June 2008

La Cabale des oursins

The Cabal of Sea Urchins, in other words. Thanks to my schoolboy French, it took me a few viewings to realize Luc Moullet did mean sea urchins. They infest the maps around Oignies in the north of France, and inspire his hilarious 17-minute film, an unclassifiable jape on tourism, art, and piles of useless rock. [...]

Keep reading →

Playing 5-Card Nancy

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 [...]

Keep reading →

Zorn’s Lemma

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 [...]

Keep reading →

The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard

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. [...]

Keep reading →

Look Out!! Monsters

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 [...]

Keep reading →

(After the Tornado)

Regular blogging resumes Tuesday with a review of Geoff Grogan’s Xeric-winner, which I was pleased to find in the mail the day after our “tornadic event.” 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 [...]

Keep reading →

Vacation with Chainsaw

I’m going to take a couple weeks off blogging and catch up on some yard work. 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. [...]

Keep reading →

I Need a Longer Lens

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, [...]

Keep reading →

Eating Louvuhl

*Thanks to my comrade from the Photogogue, I was able to enjoy a little of the NPPA conference the last few days in Louisville. This group of press photographers, training in multimedia so as not to follow the dodo, had an air of optimism and opportunity, a nice surprise given industry trends. I ate good [...]

Keep reading →