This post unofficially brought to you by the mocha shake at Bentley’s Coffee in Tucson. So very happy that after the demise of Greasey Tony’s and P.D.Q. Records, that the drink (and Bentley’s!) is still around even after twenty years.
Approaching Prada Marfa late at night when there is only moonlight is absurdly spooky, especially after driving past the giant border surveilance balloon that looms just off of US-90.
I barely touched the radio dial this trip – the soundtrack was almost exclusively accumulated music and podcasts via iPhone I hadn’t yet caught up on. I just naturally assumed that outside of Marfa Public Radio, West Texas was going to be a broadcast wasteland. I gave in around Sonora and turned the radio on expecting the worst, but the first station that came up was playing Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” Great song. Had a moment…
Kinda annoyed that I missed this one before. Knowing how Smile informed of the recording of Playing With Fire, you could probably draw lines of influence based entirely on where the font appears. Get the font here.
Hidden off to the side at MOCA’s mammoth Under The Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 exhibition were some photos from Chauncey Hare. I’d never run across his name before, but his work (mostly post-hippie, pre-yuppie California corporate anonymous) was compelling enough for me to try to dig up some information (and write this blog post). His bio is frustratingly short…
Chauncey Hare does not define himself as a photographer, but instead an engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester. Funded by three Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment Fellowships, he spent only a short period of his life making photographs. Frustrated by the photo art world, he photographed only intermittently to 1985, when he stopped making photographs altogether. In 2000, distrusting art museums, Hare donated all of his photographs and negatives to the Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley. He has an engineering degree from Columbia University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Masters Degree in Organization Development from Pepperdine University, and a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from Sierra University. He and his wife Judith Wyatt are co-authors of the denial-breaking clinical handbook Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It (1997). As a licensed family therapist Hare now helps working people – in person, on the phone, and on the internet – minimize the abuse they suffer as workers in their corporate and government jobs.
Amazon liststhreebooks with enough poisonous reviews to bump them up on the “must track down” list.
In this outdoor spectacle, Richard Jackson will fly and crash a remote-controlled, ultra-lightweight, battery powered, model military jet plane with a 15-foot wing span, and filled with paint, into a 20-foot canvas wall that reads “accidents in abstract painting.” On January 22, 2012, at 4:00 p.m. Jackson’s plane will take off and circle the field directly south of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for approximately 30 minutes. The climax will occur when the plane is aimed toward and flown into the canvas wall; the plane, made of balsa wood, will splinter on impact. Its contents—brightly colored paint—will splash onto, and then drip slowly down the canvas, making an “accidental” painting.
Following Jackson’s spectacle, video footage and photographic documentation will be shown with the wall and the plane debris, along with other work, at the Armory Center for the Arts in an exhibition entitled Richard Jackson: Accidents in Abstract Painting, the Armory, on display from February through May 2012.
I’ve shouted at length here before about Oskar Fischinger, MOCA’s Visual Music exhibition, and the occasional program from the Center For Visual Music. CVM shows are kinda rare and extremely worthy. Well worth the effort to attend.
It’s that postcard over there on the right that started it all. A dead town east of Joshua Tree that wasn’t even that much of a town before it died. However, someone thought enough of it to commission up a “Greetings From” postcard for the soldiers who were passing through town on their way to North Africa with Patton.Some twenty-five years later I’ve got a small collection of so-called “large letter” postcards and there’s enough of us online to support the inevitable Flickr group. CreativePro.com looks back at the history of the Teich company who basically created the large letter style.
…going to a lecture about futurist city design and architecture inside a re-purposed wind tunnel owned by an art school while a brush fire threatens to burn the city down.
Yet another good BLDGBLOG event though I wish there was more time to lift it out of the show-and-tell blitzkrieg. The one question I wanted to ask the panel was if they considered and/or incorporated the temporal nature of city evolution. As a sci-fi artist for movies, it seems the tendency would be to tilt toward ground-up master planning, but cities aren’t hegemonic areas, they grow, go broke, get blighted, get hit by deorbiting star destroyers, get rebuilt, attacked by Godzilla, new stuff built on top of old stuff, etc.
The last couple of Star Wars movies hinted at that evolution, but not nearly as thorough as portrayed in Blade Runner or perhaps A.I.
Cinephilia & Beyond has an amazing find: the complete collection of Orson Welles’ Sketch Book: “a series of six short television commentaries by Orson Welles for the BBC in 1955. Written and directed by Welles, the 15-minute episodes present the filmmaker’s commentaries on a range of subjects. Welles frequently draws from his own experiences and often illustrates the episodes with his own sketches.”
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