Descending

Images chosen from the google search
results for the word Descending

Thanks a.s. for the idea, even if it was sarcastic.

Zak Smith on Drugs

So I just snagged this section of a provocative interview with Zac Smith from the ever-giving alec soth blog. The whole interview is here and its well worth the jump. Some of his ideas about drugs and people who use drugs to create art are positively honest and discomforting and optimisticly resounding and hillarious, and no doubt controversial, depending on your own tendencies and directions.
The interview is predominantly concerned with the recent release of Smith'sPictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow his collection of pen and ink illustrations for every page of Thomas Pynchon's famous novel written in 1973, though it strays into further corners of the artist's mind.

Terri Saul: Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the most drug-ridden novels ever written. When considering your illustrations of it, I thought about Glenn Gould, a musician who experimented with both drugs and classical music. Do you ever use drugs while working?

Zak Smith: 1-Drugs are very popular among people who are interested in interesting things but are not themselves very interesting.

2-Drugs make your body do weird things–so they’re interesting if you’re in the performing arts.

3-Drugs make boring things seem interesting, so products created by people while they are on drugs are often really boring.

Glenn Gould is a pretty good example of all three of these propositions–his rendition of Webern’s piano opus–(23 or 28?)–is amazing, but when he sits down and writes his own stuff, he’s terrible and derivative.

What I do–and what most fine artists do–is not a performing art, so drugs just do to you what they do to everyone else: they make you suck and then waste everyone’s time pretending you sucked for some non-drug reason.

I mean, in art school if there was some minimalist who made like a 2 by 4 except it was purposefully off by a quarter-inch and that was their art, you knew that guy was either on speed or a big pothead. When you look at all that crap conceptual art from the sixties and seventies–drugs.

Anyone with half an eyeball knows Victor Moscoso is obviously waaaaaaaay better then Andy Warhol–unless you’re on LSD, in which case they’re both exactly the same–green next to magenta, fuuuuuuck duuuuude. Then you sober up and have to defend how much you liked it and well, Andy’s got some old photo of Jackie O in it so you pretend you like it because it was like socially relevant and shit and Victor Moscocco just has a cool picture of a dinosaur so you just pretend you never saw it.

Big muddy neo-expressionist art that looks exactly like every other big muddy painting anyone accidentally made ever? Cocaine.

The funny part is then the critics have to scramble back to their desks and write 80-page essays about why they think Andy Warhol is good that DON’T just say “Sorry, sorry, I was on drugs.”

Terri Saul: Gravity’s Rainbow is a book–at least in part–about how information can tend toward entropy. What is your view of our current information-saturated culture?

Zak Smith: Ok, here’s a view–in newspapers with huge circulations we got headlines saying the president is a felon who lies about pretty much everything all the time and doesn’t know where Sweden is and most people in his country either don’t vote or decide to re-elect him and I got a myspace page which says “Don’t send blind friend requests, explain who you are first” and I get blind friend requests every day.

Information is only information if people are not total morons–however, people are total morons. Therefore we do not live in an information-saturated culture, we live in a Brad-Pitt-and-whatshername-just-had-a-baby- saturated-culture where smart people who care can find what they need when they have to if they’re lucky and we always have and we always will.

What is a Ghost?

"A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."

- Coceres from Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone

Moving the Coven

Dragon Head

Leonardo da Vinci's Dragon head

3 Women in Japan

Lights of Cleveland

In Uaxctun

Ali and I ate whole cloves of garlic on the earthen floor of our little hut, giant cockroaches crackling above our heads in the dry, straw-thatched ceiling. The garlic was meant to repel the mosquitos' bloodthirsty appetite that had suddenly, with the setting of the sun, become so devastatingly apparent; but it had little success, and we made our way through the dense, humid jungle to an evening meal with our hostess. The crudely screened porch where we sat and ate was not as primitive as the kitchen from where the food emerged, but it was a savory meal of roasted chicken, yellow rice and diced beets, wholesome enough to satisfy our hunger after a long day of bruising busrides and a cumbersome search for lodging, that at one point in time had seemed utterly desperate. Luckily for us, as so often occurs when traveling in foreign places, we were bailed out by a child, a young boy of nine or ten years, who directed us to this woman's empty hut for rent. He was not surprisingly shirtless and without shoes, and his well-worn jeans were so brown with dirt and mud that from a distance he appeared to be naked. His Spanish was blunt, but effective enough to understand and, more importantly, he was able to understand us; pointing to the end of the long stretch of open grass that divided the village in two, it could have served as a runway for small aircraft, and then jabbing his finger left as if to signal that by turning at the end of the tract we would find what we were looking for. Which we did find, a place to eat and rest for the night, upon following his directions. Up to that moment, we had encountered nothing short of oblivion from the locals in the village as they had mostly refused even eye contact with us, much less conversation, and with only one bus arriving and departing daily, we had begun to consider the option of roughing it that night in the jungle on the edge of this apparently inhospitable community.

RED STONE

A poem by Dick Hugo

If underwater and glowing, a red stone
is always good luck. Fish it out, even
if you must wade and wet your good shoes.
It will dry flat red like a new potato.
You should rub it and remember the way
it sparkles underwater, like a red haired woman
curving troutlike through moss.
A red stone will get you through divorce, rage,
sudden attacks of poison and certain diseses
like ringworm or gout. A red stone will not
reverse Alzen-Heimer's disease, or get you past
cancer of the colon. Use it for what it can do.
When it has done its work, return it softly
where you found it, and let your wet feet
sting a moment in the foam's white chill.

-Richard Hugo

Vanity Witch

A rare still from the Small Town Witch video shoot.
The goth queen of underground independent music videos adjusts her makeup between takes.

Jump to the video

Rotten D.J.

So whatever, I didn't find this because I was looking for it, but rather stumbled upon it and pilfered it from another blog - I don't remember whose blog, but I'm sure its in my links. Anyway, its a playlist from John Lydon's dj set when he played on Tommy Vance's Capital Radio show on July 16th, 1977. No punk but for the Pistols, though the multitude of reggae tunes shouldn't surprise:

Tim Buckley - Sweet Surrender
The Creation - Life Is Just Beginning
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
The Chieftains - Jig A Jig
Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown
Gary Glitter- Doin' Alright With The Boys
Fred Locks - These Walls
Culture - I'm Not Ashamed
Dr Alimantado - Born For A Purpose
Bobby Byrd - Back From The Dead
Neil Young - Revolution Blues
Sex Pistols - Did You No Wrong
Lou Reed - Men Of Good Fortune
Kevin Coyne - Eastbourne Ladies
Peter Hammill - Institute Of Mental Health (Burning)
Peter Hammill - Nobody's Business
Captain Beefheart - The Blimp
Nico - Janitor Of Lunacy
Ken Boothe - Is It Because I'm Black
John Cale - Legs Larry At Television Centre
Third Ear Band - Fleance
Can - Halleluwah
Peter Tosh - Legalise It

Dead Moon, The End (belated post)

If you never got to see them live, you should have; they performed the most soulful and intimate rock show I have ever seen, huddled together inside their nest of candles and amplifiers, their barbed and jagged boogie declerations blasting out over mesmerized devotees and further gutter-strutting their way out into the city streets. Dead Moon was the ragged truth, Dead Moon, too soon laid to rest.

Transfloral View(s)

Regarding Round Objects in the Nethers of Abroad

There are times when, far away from home, all the beans are magic beans, and every single window is an invitation to be born again. These are the moments when traveling costs are as insignificant as brushes and pens are useless, for who can sit still to write amidst such delight? Afternoons spent cascading from well-lit bars into dense Tokyo streets, wine stained chins cutting through the breeze; we found our way into a lush green park where children and their mothers posed for pictures on the path and the birds in the canopy were hysterical and deafening like sirens in the trees. The din from the city grew farther away...

The Marvelous Globe of the Human Eye

"Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye."
- Cynthia Ozick