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Sunday, January 29th, 2006
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12:41 pm
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| Tuesday, June 28th, 2005
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9:51 pm
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I finally found a copy of Michael Powell's 1960 film 'Peeping Tom'; I've wanted to see this for a long time; its featured in this old book of 'cult films' I've had since high school, and finally I was able to compare my own myths about the film to the actual film; some of the pacing and acting is of course really very dated, but there are a lot of aesthetic, violent and fetishistic aspects which don't quite imitate films of the time and which make it stand out and hold its uniqueness. Moira Shearer's jazzy dance was just awful, though. Out of coincidence I've recently seen Fassbinder's 'Martha', which stars the same actor, though in a very different role.
a still.
gallery of stills.
description of the film.
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| Sunday, June 26th, 2005
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11:27 pm
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12:20 pm
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| Saturday, June 25th, 2005
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11:11 pm
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"You should be able to do anything you like onstage. Gorilla noises...it's no one's business"
I'm hanging around the house this evening.
I'm in dire need of a cheering up, so I usually consult, with all theatrical dryness of purpose, some most recently found humorous sources which serve to loosen a few knots at least when research isn't going all that well due to some mood or other:
russian cartoons
bird
safety gear for small animals
Fall Quote Generator
current music: Labradford – E luxo So 4
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| Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
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10:32 pm
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notes on Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia' and 'The Sacrifice':
-in this film, it SHOWS you how interesting and affecting the context of how one relates something to another actually is; they may not be reaching you the way they want, or in respect to what they're trying to describe, but that seems subordinate to the context of how, where, etc., they say it to you
-these are spaces, rooms, locations where there is nothing to interrupt or give burdensome weight to thoughts, questions, feelings, conversation; there is time to hear, to think, to answer, or not answer. And all slowness of time, pace and response are natural; to be patient in observing, learning from and understanding another person.
-this film is full of tactless but independent sounds or noise out of step with certain experiences or scenes; it is like life; it also forces things to stand (up) for themselves as well as succeed without help from dazzling movie effects or manipulative soundtrack.
-an embrace in the intro of a painting: affecting because each part of the given/received embrace is uinique in the 'self'; faces are inside themselves in how they are expressed; two versions of what one moment is
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9:57 pm
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Most vivid and lasting impressions of the house-sitting:
-German kuckoo-clock wooden ornamentation via the forbidden shared hotel room in 'Queen Christina' (Greta Garbo), Grimms, and souvenir-shop hybrid objects usually found in grandpartents' bungalows, combined with tin wind-up toys and baffling collectibles of an unfamiliar culture and language.
-a dark, uncomfortable livingroom of 'Blue Velvet' colors, wherein every surface is suspect and deceiving and rather uninviting; cactuses, 1950's rough-textured upholstry, cat-hair on everything, and dying plants.
-a very accessible kitchen lacking in convenient appliances but instead is filled with tricks and rituals of another kind: the 'locked' oven, a slow toaster oven, a really loud dish-washer which causes fear that it will melt the dishes with its rage, a coffee pot which is also a drip coffee-maker but isn't at all trustworthy, dishes which are too nice to use
-rooms filled with too much of their absent owner, such as the bedroom and studio
-duties which consist of procedures which go against me somehow
-the hyperactive cats who sometimes sit still and are shamefully affectionate
-the study-corner I devised and also how I completely took over the actual study with my various things
-the alien and alienating Mac laptop without normal programs or a proper connection so that my general computer use has ceased, not to mention the intolerably cramped keyboard
-insomnia and paranoia mixed with guilt, absent-mindedness, as well as shame and horror at the cats' tantrums of the stomache; also how I lost my temper and patience at/with the cats
-'Secretary', the first film I watched here; 'Double Suicide', one of the most recent
-vivid characters encountered: Henry Darger, Werner Herzog, Jeremy Irons in 'Dead Ringers', W and related people, the ghosts of people I haven't e-mailed, and the strange and unsettling individuals on the train, bus, and related stops (reminiscent of true-crime tales both historic and within the past 20 years, funeral visitors, free spirits of middle-age, brash and vulgar teenagers, stretched earlobes, suspect dances via Alicia Witt in 'Fun')
-a conversation with J.R.; witnessing his refreshing reason, humor and generosity
-in the evening and while I'm trying to sleep, the loud ventriloquist noises from the occupants downstairs trick me very persuasively into thinking that not only has A returned but the house is also being broken into; last night someone went and rang the doorbell at 4 am
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9:32 pm
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My sense of confidence and level of self-discipline has become slippery and affected by these problems in my surroundings. Which has always scared and worried me, creating a need to procrastinate out of a breakdown of control.
"re-typesets them to faciliate a narrative that could loop back upon itself, mirroring the story of the protagonist, who is continuously retracing his own steps."
"a joke that redeems itself...because it is a joke of cosmic proportions."
Nothing is seriously wrong until I try to explain why I won't, can't or haven't done something; my ideals stand in firm judgement upon/against my timid, though optimistic attempts at modesty.
Moments alone, personal and mundane rituals - these can be the most difficult moments to have speak for themselves in terms of meaning anything. When your surroundings don't seem to want you, you have to work harder to hear yourself or learn how much ability you actually have in speaking/being for yourself; having that inherent life in you that exists no matter what is happening externally.
I have only about a week left here - house-sitting for A. The black cat's insatiable egomania is annoying me. If he would sit still and allow me to eat breakfast, etc., there wouldn't be a problem but instead he is like a battleship parking itself on my lap, and he walks in a circle with heavy molesting feet, and he yowls if you don't give him a skin graft. What an annoying situation.
My first week here, about the 4th to the 10th, I had trouble sleeping and couldn't work on anything to any useful degree. I mainly napped and went through A's film collection, in my usual greedy, child-like manner. During the second week I sent away my residency application (which has a lot of problems still); then I started being able to sleep. I think I've been 'resting' while at the same time not being able to relax (sleep) and also 'resting' in marathon sessions out of the fear that I won't have such a chance for a long while again. I think such a state of 'rest', more than being constructive, is more like hibernation.
Talking to D last night created an access into another house, one which is made up of combinations of houses and apartments both visited, read about, and imagined. The points of access were J & D's empty studio, A's house, and D's sentence about painting their new bedroom orange. Combined with A's Taschen vintage Mexico prints book, and what I've been reading about 'Nostalghia' and 'Sans Soleil'; we'll see if the house lives up to my inventions.
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| Thursday, June 2nd, 2005
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3:40 pm
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Waiting for the 'job' to call back:
Walking or standing in a soft-grey coat although black food substances keep sliding out from underneath like "skin coming off in sheets", but with the consistency of cold take-out dark noodles; a little like beef-jerky though with the glistening elasticity of black canine gums; this slides out like hidden brown envelopes full of incriminating photos, but doesn't drop for quite awhile but instead looks like it will drop, hanging in its dangling-skin way.
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3:12 pm
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Last night while I was trying to fall asleep, I taught myself a method of deliberately exercising a more uninhibited tendency to change anxieties, fears and stress into images, scenes, and various beasties in order to add a much-needed humor and miniaturization to the knot-inducing feelings and thought-patterns that spend all my energy and creativity (did I mention sense of humor).
It can be as simple as 'fishing for images', wherein I procure the first image and scene afterwards. For example, one of the first 'possibly interested buyer' visits in the studio as a rather lame experience brought to mind Ian Holm's role in 'Alien' during his android-breakdown scene, spluttering lumpy white paper-mache paste in a sort of non-dance of implosion, whilst bumping into people in a horrible way. I think the image came from the already office-like atmosphere in 'Alien' after its wonderful introductory scenes of the cast's "waking up from hypersleep and exchanging pithy banter".
current music: kraftwerk - computer love
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| Sunday, May 29th, 2005
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2:24 pm
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| Tuesday, May 24th, 2005
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11:00 am
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Its difficult to explain it, and I won't over-state so as to strangle the feeling this has, but somehow I've opened up a violent need for writing, writing, writing, in all forms and all for the need to communicate, not to use writing as a stand-in for speech, as Frame would say, but to acknowledge it again as the ideal expression of words. These sparsely-affecting recent entries seemed to trigger the old insatiable side that I have to be of letters and descriptions, this side I thought was gone and was unable to use all year.
That loosening of very, very real inner knots and hurt, not just exaggerations and confirmation of ridiculous, trivial neuroses.
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10:53 am
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"Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye. Also, time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated, with the host resembling the character in the fairytale who was joined along the route by more and more characters, none of whom could be separated from one another or from the host, with some stuck so fast that their presence caused physical pain. Add to the characters all the events, thoughts, feelings, and there is a mass of time, now a sticky mess, now a jewel bigger than the planets and the stars."
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| Saturday, November 6th, 2004
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1:50 pm
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Often I wake up from dreaming to catch the last part of the dream and realize its appropriation of early themes of the dream; before I went to sleep last night I was reviewing formats and several different manners of writing applications to Exhibitions, and I dreamed about it for most of the night, specifically the text in front of my eyes and me with a pen marking things and circling things and scrawling notes. And then later in the dream, in its shift to more sensual interests of dream-uninhibitedness, transposed the formats of the Proposals and Artist Statements onto the words and acknowledgement of the Fictional Encounters; the important thing to note here is not whether or not I dream in movie-embraces, but how humorously organized and formatted, in an abstract way, those embraces are in the dream, as if they are simply and without effort shifting into another form, from text and reading to a sort of physical intimacy with emotional headings, footers, and readable font. Its very telling.
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1:37 pm
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I haven't had time to sit down and write for a while, and since there is usually an annual lock-down of the college (this year its an event which has booked the college space but other than that isn't relevant to students; since this Event, like an entity, has booked the college lobby, this forces the college to close all weekend to prevent theft in the studios; this continues to derive bitter and acrid feelings in my own stomach, this response to one's space being invaded in such a way), this year's lock-down happens this weekend. Apart from some homework I agreed to at the last minute, I have time to see friends for Tea, listen to Kate Bush and the Blue Velvet soundtrack, see a film (Ju-On The Grudge), and face/confront the rough draft of my Term Paper and its abilities/inabilities to communicate.
And I have time to think about my thoughts and feelings presently and during the past months.
She, this blameless nameless model, will not care about whether or not I can access my studio, no no.
current music: Kate Bush - Rubberband Girl
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| Monday, November 1st, 2004
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1:02 am
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Description of September-October 2004, as extracted from the small black sketchbook/journal (only):
Sept4/2004
Color patterns
-Heart of Glass, Herzog
-The Royal Tenebaums
-La Specola (wax eyes, universal abject)
-Tarkovsky
-Eggleston, S.Shore, R.Arden
-Da Vinci, etc.
-Antique theaters
-TV still distortion
-the aesthetic of books
-japanese prints
-Janieta Eyre, ‘Faking Death’
-Hitchcock; Vertigo, Rear Window
-Blue Velvet, Lynch
Myths
-from the stasis of glimpsed ear rims, jaws, noses, necks, and the lines of cothing and hair in movements of stalking-postured untoucheable agendas emerges the interaction of those glimpses as individuals worthy of the most intimate personalities
-merging directly with surroundings, clothing, their appearances merge with all
Sept 16/04
Instructors describe a difficulty in understanding what I was doing. It turned out I have a lot of sources I’m encouraged to document and write about; I’m going to write my Painting/Art History paper on Georg Baselitz’s early work. Encouraged to write about films and look up several artists… It was pointed out to me that by simply having notes and archives available, this is like saying ‘its here, but figure it out yourself’ – and this almost always leads to failure.
I love how B. Schulz describes some sort of visit to Bianca; its build-up, even an army! Its so completely descriptive of its importance, and given all dignity of sincere, passionate hopes and Ideals! (Attends meetings beforehand!) “One needs a lot of patience to find a grain of truth in the tangle of Springtime vagaries.” Schulz also describes how images of people seem, in live terms: wax figures and posters. “From the labyrinthe of night two wanderers emerge. They are weaving something together and pull from the darkness a long, hopeless plait of conversation.” “the concierges of their own gateway.” Archmatter. “feet, already shapely and graceful in their spotless footwear, speak eloquently, their fluid, shiny pacing monologue explaining the greatness of an idea that the closed faces are too proud to express.” Schulz’s freak month theory extends to elusive, temperamental, shy states like flirting, confidence, and boldness. “a half-wilted shoot, more tentative than real”.
Sept 17/04
Slow and reluctant, and then it all piles up all at once. I have a small number of stories heard about students who fail to get anywhere after their BFA. MFA application requires more from me than I physically have; still learning about the process.
Hardly know how to make comparisons.
Sept 20/04
Very tired and stung from a cold. A weird conversation about my work (I talked, stopped and started, and was listened to without comment). Everyone off to the horror movie this Friday.
“If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality – which was something almost completely foreign to him – he brought them out.”
Sept 24/04
‘Pictures of Paintings’ Richard Misrach
Thomas Ruff
Ruscha
Wolfgang Tilmans
Janieta Eyre ‘Rehearsal #4’ 1993; body as object and creature, also body as furniture, refuse or remains
Sept 25/04
Lots of forgetfulness and clumsiness today helping Jess set up the room for our show. Her story of traveling on Scholarship to Norway to see paintings and their not being thre is heartbreaking; how would that happen I don’t know. Those who are so all over the place, all their secrets or multiple lives are always baffling when they’re overheard in others’ conversations. All these possibilities lived out by others in obscure, frustratingly glimpsed ways.
Bad experience at Film Festival due to a bad film and dehydration = first nausea and fainting spell in a theater. Everyone must have thought the film made me sick.
Joseph Cornell
“His consciousness continued in a pattern different from other people’s. Several anecdotes tell of his picking up a conversation after a lapse of several years, as if there had been no interruption.”
-E.A. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition?
-A description of Cornell as frightened/fascinated by sensitivity and extreme responses to things. Momentarily accessible. Daydreaming. Needing to constrain, keep in, control and arrange uncontrollable feelings and experiences. Hard to tell how one stands; feelings and communication of affection flare up and fade. Alternating moods of suspicion and confidence (based on insecurity about ‘sincerity’). Exchanges with people and the world carefully analyzed and cross-indexed. A presence of extreme attention.
Sept 26/04
For the most part, ‘Cremaster 3’ appealed to my sensibilities: ritual, ritualized connections, ceremonial and stoic yet slapstick, abrupt violence, overly stylized unconscious icons and mythology, and the pleasure of seeing secret codes/behavior/rituals/understandings in labyrinthine conspiracy.
-the girl in the potato room and her ritual
-the disintegrating horses; the machine/gate on the car
-the emerged corpse
-the camera views from above to reveal extraordinarily beautiful compositions
-figures’ heads from above, ears, body as posture
-‘normal’ breasts
-the gibberish-singing of the myth-men
More
Sept 28/04
Made a sort of breakthrough with color. Using an earlier method, I can understand what exactly I want the color to do, to create that cinematic optic. Shamefully beautiful. Grotesque. I can get a lot done very quickly for once.
Sept 29/04
Again it was pointed out to me that I’m overly cynical about certain things, also that I have ideas of things that are too ‘conservative’. Lack of depth. Ideas that ‘push all the buttons’ and engage the viewer moreso than the others. A ‘pretty’ painting ‘lets the viewer off the hook too easily’. An emptily-visual effect. Also, tactlessly, confirmation that its alright to keep using the same subject matter. And it doesn’t mean regression, but continuation. To attack/insult aspects I admire, through fear, upsets me so much when this is pointed out to me. Obvious.
Sept 30/04
Opening for the show well-attended considering weak advertising; conversations weird and I’m embarrassed about my inability to understand others’ stories. CC more casual, funny, and friendly. D.S. probably irritated by the slapdash appearance – we’re students, I think impulsively, we goof up, give us a break. Its more CONSTRUCTIVE, I think, to talk to us about it than walk away. Wish for someone wiser to talk to about some things.
Pg. 96 Kafka neglects to allow himself the same passion for ‘life’ that he loves in others; Max is exasperated. Definition of a ‘friend’ alongside distance pg. 105.
Oct. 3/04
Magic Lantern in Bergman’s ‘Cries & Whispers’!!
‘Divine Trash’
‘Wittgenstein’
hypostasis: a descent from an incorporeal state into ordinary matter…an infusion of spirit into something inert
Marlene Dumas
“the subtle particularities of these heightened states”
“you want to make images that you miss”; “or the things you experience but that you don’t see”
‘Dead Girl’ 2002; smearing and reduction
“the most human dimensions of sight”
-a face within a face
Ed Pien
Phillipe Ramette: connexion, experiments and testing periods, prosthesis with gesture, freedom fragile and fleeting, terrifying sublime, heaviness of a caught sight, “freedom beigns with the often painful, uncomfortable and disturbing questions”; “the evil to be seen in my costume, a yoke”; hero
Oct 7/04
R. Sluggett’s talk revealing (again) the system of ‘talks’; sabotaging the questions in order to answer what you’d like to be asked, and also to carry on the conersation yourself when either a)you’re the speaker and have to deal with a lack of back-and-forth conversation, or b)the other person doesn’t respond erbally at all or very little, and may in fact nto know what questions to ask. The point is to converse.
Oct 13/04
“From the hip”, R.R. visiting artist advises:
-the digital stills work
-the painting, all it does is associate fluffy, fingery overkill; going too far
-contemporary painting techniques with old
-suggested tools I find slapstick
?: everyone I encounter misunderstands what I’m trying to do
Oct 14/04
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Salla Tykka
Thinking about yesterday, it may be sensible to say that R.R. comes from a certain point of view with respect to what he likes to see. Earlier with other students he’d say ‘take this or not.’ The question is what do I see in comparison with what he sees. I agree that there are things infringing upon a more scientific rendering of the image, such as the curliques. Questions which seem unfair. Painting as intensifiers, extentions, clarifiers, manipulative. Uplanned critiques – the person doing the critique starts dictating what they would do and its very disturbing.
Poe M.Valdemor
Oct 15/04
My impulse to scientifically or abstractly analyze others’ behavior to myself is sometimes a way of saying I don’t care for it. Or the way I say it, my tone of voice and weariness. Its very humorous.
Oct 17/04
Last night I started to ask myself the important questions: what is it about physiognomy, mythologization, memory and presence that I propose to suggest in painting?
1. Mythologization of person
2. Manifestation of mythologization (through memory)
3. Confronting deformity of mythologization and ideals
4. Confrontation of origin and impulse to mythologize
5. Confrontation of the returned origin
6. Confrontation of the returned, lost mythologization
-extension and exaggeration
-‘Heart of Glass’/Schulz
Oct 19/04
The cardboard dragonfly’s legs curl up in illness from the bookstore ceiling, the phones act as sirens or buzzers for particular ‘chosen’ blunders of students ahead of me in the line, and the nail guns in the next room sound like lame, anticlimactic explosives.
One goes from sublime music to overwhelming access to images of painting in the cinematic darkness of the classroom to zombified train-waiting and the winter-coat trudge, and the absurdities of trying to scan a slide image towards the eventual reward of burning it to a cd. A certain flight of steps, so wretched and sadisti usually, are a pleasure when compared to the uphill path of ice.
Oct 27/04
Being careless and thoughtless today, and being called on it. No right to sneak into others’ business.
Melissa Gould
Oct 28/04
Recommended that I add in the TV stripe. Bah.
Thrift store for utility work shirt; fake blood; axe-murderer costume!
Oct 30/04
Attachment and nervous system of emotions and memory through a new compendium cd of music; my odd contextualization from never experiencing this music live or from anyone else leads to severely ingrained associations in the listening. Any corporeal associations to others, they likely never knew of.
David Lynch knows the dread and sublime fear of all that is associated with someone and their idea. Their name. Where they’ve been. Everything.
Oct 31/04
“You spend a lot of time here”. I find I have to explain why I’m in the studio most of the weekends (all, really) with lame excuses. I don’t like such statements, they sound unfairly judgemental and totally lacking in logic, and if I weren’t so busy I’d be distractedly resentful of being asked.
current music: David Bowie - Letter to Hermione
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| Sunday, October 31st, 2004
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2:47 pm
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'Shaun Of The Dead':
Ineffectual/boring romantic 'bickering' and comedic laziness two reasons to be disillusioned about this film; very fun visual jokes about 'zombie film editing' and being trapped in a car with a fresh zombie two reasons to enjoy it;
"Mention that there is a new Working Title film coming out and movie buffs will immediately get an idea of what the tone of the story will be. Working Title is mainly known for droll romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones' Diary and, more recently, Wimbledon."
"The supporting cast, all dizzy friends and daffy parents, connect all the same dots that every Working Title comedy has to hit. The punchlines are clever, but you can usually see them coming from a few beats away, although the emergency zombie-impersonations are truly inspired."
"They pull no punches when it comes to splatter, but constantly dilute it by having the characters offer cheeky one-liners or, in effect, wink at the audience. When the humans attempt to wander through the town pretending to be zombies, shuffling their feet and moaning, the scene contradicts the Dead world so completely that fans are sure to throw up their hands in frustration."
"a mixed bag: outstanding scare set pieces like having the heroes trapped in the backseat of their car because the stepfather has refused to take off the childproof locks, followed by goofball “who’s on first” antics by the bickering leads."
"Though the image of a hung-over Shaun stumbling into the TV room and yawning with zombie-like mannerisms is smirk-worthy, Shaun of the Dead’s humor is eventually too self-consciously cute, too interested in winking at its audience while referencing Romero’s classics, for Shaun and company’s increasingly dire circumstances."
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| Wednesday, October 20th, 2004
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12:30 am
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Mmm-hmm.
I see what's going on here.
Makes sense.
Expect my report at the next meeting.
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| Saturday, September 11th, 2004
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12:37 pm
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"I take pleasure in the game partly because my life rarely takes such a dramatic turn. To put it mildly, I'm a reluctant traveler. My preferred phrase being, 'You go ahead. Someone needs to stay behind and take care of the cat.' My hatred of traveling is partially what makes the game so rewarding. I like the dream-like quality of waking up in a strange place, and the clinical way in which I'm forced to view my surroundings. The game is never arranged in advance; it just kicks in on its own, usually prompted by a combination of visual elements I can only define as astonishing. When played in pleasant circumstances, the effect is narcotic."
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| Saturday, September 4th, 2004
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10:46 pm - The Village should be alongside Planet 9 From Outer Space, says ACAD Painting student
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With a few moments of rather good, harsh, melodramatic monstrous 'jealous' scenes, The Village is a complete comedy, deserving of all manner of sniggering, horse-laughs, and cult 'bad dialogue' memorization. In order for some comfort during the worst moments of preposterity, I rolled my eyes in various ways for a change. I also felt terribly disappointed that they chose Mr. Adrien Brody for a certain uncomfortably cartoonish role. It was almost more enjoyable collecting these reviewer quotes than being taken with the absurdity of the film's clunkiness. My advice: peruse through the lovely creepiness of the stills and website, and invent your own film – I certainly had before this dreaded realization, and it was much, much better.
"Every village needs an idiot -- and M. Night Shyamalan is hoping it's you."
"Now your interest may be piqued for a moment or two, but it will soon dissolve into guffaws as the dialogue becomes even more stilted."
"Generic `Village' is peopled with idiots"
"Let not the bad movie be seen. It encourages them."
"a high-camp mélange"
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