Don't go, stay with the all-unknown
Stay away from the hooks
All the chances we took
We're so close to something better left unknown
We're so close to something better left unknown
- posted by cjb @ 10:23 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:29 PM

 
ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth

"Are the winged birds final, or placeholder? Some kind of weird stuff going on with those. Just want to get some clarification before giving more feedback."
- posted by cjb @ 8:57 AM

 
"I don't want to live in a house made of memories of all the things I consumed and enjoyed. Some things I've loved I never hear, read or see again! Imagine just savoring your experience of a thing in your imagination, making no attempt to repeat the experience. Imagine how much better Star Wars would be if you only saw it once! It would still be amazing."
- posted by cjb @ 2:35 PM

 
"I knew I didn’t have the energy to get someone else’s coffee for the next five to ten years until I was allowed out on my own."
- posted by cjb @ 12:43 PM

 

Radius, 2014

nb. Brood parasitism
- posted by cjb @ 11:35 PM

 
"In addition to hands-on training, visualize yourself practicing the deployment scenarios. Think of visualization as a dress rehearsal. It is a form of practice that allows you to experience events before they happen. Images have a powerful effect on us. The mind treats an imagined entrapment as if it were real. If you ever do have to drop your pack and deploy your shelter, visualization makes it more likely that you’ll react correctly, quickly,and without panic."
- posted by cjb @ 9:37 PM

 
"This is the randomest location for a Thai restaurant. It's right off the 5 Fwy in a strip mall next to Subway."
- posted by cjb @ 10:34 AM

 

Spontaneous aesthetic judgment.  Performer: CJB.  Photo: ST.  Consensus: fourteen-and-three-quarter minutes and counting.

(In passing: ST's phone's lens is really good)
- posted by cjb @ 8:14 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 9:34 PM

 

(Courtesy L.)
- posted by cjb @ 11:46 AM

 

A camera pan along an old Ford Granada, parked along a suburban roadside...
- posted by cjb @ 8:03 AM

 

Dear Ms. T. CAT,

Thank you for your recent interest in the Air and Space Collection at the Smithsonian. I am the curator assigned to answer your questions; so, in order,

1. Yes, that is the REAL Wright Flying Machine;

2. No, we never loan it out;

3. No, we don't loan out any of the Wright Flying Machines, including the 1906 one that crashed;

4. No, you cannot borrow Harriet Quimby's plum satin aviator's suit;

5. No, Harriet Quimby is not related to either Harriet the Spy or Ramona Quimby;

6. No, the glider models are not alarmed, but I remind you that 'borrowing', even inside the museum, is prohibited;

7. No, the glider models do not 'come with' the flying instructions and no, they are not for sale, even for 'one bijilion squillion dollars OR a lot of books';

8. It is a really bad idea to make any flight craft out of papier mache;

9. It is a bad idea to build wings, attach them to yourself and jump off something really high, including 'the GALLERY UPSTAIRS!!' which I suspect is the name of a local mountain. The middle ages saw a number of people attempting this. Most did not fare well;

10. For your interest in gallery security, I have referred your letter to Sgt. Smyth, who will get back to you;

11. Why, yes, I love Reuben sandwiches from Stan's and yes, I, of course have a pass to get into the Gallery at any hour.

Thank you for your interest in the Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian!

Regards,

Dr. Tom Crouch
- posted by cjb @ 6:43 PM

 
"If you love something that somebody does—some art, some words, some sounds—you tell them that you love it. You tell everyone how much you love it, repeatedly and enthusiastically. Don't save your appreciation for later, or worry about wearing people out with your passion. Because the happy truth is this: If a piece of art truly moves you, you will never, ever run out of new adjectives to express how much you love it. Getting to love someone's art is one of the very finest parts of being alive."
- posted by cjb @ 6:29 PM

 

An old favorite from high school, still aesthetically credible today, though it takes until the first chorus to really get rolling.

The trees and I are shaken by the same wind but whereas
The trees will lose their withered leaves
I just can't seem to let them loose
And they can't refresh me, those hot winds of the south
Oh I feel like an alien, a stranger in an alien place.

Maybe a little sonically overblown, but saved by the lyrics, Phil's enunciation, and the tasty drumming in the choruses (ie., 3:13-on).
- posted by cjb @ 10:06 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 7:44 AM

 
"Even the original is an interpretation." (@tejucole)
- posted by cjb @ 10:23 AM

 

RIP Nash
- posted by cjb @ 9:00 PM

 

Another good reason to visit Tatlow Park.
- posted by cjb @ 1:46 PM

 
"Frolic," by Luciano Michelini

Cafe line-up, morning.  OLDER GUY, our man, SLIGHTLY YOUNGER OLDER GUY HOLDING EMPTY TUPPERWARE BOX.  

Sign on counter beside six muffins under a little glass dome: NEW!  GLUTEN-FREE MUFFINS!

SYOGHETB:  Have you tried these muffins?

CJB:  As a matter of fact I have.

SYOGHETB:  How were they?

CJB:  Truthfully?  Pretty disgusting.

SYOGHETB:  I make these muffins.

CJB: Oh?  You bake gluten-free at home?

SYOGHETB:  No...I make these muffins right there. 

CJB:  Ya don't say.

SYOGHETB [to OLDER GUY]:  Have you tried these muffins?  They're gluten-free!

OLDER GUY picks up counter sign & studies it, deep in thought.

OLDER GUY [to BARISTA GAL, replacing sign on counter]:  Coffee.  Small, black.

SYOGHETB throws up his hands and stomps off, muffin box in tow. 

OLDER GUY gets his coffee, adds fixings.

CJB [to BARISTA GAL]:  Two americanos please. Large.

OLDER GUY heads for the door with his coffee.  As BARISTA GAL bends over the espresso machine, OLDER GUY pops the top off the muffin dome, selects one, and exits.

CJB [to BARISTA GAL]:  Hey, did that guy ahead of me pay for a muffin?

BG:  What?  No, he just got a coffee.

CJB [pointing out OLDER GUY standing outside, face half-full of muffin]:  Well, you wuz robbed.

BG:  Fuck!  I've got this lineup, can you go get him?

CJB:  Oh sure.

[Exits cafe, strolls up alongside OLDER GUY]

CJB:  Hey, were you planning to pay for that muffin?

OG [through mouthful of crumbs]:  What?  FUCK YOU.  This is FREE!

CJB:  No it isn't.  It's for sale.

OG:  FUCK YOU!  I don't FUCKING STEAL!  Why are you MAKING FUCKING TROUBLE?  There's a SIGN, says FREE!

CJB:  No it doesn't.

OG:  I FUCKING SHOW YOU!  FUCKING COME WITH ME!

CJB:  Okay dude.

[OG storms back into cafe, barges through line-up, grabs sign off counter]

OG:  THERE!  FUCKING FREE!

BARISTA GAL:  Those are for sale, sir.  Not free.  

OG [slowly reading off sign, as if to child]:  New, gluten, FREE muffins.

CJB:  That's a hyphen.

OG:  WHAT'S THAT FUCKER?

CJB & BARISTA GAL IN UNISON:  Gluten, hyphen, free.  Not FREE.

OG:  FUCK BOTH YOUR MOTHERS!

Roll credits, fade to black.
- posted by cjb @ 1:26 PM

 
Today's research: there is definitely no street light in Tatlow Park.  But this sure looks helpful:

City of Vancouver Open Data Catalogue Street Lighting Network Data Package
- posted by cjb @ 10:22 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:09 AM

 
Recent reading: Dorte Zbikowski, "Nagging Tunes You Can't Shake Off': Repetitive Aspects of Andy Warhol's Work." (Andy Warhol Photography.  Edition Stemmle, 1999)
- posted by cjb @ 6:06 PM

 
"To really understand the Internet, she asserts, the last place you want to be is online. 'It’s such a trap. Once you start looking at the Internet, that’s all you’re doing. So I spend my time reading, thinking, things like that.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:27 AM

 

Sturtevant among her works.  How I'd prefer to remember her.
- posted by cjb @ 7:14 PM

 
"That dirty little trickster called simulacra."  Sturtevant in Paris, not so long ago.
- posted by cjb @ 11:31 PM

 

Sturtevant, 1930-2014.  The bravest of her generation; Bruce Hainley's Under the Sign of [sic] makes clear just how brave.  Very few artists have meant more to me.  I thought about writing to her in the mid-2000s, but felt pretty intimidated and never followed though.  What could I say about her work that this tough-minded woman didn't already know?  A few of my recent pictures are in some sense "letters never sent," and what they are trying to say in their own roundabout way is "Thanks."

PETER HALLEY: Would you go back to the work you were making in the mid ’60s and describe how you came to those decisions?

STURTEVANT: Well, that work was a result of very long-term thinking. It was not something that just popped in my head, that’s for sure. See, in the ’60s, there was the big bang of pop art. But pop only dealt with the surface. I started asking questions about what lay beneath the surface. What is the understructure of art? What is the silent power of art?

PETER HALLEY: How did you translate that concern into making, say, your Johns Flag?

STURTEVANT: If you use a source-work as a catalyst, you throw out representation. And once you do that, you can start talking about the understructure. It seemed too simple at first. But it’s always the simple things that work.

PETER HALLEY: Going back to that Johns flag, how, specifically, does the work enable the viewer to think about the understructure?

STURTEVANT: Technique is crucial. It has to look like a Johns flag so that when you see it you say, “Oh that’s a Johns flag,” even though there’s no force there to make it exactly like the Johns. Quite the opposite — the characteristic force is lacking. So when you realize it’s not a Johns, you’re either jolted into immediately rejecting it, or the work stays with you like a bad buzz in your head. You have to start thinking, “What is going on here?”

PETER HALLEY: “Why did the artist do this?”

STURTEVANT: Well, you might think that too.  But a better question would be, “How does this work?”
- posted by cjb @ 11:25 PM

 

Hot on the trail of Pharrell's 0500 hrs (of 2400), Los Angeles.
- posted by cjb @ 10:04 PM

 

Dr. Kenneth Clark:

"Well, in the, in the test—everyone calls this, by the way, the dolls test, but in trying to answer our basic problem of how do people develop a sense of their own being, we used a number of techniques, partly the dolls technique was the most dramatic. But we had pictures of children, black and white, and we asked the children to indicate which one was like themselves, which one they liked, which ones they didn't like. We had a coloring test which I found more fascinating than the dolls test even, although nobody ever talks about it. We had drawings of such things as a leaf, an apple, a mouse, and a girl, and a boy, and we had a lot of crayons and we asked—this test was particularly concerned with trying to determine the child's sense of color, starting with three years of age and going up. And we had them to color the leaf, the apple, the mouse. And if they did that correctly, then we would say, 'Here is a little boy,' and if it were a little girl we would say to them, 'Color this little boy the color you like little boys to be,' which would indicate preference. And if it were a boy, we would say, 'Color this little girl the color you would like little girls to be.' And then we—the final question we asked them on the coloring test, 'Now color yourself the color you are.' Well, one of the reasons I found that the most interesting and disturbing [sound fades] method that we used before the doll test was that we found a number of the children who would color—when we'd say, 'Color this little boy if it were a boy, the color you are,' —a child three, four or five, who could color all the other things, the apple and the leaf and the mouse, an appropriate color, would take a totally inappropriate color to color himself. For example, would take vermillion, or a color that no human being was, and do that. That, to me, indicated a sense of disturbance about his own color. Then finally we came to the dolls test in the same situation. And the questions were very simple, you know, 'Show me a white doll.' We had two white dolls and two brown dolls. 'Show me the doll that's a white doll. Show me the doll that's a brown doll.' We had a series of about three or four questions that were concerned with knowledge of the difference, and we had questions that were concerned with preference, 'Show me the doll that you like to play with. Show me the doll that's a nice doll. Show we the doll that's a bad doll.' And after we asked these preference questions in which a majority of these children disturbingly rejected the black or brown doll, and described positive characteristics to the white doll—not all, but the majority did. Then the most disturbing question, and one that really made me, even as a scientist, upset, was we then asked as the final question, 'Now show me the doll that's most like you.' And it was disturbing because many of the children were emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected. Some of them would walk out the room or refuse to answer that question. And this we interpreted as indicating that color, in a racist society, was a very disturbing and traumatic component of an individual's sense of his own self esteem and worth."
- posted by cjb @ 5:51 PM

 

To a superb example of postmodern American-Australian art cinema, at Tinseltown.

Q:  Hey CJB, was that you crying?  In the theatre, behind those 3D glasses?

A:  Yeah, that was me.  But almost everybody else in theatre #12 was, too.

Snarky, but not totally wrong plot summary:


- posted by cjb @ 8:10 PM

 
"“They think they failed in the city, not that the city doesn’t make good its promises.” (Louise Gluck)
- posted by cjb @ 10:03 AM

 
"Boswell Sisters, Henry Mancini, science fiction, Jean Shepherd, '60s jazz clubs, jazz DJ Mort Fega, Ennio Morricone, Ray Charles, Ike Turner, four years at Bard."
- posted by cjb @ 2:28 AM

 
Via the Blue:

"Once, an old guy working in a local used record store complimented me for my taste in music, because I was looking at a vinyl ('still sealed!') copy of the FM soundtrack. I told him that SD was a favourite of mine and that I had just seen them live at the Beacon in NYC recently. 'Not Steely Dan, you didn't,' he told me emphatically. 'Those guys never played live, they were strictly a studio act. Maybe you saw a cover band, but no way you saw the real Steely Dan! It was never a band, anyways - just two guys and a bunch of session musicians,' he added, singlehandedly ruining my memories of three shows in four nights."
- posted by cjb @ 10:16 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 10:44 PM