Category Archives: Art

Awesome people hanging out together

Art

Every year – for the last several years, at least – Time Magazine posts a list of what they consider to be the best blogs for that year (they do seem to change every year, so, I assume, they are really the best blogs of the year that haven’t been mentioned before). Either, way – best blog or best unmentioned blog – the list often has some previously hidden gem. This year, one of those gems is a blog called Awesome people hanging out together. The combinations are often surprising and sometimes shocking. Here are a couple of examples with their labels from the blog. Check it out.

The Digerati: Front, left to right: Eric Schmidt, CEO Google; Unknown; Steve Westly, former eBay executive; Steve Jobs, CEO Apple; Barack Obama, President, USA; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook; Unknown. Back, right to left: Dick Costello, CEO Twitter; Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo; John Hennesy, President, Stanford; Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix; Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle; John Doerr, Partner, Kliener Perkins Caulfield & Byers; John Chambers, CEO Cisco Systems, Unknown, Art Levinson, CEO Genetech.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite

Al Pacino and Christopher Walken

Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong and Neil Gaiman

 

 

 

Reflections

Art, Photography, Psychological Musings

Last Sunday, Michele went to the annual National Bioneers Conference and we agreed to meet at the end of the day at the Tracy Taylor Grubbs Open Studio.

One of the things that is fun about going to the same Open Studio over a period of years is watching how the artist changes. Sure, sometimes they don’t change and sometimes they change all over the place at random, but, every once in awhile, the change is growth. It is like you – in this case, I – can see the artist try to solve the same, intellectual? metaphysical? problem in a variety of ways, getting closer – but, like Zeno’s paradox – never getting there because the search is really the endpoint.

I first saw this in a Jasper Johns show at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at Marine’s Memorial – more accurately, it was pointed out to me on a tour put on by the  Stanford Art Department – and it seems to me this is what Tracy is doing. I have heard her talk about impermanence as a condition that interests her and, while I don’t want to speak for her, that seems to be central in what I saw last weekend (especially in her lovely iceberg paintings).

She also had on display some lovely little square images made by smoke that seemed to almost be frozen impermanence.

While Michele went to Bioneers, I took BART into The City and spent the later afternoon taking pictures of reflections.

I thought that a series of building reflections printed as small squares similar to Tracy’s smoke squares would be fun. But, sitting here, I think that these reflections reflect – sorry – my interest in what is reality vs. the distortion of reality as my projection. I see a scene – oaks and rolling, golden, hills on Highway 120 by Oakdale come to mind – and photograph it. Only when I look at the image, back home on my monitor, do I notice the power lines and towers, the dead, dry grass. What I saw is not what was there. Building reflections offer a similar distortion; the reflection on a building – so prominent in my mind’s eye – is often overwhelmed by the building I almost didn’t see.

With all that preamble, here are several reflections.

And a final picture from Southern California where the hold on reality may not be as strong.

 

 

 

 

 

Restoring Street Art

Americana, Art, Photography

 


I am sort of fascinated with informal street art – graffiti, if that makes you happier – I like the pictures, but I like the lettering even better. I am convinced that the lettering is a throw back to Mayan Glyphs.

About a week ago, Ed Dieden called to tell me to bring my camera with me to lunch, he had found a great vain of street art in Oakland.

By the time we got there, however, the art had been defaced. I have seen this on alot of Mayan sites, also. Somebody comes along later and trashes the art, presumable to show dominance. With street art, all it takes is a spray-painted line drawn through the art, sort of like keying a nice car.

OK, “restoring Street Art” is way too grandiose a term. But with street art, or any digital photograph, the photographer has an astounding amount of after-shot-control using Lightroom and Photoshop. I have talked to lots of photographers who frown on post shutter manipulation but I am not one of them. Ansel Adams – one of the demiGods of photography – retouched both his negatives and prints taking the tradition of post shutter manipulation back almost 100 years (and I am sure he was not the first).

My own standards – using the word standards in the most grandiose way possible – is having the final picture most closely represent what it felt like being there (I guess, by that criteria, I should accent the white defacing lines because, once I noticed them, they became very obtrusive but, at first, I didn’t notice them and they do detract from the art). I have no desire to Photoshop batman running through a wall although I have no problem with other people doing that. Here are a couple of shots, cleaned-up.

 

 

Pulp Fiction redux

Art, Film

Michele and I watched Pulp Fiction Thursday night and then we re-watched about 90% of it Friday night. What a masterpiece! It makes me want to watch Inglorious Basterds again, and Kill Bill (1 & 2). They are B Movies elevated to Art.

Quentin Tarantino movies are the opposite of action movies, they are all talk movies. Talk movies in which the talk seems to be wandering around aimlessly – the quarter pounder is a Royale with Cheese is maybe the most famous line, but there are dozens of great lines – only to circle back to connect in some improbable way.  There are even more great bits –

Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork.
Vincent: Are you Jewish?
Jules: Nah, I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all.
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.
Jules: I don’t eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?

this is a conversation between two killers, between two people who make the living killing people and, somehow, the conversation is also about  people who make their living killing people – and great scenes that are like mini-plays.  Tarantino movies are collections of scenes with very little connecting them but the scenes are so good, they don’t need the connection.

Think Inglorious Basterds, there is a scene in which Michael Fassbender, as Archie Hicox, is briefed in England

and, in the next scene they are in France and he is disguised as a Nazi sitting with the inglorious basters themselves.

There are no transition scenes, no shots of them jumping out of an airplane in the dark, or meeting up with the Americans. All the transitions are covered by dialog.

Pulp Fiction is the same way. It is really a collection of set scenes that have an overriding arc. The scenes seem to be out of chronological order but the arc of the dialog is in order. Each scene sets up the following scene, so that, at the end, when we end up at breakfast in the coffeeshop, we know we are where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are waiting. Pulp Fiction seems to be a violent movie about violent people and – I guess – that turns alot of people off but the violence is mostly offstage, just being talked about and the violent people are doing the talking.

As Roger Ebert says, “Immediately after “Pulp Fiction” played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. “It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It’s not enough to see them once.”

Paul Fussell R.I.P.

Art, War

Paul Fussell died a week or so ago and I didn’t know until Michele read his obit in Time late last night. Fussell was a writer who I very much admired. Not so much for how he wrote – although he was a very good writer winning a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award – but for what he wrote about. At a time when most writers glorified war with books like A Band of Brothers, he wrote – in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and The Boys’ Crusade – about the horror of war, about  how people die in war in agony,  mutilated, and disfigured. Fussell wrote about a war that was not honorable, a war that is is gruesome.

He knew first hand, having been a front line infantry officer in Europe when the turn over in junior officers was 100% every six months. One story that is burned into my psyche is how his platoon slaughtered a group of trapped Germans. And that was not the gruesome part, the gruesome part was that the story of the slaughter became a joke told to cheer people up when they were down, Remember the turkeyshoot? when we killed all those Germans trapped in the basement?

Fussell also wrote about Class in America, a topic I know by personal experience to be taboo. His book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is a classic and, even twenty years after it was written, still dead on.

I won’t say that I will miss him – like I miss David Foster Wallace – but I am saddened that he is no longer with us.