Steve Klee is in a show at 5 Years on Friday night. So is Paul B. Davis. They will be showing some videos. You should go.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Anonymous guests
Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening. Research conducted this afternoon shows there to be a direct correlation between the level of understatement in the front verso page of a book with the degree of intimacy in the author’s inscription. The understated (blank) verso has a very sincere dedication; the overstated a very superficial one. The title page that falls between these two opposites, the one that is functional and austere, perhaps as expected, has the most generic and formal.
These are from a collection of books that I have either found, bought second hand or that have been loaned to me and I have yet to return. All have been signed by the author and dedicated to a reader – a reader sometimes known, a reader sometimes anonymous, but never me, I am simply the recipient and the guardian of these secondhand wishes.
Nosferatu
I did this picture a couple of years ago and have just found and recovered it from the bottom of a drawer in my studio. I was a little surprised to find it there because it is part of a series of about 4 or 5 that got sent to either Italy or New York almost as soon as they were finished. I guess it didn’t make the cut, although I’m quite fond of it now.
All is history
I like to listen to the radio late at night, after midnight, during the graveyard shift. Currently I am enjoying listening to the economic lullaby. I find it oddly soothing every night hearing earnest and soothing voices as they report on the latest volatility in the markets and deliver the news of further falls in the stock exchange. Schadenfreude? Perhaps, but someone has to sleep soundly throughout all of this. Inevitability is a great comforter.
Then I have a dream and it goes like this: “There is always another way”. There are thousands of alternatives, although there are those, and there have always been those who would have you believe otherwise. The assumption they made and had us believe was that “There Is No Alternative“, no alternative to the problems upon which the capitalist economic system may from time to time create and upon which it might stumble. This is a mantra that the beacons of neo-liberal economics have spent years chanting. The rest of the world was nothing but a function of their will – a world made in a vision of their greed: of economics and for economics. And until now that is how it was. Like the chants of high modernism, the sweeping aim was to universalise, to create an hermetic economic singularity and to maintain a status quo to end all history. Of course there were no alternatives – their will be done and was done. All is history. I wish.
Posted in Uncategorised Tagged credit crunch, dream, Economics, modernism, radio, schadenfreude Leave a comment
The kindness of strangers & the great disconnect: 2 touching pieces of spam
- gambling | gambling.ph | IP: 12.215.120.53gambling…If you feel distressed because of the stupefying amount of time it takes to hit upon what you are searching for, cheer up because you’re one step closer to your goal….
Not Spam — Oct 5, 2:36 PM — [ View Post ] - Night, when all your dreams come true.
http://betweenair.com/
Take 2
This is the reworking of a drawing I posted a couple of months ago. It was floating around in the studio bugging me, looking a little undercooked so I added full background paraphernalia as well change the shape of the body while trying to avoid being stuck on other drawings. It does look a bit like a cluedo character now, in a good way…(hopefully), like a marble bust with lipstick and a wig on, but it was looking a bit flat, a bit too like a straight portrait before; there was nothing awkward about it, no kick, no nothing. The semi-psychedelic background definitely offsets the blank eyes better and gives it a much creepier, more uncanny vibe.
Credit crunch haiku
Greed is good,
they say…
until it isn’t.
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Fulfil your sponsor’s criteria
The state of television. A friend recently had the opportunity to pitch in competition an idea for a documentary to a TV station. Unfortunately it didn’t get picked up. It was an intelligent, expansive and contemporary idea that engaged with intertwining and disparate elements of religious and personal identity between cultures. The three “finalists” who got a second chance to pitch rehashed some trashy ideas based on formats you’ve seen a million times already. Perhaps, as was later suggested, had she altered her pitch to “an American girl tries to see how many religious conservatives she can get to take their tops off” we might be watching it next season. That’s a one sentence pitch that fulfils every sponsor’s criteria.