postcards from nowhere in the new republic.
My utter disappearance from vox is in large part due to the amount of work I have on my plate right now.
One project that I just finished: redesigning & webpublishing the New Yinzer Magazine.
The New Yinzer is a Pittsburgh-based magazine published entirely online. The editors also host live events, usually mixtures of poetry and other literary readings and live music.
I am proud to announce that I am now The New Yinzer's web designer and administrator! This issue represents the first New Look for the magazine in several years.
This issue is absolutely fantastic. After typesetting the issue (think: reading and re-reading and re-reading the thing) I'm *still* going back to read more! With a portrait of Myron Cope, interview with & comics from Ed Piskor, an interview with This American Life's Starlee Kline, the columns (Indie Rocker vs. Classic Rocker, Lost Yinzer, etc) fantastic poetry, the growing art section, and much much more The New Yinzer is totally worth a good browse ...
... And don't forget to read videodrome, my column about video art, either.
When Language Can Hold the Answer in the NYT extrapolates upon the scientific reinforcement of the knowledge that the act of naming things makes it easier to learn about those things; and then runs right over to the paintbox.
The traditional subject of the tug of war over language and perception is color. Because languages divide the spectrum differently, researchers have asked whether language affected how people see color. English, for example, distinguishes blue from green. Most other languages do not make that distinction. Is it possible that only English speakers really see those colors as different?
Then they walk through several language use and color sorting tests to discern how the mind approaches dealing with color. Interesting stuff.
I'd love it if they'd visit the museum every once in a while. They'd learn what artists - or at least, painters - know -- color perception's dependant on the acuity of perciever's senses, on environmental qualities (light quality, time of day, relative humidity, latitude & longitude). Color lives outside of a place of names until a work of art is completed. Actual color perception is relative.
Sidebar: Favorite oil painting assignment: Mix a black.
Now mix a black that's different than the first black. Different how?
Now (pointing) That's the warm, that's the cool. Now mix one that's in between.
We do not percieve color independant of other colors. Color does not exist without relating to another color. Color may be isolated on a little card but the card rests on a table, or, held in the air, there is a color perceived next to the colored card. There is always an adjacent color for the eye to percieve, off the page, from the environment. That adjacent color shapes our perception of the color-shape. Light changes everything. Fluorescent? Incandescent?
Joseph Albers demonstrated convincingly with his Homage to a Square series of prints, paintings etc.
Sidebar I love this image because of the traces of his process, his planning, his consideration of color. His hand, which disappears in the finished Squares.
i really love the tiny animations. i wish i spoke dutch so i could understand the narratives.
This sounds like a haunting collection of photographs to explore, of stories to consider. The abandoned lives of those committed who never re-emerged from asylums. The Lives They Left Behind : Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic. By Darby Penney and Dr. Peter Stastny. Bellevue Literary Press. 205 pages. $25.
on current, with commentary
A nonlinear map of the echoes of loss still ringing through the greater Pittsburgh area, via images of Braddock and stories I've collected since I moved here in 2002.
I think when it is in your backyard, and humans cause it -- then it doesn't get the attention that it needs.
I took a few Boston friends on a brief walking tour of Braddock yesterday morning. The tension is still coming out of my body.
We parked down by the steelworks. Its the first and the last, you know - the first steelmill Carnegie ever built, the last to be operating on the eastern seaboard.
We were in separate cars. As I parked I looked at the US Steel watertower and thought, There was a man I knew, his dad worked for US Steel, and drank too much, and beat his family because of the stress of keeping his job through the 70s and 80s. And nobody in the family owned up to the injuries that he had caused after he quit drinking. They denied their wounds. I suppose they did that in gratitude that he stayed, that he stopped. I suppose they thought that was the loving response, to bury their wounds and resent him.
Lxxx's partner Pxxx said the mill smelled like the town in Poland that he's from, which was filled with steel mills. She couldn't believe the dump trucks filled with slag that drive by every 3 minutes.
Braddock feels like the 9th ward, New Orleans, except the place doesn't shriek. Its a long quiet moan. Lxxx shot over a hundred pictures of rotted out windows, faded sign details, a row of stakes in the side of a building that looks like crosses. We accidentally took a tour of the library - Carnegie's first-opened library in the US. It was supposed to be closed. We loitered on the porch. Eventually a volunteer came and asked if we wanted to see it.
The empty full-length swimming pool Carnegie built as a policy of appeasement, to keep his workers from making unions, lined with filing cabinets and boxes and desks. We'd never fix the pool, he said. The humidity would ruin the books.
There's also the 2-lane bowling alley our guide couldn't find the keys for.
The gorgeous music hall, pale blue seats flecked with faded gold paint on the armrests and scalloped back. I can imagine a candle-lit candlabra hoisted up above, hundreds of pale hands clapping too fast in the dark, wearing their sunday best.
The font on the organ's pull-knobs is beautiful, something out of the 20's I've never seen before. Three foot-shaped pedals, then all the floor pedals covered with bricks and the gaping hole in the wall behind -- vandals broke in, stole all the organ pipes to sell for recycling while the library was closed for repairs in the 80s.
Lxxx said the palette of the music hall is from the height of the 1950's.
Braddock is the fruit of so many poisonous cultural forces, its decay happened over a generation, a tooth rotted out of someone's head because of neglect. The freeway bypassing it keeps it cut off, isolated, off the mainstream cultural maps. I never see it in the Pittsburgh media, not even the five and dime drug-related crime.
When I went to shoot in the 9th ward last June, I discovered the cognitive erasure of that neighborhood in the map of the City of New Orleans. The 9th ward as an area wasn't labeled, and was spread over four discrete pages of the book in a way that made navigating the neighborhood intelligably impossible until I had gone and blown up those pages on a photocopier, cut them up, and made a new map.
Of course, what happened in New Orleans was primarily caused by a hurricane. You can't point a finger at a hurricane ... and so it pops up in the news every once in a while ... But Brad Pitt won't be coming to Braddock any time soon, because that poverty and loss was created by the loss of an industry, and the region denies it so it can live with it every day.
This is the culture of "hate what is ugly and painful, and ignore it so we don't have to think about the complicated forces that made it". Even if what is ugly and painful is simply the untreated wound of place. The steel industry was built with the bodies of men, it ate the bodies of the men who made the steel that built the world. Now it is gone, and the houses that housed those bodies rot.
Our tour guide told us they are going to premiere the play, Out of This Furnace at the Braddock Music Hall sometime later this year. This makes me happy.
The Fool is the 'unnumbered' card of the Tarot trumps. It can lead or end the sequence of 21 Major Arcana. Iconically & historically linked to the juggler, a google image search of "0 THE FOOL" produces any number of interpretations on the theme.
Don't get caught up in semantics. The markers of the actual icon are pretty clear. The above image is the classic Rider-Waite representation.
Two things have popped up in the media recently that I link to the energies of 0 THE FOOL. Conveniently, one is upright, the other, reversed.
0 THE FOOL upright: the Fool as disbelieved source of wisdom, a la King Lear, the gentle trickster who reminds us of our humanity through Freudian slips and fart jokes.
Steve-O, that Fool from Jackass who has abused himself publically to make a living, has not been doing so well of late. After he was jailed for a short period of time, he shot the video embedded below. Now locked up in a psych ward, he wrote a long letter to his friends which he had his assistant "share ... with as many people as possible on the Internet (rather than try to sell a "juicy" story to the tabloid press for profit)."
Now, what do I have to add? The research I did into the immortality of the soul, the end of life in our current bodies, and the 4th dimension, was, by no means a bunch of bulls--t. I could stand before you all and say very similar words to the ones I say in the following clip, it's just that I happened to be under the influence of a very dangerous amount of drugs when it was filmed:
Heath Ledger's last full role as The Joker, which he described as a 'psychopathic, schizophrenic clown'.
The Joker is a shadow Fool because it is consciously destructive, as opposed to the upright-Fool's playful disruption so necessary to our lives. He uses the mask to cover facial scars that cannot be hidden. He has twisted himself to destroy the culture that created him through whatever was inflicted upon him. "Whatever does not kill you makes you stranger.
The upright Fool's activity results in the necessary periodic aeration or tilling of psyche. the Fool reversed is soaked with the need for revenge and poisons everything.
At one point the Norse gods sew Loki's lips shut to keep him from taunting; from that point forward his face is scarred and he is driven by revenge, working to destroy Valhalla until they chain him underground, where even there his stuggles make earthquakes.
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roberto said:
So macabre and fascinating at the same time...I liked the very simple slide show with your non-linear narrative. You made... read more
on SPOILED HEAT: a litany
Thank you.It is a difficult place to go, and only a twenty minute drive from the richest residential area of... read more
on SPOILED HEAT: a litany