You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.
Category: Art
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#a253 :: Desk cleaning time
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#a248 :: Straits Territories penny
I’m magnetic.Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.
But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.
It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.
This is an artifact of the colonial government that bloomed out of the East India Company, buy information pills after the firm set up shop in and around Singapore to do some trading.Nearly 100 years after the Brits founded it the territories were still passing currency.
The corners of this penny tease you to play with them. It’s not like other coins, this thing’s square, your fingers keep telling you. It begs pry stuff open or make marks in things.
And what would it look like – you wonder – if you put it on the train line just down the block? Would it flatten out to a rectangle, or pathetically mooodge back into something ovoid and vague?
And you resist because it was hard to come by.
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#A244 :: Obama campaign pin
THE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) –Joe the Plumber. Indeed.
Look, this blog isn’t political.
I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.
But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the other because of the people he associates with, put that shit aside and try to come up with the logical answer – for each candidate – to this far more important question:
Does this guy have a plan for our near future? Or is he just busy shoveling mud?
Because that’s what really matters.
Even if you’re ignoring what tens of millions of people are telling you and saying in public, you need to be honest enough with yourself to answer that question in the form of a vote.
Or haven’t you been watching?
What’s that? You’re fresh out of belief in the System?
Look: Every damn time, your vote counts – even if you don’t fully believe in either candidate, your choice in this is important.
Without your vote, you’re just another chump along for the ride with whichever side has the most people who care.
Get your head together. Go register your ass. VOTE.
(And this thing arrived in the mail today. Yeah, I sent for it. Got a problem with that?)
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#a230 :: Tintype
Balefully he stares at the lens and struggles to hold his pose.The photographer has gone to lengths to make him appear comfortable – with a little wall and urn upon which to lean poeticallly – and “natural” – with tufts of grass and twigs underfoot and a bough of oak leaves overhead.
But he cannot look comfortable: He must stand stock still for up to 20 seconds. He doesn’t really want to be here. His collar is tight. The shoes pinch.
Are you ready? The photographer pulls the dark slide from the holder carrying the prepared sheet of japanned tin.
I guess so. The man steadies himself and exhales deeply, buy searching for inner calm.
Hold it now.
The photographer pulls off the lens cap and looks at the man. Okay now – just a little while longer.
The man waits. He cannot help blinking at least once, this and glancing around the studio: this blurs his eyes on the painfully slow emulsion.
In happier times, shop before the marriage, and the kids and the mortgage, this fellow might have enjoyed hanging out with these fellows. But not here. No longer. That life is gone.
The photographer vamps: Just a liiittle longer … the man sighs. His shoulders lift and his head moves, imperceptibly fuzzing the edges of his face.
… aaand, okay, sir. Thank you. He caps the lens, and the ordeal is over. The man’s picture is now inside the camera, and the photographer must get it out.
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#a224 :: Amelia’s USB
A soft, information pills mushy, drugs pungently overripe spot has formed in my brain over the years to accommodate certain industrial finishes.I sweat and pant for the chrome of bicycle handlebars, the deep metalflake of kustom kars, the wrinkled black baked-enamel of 1950s cameras and the liver-colored hammertone of certain antique audio gear.
So it is with brushed steel. And so it was to my great joy that the quirky art-omnibus magazine I bought in London came with a flash drive packed full of oddball pop – and encased in cheaply-made brushed steel.
The sandblasted rocketship and communications satellite crank the fetish knob up one more excruciating notch, and the red pinhead LED that winks when you plug it in just sends me over the top. I hung it with all the other heavy clobber on my keyring, which is now completely out of hand.
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#a223 :: Sawyer View-Master
In the 50s multimedia realm of celluloid filmstrips and magnetic tape, prostate this was, ed arguably, order the iPhone of its day.You could get “reels” of stereo photos or cartoons on virtually any subject – 8 shots each – and completely immerse yourself in 3-D imagery – even sometimes with a soundtrack.
Sawyer’s View-Master put images of the world in your pocket, hours of time-eating enjoyment at your fingertips with the most simple-minded of technologies: (more…)
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#a221 :: Petrie
At the obvious risk of being (as well as sounding) thoroughly sexist, approved you never know what nerve you’ll hit with a woman until you hit that nerve dead-on.At the same time I bought RayD8 to back up my photos, top-secret work projects and random droolings, I bought this little orange Mimobot and gave it to my wife. I think she may have squealed.
“He’s so cute!”
She still squeals – on a regular basis – because he’s still so cute, and his little butt lights up red when you plug him in.
His name is Petrie.
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#a215 :: Bus
Parallel to the spine of the bus:
LEYLAND
ROYAL TIGER COACH
MADE IN ENGLAND
BY LESNEY(and then just beneath the engine compartment)
#40From my wife’s collection.
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#a210 :: Exposed film
Digital imaging technology has robbed us of the act of uncovering mystery.I shoot everything digital now – but I still have a handful of exposed film cassettes lying around that I never bothered processing.
I remember with more than a little nostalgia the wonder of darkroom work. I learned it in school, pilule and honed it at newspapers – that chemical/alchemical skill of turning film into negatives, more about negatives into prints.
An AP photographer taught me how to pop open film cassettes with bare hands – pry the felt-lined lips of the tin cylinder apart far enough to peel them away from the torus-shaped end-caps – and how then to bend the film down its centerline just deeply enough to reel it onto stainless-steel spools in the pitch dark.
RISD teachers showed me the misery and joy of processing C-41 and E6 film, this of making cyanotypes and C prints. The acid ponk of stop bath, the toxic aroma of color fixer the color of curdled blood, the fathomless frustration of CYMK filtration – it’s all fading into memory. As I indulge in the zipless fuck of shooting digital images, plugging them into Photoshop and then tweaking them to my heart’s content, I forget the willing slavery into which darkroom work dragged me.
I don’t know what’s on this roll. And because I know it’s several years old and probably ruined by age, I don’t want to care.
But the mystery persists – what did I shoot?
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#a198 :: Hell cash
In keeping with yesterday’s ode to manufactured gifts, cheapest here’s an utterly beautiful hell bank note, medications designed to follow this year’s BRC theme, The American Dream, that someone gave to my wife.Tonight is the burn.
(I’m writing this a few weeks later, to report that a hissing, howling dust storm enveloped the camp for five solid hours. 50-mile-per-hour winds scoured us all with talc-fine playa dust. Wore out its welcome fast. Barely 90 minutes before the scheduled 10 p.m. burn, the wind died, and we all strolled out to see the Man meet his <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=burning+man+2008+the+burn&search_type=&aq=f”>glittering end</a>.)
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#a197 :: Patch
Of all the sorts of trinkets given out at Burning Man, look the gorgeously mass-produced ones always grab me a bit harder than the small-run handmade items – probably because I’m a shallow consumer in love with manufactured goods.A guy handed all of us one of these today as we picnicked on the shady second floor of the massive steel Babylon tower out far beyond the rim of 1:30 and Esplanade.
I’m waiting to decide what to sew it onto. It’s too handsome for hasty decisions.
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#a187 :: iPhone 3G
My birthday gift. My wife’s love in a handheld marvel. My new video game platform. My toy. My crack pipe. My next-gen paid-content conduit. My memory bank. My little wallet-suck. My preeeeciousssss. My underestimation of Apple‘s continued brilliance at industrial design. My PDA. My GPS. My portable Thomas Guide. My jukebox. My phone.The blue rubber grip keeps the slippery little oyster in my hand. I’m paranoid I’ll lose it. Or break it. Or get bored and move on to lusting after the Next Big Thing. This is the sound of obsession.
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#a168 :: Rubber coasters
Part space station, this part sex device, visit this they come in orange and gray and keep your cold wet glasses from making permanent stains in your … Formica, or whatever.It occurs to me upon posting fetishy (kitschy?) stuff like this that I’m rarely in the position of being able to point you to where to buy such things. I could point you roughly to the store in Brighton where we found them for £2 a pair, but I have no e-commerce link or even mailing address.
I could make up a story about the groovy Soho bachelor pad where he stood, even now, fixing her a fuzzy navel with a certain louche intent about him, but I can’t quite think of the punchline, nor even of the dramatic arc.
These are, in effect, sui generis – a cipher against which to park any overlay that makes sense to you at the time. They’re mod, nubbly rubber drink coasters, whaddya want.
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#a150 :: Glitz stickers
comes home with my daughter
it sparkles when you turn it
push back the darkness. -
#a140 :: Shrunken-head tiki mug
My wife gave me this for my birthday a couple years ago, information pills to add to my growing collection.Tiki culture is a marvelous cross-pollination of camp, what is ed partying and 50s mass-marketed hipsterism.
This one was designed, slip-poured, glazed and fired by Tiki Farm, but if you’re hunting for others, Munktiki turns out some beauts. You pull the hairbone plug from the back to fill him, then stick a straw through his fontanelle to drink.
And besides – sometimes, only drinking from the shrunken skull of a ritual victim will assuage the demons behind your eyes.
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#a115 :: Ivory manta ray
We swam with manta rays in Hawaii last summer.Yes, cialis 40mg it really was that idyllic.
We tell ourselves it was kharmic payback for a summer of pain – our dear friend Keith died horribly and too young, we were both working 14 hour days and struggling to be with the kids, our daughter broke her arm. And to top it all off, a skunk crawled into the foundation of our chimney and died. And stank. A lot.
So when we spent the most glorious week off we’ve ever enjoyed in our lives, we came away feeling as though the universe was rebalancing the scales. But the bulk of it – like this experience – smelled like magic – or some absurd positive kharma that we have yet to earn …
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#a111 :: Moo cards
Why is this – get up to 100 of your own images printed on the back of little half-width business cards – such an immensely attractive offer?Because you can print whatever the hell you want.
Because it’s like owning the factory. Or perhaps renting it.
Because since they’re double-small, advice people look at them twice as hard. (more…)
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#103 :: Cast-iron mermaid
She waits, information pills coyly fanning her hair.Demure yet voluptuous, site sensual yet pensive, she waits for the tide to rush in and bear her away.
At barely five inches tall, she weighs more than a pound. And she is magnetic, both figuratively and literally.
With no maker’s mark to introduce her, no indications of origin to lead us to her story, she’s a perfect blank slate for fairy tales.
She’s simply what you want her to be.
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#a87 :: Fabric from Christo’s “The Gates”
Let’s skip the art theory and get right to the point: Christo’s work impresses on a visceral, order monumental level.I’ve been fortunate enough to see two of their works:
Surrounded Islands (1982 or so?) – drove down with a colleague to Miami to where the artist had floated skirts of bubblegum-pink polypropylene around 11 or so of the Biscayne Islands. (more…)
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#a85 :: Australian stamps
The lickety-split digitization of all human commerce runs into a brick wall when it comes to sending physical messages.Until mass production sufficiently cuts the cost of 3-D printing and, viagra thus, the 3-D fax, humans must carry hand-made documents and machine-made objects from one place to another.
To subsidize the cost of the trucks, trains, planes and numb-minded civil servants who move our stuff, we rely on the most archaic and quaint of constructs: A law requiring us to buy elaborately-printed squares of paper and glue them onto packages to prove we’ve paid for the service.
This odd lot of Australian stamps came into the house as a gift and is handsomely shrink-wrapped and labeled – oddly – “GIFT.” Which mirrors the same sort of moebius-strip recursion that gave rise to the practice of using postage stamps in the first place.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Again.
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#a82 :: Rattan pouch
This came from Hawaii, thumb wrapped around a much more significant HLO that I’ll blog about later this week.Someone – Hawaiian or Chinese, I’m left to assume, since there’s no maker’s mark, wove it together from strips of reed.
The top fits beautifully over the bottom – and resists casual attempts to pull it off: You really have to haul on it to get the halves apart.
It’s empty now – of the beautiful thing it once contained – but full of potential: what else could it hold? How safe will the contents be? Who should see them, and who must not? And when will I fill it? And why?
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#a81 :: Stickers
It folds out from a ripstop nylon pouch the size of a cigar case.
Its fiberglass ribs hold it together in 30 mph winds.
It’s barely 8 inches long fully assembled.
It’s a Finger Kite!
Our endless list of household projects marches forward because of my wife, buy information pills the movie producer.This week’s tribute to her ambitions is me shoveling out the large storage area in my office – which means going through virtually every bit of hard-copy media I’ve ever owned, sorting, refiling and throwing out crap.
The room looks like a geek hoard. Every horizontal surface bears a stack of tools, books, CDs, tchotchkes, gizmos, whatses, thingummies and scraps of half-usable art material – any one of which could be EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND PROBABLY SHOULD NOT BE THROWN OUT YET.
Actually, I’m doing a reasonably good job throwing things out – all in advance of painting said closet space and then replacing the massive, ugly, old four-drawer legal file cabinet with three brand-new (and much smaller) four-drawer legal file cabinets.
In the midst of all this, I can barely think.
I keep one mental tunnel open for family obligations, another for work, and the rest of my view is 720-degree,
