Monday art house: Joe Boruchow

Paper cut-out artist Joe Boruchow has a new show up at the Bean Café, 615 South Street in Philadelphia:


Works include a portrait of Philadelphia artist Isaiah Zagar; a portrait of Ron Castille, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania's supreme court; and political commentary on tea party activists and pedophiles in the Catholic Church.

Monday art house: D. Christie

"Fire Fire I Heard The Cry," by D. Christie -- animated linocuts by a self-taught artist whose blog I've been following for several months now.

Monday art house: Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier was a 20th century autodiadact photographer in Chicago. Her work wasn't discovered until after her death, and this guy has been posting one photo every few days to a blog:



When I see a photo like this one, I'm not sure if a kid's life used to be more dangerous or more fun.

Monday art house: "Tale of Tales"

Yuriy Norshteyn:

Monday art house: "MacBeth - a comedie, Act I"

Ish Klein and Erik Ransom in an EvilolivE 3000 production:

Monday art house: Joe Boruchow

Joe Boruchow is a Philadelphia artist and musician (auto music) whose show "Public Service" is on display at the Bean Café, 615 South Street:


Boruchow's work is paper cut-outs. It's like Pennsylvania Dutch "Scherenschnitte," only seriously urban, modern, and worldly, often erotic or radically political. Over the years he's gotten more skilled and the pieces have become so much more intricate and detailed that it's hard to believe they're made from a single piece of paper.

He frequently makes photocopies of his work and posts it on poles and walls around town, especially around South Street, Old City, and Northern Liberties, carrying the copies in a R.E.Load bag embroidered with one of his own images. Maybe you've seen him.

Monday art house: "Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No"

For years after pitching a no-hitter in 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis swore up and down that he'd been "high as a Georgia pine" on LSD and bennies during the game. Filmmaker James Blagden has put together 4:30 of animated video and sound effects to accompany an interview recorded for American Public Media:



"One time I covered first base, and I caught the ball and I tagged the base, all in one motion. I said, 'Ooh, I just made a touchdown!'"

But seriously, folks:

It was easier to pitch with the LSD, because I was so used to medicating myself. That's the way I was dealing with the fear of failure: the fear of losing, the fear of winning. It's just that it was part of the game, you know? You get to the major leagues, and you say, 'I got to stay here, what do I need?'"

A substance abuse counselor after leaving baseball ("I hope to make these young players aware of the stress involved in being a professional baseball player and drive home the point that drug and alcohol abuse is not the way to relieve that stress"), Ellis died in 2008 of irreversible liver disease.

Monday art house: addiction

In the past year I have become completely enthralled by themes of addiction and substance abuse in modern literature. Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Leaving Las Vegas; of course On the Road. "I-80 Nebraska, M.490 - M.205," a mid-1970s short story by John Sayles (better known for his films) concludes with an amphetamine epiphany:

"And it's beautiful. Beautiful. The things a sleeper never sees open up to you. The most beautiful dream is the waking one, the one that never ends. From a straight line you see all the cycles going on without you, night fading in and out, the sun's arch, stars forming and shifting in their signs. The night especially, the blacker the better, your headlights making a ghost of color on the roadside, focusing to climb the white line. You feel like you can ride deeper and deeper into it, that night is a state you never cross, but only get closer and closer to its center. And in the daytime there's the static of cornfields, cornfields, cornfields, flat monotony like a hum in your eye, like you're going so fast it seems you're standing still, that the country is a still life on your windshield."

[ ... ]

"Do you know what metaphor is, truckin mamas and poppas? Have you ever met with it in your waking hours? Benzedrine, there's a metaphor for you, and a good one. For sleep. It serves the same purpose but makes you understand better, makes everything clear, opens the way to more metaphor. Friends and neighbors, have you ever seen dinosaurs lumbering past you, the road sizzle like a fuse, night drip down like old blood? I have, people, I've seen things only gods and the grandfather stars have seen, I've seen dead men sit in my cab beside me and living ones melt like wax. When you break through the cycle you're beyond the laws of man, beyond CB manners or Smokies' sirens or statutes of limitations. You're beyond the laws of nature, time, gravity, ,friction, forget them. The only way to win is never to stop. Never to stop. Never to stop."

Just finished reading Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting last week:

Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Lauder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road . . .

Monday art house: An Engineer's Guide to Cats

As usual, something that's made the rounds already, but that I've only recently found:

Monday art house: Truffaut

The opening title sequence from Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows):



I can't think, offhand, of too many other opening sequences that better set up their films. These titles tell the movie's whole story in 2:30. Note, first and foremost, how the pictures are shot from a child's perspective -- that's obvious. But there's more. The object of the viewer's interest ends up not being the vehicle's ultimate destination, and it always gets taken out of view. Yet the viewer keeps seeking it; he desperately wants to get to the landmark, but he's thwarted again and again. Then, even when he finally gets there, he's taken away. The vehicle doesn't pause; it hardly slows down long enough for you to see the meta-storyteller's name. The viewer is powerless, dragged along by forces he can't control, forces that don't know or don't care what he wants.

Now dig the the last scene and see how the tables are turned.

Monday art house: t-shirt edition

If this were for real, and I had money, I would pay good money for one of these shirts:


Via Phawker.

Monday art house: a picture of a bridge

This is a photo of the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol, UK. It's a 6-month time-lapse image taken with a pinhole camera.

Several years ago I caught a program of short films made with pinhole cameras: no lenses, hand-cranked film, black-and-white photography, then most of them optically printed so that each exposure lasted longer than 1/24 sec. I can't recall the artists' names, though. I also can't recall if I saw it at Bumbershoot, the Grand Illusion, or the International House. Since Google and Wikipedia are doing me no good in helping me find any of these filmmakers, I suspect it must have been sometime in the '90s out in Seattle.

Monday art house: solid rocket booster separation video

Note how the 2 boosters rotate in tandem during the fall, until they hit too much atmosphere. And people say we need to adopt the metric system. Bah!

Monday art house: Eunoia

Canadian poet Christian Bök has just published Eunoia, a "univocal lipgram" -- a book in which he limits himself to using a single vowel for all the words in each chapter. The chapters themselves are not numbered, but are lettered: A, E, I, O, and U. (Note that the title of the book uses all five.) The BBC website provides excerpts, a short audio passage read by the author, and reader contributions of single-vowel paragraphs.

Monday art house: Hammering Man

Learn something new every day. I thought there was only one Hammering Man, but I learned this morning that there are several around the world. The one in Seattle, which is the only one I had been aware of, isn't even the largest.



There are even knockoffs. This one has an anti-Nazi message that the copyists added to it:

Monday art house: "Guernica 3D"

Guernica was horrifying; Guernica is shattering; artist Lena Giseke has brought the figures out and examines the carnage in 3-D:

Monday art house: if it were a 3-way race

In a 3-party race, candidates Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche battle over whose philosophical point of view best works for America's families. Ads from the Nietzsche and Kierkegaard camps follow:

Monday art house: greeting cards

Call it performance art. The American Family Association, which spends a lot of time focusing on gay people, has provided a quick and E-Z form to send outraged e-mail to the CEO of Hallmark for marketing "congratulations on your gay marriage" cards. But you can modify the text of the message to say whatever you want. Here's a suggestion:

Dear Chairman Hall:

I am surprised so very pleased that Hallmark is promoting an unhealthy lifestyle the recognition of same-sex unions which is illegal will surely soon be legalized in 48 states. There was a time Hallmark told us to send the very best. Sorry I'm very glad to see you have taken a giant step down forward. No more. Now, American Greeting Cards, your competitor, will be getting less of my business.

Have at it yourself and send your support letter today on AFA's dime! Then, when you're done, tell them you're a pastor and give them an e-mail address so you can hear about these alerts in future.

Monday art house: vacation

The daughter and I are off to north central Pennsylvania for a vacation in the woods. Though it's a mostly unstructured vacation, we do have a few activities planned: picking apples, fishing in pristine trout streams, and avoiding being shot or run over by gun-slinging ATV-driving wingnuts. We'll be roughing it at a friend's old family homestead, which he and his siblings and uncle use nowadays as a vacation cabin and hunting camp. No land line, no internet, no cell phone coverage. It's like paradise, this yearly unplugging from constantly being informed and updated. Except that it can get darn cold at night, even in August.

The last time he was up at the cabin, my friend saw 5 bears wandering in the hills around the house. That's about 6 bears too many for me, but I don't own my own vacation cabin, and beggars can't be choosers. We'll just have to build bigger campfires at night for the fish we catch.

On the way to the cabin is the fabulous metropolis of Coudersport, home of the Olga's Living with Art gallery and shop: hand-painted glass, fiber arts, pottery, and intricately painted Ukrainian eggs. The shop features a wider variety of work by Pennsylvania artists than what you usually see in my area, which is dominated by work by Pennsylvania Dutch artists or those working in that style. Which is very nice work, but you can have only so many hex signs tacked up to the garage and so much salt-glazed blue-hued pottery in your cabinets before it starts getting a little monotonous.

If you ever do the historic Pennsylvania Route 6 tour, a stop at Olga's Living with Art is probably worth your while. The building is just a block from the county courthouse, and Coudersport is a good place for lunch or dinner.

Monday art house: Popeye

A pal of mine sent me a postcard from L.A., where his friend and writing partner is shooting a television show pilot. The show -- as far as I know -- has nothing to do with Popeye, but the postcard had a pair of early strips on it.

Here's what Popeye looked like when he first appeared in the 1930s:

And for anyone who's curious to know what I actually look like in real life: