don't speak/say it ain't so

solange - losing you

dj shadow - midnight in a perfect world

jesus

harry malt and the selby - i love david

julee cruise - rockin' back inside my heart

Tarkovsky continued

under my thumb live '66

this is sort of the anthem of the restaurant where i'm working, a restaurant that's supposed to make women faint and grown men dance, a restaurant that has french cuisine under its thumb, cutting up some crazy things with carrots, with weird editing some awkward close up

blonde redhead - top ranking

the mirror

all that heaven allows - tv scene

album art - bill withers - menagerie

giraffes

the lester horton technique

cocktails - san benedetto

recipe:

build over rocks:

1 ou campari
1 1/2 ou vodka
2 ou unsweetened cranberry juice
2 ou sparkling italian mineral water

garnish cherry or no garnish

cocktails - la navidad

cocktail recipe: la navidad

shake over ice:
freshly squeezed juice of half a pink grapefruit
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp light brown sugar
1 1/2 ou silver tequila

serve up in chilled glass and garnish with one piece star anise

thom browne - women's fall 2012

house of the rising sun - cover by legacy computer equipment

The Animals House of the Rising Sun Old School Computer Remix from PURETUNE on Vimeo.

via thisiscollosal via dudecraft

nick zedd - they eat scum - final scene

john miller on mike kelley, 1954 - 2012

Mike Kelley, Production still from Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32 (Horse Dance of the False Virgin) 2004–2005, from Day Is Done, 2005.
From My Institution to Yours

A Personal Remembrance
by John Miller

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On Wednesday, February 1 at about 11:00 am I received a telephone call with news I never expected to hear: Mike Kelley had committed suicide. The caller was Jim Shaw. His tone was matter-of-fact, grim and mournful, but also frustrated. I knew that Mike had been wrestling with personal problems, but expected that he would take these in stride as he had always done before. Jim, however, knew otherwise. He had been perhaps Mike's closest confidante. His frustration was that of someone who had done everything in his power to save his friend but failed nonetheless. Shocked as I was, I am glad that I had learned the news from Jim because he was so insightful and utterly unsentimental.

Upon hanging up, I realized that I too was responsible for contacting Mike's other friends. Mike Smith called from Austin. We tried to figure out who should call whom. As the day wore on, a steady stream of phone calls and emails progressively built up. A couple of reporters called as well. I felt stymied by my inability to offer a comprehensive understanding of Mike's suicide. Even now I feel that all explanations and observations must inevitably fall short of the brutal fact that my friend took his own life. What became increasingly clear, however, as the impact of Mike's death rippled progressively outward, was the extent of his importance—personally, artistically, culturally—to a sprawling community that cared not only about him, but each other as well.

Here, it is important to stress that a community is not simply a loose collection of well-meaning individuals. Rather, it is something with a discrete structure and a logic. Nothing makes this more clear than Mike's work, Educational Complex, an architectural model constructed from foam core that amalgamates the floor plans of every school that Mike ever attended. Mike reconstructed the floor plans from memory, facetiously claiming that the spaces he could not remember were sites where he had been abused. This claim was an allusion to repressed memory syndrome, a response to trauma, typically sexual abuse, in which one unconsciously blocks a traumatic memory in order to maintain psychological equilibrium. Among psychologists, repressed memory syndrome is highly controversial. By the mid-1990s, California courts rejected its status as legal evidence. While the non-existence of evidence doubtlessly intrigued Mike in this work, he used it to put forward a kind of allegorical institutional critique: the abuse exacted by the institution concerns exclusion and legitimation, nothing less than a matter of symbolic life and death. The predominant institution in both Educational Complex and in the massive artistic community revolving around Mike Kelley is, of course, the California Institute of the Arts.

CalArts was founded by Walt Disney in the 1960s and moved to its current campus in Valencia, California, in 1969. Although Disney conceived of CalArts as an interdisciplinary trade school, from the beginning it was run by and for artists. They, in turn, called into question what a trade might be. As the school's first president, Dr. Robert W. Corrigan, put it, "We're a community of artists here, some of us called faculty and some called students." (1) The early years were a fabled, anarchic period. Classes only began two weeks into the semester. Students and teachers who showed up before then were uncool. Wearing any kind of bathing suit at the school swimming pool, also uncool. The school, through Disney funds, covered all the students' art supplies. Teachers spontaneously took their students on field trips to New York City. Here too, the school picked up the tab. Set in California's high desert, against the backdrop of a planned community organized around the theme of golf, CalArts was a dysfunctional yet utopian oasis. Even now, it remains pointedly non-academic. Admission is based solely on an applicant's "creative talent," not on grade point averages or SAT scores.

What does it mean for an institution to embrace such an apparently democratized, egalitarian, and free-form approach? Ultimately, it yields, for better or worse, a less clichéd and more subtle kind of cultural capital. Call it an inverse elitism. CalArts's openness was all about legitimation struggles, the recalibration of social values. In Mike's oeuvre, this appears as an inclusiveness that turns the habitual avant-garde/kitsch distinction inside out. Often his work targets the vernacular, which, by definition (verna means slave in Latin), is a subordinate form. This approach allowed Mike to aggressively dilate what is considered the rightful focus of esthetic inquiry. Vis-à-vis developments in art history methodologies, it coincided with the emergence of cultural studies and visual culture. As Mike himself put it in an interview, "Popular culture is really invisible. People are really oblivious to it. But that's the culture I live in and that's the culture people speak. My interest in popular forms is not to glorify them, because I really dislike popular culture in most cases."(2) Here, I think Mike is addressing the past for the most part. Largely as the result of his work, popular culture is no longer invisible in the way it once was. Rather, Mike has made his generation of artists and those that follow painfully aware of the invidiousness of esthetics at every level. It is this radical re-positioning that has made him so central to so many. But I take his avowed dislike of popular culture with a sizeable grain of salt. In the same interview, Mike turns to his file of yearbook photos of high school performances—photos from which he conceived his extravaganza Day Is Done—with glee:

This shows how I organize things. So here's a whole group of photographs of people covered with cream pie or other goop. Here's a whole group of photographs of people gagged and tied up. Thugs, for example. Here's a photo of a guy dressed as a soldier threatening a guy who's kind of dressed as a sissy with a knife. Here's a group of hazing photos where upper-class types are demeaning lower-class types. A whole group of photographs of people in pig pens. A whole group of photos of people dressed as presents. Slave Day! Slave Day is one of my favorites. It's where people are demeaned and have to wear ridiculous costumes and are sold on an auction block. (3)

Here, the casualness of Mike's observations belies his trenchant critique. He forces his audience to recognize the forms of repression inherent in the differential of social class. Moreover, he refuses to idealize the esthetics of subordinate classes. Rather, he showed how they too can serve to discriminate against those with even less status. This, of course, offers a skeptical understanding of esthetics in general and of art education in particular.

In mounting such a critique, Mike faced problems that are by no means unique to him, but perhaps he felt them more acutely. First, there is no outside to the apparatus—and one must count art schools as quintessential ideological apparatuses insofar as they produce and reproduce the hierarchies of social class. Nonetheless, this apparatus is what bonds us—namely his friends, acquaintances, colleagues and viewers—to Mike, what causes us to identify with his art, and what prefigures our collective existence as a community. It is also what imbues even the nominally desublimated artwork with the invidious logic of distinction. The inevitable success of Mike's work transformed him from underdog to celebrity. He hated that. It fed into what became his crippling agoraphobia. As hard as Mike worked to produce a more potent form of art, his resulting celebrity status confronted him with an irresolvable contradiction: that esthetics always necessarily manifests social hierarchy. I consider Day Is Done, as an installation, a performance, and as an epic film, to be one of Mike's most important works. Based on yearbook photos, it is an unflinching examination of legitimation and exclusion through the lens of high school life. After seeing his performance at the Judson Church, I teased him that he had become quite the arts maven, producing a work that encompasses poetry, film, dance, and theater, not to mention painting, sculpture, and photography. Ironically, this sweep complements the Disney-esque Gesamtkunstwerk, a sensibility certainly unmistakable in Fantasia, but also fundamental to the definitive rupture that CalArts came to represent in the discourse of American art education. While Mike's passing counts as a tremendous loss to a broad artistic community, its also forces a seismic shift in how our community conceives of who it is and what it does. What Mike achieved cannot be repeated. Day is done.



(1) "California Institute of the Arts," (accessed February 4, 2012).

(2) "Mike Kelley: Day Is Done/Art 21 Exclusive," (accessed February 4, 2012).

(3) Ibid.

via e-flux.com

deborah turbeville - fashion photography

deborah turbeville

john fahey - Hamburg 1978

ming wong - making chinatown exhibition

For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Ming Wong creates a series of videos and scenic backdrops that center around the making of Roman Polanski’s seminal 1974 film Chinatown. Shot on location in the Gallery at REDCAT, Wong’s reinterpretation, Making Chinatown, transforms the exhibition space into a studio backlot and examines the original film’s constructions of language, performance and identity. With the artist cast in the roles originally played by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston and Belinda Palmer, key scenes are reenacted in front of printed backdrops that are digitally rendered from film stills and kept intact within the video installation. The wall flats adhere to the conventions of theatrical and filmic staging while taking on qualities of large-scale painting and sculpture.

Wong has been recognized internationally for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema and popular forms of entertainment. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai and Ingmar Bergman, Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures. Making Chinatown is Wong’s first project focused on the American context of filmmaking and draws upon Polanski’s iconic film for its use of Los Angeles as a versatile and malleable character. Wong treats the film as a text through which he is able to inhabit and impersonate the qualities that are particular to the place it represents. Making Chinatown mimics and reduces the techniques of mainstream cinema in order to emphasize the theatrical qualities that underlie cinematic artifice.

-redcat.org

the strokes - i'll try anything once / fan videos

this is a fan video from youtube about somewhere, a movie about sofia coppola that i can only talk about in extremely esoteric ways.

sean paul - like glue

runway - prada men's fall 2012

this is THE fashion show, this is the fashion show about POWER

'epicureanism'

several years ago i 'authored' the idea of a delicious diet - a diet where you can only eat delicious things. years ago when i tried it, i wound up eating delicious things and also things that weren't delicious, then i wound up simply eating everything and being kind of unhappy about it. after a really stimulating talk about creative lifestyle frameworks/lifestyle frameworks, and after hearing a story about my goddaughter who corrected the way her father was helping her put stickers in her sticker book - "they're too...close together, they're not dispersed enough" and seeing her relish in her extensive aesthetic points of view, i began the diet again, with no real goals but maybe to feel happier, and feel better about eating (i feel pretty good about it usually but a lot of time i take what i eat for granted). i will try to flesh out the delicious diet more here, because it's helpful to write about, soon. for now i will just say in theory it's supposed to make me more connected to my own subjective taste as something to have fun with and not feel very seriously about. it's also a very experience based approach to eating in that things can't be delicious when you're not in the right mood or place.

i've found things are often delicious when:
i eat them off of a cutting board while standing at the kitchen counter, especially alone.
the people you eat with are eating something they taste as delicious, some people are really talented at expressing that, and those are great people to eat with.
you're active
vegetables are so delicious
fat is delicious
hot tea is extremely delicious
ice water is delicious
regular water just feels good

i've also laid out this triangulation of deliciousness, in terms of the food itself:

texture temperature freshness

things are no longer as delicious when you eat them too often, or eat too much of them. 'too often' is up to you, though, and if you never get sick of something it's always delicious. like me and pizza,or my dad and peanut butter on toast. i've tried not to fall into discovering something is delicious to me and making that a lot. variety is key, and it's also apparently part of a healthy diet.

this sounds like the italy chapter of eat pray love, and it sounds like a lot of effort, and honestly it is. but it's no more effort than how feeding yourself and your family normally is. i'm just trying to make that old routine feel like less of an effort and more of a desire driven thing, more spontaneous. it actually feels like a very normal and natural way to think about eating. food has always been all about feelings for me anyway, so why not focus on pleasure? i'm not afraid of epicureanism, and it may just be that my bedroom is really cold but yes i have started wearing a bathrobe since this began last week.

so far the delicious diet makes me less critical of food (it's less that i look at an scone and am like 'not delicious enough' and more like i'm like, no, not now...what else? am i hungry? then a day later i really want a cup of tea and the old scone with sweet jam, and it's great, it's so great)

i'm gonna try to keep track of how this goes. today was a very delicious day:
water
advil cold and sinus
small dark roast coffee on the upper west side which happily cost less than a million dollars
at home, an egg sandwich around eleven on 6 day old foccacia bread - grilled two small pieces of foccacia in frying pan of olive oil w finlandia swiss cheese, fried egg in pan beside, added it to sandwich. fresh cracked pepper
ice water & twinings lemon and ginger clear tea

barry's gold tea w milk


a coconut donut from the brilliant sunshine donut, a "true" donut shop

some ricotta salata cheese while i was cooking dinner of fresh shrimp roasted in the oven with juice and zest of two lemons, 1/4 c olive oil, pepper, diced shallots
and a salad of baby spinach, thinly sliced zucchini i sautéed in balsamic and vermouth wine vinegar, a little olive oil, kosher salt - also roasted tomatoes, then with the ricotta salata and a dressing i made with honey, smooth dijon mustard, garlic, canola oil and a little olive oil and a little of that vermouth vinegar again
a hunk of a bread loaf w some irish butter

super small dish of chocolate hazelnut ice cream with crumbled milk chocolate with almonds in it on top
water

italian blood orange soda

portlandia - house sitter

i don't think i've ever received mail here

portlandia - coffee land

it surprises me, but this whole show has really kept me going in the dark but relatively easy/privileged days of doing little but applying to graduate school, and watching portlandia. from a media perspective it's really interesting - generally there's a correlation between this and how much fun you can imagine the crew working on this has

lis rhodes - light reading

lis rhodes - dresden dynamo

archana hande - textiles

Scroll 1, Girangaon (detail), 2009
from iniva.org - social fabric exhibition

textiles - arandu

michelle williams on some red carpet, early 2008. from ny times.

it's saturday here, very chilly but a nice time of day for a sorta cloudy sunset and a very cold christmas ale that's been chilling on the patio for a month

pet shop boys - go west

extended version from PopArt DVD

elton john - sad songs

unplugged

trailer - flashdance deutsch

"It's like...you go out, the music starts. you feel it, and your body moves automatically. it's stupid, but in this moment something happens."

appreciation of flashdance courtesy jane h

the onbashira festival - 1998 nagano cont

olympics opening ceremony - nagano, 1998

today i'm so happy because i figured out that these twin ceremonies are the media, design and performance event i most internalized in childhood. it...explains a lot.

at the time, my great aunt loretta, who had seen many olympics in her day, said it was the most beautiful of all the ceremonies. she collected little statues, and she loved children also.

it's probably why i'm making a scale model of my parent's country club's ladies locker room circa 1995 right now, and probably also why i bought the phaidon book "japan style" instead of the stephen shore or jorge pardo ones. the olympics also coincided with my third grade class's unit on the history of the us and japan, when i first learned about the atomic bomb, though long after i learned of world war two. "the nagano theme song ... "when children rule the world." when i was seven or eight, i realized i was a child. this was shortly followed by the realization that i was an american child. god i'm a terrible memoirist. don't you love the costumes?

black dice - kokomo

#oldiebutgoodie
#hashtag

"Pinky's Rule" video by Charles Bernstein and Amy Sillman

follow below link to view video on BOMB magazine:

http://bombsite.com/articles/6343

feist - how come you never go there

uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives

movie posters - l'amour fou

movie posters - the trip x8

via mubi.com