Couldn't find SHV tweet from last year circa end of August when there was a weird 50 degree day = The tweet just read, "it's winter"
Pretty sure it was at the far roc party house that Davey and I agreed that we're both better suited to winter than summer... realized that as time passes my annual "low period" shifts forward year by year: It's somewhere in the March - May cut now. Favorite most energetic and most productive time of year is always Sept - Nov.
Tried to explain to Shea'la that I think of the year as having two calendars; the normal January-December one, for "public cycles," and one for "private cycles" running from September to August.[A] While I get that this may be a typical "feeling the academic year's vestigial tides" thing, it feels true that my "private cycles" around primary creative work (paintings, heavily planned texts) and ancillary pursuits (studio or apartment building/renovation, money routines (including grant cycles), capacity for pursuing generative projects like drawing or playing music, rate and manner of media consumption, etc.) resolve on this calendar in a real and recurring way.
So this August, seemingly "like Augusts," was characterized by cleaning up, resolving unfinished work, planning, and looking forward to buckling in for eight months of relaxing and pleasant winter rendering. ((sound of bathtub filling))
August was a relaxed painting month; I had application deadlines and I spent much of the month writing. But I put this little study together:
Sunrise animation with constellations, pollen, rocks and plants
Shea'la helped me get better images of "the current era" of my painting work, which otherwise has just consisted of cameraphone pics. Then I sent out a few things with these images as "supporting materials."
At the end of almost three full studio days of fussing, I couldn't help feeling a negative "wanting one of these things" feeling re: the filed apps, and then a consequent bad mood. But it didn't take too long to get back to base = "It'd probably be fun to participate in some kind of broader culture sometime, in some way," and usually it's easy for me to re-find/reattach to the notions that the trajectory of my life or work can't be accelerated or escaped, and that that's fine = calmly aware in the studio chair of "I know I have a lot of work to do" backed by "This is already where I wanna be sitting / still all I really wanna be doing anyway." Hard to imagine a success or failure so decisive as to change these terms; I can only see the environmental conditions and requirements surrounding them continuing to change and require new adaptations over time. Always gonna have to work to keep my desk coherently integrated into a balanced life plus deal with my body and its miscellaneous needs.
I did some research and "discovered" that doing "a workout routine" both improves my focus during the evening studio hours and makes going to sleep more desirable. I also "discovered" that this tactic combines well with drinking tonic or orange juice on ice all night instead of wine or cocktails. Having "hates going to sleep" and "always has to be sipping," these have been good find... "who knew"
Had a sorta glum early August "gallery walk" but still saw a couple good things. Ended up in an empty silent cheap bar at 6pm = Bartender put on incredible cut that turned out to just be... bowie "beauty and the beast"?! I'd never heard before? (Not sure if this is a metaphor?) Anyway these:
Ariana Papedemetropoulos painting in a trio show at Fridman Gallery.
Jamian Juliano-Villani painting in a large misc group show at Rachel Uffner. Saw a couple of her pieces at a trio show last fall or so; been really enjoying watching her roll since then!
Also saw Jessica Ciocci pigs in aerosol-themed group show at The Hole = Definitely in the realm of "my preexisting associations" for sure, but seeing these up "felt like seeing an old friend."
I was invited last year to contribute to the second volume of Xander Marro's "Demons" print compilation - a collection loosely organized around artists who also sometimes write a thing and vice versa - this one thematically organized around "Trouble." Ended up writing "a story" for it last December and repeatedly edited it until June, unable to fix or finger the problem. In August, with the deadline coming into view, I realized it was that I'd written a "pretty normal northeast USA white male experiences" piece. Whoops = Striving to never do work primarily taggable this way. Had to scrap and rewrite.
The new piece feels more spacious and of a kind with recent prose I've been "happy with" (such as last november's issue of "Desk Memo") - It now centers on a portrait of "particular aspects or qualities of things regarded as unsatisfactory or as a source of difficulty" from the devil city, Philadelphia, connecting these with the current introspection repertoire standards "in this apartment," "painting thoths" and "sitting at desks" via a fantasy component. Watch for it coming circa Christmas?
I watched "Cloud Atlas" this month[B] and thought, damn, this was based on a book that has been recommended to me?! Last week James Wood's take on the author David Mitchell's new one "Bone Clocks" showed up; I identified with it. Here's a paraphrased chunk:
[Currently in culture] meaning is a bit of a bore, but storytelling is alive. The novel form can be difficult, cumbrously serious; storytelling is all pleasure, fantastical in its fertility, its ceaseless inventiveness. Easy to consume, too, because it excites hunger while simultaneously satisfying it: we continuously want more. [...] What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as - in Ford Maddox Ford's words - a "medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case."
David Mitchell is a superb storyteller. [...] But pure storytelling seems to have triumphed [in "Bone Clocks"]; the human case has disappeared. The novel keeps producing iterations of itself, in different places and times [-] but instead of formal capability there is a sense of empty capacity.
Both the book's exuberant impossibilities and its restlessly proliferating realities have a way of refocussing one's suspicions of his earlier work: Mitchell has plenty to tell, but does he have much to say? "Cloud Atlas" offered an impressive narrative parquet, but what else was it? [It's] made up of intricate replications[...], but what do they amount to? Does "Cloud Atlas" do much more than announce and adumbrate a universal, and perhaps not very interesting, interconnectedness?
This Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) "profoundly serious investigation" model seems kinda pompously narrow to me - profoundly stupid or just stupid investigations are equally valid too, etc. - but I can't argue with "investigation" seeming like a necessary core component in fiction. I generally don't read to be "entertained"[C], but I do read for an "intention to communicate something that is not (or cannot be) directly expressed," to semi-quote Mac dict on "meaning."
While "investigation" in fiction maps closely to "research" in visual art[D], the language I've been trying to develop to talk about visual art aesthetics doesn't otherwise scale to work as a coherent poetics as a bonus[E]. "For starters," I don't see "a core kind of reaction" much less an elevation of subject or materials toward "the sublime" as being much a part of fiction's mission at all.
While a lot of my favorites may be or feel "sublime," this seems secondary to the fact that they are all "investigations" into some "meaning," including ugly or nefarious meaning. Most successful visual art turns away from the world completely, or if not, transmutes its subjects into the sublime as a condition of its success as artwork, whenever it is successful as artwork. At the risk of cheapening or overly broadly categorizing "the sublime," which I'm probably definitely doing, I can't think of any exceptions to this. But fiction never does it: abjection, ugliness, violence, and horror always remain as they are directly.
Maybe because life on the planet is a totally helpless uncontainable visual experience, painting needs to posit a fully intentional and unnatural rival alternative, in which anything can be contained and seen truly? Maybe because life on the planet is "impoverished of meaning" in any communicable sense, it takes semantic compositions to investigate shareable "connections" (or something) "between the dots" in language itself, so that these can function as a shareable stand-in for "truth" or "purpose?"
I got this far and thought "this is sorta partially-baked... why am I doing this again?"
- Saw these = Innkeepers, Somewhere, Mother, "The State" seasons 1-3, Cloud Atlas, King of New York, Precinct 13, World War Z, Wayne World, Cavalry. The new movie ratings system is gonna be "movie + recommended playback speed" so that you can watch any movie knowing that it will play back at the appropriate speed for its runtime to be exactly how much time it deserves. So sickest movies can be played back slightly or much slower so you get even more time with them, possibly the rest of your week; terrible movies can be slammed at 12x or 24x so you only have to give them like five minutes. Probably gonna put this into place next month as "movies.html."
- Brown recluse alpha at far roc, Angels in America "Xilf: Sticklemusick," Bowie "Beauty and the Beast," Quando Quango "love tempo" peel session, Sun Ra watusi live youtube, Monitor s/t via Adam, Prince Far I "Plant Up" blasting, Wodehouse collection audiobook
- If you have any music or movie recs or anything that you think I should look at god please hit me up
- Or otherwise leave a comment by email or on twitter
[A] When she pointed out a third, the birthday year, I realized I never think about my time that way - I can easily recall "2007" but not "being 24." Top.
[B] A valid yt search is for "tom hanks dermot" = He plays a cockney gangster for the movie's greatest three minutes Top.
[C] I'd rather gobble "story" entertainments in pretty much any of the other forms where they're faster, bigger, more vivid, and better produced, such as in stupid movies. And normal disclaimer here = I have no judgment of the kinds of media anyone prefers to consume. If you hate dumb movies and like a big forgettable book, no sweat. Top.
[D] My big html file on "research in art" from Pleasure 2014 is, again, here. Top.
[E] Though I'm not gonna bother constructing one; so much of this riff seems so obvious already. Cutting to Woods and his Ford thing one final time, I don't know that the idea of non-entertainment-oriented fiction "investigations" around "meaning" really need defending (or further unpacking) much at all. It doesn't seem like culture suffers from lack of access, capacity, or interest in the last century or so of ambitious investigations in prose; compared to "the painting," "the novel" is a secure and present cultural vehicle. Top.