patrick hill

Christopher Miles says: A sculptor I know, who came out of art school at the height of minimalism in the late 1960s, once told me how a next generation of artists began to realize the impossibility of creating pure form that eschewed reference. This, he reasoned, was the natural response of artists rethinking their relationship to content, largely via conceptual art and postmodern approaches to image-making, and engagements with space and context that would come to be defined with terms like “postminimalist” and “expanded field.” Patrick Hill seems to want to revisit both sides of that juncture — to produce forms of stark geometry and purity, and to complicate them with plays of transparency, surface, material and engineering while contaminating them with the sorts of associations we attach to patterns, textures, shapes, hues and spatial relationships. Combinations of materials — including glass, concrete, wood, marble and fabric — in units most easily described with words like “sheet,” “block,” “slab” or “swath,” often stacked, leaned or spliced together, can become, in Hill’s delicate (and dangerous) handling, threatening or comforting, burdensome or uplifting. Their unions and intersections can translate to erotic or awkward. This is Hill’s talent — that he can deploy geometry that makes you blush or feel anxious, and that he additionally can make it seem fey or macho, or goth, or punk rock or hippie. As smart about construction as he is about subcultures and dress codes, and informed by both the strategies and critiques of the minimalist and postminimalist epoch — the assignations of gender, attitude, class and politics that were both teased out of and heaped onto largely abstract art — Hill turns all that into a playground, and if at first you think the gravity-harnessing and defying results seem lite, look again, for while they may not always deal in gravitas, they do pack a load.

love magazine fashion and fame

this is gonna be a really good mag. cover design is totally mid- 80s details. i can't find a jpeg on the web so maybe i will hit the archives and scan one? right. i ask you--where would beth and the gossip be with out YAZ? the article on iggy is great. every child should read it in school...

snippet: In the early Sixties, when Iggy Pop was still James Osterberg, he would listen to the radio and get annoyed. He recalls Lesley Gore’s ‘It’s My Party’ as a particular source of frustration. ‘Maybe it was a clever pop song, but I didn’t wanna hear it. That was fake! That was wrong! I felt bad when I heard that. In the top 40 I’d like one song by The Kinks and one by The Beatles but there were 38 things that made me feel the same. It was the same feeling I got later when Nixon was president – a kid just knows – he’s a psycho, he’s a scumbag, I’m not gonna fight for this any more and I laugh at it. Fuck you. So I really felt bad all the time.’

With an antipathy toward the mainstream that would turn out to be mutual, he took his gut feelings and the things he admired and set about making music that would make him feel better.

‘Well I started to make some of it; most of it I couldn’t make. ’Cause Bob Dylan made music that made me feel better, but I didn’t have those skills. “I Only Have Eyes For You” by the Flamingos – now that sure as hell made me feel better, but I couldn’t do that. Didn’t have the licks, didn’t have the chops, didn’t have their vocal chords or Dylan’s brains. But I figured I could find something. I met people later who assumed that because I’d do a song like “Gimme Some Skin”, swearing and cursing and spewing to a hyper-driven emotionless riff, that I wouldn’t like Debussy, or girl groups – but I do, very much. But you do what you can, also, there’s something to that.’

urban drift

good girls bad girls -- can anybody bring it like marc j?

stephen beal

beautiful paintings AND he's the president of cca?!

love etc. there's my valentines song

from yew tube comments: Pet Shop Boys saved my world a thousand times.
from me: Me too!

funny cuz i feel soooo human

Ballard’s genius lies in his metaphoric use of scientific jargon and an antiseptic tone, somewhere between the dissecting table and the psychopathic ward, to psychoanalyze postmodernity. Long before deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida were slinging around references to the “decentered” self, Ballard is talking, in his trenchant introduction to Crash (1973), about “the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect” and about “the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods.” Before postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard were announcing the Death of the Real and its unsettling replacement by uncannily convincing media simulations, Ballard is claiming that “we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind” — advertising, “politics conducted as a branch of advertising,” P.R. “pseudo-events,” et al. — where “Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.” And before neo-Marxists like Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis were pondering the deeper meanings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Frank Gehry’s Hollywood library, Ballard is pondering the psycho-spatial effects of the built environment: the experience of swooping around a freeway cloverleaf; of walking through a cavernous, empty multistory parking garage; of waiting, alone, in an airport departure lounge; of walking the privately policed streets of an obsessively manicured exurban community. How, Ballard wonders, is our sense of our selves as social beings and moral actors — our very understanding of what it means to be a self — being transformed (deformed?) by the whip-lashing hyperacceleration of technology and the media, the blurring of the distinction between real and fake? Ballard was the first to ask how we became posthuman.

invitation to mr david gandy

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.

Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.

Please come flying.
Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.
Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.

Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.
Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.

For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.

We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.

With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.
Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.

cordy ryman

no no no...lux

armory show

Some interesting stuff from the Armory show site. Lots more good stuff. These are just a few that caught my eye...

monkeyland chameleons

I shake my head and shiver
They smile and they stab my back
As they shake my hand
Send out an S.O.S. please
I'm marooned in monkeyland.
I'm idly staring at the sky
Did anybody hear me cry
A billion stars are a moving sight
To all you out there reading this tonight
It's just a trick of the light
I have to know what is real and what is illusion
Tell me how does it feel beyond this confusion?
Is there anyone there?
Do I dismiss this with a sigh?
And let the answers pass me by?
Is my creator God or a man?
Does someone somewhere care and understand?
It's just a trick of the light.
I have to know what is real and what is illusion
(Rest of chorus)
Is there anyone there?
Life's an optical illusion like other optical illusions
Beware

sunday morning coming down

Dangerous Dan is a person of extreme musical intelligence. I try to listen to him every sunday. yes, it's war and football today.

Sunday - 1 February 2009 - 9:00am to 12:00pm

ARTIST--TITLE --ALBUM
Cash, Johnny--Sunday Morning Coming Down--Essential Johnny Cash - Disc 2
Sciflyer--Never Come Down--Age of Lovely, Intimate Things
Gysin, Brion--Stop Smoking--Self-Portrait Jumping
Sixteens--Baby's Carriage--Glacier, The
Kills, the--The Good Ones--No Wow
Spit Muffins, The--End of The World--You're Soaking In It
Thunders, Johnny--Green Onions--Panic on Sunset Strip
Crazy Dreams Band--Nightcrawler--Crazy Dreams Band
Deadbolt--Voodoo Doll--Shrunken Head
Electrocute--Sugar Buzz--A Tribute to Your Taste
Fire on Fire--Heavy D--Orchard, The
Fireparty--Engine--Fireparty
Obsessors, The--War & Football--Double Scoop
Guttersluts--Crazy Cart--Something Doesn't Smell Right
White Zombie--I Am Legend--La Sexorcisto: Devil Music 1
Monster Zero--Walking Off a Fury--Wreck
Nurse With Wound--Thrill of Romance...? (Burgo Partridge Mix)--Bacteria Magnet
Cold Sun--Here In The Year--Dark Shadows
Davis, Guy--Slow Motion Daddy--Sweetheart Like You
Kaukonen, Jorma--Cracks In The Finish--River of Time
Millionaire At Midnight--Coit Tower--Titan! It's All Pop! Sampler
Tiny Concept--Drinking Wine Song--For Tiny Bullshits...
Unit Breed, The--Sand--Hello Sweet Nothings
Chameleons, the--Monkeyland--Radio One Evening Sessions
Raccoo-oo-oo--Untitled 1--Raccoo-oo-oon
Love of Diagrams--Cool (live)--Love of Diagrams
Knitting By Twilight--Jaunt to Dreamland--an Evening Out of Town
Muslimgauze--Green Is the Colour of ...--Coup D'etat
Faun Fables--Dark Solas/Hela--Songs From "Mother Twilight'