Archive for the ‘big link friday’ tag
Trash and Blur…
If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.
I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.
I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.
A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?
And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:
Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!
Tags: a book a week, art world, big link friday, books, daily photo, new york in black and white, night, photography, readingRelated posts
Free art Friday…
Opted out of of Black Friday to see some art with Dominic. We went over to LIC and checked the shows at PS1. There was a contemporary sculpture show that had some good word by some folks associated with Bard: Marc Swanson, Robert de Saint Phalle, and Penelope Umbrico. Upstairs was the Big 1969 show where we ran into my friends Renny and Judy. I found some inspiration in the documents of Scott Burton’s Streetworks, but the show as a whole seemed pretty subdued for being a representation of such a raucous time.
After a lunch at the diner during which we disagreed about the merits of the Monte Christo sandwich, we went off to the Sculpture Center to check out Mike Smith’s excellent Burning Man pisstake.
I made it home, heated and eated a holiday left-over pile, and have executed phase two of my little bit of anti-Black Friday plans: I made a bit bit of art and left it out on the street. Little anonymous gift there for somebody. makes me feel a little odd, but hopefully someone will like it.
Tags: art, big link friday, daily photo, friends, making artRelated posts
IFFYF&FDF plus links…
Or as we call it: I Follow Flash your fur and flash drive Friday.
In the office doing some training and then some recruiting. Big open house tonight.
I ran across an interesting post that in some way relates to what I was talking about yesterday. Where I work it’s very easy for all of us to get caught in reactionary work flow, since we are confronted by the needs and requests of students every day. But I and they, ultimately suffer if time isn’t made to balance that with creative work processes. We need to work on building in time to create the structures that we will be using down the road, instead of always jerry-rigging in response to crises. Conceiving of these two modes of work and recognizing that my job needs to be made up of both definitely helps me in sorting priorities.
Talking about my struggles with time-sucks I’ve come to call The Browsehole, there are several people here on live-journal that I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with in that regard. Love because they bring such great content, and hate because they send me off searching through the endless images here online instead of getting all my other work done.
Firstly, two of my favorite communities here on LJ are vintage photo and vintage_ads, both of which have an incredible amount of imagery pouring through them. And over the last year I’ve noticed that a lot of my favorite imagery seems to be coming from one person, the intrepid carabaas. I read Russian half as well as I speak it, and I can’t speak Russian, so I have no idea about him at all or what he has to say for himself, but I can only imagine that he has a warehouse full of trained monkeys, flatbed scanners and old copies of Life and Esquire in order to generate the amount of posting he does. Much of it doesn’t even end up on either of those two communities, like his many pictures of women wielding guns
I’ve also been enjoying the blog Pikaland which led me to these lettering sketchbooks which are almost unbearably twee, but somehow very inspiring to look at.
Inspiring in an um, earthier way is the incredibly filthy work of Robin Bougie (So Not SFW). I know he won’t object to the adjective since he is the editor of several crazy publications, including
Cinema Sewer a great great zine of beyond fringe movies. If you order one of his anthologies, he’ll draw a demented sex scene for the title page. He even takes requests! I ordered mine and not only did the drawing delight me, but the contents took me right back to 42nd Street in the late seventies, reminding me of porn movies I’d almost forgotten I’d ever seen. (Hey Robin, I haven’t thanked you yet but you should know that I saw Falcon Head in the David Cinema around when it came out. In those days It took all my courage to duck into a theater, and you didn’t bother with stuff like show times, so I went in saw a bunch of the more surreal stuff and wandered out again mystified, never even knowing the title. Thanks for bringing that all back!!)
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Send the Kids out of the Room for Big Link Friday…
Wow I had a hard time getting down to writing this week’s BLF. I’d thought I’d gotten the jump on it, but then Inspiration just flew away.
So I’m just going to blurt it all out. Without the clever transitions I was envisioning. Some of this stuff is NSFW just so you know before clicking on the links.
Much of my work is about the sexual implications of objects, leading me to be interested in the designs of sex toys so when I ran across a couple of references to the Sqweel, i.e. this on line I was immediately taken by it’s weird mix of organic and mechanical. How well it would actually work for anything I don’t really know. But it also reminded me of two other things. One is a prop in a scene scene I’m almost certain that I saw in Bob Guccione’s Caligula and the other is from this drawing, by Tomi Ungerer.(That’s a terrible picture I just shot because I couldn’t find a reasonable version of it online.)
Weirdly enough the next day there was a profile of Ungerer in The New York Times
Ungerer was one of those European Illustrators who could draw like a madman and really framed the Sixties graphic sensibility. Taschen had a great book of his erotic stuff called Erotoscope, which seems to be out of print. Getting my own copy down to look up the drawing showed me that I had screwed up the dust cover a bit, and now that I see what used copies are going for on Amazon, I regret that even more.
It takes a lot of looking at drawings to keep me going on my own drawings. This bit from Milton Glaser is a big help, not only for what he has to say but for the boggling grace with which he’s putting down lines.
The Times also had a link to this blog: http://inklines.blogspot.com/ which has some sweet drawings that aren’t so much to my taste but I do love the steady working method and devotion that he brings to the process. For the Times story see here.
I also ran across an archive of the work of Karl Hans Janke an eccentric artist and inventor. Lots of fanciful flying machines.
Finding his work also led me to this beautiful blog: http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/ which has a wealth of odd illustration.
Finally three unrelated things:
Spezify is a newish search engine with a different kind of interface. Try heading over there and entering “Tomi Ungerer” into the search panel. I can see the way that I wouldn’t work for certain types of things. But there’s something very appealing to me about the collage way of looking at information.
Kate Bornstein twittered about this band, and now I just want to be their groupie.
Some one posted this (Coulrophobics beware) in the Live Journal Vintage Ads community. I love all of the type on this package. I spent a bunch of time looking for faces like that of the Sugar Smacks logo. Any one have any ideas of what typeface is?
Tags: big link friday, drawing, sexRelated posts
Big Link Friday: Cute is the new Angst.
Last week I mentioned The New York Art Book Fair, I went with a couple of friends on Sunday and ran into a few more and missed seeing even more. I had to be a be almost physically restrained from spending money on all the incredible stuff there, but I did splurge at Goteblud‘s table on a couple of ‘zines and a great book of Japanese street photography.
The best part of the show was the collision of the zine/art project/d.i.y./comic/street art aesthetic, although it was interesting to see who was playing it cool and who was more aggressive. Seeing a bunch of vintage JDs (scroll down) and Straight to Hells made me rethink my affection for recent porn zines like Butt andPinups which utterly appeals to me visually, but finally seems a little too tidy and happy with its situation. The Pinup guys were however selling a great button with a giant dick on it.
The other strain in all this that makes me question my taste is the new crafty homespun look that is all over alt/popular culture like at this site. On a case by case basis I like most of the stuff for sale here, and I followed the link to it because I saw some teaser images of drawings that looked good to me. And I’m all for artists coming up with new ways to support themselves. But when I look over all this work I’m struck by how divorced from any sense of contention it all is. There were lots of things like that at the fair as well, where an imagery of oddball juxtaposition presented itself as the new hipster grooviness. All those overprinted silkscreen t-shirts with animal imagery.
There’s something about this that reminds me of the 70′s aftermath of 60′s radicalism, to use a lazy intellectual formula. But who am I to carp? I eat muesli every morning, if not granola. But I can’t help thinking that in a few years thrift stores will be filled with heaps of etsy derived clutter.
There certainly is something interesting in artists turning away from the mass produced high finish values of the last couple of decades of art production. This seems like a great project to me. God knows we have enough stuff that needs fixing, and that impulse is important whether it’s born of anger or not.
And until I finish my latest queerangstsexzine I’m going to teach myself something useful like scrimshaw.
PS: great collection of scrimshaw images here.
Tags: art, big link friday, craft, pop culture, zinesRelated posts
Flashing some Fur, and Big Link Friday….
ig link Friday is my sorry attempt at #followfriday as well as a fulfillment of my promise to make this blog more of a resource. Also I’m impressed with the way that people like Thor make their ljs about so much more than the repeated tracks of their obsessions. So here’s some of the stuff I’m enjoying these days. Hopefully it’ll spice up your weekend.
This weekend is the New York Art Book Fair, which gets more exhausting every year. It’s a fantastic event, but there is so much stuff. My bank account is already making whimpering sounds.
What’s great about the artists’ book thing is that it’s another example of D.I.Y. culture. Printed Matter has managed to bring together both the art and ‘zine strains of this into something that seems to be spawning a whole new generation of practitioners. It a way of making things that has been much on my mind lately.
Along with that, here’s a project that I ran across this week which is the first thing to make me interested in Star Wars in a long time: Star Wars Uncut, a project where random people are remaking the first movie in fifteen second chunks. There’s something so great about this: it’s a project that talks about the way that certain films get lodged in our collective memory, about methods community art making, and it treats the film as a kind of musical score. Watch the trailer: the bits that are finished so far are already awesome.
Along with communities coming together to make weird things happen with data there’s the more than slightly sleazy but totally safe for work I Just Made love a google map of where snu snu has just happened all over the world or at least where people want us to think it has happened. So now we can all broadcast our smug. I like the fact that they allow you to add a note to your record, as well as to let people know if you’re getting it on indoors or under heaven’s vault. You can zoom in to see if there’s anyone else on your block up to hanky panky.
After sex, what then? For many of us it’s video games, and as we all know the best video games are free and have “Donkey” in the title. So here’s Time Donkey, which is kind of like Groundhog Day with a donkey and also tacos. Wow, I wish I had some tacos right now. My breakfast is wearing off.
Speaking of clumsy transitions, I’ve been on a breakfast yogurt and muesli kick for the past few months ever since Sylt, and for the last two days the yogurt has come from Butterworks Farm. It has the kick that I remember yogurt having when I first tried it. My font of idle curiosity is endless and so i checked today to see if the company is online at all. The farm seems to be run by an earnest Vermont couple (with a studly husband by the name of Jack). I picked up the yogurt without much thinking, and now I’m surprised at how much more connected I feel with it after having looked at the website. This is what ad companies are spend millions to do theses days: to make us feel a personal connection to brands, with “web presence”. Have I just been tickled in my target audience spot by the home spun nature of Butterworks Farm’s site? In truth, I have no greater proximity to them now than when I was shoveling their milk product into my maw a few hours ago, yet I think I’m developing some brand loyalty.
That’s one of the tricks of digital media – it is both intimate and far away at the same time. Like yesterday Nick Frost retweeted me! That means we are totally super friends now, right?
Finally, if you like that drop cap that I began the post with, you should go over to this site where designer Jessica Hische is putting up one drop cap each day. Click through and look at the rest of her charming work.
P.S. Oh yeah – fur flashing: there’s some peeking out of the open collar there. And I got bored and braided my beard.
Tags: big link friday, books, food, movies, online life, sexRelated posts
I left before the jump and Big Link Friday….
Jeff offered me a ticket to go and see the new Tosca at the Met. I caught most of the “controversial” moments that led to the opening night crowd booing the director, but was nodding out despite the lovely, stirring singing and so I made my exit at the second intermission. The production? There were definitely weird bits, but it was a pretty run of the mill “updating” in opera sense: sets were pared back and symbolic rather than illusionistic costumes the same, and there seemed to be little faith in a line of the libretto or the presence of a singer being able to tell us about the character or even hold our attention by just, you know, singing. So everyone has to act out their emotions which might be OK if it wasn’t also coupled with a strange directorial idea that people should wander back and forth across the stage at all times. Nobody seemed to have a direct idea of why they were going to a particular spot on stage or why they should stay there once they got there (unless they got killed. Then they stayed put). The parts that freaked out the Met’s audience? A guy embraces a statue of the virgin. The same guy has three chicks at his house and fondles them a bit (not even second base here). Pretty thin broth, if you ask me especially after seeing things like this, but maybe people are hungry for something to angry about.
One other little oddity about the performance: the singer playing (or the player singing?) Scarpia (statue groper), was suffering from a cold. Before the first curtain someone came out from the wings and asked us to indulge the iffy performance he anticipated giving. Then at the second curtain the same guy came out and announced that while the same person would be providing the action of the character, a second singer would be providing the voice. No understudies for the role? It was a system that actually worked fine, with the relief baritone discreetly placed stage right at a music stand. Of course this is what happens with puppet opera, which leads me to think, why not spare opera singers the trouble of having to trundle all over the stage, wrangle horses and jump off of parapets, swim in chilly polluted German Rivers, or descend into hell entirely? They could sit snugly in the pit with the rest of the orchestra, and stunt people could engage in all the arduous action, or have chimps do it. Everyone likes that, except Peta, and I’m pretty sure they already hate opera.
Instead of worrying about fictional villains engaging in mild petting, or elephants having to do eight shows weekly, maybe we should think back to a time when people were worried about Big jerks from outside of our solar system having non-consensual tentacle sex with Gaia. That’s a link to Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, one of my other new loves. I’m finding that now that I check in with feedly so much, I’ve got a window onto all of these other amazing caches of drawing and design. I’m going to try to take some time on Fridays to point you towards them.
Like today I stumbled across this:
Which is part of a flickr set of book covers by Romek Marber. A great use of two color printing. I’m easily seduced by this sort of design. Here’s an article on his role in the redesign of Penguin’s line of paperbacks in the early Sixties.
Just typing the word “controversy” above made me unable to proceed further without listening to some early Prince. The world was better when everything was purple.
At some point the Term “Bag Lady” morphed into “Homeless Person” (“Bag Man” never had the same traction as a catchphrase, maybe because of its previous meaning as the guy who carries the loot in a heist. “Squeegee Man”, however, had the same sort of life) but if the term hadn’t fallen out of fashion the bag ladies’ union might have been interested in this invention. Insane unitasker? or ergonomic gift to the disadvantaged?
Speaking of street life: tomorrow is the Vendy Awards out in Flushing, but don’t bother going because they’re sold out. I’ll be interested to see if my current local fave The Biryani Cart can capture their second consecutive win (you can tell their energy is being put into street cooking and not web design).
Maybe you’re feeling angry and anxious and want to put hurt on somebody in general. Don’t do it! Most people don’t deserve a sock on the kisser. Except for the few that do, and I’ve found that looking over those few getting their just desserts is enough to tide me over until I calm down again so you might want to bookmark Hitler getting punched for your bit of vicarious violence.
And that’s enough for now.
Tags: big link friday, comics, daily photo, design, friends, links, music, new york in black and white, new york life, opera
