i love the sound of trains, especially when they are distant, and i can't see them...

(2 snapshots from 1930, a boy and a homemade radio)

when sheets have animals drawn upon them...

it began with a cat, moved on to a giraffe, followed by a flat nosed deer, a camel, an elephant, and a burro or a horse... each as if fallen from the sky... or ...

it began with a burro or a horse, moved on to an elephant, and then a camel, followed by a flat nosed deer, a giraffe, and finally a cat... each as if climbing up into the sky...

(snapshot of an unknown hand drawn object by an unknown artist, in an unknown location with an unknown intended use...dated 1906 on the back).

when bunnies and clowns can be scary...

click here to listen to a home recording from the 1940's, also related to halloween...

before bernd and hilla becher...

it was quite good hunting this weekend, and i will be posting numerous finds from a local library book sale and the rose bowl flea market. one of the nicest finds was this group of snapshots of industrial towers. of course, these reminded me instantly of the serial imagery of the bechers, who photographed industrial architecture in series and presented them in grid forms. while these are clearly snapshots, whomever took the photos seemed to have known what they were doing, and like the bechers the images are both beautiful and somewhat cold - similar to the structures themselves.

when the sky had vanished...

...he spent a great deal of time trying to find it in a field, until he was fortunate enough to discover it sleeping inside of his guitar, thus enhancing the instrument's resonance with a cloudiness in every sounding of a note or a chord...

when paintings and photographs converse...

top: snapshot circa 1940, found at the fleamarket on sunday, a father preacher holding an open bible, and his guitar playing daughter.

bottom: grant wood's american gothic from 1930, also a father and daughter.

in this stream of lightning-birds...

the radio of the future - the main tree of consciousness - will open up a knowledge of countless tasks and will unite all mankind.

around the radio's central station, this iron castle, where clouds of wires stream out like strands of hair, there will surely be posted a skull and crossbones with the familiar description: danger! for the slightest halt in the working of the radio would produce a spiritual swoon of the entire country, a temporary loss of its consciousness.

the radio becomes the spiritual sun of the country, the great sorcerer and ensorceler.

imagine radio's central station: a spider web of lines in the air, a cloud of lightning flashes, now extinguishing themselves, now reigniting, running from one end of the building to the other. a sky-blue globule of circular lightning hovering in the air like a timid bird, tackle stretched obliquely.

around the clock, from this point on the terrestrial globe, flocks of news items from teh life of the spirit scatter like the spring flight of birds.

in this stream of lighting-birds, the spirit will prevail over force, good advice over intimidation.

the words of velimir khlebnikov, from the radio of the future.
image: an old photo of a radio repair shop, also found sunday.

while moving from here to there...

today i fly to chicago to give a talk on my work and meet with grad students, then to philadelphia to visit the girard college site for my installation next spring.

fortunately, blogger's ability to create posts in advance, and the fact that i had a pretty good day at the flea market sunday, have allowed me a week's worth of posts just from sunday's findings. and so i begin this first post forming a line from my leaving and returning site, here; through my destinations, there...

here: seen above, a great snapshot found in a box of photos at the flea market, from the 40's of a radio or television transmission site, probably shot through a telescope, or some such circular hole-like form, taken from the pasadena area, not far from my home...

there: a beautiful song called "snow" from a 1940's set of 78's called 'songs from the first grade book'. i am sure to encounter snow in either chicago or philadelphia if not both... i honestly don't know how the real thing could be anymore sublime or beautiful than this song... which arrived in the mail monday morning...

click here to listen.

audio lucida...

"what the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially".
roland barthes, camera lucida 1980

home recording discs are like snapshots. they are small records recorded in a record booth (see photo above); or at home, with smaller portable units that looked a bit like record players. in most cases a minute or two of sound was recorded onto a plastic covered cardboard 'blank'.

when i was 5 or 6 i remember recording two sides in a booth in an arcade down in san pedro. on one disc i did a howard cosell impersonation calling a fight between muhammad ali and joe frazier. on the other i sang an unaccompanied version of bad bad leroy brown....(yes, i still have these, no i won't post them...)

like digging through mountains of mediocre snapshots and seldom finding a nugget, the majority of home recorded discs are pretty dull. an audio letter telling a son in the army about on what's going on at home, or worse, a recording of a big band song off the radio (an early attempt at killing music with home recording). once in awhile, like the hunting story filled disc i posted a few months ago, you get a gem, and over the last year or so, i've been fortunate to find a number of pretty great little discs.

there's something about an honest amateur that works. i believe it is the feeling that the folks speaking, singing, or making, are sincere in their attempt. if they miss the mark, there's generally a level of innocence that can be pretty powerful, and at times, more so than a schooled approach. it's not a question of better, but of having access to the presence of a person in a state of absolute vulnerability and humanness. like standing in front of a camera, there's the potential for either a "ham" or absolute awkwardness when confronted with a microphone for the first time.

like the photograph in barthes camera lucida, an audio recording also stops time and allows for numerous repetitions of a moment that in 'real life' was never repeated. the difference, i think, is that listening to someone's voice is more intimate as an experience than looking at a picture, and connects one more vividly back to a specific moment. listening with eyes closed, one is transported to another time, where voices are heard beneath a surface of noise, almost as they were in life. unlike the complex flattening of life onto a small piece of paper called a photograph, sound can still project from a speaker out into space as it might have when originally spoken from mouths. certainly it is detached from faces and original rooms, but in terms of the voice still being a voice, it remains relatively intact.

unlike fading in a photo, where information is subtracted, the distance of time in a disc recording is generally felt through addition. photographic images evaporate, recordings get covered in noise. handling and material disintegration fuels a mountain of defects that eventually renders the original voice mute in favor of the voice of the object's tactile surface. images evaporate, but audio get buried alive...

click here to listen to one of my favorite recent finds...

architecture on the go...

well in the midst of architecture month i'm off to austin for an exhibition and to finally visit marfa. it seems a good time to post a recently acquired snapshot of one of the greatest examples of architecture on wheels... buckminster fuller's dymaxion car.

the first of only three prototypes was built in 1933, and in 1934 the last one was built for conductor leopold stokowski (one more merging of sound and architecture...).

this image is of number two (based on the two tone paint job). the thing that is so extraordinary about the snapshot is that most of the photos i've seen of the car show it in all its lonely glory. here, you get way more of a sense of just how strange this car must've looked sitting casually next to regular cars of the era.

p.s. i'll be back in a week.

wheels of the head (or when cowboys become constructivists...)

i've started looking at a lot more photo scrapbooks at the flea market, hoping to find old music photos; and it's amazing how completely uninteresting the majority of family photos can be. the scrapbook that contained the above photo was already a cut above the usual drivel, mainly because of the hand scrawled captions to photos of rodeos, cowboys, and rural scenes in kansas, wyoming, and oaklahoma circa 1915. of course, the last thing i thought i'd come across in an album like this would be a photo captioned "the wheels of the head".

i'm wondering how in the world someone in rural kansas decided to take a double exposure that looks right out of rodchenko's oevre? i'd like to say i've discovered the life's work of an unknown cowboy photographer who is the missing link between the early american prarie and the avant garde; but there's not a single other image in the scrapbook that is remotely related to this one - technically or stylistically. based on everything else in the book, i'm pretty sure the person who took this photo knew nothing about the photography and collage work of the russian constructivists, much less the work of man ray or the dada and surrealists. the image reminds me a bit of raul hausmann's dada sculpture of 1919 of a wooden head with a tape measure and other things affixed to it.

when i blew up the image, i noticed the distant face in the upper right, which adds a whole other level of victorian pathos, and the feeling of germaine dulac's film the seashell and the clergyman.

there are other photos in the book that i'll probably post - standard faire, but interesting for the subjects or the arrangement of photos and captions/drawings on the page; some of it compelling, but none as remarkable as this...