Viva los muertos!

(Su casa es mi casa.)

From the Diary

R, it turns out, teaches at Columbia. Engineering. A geek, but interesting. Came out here to participate in that action. Has some ideas about computers and politics. About engineering and politics. About the future. We listen.


from the beginning/next

From the Diary

Dropped acid with J. Went to the grocery store to look at the bread. The amazing cellular structure of white bread. There was a little controversy as we were leaving, but we got home okay.


from the beginning/next

VVork

Severine Hubard, Un Jour, 2007

Having said that some of the most interesting art on the web is at Wooster Collective, I should add that much of the rest can be seen at VVork.

From the Diary

Max’s with J and L. Chickpeas on the tables. Iggy Pop playing upstairs. In the backroom, under my favorite neon sculpture, who do we see but the people from that concert upstate. Pretty chic hangout for cadres like that. Later, we went to their place in the West Village. Nice old brownstone. On 11th Street.


from the beginning/next

From the Diary

Had that dream again. The one about flying. Vast cerulean emptiness. Fast and shiny. A strange smell. Nausea even in sleep. Then jagged corroded metal. Like twisted monuments. Like Europe After the Rain.


from the beginning/next

Where She Lived

Two Shows (in San Francisco)

Edward Burtynsky, Iberia Quarries No. 3, 2006

Edward Burtynsky's pictures of quarries, at Koch, are about as lacking in soul as photographs can be.


Diane Arbus, Female Impersonators' Dressing Room, NYC, 1958

While Diane Arbus's early work, at Fraenkel, might be just a little too soulful.

If you had to choose, though, the choice would be an easy one.

In fact, they're both worth seeing. Burtynsky's quarries may be soulless, but they are visually awesome. And although Arbus's early work was not her best, its imperfections and idiosyncrasies are themselves interesting.

(Arbus closes this Saturday; Burtynsky is here until Thanksgiving)

BLDGBLOG

Marshall Astor, LA, date unknown

Geoff Manaugh's paean to LA as perpetual urban Burning Man must have been easier to write now that he no longer has to live there, but it's fun to read nonetheless.

From the Diary

Slug's last night. Scary past the bikers. Afterward, Leon Thomas followed O home to L’s place. They went into the bathroom and didn’t come out.


from the beginning/next

Say it ain't so!

From the Diary

In the desert. Small errors add up, said R. That’s the thing about the digital world that’s coming. Everything will be rounded; half of it will be rounded wrong. All we do is supply a little extra. On the margin. Just a little. And there it is. Induced entropy.


from the beginning/next

Richard Misrach

Art wants to be interesting and meaningful. Beauty just wants to be beautiful. Their relationship, as a result, is often difficult. It doesn't seem to bother Richard Misrach, though, who regularly makes high art from the ridiculously beautiful.

How does he do that?


Richard Misrach, 1.1.99 5:20 pm, 1999

I think it might have something to do with distance. Not just the obvious physical distance between camera and subject, but emotional distance. Misrach photographs with a sense of perspective, a reserve, that allows him to present the beautiful without wearing it on his sleeve.


Richard Misrach, Submerged Gazebo, Salton Sea, 1984

And what about the light? Have you ever seen a Misrach in which the light was not itself beautiful? I wonder if the crystalline quality of his light - like water on hot metal - doesn't somehow help temper all that beauty and anneal it into art.


Richard Misrach, Untitled # 696-05, 2005

Or it may simply be that Misrach has uncanny taste, preternatural knowledge of where art ends and kitsch begins.

Whatever it is, it seems to work.

From the Diary

Thanksgiving in Boston. Heroin in the Copley Plaza. Family in the next room. M drinking pepto bismol from the bottle. Didn’t help. Pink splashes all the way to Beacon Street. Like those crumbs in the story.


from the beginning/next

Where She Lived

Wooster Collective

Buff Diss, Buff v. The Queen, 2007

Some of the most interesting art on the web is at Wooster Collective. It's pretty eclectic, but has in common that none of it was made to last. There's something heroic (and true-to-life) about art created in the knowledge that someone is going to come and wash it away.

From the Diary

Discovered yesterday I have brain cancer. Yesterday morning, to be exact. I had just finished shaving. When I looked up from rinsing the razor, I could distinctly see that my skull was caving in. In the front. Where the cancer is. I knew I was going to die. I walked around all day, certain of it.


from the beginning/next

From the Diary

I saw a man spritzing his dog. He had one of those spray bottles, like people use on their plants. Lucky dog. It was hot today. Except that every time the guy spritzed, the dog became a little harder to see. Like he was fading away. Like he was being erased.


from the beginning/next

Where She Lived

From the Diary

Walking with D where the powerlines come down out of the hills. Near the shacks where the flower workers live. There are flowers under the powerlines too. I noticed for the first time yesterday how strangely they glow.


from the beginning/next

From the Diary

J came to see me yesterday. We sat in the living room for a long while without talking. I knew something was wrong. Finally, she tells me she’s pregnant. The light in the room was intense. That kind of orange you see when you close your eyes in the sun. I had no idea what to say to her. On the television, an astronaut got out of his spaceship and walked. On the moon.


from the beginning/next

From the Diary

Every morning I hear this sound. Like coughing. Outside the window. But not coughing. Too uniform. Two sounds repeated. Over and over for, what? Maybe ten minutes. Every morning. Could be a dog, I guess. Or elderly asthmatics fucking. Elderly German asthmatics. I can hear it now.


from the beginning/next

The Diary

A couple of weeks ago, I came home one afternoon to find a large envelope leaning against the wall beneath my mailbox. It was addressed to me, but had no return address. When I opened it, I found the diary.

Well, not exactly. When I opened it, I found a book with a gray cloth cover, dark green at the binding. The kind of thing accountants might once have used. Except that it had pictures pasted in. And handwriting, not numbers. Only when I read a few pages did I realize it was a diary.

A strange sort of diary. For one thing, it had no dates, and many of its pages had obviously been torn out. For another, it became pretty clear that the entries that remained were not chronological. But that was later.

Then, that first afternoon, I was mainly just curious, and a little reluctant to intrude. Who could have sent me such a thing? I had no idea. There was no note, and the events described in the entries I had read were unfamiliar. But there was the envelope, with my name and address on it.

So, over the next few days, I read it. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But I did. At first, I thought an explanation would turn up. A phone call. A letter. As I read further, of course, I understood that none would. And why this thing had come to me.

All I can really tell you is that it’s good to be polite. And helpful when you can be. Godspeed.


/next