What time and how burnt? Exactly.
Photo: Sally Mann
Sally Mann: Photography and the betrayal of memory.
"Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn’t diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished."
--Sally Mann, from her memior "Hold Still"
Please check out Maria Popova's review here.
I've only just recently come across Mann's work and it's nothing short of haunting. If you look into her past she's best known for her pictures of her children growing up--work that cemented her as one of the most stark talents in American photography and garnered her as much praise as infamy.
Personally, I'm floored by her portraits, but honestly more fascinated by her landscapes. When the rural Virginian countryside is her subject, that is where I find her argument about photography being the ruin of memory to be inarguable.
And with the proliferation of everything being photographed, the idea of anything lingering in memory has been essentially replaced by the simple and often horrible digital depiction of that time and place.
Whiskey Cats.
Thank you Oatmeal.
The Dismal WGAw Writers Report.
March 24th, 2016
I'll keep this brief because it's not cool beginning with what the annual report was titled:
"Renaissance in Reverse?"
Simply put it breaks down to this:
- Women make up less than 30% of working Hollywood writers.
- In the feature film side of the business women make $.68 on the dollar to their male counterparts.
- Minorities are under-representented 3:1 in TV and 5:1 in film.
- White males, ages 41-60 make the most money (and are employed the most).
Read it all in the link here. Feel free to break down my simplification if you want. It won't matter much because this report tells us what we've been hearing for years. With the exception of some TV, the business is harder to get into and harder to sustain as a career than every before.
And for more uplifting news, check out Maureen Dowd's interview with some of the brightest female talent in Hollywood here:
4 Thing Thursday
in 4 Thing Thursday, Art, Comics, Music
Every Thursday I'm going to post 4 things that I find worth sharing. They could be anything, but if I know me, they'll tend to be links or musings from something that I've come across in the world of art or music or lit...or something completely insanely dumb that just needs more gawking.
1. Platinum Grit. The lost art of Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy, which may be may favorite comic of all time. First published in 1994 and on indefinite hiatus since 2009, it's one of the most beautifully written and illustrated oddball comics of all time. It dances with the mundane, the occult and the insane all at once with a sense of humor that is hopelessly anchored in self-conscious truth. And it has a talking Jamaican Cabinet named Raoul.
2. Brain Pickings. Maria Popova is astounding to me as one the most intelligent and prolific curators and distillers of art and literature. What began as a weekly letter to 7 friends has grown to reach millions of people. I have no clue how she does this on her own.
3. Sturgill Simpson. This year has been brutal with Musician deaths. This week we lost Merle Haggard. One of the last original souls of Outlaw Country. But we also got a first peek at Sturgill's new album. Click on his name to listen. I'm going to make a bold claim and say if anyone can restore the idea of what quality country music can be it's going to be Simpson. And this cover of Nirvana's "In Bloom murders me. And anyone who can write a serious line about getting high and playing Golden Eye on Nintendo 64 has got a special level of talent.
4. Seth Godin. I hate the word Guru, but with Seth it actually fits when it comes to the world of marketing. His easily approachable and consistently brilliant insight never fails to inspire, regardless of whether you're in marketing or not, his blog is sage advice for life and his AltMBA is one of the more intriguing programs that I think is a much needed poke in the ribs to the general theories of higher education.
Less Crap = Less Anxiety
Hoarding is a disease, I'm sure of it. I'm not looking it up, just going to make an unfounded claim based on how it feels.
I believe it to be a neurological malfunction that everyone has to a degree. Something that could be defined on a scale the same way the disease of alcoholism is defined. 2 drinks a day and you're DSM IV fine, but three and that's 21 drinks a week and that qualifies as abuse tending toward dependency. I think of keeping shit the same way.
You start calling it other names and giving excuses. You are "collecting" or it was just "too good a deal." Everyone has one storage unit, right? You start normalizing your behavior alongside everyone else who has a garage too full of crap to put a car in. Three rolling tool chests is better than two because it means more tools, so you can do more work and be more....something, something, something.
The funny thing is that no-one thinks they have a problem. I don't think I have a problem with holding on to too many things. I mean, who knows when you'll need a second kitchen table--that's just common sense. What if people need to sit down and there's suddenly 15 of you.
Boxes of ethernet cable. You never know, WiFi can be fickle. A 2008 iMac? You never know when you're going to have a retro art project where you need that computer. Bike tools? For the bike you're going to get.
Cookbooks? Old copies of Guitar Magazine? Stacks of notebooks from college courses? Apparently in one corner of my mind the internet could disappear at any moment and I'll have no context for what I've read or learned in the past.
But I keep it all around, lug it from house to house, up and down California, sometimes some of it goes in storage, sometimes it gets used in a photo studio or music room, but most of the time it get lugged from one closet to another in boxes that never get opened but rather just get stashed.
Every couple of years I turn on my rare German Virus Synth and tap the keys to remind myself that I made a good purchase before putting it back in a bathroom closet, next to my dirt bike helmet that's never seen dirt.
All these critical trinkets and subtle definitions of my personal history need to be maintained, at least in some haphazard order, or so I always seem to think. The truth is simply that they don't.
I spent the majority of the last 5 months on the road with a suitcase, some cameras and a laptop. Guess what? I was fine, I was simple, I was mobile and I was generally pretty happy about it.
That got me to thinking about all the other crap that I've lost along the way, that I really didn't need. I've had a truck, a saxophone, a dozen softball bats, two cameras and three bikes stolen and the only reason I think about any of it now is because it's funny about none of that changes the fact that I'm still here and really didn't care all that much about any of it--although, I really liked that 82 Toyota 4x4 and would still drive it today if given the chance.
I've moved out of places and forgotten to take skis and racks of dumbbells and never gone back, because it doesn't matter.
When rats nested in a box of my paperwork and ate my taxes, my high school diploma and my degree from UCSD, I just tossed the shit-riddled box. There has not been a time in the decade since that I've ever gone looking for any of that stuff, let alone missed it's existence. I still did those things that those papers were "proof" of.
Where does the compulsion come from? Why the need for stuff? Is it comfort, legacy or maybe a metaphorical wall that builds into a real one to block out the real shit in life that matters?
I don't know, but I do know that much in same way that life online is plagued by infinite noise and the fake oppressive sense of busy importance, so may be the physical life when surrounded by too much flotsam. How can you see the forest through the trees when you've got boxes of CD's, board games, throw pillows and Christmas decorations in the way?
Purging may be too strong a term, but as a theme for the remainder of 2016 I think I'm going to concentrate on honing and refining my physical ownership of crap. Whittle it down to what's actually necessary, not just nostalgic.
Words that don't work.
Adorable.
Bleh. Let's start there. I had an English teacher in high school who was quite fond of that incredibly asinine word. She would use it for just about anything that she found to be attractive or worthwhile or well done. I'll let you dig into the irony of her being a teacher of AP Literature yet spackling her sentences with fuzzy words in incongruous context.
Her abuse of adorable led me to despise the word in general and snicker at anyone who used it. It also led me to use it subversively in place of overt sarcasm.
"Oh, your new PT Cruiser is adorable."
While I may be overly sensitive about such things, I think that everyone has a few words that they just can't stand.
For my stepdad it's "awesome." He's just not going to buy that anything mundane, anything small such as your latte or that hot yoga class is actually awesome. No, that's for things like asteroids hitting the earth and that guy who sky-dived from space.
After doing a brief survey of a few close friends the following words were listed as things that made them either disgusted or fume with irritation. Oddly enough the two most cliche that most people go with: moist an c*** didn't make the list.
- Heavenly
- Foodie
- Travesty
- Perfect
- Chalupadilla/Quesalupa
- Photog
- Lovely
- Fructose
- Yolo
- Consortium
- Yogi/Guru
- Viral
- Bakersfield
- Selfie
- Sticky (marketing)
- Dovetail
- Sitch
- Brah
- Bespoke
- Literally
- Synergy
- Tastemaker
- Gamification
- Gluten
- WOD
- Millennial
- Paradigm
- Actionable
- Integrity
- Flan
- Cuddle-puddle
- Dap
That's enough...it's probably making us all dumber at this point.
4 Thing Thursday
Every Thursday...beginning right about now. I'm going to post 4 things that I find worth sharing. They could be anything, but if I know me, they'll tend to be links or musings from something that I've come across in the world of art or music or lit...or something completely insanely dumb that just needs more gawking.
1. Audrey Kawasaki has produced a new limited edition painting in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda. Definitely one of my favorite LA talents working right now and whether or not she started the movement, she's definitely creating the coolest work in the field of "groggy-sexy." I'll definitely try to curb my use of the word "definitely" from here on out.
2. Baseball is back and it's not just sweaty big man chess. Or for some people it is, but for me it's synonymous with Spring. Rebirth. Grass, cleats, dirt and leather. And of course as the season gets ready to kick off, we have to deal with inevitable wave of crappy marketing. Lots of large-forearmed boys who couldn't act their way out of a locker, selling you everything from tickets to meatballs subs. But occasionally an internal marketing unit will use that exact lack of theater prowess to produce a spot like this, which is pure gold.
3. Laurie Spiegal is a composer, computer programmer and visual artist. A pioneer of electronic music in the 70's, not only is her music hauntingly timeless, but it's conceptually and literally out of this world. I'll unpack that: she musically interpreted Johannes Kepler's 1619 exploration of natural and mathematical congruences in nature titled "Harmonices Mundi" into a single track that was then pressed onto the "Golden Record", loaded into onto the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 and fired off into space. Hard to get much cooler than that. If aliens have turntables, Laurie (not Bowie) will be the first human thing they hear. (click on the pic to take a sample listen)
4. Bloom County. It's back. Well it's been back for a few months, but there's something about the way that's it's being cultivated in Berke Breathed's now autonomous world, free from publishers and the limitations of color printing that makes not only its voice as fresh as it was in 1985. In dark times, this strip is a guiding light.
Dubstep Llamas
in Video
If you want to know what compulsion is...it's the reason I keep making these videos.
The cure to dragging ass.
Surreal comedy + Vitalic on the beach = Get after it.
Why, because it's funny, that's why.
The Dodgers just released their team's new uniforms. Seems like it's going to be a great year.
Embracing Failure
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
I've heard a lot of people say that--er, rather post that.
If you could not fail...
It's actually a fascinating premise, the idea of not failing. I have a number of things that I think I would do if I could not fail.
- Be a professional MLB catcher: Buster Posey owns the diamond. Something that I've never known, except in some distant mirror world as a center fielder.
- Be a MotoGP pilot. I imagine there is nothing like it. I've only had dreams of the speed and control that somebody like Rossi commands.
- Be a singer like Mike Patton. That world of sound construction is a blaze that will forever fascinate me. Lungs unleashed.
- Be a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald. To encapsulate the American ethos in such a beautiful and condemned manner is transcendent.
- Be an artist like Berkeley Breathed. To understand and create characters that are bits of everyone's evolution and to do it with a reverence for human flaw borders on precious.
I will not be any of these. I am left handed and too old to catch, too unbred to race, too scared to sing, too myopic in my discourse to write the American Failure and too petty to get to the empathy and grace that it takes to comic--that is now a verb.
And while I will be none of these things in particular, I think all these pinnacle characters that I place as the masters of their world are tied together in one thing. Failure.
Games. Pages. Races. Stories, Jokes. Thousands of them. All losses and many simply head shaking travesties of misjudgment.
But as Seth Godin tends to note:
"The person that fails the most, wins."
I had a professor back in film school who said something that stuck with me in a much more practically applicable way:
"You're going to make 10,000 mistakes before you start to get good, so you better start fucking things up. Just don't screw up the same way twice, that'll get you fired."
Putting those two things together, it becomes obvious that the sooner we can accept the fact that we don't know everything out of the womb and that it's asinine to think otherwise and we're going to fall on our ass--a lot if we want to be really good--we need to accept that failure is the only way to grow.
That said, it's probably worthy to note that success is going to running screaming from you if you keep doing the same dumb shit over and over. To further Godin's real point from his quote; if you go too big and miss you won't get another shot, you'll be broke, broken or dead. So to fail often, you have to survive a marathon, not a game of Russian Roulette.
One Star Fun.
Yelp is it's own animal.
If you're out of town and need to see what's around, it'll give you a broad stroke, usually with reviews populated by people who either have the best or the worst things to say about a place. But it's how you navigate to eat.
5 star and 1 star, it's all gold or mud. But they generally have menus and that works better than the majority of the reviews.
"This is the best waffle house ever."
"They never refilled my daiquiri"
"Do they even get what 'fusion' means?"
It's the literal definition of literary noise. Yelling into a vacuum to equally vapid folks who don't actually have their own culture (or subculture) to be part of in reality. But it does become funny when people rate things that aren't restaurants or clubs or bars. Landmarks are definitely one of the oddest things that I've seen rated and because of that I hopped on board.
I started with Chrissy Field...which is obviously glorious and then continued to...
Anyhoo...I did this with a bunch of local landmarks until I started getting flagged:
What a fantastic use of fiscal resources. My response, that never received acknowledgment:
Please Be Serious. Like Right Now.
I came across "The Art of Possibility" on complete accident. I was reading a ton of Seth Godin and it was mentioned in one of his reading lists. So I bought the audio book.
I thought it was a little odd that it was actually a book read by the authors, Ben Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander.
Most authors either default to better orators or just take the check and walk away--talking to you Shane Snow. But this couple nails it and they do it together, despite not being together (hello progressive thought).
If you're a Landmark graduate this whole book is the best summary of your education that you'll likely ever come across. If not, it's a great way to pry through the rusty old plates of the way that you think and allow you to see your obstacles as opportunity.
I was on a long run, in the hills of Oregon listening to this oddly calming book when Ben Zander decided to relate the following tale:
"Two Prime ministers were sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and baning his fist on the desk.
The resident prime minister admonishes him: “Peter,” he says, “kindly remember Rule Number 6,” whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws.
The politicians return to their conversation, only to be interrupted yet again twenty minutes later by an hysterical woman gesticulating wildly, her hair flying.
Again the intruder is greeted with the words: “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.” Complete calm descends once more, and she too withdraws with a bow and an apology.
When the scene is repeated for a third time, the visiting prime minister addresses his colleague: “My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of this Rule Number 6?” “Very simple,” replies the resident prime minister. “Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.'” “Ah,” says his visitor, “that is a fine rule.” After a moment of pondering, he inquires, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?” … “There aren’t any.”
Whether or not any of it is true, it rang true and therefore I had to juxtapose it correctly in a piece of sculpture that looks incredibly serious and functions as it's antithesis.
Reminders: An Art Project
I've taken a few weeks off from San Francisco and the noise of the City to get some writing done. Specifically to get the 10th draft of my 90's action/comedy, ninja/heist script in the books. All it was really missing was some fine tuning of the mise en scene and some punching up of the dick jokes.
Getting out of the city and off to a few acres of pristine, militia protected Oregon countryside is great for the creative spirit. There's a special zeitgeist that occurs at the intersection of dirty hippy and meth addled redneck and as long as you're armed, it's great ritin' country.
But when you silence the sirens and traffic and general mayhem of schoolgirls and crackheads, you have to be prepared to deal with your own thoughts. It is what you wanted and they will seep in. Just ask Kaczynski.
It's easy to start questioning projects, losing sight of the promise of the premise and generally wondering if there really is any point to any of this so called "art." That's the point at which it's necessary to take a break, take a long walk or at least a trip to the batting cages.
I've been hitting a few days a week at Medford's local family fun center and it was there that I realized I had to actually pull the trigger on one of my languishing art projects.
I'd paid for a half hour in the cages and the polite and businesslike young woman had set me up on a cage and given me the generic run down of, "here's the start button." No less than four pitches in the machine jammed.
I waited a few seconds hoping that the shoddiness of the machine feed's own construction would cause it to vibrate the ball jam loose. Nope. As I was about to head back inside to grab someone, I saw the girl who had helped me enter the cage next to me. She threw on a helmet, nodded at me and said, "I got it," and ran out into the middle of the live batting cage.
At his point there are at least four other people hitting and she didn't flinch, she just did her best corn fed Indiana Jones impression and timed the hitters and dodged through traffic, around the nets, unclogged the jam and ran back.
I was impressed and thanked her as she came back to the safety of my cage and said, "holler if it happens again."
So in honor of her and all the other folks that I have run into and will run into in the future, I had 500 of these cards made up and have been giving them to anyone in any instance that inspires the term on the card.
Llamas.
Ignition.
Turn the key. Give it a little gas.
Open the notebook. Take the lens cap off.
Type FADE IN.
Don't worry about being ready, getting ready is the best way to avoid actually getting anything done. You just have to start. This is me starting.
And I'm setting a proper tone with Keanu leading the charge.
Don't smile. Ever. This is serious shit.