signwriting glass window paint

I just googled 'signwriting glass window paint' and one of the first hits had this as the first line of the description:

"Sign writers no longer use paint. Traditional sign writing has been replaced by vinyl lettering"

I am aghast. I know it's a dying art, but I'm going to keep carrying the fire. Hand-painted signs ROCK.

I will miss them.

Magritte et al

Some artists' work seem to make it impossible to make anything new. You're burdened by their achievements, kinda thing.

Like this:

I never used to like Magritte (for he is in truth the author of said painting), I thought he was a big cheeseball, because he was popular and accessible in the same way Klimt or Dali are, or something. But I keep running up against him. Recently (in Tokyo) I saw a whole lot of his paintings in the flesh and I just yielded. They were great; he's great. But they are really like a complete circle that appears to close off that territory for the artists that follow (like Duchamp's readymades I guess).

I saw a poster made by an artist once that listed all the object-territories captured by various artists, like:

Beuys owns felt
Kusama owns dots
(etc etc)

I often think of it. There are territories I'm interested in that I feel that way about. Like, Magritte owns semiotics, Schwitters owns collage, Andrea Fraser owns institutional critique, Thomas Demand owns models, and so on. I realise this is an uber-reductive way to think about artists, but that doesn't stop it feeling inhibiting.

But anyway, one's own desires for worldly success aside (because obviously the PR-driven media, time-poor curators and confused audiences prefer neatly packaged artist oeuvres), who wants to inhabit a bounded territory like that? How boring. That's like having to write romantic fiction or something. It's a big fat trap.

/obvious

Indexicality

Joel Snyder:
When people talk about indexicality, they generally confuse photons with objects, and they think it is objects that are necessarily indexed by photographs. It may very well be the objects that are indexed, but nothing in the way of an object need be indexed by a photograph.

While I'm not here

This is what I've been doing with my time:

Kate Beaton: I love love love. I just keep coming back.

Asterios Polyp. Just read it, if you like comics.

While I was in Laos and Cambodia, I was digging Never Let Me Go. Also excellent.

The world is just full of stuff that's good. How are you supposed to find the time to do your own things?

Peppy?

I found myself at this entry on IMDB:

Intriguing.

It reminded me of this stuff. There's something about the correctness of the invention that just cracks me up.

Staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow

There have been fireworks let off in the park near my house this evening. This after a bunch of possums/cats had a party with lots of flamenco and brawling on the corregated sunroom roof. The other night there was a flying fox (bat? I do not know) hanging in the tree directly outside the sunroom window. I've never been so close to one before. It was having a go at eating something, upside-down. It looked all wrong, gravity-wise. Like one of those pictures that's sometimes a bunny and sometimes a rabbit ... wait; I think I mean duck. Anyway. With legs that have hands to hang with when your head's upside down.

Quite strange.

I've been working on my website tonight. I decided a while ago I was going to put everything on it. Everything I still liked, that is. I'm beginning to question that decision as the project spreads into its second year. Mind you, I haven't touched it for at least six months, so ...

Sometimes I really want to post on the blog but there's nothing at all to say, so I end up doing these la-di-da kind of nowhere nothing posts about the birds or the sunlight. It's like a little hand with nothing in it, reaching out over the interwebs, grasping for something to hold on to.

Banalities for Novembers

Blogs are tops. What did we ever do without them? In fact, life without the internet on the whole seems like another planet in another dimension.

In other news, my show includes subliminal nods to both Officeworks and Corporate Express. I don't think it's particularly significant, but there it is. Symbols abound.

Jemand musste Josef K verleumdet haben. Why can I not get this out of my head?

Trash patch

This is quite an amazing story. At first I kind of thought it might be a positive story about how ocean life is adapting effectively to this new, human-derived environment. But then I read about the fish with plastic in their stomachs and I thought, not so much. But how amazing is this? You can't tell how large it is from this picture, but if this quantity of small stuff is what's in there, how the hell could you clean it up? Size of Texas, they think this patch is.

Look how the fish are treating this area, like it's a coral reef that they interact with. The evolution of these artificial forms that find themselves with utterly alien afterlives fascinates me. It's like when you're little and you think your toys have a life of their own when you're not there; maybe there's something to that. Material things don't enact their own fates, but they're a part of the evolution of the physical environment, as shaped by all of our actions. This patch is like a garden gone wild (...and with toxicity in the groundwater).

More upbeat

I have these times when I want to do paintings/become a painter. That might happen, one day. But other times I want to become a writer (again). Both have the same problem in them; content/subject.

What of/about?

So silly. It's best just to do things, and not worry or anticipate or plan. You can always make it good later if it's crap at the start.

Anyway.

I'm feeling a little more upbeat now.

Here's a picture of something I made recently:



Just doing anything at all is usually the biggest problem for me. I think I need to do more that's messy. Precious schmecious (if you will).

Meh, and not even original meh

I just watched a bird on a power line out the window, after hanging out there for a minute, reach across and chomp down a spider from a web. I'm aware of the banality of this observation, so perhaps it says something about my mood that it made me aware of how casually a life can be chomped up by some external force. All this angst and worry and whatever, when you can be Struck Down at any time; what's the point? Rationally, you'd conclude that with this knowledge the best strategy is to be living each moment as happily as you can and not worrying about or planning for the future. The reality of your life means nothing to the bird that sees you as dinner (for a quick second, before ceasing to think of you at all), but that personal, petty reality is so strong to you; how can you overcome being so wrapped up in it?

Wherefore perspective?

I was looking at Facebook (it's all your fault, Facebook) because I read something online about someone from primary school who is now on the BRW Young Rich List. I opened the mail and got my credit card bill and thought: What am I doing with my life, and what for?

Day after

I don't feel in the least bit triumphant.

Best Picture

There's a William Eggleston one I've always rather liked. I'm not sure if it could be called 'best' exactly.


But that's a whole other discussion.

Fuck it, I'm going to blog more

Anyone watching Mad Men (obsessively like me)? I'm even feeding the habit peripherally through re-watching movies such as North by Northwest, The Apartment, and reading this book:


It tries to show how much things were changing in the mid-late sixties via an in-depth study of the development and production of the five movies nominated for best picture Academy Awards in 1967. It's a really good read. Super-well researched. Anyhoo, I digress.

There's an episode where Kinsey has this great idea (supposedly; I'm sceptical) but he's drunk and doesn't write it down and thereafter continually regrets the loss of the (supposedly) best idea he's ever had. The 'moral' being, write it down. That's the moral I'm choosing to take in this moment, given that there was something I needed to write down, which triggered the memory of that episode, so I've retrospectively assigned that moral to the story. I can't even remember how it was needed for the narrative. Oh yeah, I think it was to show how good Peggy is relative to her peers at coming up with ideas.

My old friend Rommel said something once about not writing all those ideas down, and getting stuck in yesterday's stale ideas and re-churning them. Put them away (or something), he says. Go fly a kite.

I promise

I hereby resolve to finish my website and have it online before the end of 2009. This joint here is for ramblings, not for sensibleness. So I'm gonna flippin' do it, orright?

I've been looking at the work of Donald Evans. It's very interesting; that whole coming up with a pretext and limitation in order to produce a very particular kind of series of work thing; that whole classification and miniaturisation of a fantasy version of the world, naming as knowing thing; that whole mail art global connectedness international languages thing; that whole copying the signifiers of a certain genre thing.

It's pleasing to see someone find a project that's so clear to them, no matter how nichey.

Cakewrecks

I adore the literalism of this


Cakewrecks killed a good half of yesterday for me.

I love google-image-searching cakes. Trust there to be a whole blog about it.

When I was in Year Nine I took an elective class for one semester, cake decorating. I do not know why. It was with Miz Clee, the least liked home ec teacher. It was pretty awful, still I learnt a lot about marzipan. I made an ugly ugly cake with lots of pastel flowers on it. No sense of imagination or humour.

Perhaps I should just be a clock repairer. I think I'd be good at something like that ('what're the hours?')

The Crimson Petal and the White

Right now I'm reading this:


It took a while; initially I felt it was too cold or something, but I'm about a third of the way in and it's completely pwning me. It's a page-turner, to be sure.

The best part, now that I'm in there, is that I have some 500 pages to go.

Souvenirs of the apocalypse

It was apocalypse-tastic!

(The single most boring thing anyone could say after an apocalypse-esque dust storm is, it was apocalyptic.)

Often, when I see something I like, I want to drop all my own ideas, methods, habits and goals and just adopt those new ones.

I've got a short little span of attention(, and oh my nights are so long).

These days

I feel almost physically sick when I check my email these days. I would be really happy not to have to have it any more, except obviously I have to.

This feeling has been current for some time. One of the results of it is that most of my correspondents have pretty much given up on me, so I hardly have any emails when I do check. In one way, this is pleasing, as I don't have to answer any emails (which I don't know why makes me feel wrong sometimes - I think it's not my preferred way to interact with people: I'm reflective enough as it is); in another way, I feel sad because I'm losing touch with people. Which is very bad.

In other news, I was going to post the pictures I took from my vantage point high over Glebe and Annandale of the post-apocalyptic [-looking] orange dust storm that woke me up at 5.30am (something pounds on the exterior wall of the bedroom during gale force winds and it's not conducive to sweet dreams - and for once it wasn't the nightmare neighbours, more on whom later). But everyone else in the world already posted them. Here, look.

It was a very unsettling thing to wake up, not merely because I see that time of the morning perhaps twice a year at most, but because it looked like a mammoth super-fire was roaring in from Western Sydney. All the windows of our place were open, and in my sleepy state I couldn't understand why I couldn't smell the smoke. I had a flashback to the late eighties and thought the end of the world was nigh. And there were not yet pictures of red sky on the Herald website, so I thought maybe all the journalists had been liquified. Once I had looked up BOM and seen that the meteorologists were still living, breathing and updating their site, I relaxed a bit. Couldn't go back to sleep, though (see tree issue, previous paragraph).

I took photos to show MW when he woke up but it was extraordinarily still completely orange when the proper day started about two hours later. Now there's a yucky film of dust over everything in my studio, because of the vents-I-haven't-yet-found-a-stepladder-to-climb-up-on-and-cover-with-plastic-or-paper-or-something-because-of-the-white-dust-that-blows-in-through-them-when-there's-wind. Fortunately all the fragile masterpieces-in-progress are covered in glad wrap (or as they'd say in Adrian Mole or The Young Ones, 'cling film'. [Cling film, heh]). Dustiness is a place my work goes to in its nightmares.

I've just been in the library so I'm all full of mental blurgh. I don't mean mental 'blah' like 'meh', I mean blurgh like 'urge to blurt things out'.

I so loved Adrian Mole. I always think of him when I'm sorting through 'the heavy papers' on the weekend.

Other things are progressing pleasingly. Time is always a problem; but if there was no time there couldn't be any doing at all so I suppose I shouldn't complain that it's passing.

Favourites

Two of the best films I think I've seen over the last twelve months are 'Happy Go Lucky' and 'Man on Wire'.

Goodness me they're wonderful.

I love Mike Leigh so very very much.

That's all I have to say about it for the moment.