reading through my blog postings from a few years ago, i miss the vulnerability and humor that i expressed then. now i'm always writing "appropriate" things. blogs about personal stuff are hard to focus. who is reading it? i do want to express myself, but i don't want something i say on a whim that will negatively affect my career. i could limit the readership to the people i invite, but that would feel a bit claustrophobic and cowardly. i've only had 23 visitors in the past month, so it's pretty safe to write whatever. maybe i should put a disclaimer on the blog.
my head is so full of academic seriousness, i'm incapable of saying or doing anything creative. :-p

Boots: Take 1

I bought these boots when I lived in New York. I worked in a grey cubicle on the 30th floor of a building on 3rd Avenue. My cubicle wasn’t next to a window, but I considered myself lucky because I could see the window from my desk. Just a little bit. I could see sky and the 30th floor of some other buildings.
I’d been looking for boots for months and must have tried on hundreds of pairs. I wanted some that didn’t wrinkle at the ankles and were tight on my calves. These ones fit the ankle requirement pretty well, but there was a gap at the top between the boot and my calf. So, I paid the $200 and then took them to a cobbler in Astoria. It was a long walk from the part of Astoria where I lived. I had never been to that area before and, it was dark out when I got to the cobbler’s. He was an old man with a thick accent. He seemed not only from another place, but another time. His whole shop was like stepping into a Greenfield Village exhibit, but finding it full of soul. Anyway, I left my boots there for a week to get the tops taken in and an extra layer put on the bottom to protect the soles. I can’t remember what those are called, but the women in my office told me I should get them so that my boots would last longer.
Once I picked up my boots from the cobbler, the tops were tight and as a result the ankles wrinkled. I was so upset. Why aren’t there any boots that fit right?! Are my legs that weird of a shape? God!
I never wore the boots with skirts because I was so self-conscious about the wrinkly ankles. They reminded me of 80’s slouch socks with clunky heels awkwardly hanging off the bottom. Or of my mom’s ancient riding boots that she had kept in her closet with rolls of yellowed and frayed newspaper in them since she went to college before I was born. But I did wear the boots with my grey or black slacks (I had a brown pair of ankle boots for my navy slacks). My legs looked so much longer. They made me taller than all the women in my office, except Kimberly, and I was eye-level with my boss. I found excuses to escape my cubicle to go downstairs and walk the long marble corridor that connected the 3rd avenue building to the Lexington avenue building. No one was ever in that corridor, just the clunk-pat, clunk-pat, clunk-pat, clunk-pat of my heels. At lunchtime, I walked on the street between the buildings, past construction workers sitting on the sidewalk, backs against the cement wall below the Dress Barn shop window. I felt like my grandmother walking past whistling construction workers on her lunch break from the Dublin uniform factory in the 1940’s.
Now that extra layer on the bottom has long since worn through and I haven’t replaced it since I don’t wear the boots anymore. I tried wearing them twice when I lived in Berlin, but walking on well-worn cobblestones was difficult and the distances were too long for heels. Now, the square toes are sooo not cool and who wears heels that high in Ann Arbor anyway?

I read Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" for my performance studies seminar. Although dated, the book makes the point that we are all performing all the time. In the "Communication Out of Character" chapter, he talks about people switching from front stage to backstage activity, and refers to the backstage as the place where people are out of character. If we are performing all the time, perhaps we are simply performing different characters, none being either in or out of character. If the out of character person is also a performance, is there a true self? Perhaps our true natures are expressed when we most believe in our performance.

Poe - The Man of the Crowd
Benjamin - The Arcades Project
Baudelaire - The Painter of Modern Life: The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd and Child
Jenks - Watching Your Step: The history and practice of the flâneur

Phantasmagoria
a: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined b: a scene that constantly changes
http://www.merriam-webster.com

The Flâneur
A man who strolls around a city observing the phantasmagoria. He sees himself as other, separate from the goings on that surround him. Baudelaire's painter is a flâneur. Jenks mentions "Baudrillard tied the flâneur to the armchair in front of the TV set." Perhaps the equivalent now is the Internet surfer.
I appreciate Jenks' observation that the flâneur is inherently male and that the position of women in public is quite different than that of men. He maintains that women only go out in public with a function, they do not stroll. I disagree with this statement because women do stroll as much as men (at least during daylight hours). However, at this point no one does much strolling at all in the USA. Everyone is busy and walks with a purpose, if they walk at all. There is no time for strolling. Rather than move our bodies and observe the world around us, we sit and consume a mediated version of the outside world through TV and Internet.
In Poe's story the narrative voice is the flâneur. He appears to have very little interaction with the people around him. The flâneur exists in the space between the office and the dwelling. Benjamin discusses the development of private individual places of dwelling that serve as refuges from the work space. The dwelling contains objects evoke nostalgia for a better, past world. He observes traces of individuality in the public realm. Now iPods and cell phones prohibit aural observation and create more distance between the stroller and his/her surroundings. Public space is becoming ever more privatized. Portable music devices perform a similar function to the collections Benjamin mentions serving as refuges in the time of Louis Philippe. Listening to one's personal music collection, while on the street creates and interior space that evokes feelings, memories and a sense of identity.

Over the past semester I sought to incorporate a sense of play into my art practice. Some of the artists I most admire (e.g. Alexander Calder, Tim Hawkinson, Vik Muniz and Ann Hamilton) walk a fine line between work and play with the art they produce/d. I believe that this sense of play creates a magical quality, which in combination with intellectual investigation, generates the best art. Baudelaire writes, "But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated."

tillmans show

I went to see the Wolfgang Tillmans show at Hamburger Bahnhof.
The video of peas boiling was fascinating, inspiring. A mundane act translated to the screen rich with texture, color and movement. The work in the show is so varied - compiled text messages, photo prints taped to the wall with scotch tape, large scale abstract color photos hung from clips, photos of newspaper clippings, short videos of colorful everyday processes - it's clear that Tillmans lives a full life with his eyes open. Although he takes his artwork seriously, his creative process flows organically and playfully from what he observes.
I also enjoyed the Alicja Kwade sound installation - several speakers at head height, arranged in a circle, playing a collage of clips from The Wizard of Oz and other children's classic films, all women's voices saying things like "It's beautiful", "Oh my god!" and sighing. Cutsie innocence becomes sexual. Her other work reminded me of Thomas Demand's Gold Standard exhibit at PS1 in 2006. Both present non-precious objects as valuable. Stacks of coal bricks wrapped in gold foil aren't particulary thought provoking or visually interesting.

the curly-haired kids with the soap-bubble smiles shout Happy Mother's Day from their secret mattress leaned against a trash can world. thanks, i smile. and then, man-on-the-side-of-the-highway-collecting-trash orange flowers insistently downwarddogging their blooms toward the sky, pressing up and fluttering.

Berkeley Bike

the drops of rain were spaced out and pattered on my face as i walked down the street with the rainbow of flowers. houses nestled among the greenness and the concrete. the man in a lilac pinstriped suit with matching shiny purple loafers and a black felt cap put some stuff in his sedan. the mini brown boy with the close cropped hair protected me from his dog with the smiling tail. i looked away as a squirrel ran out to meet a moving car. then the both disappeared. the wide smiling young man with the funny square blond beard and rolled up jeans cycled past as i looked for a gap in the traffic. he was smiling at me. the black man breaking apart a tree trunk section with a wedge and a mallet. "hi" i said timidly. "how you doin?" he answered and kept chopping.

My co-worker is outraged that the free summer concerts here will no longer allow BYOB and are going to start selling and regulating alcohol. He's threatening to petition and write letters to the town council.

Three chance meetings in one day! And 2 of them gave me rides. Such perfect timing. It feels like I'm in sync with the Universe today, or maybe it's just because I live in a small town. :-)
Yesterday evening everything clicked too. A friend had a free ticket to "The Painted Veil" at the Aspen Film Fest, so I went along. Afterwards we were hanging out in the lobby drinking free wine and bourbon when a woman offered us 2 free tickets to the next show-"Pan's Labyrinth"! My eyes are fried today after 8 hours of computer time in the office and then 4 hours of film.
This afternoon I had a real Aspen moment sitting outside a coffee shop sipping and overpriced too small cappuccino. The dyed blond boob job dangly earring 40 something (adoptive?) mom was sitting with her exposed cleavage oozing out of a sheer black bra and her made up 11 year old accompanied by their pet Savannah mix cat that looked at acted like a baby cheetah on a 1 ft leash. "Oh my god! What an adorable cat!" admired the passersby. "The markings are soooo amazing! What kind is it? How old is it? What kind is it again? Savannah and what? Oh wow!"

If you don't know pandora you should definitely check it out!

Another day in front of a computer with my back to the mountain village sewage plant that's buried under mound of dirt. Amazing how I can make an incredibly beautiful part of the world sound like a shit hole.
It seems that mid-winter is when I'm always down and trying to figure out my life, rather than living it. The trapped no-future feeling coincides with cold darkness. At least the darkness here isn't nearly as thick as in Berlin.

Sometimes I dare to hope that we Americans will acknowledge our brutal history based genocide and oppression. Today's sub-heading, Tribal Underworld makes that such a ridiculous idea. I'm still waiting for the heading "WASP Colonialism" to appear on the front page of the NYT.

In case there was any doubt, this article has reaffirmed that artists actually are sex-crazed lunatics.

This city of frozen passion streches, yawns and a burp of Spring escapes. Then it rolls over onto it's side, pulls it's knees up and goes back to sleep.

David Shrigley-Caveman

The video "Who I Am and What I Want" was dismaying. I found it quite misogynistic. In this video the only images of women were negative. One was a 3/4 back view of a bending-over, naked woman giving birth to an egg. Then there's a woman in a street scene getting punched in the face by a man. And the third image is of a huge vagina (bigger than the main character himself) that turns out to be attached to a pathetically horny, panting woman in gyn exam position. The man sees her and walks away disgusted. This is definitely not what he wants. Instead he prefers to return to the forest and watch a pig drown, while babbling on about what he does want.
The video was perhaps about primitivism, but it seems that the mind of the artist has not evolved beyond this primitivism to be able to comment on it. Instead he portrays men as barbaric creatures, who hate women and enjoy biting heads off live birds. The video is rife with an adolescent smattering of phallic symbols and violence. Women are vaginas, weak, pathetic and birthing necessities. Men are more complex- they enjoy killing, belittling one another, hunting each other, watching suffering, dismembering animals; nonetheless, they maintain congnizant of their place in the world, their desires and their sense of identity.

paint peels from the walls and turrets of 14th street. the signs remind me of old small town signs that were old when i was a child. sunshine hits the garage on the corner just right and it's all so full. there's a pile of mushy leaves and trash behind the bus stop where a doughy brown woman is blowing her nose. i walk past. protected. separate. alien. i'm the observer on the other side of the 2 way mirror.

is culture shock when you get annoyed about the way things work in a country? i seem to have this problem everywhere i go. i just need my own planet.