Due to an opening in White Pine Press' publications schedule, Adamantine will be out in Fall 2010. I am excited that Peter Levitt and Mike O'Connor have both agreed to blurb, two exceptionally fine writers with Buddhist sympathies who's work have both meant a great deal to me. Also, a few feelers out to other possible blurbists of the female persuasion.

I will be brushing up on my Spanish or else it will be trial by fuego when it comes to working with many of the living Mexican photographers in the Wittliff Collections. With my boss, who is fluent in Spanish, set to retire in January, it will be an interesting time.

I'm working on an AAM MAP application for the Collections and also just finished a personal application to the Macondo Workshop.

I would like to go on a yoga or Ayurvedic retreat next year to do some detox. Where do you like to go to practice yoga? Mexico or Costa Rica? Or should we go hardcore with ghee shots and herbal enemas at the Ayurvedic Institute?

I'm excited to see Twilight tomorrow. I haven't seen a head of hair like Robert Pattinson's since James Dean.

Yesterday, I was watching a rerun of the original 90210 and realized that Brandon's former boss at the country club is the same actor who plays Chief Weber in Grey's Anatomy. A long career in soaps - speaking of which, I am tempted to start watching General Hospital now that James "Pineapple Express" Franco has signed on as GH character "Franco."

I am reading Lawrence Weschler's biography of Robert Irwin which was written over 30 years of gathering interview material. Irwin talks about how his ambition eventually turned to a much deeper and healthier sense of curiosity and abiding interest in perception. He became less concerned with taking risks and reinventing his work, then with pursuing his interest in human perception. And as a result, his work grew in complexity and evolved greatly from painting to light works and abstract sculptural forms cutting the landscape. I remember seeing his steel sculpture on the lawn of the Rachofsky House in Dallas; and then there is his installation on the campus of the University of Washington which I'd walk by almost everyday on the way to work in Seattle. I bought Irwin's biography, not on the merits of his work, which I knew little about, but because I loved Weschler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, a terrific collection on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice Beach. On my upcoming visit to SoCal, I must find a way to visit.

After a night's rain, I decided today to wear the Moov Boots I ordered from Australia. They are fleece-lined and weigh about 10 pounds (each?!), and this weight is noticeable when walking down the street to the university. Also, this Australian sizing thing leaves a lot of extra room at the toe which makes these shoes to me like driving a car - having a lot of extra material around the body. Consequently, my spatial awareness is somewhat skewed and I keep bumping my toes.

Studio Program, ACC Galerie Weimar, Germany

16th International Studio Program of the ACC Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar
Deadline: 7th December, 2009

Beyond Desire
http://www.acc-weimar.de/

The non-profit organization ACC (Autonomous Cultural Center) originated in 1987, before the fall of the Berlin wall, when students occupied a derelict Renaissance building in the center of the town where Goethe (inevitably) had had his first residence in Weimar (1776/77). Shortly before the reunification, ACC protagonists were able to secure the house with the aid of private sponsors. The institution now consists of a gallery and a café and offers a cultural program that includes theater, literature, and lecture series.

The studio is located in the historical Städtisches Atelierhaus (Municipal studio building), about ten minutes walk to the ACC Galerie Weimar in the town center. In addition to the visiting international artists, the well-lit studio building accommodates ten other Weimar artists.

ROOM AND BOARD: Rent-free furnished apartment in the Weimar Atelierhaus with telephone/answering machine and DSL internet; meals are available at ACC Café-Restaurant at reduced prices (70%).

PARTICIPATION: Artists who would like to produce works of art in accordance with the outlined theme can apply.

The jury will select three artists, each of whom will spend four months living and working in Weimar. Student’s applications cannot be accepted.

DISPLAY AND EXHIBITION: The ACC Galerie Weimar employs a curator who develops a conception and a publication together with the artists. During the residency the curator will decide together with the artists whether and how the selected work(s) will be presented at the ACC Galerie Weimar in 2010. Where appropriate, works of art will be displayed in public spaces in Weimar for time periods to be agreed upon with the artists. In case of a group exhibition of all Studio Program participants a small catalogue will be produced. It is intended that the artists are present during the preparation and for the opening of the exhibition.

ACC COLLECTION: The former participants of the program left one or two important works of art completed during their stay in Weimar to become part of the ACC Galerie Collection. It is up to the future participants to follow this tradition. The gallery and the artist(s) will select the works together.

WORK PERIODS: February 1st – May 31st, 2010; June 1st – September 30th, 2010; October 1st, 2009 – January 31st, 2011

STIPEND: The selected artists will receive a monthly stipend of 1.000€. In order to receive the stipend the artists have to live in Weimar during the work period. The artists are also expected to hold a lecture/talk at the ACC Galerie Weimar at the end of his/her stay in Weimar. In addition we offer free entry to public municipal institutions, such as the Museum of the History of Weimar, and to the museums of the Weimar Classic Foundation, such as the Weimar Art Collection, the Goethe National Museum, the Bauhaus Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Dutchess Anna Amalia Library. Participants are responsible for their own telephone bills and have to arrange for their own medical insurance.

LANGUAGES: English and German are official languages of the International Studio Program. Participants should have a solid grasp of either English or German.

TRAVEL: The participants must cover their own travel costs, although the program attempts to find additional funding in cooperation with the artists.

The application rules are enclosed in the entry form.
http://www.acc-weimar.de/16-iap-2010-application.pdf

Homage to Basho on a November morning

grown child
leaf pile
*crunch*

Book Lab, San Marcos

Yesterday, I went and visited Craig Jensen at his studio in San Marcos. Craig runs Book Lab II - a business that specializes in innovative bookbindings, special editions, conservation, and box-making. Portfolio boxes are the bread and butter of Book Lab's business - and Craig and his partner Gary make archival, cloth-covered boxes for the Getty, the Blanton, and many museum clients. We ended up in Craig's library, looking over past editions and projects that he's worked on. The one piece that absolutely blew my mind was Gaylord Schanilec's Sylvae project. I'm not even sure how quite to explain it, but here goes.

Schanilec lives in rural Wisconsin and got interested in the trees on his property. He surveyed his land and found over 24 species. He then took samples of each tree species and made wood block prints directly from the specimens. He made prints of the interior rings (end grains), as well as of the cross-section of the long grain. Here are the 24 wood samples that come with each book. Each sample is numbered and corresponds to a section/print in the book.



Schanilec was careful to closely match the ink color with the actual hue of the wood. I think this one was ash.



This amazing book also includes a map of Schanilec's land.


The hand-bound book is protected inside a cloth-covered box that also has a niche where the tray of wood blocks rests. The box set must weigh close to 40 pounds!

I found many things compelling about this project - the integration of wood into the design of the book covers and the documentation of the process through the wood blocks. The texts which encompass natural history, poetry, recipes, weird bits of trivia. But I think what moved me most about this project was that the materials came directly from the land where Schanilec lives and works. It reminded me in ways of the project that I wanted to do in my father's home town, using native plants from Ching Shui to make paper that would form the basis of a memory book/family history. Seeing Schanilec's book reminded me of what is possible.

Oh, Morrissey, you were totally in the right.

Friday morning, I was notified that the galleries would have a group of school kids visit that afternoon, so I am over my art tour hump, as I had to improvise very quickly a tour of Fireflies with a small group of 1st-5th graders. For not loving kids or hanging out with children on a regular basis, all things said, it went pretty well.

Went to Bill and Kate's opening at the Stephen L. Clark Gallery on Saturday night. Bill's also got a show up at the Witte Museum in San Antonio at the moment, and so he's definitely having a good year. But these were his Mexico photographs - more spiritual, painterly, and pictorialist-influenced than the Lonesome Dove stills. I wasn't however excited at all about how the show was hung. The Clark gallery has a very limited amount of wall space, and so photos were hung stacked in columns of two on top of one another, with very little actually eye level, which made looking closely at the images, and their details, a challenge. Kate showed new work photographed at the botanical gardens in Mexico - wild, highly textured landscapes, some of which evoked the density of Jackson Pollock painting surfaces and others that spoke to Harry Callahan's abstracted images of plants in snow, though in Kate's photo, water plants became abstract markings within a field of water, vs. winter.

Finally, heard Kate Greenstreet read at Possum headquarters in Austin last night. Kate read poems from her new book which seems infused with spirituality. Liked her follow up work to Case Sensitive and am glad to have caught her as she continues her cross-country promotional tour for the book. I don't know why, but being at last night's reading made me miss the solstice parties at the Wedgewood Coop in Seattle - the people we'd meet, the conversations we'd have. It's been raining a lot in San Marcos, but I still miss Seattle. Sigh.

I am scheduled to give my first school tour in eight years to elementary school children in a few weeks. I will be touring them through our new acquisitions exhibition and our Keith Carter shows. We have a big elephant in the room that I need to get my head around talking about - because JP Witkin's photo from his Mexico Morgue series is displayed so prominently, that there is simply no ignoring it. It's a picture of a young man's head on a platter. JP Witkin did NOT borrow a severed head from a morgue and stage that photo, but he did do an elaborate set up with a corpse in order to arrange the tableaux and create the illusion of disembodiment, a la John the Baptist's head. We have some catalogs with preliminary sketches for the photo which might be useful to duplicate and show, to illuminate the photographer's process and hopefully remove some of the aversion, repulsion, shock or horror of seeing that image. And then there are art historical images of artist's who've taken up the Salome and John the Baptist theme - like Odilon Redon. These are the questions I'm thinking of asking the 5th graders...

How does the picture of the JP Witkin's head make you feel?

How do you think the photograph was made?

Why do you think Witkin chose his particular subject matter over anything found? (probably needs rephrasing)

This last question sets the stage to talk about the staging and performative elements of photographs which could lead into a discussion of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's photograph The Clearing which is in close proximity to the head.

We could then cruise over to Marco Antonio Cruz's image of ciegos with a Mexican wrestler, or Lizeth Velasco's images of little people working as matadors in Mexico. Find a way to talk about unconventional, surprising subject matter and inspiration.

From there, we could head to Keith Carter's ethereal images and his pictures of children from Fireflies his new book and talk about how Keith got started as a photographer taking children's portraits - and how that practice evolved for him over time to be a very collaborative process. I could ask:

If Keith Carter were to ask to take a picture of you, what item would you want to be photographed with?

And since the Carter show also has some beautiful photograms, I think I could work in some conversation about process and the difference between the making of specific images.

And perhaps opening or closing the tour could be a question about "What would you collect?" if given the opportunity to curate your own gallery.

Up next weekend - a new show of Kate Breakey and Bill Wittliff photos at the Stephen L. Clark Gallery in Austin. Opening on Saturday from 6:30 to 9.

A busy weekend of extracurricular outings and multiple events at the Texas Book Festival. Poetry is not big on the TBF's programming agenda, but there were plenty of strong fiction and nonfiction events.

Started out on Saturday morning with Dave Cullen's talk on his new book Columbine. Cullen is widely regarded as an expert on Columbine and his book looks at the overlapping narratives of nine individuals involved in Columbine, including the school principal, a teacher, students, and police officers. To research his book, Cullen obtained the journals of the shooters, Smith and Kliebold, and analyzed both personal documents. What was most surprising about Kliebold's journals were his repetitive drawings of hearts and the tone of his writing - not filled with hate, but laced with depression and a futile kind of love. In this light, Cullen read Kliebold's participation in the massacre as an act of suicide - a very different motive than that of his counterpart. In the Q&A, Cullen did a great job with not placing blame on the parents of Eric Harris for not seeing the massacre coming. Cullen also did a fine job of critiquing the media, and himself as a former journalist covering the story, for contributing to some of the stereotypes and misperceptions created by the press in their rush to speculate about the shooters to create a master narrative of what transpired at Columbine. Also some good reflections about working boundaries around true crime - Cullen can no longer read about victims' lives when covering crime stories - it takes him into too dark a place; he spoke candidly of having a severe bout of depression following writing one of the toughest chapters in his book.

We went from Cullen's event to a talk on race by Colson Whitehead and ZZ Packer. Whitehead's humor and range of cadence and tone were very much offset by Packer's dry and academic approach. I tried to read John Henry Days several months ago and had to give it up, but I think that Whitehead's new book, Sag Harbor may be more to my tastes. Ran into Ben Fountain and his wife, got caught up in catching up and ended up missing Amanda Eyre Ward.

Later, ended up at Steve's panel on J. Frank Dobie and Bill Minutaglio's Molly Ivins' biographies. Steve bravely faced down dismissals and criticisms of Dobie as being a rambling and anecdotal writer - situating him squarely within the oral folkloric tradition.

From there, on to Keith Carter's talk on his newest monograph at the Austin Museum of Art. Ran into Bill who introduced me to Michael, who's portraits of Tom Waits and Bud Shrake are currently hanging in our Nueva Luz show at the gallery.

Highlight of Sunday's programming was Jeanette Walls' speaking on her memoir of surviving childhood with an alcoholic father and homeless mother. The food panel with Jonathan Safran Foer and others was not what I expected. All about factory farming, where to buy/source your food, ethical slaughter and going veg for the environment.

It was great to see so many of the events filled to capacity with readers and audience members who'd clearly read the books and cared about the issues, characters, and narratives presented within them. Austin ain't Seattle, but clearly, there's a strong literary audience. This was reflected in my mind in some of the representation at the bookfair - Dave Egger's McSweeney's even booked a table.

The Capitol seemed like a good-sized venue to hold the festival, though it needed more signage to direct traffic from gallery to gallery. Given the high number of security guards throughout the building, I was stunned to walk into a bathroom in the basement to find a homeless woman sponging herself clean with damp paper towels and brushing out her hair while talking to herself. The image of this woman stayed with me throughout the day as I thought of the work that happens in the senate and house chambers and the festival happening around me.