BoingBoing just posted a video of Brion Gysin making some of his calligraphic and roller paintings. I haven't thought about Gysin in a long while, but this makes me think I should be thinking about him all the time.

What cows do when it snows in North Carolina

They stand, keep eating grass and gather it on their backs...

Looking through (green)

why i need a new coat

Breaking down the grid by blurring

Ettore Sottsass

From Sottsass' 1973 essay "When I Was a Very Small Boy," quoted in a comment thread at Design Observer:

"I would like to break this strange mechanism I’ve been driven into. I would like to break it for myself and for others, for me and with others. I would like not to have to play the role of the artist only because this way I get paid, and I wish it wouldn’t even occur to others that there’s anyone who gets paid for being an artist. I would like all of us or none of us to be artists, as we were when we did drawings, boats, ships and windmills, cableways and telescopes. I would like to think that the old happy state that I once knew could somehow be brought back: that happy state in which “design” or art—so called art—was life, in which life was art, I mean creativity, I mean it was the awareness of belonging to the Planet and to the pulsing history of the people that are with us.

"I’d like to find somewhere to try out things, together, things to do with our hands or machines, in any way, not like boy scouts or even like craftsmen and not even like workers and still less like artists, but like men with arms, legs, hands, feet, hairs, sex, saliva, eyes and breath, and to do them, certainly not to possess things and to keep them for ourselves and not even to give them to others, but just feel what it’s like to do things by trying to do them, trying to find out whether everyone can do things, other things, with their hands or machines—or whatever—etcetera etcetera. Can it be tried?

"My friends say it can."

5-6-7-8

choreography: Rebecca Frost

Steve Martin Interview

I highly recommend this interview with Steve Martin. Has anyone read his recent book on stand up?

A song that starts normal and ends crazy (by steve martin)

Be courteous, kind and forgiving
Be gentle and peaceful each day
Be warm and human and grateful
And have a good thing to say
Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike
Be witty and happy and wise
Be honest and love all your neighbors
Be obsequious, purple and clairvoyant
Be pompous, obese and eat cactus
Be dull and boring and omnipresent
Criticize things you don't know about
Be oblong and have your knees removed
Be tasteless, rude and offensive
Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional
Put a live chicken in your underwear
Get all excited and go to a yawning festival

he(a)rd places

between seen places

a drawing done last year. i need to get a better scanner. this one doesn't pick light pencil marks well.

Have to see to draw?

What about making drawings of those places you can't see?

Richard Tuttle

Lessons from Things

"In every period, every century, there is one art form or another that is able to combine simple affirmation of physical pleasure with a quality of plaintive longing, and this becomes the international art form of the time. Living abroad convinces you that just as French painting was the event of the nineteenth century and Italian painting of the fifteenth--the one universal language--American popular music is the cultural event of our time. It is the one common language, the source of the deepest emotions and the most ordinary ones too. The taxi driver hums the riff from 'Hotel California,' and the singer Johnny Hallyday, simply by impersonating Elvis, in some decent sense inhabits Elvis. Every epoch has an art form into which all the energies and faiths and beliefs and creative unselfconsciousness flows. What makes them matter is their ability not to be big but to be small meaningfully, to be little largely, to be grandly, or intensely, diminutive."

-- Adam Gopnik, "Lessons from Things" in Paris to the Moon