Annabelle's Aspirin

Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers

2012-01-31T09:28:00.000-05:00

The New York Times ran an article yesterday about the upcoming digitization (and availability) of Alan Lomax's collection of field recordings, notes, films and pictures made over his long career. Truly global in scope, his archive covers much of world folk music.

I just learned of Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers.

"Ms. Jones was an influential singer on St. Simons Island, Ga., where this selection was recorded on Oct. 12, 1959. She and Lomax collaborated to make her group, the Georgia Sea Island Singers, a national touring act that performed at the Newport Folk Festival and President Jimmy Carter's inauguration." - from the multimedia page that accompanied the above article.

2011-12-30T11:48:00.001-05:00

Washington DC's preeminent accordionist, Merv Conn died on December 20. I called him more than a decade ago when I was living with my Nana and Pop in Alexandria. I was trying to figure out the best way to go about learning the instrument and would call accordionists listed in phone books in any city I visited. I think we must have spoken for 15-20 minutes, he gave me tips and told me about his own experiences in hopes that I might become one of his students.

I never did take a lesson from him, but years later when I heard that Jeff Krulik had made a documentary about him Kim and I went with Todd and Kristen to Silver Spring in the hope of seeing it. Alas, that screening was sold out (we saw Merv in lobby playing to his fans), but we did get to finally see it during the 2007 James River Film Festival. It's a great portrait of a beautiful person.

Blind Boy Fuller

2011-12-15T20:52:00.000-05:00

Piedmont blues guitarist and singer Blind Boy Fuller (b. 1907, d. 1941). His song "Truckin' My Blues Away" was the origin of the phrase "keep on truckin'".

I heard What's That Smell Like Fish on Edge of Americana this week.
Smokin'!

Jesse Fuller

2011-11-17T16:59:00.001-05:00

Jesse Fuller wrote The Monkey and the Engineer. A song covered by many musicians, including the Grateful Dead, and more recently Dave Rawlings. He invented that contraption next to him named the "fotdella".

From Wikipedia: The name "fotdella" was given to the instrument by Fuller's wife, who took to calling it a "foot-diller" (as in the then-current expression, "killer-diller", meaning exceedingly good); later, it became shortened to just fotdella.

Here he is (shoeless) playing all that stuff.

Perfect

2011-11-16T16:36:00.001-05:00

Yum (new favorite sign)

2011-11-14T16:33:00.001-05:00

I love this sign. This bar is located in the Dingle, in Cumberland, Maryland.
Yes, the wood chuck is a groundhog.
In literary parlance, a dingle is a deep wooded valley or dell.
In contemporary Cumberland, it's an intersection, or what I like to think of as a confluence of streets.

2011-11-09T17:41:00.000-05:00

I recently scanned some old negatives for a chapbook I'm making and came across this image of my former neighbor Naomi's window. I lived at 195 E. Main Street in Frostburg, Md for a little over a year. She was a major reason why I wanted the apartment. In her mid 80's, nearly deaf and sweet as hell, I would occasionally play the accordion for her, she would give me jars of homemade beef stew, and I photographed her on a number of occasions. She died a few years ago. I'm glad I have these pictures.

Matt King

2011-11-08T12:22:00.001-05:00

Mike, 2006

Plaster, mop, wood, paint, foil, work shirts, string, 6-pack ring

30" x 36" x 72"

Matt King is a sculpture professor at VCU.
More of his work can be found here.

2011-10-31T21:20:00.001-05:00

This autumn's swifts, August 6, 2011 7:15 pm

Notes from a Lecture

2011-10-27T20:36:00.000-05:00

2011-10-27T09:02:00.000-05:00

Moyra Davey's work is featured in Moma's most recent exhibition of New Photography. The work is direct, deep.

See more of her work here.

2011-10-19T15:01:00.004-05:00

Laura Sharp Wilson has a website!

Women's Relief Society, 2010

Acrylic and graphite on Unryu paper mounted on wood panel

18" x 12"

The 14th Annual Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts

2011-10-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

Just last night I received Richmond Magazine's Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts. The prize is given annually to a dozen (or so) visual, and performing artists who live in Richmond. The artists are chosen by a committee made of previous award winners. This year's selectors said of my work:

Michael Lease's photography addresses the familiarity and accessibility of the snapshot with an enhanced awareness of the world. He is a community-focused artist who brings people together in a collective experience, as he did when he choreographed a performance event of onlookers gathering to admire the flight of chimney swifts. He sees things others do not and captures them for us.

It's a real honor to be in the company of those who have won the Pollak in the past, as well as this year's winners: Tanja Softic, Ana Ines King and the Latin Ballet of Virginia, Rex Richardson, Susan Iverson, Samson Trinh & the Upper East Side Big Band, Eric Knight, Todd Raviotta, Scott Wichmann, Joshua Poteat, and Myra Daleng.

Damn good company!

Brad Walker suggests...

2011-10-11T10:28:00.003-05:00

John Stezaker

Small Worlds

2011-08-20T17:49:00.005-05:00

Former student and good friend, Ed DeWitt, asked if I'd put together a show for the grand opening of the gallery above his camera shop in Cumberland, Maryland. He suggested I do something with all of the unclaimed pictures that were left in the store when he bought it a few years ago. Agreeing that that was a fine idea, I solicited help from he and Kim, and we've put together Small Worlds: Unclaimed Snapshots from DeWitt Camera Centre.

The exhibit will run Sept 10 - Oct 29, with an opening reception on Sat Sept 10, from 5-8 pm.

July 19, 2011--Dubuque, Iowa

2011-08-09T07:17:00.002-05:00

July 19, 2011--Dubuque, Iowa

Northern MN is very flat with lots of lakes and rivers caused by the last ice age. Whenever you look out the car window, if you don't see a lake, you see a pond. Very wet. And flat. About 20 south of Minneapolis, however, it began to be full of rolling farm land, and then it became somewhat mountainous. Not the Rockies, but more than hills. Anyway...

After breakfast this morning we went to the Red Wing shoe store to see the world's largest boot. It's an actual boot about 20 feet high built by the Red Wing shoemakers, just real big! Anything to get into the record books.

Using his thumbnail, Dad carved his name into a hide that was on display at the Red Wing historical exhibit.
I did not do this. 7/18/2011

After our hearts stopped pounding, we continued on our way to Wabasha, MN. The National Bald Eagle Center is there, but there's an admission price, so it wasn't for us. We went to the riverfront and saw our own bald eagle. Wabasha is another one of those towns that died a long time ago but still struggles to stand up. Empty streets at 11:30 in the morning, lots of shuttered stores, etc. Sad. Michael loves to stroll through these towns.

Despite having the Eagle Center, Wabasha was empty. 7/18/2011

We then continued down the road to lock number 5 on the river and watched a boat push I think 12 barges (hooked together) through the lock. The barges had to be unhooked and it took two raisings and lowerings to get them all through. Very time-consuming, and there are lots of locks that have to be gone through. Not the most interesting work in the world. Not like accounting, say.

The gray things in the foreground are the covers on barges in Lock No. 5. We watched as the barges were lowered in the lock. 7/18/2011

The next stop was Winona (Michael said Winona Ryder is named after this town). Larger than Wabasha, and loaded with interesting architecture from the 1800s, but dead. After that we crossed into Wisconsin and drove through the Trempeleau National Wildlife Refuge that is attempting to bring back the prairie grasses. Interesting. We would have taken a walk there, but the deer flies were swarming the car, and we didn't dare.

Hills in the Trempeleau Nat'l Wildlife Refuge. 7/19/2011

The super cool, Prairie School, Merchant's National Bank in Winona was a surprise in the center of a town made up of mostly late 19th century buildings.

After driving through enormous farms of corn, and on our way to Dubuque, we were passing through the little town of Dickeyville, WI, when we stumbled upon the Dickeyville Grotto, an absolutely amazing roadside attraction. The grotto is on the grounds of a Catholic church, The priest, Father Matthias Wernerus, who was there for about 30 years, spent five years building the grotto out of bits of broken glass, shells, stones, and other pieces of stuff he found. It's indescribable; you'll have to Google it or something.

Dad at Dickeyville Grotto. 7/19/2011

The hazy evening made it difficult to capture the grotto's splendor. 7/19/2011

A detail of the grotto. It was made up mostly of shells, glass, and rocks. 7/19/2011

We're spending the night in Dubuque. Tomorrow we head to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's birthplace.

July 17, 2011--St. Cloud, MN

2011-08-06T18:24:00.001-05:00

Dad crosses the Mississippi River, Lake Itasca, MN. 7/16/2011

July 17, 2011--St. Cloud, MN

Calamity!! Michael's computer is broken, so I wasn't able to blog last night. Without constant internet service I feel like the pioneers must have felt (but with a cell phone, GPS, e-reader...).

Anyway... On Saturday we drove north to try to get into Lake Itasca State Park. Like other state run stuff in MN the park was closed, but we found an entrance which, though closed to traffic, was very close to where we wanted to be, so we parked on the road and walked in. The visitor's center was closed but all the info about the headwaters of the Mississippi was posted outside, so no problem.

The Mississippi flows out of Lake Itasca in a very narrow stream, so we were able to step across it. And it's shallow, so you can wade down the middle if you want. We saw some old guy (my age, probably) take off his shoes and wade down the river, but he didn't roll up his jeans, so they were soaked. Old people are crazy! We walked around the lake for awhile battling deer flies and then headed north towards Bemidji.

A wet-jeaned pilgrim's progress, Lake Itasca, MN. 7/16/2011

Bemidji, as all of you are no doubt aware, is the home of the famous huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the blue Ox. You've seen pictures of them. And it turns out northern MN is full of statues of Paul and Babe. We saw one today in which Paul was holding a bowling ball and babe had a bowling pin in his (her?) mouth.

Dad didn't mention the huge lake that Bemidji lay astride. Bemidji, MN, 7/16/2011

After Bemidji we headed south and stayed overnight in the small town of Brainerd.

This morning, while waiting for Best Buy to open so Michael could have the laptop checked out--they said it's toast--we hung around in a huge sporting goods/farming stuff/auto store called Fleet Farm. Among scads of other things, it must have at least 10,000 fishing poles. Fishing is very big here, as are hunting and snowmobiling.

Paul and Babe sculpture, Brainerd. Brainerd, MN, 7/17/2011

After Best Buy we took a walking tour of Brainerd that I had downloaded on to my Nook. Kind of interesting, but most interesting is that almost all the historic sites mentioned are long gone. So walking around looking at the sites is kind of dumb. But we did it. Interestingly, the place where we parked, the First National Bank, which is still actually there, was once robbed by Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang. They left town spraying bullets from their machine guns, just like the movies.

The bowling Paul and Babe were a highlight of Baxter, MN. Baxter, MN, 7/17/2011

Next stop was Little Falls. There's a dam there, and there used to be a logging operation, with logjams and the whole nine yards of logging. No longer there, of course, but still fun to look at the old stuff. We walked around town looking at old stores, etc. The town may bustle during the week (though I doubt it), but on Sunday it is completely dead. And that's part of its charm if you're just visiting.

A big mural in Little Falls depicting River Pigs shepherding logs down the river. Little Falls, MN, 7/17/2011

Some random observations: It's very, very hot and humid. Every time I get out of the car or a building, my glasses fog up. It's supposed to be this way most of the week, with temps in the mid to high 90s. It's hard to believe it gets so cold in the winter. And speaking of snow, mailboxes along the highway are designed so they can be raised as the snowplows pile the snow higher and higher.

Tomorrow it's on to Minneapolis; Michael needs an art gallery fix.

July 15, 2011--St. Cloud, MN

2011-08-01T20:53:00.003-05:00

Over the next week (or so) I'll be republishing the entries from my Dad's blog that record our recent trip together down the upper half of the Mississippi River. If you'd like to read his blog, go here.

July 15, 2011--St. Cloud, MN
Because my wife of almost 46 years wouldn't take her husband and son to the airport--she had a yoga class she couldn't miss--Michael and I spent Thursday night at Donna's, and she graciously drove us there.

Anyway, we flew to Kansas City, MO, from Reagan, and then got stuck in KC for about five hours because of storms in Minneapolis, our final destination. The KC airport is designed in such a way that if you're stopping there awaiting another flight from the same airline, you can't leave the boarding area and return unless you want to pass through security again. So you can't take a walk, browse in a bookstore, get something decent to eat, unless you do that. We didn't. We just sat in the boarding area for what turned out to be five hours and watched peoples' Kindles, and Nooks, and laptops run out of battery power.

There really are a lot of lakes in Minnesota. 7/15/11

But we finally got on the plane, and now we're here in St. Cloud, along the Great River Road. Tomorrow we'll continue north to Itasca State Park where we'll be locked out because of the State's budget problems.

Headed down Big River

2011-07-13T11:14:00.001-05:00

Image lifted from bchpics.com

My Dad and I are are headed down the Mississippi River for the first ever father-son Lease vacation starting this Friday. We're flying into Minneapolis, renting a car and then driving north to the headwaters in Lake Itasca, MN. Dad will be writing a daily journal and I'll be illustrating it w/ the best pictures of the day. My Dad is a great writer. He's efficient, funny and candid. He'll be posting to Travels with Kenny, and I'll be re-posting here at Annabelle's Aspirin.

Do check in!

Record of Receipt

2011-05-04T16:05:00.005-05:00

Alec Soth and Co. over at Little Brown Mushroom were sweet to acknowledge having received FLOWERS.

Hi from DC!

2011-05-01T14:38:00.001-05:00

The Original Rhinestone Cowboy

2011-04-11T15:10:00.004-05:00

Loy Allen Bowlin

Here he is on his tombstone in Mount Zion Cemetery, Franklin County, Mississippi, USA

Laura Sharp Wilson at McKenzie Fine Art

2011-03-24T16:18:00.002-05:00

Utah Laura Sharp Wilson's exhibit of new paintings opens tonight at McKenzie Fine Art in Chelsea. Show runs through April 30. Wish I could be there.
See more of her work here.

Screen, 2010

Ode to a Dead Misogynist, 2010

Nov. 28, 2010

2010-12-09T22:12:00.005-05:00

A Smattering

2010-11-16T07:42:00.007-05:00

New Jersey Wedding Fruit

Surry, Va's Bacon's Castle

Field of Back-lit Va. Cotton

Fim's First Ferry Foray

Corner of S. Brunswick and Main Streets, Richmond.

2010-11-14T22:31:00.002-05:00

TJ's Poplar Forest

2010-11-14T22:25:00.002-05:00

So Long (not Goodbye), A Slow Song for Swifts

2010-10-06T20:18:00.004-05:00

It happened, it was good-- great even.
I conceived and organized it as a way to say "so long" to Richmond's Chimney Swifts who will soon be leaving for their winter home in Peru.
Somewhere between 60-80 people came.
The cops didn't arrest us (no permission was secured).
Everyone faced the roosting birds.
I read an introduction to the evening, the birds, and my history with them.
Mark from Metro Sound on Broad Street provided power for the PA.
Mary Elfner from the Audubon Society talked about the ways of the swifts.
Jonathan Vassar and The Speckled Bird played music while they roosted.
The band didn't plug in.
You could hear them and the sweet chatters of the swifts.

It was all very beautiful.

All photos by Kim Wolfe.
Poster design, card and text by MKL.
Video by Andrew.

My Intro:

The idea of this- me here, you there, and them there was borne out of looking—looking out a north-facing window, in a room, in an apartment, worlds away from here. This north-facing window was the one I’d use to check the weather—the one I would lean out to talk to a friend passing by the candy store below, that I closed on foggy days because the exhaust from trucks wafts into second floor apartments in small Appalachian towns. The room that held this window was spacious and (no thanks to me) sparsely furnished. On the sill was a small, potted Crown of Thorns (also known as a Christ plant); next to the window was a radiator, next to the radiator a pair of hand-hewn candlesticks, and next to the candlesticks a cherry bookshelf. It was at that window that I would sit and read. I taught myself to play the accordion at that window; late at night I would stand there looking out on my little city before heading to bed.

It must be because I was a bartender and rarely home for sunset that it took me so long to notice the small birds swirling above the slender chimney across the street. I knew the building well—a former Chevrolet dealership smack in the city center—its gaggle of rooftops, skylights and chimneys intrigued me before I lived in the apartment. How could I have I missed the birds? I had even gained access to the shuttered structure to photograph it! The day I noticed must have been a Sunday. The bar was closed on Sundays and when finally I witnessed them swirling, swooping and then dropping into the stack dozens at a time I was thrilled.

Seeing this aerial performance across from where I lived led me to the library, to friends majoring in science and to the Internet. After my numerous conversations and trips to the library my view out that window was changed. No longer was I simply watching some birds fly around outside my window. Now I was looking through glass and seeing much further and much more than what had previously been there. The view became wider, deeper, in all ways more vast.

Before Jonathan Vassar and The Speckled Bird perform, Mary Elfner, a friend and an environmental scientist with the Audubon Society, will be talking to you about the characteristics of these birds that I learned were called Chimney Swifts. I’m going to leave the details of their migration, feeding, nesting and flying to a person I want to call an expert, but was encouraged to call an enthusiast.

I just want to say one more thing before I hand over the mic to Mary and the band. As much as it was the swooping, the flitting, the diving, and THE FLYING, that attracted me to these creatures, it wasn’t my envy for or desire to fly that fueled my interest. Instead it was the birds’ habit to come and go that has intrigued me. I’m not envious of their ease of travel. Instead, I find it fascinating that year after year, they continue to return to the same place. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize them, but I also can’t help but be a little jealous of the ease with which they gather and cohabitate.

Much has been made of the bird as a metaphor and I don’t have much to add to the subject—in fact it’s probably best if I publicly acknowledge that the author Douglas Coupland’s neologism “metaphasia – the inability to perceive metaphor” applies perfectly to me. With that said, I’m thrilled that Jonathan Vassar and The Speckled Bird have agreed to contribute to this experience and I trust that their sonic treatment of the subject will say more than I ever could with words. These swifts are urban birds and their roosting, regardless of how many people notice, is a social experience. Thank you for watching them with me.

2010-09-26T10:13:00.000-05:00

A bear in a yard.

Doin' it for Churls...

2010-08-06T21:44:00.002-05:00

William Byrd Hotel Barbershop

2010-08-05T20:24:00.001-05:00

I got a great haircut today at the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop. I'm not sure what my hair actually looks like, and to be honest, I generally go to a salon or barber w/ no idea of what I want my hair to look like (other than this) so usually just say something vague and let them decide. Not to brag, but I'm blessed w/ a classically shaped cranium so most haircuts work just fine.

Back at the Wm. Byrd, a guy named John cut my hair. He looked to be in his mid to late 80's, small clip-on bow tie, white barber jacket, smart haircut (I told him that I liked his hair and that he should make mine look like his).

He was generous in his questions of my life, his pace was refreshing, and his handshake gracious. He came to Richmond in 1949 to go to barber school (he's from Westmoreland Cty, Va.), and has been at the Wm. Byrd since 1951. It's astonishing to think of all he's seen out the window of that barbershop.

Putting it Out There

2010-06-21T14:30:00.004-05:00

I'm currently working towards a synthesis of imagery that bolsters my idea of an analogy between the vernacular images we live amongst, and the vernacular structures we live within.

Are photographs an invisible architecture, influencing the ways in which we move through the world?

Finally

2010-06-01T21:26:00.001-05:00

What I Know about Day for Night

2010-06-01T21:18:00.003-05:00

What I Read in the Basement of the Hotel Gunter

2010-06-01T21:10:00.001-05:00

What I Saw at Westover Plantation

2010-06-01T20:51:00.002-05:00

2010-05-12T06:37:00.002-05:00

It's come as a bit of surprise to everyone, but just so you know:

Kim and I are getting married this Saturday, May 15 at 4:30, in a small field, in a small town, next to a small tree.

It's a bigger deal than the small details may let on.

POSTHUMOUS - Opens at American Univ. Museum - Sat., May 8, 6-8pm

2010-05-04T23:14:00.005-05:00

POSTHUMOUS Michael Lease

May 8 - June 6, 2010
Opening: Saturday, May 8 6-8 pm

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016
www.american.edu\museum
202-885-1300

Hours: 11am-4pm Tuesday-Sunday

Image: Rachel (detail), 2005, color thermal print, pencil, Sharpie, wheat, water, 11x14 in.

From the curator:

Employing personal and collected snapshots, Michael Lease’s work encourages viewers to consider the cultural use of photographs. For the project Posthumous, first mounted in 2005, Lease uses his own images and recollections, turning a quasi-anthropological eye onto his own past.

Through the combination of snapshots and texts, Posthumous distills years’ worth of intimate moments between Lease, various friends, and lovers. Wheat-pasted directly to the gallery walls and coupled with hand-written vignettes, the intimate yet familiar images belie a mountain of experience beyond the frame. Simultaneously personal and universal, Posthumous asks viewers to reflect on their own pictures, weighing the similarities of these stories against their own.

Like the obituaries, public memorials, and remembrance walls that Lease credits as inspiration for the work, the gallery is used as a space in which a story about the past can be told. By inserting private images into a public space, Lease pays homage to the people that shaped him and reminds us that, no matter how we tuck them away (in boxes beneath the bed or buried on a hard drive), photographs play a pivotal role in structuring our histories

Allison Peck, Curator

2010-03-12T20:41:00.004-05:00

The PDA Show

2010-03-05T13:50:00.007-05:00

Roof Top Garden Club, Hotel Utah", 2010 by Anthony Ithuralde

Artist, hero, and friend Laura Sharp Wilson has spent the past 6 months putting together The PDA Show in her new home, Salt Lake City. She and husband Robert (former drummer in legendary Western Maryland band Sadhu), and their son Owen moved there (maybe?) a year ago from Olympia, Wa.

Spurned on by the news of a gay couple being arrested for a peck on the cheek while on the grounds of the Latter Day Saints temple in SLC, Laura placed a call out for artists to respond to the news, and to the idea of public displays of affection in general. 50 of us responded. The show opened last weekend.

Laura has done a great job communicating with all of us during the lead up to the show (she created a blog and posted all of the work submitted) and has sending us updates about how the work was received. Q Salt Lake, SLC's featured the show on the cover of their recent issue. Read the article.

For my part, I sent two images from a series that I'm calling Reading Blues.

Untitled (Richmond Reading Blues #1, 2), 2010

These are images from a collection of pictures clipped from newspaper obituaries. I have been clipping and saving for a number of years, and this is the first that I've enlarged and printed any of them. I collect all kinds of obituaries, but for The PDA Show I thought it would be interesting to focus on images of African American men. Enlarging the pictures emphasizes the newspaper's half-tone printing process, and like the reading, clipping, scanning that I do, there is a kind of unlikely communion that happens as a result of the isolation and enlargement of the image. I took Laura's question of PDA to be a question not of others but of myself. I can't undervalue the opportunity that the daily perusal of the obits affords me. In their pages, I have the uncommon - and in Richmond, the unlikely - opportunity to look into the eyes of these men and wonder in which ways we are the same.

There's lots of great work in the show. Here's a favorite by LA's Paul Evans (I like those little flags in the corner):

Hope Springs Eternal (Gay is Good), 2010 by Paul Evans

Thanks Laura!

Existential Quaygmire?

2010-02-16T23:57:00.002-05:00

Leah Scarpelli does it Again!

2009-11-22T14:05:00.003-05:00

Leah, a production assistant for NPR's Morning Edition showed up at the opening for mine and Nellie Appleby's exhibit Hunt or Gather at the Allegany Arts Council's Saville Gallery in Cumberland, Maryland.

Here's short slide show she put together.

Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On

2009-11-04T21:02:00.009-05:00

Here are images of the installation that's up at the Allegany Art Council's Saville Gallery until November 20, 2009.

Here are the words I wrote about the project:

Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On is a continuation of my interest in gathering photographs from vernacular, or everyday, collections. Previous projects include: snapshots of people blowing out birthday candles; a grouping of pictures of ex-girlfriends and ex-best friends; and my largest collection – and longest on-going project—hundreds of photographs of strangers, their pets, their vacations, teenagers in their bedrooms, and pictures of their cars, found while walking, riding my bike, perusing copy shop trash cans, peering beneath the lids of supermarket photo scanners, walking through parking lots, riding trains, shopping...

As a person who makes art, I am concerned with making the act of making make something other than the thing made. Or, to put it another way, I want the work I do to work in a way that makes it something other than a piece of work. That being said, many of my projects are collaborative and make plain the relationship between the components.

For Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On I solicited pictures from friends, family, former students, and acquaintances in an effort to create a multifaceted group portrait. Participants were asked to send 4 photographs: a school picture from between the ages 13-17; a picture of the pillow on which they sleep; a picture shot though an oft-viewed domestic window; and a current picture of themselves.

In gathering and exhibiting these images, I’m wondering what happens when photographs from all of these lives are brought together. Is it possible to infer from the portraits the history that occurred between the making of the picture from high school and the one from 3 months ago? Does seeing the images – the pillow with its neighboring lamp and alarm clock, or the window views, be they of the Maryland countryside or Berlin – contribute to our understanding of the subject? What it is that we learn from looking?

Here is a list of the participants:

First row, from left George Allen, Prague, Czech Republic

Greg Auldridge, Rockville, MD

Robert Barrientes, Hopewell, VA

Jen Berlingo, Richmond, VA

Arlen Bolstad, Richmond, VA

Jennifer Browne, Frostburg, MD

Jason Burnett, Penland, NC

Drew Castillo, Washington, DC

Ed DeWitt, Cumberland, MD

Michelle Dove, Washington, DC

Paul Evans, Los Angeles, CA

Sharyn Frederick, Alexandria, VA

Chris Freeman, Richmond, VA

Travis Fullerton, Richmond, VA

Seth Glass, Boonsboro, MD

Second row, from left Langdon Graves, Brooklyn, NY

Heather Guhl, Fredericksburg, VA

Butch Haggard, LaVale, MD

Jessie Henson, New York, NY

Traci Horne, Richmond, VA

Michael Huggins, Berlin, Germany

Darrin Isom, LaVale, MD

Megan Kress, Bowie, MD

Kate Lacey, Brooklyn, NY

Debbie Lease, Montvale, NJ

Donna Lease, Arlington, VA

Ken Lease, Upper Marlboro, MD

Michael Lease, Richmond, VA

Peter Lease, Montvale, NJ

Serafina Lease, Upper Marlboro, MD

Third row, from left Kate MacDonnell, Washington, DC

Meg Mack-McAbee, Huntington, MD

Stephen Manger, Frostburg, MD

Susan Manger, Frostburg, MD

Sherrie Noonan, Frostburg, MD

Tiffany Seay, Farmville, VA

Todd Shelar, Baltimore, MD

R.S., Rawlings, MD

Brigette Thomas, Richmond, VA

Brad Walker, Baltimore, MD

Liz Wille, Rome, Italy

Laura Sharp-Wilson, Salt Lake City, UT

Kimberly Wolfe, Richmond, VA

2009-10-26T21:09:00.003-05:00

How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank

2009-09-20T17:25:00.003-05:00

“Sidney paints his fingernails shocking pink, a brilliantly audacious gesture that exposes the discorroborative bias of Revlon’s vacuity, while trenchantly confirming lipstick as a phallic ploy of alpha males vis-à-vis Derrida’s strategies of discorroboration.”

There a post worth perusing about Duane Michal's book Foto follies: How Photography Lost its Virginity on the Way to the Bank over at PPV

Heidelberg

2009-08-30T22:09:00.003-05:00

Then...

Continuing my Glacial Pace...

2009-08-23T20:45:00.011-05:00

Missing from my previous Penland posts are pictures of some of the amazing people (other than Alyssa) I spent time with over those nearly three weeks.

This is Mark- he's the generous, mind expanding photo-studio coordinator that Alyssa and I both fell in love with. When you and I are together I'll tell you about the time we spent at his home. A truly great person that I'm looking forward to knowing for a long time.

Being such a social place there was lots (and lots) of dancing.

Here are some of the people from the class. From the left: Alyssa; Frank, a former Richmonder who has (quasi) dropped out in the mountains of North Carolina so he can be near Penland; Ebony, just back from three years in Angola - the country, not the prison, and originally from Baltimore; Suzie, from California, lived for many years in Winston-Salem, now retired with her husband to Floyd, Virginia; Becky, one of our classes main attractions, a recent graduate of the College of Charleston and student of Michelle Van Parys, Ashley, from Maine, one of the funniest people you'll meet, attending Maine College of Art this fall; and Liz recently back from a jilt inducing road trip, a bad ass hipster w/ Richmond roots, and also a student of Michelle Van Parys.

The paper class made a hot air balloon that was fueled by hairdryers. Beautiful. There was a huge loving crowd who cheered as the balloon made a slow, tumbling descent down the hill. If I went to Penland again and took a class I'd take a paper-making class. The class was chock full of good people.

Watching the balloon launch. Top row: Ashley (see above); Liz (see above); Jackie, in the painting class, we enjoyed a ginger aid soda and a meal together but otherwise I know little of Jackie; Shelly, Shelly was in Arthur Hash's class, from Olympia WA, in the band Razzmatazz there and an amazing singer - more about her later; guy I didn't meet; Suzie (see above); front row: ?; Alison, another of Alyssa's students, lives in Raleigh, is truly her own person and a DJ of a Monday morning (9-12) show on WXDU, Alison was happy to be away from home, citing that at home she's "mama-san" and that at Penland she got to be her own person.

As we drove off these were the faces that bid us farewell. Additions to the crew are the two on the right. In the brown tank top is Megan, a recent graduate of Cranbrook and the studio assistant for the paper class, on the first day we met Megan called me out for mentioning suicide twice during dinner; and Jason, a Penland core student who, like all the core students, did an amazing job making sure that all of us had an amazing time during our class, and also took the time to let me in and show me his Penland.

Alyssa

2009-08-17T21:51:00.006-05:00

I went to Penland to assist Alyssa with the class of 19th century photo processes she was teaching. The images above are from an outing to Spruce Pine that we took on a gray Sunday. There's a lot I could say about Alyssa but I'll opt to let the pictures speak.

Go here for Alyssa's website and here for her blog.

Mornings at Penland

2009-08-09T17:11:00.012-05:00

Penland is nestled near the top of a large mountain and overlooks a meadow that I assume is owned by the school. Weeknights at Penland are given to slide lectures where instructors and their assistants present their work. Most lectures include an image shot by the speaker of the meadow during some previous stay at the school. This meadow, archetypal in its representation of all things meadow-ish, has no doubt helped to foster the near mythical devotion that so many speakers expressed about being in these hills.

Each morning as I walked to breakfast I'd head straight to the road to see what state the meadow was in (and to see whether or not I could capture it in a photograph). The mornings when the clouds were lodged between the hills were my favorite. On these days I would continuously look towards the meadow and watch as slowly the mountains in the distance would reveal themselves.

Back to Planet Spider

2009-08-05T18:09:00.003-05:00

I'm back, in a slight state of shock, and going through my pictures deciding what and how I'll post. Here's a good one to start with... I shot it before I left using Kim's point and shoot and my new monocular. The blobs are a spider and her egg sac, the brown forms are leaves on the roof outside our kitchen window.

I thought I might do something with this image or shoot more like it while at Penland. I didn't but during the time I've been gone the spider has produced at least 3 additional sacs and there are little baby spiders everywhere. There are also lots of people, cars, the sounds of the highway, light pollution, land lines, bills...

Sigh...

2 Good Finds

2009-07-13T20:05:00.004-05:00

I haven't found a photograph for quite a while (and am unfortunately getting used to it). But today was another story and I found a handful in a nasty alley close to VCU. I've found quite a few pictures in this alley and I generally check it out anytime the trash cans are overflowing.

Here are two good ones:

I'm headed to Penland on Friday and looking forward to nearly 3 weeks of (relatively) uninterrupted thinking and making. I'll be assisting Alyssa Salomon during a class she's teaching on alt photo processes and am damn excited. Two things will be stranger than most of the other things that may be strange: 1. Kim won't be there and 2. I don't have to cook or clean... wild.

Summer Reading

2009-06-09T13:08:00.005-05:00

Chris Freeman is Funnier than You

2009-05-21T21:25:00.003-05:00

CBF is in art school and I think his classmates should feel threatened.

Go here for more.

Mom Sent Pictures from Dad's Piano Recital

2009-05-18T15:02:00.006-05:00

He played Over the Waves

Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On

2009-05-13T10:28:00.002-05:00

I'm working on a new project called Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On and am hoping that you'll participate. I have been collecting 4 specific photographs from friends, family and a few acquaintances for the past few months (a few of you have already sent me your pictures- thanks!) and am really happy about the way it's coming together. Part of the project is being exhibited at the Allegany Arts Council in October (with more venues to come) and I'm looking to make a book out of the work.

The project is somewhat similar to something I did in the past that you can see here: You're Invited and it shares some characteristics with SAMETIME 7:15

If you're interested please look over the following info (click to enlarge). If you send me your email address I'll send you a higher res version that you can print out.

Thanks!

Walking Through Western Virginia

2009-05-03T22:02:00.004-05:00

Jefferson's Rotunda

Madison's Grave

Curtain Rod Character

2009-04-22T17:53:00.005-05:00

Brad Walker's new project Curtain Rod Character (nee Some Monastery) is available for free download. Check it out! It's F-R-E-E.

Here's a picture of Brad and his sweet fella-friend Richie (Reechie).

Chris Freeman is in Danger!

2009-04-20T16:07:00.003-05:00

Go here for more.

2009-04-05T20:16:00.002-05:00

Triangular Forest

2009-03-21T19:14:00.009-05:00

The last few years I lived in Frostburg I gravitated towards the Carey Run Bird Sanctuary just outside of town in Garrett county. The reason for going there wasn't to see, hear, or think about birds. The destination was a walk through what a handful of us called the mathematical forest. No doubt the result of an effort to reforest an area previously logged or mined, the mathematical forest was a beautifully sloped 10-12 acre stand of the most unnatural stand of pines trees.

Todd in the Mathematical Forest, 2004

Stumbling upon the forest unaware was similar to walking through my first strip mine. It was close to the highway but always dead quiet. A monoculture is a very quiet place- being within one is like being somewhere where everyone is so similar they don't have anything to say to one another. The floor of this forest was blanketed with a thick mulch of pine needles and a fern-ish rhizome that I've never tried to identify.

By the looks of Google's satellite images, a lot of the mathematical forest is gone.
I've circled what is left of it.

Trolling Google maps a few weeks ago I came across this stand of trees not far from our apartment. The invisible-from-the-ground shape of this stand of trees (feminine, no?) hemmed in by CSX tracks on all sides- no doubt promised some kind of magic similar to that of the mathematical forest.

What a treat then that when I showed friends Matt and Kendall this picture Matt suggested we head over there after lunch. We walked over and entered at the Northwestern point of the triangle and traversed nearly all of it.

That's all I'm saying. There's more- a lot more- but for now it gestates. The next time I go there it'll work itself out a little bit more. There is a triangulation here. One of mathematical and triangular forests, strip mines and walks with friends. Come visit and we'll go for a walk.

2009-03-18T18:24:00.003-05:00

We watched A Zed and Two Noughts last week.
Have you seen it?

Kind of Similar- but Pretty Different

2009-03-01T12:52:00.005-05:00

Kim:

Michael:

Kim:

Michael:

Kim:

Michael:

Chris + Matt

2009-02-15T08:31:00.004-05:00

I can't get enough Chris Freeman - I really can't.

His blog is excellent and he's also a fan of the architectural chapeau.

2009-02-12T21:21:00.001-05:00

2009-01-30T11:09:00.002-05:00

Just returned from installing Liz's work in Savannah. It's the last stop on the tour. Check it out if you find yourself in charming Savannah.

2009-01-16T13:44:00.002-05:00

I grew up in Upper Marlboro, Maryland and this was the first Bob Dylan song I ever liked.

This Semester's Crop

2008-12-28T23:53:00.002-05:00

2008-12-11T17:03:00.001-05:00

Well of course it only makes sense that there was an organist before Bob Gulledge but I had never thought about that.

Smokin'!

2008-12-04T00:07:00.000-05:00

Report from Providence 1

2008-11-22T20:55:00.008-05:00

Preamble (not a disclaimer):
The following posts are a long time coming and I won't offer up excuses but I will mention the 35 students, the projects, interviews, meals, dishes, emails, deadlines, bus and bike rides, sudden surprises, and expected drags that have happened since November 8th when I got back from Rhode Island. None of these things are terrible, not one bit, they just are. Sometimes I get my wits about me, figure out a good strategy for getting all my ducks in order, and usually this means that I need to put my actual self a couple of weeks in front of my virtual self.

I went to Providence, RI to help install Liz King's exhibit The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye. We installed her retrospective at Brown University's Bell Gallery. The gallery is housed in the Philip Johnson designed List Art Center right on "The Hill", the picturesque portion of Providence occupied by both Brown and RISD.

I loved Providence-- although I didn't see much of it as we worked over 100 hours in 7 days-- but mine and Shawn's walk to the house where we stayed on Williams street was nice. The city is full of classic New England wood framed houses (many of them Second Empire), with a number of converted light industrial brick buildings. Providence is home to the First Baptist Church in America- literally the first in the colonies, founded in 1638. Like the other NE towns and cities I've visited, there is a different type of historical observance in Providence than the kind we know in in places like DC or Richmond. No doubt the New Yankee Workshop guy was just around the corner (any corner) in Providence.

Liz's show in Nebraska this past summer was also installed in a Philip Johnson designed building (the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln). I thought the differences between the two building were really striking. One, the exterior of The List was energizing-- the story I heard was that Brown ran out of money during the project and decided not to sheath the building in the marble panels that Johnson had specified (the Sheldon is faced in a mausoleum-like marble). The story goes that Brown decided to leave the building as it was at the point the funds dried up-- a tall and thin cast concrete mass- that makes plain its being made of a series of blocks. Each of the blocks is marked by either one or two holes (ostensibly) intended to be used for adhering the marble onto the structure. Who knows if any of this is true (I've never claimed to be a journalist) but the building is like a big sheet of uncut shortbread. I say this in the nicest of ways.

The building also really benefits from being snuggled by the classic buildings of both Brown and RISD, and seems to have been slid into the space between an old library and (what I remember to have been) a Victorian era Colonial style administrative building. From the little I saw of Providence, this is the only building of its kind. It is also the rare building that has eyelashes. My sources intuited (as did I) that the skin-tag, eye-flap, blinders at the top of the building served the purpose of blocking some of the direct sun that would have entered the top floors. I'm really not sure about this but it sounds good. I unfortunately didn't get a picture of the great porch (porch is too domestic a descriptor, but it was much more than a balcony) on the second floor. Unlike the Sheldon, the front yard of the List was a small grove of trees-- some elms, some ginkgoes, a tulip poplar or two-- and the porch was nestled in the boughs of these trees.

The lobby was also good- again because of the trees (the huge windows don't hurt). The Sheldon also had huge windows- in fact they were much larger, and there were two sets of them, but they looked too far out towards the UNL campus instead of onto (or into) a copse of trees as Johnson so often intended.

So that's the exterior, the lobby and the second floor porch. What about the rest? The Bell Gallery space is fine-- it's all it needs to be- a huge box w/ no windows. Perfect for transforming a space to fit Liz's work. The rest of the building, except the balconies on the topmost floor which overlooked the city, was pretty damn crappy. The basement was the only floor that had both a women's and men's restroom.

Enough said.

I'm Not the Only One Influenced by Ivan Illich

2008-11-20T22:16:00.002-05:00

From the New York Times (they eventually make these articles unavailable, so in the spirit of Hyde here we go):

November 16, 2008

What Is Art For?

By DANIEL B. SMITH

Last April I asked the writer Lewis Hyde if he would take a trip with me to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. At 63, Hyde has boyishly tousled brown-gray hair, freckled, soft-looking cheeks and the slightly abstracted gaze of a man who spends a disproportionate amount of his time in library carrels. He has an ironic streak, but his default mode is a kind of easygoing acquiescence, and so one slate gray Saturday afternoon he picked me up in Cambridge, where he lives and works half the year, and drove us the 12 miles west to Walden.

Hyde knows the area well — among his ongoing projects is a detailed series of annotations of Henry David Thoreau’s essays — and he led me down a dirt path from the parking lot to the site of the cabin where, more than 150 years ago, Thoreau wrote his celebrated paean to solitude and self-reliance. The cabin no longer exists. In its place there is a lightly excavated, cordoned-off square of soil and, to its side, a waist-high cairn erected in commemoration by generations of pilgrims.

Our own visit wasn’t commemorative, but it was a pilgrimage of a sort. Hyde has been writing and publishing for more than three decades, and he has received numerous high-profile awards, including a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1991, but his name is still obscure to most readers. His body of work is slim; he has published two books, a volume of poems and a smattering of essays, translations and edited anthologies. His reputation, however, is rich. David Foster Wallace called him “one of our true superstars of nonfiction.” Hyde’s fans — among them Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem — routinely use words like “transformative” and “life-altering” to describe his books, which they’ve been known to pass hand to hand like spiritual texts or samizdat manifestoes. The source of much of this reverence is Hyde’s first book, “The Gift” (1983), which has never been out of print (it was recently rereleased by Vintage in a 25th-anniversary edition) and which tries to reconcile the value of doing creative work with the exigencies of a market economy.

Hyde began his career as a poet in the naturalistic vein of Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver, but over the years he has transformed himself into an accomplished scholar. “The Gift,” the core argument of which depends on establishing an analogy between the making of art and how objects accrue value in traditional “gift economies,” has been praised as the most subtle, influential study of reciprocity since the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1924 essay of the same name. His second book, “Trickster Makes This World” (1998), a cross-cultural study of the mischievous, mythological trickster figure (examples from the 20th century include Duchamp, Picasso and Ginsberg), weaves together literary strands from West Africa, India and China and concludes with a new translation of the “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” for which Hyde spent months working one on one with a tutor in ancient Greek. Jonathan Lethem told me that when he first read “The Gift,” he pictured its author as a kind of inapproachable seer, either long dead or soaring so high in the intellectual stratosphere as to be unreachable. “It’d be like reading a book by Nietzsche or Freud when they were alive and thinking, Oh, I gotta send this guy a note!”

Hyde’s admirers often point out with awe (and his reviewers with frustration) that his books are all but impossible to summarize. Hyde doesn’t object to this assessment. He wrote “The Gift” because he could find no place where his own motivations for writing poetry were well articulated, but articulating them required a poet’s suggestiveness. “One thing I’ve always liked to read is the kind of literature you find in Jung and Freud, which combines personal anecdote, philosophy, mythology, dreams,” he told me in his Cambridge office last May. “I like the way it jumps from one discursive realm to another.” His books exhibit this lively heterogeneity to an at-times dizzying extent; in the course of 12 pages in “The Gift,” Hyde hops from a discussion of a Pali Buddhist parable to Marx’s “Capital” to the Ford Pinto and then moves quickly on, in the next 3 pages, to Christmas, country-western music and the psychological fates of Vietnamese refugees in Southern California.

In the late 1990s, Hyde began extending his lifelong project of examining “the public life of the imagination” into what had become newly topical territory: the “cultural commons.” The advent of Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Gnutella sparked urgent debates over how to strike a balance between public and private claims to creative work. For more than a decade, the so-called Copy Left — a diverse group of lawyers, activists, artists and intellectuals — has argued that new digital technologies are responsible for an unprecedented wave of innovation and that excessive legal restrictions should not be placed on, say, music remixes, image mashups or “read-write” sites like Wikipedia, where users create their own content. The Copy Left, or the “free culture movement,” as it is sometimes known, has articulated this position in part by drawing on the tradition of the medieval agricultural commons, the collective right of villagers, vassals and serfs —“commoners” — to make use of a plot of land. This analogy is also central to Hyde’s book in progress, which looks closely at how the tradition of the commons was transformed once it was brought from Europe to America.

For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways. Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.

In highlighting the absurd ways in which intellectual copyright has overreached, Hyde brings to mind such iconic Copy Left figures as Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional-law scholar at Stanford. Yet Hyde’s new book, which he allowed me to read in draft form (it is unfinished and untitled), addresses what he considers a more fundamental issue. We may believe there should be a limit on the market in cultural property, he argues, but that doesn’t mean that we have “a good public sense” of where to set that limit. Hyde’s book is, at its core, an attempt to help formulate that sense.

If this sounds like a heady goal, it is. But it is also eminently practical, and eminently American. For Hyde, redressing the balance between private (corporate, individual) and common (public) interests depends not just on effective policy but also on recovering the idea of the cultural commons as a deeply American concept. To that end, he excavates a history of the American imagination in which the emphasis is not on the lone genius (Thoreau scribbling hermetically in the Massachusetts woods) but on the anonymous pamphleteer, the inventor eager to share his discoveries. In an essay that offers a preview of his book (posted, fittingly, on his Web site), Hyde posits that the history of the commons and of the creative self are, in fact, twin histories. “The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms,” he writes, “is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every ‘town should have … a primitive forest …, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,’ the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance ‘exclusive right’ with ‘limited times.’ It is a tradition worth recovering.”

For nearly 10 years, Hyde has devoted himself to that task.

Hyde’s Cambridge office is located in the back of a converted carriage house near Porter Square, in the residential heart of the town. The space was offered to him rent-free by an architect who had seen him speak about “The Gift” and who liked the idea of sponsoring a “poet in residence” at her firm. Hyde’s office is bright and inviting, with meticulous piles of papers covering the surfaces, books on American intellectual and legal history stacked on the shelves and, tacked to a far wall, photocopies of several abstract drawings by the artist Max Gimblett — part of a collaborative project to reproduce an ancient parable of Buddhist enlightenment.

The countercultural air these illustrations give off goes hand in hand with Hyde’s reputation. He has often been criticized for a sort of hippie anti-corporatism. Not surprisingly, he has also been praised for the same thing: in recent years, “The Gift” has been adopted as something like the theory bible of the Burning Man festival. Yet the association hardly matches the style of his mind, which is sharp and skeptical and far from starry-eyed. Years ago, when Hyde’s hippie friends fled the city to “live off the land,” he would make sport of their idealism. “Smelting your own iron yet?” he would ask. “Distilling that kerosene?” He prefers to think of himself in an aesthetic light rather than a political one, as a writer who is upholding the tradition of the “poet-essayists who never stop being poets”: Czeslaw Milosz, William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Emerson, Thoreau.

Hyde’s link with this tradition is temperamental as well as literary. In many ways, his life embodies the diversity of experiences and exchanges he is at such pains to value in his nonfiction. Although he is currently a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a tenured professor of creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio, his self-identification remains that of a “scholar without institution” — a writer and thinker working outside the public and academic arenas.

As wide-ranging as Hyde’s intellectual flights have been, they haven’t carried him far from his origins. His Cambridge office is located six blocks from where he was born, in 1945, to a father studying for a Ph.D. in optical physics and a mother with a master’s in psychology. The atmosphere was intellectual, but in a way that Hyde now sees as narrow. “I was raised in a family where science was the real thing,” he says. “Science was the thing you did.”

As a teenager, Hyde thought he might become a geologist. By the time he was through with his studies, he had made poetry his vocation. He attended the University of Minnesota in the early ’60s, benefiting enormously from the various figures he encountered there: John Berryman, who taught poetry at the university and became a model of impassioned devotion to literature; Robert Bly, whom he met on a bus to an antiwar demonstration in D.C. and who encouraged him to try his hand at translation; Garrison Keillor, then the editor of the campus literary magazine, who was the first person to take Hyde’s poetic efforts seriously and who published Hyde’s earliest nonfiction. He spent a few years in a graduate program in comparative literature at the University of Iowa and then, bored by academia, quit and moved to western Minnesota to write.

It was in its way as much a move to the literary wilderness as was Thoreau’s move to Walden. To make ends meet, Hyde worked as a carpenter and bluffed his way into a job as an electrician at a mobile-home factory. He eventually headed East, following a girlfriend — and was unceremoniously dumped while standing at a pay phone in West Virginia. Unmoored in Boston, armed with only a youthful bravado and an essay he wrote about schizophrenia titled “The Tuber Mind,” Hyde presented himself at the psychiatric ward at Cambridge City Hospital and announced, “I’m here to be your poet in residence!” He was hired as the night guy on the drunk ward.

Strangely, the job marked the beginning of Hyde’s lifelong study of the roots of the creative imagination, and of his literary ascent. At the time, Berryman was writing and publishing his landmark “Dream Songs.” In the anguished, self-pitying tone of the poems, Hyde heard an echo of the tales spun by the residents on the ward, and he wrote a long essay drawing the parallel. “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” published in 1975, was widely anthologized and widely debated. More important, it won Hyde a $7,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which he lived on for a year and a half as he haunted libraries, tramped around and tried to figure out what he wanted to do next, and how. “I worked on how I work” is how he puts it.

At the time, Hyde’s passion for poetry was quickly being matched by a passion for cultural anthropology, particularly the writings of Ivan Illich, an Austrian priest-cum-social-critic who drew wide public attention for his book “Deschooling Society” (1971) — a polemic against modern public education. Hyde traveled to Cuernavaca, where Illich ran a language center and salon for Western missionaries heading to Latin America. It was Illich who lent Hyde a book of anthropology that contained a chapter about Marcel Mauss’s essay on gift exchange. Hyde’s intellectual course for the next several years was set.

The work captivated Hyde. “There was language in this which seemed to me metaphorically related to creativity,” he told me. Mauss was a scholar of the old polymathic sort — a sociologist, a linguist, a historian of religion, a Sanskrit expert, a philosopher. His essay on gift exchange drew on the work of the seminal turn-of-the-century ethnographers Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski to explore aboriginal societies in which the person of consequence — the man or woman who is deemed worthy of adulation, respect and emulation — is not the one who accumulates the most goods but the one who disperses them. Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.

The ideas resonated deeply with Hyde. For nearly a decade he had been struggling to explain — to his family, to nonartist friends, to himself — why he devoted so much of his time and energy to something as nonremunerative as poetry. The literature on gift exchange — tales, for example, of South Sea tribesman circulating shells and necklaces in a slow-moving, broad circle around the Trobriand Islands — gave him the conceptual tool he needed to understand his predicament, which was, he came to believe, the predicament of all artists living “in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities.” For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.

Hyde worked on “The Gift” for seven years, barely scraping by, spending long months hunting through obscure folk tales for narratives that reflected what he came to call “the commerce of the creative spirit.” When the book was finally published, the critic Martha Bayles castigated it in The New York Times for naïvely “esp[ying] a noble savage in every struggling artist” — a critique that was echoed elsewhere. Yet the artistic community immediately embraced Hyde’s work. A bevy of poets, including Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall and Gary Snyder, published a group letter in The Times responding to Bayles’s review and praising Hyde’s “search to regain the unity of economic, aesthetic, social and religious life.” Bill Viola, the pioneering video artist, remembers New York artists in the 1980s excitedly exchanging dog-eared, marked-up copies. “In a society that mostly talks about money,” says Margaret Atwood, who keeps a half-dozen copies of “The Gift” on hand at all times to distribute to artists she thinks will benefit from it, “Lewis carved out a little island where you can say, ‘Life doesn’t always work that way.’ ”

Since the mid-1980s, when his work began to gain in popularity, Hyde has often been invited to speak publicly about creativity and gift exchange. Invariably, the discussions following his lectures have wound their way to a practical question: If creative work doesn’t necessarily have any market value, how is the artist to survive?

In the course of writing “The Gift,” Hyde underwent an intellectual transformation on this subject. He began the work believing there was “an irreconcilable conflict” between gift exchange and the market; the enduring (if not necessarily the happy) artist was the one who most successfully fended off commercial demands. By the time he was finished, Hyde had come to a less-dogmatic conclusion. It was still true, he believed, that the marketplace could destroy an artist’s gift, but it was equally true that the marketplace wasn’t going anywhere; it had always existed, and it always would. The key was to find a good way to reconcile the two economies.

Following this line of thinking, Hyde grew enamored of a bill introduced in 1994 by the Democratic senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. The “Arts Endowing the Arts Act” was an unusual piece of legislation. It proposed auctioning off 20 additional years of copyright protection for creative works and using the proceeds to build a permanent endowment for the arts and humanities. In essence, Dodd wanted to create a gift economy.

The bill failed to gain any traction. The entertainment industry, led by Disney, which faced the imminent expiration of its massively lucrative copyrights on Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck, lobbied for the expansion of copyright terms without restriction. In 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed, adding 20 years to the length of copyright, both pro- and retroactively, and ensuring that thousands of creative works poised to enter the public domain remained in private hands.

As we sat in Hyde’s office on a warm day last spring, he talked passionately about why the C.T.E.A. was not only unfortunate but also unconstitutional. For Hyde, as for many legal and political scholars, the C.T.E.A. (the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” to its detractors) represents a blatant abrogation of the purpose of intellectual-property law. As he sets out to show in his book, copyright was enshrined in the Constitution for civic rather than commercial purposes. For the founders, intellectual property was a great privilege; copyrights and patents were primarily meant to serve, in Madison’s words, as “encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries.” By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice.

Hyde is not a free-culture purist; he holds copyrights on his books, and those copyrights contribute to his income. But the passing of the C.T.E.A. convinced him, as it did many observers, of what Hyde calls a looming “market triumphalism.” “I see in the paper that there is now a Congressional proposal to have a White House level ‘IP Czar,’ ” he wrote in an e-mail message to me in May. “Daily this stuff ticks me off!”

The C.T.E.A. spurred Hyde to action. He wrote letters to every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He published an op-ed, the first of his career. In 1999, with the writer Brendan Gill and Archibald Gillies, then the director of the Andy Warhol Foundation, he started the Creative Capital Foundation, a nonprofit that offers financial support to artists in return for a small percentage of any net profits generated by their work, which the foundation uses to finance other projects. He helped organize a low-fee writers’ room in Boston. And in 2004, he became a fellow at Berkman.

For all his activism, however, Hyde maintains that little of true political worth will be accomplished until the very terms of the “intellectual property” debate are changed. This was brought home to me one rainy evening last April, when Hyde and I met at a Harvard auditorium to attend a lecture on corruption in Congress by Lawrence Lessig. For a decade, Lessig has been the most-visible exponent of the position that institutions like Berkman were founded to promote: that the Internet should serve as a virtual communal space. In 2002, Lessig helped found Creative Commons, an organization that carves a middle path between the near-absolute stringency of intellectual-property law and absolute generosity by allowing creators to specify the level of control they want to maintain over their work.

After the lecture, as we walked across the darkened campus, I mentioned to Hyde that I had found Lessig’s talk to be logical and well crafted.

“A little too well crafted, if you ask me,” Hyde said.

This took me by surprise — Hyde is a polite man who rarely speaks critically of others — and I later asked him to elaborate. “Look, Lessig is a lawyer,” he said. “I like him, I think he’s solid. But it’s a very particular way of thinking.” Hyde himself makes use of the Creative Commons, yet there’s a formality to the setup that troubles him. “All of the C.C. licenses use the lever of the law,” he said. “They have the assumption of private ownership behind them. So Lessig, in a certain sense, is confining himself to one slice of this stuff, which is not as capacious as a true commons would be.”

“Capaciousness” is the keynote of Hyde’s own approach to the commons and suggests why he might feel a little out of place at a Harvard think tank. To date, the most prominent thinkers to adapt the idea of the commons to contemporary issues have been lawyers — most notably, Lessig and a current Berkman co-director, Yochai Benkler — and, being lawyers, they have an instinct to draw sharp distinctions that lead to policy solutions. Thus Lessig is careful to distinguish between “rivalrous” resources, like drinking water, in which one person’s use by definition competes with another’s, and “nonrivalrous” resources, like the English language, which cannot be depleted no matter how many people make use of them.

Hyde is interested in this distinction, too. “Shakespeare’s plays,” he writes, “will never collapse, no matter how many people read them — and such commons therefore serve as a kind of limiting case for the argument that the market will serve us well in every sphere of life.” Yet he is more interested in “fleshing out” (a pet phrase) how the commons can embody cherished values — indeed, cherished American values — that private property cannot. As Hyde sets out to show, the contemporary impulse to think of culture as “intellectual property” contains far more of “property” than the founders intended.

Thinker-politicians like Jefferson, Adams and Madison were just as familiar as we are with the metaphor that likens created work to physical property, especially to a landed estate. But they thought of that landed estate in a new way — as the basis of a republic. An American’s land was his own — he owed allegiance to no sovereign — but his ownership imposed on him an almost sacred moral requirement to contribute to the public good. According to Hyde, this ethic of “civic republicanism” was the ideological engine that drove the founders’ conception of intellectual property, and to his mind, it undercuts the ethic of “commercial republicanism” that dominates our current conception of it. Our right to property is not absolute; our possessions are held in trust, as it were. Seen through the prism of early civic Republicanism, Hyde asks, what might the creative self look like? Do we imagine that self as “solitary and self-made”? Or as “collective, common and interdependent”?

There’s a line of Emerson’s from ‘Self-Reliance,’ ” Hyde told me one day in his office, “where he says of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin? Every great man is a unique.’ Well, it’s crazy! There’s a long list of masters who taught Franklin! And yet the Emersonian song is the one that sticks in everyone’s head.”

Suffice it to say that Hyde goes to heroic lengths to unstick it — and with a striking directness. A full 60 pages of his new manuscript are devoted to debunking the Emersonian view of Franklin as “America’s first self-made man” and replacing it with a portrait of Franklin as a “commoner,” a man whose defining talent was for absorbing, repurposing and synthesizing the culture around him, like some colonial M.C. The law of conservation of charge, the eponymous stove, the precise path of the Gulf Stream: Hyde shoves aside each of Franklin’s “discoveries” to uncover thick foundations of pre-existing knowledge and scientific collaboration. The point of all this is not to prove that Franklin wasn’t a genius but to show that his genius didn’t burst out of thin air. “It takes a capacious mind to play host to … others and to find new ways to combine what they have to offer,” Hyde writes, “but not a mind for whom there are no masters, not a ‘unique.’ Quite the opposite — this is a mind willing to be taught, willing to be inhabited, willing to labor in the cultural commons.”

In Franklin, Hyde has found a subject to give canonical voice to his own beliefs. Despite Franklin’s notorious talents of self-promotion, he was explicit that his inventions were not and should not be his to claim as property. Offered an exclusive patent on the Franklin stove, he refused on the grounds that the invention was based on previous innovations — specifically, on theories of heat and matter articulated by Isaac Newton and the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave. “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” Franklin wrote in his “Autobiography,” “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

Of course, you might say, this was an easy position for Franklin to take: he was rich. People need their copyrights to live. But that’s exactly Hyde’s point: copyrights are utilitarian things. They generate money to pay a mortgage and buy groceries and continue working. Extended too far beyond their practical usefulness, copyrights not only contradict their original intent; they also wall creators off from the sources of their inventiveness. Genius, Hyde believes, needs to “tinker in a collective shop.”

“I’ve thought of doing a version of Emerson in which you simply take every sentence of ‘Self-Reliance’ and flip it,” Hyde says. “So like at the beginning he says, ‘Yesterday I read in a book somebody stating very well an idea I had myself, and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t expressed it myself.’ Well, you could say, ‘Yesterday I read in a book somebody stating very well an idea I had myself, and I felt glad that I was not alone, and that my ideas were not my ideas.’ You know, where is the master who could teach Emerson?”

There happens to be an answer to this question — many answers, in fact. As Emerson himself acknowledged, his intellectual life was chaotic with debts, influences and fellow travelers. And the greatest influence of all was an influence that looms large in Hyde’s own work as well, and whose quietly unsettling, deeply informed prose bears a more-than-passing resemblance to his own: Thoreau. Hyde still isn’t sure if Thoreau will make an appearance in his commons book, but it’s possible. In 1998, he published an essay in which he took the same approach to Thoreau as he does to Franklin, showing that for all his vaunted individualism, Thoreau could not have produced his work without the rich community and communal institutions surrounding him in Concord. It was the first expression of the thesis that would grow into the heart of Hyde’s new project, and it was the first piece of the project that I read.

It was also the impetus for our trip to Walden, and to the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Although, as Hyde’s essay strives to make clear, it wasn’t really Thoreau’s cabin at all but Emerson’s. The older man owned the land and acquired the structure after his protégé vacated. He offered the land in the first place because he believed — rightly as it turned out — that with a little space and solitude, Thoreau could do great work. He had already employed Thoreau as a handyman and tutor and given him access to his circle of illustrious friends and his unrivaled library. In other words, “Walden,” the premier document of American individualism, was in a sense born out of the generosity of the American prophet of self-reliance.

I had hoped to talk about these issues as Hyde and I walked alongside the pale water to Thoreau’s cabin, but the path was too narrow for us to chat comfortably, and we made our pilgrimage mainly in silence. The next day, however, things got a little more capacious, as it were. Hyde invited me to have brunch with him and his wife at his house in Cambridge. It is a beautiful, bright house, in whose back garden stands the trellis-covered studio — a former turkey pen — where Hyde was a tenant when he wrote “The Gift.” Afterward, as we sat around his dining-room table, Hyde got up, pulled a CD by the Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn off a shelf and handed it to me. The album contained a song called “The Gift.” “I’ll leave you with this ringing in your ears,” he said, and pressed play on his stereo. The melody was jaunty, and the lyrics were unambiguously based on Hyde’s masterpiece:

In this cold commodity culture

Where you lay your money down

It’s hard to even notice

That all this earth is hallowed ground …

The gift keeps moving

Never know where it’s going to land

You must stand back and let it

Keep on changing hands.

As Cockburn strummed and sang, I read through the liner notes and noticed that Hyde was credited as an inspiration alongside E. E. Cummings and, wryly, the manager of the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant. I mentioned this to Hyde. He grinned, opened his hands and gave a curt bow. “All illustrious company to be in,” he said.

Daniel B. Smith is the author of “Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity,” from which his last article for the magazine was adapted.

A little show

2008-11-09T17:37:00.002-05:00

2008-10-30T22:07:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, a $105 trip to the doctor where they told me something I already knew thanks to Kim W. Wolfe, MD.

Today, being questioned by 3 police officers shortly after 7:15 pm because someone reported a suspicious person in a car taking pictures.

Tomorrow, head to Providence, Rhode Island where I'll help install Liz King's show at Brown University.

The day after that?

Brad on RedFizz

2008-10-23T22:20:00.002-05:00

That's right Brad will be on RedFizz (as Curtain Rod Character) this Saturday.
Check it out...

A Real Maverick

2008-10-02T21:48:00.002-05:00

Please Translate

2008-09-23T18:27:00.001-05:00

My friend Arlen and I are learning this on accordion but we aren't working on a German preamble. Perhaps we should be.

Monday Take

2008-09-15T20:37:00.005-05:00

I went trolling for images after work today.

First I found this:

Then, a mile or so later I saw this (pictures are generally upside down when I find them) and thought pay dirt:

And then I flipped it over:

Serves me right, really.

2008-08-19T22:34:00.002-05:00

Alyssa C Salomon Equivalence, 2006. Cyanotype Print

See this it's new: www.alyssasalomon.com

(nearly) Speechless

2008-08-11T21:28:00.003-05:00

I saw a full size version of this poster at the post office today. Is the FCC serious about this design? It was all I could do not to steal it off the side of the front counter.

Land of the Lost hasn't been on TV for a long time...

In Other News

2008-08-01T17:16:00.003-05:00

1. Kim and I have been as we are for six years and that's pretty dern great.
2. Sweet, sweet George has moved to Prague. I miss him and know I'm not alone.
3. I am employed again-- this time at VCU's Anderson Gallery. I'm the Gallery Associate-- 28 hours a week of doing interesting things and my boss is boss!
4. I am also teaching photo this fall at VCU- 2 classes of intro.
5. Le Primitifs du Futur has 2 CD's that I didn't know about that I now know about.
6. I am getting better at the ukulele and do a mean version of The Titanic Disaster.
7. We will be in DC this weekend visiting my family and it should be-- will include a trip to the Hirshorn.

There's more, I'm sure.

From the Outside

2008-08-01T17:14:00.002-05:00

It's funny to think of how slowly I post... why do I have high speed internet?

First Few Days

2008-07-23T20:54:00.007-05:00

Obviously my plan to post daily didn't work out. Between working long days, excellent conversations over meals, and the mandatory minimum of two beers per night at a bar, I just never got around to finding the time. So here you go- I'm back in Richmond and will dole these out over the next couple of days...

On Sunday we were let in to the Sheldon at noon and began planning... this is one of three galleries and would be the "studio" portion of the show.

This is the innermost gallery and was used for sculptures and video. When we arrived two walls had been built in the space. There were 115 crates and boxes for us to unpack...

This is the outermost gallery and is entered from the Great Hall (as Johnson named it). It would contain sculptures and photographs.

On Monday we had our bearings and began installing work in earnest-- here Liz and Alison work on The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye.

Here they are in the outermost gallery working on Pupil. Each sculpture's pose changes from show to show.

Here Liz works on lighting for an untitled sculpture. Many of the pieces are lit from with in by fiber optic cables but still require quite a bit of treatment from other lights.

Day Five

2008-07-10T21:06:00.011-05:00

And again from Nebraska, this time writing from a coffee shop in the Haymarket district called The Mill. All the youngsters in Lincoln are so clean and good looking. So far I've only spotted one hair cut heavily influenced by Conor Oberst. I'm sure there are others but I wouldn't know as I haven't seen a picture of him in awhile.

The installation of Liz's show is going well. We're working long days and I'll eventually post some images from the gallery but for tonight here's a very abbreviated walk around a small part of town.

Neihardt Hall, the dorm we're staying in (supposedly the most sought after b/c of it's governing council and proximity to Love Library) has a sun room.

The city, which is relatively small and tidy is full of buildings that were retrofitted w/ international style (?) facades. Lots of pieces of buildings that look like they are made out of marshmallow or covered in flaked coconut. Also lots of public sculpture that looks communist. I'll post more of this soon, it's no small thing.

It's not just the outside of the buildings that are cool. This is a gyro place that we ducked into for water (well, I got water).

The University of Nebraska Lincoln has an impressive sculpture collection scattered throughout a bucolic campus (Warren Buffet and Johnny Carson are alums). This stone Michael Heizer piece is really long and kind of canoe shaped. Lots of bird poo on the top ledge of it.

A "small" Richard Serra piece. That's Alison and Sean.

A really cool Roxy Paine piece (it's made of stainless steel). Its better than the one Kim and I saw in Seattle-- lots of broken limbs and even some fungus. Very tough to photograph-- especially when you don't try that hard.

There's also a lot of civic sculpture throughout the city commemorating all there is to commemorate. This low relief was made of cast brick and is down by the train depot and the tracks (which we've affectionately dubbed the river b/c it feels like there should be water where the train tracks are but there's not).

I really like the lights on the campus. Most are askew and look like giant map pins dotting the landscape.

A Little Something

2008-07-10T06:45:00.002-05:00

We've been working 12 hour days and it's not too easy to find time to post, but here's a view from a parking garage I took last night at 9:45pm.

Live from Lincoln

2008-07-06T09:53:00.003-05:00

I'm in Nebraska for two weeks helping install Liz King's retrospective at the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln. I'm staying in a small dorm room with Liz's assistant Sean. Allison, a student at RISD and a family friend of Liz's is up on the third floor. Liz is staying at the Holiday Inn a few blocks away.

So far so good. Without the students around Lincoln appears to be a sleepy town. Then again, this may be an unfair assessment as it's the weekend, we're in the states Capitol and a couple of days ago was a holiday.

The Sheldon was designed by Philip Johnson (and slightly resembles Lincoln Center) , the state Capitol building is the second tallest in the nation (after Louisiana's), and there are lots of catalpas and Chinese rain trees. Pretty good so far.

Of Course You Have Better Things To Do!

2008-06-29T17:17:00.005-05:00

Year two of SAMETIME 7:15 is six months awesome.

Kim and I were thinking about moving to the f-a-n so she would be closer to V-C-U when school starts in the f-a-l-l (she's going for a museum studies p-r-o-g-r-a-m). After much hemming and hawing, and oh-so mature thinkings about our finances (or lack thereof) we've decided against it. So, in order to feel like there has been some kind of change we rearranged our rooms (we are proud separate roomers). It's exciting and we've both made out like bandits (although we have pretty different ideas of what this looks like).

I say all of this because my change involved an aparatus that came with these instructions. Based of this strange and beautiful instruction sheet can you guess what this aparatus is?

The first reader to guess will get a SAMETIME 7:15 button mailed to the location of their choosing. People who email Kim on a daily basis, or talked to me from their apartment in Philadelphia this afternoon are restricted from participating in this thrilling competition (and probably already have a button).

PS - My friend Robert turned me onto Teddy & Marge. They are fantastic-- from Austin (maybe that place hasn't gone the way of the Gap?), lots of organ (sounds like an actual church organ), cello, and accordion. They play wacky versions of 30's and 40's standards and don't try to sing like Mariah Carey (or somebody else who can sing too well).

what a stupid face you have here mklease!

2008-06-17T08:27:00.004-05:00

I've been getting these emails in my junk mail lately. Funny and awfully tempting...

How it Went

2008-06-04T08:45:00.005-05:00

I'm a part of the show Multiplicitocracy at American University's Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in DC. Super person Kendall Ladd curated me into the show that was organized by students of AU's Arts Management program.

The show will be up through July 27, hope you get a chance to see it.

Older Michael Writes About Younger Michael

2008-05-21T19:38:00.004-05:00

The puff balls of the few cottonwood trees in Richmond are blowing around and reminding of my years living in Fort Collins, Colorado. I had never lived near a river before and loved the Cache La Poudre river which runs through the north part of town and through Lee Martinez Park. During the summer months a young Annabelle (and a younger Michael) would walk, run, jump, and lay around the park. She would run in the long grasses that were alongside the trail, occasionally popping her head up above the tops of the blades to make sure that I was still close by.

A sweet one, that dog.

AND HERE'S ANOTHER...

2008-05-14T08:52:00.000-05:00

Has anyone assembled a list of all the people* doing year long web projects? Here are the three I pay attention to and a shameless plug of my own:

Skull-A-Day

Skull-A-Day is the work of Noah Scalin, a fellow Richmonder, designer and seemingly all around conscious and fascinating guy. I started paying attention to him a few years ago when he and Christopher Humes began another year based project called Swords into Plowshares. We met last summer at the Art-O-Mat ten year anniversary. He's a busy fellow, follow the links and you'll find Another Limited Rebellion, his "socially conscious graphic design firm". They also maintain a great blog.

will.love.logic

will.love.logic is the blog of New York artist Elin Waterson. I also met Elin at the Art-O-Mat event last summer and she has committed to making a block print everyday for all of 2008. She's had some time to focus on different themes and is currently making prints of mythical beings. All of her prints are really pretty amazing... you can go here to see a post where she grouped them by months to see a bunch at once. I don't know Elin well, but by the looks of it she can do most things very well and may be the biggest Old 97's fan to have ever existed.

Aesthetic to Ascetic

This project is brand new and by Kristin Kaskey, a fashion designer, prof at VCU and artist who also lives in Richmond. From her first blog post: starting on may 12th i will wear each item currently in my possession once before any garment can be re-worn... my preliminary count looks like i can make it 306 days without repeating a dress, sweater, top or fitted jacket. skirts and pants will be worn once then will be allowed to re-enter the rotation since i have considerably fewer of these items... each day i will post a photo of the look of the day. at the end of each day garments will be tagged and stored for exhibition, re-fashioning and sale/giveaway.

SAMETIME 7:15

I'll keep the shameless plug to a minimum but I am happy to report that SAMETIME 7:15 will be included in the exhibit Multiplicitocracy which opens at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in DC May 31.

More to come about that in a few days...

Happy May Day

2008-05-01T16:34:00.002-05:00

I'm pretending that I wasn't the only one out there that didn't work today and that all of you spent the day in the sun, talking, eating good food, playing music, and letting the ways of Spring have its way with you and her, and him, and them...

SATURDAY WORKSLOP

2008-04-20T22:07:00.015-05:00

I taught a silhouette-wheatpaste workshop Saturday to a bunch of kids who are a part of VACR's Young Artist Society. This is the same group I taught a little over a year ago.

We wrote a bunch of exquisite corpse poems and then set about illustrating them, making silhouettes, and pasting them onto the side of Paradise Garage on Main Street in Richmond.

It was a great day and if I was a super blogger (and teacher) I would have made sure I knew the poems they illustrated and would have put them under each picture BUT THAT'S JUST A LITTLE TOO MUCH WORK.

2008-04-16T22:08:00.001-05:00

Question

2008-04-07T11:29:00.003-05:00

Kim and I are back from our whirlwind Raleigh NC - Brooklyn NY tour and I'll post pictures soon. But for now, look at this short article from the Washington Post about an April Fool's joke:

Wednesday, April 2, 2008; Page B03

An "in memoriam" ad about a former U.S. ambassador that was placed as an April Fools' Day joke backfired yesterday.

A photo of Edward M. Gabriel, a very much alive international business consultant who was the U.S. ambassador to Morocco from 1997 to 2001, topped an ad on Page B8 in yesterday's Washington Post.

In language reminiscent of the movie "Brokeback Mountain," the $322.20 ad said, "Though I no longer have you as my partner, this day will always be OUR anniversary. . . . I could never quit you."

The ad was taken out by J. Peter Segall, a public relations executive and lawyer. Segall is paying for a retraction in today's Post. Segall said last night that he is a mature man who made an immature mistake.

"As I said in a correction that I hope is published [today], I engaged in a very stupid and ultimately cruel April Fools' joke against a man that has been my best friend for 30 years, and I deeply, deeply regret it," Segall said. (The retraction appears on Page B7.)

Gabriel said he fielded calls all day from friends who thought he had died. One woman told him she spent two hours crying after seeing the ad.

"He's an old friend who plays jokes on me every year, and some are hilarious, but they've been private," Gabriel said. "He's a good friend who went a little too far. He's apologized profusely, and I've accepted it, but not without being a little hurt. I think -- I know -- he had no ill intent."

It's the first time in 20 years that a spoof ad is known to have run in The Post, said a company spokesman. There is no formal process for checking the truth of the ads, he said. Unlike death notices or news obituaries, which are fact-checked, families often take out "in memoriam" ads to remember a deceased relative months or years after the person's death.

-- Patricia Sullivan

So, as some of you may know on April 10, 2005 I printed the following In Memoriam in the Washington Post:

In doing this I was wanting to have some tangible proof, to show the way I think photographic images and the words (often) alongside/under them function. To me, this pairing makes a package too tidy, and effortlessly undermines most of the complicated, messy, and beautiful history of the photographed. As you can imagine, not everyone who saw the Post that day was clued-in to why I was in the paper, and it caused a few headaches and a few people were pretty angry with me.

My question is, do I let the post know that this fake In Memoriam of Edward M. Gabriel in fact isn't the first fake obit in the past 20 years?

I Got Gustinitis

2008-03-30T20:30:00.003-05:00

Correction and a Banana

2008-03-26T09:36:00.003-05:00

Langdon wrote to let me know that I need to add one small correction to my previous post: The space where the Langdon is showing is "actually the Kantor/Feuer window, which is not a direct extension of Zach Feuer's solo project gallery (even though he's the boss of all of it)."

I have no idea who these Kantor/Feuer people are and if I were them I'd want to be associated w/ Ms. Graves but hey-- what do I know? Gee real estate in NY must be pretty expensive...

The Langdon did send along some pics of her window:

In other news, I went to a great lecture by the Guerrilla Girls last night at Longwood. Despite founding member Frida Kahlo saying "bitch" a million times and scaring some of my unbelievably pure students, I think a good time was had by all and we definitely learned a few things.

2008-03-20T19:54:00.003-05:00

Kate MacDonnell, Migrating (2006)

I'd be remiss to not mention, brag or announce that two very good people, friends and artists have openings this weekend. First up, Kate MacDonnell, fellow SAMETIME7:15-er, neighborhood high-school friend, incredibly thoughtful, astute, talented, and compassionate human being is having an opening at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC tomorrow night. Kim and I will be there, hope you are too.

Civilian Art Projects
406 7th Street NW Washington, DC 20004-2260
March 21-April 26

The amazing, enviable, and recent SAMETIME7:15 star Langdon Graves' opening is actually happening as I write this so this won't do much to get you to the opening but you can go check out her work 24 hours a day for the next month. She's showing in the window space at Zach Feurer Gallery. I don't know about Langdon but I love my work to be able to be seen as people are driving by...

259 10th Ave. Btwn W25 and 26 Sts
March 20-April 22

2008-03-20T06:58:00.003-05:00

My mom's maiden name is Sturniolo which is a name akin to the word Starling in Italian. Indeed they/we are a chatty bunch...

Happy Birthday Donna!

2008-03-03T21:42:00.002-05:00

Explain-O-Rama!

2008-02-19T12:59:00.008-05:00

Since she was kind enough to care to ask, some pics for Paula to illustrate what One Scoop is Two Balls is/was...

It was an art show...

At an ice cream parlor in Hollywood called Scoops...

(I think) this is Paul Evans, the guy that organized the show and came up with the name...

Here's what I have in the show...

Hope this does the trick!