a few suggestions if you are thinking of buying me a present...

images from moma's current fluxus show. if you are in the nyc area, it is even worth the ridiculous price of admission...

sublime skulls...

two beautiful frottages by max ernst from a 1936 publication of je sublime by benjamin peret. ernst continues to slay me with his experimentation... not to mention these look like punk rock flyers from the late 70's.

when on kawara saw two animals in antanakos' studio...

"two tortoises in the studio of stephen antonakos this afternoon"

"two or three men knocked on the door of my apartment tonight. without opening the door, i asked 'what's wrong with you?' one of them said, 'it's all right you are there'."

"this afternoon dan graham dropped a letter into the mailbox at the corner of eldridge and grand streets in ny."

"i have a dull pain in my eyes"

"dan graham brought joseph kosuth to my apartment this afternoon."

"jiro takamatsu called me this afternoon when i was reading 'ninjabugeicho'."

"my letter from ray johnson was postmarked somewhere in new york city this afternoon."

some of the more cryptic and diaristic captions from on kawara's 1967 date paintings, which for the most part are captioned by fragmented found text from newspapers of the day that the paintings were completed. the bits above not only stand out for their biographical nature, but the blunt approach to sharing seems to wholly compatible with the seemingly obvious but truly hermetic paintings themselves.

when there were haters of quiet music...

while organizing the mess that is my computer, towards a re-release of one of my most requested out of print cds, i found a note that was sent to me circa 2002, related to a wired magazine article on so-called "lowercase music" - a term that wikipedia claims i invented, but which in truth, was a term i used to describe something quite different. i will share the true story of the term and its meaning another day, but for now i thought it would be nice to share this note in response to my own work as well as the work of my "cohorts"...

Hi,

I just listened to some sound clips of various artists from the Wired.com website of Lower Case Sound & they mentioned your album Forms of Paper which I went to the webpage they had linked for that & read about your album.

I have a couple of things to say to you:

Are you serious? This is not music, in fact it's not even sound FX. If you guys were actually doing something then I might be impressed. I worked in L.A. in the music industry & I heard a lot of crap but this is not even that. What's the point of buying a CD that has nothing on it except a few random barely audible noises that I can make on my home DAW setup. I am thoroughly disappointed with this lame idea especially when music & audio in general needs a serious artistic movement to revive it. You & your cohorts are pretending to be serious artists that have a alternative to all the groovebox beat music that is out there. What you are doing though is truly nothing & the only statement you are making is that you really have no talent or ideas to present. If you really want to change the way people listen to sound then you must actually make something for them to listen to first. Not really a very novel idea but I think it works.

when guitar godesses rise up from a pool of light...

when needful things are found in seemingly lesser things...

this rugged crater
alive with
sounds

...and listen

sounds come
from within the
rocks

follow the almost
hypnotic lure of music...

music

rrrrrrrrr
crash
krak
bam
powpow
eeee

echoes in the sill air!
do you hear me out there?

i still can't believe my ears

and in peaceful silence.

when music moves from organs to strings...

achingly beautiful rendition of arvo part's pari intervallo, originally written for a pipe organ, here transcribed for the finish kantele - sounding less like a gold crowned church and more like a small wooden box made by a shaker...

some upcomings...

some upcoming events as i journey from one coast to another...
september 7, 5-8 pm
opening reception for the group exhibition: game theory
cornish college of the arts,
seattle washington.

september 8, noon
artist talk
cornish college of the arts
main art gallery - free

september 8, 7 pm
performance
cornish college of the arts
main art gallery - free

october 1, 6:30 pm
issue project room benefit art auction
at industria superstudio
more info here
i will be doing a short 10-15 minute performance early in the evening.

when cage attempted to apprentice fischinger...

"Galka Scheyer had introduced Cage (and Edgar Varese) to Fischinger shortly after his arrival in America (1936) in the hope that Cage might provide Fischinger with some original and modernist music more suited to the extraordinary, radical potential of his animations. Fischinger, round and jolly as a Chinese Buddha, explained to Cage that he had tried writing sound himself a few years earlier by drawing ornaments and photographing them into the soundtrack area of film so that their inherent spirit, that gave them visual shape, might also be released to give them equivalent auditory values. This notion that each object contained its intrinsic sound spirit - undoubtedly articulated with bilingual aleatory whimsy - intrigued Cage immensely and led him to embark on his percussion pieces. When Cage proposed doing a soundtrack of percussion music for one of Fischinger's films, Fischinger suggested that Cage should actually work on animating a film to better understand the process and potential of the medium: that incredible freezing of time, and that tedious thawing. Cage dutifully came to observe and help Fischinger on his current work-in-progress, Optical Poem, for which dozens of paper objects were suspended on strings throughout the deep space of a stage area. Cage's lesson involved taking over from Fischinger the long pole topped by a chicken feather with which each circle would have to be moved to a small, even increment, then steadied to motionlessness in preparation for the next exposure. Fischinger merrily sat beside the camera, puffing his smoke, supervising, waiting for the next take. But in the hands of a novice, the set-up took such a long time! Gradually Fischinger dozed, and his cigar, falling to the floor, ignited some rags and papers lying nearby. Cage seized a bucket of water and splashed it over the fire, coincidentally inundating the camera. That was the end of John Cage's apprenticeship in film (though Fischinger wrote him a few years later asking if he had ever done a suitable music track)."

via calvin thompkins, the bride and the bachelors