Site Q

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Friday, January 9, 2009

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

Thursday, January 8, 2009

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.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Have to see to draw?

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

Richard Tuttle

Monday, January 5, 2009

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

Notes

In an interview with Rae Armantrout, Michael Silverblatt describes her poetry:

It's really extraordinary that things have two faces. And it seems to me that in your poetry much of the design is to see that things are double-faced, meanings are inter-penetrating with one another, not separate from one another. And that the interest is in the simultaneity.

Les Voleurs
from William S. Burroughs' The Adding Machine

Out of the closet and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. All the artists of history, from cave painters to Picasso, all the poets and writers, the musicians and architects, offer their wares, importuning him like street vendors. They supplicate him from the bored minds of school children, from the prisons of uncritical veneration, from dead museums and dusty archives. Sculptors stretch forth their limestone arms to receive the life-giving transfusion of flesh as their severed limbs are grafted onto Mister America. Mais le voleur n'est pas presse' --- the thief is in no hurry. He must assure himself of the quality of the merchandise and its suitability for his purpose before he conveys the supreme honor and benediction of his theft.

Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! a bas l'originalite', the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons as it creates. Vive le vol-- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.