Friday, August 29, 2008

Rei Kawakubo

accessible?


football bags

me



Tuesday, August 26, 2008

not so fresh thought

just reminded of mortality while exiting I5

on Pacific

and driving through dos symetrically crossed

items of road kill. 

it was like passing through the

Southern Oracle's sphinxes

in the 

Story that Never Ends. 

Sunday, August 24, 2008

391



If Dada, as claimed by the Dadaists, was a noisy alarm that woke up modern art from merely aesthetic slumber, then this Picabia drawing shows us how the alarm was sounded. It is the wiring diagram of a Dada alarm clock (made in Switzerland in 1919) which historically plots the flow of the current of modern art, from Ingres to 391, Picabia's own Dada magazine.

For the nonmechanically minded, some words of explanation as to how this machine works: 

To the left we see a battery in cross section, with the electircal current moving in waves between the positive and negative poles, properly represented: the former in black, the latter in white (and with the ladderlike pattern that conventionally associates the negative with neutral or ground). French modernism is attracted to the stable, negative pole (and therefore to tradition), and rises historically until it reaches (with the help of Walter Arensberg, patron to French artists in New York) the rectangular transformer that bears the Dada name. Around the top of the active, positive (and therefore antitraditional) pole is an international cluster of innovative early twentieth–century artists, headed (of course) by Picabia himself. This positive pole directly connects with the Dada clock. The negative pole of French modernism, however, has to pass through the Dada transformer before it can be wired up to that inner circle. (Even then the wiring job looks amateur and not entirely convincing, but apparently it works.) When thus connected, the circuit is completed.

John Elderfield, The Modern Drawing: 100 Works on Paper from

The Museum of Modern Art, New York



Monday, August 11, 2008

gray



I'm calling you 

from a grave hard because

 you are dead to me

And because it was with you 

in a graveyard, 

when I first felt how painful it was 

to be alive.



Friday, August 1, 2008

intro

"You were listening to Tom Waits.
I'm not sure if we've officially met."


"Nice to officially meet you. NPR has a 2+ hr concert I’m still listening to:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92916923"

"recorded live no less."