More untimely links…
Paul Chan interview in Bomb Magazine
Collective social power needs the language of politics, which means, among other things, that people need to consolidate identities, to provide answers, to create a social cohesion that would give them the power and the responsibility of a bloc of people to move things, destroy things, to make things happen. Whereas my art is nothing if not the dispersion of power. To never consolidate. To always disperse. And so, in a way, the political project and the art project are sometimes in opposition.
David Simon reads his intro to a book about The Wire
[The Wire] was about the city. It was about how we in the west live at the millenium, an urbanized species compacted together sharing a common love, awe, and fear of what we have rendered, not only in Baltimore or St. Louis or Chicago, but in Manchester or Amsterdam or Mexico City or Cairo as well. At best, our metropolises are the ultimate aspiration of community, the repository for every myth and hope of people clinging to the sides of the ever more fragile pyramid that is capitalism.
Steve Jobs interview from 1994
I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.
Hard Knocks on Hulu
I can’t take my eyes off this show.
Hard Knocks presents viewers with an inside look at NFL training camps. From the top coaches to the rookies trying to make the team, Hard Knocks will showcase what it takes to be in the NFL.
Still from Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead, 1968
“Beauty is… a notion that’s very hard for me to understand in that it seems to be something that people lay over any given historical period and the criteria always seems to be behind the times. I think, for the most part, artists don’t get involved with beauty. They get involved with the language of art, they get involved with trying to extend the language of art, and if beauty happens it’s a residue of their involvement in the particularities of what they’re trying to accomplish in terms of communicating something to someone else.”
Richard Serra
Night scene
George Saunders on Daniil Kharms
Stories are, in a sense, a scam. There was never a clerk as unconflicted, docile and pathetic as Akaki Akakievich, but from the subterfuge that such a man could exist, Gogol made the wonder that is The Overcoat. Ghosts don’t show up to save the stingy, and many stingy die unsaved, but a stingy guy stayed stingy, then died is not a story, and is certainly not A Christmas Carol. Princes don’t invite their entire kingdoms to the palace, but if at least one doesn’t, our story is Once upon a time Cinderella miserably cleaned, forever and ever.
Photography is easy, photography is difficult, by Paul Graham
It’s so difficult because it’s everywhere, every place, all the time, even right now. It’s the view of this pen in my hand as I write this, it’s an image of your hands holding this book. Drift your consciousness up and out of this text and see: it’s right there, across the room – there… and there. Then it’s gone.
Jerry Saltz with Irving Sandler
I don’t even really think of myself as a writer; I think I’m more of a folk-critic, a raw nerve, or a loudmouth. I agree with the sportswriter Red Smith who wrote, ‘Writing is easy: You sit down at a typewriter put a piece of paper in… and open a vein.’ For me there is no such thing as writing. There is only re-writing.
David Lynch Interview Project
Whoa, this thing is really filling out.
Kitchen
“Formalism stands for something negative: contrived stuff, games played with color, form, empty aesthetics. When I say that I take form as my starting point, and that I would like content to arise out of form (and not the reverse, whereby a form is found to fit a literary idea), this reflects my conviction that form, the cohesion of formal elements… generates a content—and that I can manipulate the outward appearances as it comes, in such a way as to yield this or that content… The issue of content is thus nonsense; i.e., there is nothing but form.”
Gerhard Richter
Night scene
Vice Magazine interview with David Simon
There are some people who are destined for celebrity or wealth or power, but by and large, the average American, the average person in the world on planet earth, is worth less and less. That’s the triumph of capital, and that is the problem. You look at that, and you think that’s what we’ve come to and that’s where we’re going and it’s like, Can you tell me another bedtime story about how people are special and every one of us matters? Can you tell me that shit?
Letter, Jack Kerouac, 1962
Lois and Janet and all those other girls actually scare me down deep — They scare me because of their slinky beauty like snake-beauty…what do they want? Out of me? If they won’t give me a piece of ass because I’m a rowdy inattentive monk drunk, then why do they want to see me? They scare me like the Devil — Their intentions are not honorable.
Port interview with Tom Cramer
Overall I reject the idea of northwest art. If you go to Iowa or Missouri you can find artists who look a lot like Louis Bunce or Carl Morris. There’s this myth that Northwest art has this look but it doesn’t, they are fine artists of course but those same styles were present everywhere. Grant Wood looks like Willamette valley. The stuff that does seem regionally unique like Ed Ruscha, paradoxically often ends up becoming international. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner looks like northwest art; with his alpine scenes… we don’t have a proprietary claim on trees.
Editing DFW
Editing him was sometimes a more painstaking process than editing most writers, but it was a genuine pleasure to engage with his intelligence and with his way of thinking about language, from how it supported narrative trajectory and character development all the way down to the punctuation. He was truly interested in the fine points of grammar, and every rule he broke he broke deliberately, with a specific artistic purpose in mind. Those long paragraphs—as off-putting as they can seem—were entirely purposeful.
Ed Ruscha in studio (1976), Bonnie Prince Billy record cover, still from Warhol’s Beauty II (1965), Egon Schiele.
A few from the Ed Muscle image vault. Cheers!
Detail of an unfinished drawing called “Shop”
When I pray I pray for pure intentions — kind of cheesy, but I want to make sure I’m living this way for the right reason.
A few foggy minutes ago I was working on a drawing for the Girl Muscle Girl site, trying to finish it up in time for a self-imposed Wednesday deadline. I like the drawing, think it has potential, but after a few hours of work I realize I can’t commit to it, not tonight.
Normally in this situation, I’d put the drawing aside and come back to it in a few weeks, no big deal. But looking at the drawing some more, I’m beginning to think I like everything the way it is. I’m thinking maybe I’m allowed to like drawings in different ways throughout the process, not just at the end — after all, the “finished” work is usually a betrayal of a far more exciting, far more promising, earlier state. And now here I am thinking, I am a happy man blessed with easy good looks and passionate, forgiving friends, why not publish the unfinished drawing anyway?
And so, here’s the drawing. I like it. Maybe it’s unfinished, but this drawing still fulfills a lot of what I’m hoping for with the site, in particular my desire for a kind of spontaneous self-portraiture, a snapshot record of various mental states (currently, I am cautiously happy with a dash of regret). Maybe the site is more of a sketchbook than anything else, we’ll see.
Laters,
Ed.
