micro
On hard work and patience
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
(T)
A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery -300C
“During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease lamp—a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone—to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the principles of stencilling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso’s insight, the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas—but not from a void.”
“Everything” by Micachu and the Shapes with the London Sinfonietta (2011)
Freedom of ‘76 by Ween (1993)
Floris Neusüss (1937)
“Neusüss’s frames are very large, and reproduce the human body in life size, but also other objects. They look like ghosts, ectoplasms, magical light creatures. And they constitute a different point of view on bodies and things. The German artist says: “In the frame the observer distinguishes the fragmentariness of the object as a citation of reality”.”
Let’s Get Out Of Here
- End Credits by Chase & Status, Plan B
- Fall In Love With Me by Iggy Pop
- Paradise Circus by Massive Attack
- New Values by Iggy Pop
- Joppa Road by Ween
- New Big Prinz by The Fall
- Kicking The Lights by Girls Against Boys
- Can’t Stop Now by Major Lazer, Mr. Vegas, Jovi Rockwell
- Baby I’m A Fool by Melody Gardot
- Golden Phone by Micachu & The Shapes
- To Bring You My Love by PJ Harvey
- I Need Somebody – Iggy Pop Mix by The Stooges
- Black Swan by Thom Yorke
- Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells
- Blue Yodel No. 9 by Jimmy Rodgers
“Television, the Drug of the Nation” by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (1991)
And Everything Is Going Fine
By A. O. SCOTT
NY Times Published: December 9, 2010
“Here is a description of some of the most innovative and important American theater of the last quarter of the 20th century. A man sits at a table and starts talking. If he has props, they are minimal — a spiral notebook, a record player, a box of pictures — and his costume is correspondingly modest, consisting usually of a flannel shirt, blue jeans or chinos, and sneakers. He speaks mostly about himself, digressing from anecdotes about his childhood and professional life into more serious confessional territory, though always with reserve and good humor.
When Spalding Gray, the man at that table, began performing his autobiographical monologues in the late 1970s and early ’80s — first as a member of the Wooster Group, then on his own — they felt radical and revelatory, like bulletins from newly discovered artistic territory. By 2004, when Mr. Gray committed suicide by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry, his work was a familiar and widely appreciated feature of the cultural landscape. He made occasional appearances in movies, television series and conventional plays, but his great role, his great project, was himself.”
via WolfAndFox
Saw “Swimming to Cambodia” when I was quite young and it made a huge impression on me, found & read transcriptions of his other performances (no internet). It hurt me when I found out that he had gone.
Paul Greer 