072103 black & red cross
Monday, July 21, 2003
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My mind wanders from thing to thing. Today is the birthday of Hart Crane, born in 1899. It is also the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, also born in 1899.
I only know this because as I was driving to work Garrison Keillor told me so. Every morning at 9:00 a.m. on KALW, right before Fresh Air, Mr. Prairie Home Companion does a little five minute spot called The Writer's Alamanc, during which he reports the birthdays of various authors and poets, reads some quotes, and often ends with a poem.
And as Mr. Keillor reads or talks I wonder how and when he breathes as he talks in a soft breathy continual exhale, a wheezing out of words while subtly sucking in faint whisps of spare oxygen, a technique to be used during a contest to see who can talk the longest without stopping. You can hear how his arched eyebrows and the deep sincere furrow in his brow tug the skin tight in the dip of the nose between his eyes. How has he escaped being caricatured on Saturday Night Live?
And I thought of how I briefly entered grad school way back when, 1981 or so, when I had it in my head that as much as the art thing was my thing that I was smarter than that and that I would become a writer, which I didn't, and I dropped out.
I had a writing teacher named John. I can't remember his last name. He had been a screenwriter in Hollywood. Our classes were often just story hour, with John holding court. He said that Cary Grant was the most vacuous personality he'd ever met.
Professor John once read us a Hemingway short story- I'm closing the loop here- and at one point he kept say a line over and over that he thought was a particularly tight and beautiful and descriptive Hemingwayesque line, something like, and I'm not going to look it up to get it right, as I don't even know the short story, he kept reading, "the flapjacks cooked on the griddle," or something like that. Maybe instead of "cooked" it was "sizzled," or some other more colorful word. Who knows?
He kept reading it over at different speeds, pausing, emphasizing different words. "The flapjacks... cooked... onthegriddle." "The flapJACKS cooked... on the... grid-dle." "The flapjacks cooked... on... the... griddle."
"The flapjacks cooked on the griddle." What a great line, he kept saying, what distilllation of language, of boiling down something to such essentials that then illuminates the moments, the smell, the time of day.
Sure, John. Whatever you say. How about some more Hollywood gossip. "Cary Grant sizzled on the griddle." "Cary Grant was a flapjack." "Gary Grant ate flapjacks and thought of Ernest Hemingway." "Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway celebrated their birthday by eating flapjacks and debating Cary Grant's personality." "Garrison Keillor ground Cary Grant's bones into the batter to make flapjacks for Mr. Hart and Mr. Hemingway."
These are the kinds of distractions that Garrison Keillor's pretensions, and literary information services, drives one to.
Knocking Garrison Keillor? What, am I some kind of uptight conservative Republican who doesn't enjoy community and story? No, I'm just knocking down idols. Down comes Saddam, down comes Garrison. Thou shalt not... hold before you... something... idols, etc. Let's hook a tank up to the old guy and topple him right over, the inhabitants of Lake Wobegone shouting and firing Russian made rifles into the air to celebrate their freedom from tyranny and oppressively picaresque moral tales.
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Why does this weblog have so many hits from Google Belgium on the painter Phil Sims? Who in Belgium is looking for him?
http://www.google.be/search?q=%22phil+sims%22+a... 11
Seeing this led me to a page of recent paintings, digital representations of monochromes which make me think, "why bother representing them on the web? For all the info those crummy little jpegs give, I coulda just made those in HTML." This is why for purposes of display on the web an installation shot is much more effective and informative for some kinds of paintings than a straight shot of the painting.
And at this page, a good starting point from which to take off and think some things through:
The Presents of Paintings (that should be "Presence")
by Stephan Berg
What can paintings be, if they neither wish to be a comment on something materially or immaterially external to themselves nor are intended to be understood as a pure expression of their own internal autonomy. This question arises not only in relation to the reality of the paintings of Phil Sims, which oscillates between these two poles, but also in relation to the general development and possibilities of painting in the twentieth century. Up to this point, the development of the medium can be described, by and large, as a process in which the self-significance, the self-assertiveness of the picture increasingly gains weight against the moment of the depiction, the visualization of something which lies outside the picture itself. From this viewpoint, the recently-ended twentieth century, whose first half saw the breakthrough to a fully non-representational pictorial concept justifiable only in terms of itself, can be understood as the logical and, in Hegelian terms, ideal completion of a route pursued step by step down the centuries.
Recently this interpretation has attracted criticism, directed on the one hand against the reduction and linearization of complex historical processes to a monocausal development pattern, while on the other generally expressing doubt about the possibility of absolutely autonomous artistic styles. The area in which the debate about the risks and chances of a pictorial concept directed purely at itself remains the most pointed object of discussion is still monochrome painting. The development of monochrome techniques in this century, starting with Kasmir Malevich's "Black Square," up to Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman or Marcia Hafif, makes it clear, however, that the setting of focal points within its radical framework can give rise to extreme variation, and in its breadth indicates, above all, the possibilities for differentiation in which the autonomy of the image can be discussed.
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I often get hits for Sea Ranch, and I imagine those in search of info about that wonderful place are disappointed by my "playing with colored blocks" drawings from a week spent there last year.
Say...
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