One Lucky Bird

You know, I don’t like to see shit in art. Really, I don’t. However, at the Gilbert & George show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, I got past shocking imagery (including nudity, depictions of sexual acts, and various bodily fluids) and savored the rainbow avalanche of saturated glorious technicolor on the wall enveloping photo montages. The show concluded with a small room filled with ephemera created by the pair including various “postcard sculptures”. The G&G show ends May 18th. See my own take on the postcard sculpture on the next post.

When I was in grad school, I think I visited every single library in a 50 mile radius of the campus. Many times, there would be a cart in the lobby with old books for a buck or two. I got a handful of these books so sadly marked “Discard.” I absolutely love the patina on this children’s book about ATV’s (All Terrain Vehicles) called On the Sand by E. and R.S. Radlauer (1972). The authors also shot the photos. Here are some of my favorite images - immortalized.

Jumping:

Here’s my niece Olivia jumping on the trampoline in her backyard like a superhero.

And here’s her brother Jack. He’s a good jumper too.

There are more trampoline pics on my flickr.

Free Fall:

By French photographer Denis Darzacq, from a series called La Chute. Makes me say ‘wow’ not ‘ow’. He has a new series called Hyper.

Your Tax Dollars at Work:

From the NASA Image of the Day. They even have a spanking new web site too.

Marshall McLuhan was a cultural prophet. I recently re-discovered The Medium is the Massage, written by him and Quentin Fiore.

Back in the late 60’s, McLuhan envisioned how television and electronic media would change our lives. He coined the term “global village”, and wrote about our growing [glowing?] sense of self as “The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions…are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval…the one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of the early mistakes.” Today, newspapers struggle to stay afloat while careers are made and broken in the blogosphere.

Seriously threatened? I’m not sure if all bloggers feel that way, but there is definitely an old guard who feels strongly about guarding their privacy. Some put their digital self [selves] out there – contributing to blogs, publishing photos, creating profiles on Facebook and Myspace, Digging digital ephemera, and commenting like crazy. [I once was Lost and now am Found via Google.] Others cling to their “handle” and their “alias” in an effort to keep their friends, family, professional and other selves private and separate.

I guess I’m somewhere in between. I put my work portfolio online, and that’s perfectly natural to me and an absolute necessity (if I want to keep working). You know, I never really thought I would have a blog. I thought… that’s a thing other people do. I mean, does anyone really [have the time to] care what I have to say, and more importantly, do I want to give up my ‘privacy’ and do something so public as write a blog? Ever since my mom read my my diary when I was 16, I’ve had a fear of writing anything personal. Maybe that’s why I take so many pictures. I used to only upload a highly edited selection of photos to flickr – so as not to give away TMI about me personally. Now, I just put it all up there. Still edited, but not just the nice looking shots. I share pictures of friends, and family, and birthdays and vacations. It’s a chronicle of my life. It is all my self.

Last weekend I saw and saw Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 at the The Legion of Honor. The show is intersperses her famous people portraits with more mundane family snapshots and very personal shots of her life partner – Susan Sontag – in the various stages of cancer. The collection is a full “photographer’s life,” as Leibovitz says: “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”