posted by on 2006.11.30, under Uncategorized

Excerpt from my web posting entitled “Excerpt from my web posting entitled one reason why Yves Klein is super-awesome”

One.

Also – out here in LA, this guy Baldessari designed a show about Magritte. They must have chosen him because they both have double consonants in their names.

posted by on 2006.11.30, under Uncategorized

A court rules that Boys cannot compete on the Girl’s gymnastics team (well, in Madison anyway) – lucky for me I was allowed to back in the day. Similar situation too, no boys team due to lack of interest, but the girls team in my school welcomed my brother and I to the team. I got a bronze medal on the vault, my brother got a broken arm. Yowch.

posted by on 2006.11.28, under Uncategorized

Nice find Tim, but how am I supposd to get any work done with that around? Michele was just reading an article the other day about how bad the fine print is (you give away lots of rights) for YouTube… so its great to see a site dedicated to fine art video. Now I have a lot of videos to watch.

posted by on 2006.11.21, under Uncategorized

DeepCreekTripReport

(for you northern-east-coasters, this is how we do November in Southern California)

Photos are up on Flickr from our brief trip to Deep Creek. I only have photos of our camp, since we were at the Springs in the middle of the night.

I have to tell you, this place is one of the most amazing spots you will ever see, but you have to be there at the right time – the wrong crowd there can ruin it pretty quick.
We headed out very, very late. Packed a few things, loaded the Scion, then got in it and I noticed the windshield was very cracked. Three places. Not good for Cajon Pass, high winds, then dirt roads. SO shit. Do we switch to my iffy GTI to get out there with, or bail and go Sunday? To complicate matters, we found out earlier that part of the I-15 would be closed going Northbound as of 8am Sat. There would be a detour involved, and possibly epic traffic. So it’s either now or never. AAA card in hand, we reload the gear into the GTI. Amazingly, it fits. Check coolant and oil. Cross fingers, and go. By now it was 4pm. We faced Rush Hour, and would never get to camp while there was still daylight. If you have never been there, I recommend not doing this, as it’s not so much a campground as a place where a nice guy lets you camp.

So, yeah, we hit the traffic hard. But it cleared up eventually. The trip took three hours, maybe three and a half. This is a 1.5 hour trip usually. But we were out there… we made it.

OK. So we hit the dirt road to Bowen Ranch, and the GTI vibrated like a sex toy store in an earthquake (how’s that for a simile?). CD player rendered useless. Sunroof made crazy, crazy sounds. But the road was just bumpy, not soft, so we rolled into Bowen Ranch. Stopped at the entry and talked to the Bowen guy (not sure what is name is) and paid him his fee (he charges an access fee, and in return provides the camp and parking area, only other way in to deep creek is by 4×4). Then we rolled on down to the camping area.

There was only ONE other car parked. Holy shit. We had only been here twice before and only camped once, but had seen many more people previous times. No moon, only starlight, so we needed headlamps and then my trusty new Coleman Lantern to set up camp. I put it on a camera tripod, and that rocked. We flicked up the new tent in no time, and then decided we would eat first and see if we still wanted to do the night hike down to the creek and springs.

From the only other car around, a guy came out and walked over to us.

Hi! Are you going down to the springs tonight?

-yeah, but we will eat first. and we are camping up here.

OK. We are camping down there, so we go now. Want a hit on my pipe?

-No thanks, see you down there

You are welcome! Bye!

Friendly. Anyway, he left down the trail as we started cooking. I think he had someone with him, but I never saw the other person. Now we were the only people around for miles, except for the Bowen ranch guy in his house/shack about a mile back down the dirt road. We cooked up some great chicken with potatoes and vegetables and rice, I had a glass of wine, then we got packed to hit the trail. We decided against bringing our sleeping bags and ground pads down… we should have brought them. We could have easily camped out in the open down the canyon.

With water, towels, and extra clothing layers for the coming drop in temp, we set out on the trail. Luckily we have hiked it at night before, as this night was very dark and we had to sort of know where we should be headed sometimes. A couple of hundred feet in, where the trail abruptly dips, we heard Coyotes. Howling upon Howling, painful, frightening animals screaming. They must have been tearing each other apart somewhere out there, and they could have been anywhere.

We stopped. Crap. And we have no walking sticks even to beat off wild attacking dogs. I picked up two rocks (seriously) and we decided to continue. It was a little scarier knowing there was no one around for miles.

The trail turned out to be easy to follow, and the stars amazing. We hiked for about an hour, steadily downwards, then hit the final, steep descent at the end. The trickiest part is right when you actually get to deep creek, and you have to somehow cross the creek to get to the hot springs. The creek is cold, very cold. We remembered a way up a little rise, then scrambled down a steep bit of trail (almost a cliff there) and there were rocks to use to cross the creek. This is not so easy with the dark and all, and while I made it across, Michele stepped into the creek and soaked her pants up over her boots. So now she has water inside them. Nice. But this is the end of the trail.

We walked around to the first tub (there are four to six of them, depending on the time of year, and they flow into each other) and ran into a guy with a backpack coming from there. We said hello, and he went off to set up his tent in the nearby sand. There were a couple of tents down here, and the air was warmer than up on the ridge. We should have brought our gear.

We got out of our hiking clothes, turned the lights off, and carefully made our way into the first tub – the hottest one. It was a bit more than waist deep, and wide and long. Gorgeous. It was pretty damn hot, and I had to stand up every once in a while to keep from overheating.

This is where it gets amazing. Sitting in clear hot water, a river running below, solid rock sticking out behind us, floating and staring at the millions of clear stars. Cool air to contrast with the hot water. Perfect.

We thought we heard people chatting quietly in adjacent tubs, and tried to peek over to see if we were seeing people or just rocks in the next tub. Turned out to be rocks, so we moved on to the next tub. It’s a bit cooler, so we could stay in there longer. But that one is small, so we moved onto the large, deep tub. This tub is hard to get directly to, so people get out and walk around to it. But we scrambled down the bit of waterfall into it (wet bouldering in the middle of the night is kinda risky). Now this was where it was at. There was still no one around, turned out the voices we thought we heard was just water babbling over rocks. The stars had just enough light to see a little ways. We hung out here for quite a while. This one you can sit on a waist-deep shelf, or actually swim around in the middle (I think its 7 feet deep).

So. This place is near-perfect. And at night, with no one around at all (we never saw anyone in the pools) it is just right. Just floating, sky, hills and the quiet night. Maybe we floated around for an hour – its hard to keep track of time down there.

We still had to hike back up, so when we had our fill of hot water and floating, we got back out into the chill air and headed up. River crossing was easier this time, but the steep uphill slopes were a killer after the super-relaxation of the tubs. I had to stop to rest often, but the hike was very nice once I got my breath. For part of the trail we turned off the headlamps and walked by starlight. Some narrow parts above the steep canyon made it safer to use lights at though.

We got back up to camp around 2 am, and crashed hard. The new tent was cozy and warm – and we slept in a bit. When we got up, several more people were arriving to hike down or set up camp on top. It looked like it would be crowded down there that day, so we were glad we got to sample it in utter seclusion. We hung out at camp, made coffee, and I played guitar – then we worked on a photo-shoot for a series of images I am making. So technically it was a business trip for me. Word. I can write off camping gear!

We made it back to LA around 3.. a perfect little escape.

posted by on 2006.11.20, under Uncategorized

Amateur – Lasse Gjertsen

This, rocks. This is why we have digital video editing.

posted by on 2006.11.17, under Uncategorized

“Now, our demands. Listen carefully. A helicopter. A Delorean. An enchanted school bus made of peanut brittle. Twelve unicorn steaks. A massive effort in social reform, including stronger enforcement of rent stabilization laws for pre-war, multi-unit residential toadstools. A bag of glitter. And we demand that you change the name of the United Nations building to the Frazzleberry Center for Conflict Resolution and Taffy Time.”

-you just don’t mess with the Frazzleberry Dumpling Gang.

posted by on 2006.11.16, under Uncategorized

Hey, gimme back my femur!

posted by on 2006.11.15, under Uncategorized

BUSH WARNS AGAINST PULLOUT.

-Perhaps there are fears things will get too sticky?

-Can you believe this is an actual headline. Nice work newspaper double-entendre inserters.

By the way, one of the earliest examples of risque double entendre in American culture was the late 19th-century vaudeville act, the Barrison Sisters. They danced, raising their skirts slightly and asking the audience: “Would you like to see my pussy?” After an enthusiastic response, they would raise up their skirts, revealing live kittens secured over their crotches.

-I lifted that directly from the Wikipedia entry.

Also. When my dad calls the cat, he likes to make a joke by yelling:

“C’mere pussy!”

Especially when I have company over. He is really the only one who can get away with that one. I have tried and people just look at me funny.

posted by on 2006.11.14, under Uncategorized

So if you are in LA this Thursday, I curated a video screening for Film & Video 825 called “The State of the World – Personal reflections on war, politics, society, race and gender.” It’s at the Echo Park Film Center, check out the Calendar page for details.

posted by on 2006.11.13, under Uncategorized

TheoreticalSundays.

I was having dinner with e x t r e m e l y slow service at a Thai food place in Silverlake last night, when my neighbor and I got into a debate about the nature of art theory – she held that it is objective and I contended that it is subjective. We soon realized our ideas were pretty much polar opposite. So in the morning I sat down and hacked through some woefully inadequate and contradictory definitions of terms in the OED, then jotted some ideas down. I even titled my thoughts and sent them off memo-style for continuation of the discussion.
Feel free to comment – jquinn at rise dash ind dot com.

The Atomic Weight of Cobalt is 58.933195

How to define theory as it relates to art?

If theory is purely objective, as in Science, then this definition should be used:

A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.
“theory 1, n.4.a” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press.

The problem I see here is that confirmation of a hypothesis relating to art depends upon the personal and “inward thoughts or feelings” of the author of that theory. Though it may be in agreement with other theorists or critics, this agreement between thinkers does not constitute the existence of observable facts, rather it contributes to a set of questionable ideas. Questioning and discussion of these ideas then forms the basis of Art Theory.

I can understand the application of this definition as it relates to the mere physical state of artworks themselves, as there are facts to point to in this case, but still feel the interpretation of those facts, and of particular artworks, puts the theorist firmly into the realm of the subjective.

The very concept of Art Theory seems, to me, to rely on a basis of discussion and argument (of subjective points of view) rather than an attempt at confirmation of some (objective) facts which then are unquestionable – as would be the case with fact.

Rather than tangle with fact and objectivity, I would promote the use of this definition of theory:

A hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.
“theory 1, n.5” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press.

This clearly relates to the subjective view, and speculation about a possible explanation of phenomena (here, the artwork it describes). This seems to me to jibe with the practice of argument and discussion that is theoretical discourse.

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