- posted by cjb @ 11:52 PM

 

Eldorado Cholla, 2016

Digitally altered.  Curious to see if anyone notices the improvement.  Big, approx. 40" x 30".   Radical facingness; selbstportrait.
- posted by cjb @ 9:24 PM

 

Foothill Boulevard (Southern California)
- posted by cjb @ 10:48 PM

 

To The Big Short. As advertised; like watching myself on screen for 2.5 hours.  Michael Burry's quandry -- to be right, but to also lack the emotional & communication skills neccessary to convince anyone, most of all the Joel Greenblatt character, of that rightness, strikes remarkably close to home.

"Here's your fuckin' steel-cut oatmeal!" Recommended.
- posted by cjb @ 8:17 AM

 

Here's Helpsy in Europe, where it is not currently raining & people aren't phoning to lambaste her over her "poor to nonexistent" selection of Readers Digest magazines.
- posted by cjb @ 4:00 PM

 

Can we make sense of the Malheur mess?

A very thoughtful essay. I've photographed in and around Burns for five or six years now, and much of this Bundy/anti-BLM/"occupation" stuff hits uncomfortably close to home. These are known places to me, at least as much so as the Huntington Desert Garden, or Whitney Mesa, or the road cut on the #14 just south of Palmdale, CA.

"Buyers, in a world packed and competitive beyond the imaginations of those who set aside these unclaimed and abandoned lands as forest reserves and public grazing lands in the early 1900s, are now everywhere, planet-wide. As Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory, when he was president of the American Lands Council, famously said of privatizing federal lands, 'It’s like having your hands on the lever of a modern-day Louisiana Purchase.'

When that lever is pulled, and it will be, unless a majority of Americans know enough about what is at stake to oppose it, we will live through the transformation of our country. Federal water rights that underpin entire agricultural economies, and that are critical to some of the last family farms and ranches in America, will be in play. Few Americans, even those in the cities of the east who know nothing about these lands, will be untouched in some way by the transformation. Once the precedent for divesting federal lands is well-set, the eastern public lands, most of them far more valuable than those in the West, will go on the international auction block. The unique American experiment in balancing the public freedom and good with private interests will be forever shattered, while a new kind of inequality soars, not just inequality of economics and economic opportunity, but of life experience, the chance to experience liberty itself. The understanding that we all share something valuable in common – the vast American landscape, yawning to all horizons and breathtakingly beautiful – will be further broken."
- posted by cjb @ 7:18 PM

 
Charlie Munger Daily Journal Meeting Notes 2016, take 2

No PFB without CM, who gave me the courage to start.
- posted by cjb @ 7:08 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 11:27 PM

 

Charlie Munger, 92 a few days ago, still going strong (scroll):

"As an attorney, the most important client was myself. Reading and thinking. The beauty of doing it [reading and thinking] is, if you're good at it, you don't have to do much else."
- posted by cjb @ 8:05 PM

 
Following the #refugelivestream. Right now, in real time.
- posted by cjb @ 6:58 PM

 

Jeffrey David Wall, Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context, 1970

Still recall using my so-called UBC Library Assistant I privileges to check this doorstop out of closed storage in the basement of the Woodward Biomedical Building, c. 1995.  Didn't follow much of it at the time, but have dutifully laser-printed this digital version off for a rematch, up next after Allan Bloom's Republic of Plato (Basic Books, 1968), which has been melting my head since Christmas.  Followed by: Stanley Rosen's exegesis of Plato, Auerbach's Mimesis, & Stella's Working Space. Back to California & Nevada in March, exhibition of new desert pictures in August.  Lots of fun at parties, old white guy reading list notwithstanding.
- posted by cjb @ 8:05 PM

 

- posted by cjb @ 8:58 AM

 
Sweeney Granite Mountains Research Center, University of California, Riverside
- posted by cjb @ 8:52 AM

 

- posted by cjb @ 12:00 PM