit to your dinner date that you’re not actually intimately familiar with Joan Baez’ oeuvre? 'I’m seeking to establish a stress test,’ Prina told me. ‘Can what I did be lodged within a Conceptual art practice?’"
- posted by cjb @ 9:35 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:40 AM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): David Byrd, Clouds, Anthony's Nose, Bridge (178), 1974
- posted by cjb @ 4:48 PM

 
I mentioned the Arbitrary collected snowflakes. Actually it was searching for a pair of identical ice crystals. It had - has - a collection; not holes or figure break-downs, but actual samples of ice crystals from every part of the galaxy it has ever visited where it found frozen water.

It only ever collects a few flakes each time, of course; a saturation pick-up would be ... inelegant.

I suppose it must still be looking. What it will do if it ever does find two identical crystals, it has never said. I don't know that it really wants to find them, anyway.

But I thought of that, as I left the glittering, grumbling city beneath me. I thought - and I still dream about this, maybe once or twice a year - of some drone, its flat back star-dappled, quietly in the steppes or at the edge of a polynya off Antarctica, gently lifting a single flake of snow, teasing it away from the rest, and hesitating perhaps, before going, displaced or rising, taking its tiny, perfect cargo to the orbiting starship, and leaving the frozen plains, or the waste of ice, once more at peace.
- posted by cjb @ 3:11 PM

 

Dear IMB,

Walking on Glass changed my life when I found it, aged fourteen or thereabouts, in the "New Arrivals" section of the West Vancouver Memorial Library.  I reread it a year or two ago; it still holds up, all those correspondences between the three narratives, the games' complexity & futility, the way far future & Scottish present alternately stand apart & intermingle.

I bought all your first editions for years, even going so far as to track down UK hardcovers of the Culture novels, which weren't widely available in Canada.

On my first cross-Atlantic trip I went to Scotland.  I bought the UKHC of Feersum Endjinn on the day of its release in Aberdeen and read it on the overnight ferry to Shetland.  That phonetic Riddley Walker-esque voice will stay with me the rest of my life, along with the flat North Sea, the summer fog, the unfamiliar islands rising up out of the mist the next morning.

I suppose this is all a way of saying, thanks.  Your careful, imaginative, and deeply humanist writing touched me at a time in my life when I was badly in need of a wider, more ethically inclusive perspective on the world.  Culture, plural, rabidly Other.  Identification with the transgendered; mad; kinky & obsessive. Without your books I would be smaller, narrower, more conservative.  So thanks again, from someone whom the fine example of your writing helped grow.
- posted by cjb @ 3:00 PM

 
The People Who Make Things To Appeal To Everyone Vs. Everyone Is Much Weirder Than We Initially Thought

"Choice rules. The dominant realization of the post-Cable, Internet age is that You Don’t Have To Be Here. There is nothing holding you here. You can click out of the window. You can wander off and eat a sandwich. Appointment viewing? You can watch it on your own time. Want to watch something before you go to bed? You can watch Anything In The World.

The fact that this was not always the case explains a lot of the most popular television in the past. You want to watch this show about David Hasselhoff and a talking car? Is anything else on? Well, fair.

We want Everything Now. I want to watch an episode of a TV show and I want to go online and be able to figure out what that thing was that Jim whispered just before the commercial break and What It All Meant For The Season Arc and I want it Immediately! And it’s there.

We live in an era where I will become actively upset that a five-minute Google search has not instantly brought me, for free, footage of an obscure television episode from the 1970s.

But then, you were at the mercy of whatever they had for you."
- posted by cjb @ 1:44 PM

 
Turner:

"If this exhibition should come to pass, it has the potential to mark yet another turning point in our city, where artists and the institutions that serve them are less an autonomous presence than co-opted agents of emptiness, motivated not by curiosity but by its opposite: fear."
- posted by cjb @ 10:21 AM

 

Citizens vs. the water table.  August's motif visible at far left.  Undepicted: birdsong, yappy little dog, the steady thrum of a nearby freeway.
- posted by cjb @ 9:50 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 6:11 PM

 
Amazon Announces Purchase of English™

"Oral speech will remain free, Bezos said, so long as it isn’t written down or recorded by an electronic device. Every English™-speaking person will be allowed a 'fair-use' quota of 500 words per day, which he or she can use to send emails to friends, make grocery lists, comment on Facebook posts, or write self-flagellating journal entries. For those who exceed their daily quota, Amazon will offer a variety of licensing options ranging from a simple per-word fee to so-called Unlimited Scribbling™ plans for novelists, bloggers, and others who can’t stop writing even if no one is reading their work."
- posted by cjb @ 5:23 PM

 

Pigeon Photography

"When one of his pigeons lost its orientation in fog and mysteriously arrived, well-fed, four weeks late, Neubronner was inspired with the playful idea of equipping his pigeons with automatic cameras to trace their paths. This thought led him to merge his two hobbies into a new 'double sport' combining carrier pigeon fancying with amateur photography."

The peanut gallery adds, helpfully (hopefully): ROSE TRAIN?
- posted by cjb @ 2:38 PM

 

Culver, 2013.  A site I've been searching for off and on for approximately seventeen years, finally located via Street View and a lot of driving around. The field grass is soaking wet and, in places, more like standing in a shallow brown lake with vegetation growing up out of it.  It's not a spot I'd personally choose to recline. The little bare tree by the gate, the real subject of this picture, was not yet in leaf, but should be by August, when I hope to make its approximately life-size portrait.
- posted by cjb @ 12:47 PM

 

Scrim, 2013
- posted by cjb @ 10:44 AM

 

Picture for Rose, 2013
- posted by cjb @ 10:30 AM