June 2011
1 post
“You are not a car. You know you are not a car. You are not a car. You know...”
– It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but this Providence idiot behind my bicycle at a stoplight today. Unfortunately for him, he was wasting time clearing something up that I was already clear on. I never thought I was a car, and even when I drive one I don’t think that—maybe...
December 2010
2 posts
Almost free
Finally broke 10,000 on my thesis word count. The end is (finally) near. But then again, at this point it needs to be.
September 2010
4 posts
“Down with gouty academics and drunken, ignorant professors!”
– The Manifesto of Futurist Painters can be thanked for this gem, which I noted as a reminder of who I don’t want to be as a result of my immersion into academia.
google
I’m a bit freaked out by how ever-present and all-knowing google is, but sometimes they’re just so smart. I discovered a new feature today while writing an email in the gmail setup: when I go to send it, a box pops up that say something like, ‘You used the words “I’m attaching” in your email, but didn’t attach anything. Do you want to continue?’...
“the sprains and ruptures of sense”
– We can thank Wendell Berry for this delightful use of the English language (in The Unsettling of America)
“Nobody but Frenchmen and Hollywood homos still believe that old saw about how...”
– Dave Hickey, in his book Air Guitar (but writing as Hank Williams)
July 2010
5 posts
“I grew up in Virginia, in the flat land not near but not far from the ocean. I...”
– Sarah Tate, reflecting on the three thoughts that come to her mind when considering the Southern landscape, this being the first one: 1. But it is the worked land, as published in an exhibit catalog, A Place Not Forgotten: Landscapes of the South from the Morris Museum of Art. (Lexington, KY:...
“We have been half persuaded by Thoreau and by the evidence of our own brutal use...”
– From the essay by John Szarkowski in American Landscapes (p. 14)
The Year in Pictures →
Notes from the Oxford American
So I’m still catching up from the Oxford American issues I received during the school year, and ran across some gems in Warwick Sabin’s notes on some of the songs on the CDs included with the music issue.
Particularly, on the South’s relationship to time:
“Faulkner famously said, ‘The past is not dead. In fact it’s not even past.’ When time moves...
June 2010
1 post
May 2010
1 post
Fourteen Clichéd Southern Subjects That...
(because great photographers have already done them and because the “symbolism” or “meaning” is now trite. Only the most sensitive photographers can still succeed with these subjects):
1. Snake handlers
2. Cock fights
3. African-Americans being baptized in muddy rivers
4. African-Americans, who do manual labor (on cars or farms, etc.), in dirty work clothes
5. Quaint...
April 2010
1 post
Currently in crit
Who is sexier: Halle Berry or Beyoncé?
March 2010
1 post
“There are moments where I wanted to punch myself in the face.”
– Philip Toledano, responding to work in crit
February 2010
7 posts
Just sent my committee the first draft of my thesis. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I just went from -about to snow- to -just snowed- by flying over a snowstorm. Enter Chicago, exit Providence.
1 tag
“I don’t care about the damn aesthetics: Is it a good picture or not?”
– Roy Stryker (Walker Evans’ FSA boss)
1 tag
“I’m often asked by students how a photographer gets over the fear and uneasiness...”
– Katz/Evans interview quoted in Walker Evans Walker Evans at work (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 125.
1 tag
“When you say “documentary,” you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that...”
– “Katz/Evans interview” Art in America, April 1979. quoted in Walker Evans Walker Evans at work (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 216.
1 tag
The ride home this afternoon left us giddy...
Bus Driver: (yelling over his shoulder to the back of the bus) If you swear one more time you’re out on the street!
Jerk in the back of the bus: Who?
Bus Driver: She knows who!
January 2010
9 posts
“Perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.”
– Thanks again to Mike Mergen for passing along this piece of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
“Absence has a way of being there.”
– Michael Gizzi from his poem Dear double jehovah, with a tip of the hat to Tim Davis for suggesting Michael Gizzi during his visit to RISD this fall, and to Mike Mergen for uncovering this gem and passing it along to me.
1 tag
“In the most compelling portraits there is often a collision of wills, an...”
– Sylvia Wolf, Director of the Henry Art Center at U. Washington in conjunction with a portraiture show
“I couldn’t get any of this feeling without a strong connection for a...”
– Andrew Wyeth, in connection with his exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum; I saw it on my visit back in August and just ran across this quote again where I’d jotted it down.
1 tag
“Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes....”
– Also Andrew Wyeth
“Don’t ever let anyone talk you out of physical splendor”
– Frederick Sommer to Emmet Gowin in Gowin’s Changing the Earth (New Haven, CT: YU Art Gallery, 2002), 136.
1 tag
“We all have to belong to something, if only to the idea that we should not...”
– Wendell Berry as reprinted in Gregory Spaid, Grace (New London, NH: Safe Harbor, 2000), third paragraph.
1 tag
“It’s easy to see today how students don’t go to school to learn but...”
– Piero Golia as quoted in Steven Henry Madoff, ed. Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 322.
Searching...
Currently on the list of desired reading:
Thomas Wolfe’s “Return” on his return to hometown Asheville, NC—originally published back on May 16th of 1937 in the Asheville Citizen-Times. So far no luck locating it.
1 tag
“In grad school, I was too cool to learn craft. I said I wanted to be...”
– Graham Gordy (p. 102) in “Why We Like Drama: A simple story well told.” As published in one of my new favorite magazine, Oxford American, Fall 2009 issue on pages 100-105.
December 2009
8 posts
1 tag
“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult...”
– Richard Misrach (via Michael Mergen)
2 tags
“What does it mean to say that Caspar David Friedrich is a quintessentially...”
– from Koerner’s Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (page 23)
2 tags
Recently from the library
On Caspar David Friedrich
Vaughn, William. Friedrich. New York: Phaidon, 2004.
Leighton, John and Colin J. Bailey. Caspar David Friedrich: Winter landscapes. London: National Gallery Publications, 1990.
Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1990.
On Hudson River Painters
O’Toole, Judith Hansen. Different Views in Hudson River...
1 tag
1 tag
“To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically,...”
– Henry James, The American Scene, taken from The Home Place by Wright Morris
Check it.. →
It’s a crazy world out there, but at least I’ve chosen a noble profession.
“These are like a bunch of one night stands. We want to see a relationship!”
– Currently in crit
September 2009
1 post
July 2009
1 post
April 2009
4 posts
U.S. Cities Where It's Hardest To Get By →
I still think it would be great to stay on in Providence once school wraps up, but Forbes doesn’t paint a pretty picture for surviving in this city.
Brown University Folk Festival—good times.
the old homeplace →
Just found the old homeplace of our Italian landlord. Check it out.
“She ambushed me with an open heart”
– Angel, a NUA senior, about Sarah Meyer (the Program Director)
“The whole digital-film thing; I’m sorry it’s just over!”
– from today’s critique
March 2009
8 posts
“Out here in Texas everything either bites you, stings you, or stabs you.”
– bus driver for SPE gallery crawl
Saw The King Bucks at Adair’s Saloon...
