Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Leo Villareal's Multiverse


I took this video at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's not the best quality but you get the idea. It was really cool to walk through, especially emerging into I.M. Pei's East Wing Building, with a basement full of contemporary art, on the other side.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Weekly Doodle


Simple but appropriate.

Lomo's Russian Winter in New York


Last week I went to a workshop kinda thing at the new Lomography shop in Manhattan. There were loaner Diana+ cameras (though I had my own with me of course!) and free rolls of 120 film for all. We went walkabout in lower Manhattan and took some pictures, including experimenting with the Diana's pinhole setting, as in my picture above. More on my flickr. If you're interested in future events, you can get on the mailing list at the Lomography website.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Department of Eagles


Just got the album "In Ear Park" and I love it...

Friday, December 19, 2008

Rock-Afire Explosion


Playing Arcade Fire's "Neighborhood #1"

Monday, December 15, 2008

Iggy Pop, Pete n' Pete


Writing about Dead Man yesterday reminded me about Iggy Pop's forays into acting, including one of my favorite TV shows of all time, "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," which aired on Nickelodeon from 1993-96.
More...
Iggy played the father of little Pete's best friend Nona (Michelle Trachtenberg) in a few episodes. Steve Buscemi also made a couple of appearances as the father of big Pete's best friend Ellen, and Bebe Neuwirth played the mail carrier.


The show is a brilliantly strange and offbeat portrayal of suburban life in the 90s from the kids' perspective. Big Pete is a classic angsty teenager. Little Pete (Danny Tamberelli) is a model of standing up for kid-nation against nefarious grown-ups. Not to mention he's got ill steez: oversized red plaid flannel shirts, a matching hat, baggy jeans and big stompy hiking boots. Plus his pride and joy, the lovely Petunia:

I secretly want a tattoo like this. I've definitely drawn her on my arm a couple times for parties!
The music's not half bad either, it was all done by a band called Polaris. The opening is iconic, at least in my book.
Iggy Pop's endorsement says it all. This is a part of 90s culture worth looking back on.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Weekly Doodle

Dead Man


I had the pleasure of seeing Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man, made in 1995. The cast is stupendous, with the lead played by Johnny Depp and appearances by Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Alfred Molina, Gabriel Byrne, and Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton is unrecognizable as latent homosexual bible-thumping trapper "Big George," living (presumably in sin) in the middle of nowhere with Iggy Pop wearing a dress as Salvatore "Sally" Jenko and another gruff male companion. In one of the more hilarious/disturbing scenes in the film, Depp's William Blake (yes, like the poet) happens upon them in the woods and Big George fawns over his hair, wondering how he gets it so soft because he can't seem to do anything with his.
Central, of course, is the character of Blake, of whom one of the film's taglines says it all: "No one can survive becoming a legend." I love his look: his prim plaid suit and glasses eventually deteriorate to a raggedy fur coat, no glasses, streaks of paint on his face and a crushed top hat. Blake had never heard of his namesake, the English poet and artist, until enlightened by Nobody, the Native American man who saves him in the wilderness. Later, when approached by two sheriffs who ask, "Are you William Blake?" he replies, "Yes. Do you know my poetry?" then shoots them in cold blood. Badass.

When the bounty hunters on Blake's tail find the sheriffs, one of them has fallen into the artistic arrangement of the image above. One of the film's most shocking and memorable moments follows, but I won't spoil it.
The film is beautiful, frightening, and funny all at once.
More...
As a side note, having seen Alfred Molina's name in the opening credits, I was looking for him throughout the film, and didn't realize that he played the priest at the trading post until the end--for some reason I thought Gabriel Byrne played two parts, because Molina looked so much like him in his scenes! I had never noticed a resemblance between them before, but it's something about those intense eyes...


Separated at birth?!?

another silly story

Inside a rose there lived a muskrat with a top hat who sang trilledy-dee all the live long day.
In silver expeditions to the turquoise wool of my childhood I ate a superb truffle pie called "Trumblehead."
Existing as a dirt brick would be kind of cool I guess.
Paper cupcakes at a party for chips would be tres jolie, n'est-pas?
Vibrating along in a jiggly, finger-breaking triple D kind of fashion I rainbow'd into astronaut-helmets-r-us for a spot of tea and a chat with a peckish purple rhinoceros of the sort one often sees with pink leather fingerless gloves of the pop star variety.
Aquamarine barnacles, quite geloid in nature, trumbled in salty seas of kelp-tastic singularity. I sit in armchairs to discuss the phenomenon of barnacular splendifery.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Weekly Doodle

An Absurd Tale

Once upon a time there was a leech who supped upon vast mouthfuls of freckle creations. There are camels upon the great plains of taffeta. This is the time for a serious story.

There was a girl and another girl and they loved each other very much. They had matching rhinestone-studded joke books and silver remotes of doom.

Wait! Pause.
Once there were two unicorns who made love upon a field of poppycocks. Cheese dust fell upon them in waves. They couldn’t be together because their families had warring dock properties.
A frog had some interesting financial propositions to do with coffee bean prospects. Mounds of detritus rained from the heavens as mammoths galloped ‘cross emerald-studded caterpillar filaments.

Joy and insipid hair exodus gelled into pudding-mass with a nose like that of Helen Keller’s dog.

Fingerprints studded the helm of the silver child-like prow of the vessel on which Jews of every description could be viewed dancing among the Band-aid fibers like the hand-lines of a beautiful head shake.

David Chadsey wore a gown of silver taffeta that flowed like toilet paper as he stepped regally amidst the flames, the rabid rhinos, elephants and hippos chanting “Fi-re, Fi-re” as they tossed their righteous horn heads in indignation.

Meanwhile Master Señor Kandel, lord of all that is holy, strolled among the duct tape billowing from flower patch to flower patch amid the joyous peals of maggot-laughter that rang out from pink marshmallow puff archways as in olden times.

Rachel had a well-oiled mustache much like that of Salvador Dalí and she coiled it maliciously as she grasped Annie by her curly Colombian hairs.
HOW MUCH FOR THE LITTLE GIRL?
So saying she turned the many strands of her many-stranded mustachio in such a way as to ensnare Annie against the train tracks of Western China.

Some kind of gelatinous carousel-horse skipped along under sun lamps of the orange coin variety.

“You’re like your own father!” she proclaimed loudly as she contemptuously tossed gold coins (for they lived in a nation with no paper bills).

In the Pleistocene era Annelid segmented worms wandered the Earth with no regard for human laws or textures.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was built elfin peoples rejoiced and performed a nose-dance to please the ages. Climbing upon the empty rinds of a burgeoning adolescent consumer society the whiffs of despairing nature moaned at their own inability to alter the irreparable future.



Written on a journey to somewhere else.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Weekly Doodle


A profound question...

Video Art

Some funny pieces from video art's early days.

"Baldessari Sings LeWitt," John Baldessari, 1972
Baldessari sings Sol LeWitt's "Sentences on Conceptual Art"

"Two Dogs and a Ball," "Used Car Salesman," and "Dog Biscuit in a Glass Jar," William Wegman, 1972
Kind of mean, but also kind of funny...

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Asger Jorn


from his 1959 "Modifications" series.
Banal thrift store-found canvases are altered with formal experimentation.
I want to try it!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

I Baptize Thee


by William H. Johnson, c.1939-40
I came across this painting today and I like it.
Somehow I can't help thinking of Courbet's Burial at Ornans.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Dead Squirrel


Encountered this guy on the street last week. I only had my cameraphone on me but it's amazing what that thing can do. The neat thing about this is the bones that show through--the intact vertebrae of the tail, etc. Couple more shots on my flickr. Some day I'll do a real project with these roadkill shots. Maybe a print series. I can just see some lovely layered silkscreens...

Monday, November 10, 2008

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Words from Piero Manzoni


From For the Discovery of a Zone of Images (1957) by Piero Manzoni, the man who brought us Artist's Shit (pictured above):
"...subjective invention is the only means of discovering objective reality, the only means that gives us the possibility of communication between men...We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental sceneography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images.
Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be."

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Fluxus


A couple of weeks ago I read a fascinating piece about Fluxus, an international network of artists of all kinds (visual artists, composers, designers, architects...) that was especially active in the 1960s and known for their "intermedia" art pieces. A manifesto for the movement is pictured above. The piece I read is called "Between Water and Stone" by Kristin Stiles from the exhibition catalogue for "In the Spirit of Fluxus" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993. Here're some of my favorite bits:
"Performed for the 1963 Fluxus festival in Amsterdam, the actions that constitute Zyklus für Wassereimer [oder Flaschen] (Cycle for Water-rhymes [or Bottles] are direct and simple, subtle and conceptually sophisticated. The score permits the performer between ten and thirty bottles or buckets. Its duration depends upon the speed and precision with which the artist undertakes the process of pouring, a procedure either quickly resolved or enduring for long periods. The task may, but does not have to, depend upon skill. It is the kind of quiet action that a thoughtful child might perform as a means to study the operation of things...Speculating on the nature of existence, the artist who performs Zyklus undertakes the careful exploration of human labor as a concrete condition that determines meaning. While Schmit's score leaves the construction of laborand its significance open to a mechanics of doing, at the same time, doing emphasizes the concrete condition of being. This doing, because it has a temporal dimension, equally calls into question the relationship of being to becoming, in and through time, and positions ontological speculation in the pragmatic activities of labor. Doing both exhibits and stabilizes the unstable relationship between objects and the human states of becoming and being. Metaphysical questions circle in Zyklus in the mundane conditions of the piece itself, in the actual flow and change among human action, bottles, and water."
and
One artist, Robin Page, "turned a corner...into a Suicide Room and filled it with all the knives, razor blades, and poisons normally found in the home. There the public was encouraged to interact and a sign read: "Kill yourself or else stop beefing and get on and enjoy life.""
And finally my absolute fav:
"'Goofing off' is a quality that Fluxus artists certainly honed in performance, and...there are positive qualities to goofing-off. Goofing off requires developing a fine-tuned sense of what it means to pause long enough and distance oneself far enough from worldly objects and events to recognize their illusory dimension and thereby reinvest the world with wonder.
In order to really goof off well, the instrumental sense of purpose so deeply ingrained in Western ego and epistemology must be abandoned."

Great stuff! Would have been awesome to be a part of.

Monday, October 20, 2008

SUPER-VISOR

The other day I saw a woman wearing a shirt that said "supervisor" on the back and I was thinking, "super visor?!?" until I realized that 'supervisor' is actually a word. Let me illustrate what I mean:
Plug 'supervisor' into Google image and you get this:

But plug in 'super visor' (note the space) and you get this:

SUPER VISOR!!!!!!!

Antibodi Chairs



These Antibodi chairs from Italian design company Moroso caught my eye. You can choose to leave the fabric petals folded for a "severe" modern look (the black chair up top) or unfold them to create a whimsical seating organism (below). They're available in a number of styles and colors for endless combinations. I wonder if they're actually comfy to sit on?

Freshwest Design



The design team at Freshwest Design have crafted some pretty rockin items. A couple of my favorites are shown above. Top, the duo's ContemPlates each have a single silhouetted figure printed on them and underneath, the details of where and when that person was photographed. Say the designers, "the eater is encouraged to stop for a moment, and contemplate the hidden world emerging on his or her plate." On the bottom is the "You Are Here" table, a glass slab engraved with a map of London and a mark showing the location of the home for which the piece was commissioned. Super sleek and cool, love it.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Best Saturday Ever


The "Cop a Snack" car careening down Dolores Street during the Red Bull Soapbox Race in San Francisco. A fun way to spend the afternoon, especially if you can get into the VIP tent and snag free eats!

Estelle, Gym Class Heroes, and The Roots later in the evening at the San Jose Event Center. Goes without saying it was an epic show.
Couple more shots on my flickr...

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin



I watched this beautiful and strange film this past week and the more I think about it the more intrigued and charmed I am by it. The performances are superb and it's all in the most wonderful saturated colors. I can't really explain what it's about without giving too much away, but suffice to say it's a meditation on fate, life, love and the pursuit of happiness and a real gem of a film.

Soy una amiga!


It's official: I've been made a bona fide Lomo Amigo on lomography.com! Check out my interview and gallery on the online magazine/blog thing and also on the Lomo Amigos website under "Diana." The shots are all from this summer, taken on my friendly little LC-A+! Most of them are also on my flickr, though I haven't gotten around to posting all of them yet. Enjoy!

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Words from Michael Fried

"There is nothing binding in the value judgments of formal criticism. All judgments of value begin and end in experience, or ought to, and if someone does not feel that Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Matisse's Piano Lesson, or Pollock's Autumn Rhythm are superb paintings, no critical arguments can take the place of feeling it. On the other hand, one's experiences of works of art are always informed by what one has come to understand about them, and it is the job of the formal critic both to objectify his intuitions with all the intellectual rigor at his command and to be on his guard against enlisting a formalist rhetoric in defense of merely private enthusiasms."

As someone who tends toward formalism, I dig it!
From Art and Objecthood.

Expanding


This morning I finally managed to remember to stop by Stanford's own Thomas Welton Art Gallery on my way home from class to see the current exhibit there, "Expanding." The show consists of pieces by eleven Bay Area artists that, in the words of the curators, "pulls you out of a routine and plants you firmly in the middle of a new perspective by offering a fenestration on the unfamiliar and a new context to the familiar. When contemplating expansion one might think of the expanding universe, the expansion of landscape, or expanding one's mind..."
The piece pictured above is Shims: Thousands of Uses-Use #17 by Christine Lee. It's a number of wooden slats jammed together in a constrained space to create intriguing fluctuating patterns. The installation "alludes to the composition of geological equivalents of sediment transformed by wind...[and] melds the architecture and natural environment seamlessly."
I was also particularly taken with Katie Lewis' Parallel Evidence, another site-specific installation of thousands of pins pushed into the wall in patterns reflecting bodily sensations, with a mirror image of pin holes and numbered markings directly opposite.
I also loved Jesse Houlding's Ferrous Wheel, an intricate piece of machinery that drags a magnet in a perfect circle across the back of a sheet of paper, thus also dragging rusty iron filings across its front that leave a reddish brown trail behind them. Next to the working machinery hangs a roll of paper with a completed circle on it, and it seems to raise up from the paper and even slightly pulse.
I took these pictures with my cameraphone, so they're not the best quality!
Ferrous Wheel, with extra rolls of paper to the side:

Close-up of the filings on their endless journey across the paper:

The finished circle (note the places where falling filings left traces down the bottom of the sheet):

All in all, a very interesting show.

Du musst Caligari werden


Last night I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for the first time and I can definitely recommend it. Directed by Robert Wiene in 1920, the film is a masterpiece of German Expressionism, not to mention creepy as all hell. Conrad Veidt's performance as the somnambulist Cesare was terrifying--when he awakens from his slumber (shot of it above), it is one of the most bone-chilling moments of cinema I have witnessed. His heavy makeup, dark costume, and trembling, inhuman facial and body movements make for a spectacle so frightening that even Lil Dagover's overwrought performance as Jane seems justified. For those of us who don't buy into the whole "gore is scary" thing that seems so popular these days, it's a perfect Halloween thriller. Go watch it!

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Spoon @ the Fillmore 9/22



More on my Flickr.

Anderson Collection

Alexander Calder

Mark Rothko

Robert Motherwell

Vija Celmins

Franz Kline


I also liked work by Lynda Benglis, Carole Seborovski, Donald Sultan, Mark Fox (a recent Stanford MFA), and many more.
I had no idea this incredible collection of modern art was so nearby! I was lucky enough to see the private collection in the Anderson home, but there is also a public portion of the collection of which there are tours on the third Thursday of every month. The collection website is here with info about signing up for tours of the public collection. There's also a great feature on the SF MoMA website here that gives an in-depth look at 15 works from the collection and more. Check it out!

Monday, September 29, 2008

Magdalena Bors



Whimsical Belgian artist. See more here.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Um Bag


Totally cool. Starting at $45. At Pod Design.

Mini Digital Leica


With 5 megapixels and going for a mere $225, this precious l'il Leica is a total steal. At Urban Outfitters.

The Moon in Your Living Room



More here.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Polaroid PoGo

I just heard about this nifty little device a couple weeks ago and I've been wanting one ever since. It's a tiny printer that you can hook up to a mobile phone or digital camera for instant prints on equally nifty Zink (zero ink) paper. You can connect your devices to the printer wirelessly and, as you can see, it fits as easily into your pocket as the phone itself. Zink also comes in adhesive sticker varieties, so you can make instant original stickers. Think of the possibilities! At $150 a pop, they're not even that expensive. Let's all get one and paper the world with our images.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Replicating Disposability

Check out this awesome glass from Up to You in Toronto. It's molded after classic plastic cups, but when you pick it up, it has the surprising weightiness of glass. If the $30 price listed on the website is for each glass, they're a bit pricey--cause who wants just one? Even so, I'm lusting after them a bit.

Hello and Welcome.

Let's party party party