sing your melody

an excellent recommendation by felipe:


Once, John Carney, 2006.

no me siento nada

Maria Full of Grace, Joshua Marston, 2004. Subtitled.



Stream it here | Download it here [FLV, decent quality]

i wish i was the hunter

"Before the game is after the game."
- S. Herberger


Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1999. Subtitled.

Bad ass.

Lola Rennt - Playlist on YouTube

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

Full Version (DivX) & Download link

be prepared to meet him

watching this now as i paint [download or stream here]

and now i want to watch this:


- - - - -

[track available here]

protect me from what i admire, desire

so finally made my pilgrimage to a not-so-holy land, the Whitney Museum, in time for the Jenny Holzer show, "PROTECT PROTECT" (among other things)!

a cursory recap, because that's the only kind i have the discipline to do:


Jenny Holzer, "For Chicago," 2008, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY

Jenny Holzer: i really didn't/don't know anything about her, except that apparently she likes to do politically engaged/charged work. she incorporates text into many of her pieces, which i enjoy, and in this latest installment (and perhaps in others, i don't know; like i said, i'm not familiar with her œuvre), she'd appropriated previously classified documents from US military intelligence and chopped them up and reconfigured them. alternating between scrolling blinking LED marquees (so mesmerizing and really cool!) and mounted blowups-cum-'canvases', she displays bits and pieces of these documents to reveal...well, you get the point. stuff we civilians~ don't normally get to see or think about. i stood at the scrolling tunnel for quite awhile, reading its narrative and just...feeling at once entranced and appalled by what i saw, what i was reading:


Installation view of Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT (March 12, 2008 – May 31, 2009) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, ©2009 Jenny Holzer

[photos from here and here]

the NY Times tells a better story than i, obvi: Sounding the Alarm, in Words and Light

Claes Oldenburg: -deflates-


Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, "Soft Viola," 2002

ok ok, all jokes aside, i was a little disappointed. i don't know what i was expecting, but apparently something...with grandeur. with stated sophistication, and...elegance? i don't know why. again, i am wholly unfamiliar with Oldenburg's work, save for that slide of the plaster burger or what have you that was subsequently photographed and ~made an art all its own~...hahaha. *eyeroll* but i'll just chalk it up to my own lack of knowledge regarding this particular artist's work, his legacy and influence etc etc. i did enjoy his drawings and sketches that were on display -- a sampling of which can be found here: Jill Krementz Photo Journal - Oldenburg & van Bruggen


Claes Oldenburg, "Giant BLT (Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato Sandwich)," 1963

"Photoconceptualism 1966-1973": i was really pleased! :D


Bruce Naumann, "Waxing Hot," 1966

saw a lovely sampling of Bruce Naumann's photos, a playful selection in which he explored puns and dallied in muted, whimsical colours. very much my thing on some days. i don't know, photography's a tricky area for me to navigate, but i guess that's just cuz i'm a fickle pickle.


Mel Bochner, "Photographs 1966-1969," 1966-69

also spied an interesting series by Mel Bochner, who took a piece of glass and alternately smeared Vaseline and shaving creme on it and hired a photographer out of the phone book to photograph them in "a way that makes it beautiful" -- i was very tickled by this, as there's something decidedly Duchampian about having someone else do the actual photographing and then signing your name to a work. they turned out well.

and surprise of surprises, what did i spy sandwiched between a Dan Graham (ugh) and a Wegman (??) but a couple of Gordon Matta-Clark's Thresholes! *eyes glaze over* awww, truly a lovely little treat, brought memories of Rosalyn Deutsche's class flooding back. and then i thought about what a tragedy it is that he died so young, and that of course brought Ana Mendieta to mind, and i grew rather somber and downcast. but no matter; i drafted a note to Professor Deutsche in my little red notebook, and i also drew up a list of artists to Wikipedia. yes, i do use that as a verb. and you can too!

- - - - -

browsing Picture Postcard, saw this:


Marilyn Minter, "Little Egypt" (detail), 2002

took my breath away.

you have gone and dreamt them dry

mmmmmm. this is my new love song to myself.
i'm only going to be 23 once. what if i fuck it up?

- - - - -

United won the league. Again.
They've now tied us for 18 titles.
And I'm also out of a job.

Music isn't going to fix this, but it can't hurt.

New acquisition:


Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous gray entrails.
[ Tristan Tzara ]

when your mind is your might

so when you go solo you hold your own hand
and remember that depth is the greatest of heights
so if you know where you stand
then you'll know where to land
and if you fall it won't matter
cuz you'll know that you're right

don't worry so much about making it new
worry about making it true
and real

worry about that.



art must be neither realistic nor idealistic, it must be true;
and by this [i mean] above all that any imitation of nature,
however concealed, is a lie.
-- Alexander Archipenko

i worry about it.

seduction dances hour by hour

"One must be drunk always," wrote Charles Baudelaire. "If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself unceasingly. But with what? With wine, poetry, or with virtue, your choice. But intoxicate yourself."



the only bohemia to be enjoyed
would be a self-made one
inasmuch as one can and does 'make oneself'
in a world in which originality is a rapidly dissipating illusion
we are—everything is—quotation
we lift emotion from poetry and song
because it fulfills a double act of consumption as well as expression
we are told by cinema and advertisement what to covet
and how to mistake it for necessity
i sometimes wonder if everything has not already hardened to artifice
i sometimes worry that i am always being lied to

I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made life wonderful, it's made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my clapped hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Does anybody's insides and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside."

[ Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ]

delirium.

i already know where i want my ashes scattered;
nobody can accuse me of lacking foresight



- - - - -



Our cult of death is also a cult of life in the same
way that love is a hunger for life and a longing for death.
Our fondness for self-destruction derives not from
our masochistic tendencies but also from a certain variety
of religious emotion.

-- Octavio Paz, as quoted in Ana Mendieta's unpublished notes

mortality is an awesome power
and i am humbled

terrified.

break my fall

well, this'll certainly give me more time to ~create~ hur hur hurrr






maybe now i'll really get to be the 'starving artist' i'd always dreamt of. haha. ha.

tumult

i miss painting and being by the ocean
i shouldn't compromise, censor, or limit myself for anyone
i wonder what my life would be like now had i gone to pont aven
or berlin



f said he might be here by october
we'll see

schwein flu

i don't think anybody will get it but whateva~



HAPPY MAY DAY!
Everybody Sing Along