"Hello, Trojan Books?

Yes, this is Greekazon.

I have this horse I'd like to bring around. You can put it inside your store. You know, leave it there for the weekend to bring in customers. That sort of thing."
- posted by cjb @ 7:48 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 10:22 PM

 

Sketch for a picture, Vancouver.
- posted by cjb @ 11:17 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Edward Steichen, Bricks (West 86th Street), New York, c. 1922

Edges, corners, the oddly torqued space at lower left. The blunt facticity of the whole.
- posted by cjb @ 9:21 PM

 
He's An Artist, a Pioneer

Today's surprise: apparently interviewing one of my few real heroes, mid-October.  Not saying who yet, so as not to jinx things, but his authorial debut drops October 23rd.  The nicest early birthday present I could ever hope to receive.
- posted by cjb @ 9:13 PM

 
"The senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the charges had not yet been announced, said that one undercover agent was able to register accounts under names like 'Joe Bogus' and describe the purpose of the account as 'for cocaine' without questioning."
- posted by cjb @ 10:40 AM

 
"The outside world will trivialize you for almost anything if it wants to. You may as well be who you are." (Grace Paley)
- posted by cjb @ 2:34 PM

 
"Hi, do you have any books on erotic servitude?"
- posted by cjb @ 1:55 PM

 
Who's Advising Him?

"Hardly a day goes by when senior staff in the mayor’s office aren’t called by so-called expert strategists and told what to do.

Even members of the public call the mayor’s customer service staff, advising them on how to handle the media.

Ford’s staff bite their tongues and politely listen to this advice, the vast majority of which would be impossible to implement because, let’s face it, this is hardly a normal mayoralty.

For example in March, Sun City Hall Bureau Chief Don Peat reported the mayor had shown up at an event 'between local politicians and the Toronto Eruv committee, organized by Coun. James Pasternak.'

Typically, this wouldn’t make much news but it did because the mayor came ill-prepared and gave a barn-burner of a pro-casino speech to an Orthodox Jewish audience.

Had he informed his senior staff he was going to attend, they would have given him a scroll to present to these community leaders, briefed him on who would be there and given him prepared -- and appropriate -- remarks.

Recently, after being briefed on all the proper protocols, the mayor missed an event when Prince Phillip came to Toronto. An event he was clearly expected to attend, since a chair with his name on it sat empty.

And, since I have your attention, the mayor’s staff did not advise him to call the police on a reporter checking out his property regarding his application to buy an adjacent piece of land from the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

The mayor’s staff did not advise him to call 911 when a plastic sword-wielding Marg Delahunty (aka Mary Walsh) ambushed him on his driveway. (I dealt with that one when I was Ford’s Press Secretary.)

His staff didn’t tell him to hand out magnets at a community meeting in Etobicoke, though it is worth noting the staff member that did help the mayor on that one is new to the office and, according to the Globe and Mail, allegedly sold drugs in high school with Doug Ford. (Ford has denied this allegation.)

What his current and former experienced staffers have advised him to do is to get a driver, stop calling constituents late at night, get some rest, and as the Sun reported, go to rehab."
- posted by cjb @ 6:20 PM

 
"The 24-hour news channels that run silently in the corners of bars and dentists’ offices loop random clips of Ford being chased around by packs of TV reporters. Here’s Ford trying to order something through a thicket of microphones at Tim Hortons, a forced grin on his face. Now Ford peeling out of his driveway in his Escalade. Now Ford crossing a parking lot, mob in tow. Behind him in the last frame, the sign on the gas station, over his shoulder: 'On The Run.'"
- posted by cjb @ 8:02 PM

 

Boys Walking, 2013
- posted by cjb @ 2:30 PM

 
New WG, The Peripheral.  That careful observing tone I remember.

"She called his name. 'Easy Ice,' he answered, her gamer tag, bumping the door open with the flat of his hand, pulling a new white T-shirt down with the other hand across that chest the Corps had given him, covering the mark above his navel, size and shape of a playing card. Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Walmart amber. She had helped him sweep it out before he moved in. He hadn’t bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick, some Chinese polymer, glassy and flexible. Now you could see stubs of burnt matches in it, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette, older than she was. She knew where there was a rusty jeweler’s screwdriver and somewhere else a 2020 quarter. The polymer had taken care of the smell, now he just had to get his stuff out before he hosed the inside every week or two, like washing Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial. You could peel it all out before you put your American classic up on eBay, let it take the dirt with it."

Publication scheduled for 2014; can't wait!
- posted by cjb @ 1:43 PM

 

Relevant to my interests.  The methodology involves a level of access I'm unlikely to enjoy in this lifetime, but, still.
- posted by cjb @ 9:47 AM

 
"'It is not the Russians that we quarrel with,'' Mehmet says quietly, 'but their choice in allies. They believe themselves to be infidel atheists, but by their deeds they shall be known; the icy spoor of Leng is upon them, their tools are those described in the Kitab al Azif. We have proof that they have violated the terms of the Dresden Agreement. The accursed and unhallowed stalk the frozen passes of the Himalayas by night, taking all whose path they cross. And will you stopper your ears even as the Russians grow in misplaced confidence, sure that their dominance of these forces of evil is complete? The gates are opening everywhere, as it was prophesied. Last week we flew an F-14C with a camera relay pod through one of them. The pilot and weapons operator are in paradise now, but we have glanced into hell and have the film and radar plots to prove it.'"
- posted by cjb @ 10:37 AM

 

Hide n' seek FAIL.  (Kato Cat via L.)
- posted by cjb @ 10:53 AM

 

"Has another company ever come out with a high-concept, big-production 'brand ad' and then, just a few months later, turned around and utterly trashed it? I don’t think so. What we learn from this is not just that Zuckerberg is a bullshit artist who’s most insincere when he’s sounding most sincere — we already knew that — but that for Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, 'sincere' and 'insincere' are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit. A chair levitating in a forest and a ballerina dancing on a dinner table are equally fake. They’re fabrications, as are the emotions that they conjure up in us. It’s all advertising."

[....]

"Every object, at least in our perception of it, carries its antithesis. Behind the plenitude symbolized by the vase we sense an emptiness: the wilted bouquet rotting in a landfill. And so it is with the tools of communication. When we look at them we sense not only the possibility of connection but also, as a shadow, the inevitability of loneliness. An empty mailbox. A sheet of postage stamps. A telephone in its cradle. The dial of a radio. The dark screen of a television in the corner of a room. A cell phone plugged into an outlet and recharging, like a patient in a hospital receiving a transfusion. The melancholy of communication devices is rarely mentioned, but it has always haunted our homes."

I had a Facebook account for a year or two, then, tired of cropping digital cotton for Marky-Mark, deactivated it.  Zuckerberg's contempt for users informs every decision Facebook makes -- nonstop revisions to the interface; dwindling privacy options; ever-increasing coercive exhortations to "share" -- and I'm never going back.
- posted by cjb @ 5:11 PM

 
"'Hello agent John, it’s client Dan,' commented the pecunious scribbler. 'I’m worried about new book Inferno. I think critics are going to say it’s badly written.'"
- posted by cjb @ 6:33 PM

 

Study for a picture.  I'm glad someone invented this, even if its color profile's off.  The puzzle pattern is pretty simplistic -- I count only two different piece shapes -- but I bet I can fix, or at least conceal that, once I actually locate the object.
- posted by cjb @ 3:06 PM

 

Recent reading (11pm-230am, waiting for dough to rise):

Clark Coolidge, A Book Beginning What and Ending Away

Don Carpenter, A Couple of Comedians
- posted by cjb @ 9:22 AM

 

Thoughtful answers, esp. to the question of constructions, etc. vanishing into images, but the real ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing) here is the interviewer's awesome deer-in-headlights expression, as his simple questions repeatedly lead out into deep water.
- posted by cjb @ 10:07 PM

 

YVR -> SEA -> PDX

A few days to walk in the sun, locate some professional baking tools, & try and capture some things I saw a while ago.  An ancient volcanic neck; the Columbia River; a cemetery.  "I begin by not photographing..."  Back soon.
- posted by cjb @ 8:15 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:00 AM

 



Local beekeeper Norm Kaethler plies his trade.
- posted by cjb @ 4:24 PM

 

Main Street swarm, right now.
- posted by cjb @ 1:31 PM

 
Day seven: the sourdough starter on the kitchen counter doubled overnight, & now is bubbling away with a thick creamy head.

Anyone who would like a loaf of handmade bread, please get in touch late next week.
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 AM

 

Via Dru: "We got chickens and the cats are very interested."
- posted by cjb @ 7:59 AM

 

"Henry Gribbohm, 30, lost $2600 – his entire savings – on a game called Tubs of Fun at a Manchester, NH., carnival.

He wanted to win an Xbox Kinect (retail value of around $100), but quickly lost $300 on the game when the balls he tossed bounced out of the tubs.

Instead of cutting his losses, he went home to get the rest of his savings, which he lost as well in a few rounds of double or nothing.

'You just get caught up in the whole "I’ve got to win my money back," Gribbohm told CBS. 'You’re expecting the kids to win a few things, let the kids have a good time,' Gribbohm said. 'It just didn’t turn out that way.'

Gribbohm went back to the carnival the next day to complain.

'It’s not possible that it wasn’t rigged,' Gribbohm told CBS. The man running the game gave him back $600 and a rasta banana, too."
- posted by cjb @ 7:49 AM

 
RIP Jim Davis. Autographed book collector, AA stalwart, van loading expert, martial artist, Main Street hangaround, my friend.
- posted by cjb @ 3:39 PM

 
Q:  Hey, where are all the new pictures?

A:  Two new autonomous pictures in production right now, one in a Pacific Northwest cemetery and one in Burnaby.  Also waiting on some more computer memory to finish assembling Pearblossom, whose 116+ layers now routinely crash the office machine.
- posted by cjb @ 9:25 AM

 
ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): My sweetheart behind the wheel of her zippy new car.
- posted by cjb @ 9:21 AM

 
"British artist David Hockney is also a master at fusing multiple photographs. He moves his camera across a landscape or a person, constantly snapping the shutter, and then assembles the photographs into a patchwork image.

The underlying workings remain visible in Hockney's work. Wall's photographs, however, are gliding swans whose paddling feet are hidden.

Wall admires Hockney's work but doesn't believe Hockney likes his.

'He thinks my way is a starchy academic way,' Wall says. 'My view is there are no rules, and there can always be something good.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:21 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:55 PM