Run Wild, Out on the Edge of Time

2013 ending as it began, Barry & Barbra and books.  Contrary to popular belief I did not always aspire to bookstore ownership, but I was a terrible employee and someone needed to provide a counter-example to Jeffrey's repulsive techno-libertarianism ("I got $300,000 from my parents...").

New pictures in 2014, new places to visit, old friends I love.
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Motel 6 Palmdale

"Cheap, right off the highway, no breakfast, questionable people next door doing questionable things through the entire night, malfunctioning A/C, holes punched into the bathroom door. $50."

Back to LA (& environs) in February!
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"[Amazon has] what is called a 'negative cash conversion cycle'. They take in money before they pay suppliers. This means as long as your Revenue is growing, you will show the appearance of cash flow growth, when you are really just borrowing it as Accounts Payable. You have to keep the top line growing, otherwise, cash flow growth stops or reverses. If Amazon stops investing in growing the top line, the whole story unwinds. That is why they keep selling at zero margins. They need to keep the top line growing at all costs to provide the illusion of 'sustainable' Cash Flow growth."
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The author, brother Dru, & our dad, Jim. Xmas day 2013, shore of Killarney Lake.  Photo by EC.
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Q:  For a while you were finding "Jeff Walls."  Now it's all movies from the 70s.

A:  The process of finding a place pictured in a work, and then making a work about, or after it, is a very open one.  It's not a program, and it's certainly not systematic.

For the record, I've currently made or am making works about, or after, places depicted in works by the following artists:

Jeff Wall
Ethel Wilson
Scott McFarland
David Hockney
Kelly Reichardt
John Carpenter
Stephen Spielberg
George Roy Hill

So it's a broader, and maybe more peculiar list than it might seem.

Q:  What ties these together?

A:  I don't know.  That's not my business.  Duel and Hallowe'en were movies made by talented young men with ambition and no money.  Maybe that enters the work, theirs or mine, on some level.

Bear in mind that these location pictures are only one part of my practice; they occur simultaneously with, or alongside, what some people have called autonomous, or nonreferential photographs.  I'd argue that all photography is referential.  Photographs point.  A picture pointing at a cactus is no different, in my view, from a picture pointing at a photograph of a cactus.  It treats the cactus and cactus photograph as equally significant things in the world.
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ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Self-portrait by Marshall Marice, maybe the only contemporary artist in the world lacking some kind of comprehensive web presence.  This photograph is really good; it reminds me of an element in a collage I once made, and maybe of a boy who just kept on falling.
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There's a person he once was in a place far away
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MAN WITH A HANDSOME BABY STRAPPED TO HIS CHEST:  Hey CJB, when's the next show?

A:  September 2014, as follows:

Pearblossom, 2012-4

Haddonfield, 2012-4

Cutoff Tree, 2012-4

Sierra Highway, 2014

Plus three or four of the following:

Self-Portrait as Michael Myers, as Jerry Zaslove, as Charlie Brown, 2014

8826 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 2010-4

One or two Huntington Garden cactus pictures.

An architectural picture made many years ago, ably assisted by Lisa Jean Helps.

A picture of a tree in a Pacific Northwest cemetery.

Some other pictures, mostly Street Views.

Titled either Dad Loves His Work or Trouble in Paradise.

I would have really preferred not to have made 3 labor-intensive non-Vancouver pictures over a number of years, but the muse, & etc.  
- posted by cjb @ 11:04 PM

 

I won't end this high, not this time again
So long, so long, so long
You cannot survive
And I'm not dying
And I can't lose
I can't lose
No, I can't lose
Cause I can't leave it to you
So let's get too high, get too high again
(Too high again
Too high) 

(Late night, for my girl)
- posted by cjb @ 10:27 PM

 

Duel Movie Locations (2010) by Werner Naessens, another project after my own heart
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Study for Sierra Highway, 2014
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"Sympathy begets sympathy, to the benefit of things that don't deserve to be sympathized with. The ascendent forms of cultural power depend on the esteem of others, on the traffic driven by Facebook, on the nihilistic embrace of being liked and shared."

This is an important essay, full of insights, of which these paragraphs are perhaps the best:

"In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the language of actual dispute. An entire political agenda—privatization of government services, aggressive policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Security—has been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are 'interest groups,' whose selfish greed makes them unable to see reason, or 'ideologues.' Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power."

[....]

"The idea of success, or of successfulness, hangs over the whole subject of smarm. It is not true, after all, that the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of the market.

Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences, producing an economicist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed. Immense fortunes have bloomed in Silicon Valley on the most ephemeral and stupid windborne seeds of concepts. What's wrong with you, that you didn't get a piece of it?

We all live our lives, we're told, on these terms. If people really wanted a better world—what you might foolishly regard as a better world—they would have it already. So what if you signed up to use Facebook as a social network, and Facebook changed the terms of service to reverse your privacy settings and mine your data? So what if you would rather see poor people housed than billionaires' investment apartments blotting out the sun? Some people have gone ahead and made the reality they wanted."
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Muntadas: like every terrible cliche of conceptual art c.1970 crawled up onto the VAG's 3rd floor & died. A terminally dumb & preachy show.
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The rest of the gang have quietly followed him from the auditorium. Linus approaches the tree and gently props the drooping branch back to its upright position, wrapping his security blanket around it.
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It's 2 o'clock in the morning and I don't know nobody.
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veryrelentless.com

A three-tiered in-joke, bargain-priced at $11.95/year.

Also: anticadabra.com
- posted by cjb @ 4:22 PM

 
The Love Inside (Demo for Barbra Streisand)

I got me loving you
I had you loving me--
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Kato Cat, majestic.
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