Photo Booth Mask by Mark Pernice
“Photo Booth Mask” is an actual mask rendered from a distorted image using Apple’s photo booth application; that he documents himself wearing the mask adds to the disembodied simulacra. The project may point to the absurd narcissism of the affected expressions usually made with the distortion effects, a kind of reverse aesthetic of trying to look grotesque. One is reminded of Francis Bacon, who fucked with faces way back; true, the camera changed painting, and now it changes sculpture, and with the latter, there’s an eerie leap from what ought to be two-dimensional to an actualized object, a transgression of mimesis.
The Art of Recklessness
I’m reading Dean Young’s new nonfiction book, The Art of Recklessness, part of The Art Of Series from Graywolf Press. Only 30 pages in, and I feel like I’ve swan dived into the swirling, dangerous waters of Young’s unbelievably complex collector’s brain. I love it. Here’s a review.
On page 12, Young quotes Wallace Stevens:
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
This is the exact idea I want to relay to my students when school starts next week. Not being shackled to rules, allowing poems to fall out of you un-self-consciously, is what makes great art. Learning craft so that you don’t have to think about it should probably happen simultaneously, but without imagination, recklessness, fire you’re fucked.
This is a different kind of book, one that might be the most important kind. I’ll follow up when I’ve actually finished reading it.
29 Comments
August 12th, 2010 / 8:26 am
August 12th, 2010 / 8:26 am
Mustaine
I mentioned Dave Mustaine yesterday on twitter jokingly and then realized today that dude just published a memoir. Shit yes. I am going to put on my fat kid clothes and read this while eating cereal.
Nick Antosca—
I just got the first library card I’ve had in years. For most of my adult life I’ve bought rather than borrowed the vast majority of books I read. New or used, whatever. Now I’m recovering that thrill I used to experience as a middle-schooler browsing the library’s website, putting stacks of books on hold. It’s pleasing, no?
Some Stuff
Seems like someone said something somewhere about 3D books happening in about 3 years…well, it looks like these “Between Page & Screen” folks have got it going on right now!!
Have you ever checked out textsound: an online publication of sound? Their mission: “Our mission is to bring together a range of experimental soundworks from the U.S. and abroad.”
According to some dubious organization called Online PhD Programs, here are The Top Literary Studies Blogs of 2010
You gotta check out the Philoctetes Center: The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, which has nearly 200 videos spanning all kinds of interesting things…
Here’s one example:
“I’ll Go On: An Afternoon of Samuel Beckett”
Roundtable discussion with
Edward Albee, Tom Bishop, Alvin Epstein, Lois Oppenheim, and John Turturro
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5UF2-2kqaw&feature=channel
Nick Antosca—
Profile of Eugene Marten in the NY Observer. Damn, nice. I like that picture. I want my skull to look like that when I’m 50.
Thief!
Alexandre Dumas said: The man of genius does not steal, he conquers.
And Robert Schumann said: Talent works, genius creates.
And Oscar Wilde said: Talent borrows; genius steals
And Pablo Picasso said: Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Or maybe Pablo Picasso said: The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.
And Igor Stravinsky said: Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
And T.S. Eliot said: One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
Liszt on Lists
“A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.”
—Franz Liszt
(Though, really, I too enjoy being introduced to new writers through lists of writers.)