and this, and this, and this, and this....

Kanga translations

2012-01-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

More on Kanga at the British Museum website.

Having A Telephone is Boring. Not Having A Telephone is Boring

2011-10-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

I applaud all ideas, but nothing else, only the ideas interest me and not what gravitates around them, profiting from ideas disgusts me. "One has to live," you tell me? You know as well as I that our existence is short compared to the profit one can gain from an invention; we're on the earth since the day before yesterday and we'll die tomorrow. Cubism was born one morning only to die that evening, then Dada appeared and was, actually, just as ephemeral. The evolution continues; some person will find the name of a new package for a bygone spirit, and so forth.

The Dada spirit only really existed from 1913 to 1918, an era during which it

never stopped evolving and transforming itself. After that time, it became as

uninteresting as the output of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the static elucubrations

offered by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise and certain members of the Institute. In the

attempt to prolong its life, Dada has closed in upon itself. I am sorry if, with these

lines, I'm wounding friends whom I love dearly, or disturbing certain colleagues

who perhaps are counting on a profit from Dadaism!

I couldn't tell you what will happen at this point; all I can assure you is that

our state of mind is not the same as it was from 1913 to 1920 (if you like), and that consequently it will show itself differently. Don't think that I'm standing in my shirtsleeves at midnight in July, contemplating the moon, don't worry, I have my good sense-if there is such a thing as good sense! What I am sure of is that it is impossible to stop movement. Money itself has value-or it doesn't; paper would perhaps be worth more than gold if it were given to me to discover gold mines as large as the coal pits of Cardiff. People class individuals into two categories: "unserious" and "serious."No one until now has been able to explain to me what a serious man is. I will make the attempt here myself. I think that you call a man serious when he is able to provide for his neighbors, his family, his friends, on condition that to these ends he put the interest on his capital to work. An unserious man is one who confuses interest with capital, and doesn't seek to make dollars with his ideas-from an artistic viewpoint, a copyist at the Louvre will always be more serious than I am! Dada, you see, was not serious, and that is why it won over the world like wildfire. If some people take it seriously now, that's because it's dead! Many people will call me a killer, but they're deaf and shortsighted. Anyway, there are no killers; are tuberculosis and typhoid killers? Are we in control of our lives? In my opinion, there is only one killer, the one who created the world. But, since no one created the world, there are no killers, Dada will live forever! And thanks to that, art dealers will make their fortune, publishers will treat themselves to cars, writers will get the Legion of Honor, and I ... will stay Francis Picabia!

One must be a nomad, traveling through ideas as one travels through countries and cities, eating parakeets and hummingbirds, swallowing live marmosets, sucking the blood of giraffes, feeding on the feet of panthers! One must sleep with gulls, dance with a boa constrictor, make love with heliotropes, and wash one's feet in vermilion! One must disguise church interiors as ocean liners and ocean liners as artichokes with cream, make statues come out of the sea and recite verses to passing steamers, go out naked then put on a tuxedo at home; one must hear confessors' confessions, never again see the people one knows, above all, never put the same woman twice in one's bed, unless one has a mistress who cheats on you every day with a new lover! All that is a lot easier than the faith of a copper- smith, who always laughs at what's funny and finds black dark and white light. The coppersmith warms up in the sun because he's cold; don't be cold, and you'll see how much the sun looks like rain!

Existence is tolerable really only on condition that one lives among people who have no ulterior motives, no opportunists, but that would be asking the impossible...Talent doesn't exist, masterpieces are just documents, truth is the pivot on the scale. Everything is boring, no? Falling leaves are boring, new leaves are boring, heat is boring, cold is boring. Grandfather clocks that don't chime are boring, those that do chime are boring. Having a telephone is boring, not having a telephone is boring. People who die are boring, just as are those who don't! Look how badly the world is put together, why doesn't our brain have the force of our desires? But all that matters very little, paintings in museums are masterpiece- fossils. A man is called tasteful because he shares the taste of others; for you, life is a guitar on which one plucks only the same tune forever.

Translated by Matthew S. Witkovsky.

Francis Picabia, "M. Picabia se sépare des dadas," Comoedia, May 11, 1921, reprinted in Francis Picabia, Ecrits 2, ed. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes (Paris: P. Belfond, 1978), pp. 14-15.

In the October Issue of Frieze: I'm uncomfortable with Christoph Büchel

2011-10-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded a pdf here.

See online (subscription-only,alas) for the full version.

PIFAS

2011-09-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Studies

Sociological Walk in another Brooklyn

2011-08-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

September 8 (@4pm) French conceptual artist Fred Forest replicates his infamous 1973 sociological excursion through working-class neighborhood of Brooklin, São Paolo. Given that this time he is starting on N.7th street, (the heart of the party, so to speak) the tour should be an incisive study. Curated by the awesome Ruth Erickson.

Venice Biennale Posts

2011-07-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

Reporting on the 54th Venice Biennale for Black Book, in three posts. The last one is best.

1 Smells Like Art
2 Institutional Critique and Nationalism
3 You Never Sausage a Place

Noelle Kocot

2011-05-05T03:17:00.000-07:00

Fugue
A flash of sudden joy
From the solar plexus
Where fear usually resides,
She knew she’d be okay.
“There is no other life
Apart from this one,” she
Said to no one in particular.
The building gleamed
In the midday rain. The cats
Ate their turkey dinner. She
Screened phone call after
Phone call. A wild loneliness
Descended like a flock of
Robins drained of their red.
Nothing seemed to matter
Anymore, not the past with
Its ax of granite nor the future
With its watery punctuation,
But the moment, yes the moment,
She was forced into it like
So much dough between
The fingers. “God bless us all,”
She said aloud to everyone and no one.
There is no other life.
-----
Noelle Kocot interviewed by Claire Wilcox here.

Peter Schjeldahl in Frieze this month, blowing me away

2011-04-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

and offering his thoughts on...

the artist's statement:"An Artist’s Statement is a batch of required thinking which purports to be about the inspired doing of something, but which replaces it. The art-schooled art world is mad for intellectual hooks. These leapfrog from an idea, sail clear over the sweat and bother of actual creation, and land in forensic analysis, which some dismal pictures or objects have been devised to illustrate. A hook may get you into the art game. It will also digest you. You will then be excreted out, at best as fertilizer for next year’s crop of Artists’ Statements. More likely, you will have been just another silly fart, dispersed on the breeze."

clichés in art criticism today:" It’s a reflex to characterize, and even to congratulate, new art in terms of what it is ‘responding to’, ‘being interested in themes of’, ‘reflecting on’, ‘being concerned with’ – and I would add, ‘interrogating’, ‘challenging’, ‘subverting’ and so on: mental monkey tricks. "

artists and their practice:"Then there’s that horrible word – I wince every time I read it, and I read it a lot lately – ‘practice’. Artists don’t make works any longer. They maintain practices. Like dentists, only less honourably. Or like musicians trying to get to Carnegie Hall. When do you stop practicing something and do it?"

A reprinted lecture he delivered at SVA, the article also includes a full version of the great "modernist warhorse of a poem" Wallace Steven's "The Idea of Order at Key West."

It's all here .

The Serving Library

2011-02-22T12:15:00.000-08:00

Donate here.
More information and statement of purpose here.

I interview conceptual artist Iain Baxter& for Art in America

2011-02-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

Here.

Sonic Wire Sculpture

2011-02-17T02:37:00.000-08:00

by Zach Grade

"Sonic Wire Sculptor is based on a musical instrument by Amit Pitaru which has been shown in museums and galleries world wide.

The Sonic Wire Sculptor turns your 3D drawing into sound. Sonic Wire Sculptor requires headphones, without them you may only hear limited audio, especially on the low (bass) tones.

app here: sonicwiresculptor.com"
From Zach Grade's site.

2011-02-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

1/31/2011. From the NY Times. Photo Credit: Tara Todras-Whitehill/ AP

Not Not Not Not Unreal

2011-02-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

By my buddy Jon Clark and Spencer Longo. The effect is unreal. The FX are mostly done in camera.

q week of using french keyboards

2011-02-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

qnd qll my A's hqve turned to Q's.

On archival 'fever'

2011-01-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

"Can its underlying cause be expediently diagnosed as a generic effect of globalization, as anxiety over theses on “the end of history” (from Alexander Kojève to Francis Fukuyama), or the failure of utopian paradigms and loss of faith in western notions of historical causality and progress? For art historians and critics, this is a deeply paradoxical state of affairs because the unraveling of historical paradigms, especially those beholden to a teleological, revolutionary temporal logic, suggests we should no longer put our faith in future retrospective viewpoints or judgments. However, we have yet to invent satisfying critical-historical alternatives to looking forward or looking back as we live in the present. A heightened historical, sense of self-reflexivity, in the spirit of the sort found in the work of Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, is indispensable."

More of Vivian Rehberg's crisp essay in Jeu de Paume's Le Magazine this month.

REVIEW: Art in America: Nous Ne Notons Pas Les Fleurs

2010-11-05T02:08:00.000-07:00

My review of a group show in Paris, here.

REVIEW: Art in America "Slummer Nights"

2010-08-18T03:25:00.000-07:00

My review of "Slummer Nights," curated by Sadie Laska, at CANADA gallery.

disco party 9-5

2010-08-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

Seth Price's bumpin 8-hour work mix here. Tests at my "day job" are already in process.

Seth Price: I didn’t have a particular use in mind. I was thinking about work days, where different sets of working hours represent different kinds of work and different cultural areas: a union job, an office job, an art gallery, a boutique… But it’s true, I liked the fact that the track could be played perfectly, start to finish, during an 8-hour work day, so yes, a work mix, why not.

-from an interview with Boško Blagojević, here.

Dispersion and Jogging.com

2010-08-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

I saw David Joselit deliver a lecture on the subject of dispersion and circulation last winter. He began by asking: How do we produce value and meaning in a world of overproduction? He answered with the following: The only way to derive "meaning" from art is by "moving it"*:

Joselit described how we now rely on an "epistemology of search" to identify value in art. And this value has been untethered from material and assigned to the amorphous bonds that combine unlike objects (telecommunications, human relations). Rules for this epistemology are as follows:
1. images multiply
2. value is produced by circulation
3. objects are constituted (ie: an object d'art is designated a 'work of art').

With this in mind, I am reminded of a new crowd-sourced curatorial project on jogging.com:

Jogging will now enter an experimental mode of image distribution called Positive Feedback. .....

.......We ultimately hope for the entire blog to become a self-regulatory process, allowing viewers the chance to both create content and vote on the relevance of that content to Jogging’s brand for inclusion. When this end is reached, Jogging will become the first artistic ‘being’ to be associated with an anonymous and endless number of identities– a form of production we feel makes the most efficient use of the possibilities our digital location provokes and is most relevant to the blog’s political aim of encouraging a decentralized system of distribution (and creation) for art.

I am looking through the anonymous images on Jogging.com since the project has been initiated: sliced Jpeg of two baseball hats against one another and two different colored woods. A totem pole with a bear carved into it, fitted with an airline head-rest. Barbara Streisand's home. They are so full of signifiers and so empty at once that they are exhausting, which is good.Value is not derived from these because they are contemplative and significant but if I, and enough people "Like" them/reblog, their value increases.

As surely the makers know all too well, the project is the successful envisioning (as a online curatorial project) of what was discussed in an AUDC (Sumrell/Varnelis) essay, "Revenge Against Objects" in 2006. Post-modern society, they write, no longer has need for material culture. Of course, "All objects are now wild signs, free-floating signifiers unable to represent anything specific themselves, part of the mechanism of circulation, which has become a goal in and of itself."

Benjamin Crotty and Gabriel Abrantes

2010-08-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

Poor boy falls for daughter of Chinese neo-colonialists in Angola,

with the arcs, score, and stilted dialogue of Hollywood narrative film. The improbable is now plausible.

Liberdade, at the Palais de Tokyo (23 mins).

Svetlana Boym

2010-08-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

#4, A Critic, an Amateur, from Notes for an "Off-Modern Manifesto":

If in the 1980s artists dreamed of becoming their own curators and borrowed from the theorists, now the theorists dream of becoming artists. Disappointed with their own disciplinary specialization, they immigrate into each other's territory. The lateral move again. Neither backwards nor forwards, but sideways. Amateurs' outtakes are no longer excluded but placed side-by-side with the non-outtakes. I don't know what to call them anymore, for there is little agreement these days on what these non-outtakes are.

But the amateur's errands continue. An amateur, as Barthes understood it, is the one who constantly unlearns and loves, not possessively, but tenderly, inconstantly, desperately. Grateful for every transient epiphany, an amateur is not greedy.

More here.

Coming Up!

2010-08-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

Paul & Linda in various guises. (Thanks Michael!)
See also: "Notes on the Paul McCartney Shadow Canon" by Mark Owens, in #20 Dot Dot Dot.

REVIEW: Art Papers: Sam Durant, "Dead Labor"

2010-07-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

SAM DURANT
ART PAPERS July/ August 2010
PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK, March 13-April 17 2010
REVIEWED BY MIMI LUSE

In contemporary American popular culture, work is often represented as an innocuous form of incarceration. Television cubicle-sitcoms like The Office give us the comedy of extreme banality in confined conditions. How easily we forget our indebtedness to a much more radical history for the grey creature comforts of the modern workspace. For modular furnishings and humane amenities like the eight-hour workday, we can respectively thank utopian furniture designers and a series of anarchist-led labor strikes in the late nineteenth century. Taking advantage of our collective memory loss, Dead Labor Day is Sam Durant's historical corrective (Paula Cooper Gallery; March 13-April 17, 2010)

"Capital is dead labour," as Marx's gothic metaphor holds, "which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour." For the exhibition’s eponymous work, Dead Labor Day, Durant built a life-sized gallows whose scaffold platform can be accessed by a set of metal stairs. Gallery-goers who climb it will find a water cooler, with paper cup-dispenser, installed on the platform. The concept is a visual pun: distracted by complimentary Dixie cups, the modern worker finds herself an unwitting hangman of the life-sucking forces of capital. But it is also a superimposition of two discrete historical models of discipline: the theater of punishment and the humane, slow-burning incarceration of the modern working environment. Models upon models.

In the front room, Gallows Composite C (Billy Bailey Gallows, Haymarket Gallows, Rarney Bethea Gallows, Saddam Hussein Gallows), 2010, lies on a mirrored pedestal. Just as modernism provided better living through furniture, the model here is a process of refining capital punishment through the rule of averages. The lightbox Break Room with lnternational Mass Meeting, 2010, shows an upside-down spread of an ideal, sleekly modern, open-concept office break room layered over an archival poster commemorating the four Haymarket martyrs who were hanged in Chicago in 1887. Durant also introduces archival materials at the gallery's front desk – documentation of Grover Cleveland's decision to move Labor Day to the month of September in order to disassociate the holiday from its radical May- Day/ Haymarket origins, for one, and sheathes of economic data; two curve graphs overlaid to show, gracefully, the correlation between economic inequality and a decline in union membership. Offering these materials, Durant demonstrates the increasingly elegant ways in which history ironizes itself; while it might profess a true reflection, it instead turns things topsy-turvy.

Durant's earlier work likewise served to demonstrate this principle. Reflected Upside-down and Backwards, 1999, created a corrupted mirror-image by placing two model- sized versions of Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 (now mostly destroyed), on top of one another. One was charred – as the structure was in 1975 – and the other was pristine enough to file under the text-book header "sculpture in the expanded field." Meeting Smithson's self- supplied definition of a "new monument" as that which “places both past and future into an objective present," Durant’s composite played with the dualities of perceived history and the archives of art history. These works are a painful remedial that force us to accept coexisting versions of history, and burn neural pathways in the process. In his writings on the "archival impulse," Hal Foster describes Durant's work as a counter- memory for our cultural Alzheimer's: "why else connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?"

-Mimi Luse

Network Culture Chart by Kazys Varnelis

2010-07-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

5 years old but still.... More here.

	Modernism	Postmodernism	Network Culture
Political Economy
economy	production	service	debt
capital	monopoly	multinational	transnational
regime of accumulation	Fordism	Post-Fordism	Empire
forms of consumption	scarcity	affluence	luxury and clustering
enemy	revolutionary communism	soviet communism	islamic terrorism
Culture
settlement	suburbia	postsuburbia	exurbia
space	abstract	hyperspace	network space
subjectivity	autonomous	schizophrenic/fragemented	subsumed into the object
media	mass media	niche	long tail
dominant mode of art	rupture	critical appropriation	smooth aggregates
authorship	author	discursive field	network
narratives	Hegelian narratives	end of the grand narrative	neo-Hegelianism
music	records	cassette tape, compact disc	file sharing or itunes
portable music	transistor radio	cassette walkman	ipod
sci-fi fantasy	metropolis	star wars	the matrix
past reference	antiquity	19th c.-1930s modernism	1960s contemporaneity
disease	TB	AIDS	Ebola, Anthrax, Avian Flu
war	World War I, II	Vietnam	9/11
computing	mainframe	personal computer	ubiquitous computing
screen-based media	Television	GUI	Web 2.0
urban détournement	the dérive	skateboarding	le parkour
Representative Figures
psychology	Freud	Lacan	Zizek
philosophy	Sartre/Heidegger/Wittgenstein	Derrida	Deleuze
architecture	Le Corbusier/Mies	Venturi/Eisenman	Gehry/Koolhaas

I wish we didn't have to have a "World Debate" on this

2010-07-17T21:46:00.000-07:00

Is water a commodity or a public right? In an ideal world the issue wouldn't require a heated debate on BBC World. In the audience, Christopher Gasson, with an organization called "Global Water Intelligence" asked that the panel stop referring to water as a "right". Yikes.

Hype Machine

2010-07-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

By now everyone is familiar with the hype cycle. You know the drill: the ginned-up enthusiasm of publicists combines with word of mouth (and blog) to create so-called buzz. Articles appear, posing one of three questions. For the new artist: is this the next big thing? For the established artist (or restaurateur): will stratospheric expectations be met? For the figure whose stock is down: can a comeback be staged? Then the release date arrives, or the premiere, or opening; at last the thing itself can contend with its reception. But, wait, now backlash surges alongside the ongoing hype. And understandably, too: it’s not nice being force-fed even the tastiest food. But hold on a second, here comes the backlash-to-the-backlash …

from "The Hype Cycle," April 2008, N+1. More here

Articulate Monsters

2010-06-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

Saw Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime at the slick new IndieScreen theatre last night in Williamsburg .

The film could not be clearer in its politics: America is a nation of over-medicated human shells posing as "normals" and living the bland life in Florida. Fine. Not an uncommon viewpoint, especially in independent film. But while Solondz's other films seem otherwise morally ambiguous, the Judeo-Christian values of forgiveness in Wartime were unmistakable.

Sometimes even verging on the heavy-handed, "forgive and forget" is a lietmotif, down to the theme song, "Life During Wartime," (lyrics written by Solondz and performed by Beck Hansen*). You could dismiss this as Solondz's ironic sensibility. But the movie reinforced these values so sweetly.

From the child who forgives his pedophile father to the woman who works with (and eventually marries) ex-convicts, Solondz articulates and explains the compulsions of the most gruesome offenders. For example, by linking a pedophile's sexual urges to his seemingly innocent compulsion for gum-drops, Solondz implies that the perv has just as little control over his pedophila than he does over a sweet tooth.

Paul Reubens is also in Life During War Time, and during a q+a after the screening last night (hosted by another L magazine contributor, whom I'd never met before) Solondz said he cast Reubens precisely because of the cultural baggage the actor carries with him. Far from a reactionary or sensationalist artistic decision, Solondz is actually exonerating Reubens by hiring him, while at the same time generating a tension with the audience; forcing viewers who have not yet forgotten Ruben's gaffes to sympathize with this scripted character and forgive him.

* not a Talking Heads cover.

9 to 5, Underground

2010-06-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts on two books I read recently; both books exploring "undergrounds" of the American workforce. What does it say about modern labor when a great portion of regulated working class jobs are just as bad, if not worse, as those of the underground economy, and are only humane for the workers if the rules are bent?

For his exposé working the jobs that most Americans won’t do, Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson spent a year picking lettuce, processing poultry, and working in the back kitchens of New York City restaurants. During his immersion, Thompson, who is a journalist and former SEIU researcher, operated by the dictum, “no matter how unpleasant, I would stay with each job for two months”.

Like Nickel and Dimed or A Year of Living Biblically, Thompson's approach is the sincere adoption of prevailing practices taken to their logical conclusions, for the benefit of a larger literary public. Reading Working in the Shadows, the reader's is a task of empathy and endurance, and we trudge through the author's daily pains, which he himself must ease with steady regimen of pain killers. Fine in and of themselves, his tasks repeated ad infinitum deform his hands and give him sore limbs for weeks. In Yuma Arizona, stooping thousands of times a day as a lechugero (lettuce picker for Dole) leaves large welts on his thighs from his metal holster, and charley-horse spasms in his back.

In recent years, books like Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft have explored the sometimes liberating ontology of manual labor. To make peace with the brutality of his labor,Thompson finds grace in the acquired skill and tacit knowledge of his Mexican co-workers who swoop gracefully to cut heads of lettuce, and palm them gently before twisting them into plastic bags. In moments of sun-stroked delusion, Thompson himself imagines he is training to be a master of "lettuce martial arts."

But aside from rare instances, the work Thompson does as a laborer offers few opportunities for the satisfaction of a job well done. What emerges instead is a classical case of alienation and estrangement. He describes his time on the graveyard shift at a poultry processing plant: "The graveyard shift at the chicken plant is full of zombies. By two in the morning, nearly everyone on [the] line looks half-dead, with eyelids drooping and faces devoid of expression." Though Thompson jokes that the painful physicality of his job distracts him from his more existential concerns doing jobs where results are measured by absolutist standards, (eg; 3,000 lettuce heads cut a day, 4,200 chicken breasts in one shift) poetic descriptions serve only to masquerade literally deadening work. For example, everyone at the plant he works with looks 10 years older than they are, and life expectancy of the average farm worker is only 49.

Many of Thompson's colleagues are abused in his presence, and are paid less than minimum wage (this, even after landmark settlements). But not all of Thompson's colleagues are undocumented workers. Many in Arizona are guest workers with flimsy H2-A visas who commute from Mexico, or legal immigrants with work visas, like the Venezuelans he meets in Alabama. Nevertheless, the conditions Thompson describes provide evidence that legal and illegal immigrants' resistance to unionization efforts are ultimately detrimental to the rights of all workers. Suprisingly, however, Thompson discloses that many 'underground' jobs are often well-compensated (relative to the average US hourly wage of $22.46,) precisely because the work is so ignoble and the work is simply hard. The book will serve as a testimony refuting the claims that immigrants 'steal' blue-collar jobs, since in reality, blue-collar workers would never want these jobs. In 2006, John McCain offered, in mock-seriousness, to pay a group of union workers $50 an hour picking lettuce in Yuma: "You can't do it, my friends". Thompson could but he asked one of his Mexican colleagues why most Americans wouldn't. The honest answer: “ The very simple reason that everyone knows, is that Americans have become lazy”.

What does it say about the state of the American work-force today if the work we rely on cannot be done by Americans themselves? Meanwhile, in a cruel irony, the jobs that Americans are willing to do, that is, service jobs, cannot support the people that work them, though their compensation should technically put them "above the poverty line." In her book of case-studies, The Moral Underground, activist and Boston College professor Lisa Dodson compiles eight years of interviews with those on the fault lines of an " economy that impoverishes so many people, even as they do the jobs of the nation." Though Dodson initially set out to detail individual struggles of so-called 'wage-poor' workers, many middle class managers whom she spoke with revealed that they would often engage in remarkable acts of civil disobedience to help their employees get by. She speaks with supervisors, managers, day care workers, and grade-school teachers. Doctors give medicine "samples" to the whole family, food factory workers invite employees' children to eat in the evenings, store managers pad pay-checks and "borrow" prom-dresses, and interns at a Wisconsin highschool babysit a students' siblings to allow the student to participate in the school play. The eponymous "Moral Underground" she writes, is a nebulous indeterminate grouping of upper and middle-class managers who constantly grant their employees clemency.

The "Robin-Hood" style acts she hears described over and over again violate labor, FDA, caregiving, and supervisatory rules, and yet Dodson keeps the personal and technical details vague, so that she doesn't 'out' them. A central tenet of her book is that the very conditions endured reverse our conceptions of right and wrong, and that unsustainable working conditions warrant minor and occasional lawlessness. Her book, which is more suited to policy-makers and social workers than the general public, points to the adverse effects that instability and poverty have on the child's school performance, and prescribes work reforms not merely as cushy band aids for worker morale, but as crucial to closing the 'achievement gap' in American schools.

Though both Dodson and Thompson reveal what is ostensibly 'hidden' from middle class Americans, what they describe is in fact representative of a large portion of the American work effort. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are more likely than not to have a hand in processing the food we consume, and it is estimated that the informal sector contributes to 10% of our GNP. In terms of legal jobs, since 1979, hourly earnings for 80% of American workers (private sector, non supervisory jobs) have risen by just 1% after inflation, while worker productivity has climbed 60%. 39% of the nation's children live in low-income households and one in four US-workers earns less than $9 an hour. Though a new poverty threshold, set to be implemented for the fall 2010 census report will adjust "poverty" based on the cost of living in a given geography and extend more aid to families that need it, both of these books make clear that the way we pay the workers who bring us the food on our table and who will care for us in our old age, is unsustainable.

The publishing of both these books comes at a good time, adding to the discourse at a moment when we are reexamining both the Fordist workshop and American work-places stuck in an archaic (1950s) employment model of promotions in return for company loyalty. The regimen of cubicle-culture has become a punch-line in popular culture, its absurdities a ready-made situational comedy. Recent suggestions, from the hokey to the more serious, laud telecommuting, flexible hours, and the most dramatic of all, the "Results-Only Workplace". Of course, some of these solutions, which fit tech-workers and other knowledge-industry workers, may not make sense for service employees and other manual laborers whose physical presence is required. Nevertheless, anecdotal books like these will help as policy-makers and academics move forward with more prescriptive measures.

Cleo de 5 a 7

2010-06-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

"They all want some kind of group to come into power which has already been in power"

2010-06-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Meese on nostalgia and politics.

video here.

Underwater, Middle East

2010-06-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Sent by my friend, deployed in Iraq and Kuwait.

D.I.Y. Recluse

2010-06-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Make your own shack. Another Mimi (Zeiger) alerted me to Derek "Deek" Diedricksen's new booklet, the exuberant comic-book and architectural manual. Diedricksen describes his book as Gary Larson meets Bob Villa. This book could be just the thing to indulge a summery bout of hermitism!

The Political Face

2010-06-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

All form is a face, said Serge Daney (apparently) but I can't find where he said that.

Entry-Level Reporters Wanted

2010-06-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

TO describe the website Examiner.com, in a recent Ad Age interview, former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan referred to another sort of content production, the meat factory in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle":

"What these sites are producing....You know what it is? It's like sending unchecked meats out to the public."

It doesn't stop me from applying when I see a post on Craigslist advertising an entry-level reporter job for a site called "Mainstreet Connect," essentially a hyper-local version of the examiner, about to launch in my hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut.

The publisher emails me, asking that I call him at my earliest convenience. The next day at nine am we are talking on the phone. He tells me he is driving and on Bluetooth. He tells me he is just out of college. He describes the job to me: "This town is interesting. There's a lot of stuff to write about. I mean, you know Steve Young? I'm not sure how I know this, but his dad, is a member of the Greenwich YMCA and I heard that everyday he does something like 3,000 sit-ups. That's interesting! " He tells me he wants someone ASAP, who knows the town, and that he would be able to tell how serious I was about the job by how quickly I could turn around a test assignment.

I look online too get an idea of what they're looking for and see a feature on a news site by the same publisher already launched in the neighboring town: "Osprey Alert: Pair Stakes Out Beach." The piece is about 40 words long:

Emilse Cardona and her husband, Oscar, have been watching Osprey at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk for about a month now. This afternoon they had the opportunity to watch as one of the osprey brought back sticks to add to their nest while the other stayed and cared for their young. Emilse and her husband expressed that watching the birds is a very enjoyable and fascinating pastime.

This gives me an idea of the kind of thing they will be looking for at Greenwich Daily. I picture myself walking up to a couple just like Emilse and Oscar in my home-town while they are bird-watching and saying "Excuse me, but do you mind if I take a photo? Our editor is looking for content of any kind."

Twelve minutes later I've written a piece about a woman I know in my town who started a toy bear company. I send it in and get an almost immediate response. "This is exactly what we're looking for." In the next email, the editor gives me another test. I am to interview anyone I want in Greenwich, CT, and take a photo. A "Big, face shot," and suddenly the cynicism that had allowed me to write the first piece falls away as I am faced with the actual task of giving the editor what he wants. I sit around all morning and finally around five o'clock I leave my house and park my parent's car in the strip mall across the street from the McDonald's next to the one of the public housing units in Greenwich that no one ever really talks about. I prepare the kind of questions that I imagine Emilse and Oscar were asked and decide that what the editor will get is an interview with someone who works there.

Inside McDonald's it smells only faintly of food. The place is a circus. Families of seven or eight, just returned from a day of amusement fairs, have their faces painted like tigers. They mill around the restaurant filling up their drinks and getting napkins.

I stand in front of some potted plastic plants, pretending to read the Value Menu above the counter. I am scared out my wits that someone will discover I have no faith in what I am here to do and whom I represent. The main newspaper in this home-town of mine does a fine job and has their own website. Their bread and butter is the girls' lacrosse game. Isn't that already hyper-local? With the rare exceptions where the model is creating a newspaper where there had been none, this "fiesty" entrepreneurial business model that Jeff Jarvis thinks is going to save journalism is ultimately just a coupon flyer with faces in it, an SEO trap for local businessmen Googling themselves, an adsense platform with sophisticated market content. What am I doing here? I watch an employee at the take-out window concentrating on holding a gallon jug of liquid chocolate upside down over a super-sized drink. At the condiment counter an elderly woman with a stylish McDonald's beret and horn-rimmed glasses is throwing a pile of straws half-hazardly at the straw dispenser, and they are catching the wrong way and scattering. She breathes heavily and turns her head when she senses I am watching her. People keep walking in. It is 5:30 and dinner time in Connecticut and they want their burgers yesterday.

I am still standing in the plants and the cashiers are now asking me for my order. They ask me and then forget they've asked me and ask again and I keep shaking my head because because I don't want to tell them that I'm not here to eat and I'm a journalist just looking for "content".

I don't really say anything back, I just keep leaning against the plants. A slight man with two soccer daughters in cleats and shin-gaurds thinks I'm queueing and starts forming a line to the left of me, ushering his family behind him.
"Go ahead" I say.
"Oh, no!" He says. He is indignant with politeness. "You were here first!"
"NO. I need more time." I say.

I am sunk by grief and I can't decide who I hate more, the guy who is turning news into phone-book listing of everything that has ever happened here or myself for making a mockery of a job assignment and a full-time writing job with benefits. When the circus dies down, I walk up to a young Hispanic cashier wearing a red McDonald's shirt.

"Hi, Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? For The Daily Greenwich, a site on Main Street Connect?" The words are out and I am consciously regretting their delivery.

"I don't know about that.... Hey Colleen…!" He is asking his manager. Super Size Me just came out on DVD and there is no question that a memo to "refer all journalists to McDonald's Public Relations" is posted behind the counter. Colleen comes out from behind a broiler and looks at me suspiciously. Why is a reporter in a McDonalds?

I try again, barely convincing myself.

"I am here with Daily Greenwich and I want to interview people who work at the Greenwich McDonald's."

Colleen tells me to come back Monday. I don't insist. As I walk back to my car, I think of other story ideas for the day, but somehow, in what is perhaps a subconscious self-defense mechanism to keep me from getting this job, I don't allow them to make any sense. On the Post Road, there is an old Howard Johnson's motel with a sign that has been rubbed out to just say 'Johns'. It's my favorite thing in town. I could write about that. I pass by a tiny house with a hummer parked in the driveway. "That hummer was blocking the whole house," I think. "Funny. Maybe I could take a picture." And then I actually stop and try to. I stop and do a three-point turn and try to find the house again. But then I change my mind mid-way. A Volvo is in the intersection behind me.

"Go ahead" the driver motions to me.
"No you go ahead," I motion back. I need more time.

I go back home and look at the osprey article again. The next day I write to the editor and tell him thanks for the job opportunity but I think I'm going to pass.

Loose Club-Going Women

2010-06-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

Last year a group of activists founded the Consortium of Loose, Forward, and Pub-Going Women in India. It was not formed for fun, but in response to the the hyper-conservative Sri Ram Sena and the group's violent campaign to chastise bar-hopping women in Southern India by beating them physically.

In America calling yourself a loose, forward, pub-going woman is simply your alignment with the status quo, the freedoms afforded by third-wave feminism. We can now dress badly, drink until we black out and wake up with whomever caught us falling (1). Nonetheless, going out to a bar (as the consortium organizers in India worked so hard to defend) is a public stage to demonstrate women's liberation.

In America, there have so far, been few pop-culture patron saints of this excessive, debauched proof of freedom. Though pop singers mention clubs, these spaces always seem abstracted. The 'club' is less an actual venue than an a romance that is really just a backdrop for meeting that one special someone.(2) You are not going to be annoyed by stuff they say to you, and you are not going to get beligerantly drunk.

But in 2009 someone gave us a more realistic reflection of a teenage-bar hopper; one that celebrates the parental dissapproval, binge-drinking, the run-in with the law, and the morning-after eye-crust. These are freedoms we take for granted. Hello Ke$ha, patron saint of the American Chapter of the Consortium of Loose, Forward and Pub-Going Women.

(1) Beyond the circular arguments and the moralizing that "hooking up" (Tom Wolfe's term here) incites in some ways, bar culture is now the 21st century version of "coming out" to your town, society. You may find this charming or you may find this offensive. But there it is, public space.
(2) The club in these videos is not a place where people you know are. It is a mysterious anesthetized zone where you meet good-looking strangers only.

Tiiiightrope.

2010-06-13T20:28:00.001-07:00

Well, to start: the saddle shoes!

Night People tape covers

2010-06-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

More here.

three super conductors

2010-06-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

1) Rashad Newsome's amazing new videos, at PS1's Greater New York show.

2) John Underkoffler (via Fast Company, via TED)

3) The Meissner Effect

The End of Major Combat Operations

2010-06-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

My buddy Nick McDonell gave a graceful talk this evening at 826 NYC about his new book, The End of Major Combat Operations, which is essentially a humane mirror to the 'hard-news' approach he took as a war correspondent in Iraq for Time magazine. The book is great. Oh yeah, and Nick is only 26, no big deal!

Must we Monetize Every Waking Moment, So That We Must Now Call Moments without Recompense "SURPLUS?" Yep.

2010-06-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged 'immaterial labor' labor that creates immaterial products such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response.

-Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri.

These words were written in 2001 and should be familiar to any service or knowledge worker. Meanwhile a new book out by techno-idealist Clay Shirky, called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin Press, June 2010) purports that today we are so flush with immaterial labor we now find ourselves in excess of it. At a book talk tonight, Shirky tasked himself with categorizing activity of cognitive surplus online into a social spectrum online.*

As its title suggests, Shirky's first book, Here Comes Everyone, had a-give-it-up-guys tone for the content producers who cherish their bottleneck on information (journalists!) while outside the teeming net-masses storm the barracks of proprietary content. Likewise, in Surplus Shirky maintains his faith in wise crowds and collaborative amateur enterprise, but here he zooms in on why we donate time for free. These ethonomics have been discussed ad nauseum by all the pop economists who look at irrational motivations in human behavior. So much do we value our self-worth that we are compelled to contribute cognitive labors in our free time. If you've ever been promoted from underpaid intern to salaried employee, and found your enthusiasm zapped, you will understand this concept.

In the beginning of his talk, Shirky said that collectively, Americans spend about 100 million hours every weekend watching just the advertisements on television. Just the advertisements.They spend far more watching whole shows. This same figure, he says, also reflects how much time Americans spend yearly on Wikipedia, contributing to the creative commons, and the most trenchant bit Shirky dangled before the audience last night was the question: What if we tapped into that surplus? He didn't answer, but it is worth asking it if would supply the world with more LOLCATS or more social justice?

-Cognitive Surplus- the word sounds snappy and at one point in the evening's Q &A Shirky politely corrected an audience member who used it as a catchphrase: "I don't want the term to turn into a Longtail type phrase" he said, quickly. But thinking about it, what exactly does the fact that we call this a cognitive surplus imply? How different is it from the brain power that ordinary humans may have logged into an old thing called 'civic engagement'? Must we 'monetize' every waking moment so that the moments without recompense we now call 'surplus?'.

This was another question untouched in Surplus, or at least, not in the talk Shriky gave last night (Hardt and Negri would answer yes). Since I'm not getting paid to write this, I didn't buy the book. By the time it would have taken to obtain a press copy, some unprofessional (apologies guys!) online would have already scooped me. Or the wikipedia page. Plus I'm lazy. Pretty unprofessional huh? Well I'm doing this for free! For self worth. Wht do you expct? Copy-edited prose and fact-checking? If you would like to know whether or not Shirky addresses this question in his new book, it will cost you $39 dollars, and at 256 pages about a weeks' worth of your own cognitive surplus in order to find out.
----

*At the base level, he spoke of the personal (1) contribution; sites like LOLCATS where anyone can upload a cute photo and add text. Next, we see the communal (2) level of activity in organizations like "Yahoo Groups"while revolve around a topic of interest that is shared by many but ultimately self-serving, third (3) the Public, a space where ideas (and in his example, code) is exchanged, and finally (4) the civic, demonstrated in groups where participants work actively to change the hegemonic culture for the good. For the last example, Shirky refers to Patientslikeme.com, a site where people afflicted with a specific disease (Lou Gehrig's for example) congregate and talk openly about their symptoms and feelings. In a culture where disease symptoms cannot often be discussed openly, especially around healthy subjects, the site fosters within itself a culture of acceptance, and from without, helps to shift perceptions of the condition in the social sphere. Not only that, but the aggregation of like-patients under one roof is unheard of in typical medical tests, and PatientsLikeme has the potential to provide doctors with instant test groups, helping them advance treatment. Shriky cites another civic example in the tongue-in-cheek "Pink Chaddis" Facebook group started by an Indian journalist to shame a group of social conservatives whom had started a campaign to beat "loose" pub-going women in Mangalore. Shirky applauded the power of social networking to effect change. Admitting that this applause was 'old news', he put a fine point on it by saying that what really interested him was the political power of the movement, which was strong enough to lead to the arrest of the Sena group's leader.

Some (slightly depressing) Things I Learned Today

2010-06-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

That the excellent film Hurt Locker topped out at just over 16 million, making it the lowest-grossing Oscar-winner ever, that everyone's gone to seed on Facebook, and that there is a grown man who travels Brazil in a hot pink van looking for blonde models of Germanic descent.

OIL + REAL ESTATE

2010-06-06T22:49:00.000-07:00

June 6th, 2010: Summer is not even here yet in America, but all morning there has been talk on the national radio of beaches closing down for the season.

Little clods of tar are washing up on shores as far as Florida because for forty-seven days now the Macando oil prospect has been emptying into the ocean at a rate of 12,000 to 100,000 gallons a day. The government reports that 29.7 million gallons have been released into the ocean. The Macdonald estimate has this at 51.5, the Wereley has it at 95.0 . The BP worst case scenario is at 117.7 million gallons. It's a Sunday in Connecticut. This time of year, the green trees that line our streets give us a reason to live in the suburbs, while in the moments we have our doubts, the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis won't allow us to move.

Last year this month, Real Estate released Real Estate. None of the members of the band are from the beach, though we'll credit Real Estate with contributing to the movement of rock bands that have that sound of sun-stroked nostalgia. Eager-to-please chords quickly resolve themselves and voices are washed with a remarkable microphone echo, which gives any recording heavy nostalgia with it's self-conscious reminder of time, and in this case, the sensation of getting stoned in a volvo and looking for redemption in the music of the Grateful Dead, or anywhere: "You're walking down that Pensacola Beach, keep on searching. Until you find your Rolex in the sand, you wont be stopping..." is how Real Estate's "Beach Comber" goes. The record was made between January and June 2009, during a period when the band was out of college and marginally employed, living at their parents' homes in New Jersey. Other song titles are as follows: "Lets Rock The Beach,"Atlantic City", "Suburban Beverage," "Suburban Dogs." It is a nostalgic (Greek: nostos (return home) and algos (pain)) record of mundane agonies they call Fake Blues, and beaches and lawns and sprinklers and Budweisers, life as vacation.

The project of the suburbs operates on nostalgia, on what Mikhail Bakhtin called an 'historical inversion': being that the ideal is not being lived now, it is projected into the past. Out here, in the suburb in which I grew up, in the faux-danger of dark patches of trees, the small thrill of an unexpected turn in the road, the falsely wild hedges, we search for a preternatural return to the myth of eden. But our Valhalla hides invisible irrigation systems, tamed with pesticides, and powered on gas.

Down the street from me, a man I do not know has built a scaled version of Le Petit Trianon at Versailles, the delusional playhouse of Louis XVI, which was itself Jean Jacques Anges' return to the myth of Palladio, which was itself a return to pastoral Greece, who they themselves were nostalgic, since they invented the term. On the north side of the original Trianon, a double spectator staircase descended into a manicured backyard, hidden from the public. In Greenwich, Connecticut, a town in which I have noticed, since childhood, the boom of speculative building, the quieting of crickets, the nearly complete extinction of reptiles, and the thinning of mammal populations, the new new new manse in the woods has been reversed to face the street, so the back-lawn and all of its imagined pleasures spill out into the public eye.

On the New York Times website, there is an interactive feature that allows you replay the oil spill in time-lapse, and I've been scrolling my cursor obsessively back and forth through it, making the oil condense and then drawing it out again over the ocean. I hear reports that the oil spill has reached Pensacola beach, slowly turning the vacation zone for the family into a nightmare. The promotional on the website for Pensacola has yet to be corrected and still reads: "Pensacola Beach offers family fun on the whitest beaches in Florida. I am trying to grasp what has happened in the most abstracted, rational way, but in the end what I do is listen to Real Estate and feel nostalgia for nostalgia for nostalgia, for the beach and for everything else.

My Doctor Docs Reviews vs. NY Times

2010-06-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

I review two films in this week's The L magazine, both of them "doctor-documentaries". Living in Emergency, is a documentary about the NGO Doctors Without Borders, and Burzysnki: The Movie is about the famously suspect, famously beleaguered Dr. Stanislaw Burzysnki of Texas. In this Friday morning's paper (the only Arts section I really read with interest) I had the masochistic pleasure of comparing my opinions with those of Jeannette Catsoulis and A.O. Scott in The New York Times. This game is always dangerous. You can feel vindicated if your opinions 'match' or defeated if you 'missed' something. In this Friday's case, vindication! Most of the time though, it's sort of a moot point. Today's happy victory could be next week's defeat; piece has been e-printed. A better approach then, would be the critic's slow resignation to trusting her instincts.

Market Hotel Grows Up

2010-06-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Newsy piece I wrote for the Brooklyn Rail

Dads in Drag c. 1950

2010-05-31T11:30:00.000-07:00

Just stealing this from Jacqueline Appleby's facebook wall.
addendum: date confirmed at 1959. T. Appleby recalls being "fresh back from Rhodesia at the fascist Copthorne Prep"

The Microchip!

2010-05-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

So that's what it's for!

Two scenes from the same Weekend (1967)

2010-05-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

the weekend as dream:

...the weekend as nightmare:

best coast

2010-05-16T20:09:00.001-07:00

American Folk Anthology

2010-05-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

This fits well with the Tess of the d'Urbervilles post below

Artists' Maps of Lower Manhattan

2010-05-07T10:39:00.001-07:00

I like 16Beaver's self-conscious deliberations, sketched out here in response to being asked by the New Museum to submit a map of lower manhattan for the "Get Lost" project (2007). More maps after jump.

Chris Johanson (2007)

William Pole. L, Safe Houses in New York City (2007)

Thomas Hardy. Hilarious?

2010-04-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

First she fetched a great basin, and washed Tess's hair with such thoroughness that when dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other times. She tied it with a broader pink ribbon than usual.

Then she put upon her the white frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking, the airy fulness of which, supplementing her enlarged COIFFURE, imparted to her developing figure an amplitude which belied her age, and might cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more than a child."I declare there's a hole in my stocking-heel!" said Tess.
"Never mind holes in your stockings--they don't speak! When I was a maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the devil might ha' found me in heels."Her mother's pride in the girl's appearance led her to step back, like a painter from his easel, and survey her work as a whole.

Ariana Rubcic

2010-04-22T19:06:00.001-07:00

I love my friend Ariana's drawings

Volvo as muse

2010-04-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

by Hillary duPont, from her album: "late, great, 240"

My interview with Barbara Kruger

2010-04-21T20:07:00.001-07:00

This was an odd assignment.
My buddy, one of BB's editors, a really smart guy, asked me if I'd like to interview Barbara Kruger. No brainer. I thought the occasion would be the release of her book, or her show at Mary Boone.

But as it turns out that was not my assignment. Instead of celebrating the accomplishments of a big-deal, living breathing feminist art crusader and her grand career, it was requested that I ask Kruger questions about a guy whose legend is already outsized and whom is six feet under. I was to ask her questions about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Why? Because in the pragmatic world of magazine publishing, April would be the 'Brooklyn' issue, and Basquiat was born in Brooklyn. Right.

I was impressed with this leap of logic, and when we started talking, Kruger was too. She made it perfectly clear to me right from the start, and the article reflects that. She hilariously kept on softball-pitching to me one-liners about Basquiat. Eventually, after the requisite Basquiat questions, we spoke of other things, which didn't make the article. Instead, this piece is of the 'article about the difficulty of this article' variety. So here's my version, which I filed somewhere between Memphis and New Orleans:

Barbara Kruger's art is at its core, a reflection of the artists' integral sense of doubt. Her job is to question everyone's motives and it was no surprise when she doubted my questions for this article. "Now you tell me why I find this funny," was her counter to my first question for her, which wasn't about her, her new book (published by Rizzoli) or the show she's putting on at Mary Boone (opening March 27). It was a question about Basquiat.

It's the Brooklyn issue, I explained. Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn. Though their careers and their artistic styles could not have been more different, like many artists who came to the art world's attention in the early 80's, both of them spent time at the Mudd club. On a phone call to her in LA, where she teaches now at the University of California, Los Angles, Black Book was hoping she might have something to say about the artist.

Not really. "One of the things that creeps me out, is the crazy nostalgia that paints times so different and rosier and utopian than they actually were. It was just everyday life, the way we have everyday life now…"

Twenty-two years since being laid to rest in Greenwood Cemetary, Brooklyn, the public's understanding of Basquiat's work has been de-clawed by a sort of celebrity-obsessed biopic-ization. "Basquiat" is short-hand for a grittier, more 'authentic' New York. The massive paintings he made in his big Soho loft in the 80s conveniently still look great in big Soho lofts today. “a Basquiat,” the noun, is a luxury commodity.

Answering questions about the late artists' life and legacy, Kruger took care not to perpetuate his deification: "All I can say is that I think he was a tremendously gifted artist….it's amazing how people do not know his work today, especially people involved in so-called street culture, that they don’t even know what his roots were and the importance of his work.”

Kruger emphasised the radicality of Basquiat's career: "The art world was a very different place then...there was a time when the art world in New York were 12 white guys. It's better now. The art world's more globalized, there are different people of different colors, different genders, persuasions, different classes who are able to call themselves artists, that makes for a richer cultural life.... I don't think about the good old days. To me, these are the good old days."

She recalled Warhol's strange adoption of the much younger artist (in 1982) and Basquiat's meteoric rise to fame: "I thought Warhol's appropriation of him was sort of weird, on a certain level, but it was based on power, and libido, and prominence, and about two very gifted male artists." Though Warhol would aid in the creation of Basquiat's myth, Basquiat himself was by no means naif to the benefits of a well-branded artistic persona. One painting of his, also from 1982, is nothing but two shades of brown acrylic and in the top half, the intended sale value of the work scrawled in white oil-stick. It is called “Five-Thousand Dollars”.

A work Kruger made that same year advocates her own ideas about the value of Art: over a photostat collage of the Sistine Chapel, she printed the following in her signature geneva font: "You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece." (The MOMA invested, and the work is held in their permanent collection).

"To me the "art world" is an anthropology....It's all down to construction of power through a proper name. These people are no longer bodies to tell us that we're right or wrong.... so rather than talk about a particular artist, it's all about the construction of fame, or prominence, and in truth it's more about how proper names are created through a subculture.... You can attach a name to it, you can call it 'Basquiat', 'Warhol', you can call it 'Eva Hesse', if I dare mention a woman," Kruger said. "What we're seeing is this sortof really unexamined look at how things were back then. This article, these questions you're asking is a furtherance of this very thing. That is the way periodicals work."

Rodney Alcala's photos

2010-04-21T19:00:00.001-07:00

My friend Jessica Wolfe points out
that each of his victims/subjects has "such specific beauty."

It goes without saying that a photographer is always present in his photo.

Intent seeps through form and looking at these makes you feel like a predator's accomplice ....or is that always how you feel reading the New York Post?

Joyce Kim

2010-04-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

"It's sort of a parody of its own subject matter, a parody of seriousness. The aesthetic object has become a displaced subject. The cartoony aspect of it, the peeling, the Pollock-like style, the Barnet Newman-like vertical lines are present. It's a group of fragments of different experiences that I've witnessed. Placing myself as a visual witness in abstraction, and recategorizing the deck of cards, representing the process as a critique."

Will Rabbe

2010-04-13T08:32:00.001-07:00

My buddy Will Rabbe, IFC's 2008 campaign correspondent, collects presidential paraphernalia and is a good artist too.

Cartoon from the Archives: Mr. Villnave

2010-04-04T16:34:00.001-07:00

AMERICAN CRAFT: Hardcore Romance: Lola Brooks

2010-01-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

ART PAPERS review

2010-01-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

I reviewed a great painting show in ART PAPERS' January / Feb 2010 issue, featuring works by Liz Markus, Daniel Heidkamp, Kenny Scharf, Alicia Gibson, and others.

time signatures, heart rates and violence

2010-01-04T22:16:00.000-08:00

Brendan Mullen, interviewed in Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization (1980) relates the BPM of punk and the adrenaline rush that results from the adjusted dance to increases in violence during shows. He also relates punk and folk music, both being protest genres.

"I think alot of the time that it gets out of hand is because of the speed of the music, which is way above the normal rythym of a dance. If you take a 4/4 disco time signature, which is comfortable, you can kind of dance easily to the disco rythym, which is, I understand, 126 to 132 heartbeats a minute.

Whereas the kind of music the Germs or the Black Flag is playing is playing is upwards of 250 or 300 beats per minute, which is not comfortable or normal to dance to. And this is why this dance that you'll see in the film, the pogo dance, which is jumping up and down and bouncing off walls and stuff, is kindof an abnormal level of adrenalin and sometimes some violence breaks out.

Nowadays I think the kids are more desperate or something or more bored. Some of the better of the punk bands developed into sort of like "folk music" I dont mean folk music as a traditional folk music but the allegory can be drawn in the sixties when the protesters used acoustic guitar. Now instead of acoustic guitars they have high speed three hundred beats a minute speed rock. Yelling about the same things. About how the air is poisoned out there. The air in utopia is poisoned. The final joke."

Matthew Brown

2010-01-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

Matthew Brown,Untitled, 2006

Willem de Kooning, Woman V 1952-53

Matthew Brown of Vancouver rips stuffed animals apart, sews them together, photographs them, alters the photographs digitally, then repaints them.

variations on the 'S' curve

2009-12-29T22:04:00.000-08:00

Ida Ekblad, Time is On Our Side

Wade Guyton, Untitled 2005

scanned from october # 130

2009-12-27T20:50:00.001-08:00

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Megan Sullivan in Conversation with Gabriel Orozco.

french theremin

2009-12-10T21:29:00.001-08:00

Olivier Messiaen composed the Turangalia-Symphonie, the posthumous "Feuillets" inedits (unedited leaflets above), and several others with the ondes Martenot in mind.

l'argent de poche

2009-12-10T21:25:00.000-08:00

at IFC until Monday Dec 14

Stuart Sherman

2009-12-10T21:16:00.001-08:00

RINGED FINGER, RINGED MOON: POINTLESS POINTING

At NYU's and Participant Galleries right through Dec 20

Eric Wendel

2009-12-07T08:39:00.001-08:00

The Cooking of the Juice, The Licking of the Thumbs, 2007

Untitled, 2009

Untitled, 2009

Content as a glimpse here in Wendel's paintings.

He has one up at the "Too Big To Fail" show right now (through Jan 2010).@395 Flatbush Avenue ext. Brooklyn.

Today

2009-11-30T10:43:00.000-08:00

Chunklet has posted a 45 min. audio montage of Fugazi's onstage banter here.

Facetious questions to the audience ("what else can I do for you you little mtv-generation piece of shit?") are a highlight.

Slow Pans

2009-11-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

Kenneth Anger's Mouse Heaven (2004), described as "a fantasy featuring the Birnkrant collection of extremely rare vintage Mickey Mouse toys" is just as erotic as his Scorpio Rising (1964). It's the cheesecake slow panning camera:

Allison Shulnik

2009-11-19T09:04:00.001-08:00

Some of the most gunked-up paintings I've seen. Thicker than some in the abex warehouse at Christie's. Inches thick. And they look like Chaim Soutine still-lives. Video here.

Horse Dance of the False Virgin

2009-11-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Act 11: Horse Dance of the False Virgin, at the Judson Church Nov 18 2009, New York, NY during Performa09. Choreography by Kate Foley, music by Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel. Scored by Devin McNulty.

Candice Breitz, Him (1968-2008) and Her (1978-2008)

2009-11-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

At the Power Plant, Toronto

Roberta Smith interview

2009-11-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

This spring, Irving Sandler asked Roberta Smith about what's fashionable in art today. I like her honest (as always) answer:

"Rail: ...What are your thoughts about what is considered the fashionable style at the moment?

Smith: Oy. There are probably several, with most of them involving some form of appropriation, whether the medium is abstract painting, or the juxtaposition of odd found objects. I think the notion that everything—whether materials or narrative—needs to be found, not made is a bit of an obsession. Another one is this reverence for the late 1960s and early 70s. It seems like a certain kind of early 70s conceptualism is considered a kind of antidote to the market and the corruption—I’m using scare quotes—of object-making. I find that kind of tiring, or perhaps a way of hiding from your own time. There’s also resurrection-for-resurrection’s sake: the rediscovery of forgotten artists just because they’re neglected. Some of these artists aren’t that interesting, but the mere fact of their having been overlooked makes them heroic in some people’s eyes."

I also like alot of other things she says in the full Brooklyn Rail interview here.

Not a Boring Post I Promise

2009-10-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

Mick's ponytail and Steevie's sleeve match the spur of the "F" and the lower bowl of the last "s" in the album title, respectively.

Duchess Says....

2009-10-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

S & M synth band Duchess Says (Montreal) play CMJ next week. Singer Annie-Claude Deschênes wears a hockey goalie mask while performing, barking like Stasi commander above a din of guitar shreds and deep synth. This song is the poppiest they get, but thanks to the video, their perversity shines through.

Nina Chanel Abney

2009-10-08T12:13:00.001-07:00

Class of 2007, 2007

The Boardroom, 2008

Whoosh, as a friend says, so good. The earlier works are more Hurvin Anderson (link to my buddy Alex Taylor's article on him), with the deranged faces of Alice Neel. The newer works are flatter, mocking John Wesley.The first two here are already in the Rubells' collection.

Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986) at Zach Feuer

2009-10-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

"Drawn to the power of the word, Sister Corita incorporated fragments of text, slogans and signs taken from billboards, street signs, advertising jingles, pop songs, poems, newspapers and magazines into her work. She sampled quotes by Martin Luther King Jr., Rainer Maria Rilke, Phillip Roth and the Psalms.... Corita's innovative use of loaded text...enhance the power of the quote to create unique revolutionary, spiritual and social statements. Sister Corita was not only an activist and Pop artist but also a teacher."

@ Zach Feuer from Oct 23-Nov 5.

Real Life Cartoons

2009-09-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

An exerpt from the Baltimore Annex Theatre's production of The Point, written by Harry Nillson, is shown here. The original animated version had Ringo Starr narrating.

My First Glossy Mag

2009-09-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

Syked for my article on the extremely talented, multi-faceted designer Dan Funderburgh in the Oct/November Issue of American Craft.

Teenie Url

2009-09-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

Tiny blogger Tavi of Style Rookie rules the fashion world! Scrolling through her blog's archives (they start way back when she was 12 in 2008) it's amazing to watch how she refines her sense of style.

hoser.

2009-09-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

my hose collection.

enjoy xxx

Nu-House

2009-09-07T08:51:00.001-07:00

Even on the crappiest of computer speakers, TeenGirl Fantasy sound awesome. But a post on their official fan-site describes it best:

"Sometimes when I close my eyes I picture a club far away where there is free piña coladas. People are happy and no one can hurt me, not even myself. Suddenly a glitter ball light starts pulsating out of a cube that appeared out of the ocean. It slowly walked towards me and asked me to dance. I figured, why not? The night grew into a sunrise, I sat on a rooftop and cried while falling asleep, but with a glimmer of a smile on my face. It was possibly the most beautiful club I'd ever been to. The pulsating ball of light was called Teengirl Fantasy."
teengirlfantasy.angelfire.com/

today.

2009-08-31T22:32:00.000-07:00

Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe has a Myspace blog.
It's terrifying...and fascinating.

today

2009-08-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

monster skin wing-back chair by joshua ben longo

today

2009-07-30T16:16:00.001-07:00

via here and here

today

2009-07-30T15:36:00.001-07:00

EYE x Joshua Petherick x PAM (i-D Magazine clipping)

today

2009-07-27T16:32:00.001-07:00

hello, francoise hardy

roo-day

2009-07-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

cold cave's new album cover all gussied up

today.

2009-06-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

Helle Mardhal, from Finland, just closed her show at Laviola Bank Gallery on the Lower East Side.

today

2009-05-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

"Uni" by Stewart Coffin, packaging design. Skor-Mor Corp,1970s

Stewart Coffin, author and famous polyhedral puzzle designer, welcomes the replication of his designs, many of which are not under patent. He writes:

It is not necessary to ask my permission to manufacture and sell any of the designs listed here. I encourage others to become involved in this rewarding and fascinating craft. Unless otherwise indicated, all of these designs are my own creations. Yet you might say that is only partly true, for they are all based on ideas that have evolved over centuries, their origins fading away into the dim and distant past. As far as I am concerned, they can all be regarded as in the public domain.

Link to this and autobiography here.

"Aries" by Stewart Coffin, Skor-Mor Corp, 1970's.

Stewart Coffin, "Cetus" Skor-Mor Corp, 1970's

Stewart Coffin, "Tauri",Skor-Mor Corp, 1970's

Other puzzles of interest:

"Ring a-Ling" Designer unknown, Skor-Mor Corp 1970's.

Mike Reilly, "Weaver's Puzzle"

today

2009-05-12T07:21:00.001-07:00

Montgomery Perry SmithCreamyLittle Orphan Andy. (Photo by Lucas Blair )
Brad Callahan Big Face sculpture

Darwinian Dandies, photo by Lucas Blair
via Hannah Shaw

today

2009-05-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noland in Kansas City

s/s 2009

ye older seasons

via Missbehave

today

2009-05-09T12:18:00.001-07:00

drawing by Jennifer McGee

Shary Boyle

2009-04-23T07:51:00.001-07:00

2007. The Beast. Oil on panel. 40 x 35 cm.
2005. Porcelain, china paint. 20cm tall. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
2006. La Bête. Porcelain, china paint, gilt, feather. 22cm tall. Collection of The Paisley Museum, Scotland.

2005, detail. Soldiers Aren't Afraid of Blood. Ink on paper. 60 x 46cm. From The Illuminations Project, a drawing/text collaboration with Emily Duke.

2005. Porcelain Fantasy series. 21 x 30cm.

Shary Boyle, from Toronto.
The Art Gallery of Ontario recently commissioned her to do two porcelain sculptures. The National Gallery and the Musee des Beaux Arts in Montreal now own two of them as well.

today

2009-04-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Alicia Gibson:
The Long Black Veil

Jizz Over Chelsea

Hot Topic

today

2009-04-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Bianca Casady

today

2009-04-18T10:17:00.001-07:00

Matt Mullican, Untitled (Learning from that Person's work: I) 2007 via James Wagner

today

2009-04-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

Olga Sophie Cala
is studying at the New York Studio School. She responded to an advert for an apartment in our place, so I know her only by chance.

today

2009-04-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Lewis, taking on Johnny Cash, "I've been Everywhere" (New York Version). You need to scroll through to the part where he starts singing. I saw him perform this live at Pete's Candy Store.