until you've seen the stars
reflect in the reservoirs.

[ -Morrissey, First of the Gang to Die.]

--
i think it's official. my clothing line will be called Editions on Purpose.

 

file under; +; for the future; quoted
link / 5 have made it up

Time Magazine's Person of the Year is you.

let's not get this confused with 'it is everyone'. you personally; you specifically.

infinite loop: there's still time -->

 

file under; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Top: Kermit Oswald 1981. The photo is from his own collection, but I don't know who snapped it. Kermit was Keith Haring's best friend throughout his childhood, and when Keith was briefly studying commercial art at a now-defunct art school in Pittsburgh, Kermit organized a carful of Keith's friends to all go visit him as a surprise, in conjunction with some art thing Keith was doing there at the time. Kermit was surprised by how much this touched Keith, his major impression of the experience being that Keith Haring, the artist, was 'obviously on his way'. Kermit saw the edges of a star expanding fast, fusing light. He also remembers that Keith tried to talk to him, but something stalled and failed. He remembers being embarrassed without understanding why.

^that's interpretive, some of it. K+K were of course best friends; the Pittsburgh carful happened; the 'obviously' quote is real. The remainder =how I read one of the memories Kermit shares in Keith Haring's official biography [1991], a book composed of quotes from Haring and people who knew him [family, friends, boyfriends, artists, musicians, Timothy Leary, etc]. Kermit Oswald has a few long passages. I find myself absolutely stuck on his story.

different scene from Kermit, in his own words [emphases mine];

When Keith and I graduated from high school, Keith went off to Pittsburgh, and I enrolled at the Kutztown State Teachers College, which is now called Kutztown State University. [...]

Around 1977, I was into chalk drawings, which is part of a well-kept secret. I did them all over the university. I did them on every wall... I was getting sick of working in the classrooms. I was sick of making objects that nobody was paying attention to. So I decided to take my art to the streets.

In addition to the chalk drawings, I did chicken-fat drawings, which I did on the cafeteria steps. I did salt water drawings on the gymnasium floor, to represent sweat. I was making paintings with salt. I was carving wax. I was experimenting all over the place. So these were pretty aggressive works which I did all over the campus , and I was nearly thrown out of school. I lost my student job. I was stripped of financial aid. I have nasty letters from the president of the university.

Well, when Keith came to visit, I showed him my stuff, and he said, 'This is urban guerrilla art!' It really raised the hair on the back of my neck- like, all of a sudden, something clicked. And he said, 'Kermit, on this one you're years ahead of your time!' And it scared the living shit out of me, because for the first time in my life the person I really looked up to and respected for having the balls to go after what he really wanted, was slapping me on the back for something he admired. I kept thinking to myself, 'What the fuck am I going to do to top this?'

Now: not to say that a single thing Keith H ever said to Kermit about loving Kermit's art was disingenuous. Not to say that at all. Keith was probably the biggest fan of Kermit Oswald's art who ever lived [for those familiar with another discourse, we might say Keith Haring : Kermit Oswald :: Morrissey : Linder Sterling]. And, certainly, Kermit makes his art sound completely prophetic for 1977. Just reading his descriptions of his work, you can tell Kermit Oswald is a fantastic rhetorician/bullshitter, or he is a genius that hardly anyone ever knew because he thought, quote, 'you can't really go after art; it's more like it wants you.' Still, Kermit eventually did get a workspace one day, a place in Nyc where he could paint, and like I said before, he ended up doing a whole bunch of paintings of trees that apparently no one found even the slightest bit interesting, because I've never been able to learn anything about them other than the fact that they exist[ed?]. I'd really love to see them.

By the time Kermit is interviewed for Keith Haring's official biography, in the late 1980s, there is still something he doesn't understand-

Even though Keith and I were separated and doing our different things, we still kept up our friendship. In fact, he'd come back from Pittsburgh and so we'd be in contact every thirty or forty days. And, we were always writing to each other. I mean I have these really beautiful letters from Keith and these incredible drawings that he'd send me. The letters didn't make sense, somehow, because I wasn't aware of the gay issue... all of a sudden this guy I've been spending my whole childhood with turns around and has an attraction for me.

So when I started receiving these really beautiful letters and drawings I said, 'What is this?' I mean, what does this suggest? Because part of me was experiencing some sort of guilt about what people might think about me. I mean, they'd obviously assumed that Keith and I must have had our moments. But I would point out we had done absolutely everything together but that! So it is what it is.

Yeah. First of all, what I would give to read those letters and see those drawings. Wow.

And yeah second, you probably don't become a major artist if people think you had sex with Keith Haring and this is somehow a problem for you. Rushing to point out that you did everything 'but' that is... 'what it is'? Is that actually a helpful way to think about it, 'it is what it is'? Maybe Kermit is right when he says that art has to claim you, and not the other way around, but I think he is talking only about himself.

of course
talking about yourself, to yourself
[as Kermit did]
there's a name for that. think it's
the rainbow connection?

anyway, yeah. discomfort Has
a fucking beautiful face [more images] -->

 

file under; drawn; keith haring; male beauty; photographed; quoted
link / 2 have made it up

I own Taschen's softcover 1994 Wassily Kandinsky book because Kandinsky's art was the first art I ever pointed to in a museum and said I liked it. This happened at LACMA when I was I guess about five or six. Later, when I was in fifth grade, in a bizarre school project that was part of some program called 'Art Docents' that made absolutely no sense, my classmates and I were instructed to render a copy of Kandinsky's 1911 painting of a running horse, entitled Lyrical. There was, for some reason, a contest involved, with a prize or something for the closest copy. A poster-size print of the painting was stuck on the blackboard, and we were all given some rough-textured paper and pastels. We all tried to make as close a copy of the painting as possible, and in the end, the class and teacher and visiting 'Art Docent' decided that I'd come closest to copying the lines, and this dude Eric [who was smart, attractive, and i think gay /edit: and i just remembered his name was Craig, not Eric] had come closest to copying the colors. We both got some kind of prize. Maybe just recognition actually. I remember standing at the front of the class with [Craig], holding up our horse drawings. I was actually very into horses at the time, and within a couple years, I would [briefly] own a horse.

I brought the drawing home, and I know I explained the whole business of the contest to my parents at the time, because I thought it was an absolutely ridiculous way to teach art and I hadn't even enjoyed doing it. Somehow, though, they forgot or weren't listening or whatever, and they were so impressed with this impressionistic drawing of a racing horse that they _framed_ it. It was only after it had been hanging framed for at least a few years that I finally had the chance to bring it up and explain it to them that it was a copy of a famous painting.

I swear to god, this is all true. I think the framed drawing is still in my father's office someplace. I'm going to check when I'm in California this Christmas.

I got the Taschen Kandinsky book for Christmas in 1994, after having been reminded of Kandinsky by the film Six Degrees of Separation, which includes a long, hilarious nonsense treatise on the paintings of Kandinsky and The Catcher in the Rye. In it, Donald Sutherland plays a Manhattan aristocrat obsessed with art, who rants, 'Kandinsky left areas of his canvas blank, if he had nothing to paint on them, rather than have imperfection.' [What else you need to know about the film: while very passionate about something or other, it has nothing to say about art. Will Smith, who reveals himself to be kinda shitty at playing queer in the first place, has a stunt double kiss Anthony Michael Hall because he was thinking, quote [Entertainment Weekly], 'What are my boys in Philly gonna say about this?' His character is a con man who claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier.]

Kandinsky left blank space at the apparent risk of imperfection? Blank canvas is perfect? You would think this meant Kandinsky left giant open spaces on his canvases. Kandinksy's canvases actually tend to be- i dunno, pretty full so far as canvases go? Of course Kandinsky uses what's called 'negative space', but not more than any other random artist. It's such a bizarre moment in that film. Everything the movie says about The Catcher in the Rye is similarly daft. At the end of the film, Will Smith supposedly hangs himself with a pink shirt. 'That burst of color,' Stockard Channing tears. Whatever.

In the fucking meantime?

Hello Prophet --> [let's talk about the artist]

 

file under; drawn; hero worship; kandinsky; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Yves Arman:
'Even when you die, if it's early in the morning, the birds are singing.'

 

file under; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Tosh Bergman on the Eiffel Tower:
'It read to me as not a tower of the future, but the 19th Century saying goodbye to its past.'

 

file under; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

You Fucking Love It

--
wanted to do another one with words on it

 

file under; drawn; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

t.r.e.c.k.o.

 

file under; drawn; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

'Well. Excuse me. I'm crunching a cookie. Anyway, Dante's Divine Comedy could not have been written without what I call scriptural astronomy.' -William T Vollmann

seriously kids, avoid using the phrase 'what i call' with reference to any famous artwork's prerequisites for existence. what you call. pfffff.

 

file under; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937
tagged 'kill lies all' by Tony Shafrazi, 1974

 

file under; drawn; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Sexual restraint at the state of the art

--
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true cannot be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol, do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.
--

it was for me as it was for many: Oscar Wilde was the first sloganeerist to catch my attention and throat my heart. this is the introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, my favorite work of 'art criticism'.

infinite loop --> oh baby baby

 

file under; hero worship; quoted
link / 3 have made it up

God. Heroes you acquire at age twelve are easy to forget.

Not true. That's bullshit.

I don't know why I forgot about Keith Haring, the art darling who slips between Matthew Barney and Andy Warhol, a bigger and truer prophet than either. This past week, I reread his diaries and official biography for the first time since 1995. Why can't I be like that? Well of course I can. Why aren't I like that already? Girl? Gah.

From Keith Haring's diaries:
'You don't know me.
You never will.'

Ha. He wishes? But he doesn't wish that at all. What a queer thing to say. Something There, Something There, Something Here...

And:
'I don't care if I don't paint on it.'

Swoon.

Smart:
'The medium is a tool of the message.
The medium is not the message.
The message is the message.'

Killer K. Can you believe his best friend Kermit grew up to make _frames_? Jesus fucking christ.

 

file under; keith haring; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

George Condo on 'what is inside a Keith Haring painting':
'that suspense'.

'Untitled' by Keith Haring, 1988
from the series Pop Shop II

i'd like to turn it upside-down and call it 'Suspense, 2006'. ok?

 

file under; drawn; keith haring; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Yeah, I'm still reading Love Is Colder Than Death. I'm a very slow reader actually.

pp. 119-120:
--
[Kurt Raab] would clean up, but that was only one of his jobs [at Fassbinder's house]. With Rainer dead and buried, Kurt would recollect those days and speak to him "directly" in this voice:

So now I'm your private secretary. And if there's nothing to do, you'll think of something to keep me busy. The telephone rings. You don't answer anymore. That's beneath you. Mostly, you lie in bed, getting up only when it's dark.... I'm left to invent the excuses and the lies. I'm also your nurse. Not only do I have to cook, and serve you in bed, I must also look after you like a child, to make sure nothing bad happens to you. All night long you've taken cocaine and now it's four o'clock in the morning and you want to sleep. But you're too stimulated, so you have to take three Mandrax pills to calm you down. Then you remember you have to call Ingrid in Paris, to argue with her, so you take two more lines of coke and you're more awake than ever. More Mandrax. Suddenly the telephone receiver falls out of your hand and you collapse to the floor. My God, I think, now it's over. He's had a heart attack. I bend over you and listen to your chest. You're still breathing. You start to snore, so I drag you to bed and try to go to sleep myself. A little later, I find you in the bathroom sleeping very peacefully beside the toilet. I bring you back to bed again. You keep me going day and night.

Rainer's relationship with Armin was rapidly deteriorating, too, and both Kurt and Armin were finding themselves more and more frequently locked out of the apartment and searching for places to sleep, sometimes for a week at a time.

In March, Rainer shot his version of Clare Boothe's 1973 play The Women, which he called Women in New York. It was filmed in seven days just as he had staged it in Hamburg some months back, his final work in the theater. There were forty actresses and no men in the piece, and when released it was hailed as brilliant by some of his critics and as antiwomen by others.

During the staging of Women in New York in Hamburg, Irm had gotten pregnant. As she's said, she always used contraceptives with Rainer, and whether he knew it or not, whenever her period was late, he would fill up with childlike delight, says Irm, "thinking at last it's happened." Their sexual relationship, however, left much to be desired, at least as far as Irm was concerned, and copulation between them was sometimes unnatural, if Rainer's indiscreet confidences are to be believed: there had been vegetable and mineral phallic substitutes. So it was not surprising that when conception finally took place, Rainer was somewhere else.
--

I mean huh? It's one of the only places the book declines to give details. 'Vegetable and mineral substitutes'? I can't tell whether the author is trying to render, like, basically dildos extremely exotic, or whether he's being vague about something actually really bizarre, out of some impulse towards politeness that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere in the book.

 

file under; fassbinder; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

Raymond Radiguet:
'All great poets have written by seventeen. The greatest are the ones who manage to make us forget it.'

 

file under; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

'Propose a Title 5'

Your time on... something. What to expect: anything visually rich. Struggling with academics? Your time is too important. Texts. If you've read A, same problems. In other real OO design principles... most importantly, on your team.

Singleton isn't as simple as a brain, in a way that sticks. A book? You want the latest research
learned by those (and impress cocktail party guests) who support your own code. This will load patterns into your sounds, how the Factory designs problems, and better science. Learning theory? Look 'in the wild'.

You want to learn about a design paddle pattern.
You want to learn to know how they, Head First Design Patterns...
You want to learn the more complex.
You want in a way that makes you alone.

At any given moment, so that you can spend: an adapter. With Head First, own your co-worker's brain- in a way that sticks! As for the experiences of others: Head First Book. You know you also want to learn about patterns with others (and impress cocktail party guests). So often this wish is misunderstood. With Head First Book, you know them to work immediately. Also want to learn why he casually mentions 'real OO design principles'?

So you look to Design in a way that makes you up a creek without.

The next time you deeply understand what to do instead.

You want real OO design principles in their native design patterns. You'll avoid worse. Most importantly, you will use the Java API (and impress cocktail party guests) (or worse, a flat tire).

About inheritance you might have: you know you don't want something somewhere in the world. You want to learn alone. At any given moment, work immediately.

Words, in the real world (and impress cocktail party guests), will load patterns into your stunningly clever use of Command. In their native look; 'in the wild'.

You want in a way that lets you put problems elsewhere.

Something more? You'll easily counter with your learning. Singleton isn't as simple (and too short). Spend and experience: others.

Your boss told you about the stuggles with the academic format designed for the way. This is more complex, like the Trading Spaces show. A book? You want design problems used in the Java API brain- in a way that makes you have.

You know the next time... well, someone who struggles is so often misunderstood. When to use them? How to use them? And what environment?

In other want: to see how.

In between sips of a martini, design problems and better advantages can hold you up a creek without. Decorator is something from.

--
i'm not impressed by the title, although if i get to personally 'propose a title', i like Up a Creek Without, or You Want in a Way that Makes You Alone.

the piece came to one of my work-related email addresses, unedited and a little bit more nonsensesque. i fixed the punctuation and reformatted it and such. i didn't add any ideas to it. the ellipses don't indicate parts that i left out [nor were the ellipses in the original text]; they're just there to lend structure.

obviously, it's just spam, presumably drawn from 1-3 preexisting pieces [among them, an ad for a book by one of Singleton's competitors, whoever he is]. but shit this thing fusses me to the extreme. i know it's always, 'always already' too late but

Somewhere A Robot Is Onto Art

 

file under; quoted
link / 2 have made it up

Sexual jealousy at the state of the art

Want

 

file under; hero worship; male beauty; matthew barney; photographed; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

the Vapor Room, Haight+Steiner, San Francisco.

__merely overheard;

stylish late-20s Asian customer dude: yeah man, were you at the [indistinct] show?
tall+wide mid-30s black bouncer dude: yeah, it was okay.
[...]
bouncer: you know what i miss?
stylish: what?
bouncer: the cheap movie theater. you know, where you could see a movie for like a dollar.
stylish: oh yeah, those were great.
bouncer: no, one in particular, i mean. the one where the liquor barn is at now.
stylish: on Gough St.
bouncer: no man, it's where they put in that giant place to buy liquor.
stylish: by the arcarde?
bouncer: no man, like the giant, it's basically like a really nice barn where you can buy giant fucking liquor.
stylish: what?
bouncer: come on man. it's where they put in the behv-eh... the BevMo.
stylish: DUDE!
bouncer: yeah that one!
stylish: DUDE! you talkin about WAY back.
bouncer: yeah man! i was a little shit when all that was goin down.
stylish: i didn't know you went that far back, man. okay, here's one for you: how do you feel about... the launchpad?
bouncer: DUDE, oh my GOD.

-
these dudes' knowledge of the San Francisco bay area predates mine by about 5-6 years.

 

file under; quoted; rebel rebel
link / 0 have made it up

 

file under; baudrillard; morrissey; photographed; quoted; self capture
link / 1 have made it up

At True to You:

I am writing this in the city of Barcelona where, many years ago, I discovered the American writer James Baldwin sitting alone and somewhat lost in the darkened lobby of one of the city's oldest hotels. Surprised at being inches away from such a great man, I froze in sheepish clumsiness, circled him eleven times, before I realized that he could not possibly have any interest in being approached by someone who had spent all 25 years of their life locked in an attic because too awful to look at. So, I did nothing, walked on, and shortly thereafter he was dead. Yet another lesson.

 

file under; hero worship; morrissey; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

In the 1997 Taschen 'Complete Works 1976-1996' for Pierre et Gilles (perhaps the best $40 that has ever been spent on a gift for me*), there's an essay written in French by Bernard Marcadé. It's translated into English by Martyn Back and into German by Uta Grosenick.

There's also an essay written in English by Dan Cameron. It's translated into French by Frédéric Maurin, and into German, again by Uta Grosenick. I think in both cases, Uta Grosenick actually translated the English version into German, not either French version, but obviously I don't know (might you know?).

Anyway, translator irrespective- the essay titles are as follows-

-
Bernard Marcadé's
In the original French: 'Pierre et Gilles, ou Il n'y a pas de second degré'
In English: 'Pierre et Gilles, or What you see is what you get'
In German: 'Pierre et Gilles, oder »What you see is what you get«'

-
Dan Cameron's
In the original English: 'In the Name of Love'
In French: 'Au nom de l'amour'
In German: 'Im Namen der Liebe'

-
My impression [?]
;There's no real way to say Il n'y a pas de second degré in English - literally, in French, 'There is no second degree', generally meaning something like 'There's not another layer/level'.
;There's no real way to say it in German either.
;There's also no real way to say 'What you see is what you get' in German.
;But 'in the name of love' means the same in all three languages.

-
Christophe 1981

 

file under; male beauty; photographed; quoted; twins
link / 0 have made it up

Damon Albarn on Brett Anderson, 2001: 'Yeah, I know I went overboard with all that stuff... I was rather pissed off... but I have to ask one question, is he still a bisexual who's never had a homosexual experience? Because I'm essentially straight, and I've had homosexual experiences. If he actually is bisexual, he's obviously got some sort of hang-up.'

-
photograph of Damon Albarn by Gregg Williams, for Make Trade Fair
photograph of Brett Anderson 'bi'... ?

 

file under; photographed; quoted; rebel rebel
link / 2 have made it up

p. 32 (collection: Blood Lake by Jim Krusoe, Boaz 1997)

'If there ever was a choice, it was not ours, but our parents', and by the time we realized that we might do things differently it was already far too late.'

 

file under; quoted
link / 0 have made it up

p. 22 'This means that treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.'

 

file under; jean genet; male beauty; mike joyce; morrissey; quoted
link / 2 have made it up