Your Daily Awesome

Christian Marclay has been on a lot of people’s minds since Apple ripped the holy hell off of his video, “Telephones.” Here’s a good short doc about Marclay and some of his sonic experiments.

Sugar’s File Under Easy Listening came out in 1994, but it’s somehow the perfect record for the winter of ‘07. Don’t just take my word for it, though. See what Amazon reviewer J. F Treml “no_jack_no” has to say about it:

i listen to this album because i like my bloody valentine so much and loveless is a little strong and easy to overdose on. there are some song on this album that i can’t live without and there’s some songs here that i wish i had lived without.
gee angel is cute andi want to like it, but the lyrics kill it. and then there’s ‘explode and make up’ and ‘can’t believe what you’re saying’ that kill me. they’re fantastic. these are exactly the kind of powerful, heart wrenching songs that make bob mould great.

Well said, J. F Treml.

Believe What You’re Saying (mp3)

“Men Waiting,” with its cast of 20, its two-week shoot and its on-the-street location, is a small-scale Wall production. Not long before, the artist devoted a full year to “In front of a nightclub” — a picture of young people standing outside a Vancouver club at night. The shoot took so long because the club Wall found, on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, could not be photographed as he wished. There was no place for him to stand with his tripod and large-format camera. So he had the club exterior — the columns and grille-work of the facade, the gum-spotted sidewalk, the concrete curb — reconstructed in a studio. One assistant worked for six months dressing the set. “Of course, you can’t see everything he did, but that doesn’t matter,” Wall says. “There is dirt and moss growing in the cracks where the bottom of the building is crumbling, but you can’t see it. The discoloration of the sidewalk is extremely accurate, and it took many layers of application. My son and his friends came and chewed gum. That was their job for two weeks.” He placed his strobes in the precise locations occupied by the street lamps and other lights that shine opposite the real nightclub. Concealed in a van with blacked-out windows, he and his assistants parked outside the actual club on several nights and, using a telephoto lens, took 300 or 400 snapshots of the kids gathered there. Wall scrutinized the photos for characters and clusterings he liked, then he hired 40 extras from a casting agency. Dividing them into two groups and giving them general directions, he photographed them over the course of a month on alternate nights. (“People’s metabolism is different at night, their coloring is different,” he explains.) For each group he finished with only one frame that satisfied him. “You only need one,” he points out. Using digital technology, he combined the two photos of the crowd with a third one of the building into his final picture.

Man, I just don’t get it. I’ve been trying to figure out what the big deal about Jeff Wall is since 1996. (I know what the books tell me—he was a pioneer of the postmodern cinematic photo tableaux; his use of scale and presentation was groundbreaking; he works harder on each image than just about any other photographer in the world.) But all I can think is, “He spent a full year working on this picture? It’s so… boring!” But I keep looking at his work and reading about him, wondering if his photographs will someday reveal themselves to me. Wall’s career got a big old shot in the arm from the New York Times yesterday.

Reading these helps me to remember that the world is by and large a very good place.

A brisk early-morning walk
Best started at exactly sunrise. Not a jog or a run, a walk where you spend some time looking around.

James Tate
His poems, in books such as Memoir of the Hawk and Return to the City of White Donkeys, read like brilliant, surreal short-short stories.

Stouffer’s French-bread pizzas
You probably abandoned these around the time you left middle school, but it’s time for a reappraisal. Crunchy, zesty. A nice sauce/cheese mix. Methinks they’ve been up to some fine-tuning in the Stouffer’s kitchen.

The American version of The Office
This show really snuck up on us. At first, we were maybe a bit dismissive, suffering from the vertigo that comes from comparing it with the original, but the recently aired season finale demonstrated that this is not only the best comedy on television (RIP, Arrested Development) but one of the best dramas as well.

Not showering for a day or two
Sure, you’re a bit grungy if you do this one, but after you do shower you realize you’ve really been taking being clean for granted.

“Discovering” a writer who has already published a bunch of books
We recently became acquainted with the work of Eric Kraft, who is highly recommended, but what makes it even better is that he’s published like 10 books, none of which we’ve read, which means we’re pretty much guaranteed a bunch of great reads in the coming months. Same thing happened with Steven Millhauser a few years ago.

Screened porches
Protection from bugs and rain while still getting the benefit of the fresh air.

Kicking Television—Wilco Live in Chicago
If possible, the Ghost Is Born songs sound even better on this live CD.

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
Ford’s third book featuring Frank Bascombe. The first two were The Sportswriter and Independence Day. This one’s every bit as good as those, which is plenty good.

Led Zeppelin (I)
People aren’t recommending this album as much as they used to. We’re here to pick up the slack.

Taking stock
We’re talking physically and mentally. Every so often it helps to know the exact quantity of SpaghettiOs Sliced Franks in the cupboard as well as the state of your psyche.

So many more

Elliot Sharron is a very very very good Etch-A-Sketch artist.

Strange Maps is an intensely researched compendium of really fascinating and bizarre maps from around the world and across centuries. Here are just a few to nibble on before you get lost in the all the site’s content.

What the World May Come To: A Tetrahedron

The Land of Oz

Driving Orientation: A World Map

I sit on the couch and stare at that rustic path and those big old maple trees. By now I know the name of this particular wallpaper or background or whatever it is: Autumn. Moving to the desk and gazing more closely, I see a vague, dark, summoning something at the end of the path. A cabin? A covered bridge? A barn? I want to be there, for real, on that path, under those maples, moving slowly toward that dark, summoning something…

It’s a lead-pipe cinch, I figure. I’m a good detective. I’ve found opium dens in Vientiane; been granted interviews by cardinals, mafiosi, and sheikhs; discovered the meaning of “half-and-half” in the old song “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee”; conned the Vatican into bestowing a doctorate on me so that I could gain access to hiddenmost archives; deciphered the cryptic message Ezra Pound scrawled in his own copy of the Cantos while in the bughouse; tracked down and interviewed Phil Spector’s first wife, long presumed dead; charted my way to the sacred stone of the Great Mother, in Cyprus; gotten Charlotte Rampling’s cell-phone number; even come close to understanding the second page of my Con Ed bill. Finding out where a picture was taken—a picture plastered on millions of computer screens—seems a shot away…

I see people in black hoods and robes sitting round a table, bound by blood oath never to divulge the latitude and longitude of Autumn.

read the whole thing here
via

William Drenttel at Design Observer posted a very interesting article a while back about a phenomenon he encountered while designing the packaging for the (excellent) soundtrack to the (very good) film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Drenttel—a New Englander—became fascinated with religious signage in the South during his research for this project, and has assembled lots of thoughts, references, links, and photos on the topic here. The article also has mp3s from Jim White, one of my favorite musicians of all time, quotes from the movie by Harry Crews, and generally a lot of amazement about this method of ministry that I took for granted growing up in the deep South. I think it’s totally worth a read.

I love the small town. It’s not even a half-mile across the whole town. Very small. This way over here we have the church. Over here we have a truck stop. Over here we have the juke joint. Back behind me we have the prison. It’s your typical Southern town. Some people go to church. Some don’t. It’s just one of those small towns.
— The Mayor, Ferriday, Louisiana in “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus”

Andrew Douglas refers to this north-south-east-west geography as the “Stations of the Cross.” At every “station,” though, is a sign, a plaque, a statue, a monument signifying faith. Jesus’s name is invoked in the landscape to name beauty salons, to say this homeowner is a believer, and to give direction to non-believers. The typography of the used-car lot — Car Lot Gothic, if you will — is frequently encountered, as is the multi-colored calligraphy of the amateur sign. The typography of faith in the South has its own look, distinct from the “Stop the Plant” signs in my part of the country. In the South, it’s not enough to name things: there is always a message, a sermon, a small bit of poetry.

People (or bloggers, anyway) are really flipping out over Rosemarie Fiore’s long-exposure screen shots of ’80s video games, but I like these drawings a lot more. They were made “by exploding and containing live fireworks, resulting in bursts of saturated color that are overlaped and collaged into abstract compositions.” Actually, I like a lot of her projects.

From their mission statement:

The goal of the Urban Curators project is to engage the public in the celebration of the decaying urban environment, recog- nizing its inherent aesthetic qualities as well as the important role that it plays within our cultural habitat. The project achieves its goal by elevating common, overlooked objects and spaces within the city of Providence, Rhode Island to the level of high art.

The project achieves this elevation by literally hanging gold, gallery-style frames in derelict spaces within the city, framing objects and views that are of aesthetic or cultural value. By utilizing frames that one might expect to find in an art museum or gallery, viewers are forced to make connections between the urban landscape and the museum environment. Viewers are likewise encouraged to reconsider their prior conceptions of beauty and worth, understanding that the spontaneity of decay offers an alternative aesthetic to excessive design.

Urban Curators
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Team Assignment

How did I not know this movie existed?

design: Chip Kidd
photographs: Thomas Allen
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Still don’t believe me?

For my high-school literature class I was constructing an anthology with a wide range of different stories that I believed reflected the black girl’s experience. For the different chapters, I conducted interviews with a variety of black girls in my high school, and a number of issues surfaced concerning the standards of beauty imposed on today’s black girls and how this affects their self-image. I thought this topic would make an interesting film and so when I was accepted into the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program, I set out to explore these issues. I also decided to would reconduct the “doll test” initially conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark, which was used in the historic desegregation case, Brown vs. Board of Education. I thought that by including this experiment in my film, I would shed new light on how society affects black children today and how little has actually changed.

With help from my mentor, Shola Lynch, and thanks to the honesty and openness of the girls I interviewed, I was able to complete my first documentary in the fall of 2005. I learned that giving the girls an opportunity to talk about these issues and their experiences helped us all to look deeper and examine the many things in society that affect us and shape who we are.—Kiri Davis

(That last one is Freddie Mercury, by the way.)

gallery
the waterfront

God I love this stuff!
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seuratjmb.png

(Using Photoshop’s “Pointillize” filter on Seurat’s “Grande Jatte”)

Unrequited Synergy

If I Had the Money
i would hire paparazzi to follow vito acconci around 24/7 for one week, then sell big new york gallery style prints of the photographs.

jmb’s blog