Start again….
Still from Starting Over, 2000 Video installation.
Welcome. Once I had this website, see, through AOL, with a couple of sad pages on it and I never did anything with it. Then I tried to register a domain in my name and someone was squatting it (they still are, for all I know). Then I registered this other domain and never did anything with that. Then I built a site on it using the cheesy tools the host provided, which was up for a year or so until the hosting agreement ran out ( I wasn’t paying attention) and the site was taken down. That was so long ago that I’m embarrassed to tell you. Now finally I’ve been able to reactivate this site that you’re looking at. It’s still being built out, and there is a lot more to come, including, hopefully, an archive of any and all of my work that I have documentation of, craft projects, and visitor forums. For now, you can scroll down to see the blog I’ve been maintaining for the past six years. To the right you’ll find pages that detail my professional life, and below that, links to what I find interesting. Please poke around and let me know what you think of things so far. I can be contacted via gmail, the name being of course naylandblake . I look forward to hearing from you.
What’s new:
07.10.2009: Added the year 1988 to the Selected Works page.
07.25.2009: Added three new items to the online bibliography page.
09.18.2009: Changed appearance, and made new index page.
09.19.2009: Added gallery of self pictures to the about Nayland Blake page.
Related posts
Thanks to all..
Part of my Birthday celebration has been a vacation from on line life. After a couple of days in meat world, I’m coming back, so let me express deep thanks for all those great birthday greetings. I’m bowled over!
Tags: daily photo, friends, gratitudeRelated posts
Fifty, as in fifty
I’ll be honest – There has always been a good part of me that has not expected to live to see 50 for whatever reason.
I’m glad I have, thanks to coffee, bourbon, cigars and scurrilous living.
Now I can start being the old coot I always dreamed of being.
Tags: birthday, daily photo, happiness, self portraitRelated posts
Everyone’s gone to the movies…
My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.
Low ceilings, patterned carpet.
These twenty sentence things are not repackaged tweets; rather they are all new original content generated out of a crushing sense of inertia.
I’m a content provider?
The above photo was taken while I waited for people to get out of the way of another photo I wanted to take: a heavily bolted steel pillar in the middle of a Queens train station.
I had noticed the pillar’s knobby texture in contrast to the tiled surface of the passageway behind it and like so many other of my pictures I didn’t want something in it that would distract from showing that contrast.
Thus, I was in the position of wishing that the torrent of other people moving through the hallway on their evening commute would vanish, so that the purity of my aesthetic vision might be transmitted uncompromised.
I suppose I was feeling like Ayn Rand.
The moment of absence didn’t happen, at least not during the ten minutes or so I was waiting and snapping off pictures so as to ward off the notion that I was loitering, so I packed up my camera and moved on to my evening appointment.
In my pictures New York is mostly an unpopulated city.
It’s as if I appreciate their traces more than their presences: better a scrawl on a wall than the person sitting next to me on the subway.
There’s some exception if the person is cute, and my friends and family show up in front of my camera as well.
It’s a bad habit, to be wishing people away.
Pictures and recognition have been much on my mind lately.
Think of the world before 1800, and ask what percentage of the population had ever had a likeness made of their individual physiognomy.
Following on from that, how many ever had the slightest expectation of that happening to them?
And what is those percentages today?
In much of the world, I suspect that it has become hard to make it all the way through your life without having your picture taken, either by family or by someone else.
Is turning the camera away a recognition of the everyone’s compromised privacy?
Tags: daily photo, new york in black and white, photography, twenty sentencesRelated posts
Not a twenty, I don’t think…
Mom just swung by the office, and while I know she’ll want to kill me for posting this view of her, I have to post this, my favorite of the pictures I just shot. But here’s the thing: I’m shocked at the difference in quality between the camera I just lost, and this the backup one. The ability to handle interior light conditions is vastly different. Now given, this current camera is about four or five years old. It’s just that I can really see the difference in lens quality between it and the Lumix.
I might have to start toting around my DSLR. I’m turning into one of those photographers I always used to crack wise about.
Over on The Onion’s AV Club, I see that Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson is giving a rare interview. I may have said this before here, but I don’t really care for that strip, which provokes passionate devotion among many of my friends. Some of it is beautifully drawn, but I just never thought that the writing was much more than a few stock situations reshuffled, and I was pretty much repulsed by Calvin, who struck me as a thug in training, unredeemed by his flights of fantasy. It’s Krazy Kat, where you’re mostly being asked to root for Ignatz. But then I always hated Dennis the Menace, too. Maybe I see Calvin as exemplary of the boys that used to frighten and make me nervous as a kid: boys who delighted in smashing stuff and running around. I suppose we are meant to see him as creative, and rebellious, but I just don’t get it.
Tags: Calvin and Hobbes, camera, comics, criticism, daily photo, mom, photographyRelated posts
Twenty is as does…
Why does it seem like some alarm is going off over and over?
Spent way too much time entering urls, because I got obsessed when I should have just delegated.
That was a good salad I made my way through this evening; spinach, avocado, beans, greens.
Creativity is frightening, overwhelming; the best art instruction should strive not to domesticate that information.
Frightening because it is the engine of change.
The way to handle such change is to make it habitual, to internalize and observe it daily.
That’s the way I’d do it if I were superhuman.
Here are the pleasures of comic book narrative: the continuing opening and stitching up of narrative loops; the greater distance encompassed by the stitch, the greater the pleasure.
We enjoy seeing a pattern emerge from a great distance.
It’s reassuring.
The TV tells me “The snow is already falling” and I look out of the window to see that it’s true.
Yes, the streets are dusted.
I miss snuggling with Lehigh who is being well looked after by my Mom.
In the space between lines, between sentences, between all too stolid thoughts is a challenge to what I know.
Step into that challenge.
This morning I read Toni Bentley’s review of Catherine Millet’s book Jealousy in the New York Times and while I haven’t read the book in question, I found the smirking triumphalism if the review repulsive.
It looks like I’m going to be doing a show in New Zealand, and if so I’ll be heading there to install it.
Yes, I’ll check beneath every sheep for hobbits.
And now to clear more floor space.
Tags: art, daily photo, reading, twenty sentencesRelated posts
Please may I have another twenty?
This morning’s dream involved Dennis Cooper telling me about the fantastic rents he was getting from a tenant on some Los Angeles industrial space.
Yesterday I stopped in at an art opening in Chinatown, too early to see D, but in time to feel hemmed in by the crowd, and thus shy.
In a way, I’m relieved that there are entire sections of the art world that I have no connection with.
Ah, Chrissie Hynde can sing “Stop Your Sobbin”, but the way she does so makes me want to sob all the more.
Clothes are still on the floor, but they at least sorted into piles, and a load of laundry is done.
The schedule doesn’t look much clearer into the foreseeable future, but I have taken some steps to getting help with it.
Little headache right now, from both the caffeine and squinting at screens through the glasses.
I’m going to break the TV embargo to watch RuPaul’s Drag race tonight.
Today i was remembering the time when my parents allowed me to join The Science Fiction Book Club.
Of course, the books piled up faster than I could send them back, which lead to my first experiences with unexpectedly high bills.
These sentences are uninspired in their construction and cadence.
I often find myself sighing over pictures of furry young men these days in a way that seems to encompass a despair of possessing them; yet this mooning isn’t coupled with any real desire to spend more time around people.
I mean, I’m kinda booked up.
When I feel dissatisfied with what I’ve got in such a generalized way, it usually means that there is some other psychological crisis going on and that I’m merely fixing on that point of dissatisfaction because I can’t or won’t look at the root cause.
I’m suddenly craving croissants with butter and raspberry preserves.
Apple’s “Genius” playlist software can’t understand the simple notion of “contrast”.
I woke feeling partly shocked at Dennis’s venality in my dream and partly ashamed at thinking ill of him, even as an unconscious symbol.
These days it’s about balancing and filtering the input.
I feel like Julianne Moore in “Safe”.
Or something else: a hypochondriac who doesn’t really want to make a fuss.
Tags: art, daily photo, emotions, music, twenty sentencesRelated posts
Twenty sentences that won’t change your life.
There’s a little something around my sinuses that feels like it could be a cold.
Last night’s flight home was smooth and undersold, which meant that I had two seats to slump into while I read a copy of The Age of American Unreason that I had picked up at the Nashville Airport.
It turns out I really did lose my Panasonic Lumix somewhere around the Austin Peay campus Tuesday night, so I can’t show you any pictures of the polaroids of hot hunters from the Bar B Q shack’s “Brag Wall”, because those pictures were on the SD card in the camera.
Coming back to work after being in such a different environment is always like taking a leap onto a moving train.
These days, one of the only constants in my life is my tumblr account.
It was snowing pretty seriously around my block this morning but I bet it’s all gone now.
I worry that I’m losing the capacity for sustained thought, but then I’ve been having that worry for the past twenty years or so.
In his book David Antin told an excellent story of how Herbert Marcuse ended up not teaching at my alma mater, CalArts.
Simply because someone has progressive political views, it does not automatically follow that they will have progressive views about art making or how art functions in society.
If as a student, you work hard, I’m not worried about whether or not you share my opinions or already know a lot; I know you’ll get to something interesting.
Right now, much of the art infrastructure that I knew in my youth is simply not producing much of interest.
Yes, I’m getting old: the cycles of excitement no longer seem unique to me.
The most interesting thing so far in Susan Jacoby’s book is her quick history of the American Lyceum movement, the TED lectures of the late 19th century.
I’m only a third of the way through the book.
I don’t have a business plan, or much of a plan plan for that matter.
I’m getting tired of my office knick-knacks, meaning it may be time for some redecorating.
“Never enough coffee” is not a sentence, unfortunately.
Right now, making art is, for me, like licking the contacts on a nine volt battery: tantalizing, a little painful, always calling me back and yet producing the smallest flop of sickness in my stomach’s pit, a sensation that feels like a warning.
Hey, I know some sexy people.
My back-up camera is nice and does some things very well, but I’ve been spoilt.
Tags: art, camera, daily photo, musings, readingRelated posts
Here we go again…
Please let me track down my camera from wherever it is here in town. Oy.
Tags: camera, dissapointment, lostRelated posts
Are you rolling in the ears?
A member of the New York Correspondance School sent a package to the class here at Austin Peay. Inside we found twenty pairs of sequined bunny ears and the phrase “How to Bowl like a Bunny”. So of course we all donned them and proceeded to bowl for the evening while the jukebox played things like Root Down, and Joan Jett singing “now I wanna be your dog”. A great way for us to all get to know each other a bit better. Afterwards I had some ramen and slept like a rock for seven hours.
The weather has been a little schizo, snowing on and off. Clear and then cold, some hail. I feel calmer than yesterday, partly because of the sincere responses of the students. I’m easily frazzled in so much of my life, but in the classroom and in the studio, it’s hard for me to be unhappy.
Tags: bowling, daily photo, teachingRelated posts
Half empty?
Made it down to teach. There were moments around five this morning when I was feeling pretty dark. So much had to happen and things like MTA were not co-operating. I was functioning on very little sleep, forgetting things and slamming around the house so much that I woke my downstairs neighbor, much to my chagrin. Once I got to the train to the airport, I sat on the platform for what seemed like forever. Once I made it to the terminal I was too late to check my bag, which meant that I had to throw out new bottles of shampoo and conditioner, because they were over three ounces. When did air travel lose it luster? These days every aspect of it is cramped and cheap. Winge, winge winge. This stuff wouldn’t bother me if I wasn’t so frayed already.
But now I’m at rest in a lovely inn, recuperating and trying to assemble a to-do list. Tonight is bowling and tomorrow, teaching. For the present, I’m trying to take a little time to begin on the self organizing that I should have been doing all along. I hope it will provide me with a greater sense of caml and control to at least get a sense of the scale of what needs doing.
Tags: daily photo, frustration, planning, self examination, travel