Low Commitment Projects

Macinwi sent me a link to Low-Commitment Projects (specifically to Sandwich Artist) a couple of months ago, and I've just gotten around to clicking through it...

I'm destructive, Miami, Florida

steve.lewis@farawayhills.com. thumbtyped

Yeah, that kind of rich

R station, 4th Ave and 9th.

Street pig

Portland, Maine, at Pleasant and Maple.  Pebbles in concrete.

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Jaume Plensa’s Echo

A few weeks ago we hit the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park.  I hadn't been around the park for months, so hadn't seen Jaume Plensa’s Echo.  Wow.  There are many pictures of it on the web, but few give a real sense of how luminous and hovering and present it is.  The pic below is by Noel Y. C.

 

Alexander McQueen

And everything is going fine

We're just back from the premier of And Everything is Going Fine, @ MoMA, and let me urge you, friends, if you are anywhere near NYC when this film opens there in the coming week, GO SEE IT!  (Shameless promotion!  Amy Hobby!)  It is as though the man is in the room with you, from beginning to end.

Reahabilitation Through the Arts

The Unofficial House Band of Sing Sing from Fly's Eye Films on Vimeo.

Lota and I attended a benefit last evening for Rehabilitation Through the Arts - mostly theater, but also some music, dance and poetry readings - and you would have had to have been a stone not to have been moved.  A few of the scenes and monologues written by prisoner members of RTA were just devastating. And lest you think this is a soft heart-on-the-sleeve sort of thing, New York State Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, Brian Fischer, attended and was honored for his support of RTA. 

Miwa Matreyek - myth and infrastructure

At TED.  Semihemisphere. I've become an instant fan.  Did you see Digitopia?  Kind of freaks me out a little - the disembodied hand thing.  (A la The Beast with Five Fingers, then The Hand...)

Brooklyn’s Finest: Gilbert Moore

Nice post by Nitasha Kawatra on the Brooklyn Museum blog about Gilbert Moore, who runs the museum's freight elevator. 

Untitled video on Lynne Stewart and her conviction, the law and poetry (2006)

I post so little lately that it seems like too much to track back through all of the readings and thoughts that gets me here, but here I am.  Paul Chan's "Untitled video on Lynne Stewart and her conviction, the law and poetry (2006)".

I will say that the tag I've tagged this with, "stand up and say something", are words I heard Lynne Stewart speak, back in the environy days, leading to the wars of our worlds.  If I remember right, she also said, "Make noise!"

Michelangelo Merisi's occasional verse and jail time

A few years ago I was writing a bunch of occasional verse and really enjoying it.  So I was tickled reading Francine Prose's description of the verse Caravaggio and a handful of his fellows were accused of writing (and jailed for) about their hated rival, Baglione following the unveiling of one of Baglione's paintings of the Resurrection. 

The verses predict that Baglione's utter lack of talent would soon reduce him to the point at which he could no longer afford the cloth for breeches to cover his naked behind.  They suggest that he bring his drawings to the grocer, or use them for toilet paper, or give them to the wife of Baglione's friend Tommaso Salini (a hugely unpopular and notoriously nasty painter), who could put them in her vagina so as to prevent Salini from having sex with her.  The poems refer repeatedly to the sore subject of the gold chain: Baglioni is undeserving and unfit to wear it; an iron chain around his ankles would be more appropriate.

Andreas Laszlo Konrath: My Generation

Andreas Laszlo Konrath.  A grouping o prints named My Generation, which we say at the Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland, ME. on the fabulous First Friday of this month.  Another artist who lives in Brooklyn whose work we first saw in Portland.  Odd.

Lisa Dahl: Trickle Down

Portland, Maine. First Friday. Congress Street.  Lisa Dahl. 
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Fabricant Studio

Bumped into our friend, Jon Fabricant, this morning (me moving the car, him walking the dog) and he told me he has this new site for some prints he's working on, fabricantstudio.com, and now I've gone there and I am telling you you need to do the same.  Fabu.  I'm gonna buy a copy of the Bicycle Rider.  Nu?

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes...

These are two etchings by Charles Emile Jacque (1813-1894), now in the New York Public Library’s digital collection, acquired from the collection of Samuel Putman Avrery (1822-1904).  The images are digitized and on line at NYPL – digital IDs 1220758 and 1220759.  Officially “sujet libre”, but browsable under “sex”.

The 25th anniversary edition of Little Big, by John Crowley

Ron Drummand and (as) Incunabula has put together a web site (interviews, essays) celebrating the 25th anniversary of John Crowley's Little Big.

Dan Levy, who I haven't seen more than once or twice in a long time, is the person who recommended Little Big to me.   (He recommended I read Ægypt first, but I didn't. Faraway Hills is in Ægypt, and farawayhills is, sort of, where I live.  Now I'm really digressing, but there's a spur of land in the Hudson just north of Cold Spring on the east bank of the river, 41.425841,-73.969586, which I always make believe is the site of some of the parties in Ægypt.  I don't typically mention this to anyone, because, aside from Dan, I don't know anyone else who's read Ægypt: maybe I just need to ask more people if they have.)  Dan's been many web people, pretty fancy, but at the time we're talking he was Levity.) My jaw stayed dropped the entire time I read Little Big. I laughed, I cried. I mean I really wept at one point when I realized how much I identified with one of the characters and that character was now, no kidding, just dead.

You know, when I finish reading what I'm reading now, I'm going to go back and reread Little Big. Or maybe wait for the 25th anniversary printing in April.  Thank you, Incunabula.

[Well, I'm in a groove.  Let me say a little more.  David Kassel introduced me to Dan Levy, lo those many years ago, and David is the other half of a few of web projects I posted about earlier this week.  We saw D last week for the first time in a long time, and I told him then that I had a dream - a pretty horrific dream about Dan L.  OK: here's how old friends differ.  DK immediately launched the question What does that mean about you (me, Stumpy)?, whereas I was telling DK because my next question was Is everything OK with DL?

I think I'm done now.]

like a visit from an old friend...

juju hisowndamnedself was laid up with a bit of a cold this weekend, and when we felt it coming, we dropped into our local video emporium to pick up some DVDs to watch. Lovely to come across recently released Criterion edition of Wim Wenders' marvelous film, Wings of Desire. A.O. Scott makes recent mention of the film at the NYT's Critic's Picks. Oncet upon a time juju's alter ego posted a d'monkey mention of WoD, if ye be interested look for the 6.27 link you'll find at this page...
damn, 1987?
Egads...

The letters

Yes, I spent a week in Amsterdam last month, with not a single responsibility, and never made it to the Van Gogh museum (or any other museum, for that matter, except FOAM).  But now I'm browsing the Van Gogh letters, annotated, searchable, and all that.  At the Van Gogh Museum, where I probably could have seen the darned things in the papery flesh.  Via the WSJ via Arts & Letters Daily.

Illuminated Manuscripts: Alexandre Singh's "Assembly Instructions"

Written about by Brian Droitcour on rhizome.org.