The Secret Museum

Macy's Day Parade

No holding forth on art, photography (as distinct from art?), or anything else today. Except, well, I'm happy to see the wretched Bush energy bill foundering in Congress.

Childhood dream realized! Tomorrow I will have a seat in the bleachers for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Or as many NYC natives call it, the Macy's Day Parade.

My brother won the tickets in some sort of silent auction, in L.A. of all places. He'll be there with his wife Angie, and Dad and I will represent the local contingent.

The irony of being back

The irony of being back in New York City, after my week in the Pacific Northwest, is that I live in one of the world's art capitals, but only found time to go look at or think about art while I was in a supposed backwater (note: not my opinion).

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher have created Learning To Love You More, a combination of web site and non-web presentations that engage participants from the public in the worlds of the artists. Learned about this at that Baja to Vancouver show in Seattle, last week. It's fascinating.

Spent three hours browsing in

Spent three hours browsing in Powell's City of Books yesterday. Being able to access the store's whole inventory via the web back in New York City has taken the edge off searching the store when I manage to get to Portland. Actually, I'd have to amend that; it's transformed the experience: now browsing is relaxed, rather than a desperate attempt to find a few vital texts before I have to leave. I wandered from travel writing to nuclear studies, to photography, to science fiction and back up to photography, on a stream of associations and remembered authors.

So I finally got to browse a book I covet: 100 Suns by Michael Light. In a pure expression jealousy, I said to the photo department clerk, "This guy's a genius. He's got a monograph and he didn't take a single photo in the book!"

But really, editing is a big component of good photography, and Light sorted scads of archive photos of U.S. atomic and nuclear bomb tests to arrive at this book, as well as adding text components and writing the notes. It's a beautiful book about weapons of mass destruction.

It's been brilliantly, freakishly sunny

It's been brilliantly, freakishly sunny every day I've been in the Pacific Northwest so far. Meanwhile, at home in New York City, the wind is ripping the roofs off trucks and uprooting trees.

A girl's thoughts turn to global climate change at times like these.

Stopped by the office of The Bear Deluxe yesterday, to discuss future writing contributions with editor Tom Webb. (Here're some Sextoids I helped compile for the Winter 2000-2001 issue, Sex and the Environment.) The Bear's newest issue, Art and the Environment, is available not only west of the Rockies, but south of the Catskills, at Blackout Books, the St. Marks Bookstore, Gotham Book Mart, Gallery M.

I'm going to bring a few issues home to Brooklyn, towards arranging some distribution in the nation's largest Democratic county.

This morning I woke up fully adjusted to the fact that I was perched on the left coast, with the ocean to my west, instead of the right. Feels good.

In Seattle. Yesterday, went to

In Seattle. Yesterday, went to Seattle Art Museum to see the exhibition, "B2V: Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art."

Immediately I was taken with the concept of the exhibition. Would a New York museum organize show around the fact that all the artists live on the Atlantic Coast? Probably not.

Standout work (sorry, I didn't take notes on who did what, bad of me) included sculptures reminiscent of Native Northwest tribal masks, but made entirely out of white, red and black Nike sneakers. Beautiful, immense pencil and ink drawings based on what the artist sees when he looks at the stars though a telescope, but with an edgy attitude (they include the urban glow that blocks out the stars in some cases, and little words worked into the drawings that not only celebrate GALAXIES but also note the POISON IVY on the ground beneath his feet). Also, a wonderful art mockumentary, "The Accidental Art of Graffiti Removal" by a Portland artist (Mark McCormick?), narrated by Miranda July and shot in Portland's southeast industrial district. Graffiti removal: the Northwest's advancement of suprematism, a hundred unknown Mark Rothkos daily covering tags in subtle tones of "snow," "halation," and "dove" colored paints?

It made me homesick for Portland. I'll be there tomorrow.

The Universe Folds Back On

The Universe Folds Back On Itself

My friend Matt Barton holds the Salon of Surface Noise every weekend, dj'ing 78's (that's 78 revolutions-per-minute record albums, just in case someone under 25 ever reads this) every weekend at The Living Room, in the East Village. Today's edition of The Next Big Thing (a great radio show produced here in New York City) presents a sound sampler of the tunes Matt devotes his life to exploring, preserving and popularizing. Not merely a weekend platter maestro, he's an American roots music expert at The Smithsonian.

Dean Olsher, The Next Big Thing's creator and host, describes Matt's gig spinning 78s as "one more example of the universe folding back on itself."

After yesterday's open house at the School of Visual Arts, I am thinking about the onset of digital media in photography. Is the emphasis of SVU's graduate program about art, or commerce? Is it ridiculously 20th century of me to persist in thinking they're different?

This kind of technological upheaval is intrinsic to photography. The daguerreotype, (the first true photographic process) was announced by the French government in 1839, inaugurating daguerreotype mania in France, England and the United States. It was outclassed 12 years later by the wet collodion process (which really is wet), and in 1871, a more convenient dry process was created that tossed wet collodion into the commercial dustbin.

And this leaves out all kinds of other processess that were trying to make it on the market at the same time: ambrotype, talbotype, albumen printing...daguerreotype -> wet collodion -> dry plate process is simply the progression annointed by art historians as the main current in the history of photography.

Each brought a particular look to photographs.

The aesthetics and physicality of these old processes continue to engage. Sally Mann makes collodion photographs using an ancient 8x10 camera and old lenses. Photorealist painter Chuck Close makes daguerreotypes.

There's a commercial photographer doing wet collodion, in the Tribeca building where I rent a darkroom. He's also got a high-speed Internet connection in there. The universe folds in on itself.

Digital's main contribution to photography is not the technology--monitors instead of glass plates, computer processors instead of chemical processes. (There's certainly no ecological advantage in digital over chemical.) In the end, most photographers are still trying to get their work output onto paper, no matter how they created it.

Digital will really come into its' own when a new, accomplished artistic aesthetic emerges, actively advancing the history of photography.

Spent the afternoon at an

Spent the afternoon at an open house for the MFA in Photography and Related Media at School of Visual Arts. There was a nice spread of fruit, sweets, coffee and Dasani bottled water, and a lot student work on the walls. A diversity of subjects, from portraits to landscape, suburban vernacular to abstracted nude studies.

It's a very nice contemporary facility, with lots of computers, digital video editing stations, on-site high-quality printing, and a few vestigial graduate darkrooms.

SVU photography is emphatically digital at the graduate level. The staff we met spoke of their students as the vanguard of a "new image-making paradigm in the 21st century."

They also mention that graduates of the program are in Chelsea galleries, the upcoming Whitney Biennial, and coveted tenure-track professorships. 20th century paradigms of status and recognition are still alive and breathing, apparently.

The idea of getting the MFA has dogged my thoughts for years. It's as if the MFA would confer a legitimacy to my undertakings as an artist that the MA I actually got, in Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, can't hold a candle to. Doing an interdisciplinary environmental studies degree that emphasized photography and landscape history didn't really put me on a well-defined career track.

When I got out of SVU, it was dark. Late fall, night time in New York. Leaves blew dramatically on a cold wind, and the lights on stoops and in store windows glowed out into the clear night. A most dramatic and beautiful time of day and year in my home town.

A few hours later, I walked by a man and his son in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The father was saying, "It's a good thing there are no clouds in the sky," and I said Oh yeah! and looked up, in time to see the onset of tonight's amazing lunar eclipse.

After ten years of indirectly pursuing the life an artist, now I am trying more and more to center on it. This comment from Akira Kurosawa's autobiography inspires me: "To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes."