Friday, February 23, 2001
Streetstudio NYC 000 an ongoing project to produce the most comprehensive visual record of the people of New York City. "Treating everyone we photograph as someone special, we are endeavoring to capture the diverse faces, fashions and attitudes that comprise this great city. We think we've found a way to fuse all the spontaneity people expect of an urban peoplescape with a depth of character found in a fleeting glance." Streetstudio is just that, of the streets, Clay Enos and Stephan Ghukfvin travel all over the 5 boroughs with a simple mobile studio capturing thousands upon thousands of faces with their vintage Hasselblads, one of them shoots, the other either reloads his camera, answers the questions of curious onlookers, or speaks with potential subjects. Nobody is denied a moment before the lens.
1:36 PM :

Thursday, February 22, 2001
Ignore your viewfinder, shoot from the hip, a fine showcase of snapshot photography, instant ART-i-fax from the ROID camera and more fun with the LOMO. (although I have yet to use my OLGA)
10:51 PM :

If one loves Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such love the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out. Oscar Wilde
10:29 PM :

Sad French poems on gray days, Paul Verlaine 'Chanson d'automne' from Po�mes Saturniens.
Les Sanglots longs (the long sobs...
Des violons (of the violins...
De l'automne (of autumn...
Blessent mon coeur (touch my heart...
D'une langueur Monotone (with a monotonous langour...
Tout suffocant (Stifling...
Et bl�me quand (and wan... when...
Sonne l'heure (the hour sounds...
Je me souviens (I remember...
Des jours anciens (the old days...
Et je pleure (and I cry...
10:23 PM :

Hilarious! Richard, you take the cake!
1:09 PM :

Wednesday, February 21, 2001
I can't believe my forecast From Rob Brezsny's Astrology:"This week a troubled teen in paramilitary garb may offer you $10,000 to join a team of mercenaries and kidnap a Colombian drug lord. DON'T DO IT, Aquarius! Say no, as well, to any other invitation that is both lucrative and risky, or appetizing and stupid, or dramatic and impossible to research. If you manage to resist the reckless proposals, I predict you will set the stage for a host of subtler, smarter enticements to come your way. Now study (and refute) this quote from Marcel Proust: "Impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions" Great, I wish I would have known this yesterday, now what the hell am I going to do with this 10g and one Juan Carlos?! Shit!
9:35 PM :

Damn! I love PDAs, public displays of Art. Ever since I was a wee lad wandering around the city catching glimpses of Keith Haring's work and clawing Barbara Kruger posters off walls, I've been hooked. Art where you least expect it. Creative Time's mission is to present and stimulate dialogue around art in the public sphere. This week, a large scale show by, Vic Muniz: Clouds (Feb 20-27) Do you want to be notified about when to look up? Visualization really does come from within the observer and who's to argue with such a grand scheme. Muniz knocks sculpture off of it's bronze pedestal straight into your lap or ummm sky, talk about site specific, I bet he is banking on millions of viewers from the New York Metropolitan Area seeing his work. Thanks to sponsor Panasonic, artists Marco Brambilla, Fischli and Weiss, and William Kentridge have created short films that will show on the NBC Astrovision in Times Square every 59th minute of everyhour. Each video will run for six weeks. Other projects inlcude the amazing (everyman's Duchamp, sorry it's fitting blurb!) Felix Gonzalez-Torres 'Untitled 1995' Billboard Project and the upcoming WINK by by Takashi Murakami with MTA Arts for Transit in Grand Central Terminal.
6:09 PM :

The English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. This years guilty party and winner composed the following: "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside the darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at her throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly 'You lied!'" and this horrible personal favorite which I am sure earned a dishonorable mention of some sort: "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex change surgeon to become the woman he loved."
9:57 AM :

Tuesday, February 20, 2001
Senor Coconut Y Su Conjunto, the alias of producer Uwe Schmidt responsible for last year's zany collection of Latin Kraftwerk covers, El Baile Aleman, will play six rare U.S. dates in March, complete with a full band. Schmidt, a German native who now resides in Chile, is one of electronic music's most prolific and intriguing artists and has recorded under a number of monikers including Atom Heart. Picture Perez Prado or Tito Puent� covering Kraftwerk, the project turns Ralf and Florian on their heads. Schmidt will perform on a bank of electronic equipment, joined by a band that includes a Venezuelan vocalist, a vibraphonist, an upright-bass player, a percussionist and a horn player. The Finnish electro-funk trio Pepe Deluxe will be the opening act on the tour, with Brazilian singer/songwriter Moreno Veloso. If you are lucky enough to be in Austin on March 15th for the South by Southwest Music Conference Senor Coconut will perform @ The Waterloo Brewing Company, with added guests Tahiti 80. Other shows are as follows: 3.17 - Seattle, WA @ I Spy (with Pepe Deluxe, Moreno Veloso) 3.19 - Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey Theater (with Pepe Deluxe, Moreno Veloso) 3.21 - San Francisco, CA @ Roccapulco (with Pepe Deluxe, Moreno Veloso) 3.23 - New York, NY @ Knitting Factory (with Pepe Deluxe) 3.25 - Miami, FL @ Space (Winter Music Conference).
6:10 PM :

Jonah Peretti's CULTURAL JAMMING turns Nike's corporate creativity upside down. The Nike iD website allows consumers to 'customize' a sneaker complete with a choice word as an 'iD'. Peretti, as a stand against third-world exploitation selected "SWEATSHOP" which was declined and generated a rather pointed and hilariously ironic e-mail exchange.
1:52 PM :

Monday, February 19, 2001
There is a beautiful kind of raw badness to Gary Panter's punk everyman-Jimbo. Damn, I often wanted to be Jimbo, he's cool and tough, a Joe Bazooka punk warrior type, part mexican luche libra poster illustration come to life, part boy next door gone bad, and part sexy Fantastic Four superhero. Sometimes the stories camp on testosterone induced punk homo erotic adventures, and pop culture. Panter's style walks a fine line between high art and low brow clip art illustrations from the 50s and 60s. His career took off alongside the do-it- yourself amphetamine burst of the late-'70s Los Angeles punk scene and was part of the collective known as RAW magazine. Strangely enough he won an Emmy for his set design of 'Pee Wee's Playhouse'. Oh and how about those numerous album covers for Ralph Records! Although the original pressing of Jimbo is now gone, the series can be found reprinted by Simpsons creator Matt Groening's Bongo Comics Group. Check around a bit, it's worth a 'look see' (ebay, amazon special orders, comic shops, thrift stores etc). In the meantime, Panter's collaboration with Charles (Dog Boy) Burns, 'Facetasm:Creepy Mix and Match Face Mutations', can be had for a small price, it will keep you amused for hours and hours and hours!
9:23 PM :

Stopping and starting, words identity and lack of crisis. As an artist, stopping occurs only once, that final show, performance or piece, a finish line where beginning again never really takes place. 'Keep starting' I tell myself but this week it is more like 'fail, fail again, fail better' that's Sam Beckett by the way, not me. When did art become all trauma angst and pain? Curse the Renaissance, when artists/craftspeople, were striving for status, striving to get out of the same guild as the pharmacists! Who can blame them! We want trauma, suffer, really no try it, it's fun and uplifting. Make absurd statements like 'I invented the question mark', be a reclusive flamboyant intuitive intellectual. Tell people about your 'art job' displaying parsley around packaged meats at the grocery store. An artist is a form of identity today, and that identity is confused with product or craft. If I were to make some flawed art does that make me flawed? Hardly. Oh, but it often seems as such today when a big art show equals a disgusting display of personal cosmology. That is probably why I look at very little 'new art'. I tell myself not to confuse life and art, that life is process not product. Life is pliable, and ever changing, product is static and heavy; a giant house or land mine that acts as a place marker. Like it or not, we are all smack in the middle of our process, introductions, beginnings, endings and epitaphs have little interest for me. The center really is the best part, our gooey inside is the quintessential part of living. Process rather than product, in process I am living, growing, changing, adjusting, involving, and synthesizing; process inevitably becomes product. Am I interested in quality? Making some good 'shit' some great 'art', 'writing' something amusing, do I care how it is received? Hell Yes, of course, but isn't that really the part of another process as well? Process is NOW, your future is NOW, process will bend with the promise of what is possible. Make and do, process and please shut the fuck up and quit whining about the suffering part of art or Art with a capital 'A', make some damn money and please...can we make it interesting this time?! Whew! That felt great...off to class....
11:00 AM :