For years I've tried to find a cheap copy of Ugo Mulas' The New York Art Scene to no avail. I saw the book for the first time 15 years ago at house of one of my friend's parents. I didn't really get far through it as I was grabbed by the cover which seemed almost criminally perfect. It's an image of two New York City cops watching over a gathering at Warhol's Factory. Can an image capture a cultural moment? That one seemed to. A few minutes into my book browsing, I had to leave never to return.
Anyway today I discovered a Mulas web site maintained by a foundation that bears his name (he died in 1973). The site is surprisingly rich complete with long texts and a portrait archive of 60's art world figures like Giacometti, Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and so on.
The book keeps going up in price. When I first started looking for a copy you could find a first edition for $100 which seemed outragous to my 25 year old mind. In recent auctions good quality copies have been going for 3 to 20 times that. Grrr.
I recently came across this (somewhat self conscious) self portrait taken exactly 21 years ago. You're looking at my freshman year dorm room, a two room triple I shared with Nick ("The Rage") and Scott (Scott was the kind of guy who never merited a nickname. He was leader of the mime troupe and was always proudly proclaiming his virginity.) The things that draw my attention the most are the typewriter on my roommate's desk (which makes the picture seem ancient) and my dorky hat. I was trying out the hat thing... I've tried the hat thing many times over my life. These episodes usually last a week or two and, thankfully, fade quickly.
I remember taking the picture... A brand new Hüsker Dü tape was playing in the cassette player and I thought, "I'll probably want to remember this room someday. Nick is out raging, Scott is out miming, now's my chance, but then again I'll probably look back at the picture someday and think, man what a jackass I was. Oh well, at least I'm wearing a cool hat."
Blog reader Paul from Madison Wisconson asks, "If you could go anywhere in the world right now. Where would you go? Your budget is $1600. This is really a way of asking where should I go. I want to travel to the type of places you've been and I want to travel around for about a month. I'm into mountains but not mountaineering."
Hmm. The place that immediately came to mind is Leh in India. It will be around $1100 to get yourself to Dehli ($800 direct from NY). From there you get to Leh by bus and as long as you stay in backpacker type places your costs are minimal. The journey up to Leh is an adventure in itself, Leh is spectacular, and then from Leh you could take a bus to Kulu Manali and then back down to Dehli. I haven't scanned my negatives from Leh, but the snapshot above taken a few blocks from the bus station might give you a sense of the lost in time feel of the place... There are great day treks from Leh in all in all directions and the road to Manali is is flanked by some of the most spectacular mountain ranges in the world. I'm getting itchy feet just thinking about it.
You know your wife is very very pregnant when the OB can't help but exclaim, "Wow! Now that's a belly." Officially there are 30 days left, but it looks like it could happen yesterday.
A video posted by autistic woman titled "In My Language" has sparked lively online debates on personhood, the essence of language, and the nature of her condition (some claim that someone who expresses herself so clearly can't be autistic). While these debates interest me, they weren't the questions that came to my mind on seeing the video. Instead I was fascinated by purity of experience it portrayed, a kind of purity most often seen in children, and which artists are always talking about trying to reclaim: a state of elemental awareness, an almost painful sensitivity to the world...
Last weekend 60 minutes profiled Daniel Tammet, a savant who was able to recite pi to 22,514 digits (it took him 5 hours), and was able to learn conversational Icelandic within a week. Unlike most other known savants, he can interact fairly normally with other people in everyday social situations. And unlike most other savants he can narrate his mental process. Numbers for him aren't abstract things, but objects with mental geographies, "Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize.... [each] has it's own color, has it's own shape, has it's own texture," he explained in the interview. He spoke of the beauty (and ugliness) of numbers and illustrates their forms as landscape-like paintings.
I believe savants are not much different that the woman in the first video, it's just that the focus of their intense gaze happen to to have practical application in our world—descriptions of numbers versus descriptions of water or some other more ineffable obsession. The cerebral wiring that allows this focus, limits human interaction. Daniel Tammet for all his startling abilities can't remember faces a few hours after meeting a person, instead he memorizes the number of buttons on a coat, or the count of stripes on a shirt, but even so Tammet is unusual amongst autistics. He can have human relationships. Most severely autistic people have trouble relating to anyone. What "In my Language" was saying, I thought, was that this was ok. The author wanted no pity. Her life is not empty, her gestures are not randomness, or madness as is often supposed by outside viewers, just the opposite, it is a life emotionally overfull- her brain is saturated with dense thought much of it beyond our comprehension.
Most anyone who has dabbled in the arts, I think, can relate to these inward impulses. We become immersed in the clarity of a particular interaction, in the love of the word, in an idea, in a particular emotion, or in a fleeting vision and the artistic instinct is to fix time telegraphing the moment so it can be remembered. We live for those moments of heady transparency when the mundane veneer of our lives is peeled back to reveal something extraordinary. But of course usually we fail even at holding on to the thing for ourselves. It is the rare individual who can marry impulse, idea, and technique to produce something that allows us to peek into that hidden world of extravagant beauty surrounding us... Despite our clumsy fumblings the important thing I think is to try. Because in trying we build bridges between the worlds and we become more adept at living in them both.
Related: Tammet on Wikipedia (contains many other links)
That's the first line of Michael Pollen's article Unhappy Meals in yesterday's Times magazine on the food industry. Odds are if you are reading this blog you've already read the article, but just in case, there's the link served up for you. We're big Michael Pollen fans in this house and happen to be in the middle of reading The Omnivore's Dilemma which is excellent (Jenn is further through it than I am and keeps hitting me with corn facts... read the book and you'll understand). The Botany of Desire is another must read book we push on all our friends. If you love food and incisive writing, these books are for you.
A friend of mentioned I might like the photography of Linn Schröder and indeed I do.
Making Room did an interview with her a while back and features a gallery of her series "Sind Sie ein echter Frosch". The image above is from a series titled A Play (sometimes translated "A Piece"). One or two more shots from this series can be found on a page called The Art of Being German which is chock full of interesting photography.
If you have ever tried to make photographs in the New York City subway system, you know what a difficult task it is. The lighting is terrible. People are wary. It's hard to get a clear shot because of the crowds. Etcetera. And yet Travis Ruse has managed to take countless beautiful candid shots in the subway, day after day, year after year.
Tonight a show of his subway photos will open at 6:30 at Redux Gallery (116 E. 16th St. 12th Flr). I happened to see several freshly printed images over at Gabe Greenberg's studio and they look spectacular, so much more alive than any image on a screen could ever be, can't wait to see them on the wall. The show runs through March 9th.
Last night I finally hunkered down and ported this blog from blogger to Movable Type. Nothing exciting design-wise, just a more functional (I hope) layout with some long overdue new features (categories, search, custom feeds, tags, etc).
I've only tested on Safari and Firefox, so if there's any wonkiness in Internet Explorer (or just in general) let me know. There is still quite a bit of fine tuning to be done and a few features I want to add. I also need to get busy tagging/categorizing old entries.
Jenn hates the new design (or lack of design) by the way ("is it finished?" she asks).... Ultimately I don't think the design matters much as the vast majority of you read this site via RSS.
For the past couple of years Photo Eye has been my favorite photo magazine/photobook source with consistently smart editorial choices and thoughtful reviews. Tonight I gave their website a spin for the first time in a very long time and discovered they host online galleries with scores of artists. Unlike many similar sites these gallery feature decent sized images (on each artist click the small thumbmnail, then the medium sized one, to get a pop out window with large images). Many photographers also have prints available. Navigation of the galleries is clumsy, and artist selection is somewhat tame, but suffering bad HI is a small price to pay to be able to check out so many excellent photographers in one place.
Like everyone else, I'm pretty exited about the iphone. But I won't be head over heels excited until I find out if 3rd parties can develop apps for it, because a slick phone would be neat, but a real version of OS X with 3rd party apps would be like cherries every day. This list of "I want" apps came to mind almost immediately. What's on your list?
1. I want to be able to find photographs on the net geotagged to my current location with a scroller that goes back chronologically. Imagine standing at a particular spot, and instantly be able to see what happened there last week, last month, last year. (idea originally from Jakob Lodwick)
2. I want fingerpainting. (allowing you to choose between watercolors, gouache, oils, etc... and with paint running down the screen based on the phone's orientation)
3. I want an intruder alert. In other words you lock your phone with a special code, and if someone picks up your phone it starts taking pictures, recording sound and sending you an email with photos and the recording. Also it should have a siren.
4. I want an alarm clock set to one of my itunes playlists.
