Oz

February 12, 2005

Was there a man behind the curtain before Lyman Frank Baum? Was Baum's description of power as a form of bombastic manipulation and subterfuge immediately embraced into the lexicon of cultural symbolism or did it take time? Should we ultimately credit the clarity of Baum's thematic intentions, or the barrage of popular culture depictions, for the Wizard of Oz as a symbol of empty authority?

Germs came out of your nose?

February 11, 2005

Ah, February. Ah, ah, ah-chooo, February! 

It seems that I also had a cold at the same time of the year four years ago. Whatever could chase these winter germs away? How about the healing power of song?

(to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat)

Blow, blow, blow your nose

Gently on each side.

Use a soft, clean tissue,

And then wipe the outside.

I must confess, that the "Be Good to Your Nose" cd* by Puffs, is one of the prize holdings in my music collection. It never fails to educate and amuse. Thanks Procter and Gamble Company!

*Featuring tracks such as Sneezer Wheezer and Keep Germs Away.

Creativity and Credentials

February 10, 2005

A teacher must be an uber-artist: creative, certainly, but intuitive, tireless, knowledgeable, empathetic, and flexible as well. In any given week you may be called upon to invent a new game, diffuse a social conflict, work 60 hours, conduct scientific experiments, soothe the fretting parent, or build a forest out of cardboard.

When standing in front on my class I often feel fortunate for having been trained as an artist and not as a teacher. In art school I was educated in fortitude and inquisitiveness. Those qualities seem far more useful than curriculum comparisons or grading techniques when I try to craft a lesson that integrates music, mathematics, and world history. As for tests, classroom management, and communicating with parents— those things that a teaching credential theoretically prepares you for— well, most of those can be navigated with a resolute compass of compassionate ethics. I don't know if learning them is nearly as effective as living them.

* * * * *

Above is an image of an animal classification card game created by a colleague at the French school. This photo was taken before we sat there for an hour and cut out every single laminated card.

It was a very effective way of teaching the names of animals in French to a group of American students and, like most card games, was exceedingly adaptable— provided you had the creativity to adapt.

IKEAescence

February 9, 2005

At IKEA, extinction is seasonal, and every customer enables the demise of some product or other by not choosing. So I can't provide a link to this particular lampshade because it doesn't exist any longer. 

Does that make the lampshade in my living room more or less valuable? Will IKEA's designs become collectible? Will I see them in antique shops fifty years from now and shake my head at the 500% mark-up?  Would hordes of recent undergraduate couples buy, build, and discard this fiberboard furniture with such blind ambivalence if they thought it might generate retirement income? Is it even physically possible for such products to survive fifty years when they are designed for transience?

I'm not going to speculate. When the lampshade receives its final, irreconcilable, dent it will join its kin in the landfill. Future regret may be my fate, but in the end I'll have kept the part that is most valuable to me: the universally decipherable pictogram directions featuring a genderless community of grinning Homo sapiens without hands.

For God's Sake, Don't Look

February 8, 2005

The cheapest diffusion filter is your breath. You'll need some cold air to play opposite your hot air, and you'll want some sort of lint free cloth to clean the lens when you decide to find some focus again. However, in many instances, a lack of focus is all the aimless photographer needs to elevate the mundane.

Case and point: Here is an unmade bed, lamp, and the glow of frosty February light on the bedroom wall. Such a cut-and-dry listing of the compositional elements doesn't tell you anything about this photo. It doesn't speak to atmosphere, memory, or the balance of colors and shapes.

Does that imply that the first step towards artistic merit might be a little mystery? I certainly believe that's one route, and at this point I find it a trusted path to walk when I'm getting too fussy. There are many excellent artists who rely on the strength of their intention and can plan their way to perfection. I've tried that route; it leads to the artistic equivalent of breakfast cereal— palatable, but far from inspired.

So, often I don't look through the viewfinder. I don't adjust the light with reflectors or fills. I frost the lens with my breath and literally shoot from the hip. If I look at it, if I plan it, I'll destroy whatever it might have that is beautiful or mysterious or impulsive. In this way you can look at the results without preconception and the ownership it engenders. Your editing process becomes responsive to the leap in your chest or the lingering eye, not some need to wrangle reality into a state of matched perception.

Animism

February 7, 2005

At this point we still had Pneu and she still had ears.

Barney's Soap

February 6, 2005

A few days ago I posted a supposition about the aggressive implications of cleanliness.* 

This image coincides nicely with that theme but I do not tend to equate it with scrubbing hands (although that is the obvious depiction) so much as the color palette of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.

For those of you familiar with Barney's films you might think I'm making a comparison born out of extreme arrogance, so let me clarify. I'm not comparing myself to Matthew Barney. I'm sharing with you that this crappy low-res movie of me washing my hands with an unnaturally pink bar of soap was a meditation of the coolness of his color palette. It was not contrived— the pink bar of soap was sitting by the sink and the quality of the florescent lights overhead had been established when I filmed the toothbrushing sequence. So in that way, it is nothing like Matthew Barney, who might be one of the most calculated and meticulous artists alive today. My spontaneous film would have no place in his icy palace of conceptual frosting— it is too earnest in its simplicity.

*Further proof from the forefront of cultural design: Fight Club soap design by Weiden+Kennedy. "Works great on blood stains." Draw your own conclusions.

Reflection

February 5, 2005

As a species we would do well to emulate the pliability and memory of light.

Chicken!

February 4, 2005

Exceptional Chicken Related Things:

• "know your chicken" by Cibo Matto on VIVA! La Woman
  
• chicken fingers (Oh delicious contradiction!)
  
• Milla Jovovich's chicken-adoration scene in The Fifth Element
• home made chicken noodle soup
  
• "C-h-i-c-k-e-n Spells Chicken" by the McGee Bros (featured on the Ghost World Soundtrack)
  
• Eggs ("Come into my tummy, oh so very yummy")
  
• Taxidermy chicken on the dining room table (see below)

Horrible Chicken By-products:

• Nuggets
  
• Playing chicken
  
• Anemic yolks
  
• Debeaking
  
• Pacific Northwest hipster artist appropriation of chicken imagery
  
• Salmonella
  
• "The Chicken Dance"

Out of Place

February 3, 2005

There are a few things I don't associate as rightly belonging in the world. There existence seems so awkward, so troubling, that I believe them to be misplaced in the temporal and corporeal stream. Giraffes are a good example. 

My father periodically would talk about great figures of the past who were not, "of their time." Which I believe to mean that they may have fit in wonderfully in the future or the past, but the present epoch cannot possibly meet their capacities. Many of them are branded as geniuses, or spiritual leaders, but I suspect that we've all met people who seem dramatically out of place in their own culture who will never be given a glorifying plinth in the the annuals of history. For every William Blake there are countless other visionaries, dreamers, healers, and artists who will struggle with difference in an indifferent world.

* * * * *

On this same February field trip to the zoo I turned the Photo Phazer away from the animals to document how people were interacting. I found the following photo to be one of the more telling images I took in 2005:

Death Tones

February 2, 2005

Have you ever tried photocopying your body? It's fascinating to see how the technology, combined with the flattening of your form against a pane of glass, transforms your figure. You realize that your physicality is really just another type of meat, this pulpy mass that's eternally subject to gravity— it's only allowed autonomous form through the mystery of biological complexity and spiritual will.

A classmate in college made a book from images of his body. He methodically placed a piece of himself on his small color copier at home to gain a life-size self portrait. The images were startlingly repugnant in the way that the skin grew more and more pale as it came fully into contact with the pane of glass. Body hair was squished and angled unnaturally. The natural pinks and peaches of flesh had bled away into cold aquatic tones, and the form of the body seemed flattened by an oppressive black behind it. The whole project reeked of death.*

When I filmed myself brushing my teeth under florescent light I wasn't thinking about self portraiture, but I was thinking about the action of snarling; of jutting out the teeth and glaring forward, as you do when brushing (or, as I do when brushing). Strange how this act also forces a foaming at the mouth, and it made me wonder if a correlation could be drawn between hygiene and aggression. It may seem like a bit of a stretch, but much of the language we apply to cleaning ourselves and our environments employs the lexicon of warfare. Even the Almighty once chose to wash away the scourge of humanity. Perhaps it is implicit in new beginnings that they are born out of violent endings.

*For the definitive exploration of this sort of subject matter I refer you to the work of Jenny Saville who was picked up as one of Saatchi's Young British Artists in the early 1990's. She continues to produce a mesmerizing body of painted work that manages to both rob, and simultaneously endow, the human form with life.

Ruby Red

February 1, 2005

There's little truth to the color in this image. That table top is bright red. The printer itself more gray than blue. I always appreciated how my sterile-toned electronics looked on that table, and I believe that it somehow influenced the color scheme in our bathroom at that house. The main portion of the bath was painted grey, while the little toilet room was a blistering tomato red. When the door between these two spaces was left open that tiny side room emitted this lively ruby glow that never failed to elevate the spirits. 

* * * * *

Painting a room gray is a luxury you don't have in the Pacific Northwest. Gray is the most common state of each day, and you don't want it encroaching on the miniscule amount of space you can actually control.