‘Atlanta 1984’ by Harry Callahan
CITY PLANNING
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“Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.”
— Bob Dylan (via justement)
Discussing John Bellairs with George yesterday, I was reminded that when I was ten The House with the Clock its Walls was one of my very favorite books (even though it gave me a few nightmares). Bellairs wrote about wizards, ghosts, treasure, sorcerers, skulls, and curses. Almost all of his books were illustrated by Edward Gorey, beginning with the aforementioned title in 1973.
Hunter S. Thompson’s campaign video for Sheriff of Piktin County, Colorado in 1970.
“Thinkin’ Bout My Baby”
American Spring
American Spring (also known simply as Spring) was the duo of Marilyn Wilson and Diane Rovell, previously member of the girl group The Honeys. Wilson was the wife of The Beach Boys Brian Wilson, who wrote and produced most of the songs on their self titled 1972 album, including this track. Despite his involvement American Spring never found mainstream success and ultimately dissolved once Marilyn and Brian Wilson divorced.
‘After A Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California 1979’ by Joel Sternfeld
Our Beautiful West Coast Thing
I sit here dreaming
long thoughts of California
at the end of a November day
below a cloudy twilight
near the Pacific
listening the The Mamas and The Papas
THEY’RE GREAT
singing a song about breaking
somebody’s heart and digging it!
I think i’ll get up
and dance around the room
Here I go!
-Richard Brautigan
‘Cold Weather Testing on Mt. Washington’ by Peter Stackpole for LIFE Magazine (1953)
“The Cold Song”
Klaus Nomi
The German nightclub singer mixed his operatic vocals with the sounds of Disco and New Wave in the late 70’s and early 80’s attracting the attention of David Bowie who recruited him as a backing singer on an early Saturday Night Live performance. This lead to a contract with RCA records and an American tour before his death from AIDS in 1983. “The Cold Song’” first came to my attention in À nos amours, Maurice Pialat’s 1983 film that uses it as a sort of plaintive refrain.
Dieter Roth, Björn Roth Work Tables & Tischmatten
At the beginning of artistic career the late Dieter Roth produced precise, organized, controlled works. He was, as a young man, especially ashamed of smears, mistakes, and imperfections.
However this exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York highlighted the work of an older Roth who gained the confidence to embrace imperfection, realizing the artistic possibility that could be found in it.
The exhibition collected, for the first time, a selection of the large gray sheets of cardboard the artist used to cover the work surfaces of his various studios and living quarters in Iceland and Switzerland in the 1970s. These table mats (Tischmatten in German), which Roth produced until his death in 1998, became cumulative diaries of his process, works of art themselves.
“Meeting of Aspen Computer Society” by Nick Dewolf (1977)
Nick DeWolf was an engineer, entrepreneur, and inventor who founded a company called Teradyne. But he was also an a photographer, obsessively documenting his life in pictures. Now thanks to his son-in-law and archivist, Steve Lundeen, his enormous archive of photos is available on Flickr, so far there are over 40,000 and counting.
‘The Phantom Tollbooth and the Wonder of Words’ by Michael Chabon for the NY Review of Books
