Mare Island

Picnic Table, 2008

Fever Ray

This is a great album. It’s just a little hard to describe.

Fever Ray is the solo project of Karin Dreijer Andersson. From The Knife. She's a little like Bjork. Like Bjork's, Andersson's voice is an instrument. A strange instrument. And, like Bjork, she's an Artist. But where Bjork is whimsical, Andersson is driven. (Or do I have that backwards?) And Fever Ray is macabre. But also cheerful. As if Sigur Ros suddenly took up marimbas and the bamboo flute. But that’s not really it, either. (Besides, Fever Ray is in English.)

Maybe you should just check it out for yourself.

Mare Island

Path, 2008

Mare Island

Gas Station, 2008

Some Hope

How sad are those humans? No sooner do they escape some horror than they rush to inflict worse on someone else.

Israelis oppress Palestinians as if there had been no Holocaust. Old boys torment new boys as if they had never been new boys themselves. Lawyers, bankers, and doctors perpetuate the grim systems of apprenticeship that turned their own lives to mud. And the abused abuse.

Is it because they’ve forgotten? Or because they haven’t?

No answer is to be found in Edward St. Aubyn’s Some Hope, a trilogy of the novellas Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope. It will convey the book's tenor to say that when young Patrick Melrose is first raped by his father, about halfway through Never Mind, it isn’t even shocking. Nor is it the first time the reader will have had occasion to consider the childhood of David Melrose, the father, itself a nightmare of savagery and helplessness.

But why must these nightmares always be passed on?

Never mind. Some Hope is witty as hell and just the thing for Father’s Day. And yes, it’s all true.

Crayon

Plaza, California Street, 2008

Crayon

Stairs, Polk Street, 2009

Crayon

Plumbing, California Street, 2008

Plastic

Cow Hollow, 2009

The sterility of digital black and white is appalling. Strangely, digital color is not as bad. In fact, I kind of like it. But I keep thinking we should use it to create a new art, one in which the message is as empty as the medium. Like advertising, but with nothing to sell.


Cow Hollow, 2009

North Coast

Native Americans, Ocean Beach, 2008

San Francisco

Teepee, Hyde Street, 2008

San Francisco

Structure, California Street, 2008

San Francisco

Plant, Clay Street, 2008

Gone

George LeChat, 1990-2009

Art and Baseball

Barry Bonds, 2007

Peter Schjeldahl's new book Let’s See is a compendium of his writing from The New Yorker over the last 10 years or so. It has many nice things, including its introduction, which consists of 20 questions posed to Schjeldahl by friends and colleagues, and his answers to them. Here’s a portion of his colloquy with Roger Angell:

RA: "Given the hugely inflated prices paid for every form of art these days and the vastly increased publicity and critical and personal attention that attends each crowded gallery opening and biennial and world-class retrospective, has it occurred to you that writing about art has inevitably become another form of sports writing?

PS: Yes. Money and celebrity govern the art game now, and covering it is pretty well reduced to reporting scores. Goodbye to critics functioning as scouts, umpires, scorers, clubhouse cronies, and occasional coaches - not a dire loss, perhaps. . . . These days when you use the word “value” and mean something besides price, you probably have to spell it out. . . . Meanwhile, there remains at least one nice difference between art and baseball: in art, none of the players knows for sure what the game is."

I like that. (Although whether the economic premise will be sustained remains to be seen.)