***

2. Book-of-the-Year: the disjointed, entrancing Red Colored Elegy hits stores this week. I’m still kind of amazed it has been translated. Way ahead of its time, it will rewrite many people’s understanding of the art form’s history.

Very soon in the Journal, I will have a long essay about the book, touching on the political context, the animation industry in the day, artist Seiichi Hayashi’s role in both, and some of his earlier work. So read the book now, mull it over, and maybe we can talk about it in a month or two.

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3. If I ever finish it, I’ll have an essay about Dousei Jidai, the other great youngsters-living-in-sin manga from the 70s, in a future issue.

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4. This week, I’ll have short snippets about the Finnish anthology Glomp #9 every day Monday-Friday. And sometime soon, a little note about the “1-2-3 Trio,” I suppose.

Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers floated a soporific city symphony on the walls of MoMA, balancing long takes with short bursts of rhymed images. The multiplane video was silent, but Aitken talks 26 ears off in Broken Screen, his book of interviews.

The thin thread connecting the interviews is put best in the subtitle: “expanding the image, breaking the narrative.” It’s really just an excuse for him to interview a bunch of mostly gallery artists and filmmakers (and an architect) he likes.

Even though many artists are close to overexposed– would that Werner Herzog had bitten Matthew Barney– it is refreshing to have them out of their respective ghettos. Broken Screen reads like a great magazine that only lasted for two issues because it tried to do too much.

Some of the artists are new, like the fascinating Olafur Eliasson. Others, like Manny Farber and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seem curiously old-fashioned. Better are the lesser-known, like Pablo Ferro, the titles designer of Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. And especially welcome is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose interview glimpses the nuts and bolts of an artist working with a seasoned film crew.

The book’s real value is in its lavish production. Like a little coffee table book, it teems with full-color reproductions of art, film stills, and even a clutch of photos from Robert Wilson stage shows. I doubt I’ll reread the interviews, but I leaf through the book every time I see it.

These urchins represent the unnamed mounds that pepper the landscape in what were once coal towns. The mines have closed, but the mounds remain, changing a landscape without so much as a proper hill. They have no names, no doubt due to a conspiracy. As Moullet reminds us, coal mining is underground work, so the heaps insult its discretion. Defiant, he aims to liberate, even elevate them.

To his eyes, the heaps look like his beloved mountains. While he has juggled a dual career as film critic and filmmaker in Paris, he is at heart a country boy and climber. Mountains appear throughout his films, as the backdrop in the anti-Western A Girl Is a Gun and the subject in Up and Down, about an absurd bicycle race in the Alps. In “La Cabale,” they appear almost as a pun. The heaps may have a more perfect form than Fuji, but they’re not exactly stable. Yet he climbs on, skidding down the side.

His deadpan humor– two lovers walking on crumbling mound, a cheeky crew, an argument over the most beautiful of all mounds ending with a monkey wrench– shares the tone of Agnes Varda’s masterpiece, The Gleaners and I. Both have a quotidian quirkiness, with a judge in a field or a hotel on a heap, that gets better with repeat viewings. Moullet might not be the most famous or prolific of the Nouvelle Vague, but he certainly is the funniest. And “La Cabale des oursins” is probably my favorite of his works.  It translates this unique director’s wit into an intricate short, a perfect miniature.

A shame, then, that it’s so hard to see. One DVD exists, a part of the fine French journal Cinéma’s 11th issue, and is French only. At least a box set of most of his features has been released, by Blaq Out in France and Facets in the US. And another hilarious short, “Essai d’ouverture” (”Essay on Opening”), about a bottle of Coke, can be seen online.

For reasons I’ll never understand, one of my teaching jobs occasionally pitted me against vicious packs of screaming teens expecting entertainment. So we played 5-Card Nancy instead.

Years ago, an old friend printed me a deck on company cardstock right before his employer went bankrupt. It turns out the deck’s a great teaching tool. Doing film, the Soviets, the Kuleshov Effect? Here’s Nancy, here’s a burger. Pacing? What happens if you put thirteen panels of Nancy walking in a row? Leibniz? Each panel’s a monad!

Most of the people I’ve played with don’t really know the strip. A few have never seen it before. But they all take to the game– that is, Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip– like it’s as natural as breathing. Everybody knows when a panel’s right, or wrong, or deliciously wrong.

Some panels are so right they don’t need anything else. Like this one, which I wish were on a 12×12 canvas hanging in my postindustrial loft:

Or better yet, on billboards all through the countryside, advertising Nancy’s absorbent hair as it drinks in the pathetic fallacy’s rotgut.

***

There is an online version, in color, with its own clutch of panels. And a huge list of examples from someone’s LJ.

And I have trouble arguing with the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn, or even its video. Copacetic!

Not the idea that, if S is any nonempty partially ordered set in which every chain has an upper bound, then S has a maximal element, but the Hollis Frampton film. Since I don’t live near New York or San Francisco in the 70s, seeing it was almost as hard as understanding S without a mathy companion. But Ubuweb is a kind mistress, making the experimental film ghetto a little more open.

Not to say the film has a clear meaning. I haven’t done the required reading yet, and Zorn is not a gracious host. If such art for the last several decades has relied on a primer, unique to each artist, I’m left in the cold. But that can be an advantage of sorts, a reminder to trust experience.

(more…)

Over and over, the artist Joe Brainard painted Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Nancy as a transsexual, Nancy as toddler Breton, as the Manhattan skyline. In my favorite, she’s kidney disease. For Brainard, she was a passport.

He wound up in New York City in 1963. But he was born in Arkansas and reared in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That oil town, home of the Golden Driller and Oral Roberts University, had nowhere for a young man in love with art and gay besides. He left for good the same year the Star Trek architecture went up at ORU. I doubt it would have made him feel more at home. Another artist’s photo essay, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, might have reminded him why he left.

In New York, he mixed with artists and poets. First Frank O’Hara, Alex Katz, and Kenneth Koch, later Warhol, Johns, and Ashberry. Yet Brainard maintained a simple persona. And made art about Nancy. As Ann Lauterbach writes, “Nancy could travel with Joe from his humble roots in Tulsa to the bright complexity of New York City… Both the troubled, earnest pathos of the times and the overwhelming grandeur of ‘high art’ might be resisted, or converted, by Nancy’s ubiquitous smile.” The bumpkin takes the city, in other words.

In the 1960s and 70s, he made scores of works on Nancy, most collected now in The Nancy Book from Siglio Press. A glance through shows he’s no bumpkin. These witty, inventive brillo-haired jazz riffs put bland American identity through the wringer. “The Nancy Book,” a 27-page comic book done with poet Ron Padgett, mixes raw sexuality with mad formal play. Everything is up for grabs, even words: at one point, the word “sky” appears wherever the sky should be. Another work, cover art for the 1968 Art News Annual, views the avant-garde through a Nancy lens. The works always feel personal, as Brainard uses Nancy to explore his complex emotions. Somehow, she is a worthy muse.

No small credit must go to Bushmiller, whose cartooning was kind of brilliant. Nancy has proved a perennial muse for cartoonists, Mark Newgarden and Bill Griffith chief among them. As Lauterbach rightly notes, “the comic strip and the miniature are both economies of distillation,” and Bushmiller made a perfect miniature in each panel. It’s why Five-Card Nancy works, but Five-Card Prince Valiant doesn’t.

Brainard shared the flair for miniatures, and so found a perfect match in Bushmiller’s creation. Navigating the City, he found familiar comfort in Nancy. Much later, when he died of AIDS, he did not share the celebrity that engulfed some of his circle. Reading The Nancy Book, I wonder if he preferred it that way.

(The images come from JoeBrainard.org and are (C) the Estate of Joe Brainard. Top: “If Nancy Was an Ashtray,” 1972; Middle: “Nancy Diptych,” 1974; Bottom: “If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning,” 1975.)

Geoff Grogan flays the Gray Lady and makes pop culture collages with her remains. They hang in galleries, where this irony gets appreciated. For his subjects, pastiches of Kirby and Lugosi, he prefers affection to irony. For proof, look no further than his latest comic book, Look Out!! Monsters.

The comic, a tabloid-sized Xeric winner that feels thick with ink, mangles more newspapers. He slathers an issue of the New York Daily News with washes, paint, and shreds of the Times. On them he builds a story of Frankenstein, a collage of body parts. A war’s on; the stiff-legged monster makes quick work of some soldiers before vomiting in front of a cathedral.

Grogan’s thick brushwork creates a monster that seems to wade through the pages. Reading the news beneath is a similar slog: we’re told of three drowned girls, the Taliban, infected birds, even a “battle with Nicole Kidman.” Any given day has the same sour words; when Frankenstein vomits, he splatters torn headlines in a double-splash. The most visible word: “Hell.”

From this point, Grogan unleashes color. A double-splash of red shows a 30s vision of science under the headline “Mad Doctor’s Work.” Kirby-fried energy engulfs the page, giving way to giant-sized Ben-day patterns, evoking both pop-art lithos and four-color printing. Underneath it sits a love story of sorts, with samples of the Thing’s blind girlfriend beneath an embossed rocketship (or nuclear missile).

At first, Grogan seems to lose the story’s handle. These color pages, peppered with lovers kissing and details from possible gallery paintings, lack the violent drive of the comic’s first half. Even the occasional black-and-white panels of Frankenstein seem muddier than his first appearance.

Yet a closer reading shows the earlier conflicts continue, formally. His sources, Universal monster movies and classic comics, pivoted on love as well as war. Frankenstein went up in flames, not for his appearance but his failure to treat beauty with delicacy. It’s a old theme, reprised with Ben Grimm, King Kong, and countless others.

Newsprint has its beauties, too: celebrities and underwear models. Grogan samples them on the cover, with Brittney Spears in the upper left, and fashion’s doppelgangers of real women on the back. Frankenstein couldn’t stomach the monsters in the news, and now he can’t stomach the ads either. His few second-half panels seem to show his fury at rejection, while the models kiss another.

The final image– an embossed bomber, an ad logo, and the Bride of Frankenstein screaming under a colorful layer of giant dots– ties everything together. It’s also an invitation to go back and find new meanings in this riot of color, newprint, and classic monsters. In his artist’s statement, Grogan cites the conflict of ideologies that marks the newspaper. His achievement lies in how he finds an analogue in classic pulps. Both have a home on that low-grade paper, but the pulps increasingly seem tame compared to the news.

***

Grogan has other comic works available. One, a work of nostalgic revisionism at ModernTales, left me cold, but Dr. Speck looks promising. A ‘pataphysical superhero tale with doses of Tibetan (Californian?) mysticism, he appears to wield the genre fresh. All Grogan’s work blurs distinctions. Seeing this artist and art professor prove the divisions meaningless yet again in a Xeric-winning comic reminds me of the best works that foundation has funded.

(The images are from Look Out!! Monsters, save for the top collage-painting, whose source I can no longer find. But it turns Jasper Johns’ “Target With Four Faces” into capes-n-tights, so I couldn’t resist the pillage.  And yes, that’s not the Thing’s girlfriend in the art I sampled.  She’s on another page, though.)

Thanks to all who sent word, and the old farm boys (& ex-Marine) who plied chainsaws Saturday after, transforming walls of tree into house, yard, driveway. Of the 30-40 trees that went down, only 6-12 remain out back. They’ll wait.

The preacher saw it pick up a barn and drop it back down in pieces, with the overtones of Judgement.  I respect it as part of nature.  And I never, ever want to see one again. I’ve lived through two of the damn things, and I think no other natural disaster has the same sense of the world trying as hard as it can to kill you dead.

Me, that is.

This one was actually quite terrifying, more than my five earthquakes and that time riding in a car in the mountains with some emotionally unstable dude drinking beers behind the wheel.

We were gonna take those trees out anyway.

The bottom of Tim’s trailer here (in Rick’s yard) put me in mind of a Mondrian.

It even took out the ivy by the roots. Anyway, stay safe and keep a flashlight handy, and if the sky gets black in an instant, run to the basement.

(The tree now on my front page is gone forever, but the house & all involved are mostly fine, and thanks to the chaps from the electric company for rolling up the wires so nothing burned down. Though why a company in Kentucky’s called Duke Energy is beyond me.)

Crashing a pro photographers’ conference, looking at cameras and lenses costing more than an acre of land in some places, was a little like being in the locker room in middle school.

It didn’t help that I was carting around a Holga, a plastic toy that shoots on 120mm film. Its focus dial offers: head, person, people, and mountain range. Its case occasionally keeps out the light, and the people who develop your film usually apologize until you mention, to their relief, a Holga was involved.

All the gear lust & envy brought to mind a few artists working with meager means. I have in mind not Bolexes and Holgas so much as the PXL-2000. This plastic video camera, with an ethereal black and white image taped to cassette, came from Fischer-Price. Grown up not at all, it now has it s own film festival, of all things.

And the whole of the work from the PXL hardly compares with the work, almost undiscovered, of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy. Working in virtual isolation, he returned to his hometown in Moravia after studying art in Prague. He made his own cameras, crafting long lenses out of pipes, tape, and handmade lenses. The photos– almost always of women, spied from afar– have a glowing, hazy texture, being born with the patina that takes most photos years to acquire. His approach would take most pros years to learn, as they unlearn all the artistic traps of expensive gear.

Miroslav Tichý, MT Inv. no.: 1-30, © Foundation Tichý oceán