Your Daily Awesome

Call me a product of the ’90s, but the sort of inspiration that I got from both of these creative masterpieces is the exact reason that I started this blog.

The same way the previous half-generation felt that Blue Velvet redefined cinematic and aesthetic experience by bringing an uncanny psychological menace to suburbia; so too did Lost Highway have a similar impact on me: it helped me to realize that art posed questions rather than provide answers. It posed metaphysical queries; had Patricia Arquette nude; introduced be to Robert Loggia; provided one of my favorite soundtracks of all time; and managed to chill the piss out of me by entering through my brain and gut simultaneously.

Similarly, the next year when David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was published, it was as if the rules of creative nonfiction had been re-written. DFW was blisteringly smart and funny at the same time, and his essay, David Lynch Keeps His Head, was like having the coolest guy you knew break down your favorite movie with crazy insight as well as on-the-set reportage.

2. WHAT DAVID LYNCH IS REALLY LIKE

I HAVE NO IDEA. I rarely got closer than five feet away from him and never talked to him. You should probably know this up front. One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed, because when he’s actually shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain space available for anything other than the movie. This may sound like PR bullshit, but it turns out to be true, e.g.:

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. This is on 8 January in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take to run down the base camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first (and generally representative) sight of Lynch is from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway’s cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch’s urinating in public*, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.

TRIVIA TIDBIT:
What movie people on location sets call the trailer that houses the bathrooms: “the Honeywagon.”

*(though I never did see anybody else relieving themselves on the set – again, Lynch really was exponentially busier than everybody else.)

This typewriter has a POP device, but otherwise acts as an ordinary typewriter. Once you pull the sheet of paper from the machine, it automatically transmits your message to the receipient via email.
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I was never a fan of the work that Todd Hido became famous for. His photographs of vacant homes and apartments at night seemed too conceptually pat to me; I took him as a one-trick pony, and for years, he showed very little that would change my mind about that. Even worse, I didn’t think he was particularly good at that one trick. The problem boiled down, in my eyes, to the unteachable skill of “knowing where to stand” when you take the photo. Walker Evans knew every time. Hido, I thought, rarely got it right. His foregrounds were dead and distracting; the compositions were bland and static.

But this is Your Daily Awesome, not Your Daily Visit to Hear Me Bitch About Artists I Don’t Like. I say all of the above to convey my own surprise at how much I’ve been enjoying Hido’s recent work. My favorites are the new nudes on his site, which I find uncommonly erotic and psychological, and I’m not easily wowed by contemporary nude photos. His seacape photograph in the new issue of Wired (pictured here) is stunning, and some of his new landscapes are quite good, too, although that whole “where to stand thing” hasn’t gotten much better in the bulk of them.

In any case, I was really excited to see him do something new with the nudes and portraits, and this is one of those times that I’m more than happy to change my mind about something and give credit where credit is due. I thought I had seen more than enough Todd Hido for one lifetime; now I’m eager to see what he does next.

Todd Hido

So, is there, like, a backroom where you change for work, or do you walk around like that?

Would it be possible for me to see that room?

I used to have very long hair.

And an earring.

In fact, Trent Reznor and I went to Hebrew school together.

You know who that is, right?

And, oh, my daughter is my niece. No, not my niece. She’s an orphan I adopted to indoctrinate into the ways of the vampire.

Can you tell by the way I’m checking out this skull-and-crossbones key chain that I’m secretly dangerous?

I knew I shouldn’t have worn my Dockers today.

Pee on me.

from the incomparable McSweeney’s
lots more Wayne Gladstone here

Mental Floss takes us on a quick stroll down the memory lane that heads to B.F. Skinner’s notorious invention of the ’40s, the Baby Tender. Here’s Wikipedia’s nutshell entry on the ‘Tender:

“An ‘air-crib’(also known as a ‘baby tender’ or humorously as an ‘heir conditioner’) is an easily-cleaned, temperature and humidity-controlled box Skinner designed to assist in the raising of babies. It was one of his more controversial inventions, and was extremely poorly received by the general public due to perceptions of its making child rearing cold and mechanical. It was designed to make the early childcare more simple (by greatly reducing laundry, diaper rash, cradle cap, etc.), while encouraging the baby to be more confident, mobile, comfortable, healthy and therefore less prone to cry.”

Sounds like a recipe for a disastrous childhood, right? Turns out, maybe not.

“In all, perhaps 300 children have been raised in Skinner-type cribs. We recently tracked down more than 50 of them. The outcome? Positive results across the board. All of the children had normal health, and their parents praised the crib for its safety, warmth, and convenience. As for Deborah, she grew up normally, married a professor, and is now a successful artist in England.” (Are we sure she didn’t change her name to Andrea Zittel?)

Next month, master cellist Erik Friendlander will release Block Ice and Propane, a solo album of compositions inspired by the summer-long roadtrips he and his family used to take with his father, photographer Lee Friedlander. “What is an American sound, what does that even mean?”, he wondered in the New York Times. “So I started checking out American music. But I realized that a lot of what I have in my brain about America is from these trips, seeing national parks and small towns and diners and parades — everything my father wanted to cover.”

Time Magazine currently has an interesting series of photographs that profile the weekly diets of fifteen familes across the world.

Japan

United States

Chad

Mexico

“This essay was written by an 8th grader in Pittsburgh in the spring of 2004. The assignment was to pick an enangered species, and explain why it’s important to save it. The typos and formatting are preserved from the original.”

I shouldn’t do shit. I don’t care about them they all could die and it won’t affect my life. I know a lot about them but I don’t need to think about them. They’re just a waste of time koalas are stupid they don’t help me with shit so why should I help them. If they all die there will be more room for the panthers and all the other hard animals. Koalas are weak a pit will get rid of their whole fucking family. That’s why I don’t like koalas.

Koalas have sharp claws but they are weak. They all small and fat and they be climing trees. I hope a storm just come while theyjust chilling up in the tree thinking they is hard and they’re will all just fall off. They just break they neck and shit. When they fall they claws are going to fall off and they going to be crying like some little bitches.

Koalas aren’t hard they some little bitches. They start climbing up the tree soon as they see a deer from like 50feet away…

read the whole essay here

The artist simply known as “Laura” pulled a pretty brilliant prank with this fake $100 million Damien Hirst in the trash heap outside White Cube.

(Here’s a tidy story about the Damien Hirst piece this refers to, if the reference escapes you.)

The topic of truth in photography will earn a lot of groans from the other photo history nerds out there: Aside from “is photography art?”, no other question is bandied about (usually with colossal tedium) as the one about photography’s propensity for fibs. In yesterday’s New York Times, filmmaker Errol Morris picks up the gauntlet with the essay, Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire. It won’t be anything terribly new to anyone who’s read John Berger or shared an apartment with a photo major, but it’s a well-written piece, and it’s interesting to see it so prominently in the Times.

And if nothing else, it’s a great reminder about what an fascinating filmmaker Errol Morris is: Throughout his career, he has sought to uncover Truth in his films, using vastly different approaches (many of which he pioneered in the documentary genre). From the verite style of Vernon, Florida to the recreation-and-collage techniques of Thin Blue Line, to his Interrotron, so brilliantly used in Fog of War, Morris has been restless in his pursuit to examine the methods with which we seek life’s truths, and the lies we encounter along the way.

But why this photograph? It’s so terribly bland. I wanted to begin this series of essays on photography with an image chosen particularly for its blandness. Removed in time, far from our core knowledge, it is unfamiliar. We know little about it. We most likely do not recognize it as the Lusitania. We might think it’s an early-20th-century ocean liner, and perhaps even imagine it may be the Titanic – at which point we have placed a kind of mental caption under the photograph, and we begin to see the photograph in terms of our associations and beliefs, about what it seems to say about reality.

It is also interesting how a photograph quickly changes when we learn more about what it depicts, when we provide a context, when we become familiar with an underlying story. And when we make claims about the photograph using language. For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

So here’s a story…

(Morris’ website has tons of great video from his movies, TV spots, and commerical work.)

I personally have never seen Nic Cage’s remake of The Wicker Man. But this jawdropping YouTube makes it look like the most bizarre, incredible film to come along in years. And now I’ve seen all the best parts, so I don’t have to bother with all the boring filler. Thanks, YouTube. (And bravo, Mr. Cage. Bravo.)

a fascinating photoset on Flickr

Those of us who suffer from (or “engage in,” as some would presume) procrastination know that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. But now we have our own website, Procrastination Central, which aims to be “a central resource about the phenomenon.” From scholarly essays and psychiatrist-advised therapies (Learned Industriousness, Energy Regulation) to a bunch of (depressing) quotes and reviews of self-help anti-procrastination books, the site has enough interesting info to maybe make you get off your ass and finish that one thing that’s been nagging at the back of your mind forever. (First thing tomorrow.)

The Museum of Modern Art has over 300 pieces from ther photography collection online; I have no idea what factors went into deciding what made it to the site, but it’s a curious curation. (Friedlander, Sherman, and Nixon are represented by dozens of photographs, while countless of photo giants [Paul Strand, William Eggleston] are absent entirely.) It’s not meant to be a history course or a “best of” the collection, though (it does beg the question of what it is supposed to represent), and there are some terrific photos on there, including a handful of great ones I had never seen before.

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Groceteria.com is an oddly absorbing and expansive tribute to the grocery stores of yesteryear. Within moments of clicking onto the site, I was flooded with memories of going to the Economical and the A&P with my grandmothers in the suburbs of New Orleans 25 years ago. I think this is the sort of response that the site is intended to provoke. Says the webmaster:

Supermarkets are one of the most important and overlooked elements of American life. I’m fascinated by them, and my road trips always include visits to the local chains, from Winn-Dixie in the south to Giant in Baltimore, from Cub Foods and Rainbow in Minneapolis to Kohl’s in Wisconsin. Harris Teeter, Alpha Beta, Piggly Wiggly, and the “holy trinity” of Safeway, Kroger, and A&P: I’ve done more than my share…

I really hate the new breed of supermarkets which rival Macy’s for square footage. I’m not too fond of small corner stores either. I think I’d be happiest if supermarket evolution had ceased around 1968 or so. I usually make weekend treks to a long-forgotten Lucky store on Alemany Boulevard and a mid-1960s era Safeway on 7th Avenue just to satisfy this craving for dowdy little markets.

It’s a little sad that people don’t get nearly as nostalgic about their old supermarkets as they do about drive-ins and movie palaces. Maybe it’s because supermarkets are too “everyday” and no one could imagine them to be a source of sentiment or worthy of a glance back in time, right?

Wrong. I’ve been looking at old supermarkets a lot lately. I’ve been researching them and even taking pictures of their remains. I’ve been leafing through musty old city directories at the library to find out what used to be where. I’ve realized two things: First, this is a very interesting subject, about which I might get very obsessive. Second, I really need a life.

check out the site here

I first saw Peter Beste’s photos of Norwegian black metal artists in Stop Smiling magazine a few years ago and noted with some curiosity that he was a Houston photographer I had never heard of (having been active in the Houston photo scene for a number of years). Then today a coworker sent me to his website to check out his photos of Houston’s (primarily southside) rap community, which I had never seen before. Far removed from the MTV-ready images of Mike Jones, Paul Wall, and Chamillionaire that we see in glossy magazines that profile Houston’s rap artists, Beste’s pics of Z-Ro, K Rino, ESG, and the like, show the gritty reality of an underground scene thriving in an impovershed community with tons of dramatic style to spare.

(thx James)

Centripetal Notion does us the favor of reminding us of Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s amazing transformation of Houston’s Art League gallery, shortly before its 2005 demolition. (Glasstire has the story.)

For example, Ayres points out that McDonald’s can’t charge Hispanics more for hamburgers than white people—even if they thought that Hispanics would be willing to pay more for hamburgers—because a Hispanic standing in line behind a white person would quickly discover what was going on. Transparency is the great antidote to discriminatory behavior. So is competition. This was Gary Becker’s argument. If a fast food restaurant tries to over-charge Hispanics, then another restaurant can open next door, and make a lot of money treating Hispanics properly. Once again, knowledge about an offending behavior has the effect of correcting the wrong.

But are there cases, Ayres wondered, where there isn’t enough transparency and competition to correct discrimination? If I don’t know I’m being treated differently, for instance, I have no incentive to take my business elsewhere.

story

Ed van der Elsken moved to Paris in 1950, joining many young Dutch artists and intellectuals seeking respite from the gloomy aftermath of the war in Amsterdam. Love on the Left Bank (1956), created during this period, remains his most celebrated work and the one which secured his reputation in the early 1950s. A noir novel-in-images, it follows a circle of drifting post-war youth, young people whose lives, and ideals, have been devastated by the war. Leading a nocturnal, aimless existence punctuated by drink, drugs and sex, van der Elsken’s free spirits personify the restless hedonism, and the nihilistic spirit that was to animate the French New Wave.
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