Showing posts with label Polaroid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Polaroid. Show all posts

Sunday, June 8, 2008

May 26 - 31, 2008


Famous for Fifteen Minutes
My Years with Andy Warhol
By Ultra Violet
1998, hardcover
9 cards

I picked up this book about Warhol, written by one of his Superstars Ultra Violet. Partly about Warhol and partly about Ultra Violet's own life an experiences, a quote at the beginning points out that all conversations are reconstructed, warning one to not take some of the quotations at their word. While interesting in parts, Ultra Violet was out for publicity, in fast pursuit of the media, and the name dropping gets a bit overwhelming at times. She knew (and dated) lots of people including Dali and Ed Ruscha and while she has some great insights, at other times it seems like she's trying to hard to make sweeping statements about the time.

1- "In death, as in life, Warhol deals in contradictions."
3- "I met the King of Pop years ago. His name was Marcel Duchamp. To me, Andy was the Queen of Pop."
5- (Warhol) "He changed the way we look at the world, arguably the way we look at ourselves."
6- "The primary creation of Warhol was Andy Warhol himself."
7- "Magic was a word Andy gargled with for hours."
8- gimlet eye
-"There is no taking of Polaroids in heaven: the ineffable light precludes it."
11- "Here in the Factory the mirrors have come out of their frames and merged into a total environment of silvery reflections and refractions."
12- "...a wonderland where you step in and out of yourself, where memory and fantasy race into each other at full tilt."
-"Maybe what you're creating is artifact not art."
13- "Mirrors- they have the most memories. I am quoting John Graham."
18- Billy Name- "trained in the spirit of Black Mountain. 'All of us carried Rimbaud under our arms.'"
28- doughnuts
31-33- screening of Blow Job
42- worked in a five and dime store
89- luncheonette
90- "In the Factory, Andy always works with loud rock music on. In rock, repetition is the leitmotif. ... the drum, a replica of the heartbeat."
92- "But for Warhol, photography is not just a helping hand. It is a replacement of the chosen object. The photograph becomes the painting. ... no original painting; from the start, there are multiples."
95- "It amazes me that a country as liberal as the United States allows itself to take on the burden of capital punishment."
96- Red Race Riot- "the repetition produces an action painting."
97- subliminal art- "takes objects people are fascinated by and turns them into art."
98- quadruple impact
-"John Cage uses graffiti sounds in his pieces and Merce Cunningham uses everyday noise in his dances."
102- "The Velvet Underground plays so loud you never hear the music."
103- Nico- "She looks like a girl- but when she sings, it's hard to be sure of her sex."
-"The decibels are so deafening that talking is out of the question. That's why Andy loves it so much."
104- "The Velvet Underground is going with music what Andy is doing with images. They repeat and repeat and repeat the same word or phrase until someone screams out, 'Shut up!'"
105- "Minimal music echoes minimal art."
110- Empire "It is a picture postcard of the building transferred to the screen."
125- Duchamp
John Chamberlain- orange corduroy pants
142- Max's Kansas City
144- Brasserie in the Seagram Building
198- "The moon is no cheap date."
205- "Since the sixties people workshop the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone starts at the beaming energy of Edie..."
214- Ed Ruscha
216
221- Polaroid camera
254- "And his camera is still an integral part of his clothing."
273- Fiesta ware

Sunday, June 1, 2008

May 25 - 26, 2008


Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes
1981, paperback
15 cards

Roland Barthes is a genuine voice who contributed amazing tracts about life and things living produces. Here he discusses photography, though delving deep, into how it means through a personal photograph where he knows his mother. The best part is this photograph is never reproduced, in part, because it would not mean in the same way for other viewers. This is a landmark book that I needed to reread and probably could read 100 more times, finding something new and valuable with each reading.

Selected notes/passages:
Reproduction of a Polaroid photograph at the beginning
3- "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor."
4- "what the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially."
6- "photographs are signs which don't take, which turn"
-"the referent adheres"
9- "to do, to undergo, to look"
-"(Polaroid? Fun, but disappointing, except when a great photographer is involved.)"
15- death
-"cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing"
26- studium
27- punctum
30- "Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography."
-"the ghost of paintings"
38- "when it is pensive, when it thinks."
40- Baudelaire
42- a detail
45- "less Proustian"
47- "The photographer's 'second sight' does not consist in "seeing" but in being there"
51- "The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance."
53- remembering the punctum
-Kafka: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."
63- Proust
64- history
65- "History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it- and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it."
70- Proust
71- Mallarme
73- Nietzsche
76- "Painting can feign reality without having seen it."
-"in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there"
-"That-has-been"
80- Sontag
81- "A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze..."
- "For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic"
84- co-presence
85- "what has been"
87- "language is, by nature, fictional"
89- time
91- "actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory"
-Rilke
-violent
-monument
-"A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography."
94- "love-as-treasure"
97- private reading
100- "Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see."
102- "no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental"
-"Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents."
103- "the photograph makes appear what we never see in the real face"
110- provincial photographer
115
118


Sunday, April 20, 2008

April 17-19, 2008


Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Hardcover 2005
31 cards

It's hard to read a book while crying, but it is truly amazing to read a book that moves me to tears. When this book was lent to me the picture from 9/11 was flipped to. I admit this was a picture I did not want to see at the time, I didn't watch the news, I didn't need the images at the time. While I loved Foer's other book Everything is Illuminated it took a month or so for me to pick this book up, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. Using the picture as a sort of Readymade and wrestling with Duchamp's both and rather than either/or (the door that is both open and closed), Foer, from a child's perspective (a child anyone would live a richer life to know) offers amazing story layered upon story, driven by letters and emotions, while also revealing revelations about life not unlike Jenny Holzer's Truisms. Foer includes amazing statements about love throughout while also cracking the reader up. I thought I was one of the few who see the need for a detachable pocket and I was delighted to see that Foer through Oskar also see the need. This is likely the best use of a tambourine in a story. Ever. "Heavy boots" but boots worth putting on and wearing.


I don't even know where to begin with my stack of cards from this book. Each page offers a present. A rich experience with each page turned.
-2 birdseed shirt
-tambourining
-4 "It's that I believe that things are extremely complicated."
-7 children and parents
-8 map of Central Park
-"Was nothing a clue?"
-9 "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I be right?" "...Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"
-10 not stop looking
-"The more I found the less I understood."
-11 letters
-12 laminator
-13 "Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are."
-17 yes, no
-36 coffin and closet
-40 319 post offices, 207,352 post office boxes, 41,163 million locks
-42 "someone walking on a tightrope between the Twin Towers" (Phillipe Petit, about whom I just saw the film, Man On Wire)
-Stuff That Happened to Me scrapbook
-45, 47, 48, 49
-46 "...most people write the name of the color of the pen they're writing with."
-"Would you mind not shaking the tambourine in the store?"
-53
-60-61
-59, 62, 63
-69 "It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone."
-71 portable pocket
-Mencils
-72 and 73- ambulances
-74 "We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."
-"In the end, everyone loses everyone." (This reminds me of Jason Collett's song We All Lose One Another)
-76 (letter) "Where had it been for those 15 years?"
-"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
-ruby bracelet
-"I had a letter from everyone I knew."
-81 "Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted."
-"We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it."
-82 "I was more along than if I had been alone."
-84 "Together and separately."
-87 meeting people with last name Black
-88 "I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me."
-90 Edna Saint Vincent Millay
-95
-96 elephants, remembering
-99 "So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are."
-card
-100 scarf and knitting
-101 "Don't go away."
-102 love and collection
-106 inventions: wedding rings and bracelet
-108 "songs are as sad as the listener"
-109 "...at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news."
-111 Something. Nothing.
-126 "Trying to be"
-130 "My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met."
-133 "I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life."
-145 gambols
-147 Coney Island, Cyclone
-149 leather
-154 "I was keeping a list in my head of things I could do to be more like him."
-"There are more places you haven't heard of than you've heard of."
-LP...Polaroid...drive-in...Frank Lloyd Wright
-156 "Is a love song a love song?" "Yes!"
"Is love love?" "No!"
-biographical index
-160- 230 years of peace
-162 library sinking
-163 being careful with people
-164 artists, arms, feeding each other, believing in the story
-166 and 167
-169 "His memory is here"...
-cells
-170-171 Feelings Book entries
-172-173
-175 taking pictures
-178 "Everything will be..."
-179 shyness, shame
-colder
-books, grandfather clock, time
-180 book crying
-189
-"Why are you so weird?"
-190 Buckminster Fuller
-191
-193 postage stamp, creme brulee
-194 "He said poverty made him nervous, not people."
-195 watching the world
-202 Cucumber, Formica
-203 juicebox
-207 Hey Jude
-208-216
-208 "You write to someone you can't be with."
-214 typewriter
-215 "Life is scarier than death."
-216 letter- "And here I am instead of there. ..."
-217 the Sixth Borough
-220 "I love you" and response
-222 "Maybe we're lost..."
-Antarctica
-230 staples and tape
-226-229
-230-232
-232 "That beautiful person is mine! Mine!"
-233 empty envelopes
-239 "In Chinese ny mean 'you' Though was 'I love you.'"
-245 Empire State Building- what it's really like
-247 "I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for."
-Ruth
-249 "We'll care incredibly much."
-250- kissing, electric sparks
-251 "If I had an answer, it wouldn't really be love would it?"
-252 spotlight
-253
-255
-256 "Maybe he didn't say he loved me because he loved me."
-257 "Why Yes and No?"
-260-261
-269
-275
-278 "The room was filled with the conversation we weren't having."
-map of where he went
-280 "We didn't talk about unimportant things."
-285- Mr. Black's
-286 Oskar Schell: Son
-"...I wouldn't have let him go."
-believing
-287-288
-304-305
-"I wish I were a poet."
-307- nothing to write on
-309
-310 "It's better to lost than never to have had."
-312 "What if we stay?"
-314 "It's always necessary."
-316 book invented
-318
-319 names, keep
-321 dictionary definition
-324 extremely complicated
-325 reversed the order