Here’s a re-up of David Lynch’s Ghost of Love from the Inland Empire soundtrack and a older post, with props for the curious folks that let me know that the previous link was dead. Communication is always welcome and appreciated. Well, almost always, I suppose (although some spam is ridiculous enough to actually enjoy). Said exceptions aside, notification of the need for re-ups are never filed under that category, so thanks again.

And a funny thing happened on the way to this re-up…

While in the process of digging for a new header/gallery link image, I was reminded of a scene in Inland Empire that reminded me of one from another film. The film, Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren had such an impact on me as a young film student (preparing to drop out of art school to work at a skateboarding magazine) that I named my daughter after the woman who made it.

I wonder if Lynch intended the shot as an homage? It wouldn’t surprise me at all considering Deren was as much of a risk-taking, visual-narrative driven, abstract filmmaker as Lynch. She hasn’t been referred to as the High Priestess of Experimental Cinema for nothing. Plus, Meshes of the Afternoon deals with transitive states of consciousness shot in a nearly seamless linear flow, leaving a more obscure line for the viewer to strain their mind in their attempt to follow. Classic Lynch, classical Deren…

Although I’ve got a more focused post about Deren in the works, in the spirit of serendipity, homage and the Silver Jews’ Open Field nod I’m about to post about, I thought I’d upload the scenes from both for your own comparison, edification and amusement.

Screens via the image above, Ghost of Love re-up below.

David Lynch: Ghost of Love (9.2mb, mp3.zip, MF)

Previous, link-laden s|b posts:
strange what love does
strange what love does (redux)

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Update via Needles and Pens:

Feb. 13, 2008
The great hive of the internet is buzzing about over the Xerox on the Insides of Your Eyelids show, look onward: GSD’s blog over at Altamont, Roger Bridges’ Strange Beautiful, Bernie McGinn’s Of Skateboards + Copy Machines, Andy Jenkins’ Bend Press, and Epicly Trife

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It’s really weird that I haven’t dug deeper into this subject matter before. Not just here, but generally as well. The sense of nostalgia that arrives while digging through this stuff has little influence on my sense of awe at the impact of the work itself and the signature beauty it continues to maintain.

I remember seeing a couple of light shows as a kid. I think they were at a local library. Certainly (unfortunately) not a Hendrix show. I remember being moderately appreciative. It wasn’t until later, at the right time and state, that I’d get it. I mean, the cross-disciplined, like-minded collaborative tactile effort is inspiring in itself, given the insular state of the work most of us do today— nestled behind our monitors. And the results, so entwined in the act of creation. So directly linked with the chemically agape audience…

OK, so maybe nostalgia does have a part to play.

Regardless, it seems that with few exceptions these performances overshadow any similar projection work that has followed since. This is especially true in regard to the Boyle family. Surely, well known in the old guard of psyche cognoscenti, but new to me — by name at least.

More to come.

Boyle Family: 01 / 02 / 03
Tate Show ‘05

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My good friend, Art Director for Girl Skateboards and founding member of The Art Dump (among many, many other hats) , Andy Jenkins has a shitload of reasonably priced 5×5″ paintings for sale from the Lab101 show, “stAAAmmering” he took part in earlier this year. I’ve got two on the way. Wish I’d had the chance to score some of these too.

Get ‘em before they’re gotten at Andy’s site, Bend Press.

via: BEND / Lab101 / stAAAmmering 01|02

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I first met Dan Estabrook when he was working the counter of a skate shop in Boston during my first semester at art school. By the time I dropped out to work at Transworld, I’d spent the greater part of a year skating with him and a handful of locals, making zines, sneaking into his Harvard classes and exploring it’s red-lit subterranean catacombs.

Where I was content to continue exploring our rigged, Letraset® half-tone transfer printing technique for better photo reproduction in zines, Dan dug deeper into tin type, albumen, salt prints and other antiquated techniques and processes.

A lot of us made art at the time. Dan is one of a very few who became an artist in the true sense of the term. Not just because he’s maintained an active presence in contemporary art circles, but because he has continued to live a life of personal creation and expression as fully and consciously as he always did.

Just one hundred years ago, science could still claim palmistry, phrenology, and physiognomy among its disciplines, and even today we tend to believe that written on the body are the keys to decipher the secret language of the everyday. There is science, too, in photography — mixing salt and silver to represent the otherwise unseen details of the natural world. By processes physical and chemical, it is even possible to distill one’s breath, capture time, and give a material life to the immaterial. It is this alchemy that moves me. Using and emulating nineteenth-century printing techniques, and making visible the very physical materials of which photographs are made, I attempt to have seemingly anonymous photographs become highly personal objects. In these images a single repeated shape, a formation of flowers, or the patterns of dust and decay are almost legible texts, inscribed on the skin of paper, tin, and glass.
– Dan Estabrook, 1998

Desta is showing at DCFA until the end of December.

If you’re in the area — don’t hesitate:

Dan Estabrook, MUSEUM
1 November – 22 December, 2007
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street, Suite 506
New York, NY

Wish I could be there, D.

via: Pathetica (work) / Flickr / DCFA / Edelman Gallery (bio) / Artnet

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GSD.

Unless your skateboarding enthusiasm pre-dates 1990, chances are good you’ve never heard of him. That’s about to change.

Garry Scott Davis is a prolific, obsessive-compulsive collector/creation-engine currently working and living in Lake Forest, California. He is one of skateboarding’s forefathers. He invented the boneless one, and was the first street skater with a pro street deck. For the past decade he’s been playing in bands with “Floor” in their names, Custom and Carpet respectively. His zine Skate Fate, was not only the first and longest running in skatezine history (1981-91), it was also one of the most creative (grip tape, Del Mar pool tiles, an issue issue folded up into a kite). Though Winford Thomas has been relegated to the past, and still staples xeroxed piles of paper to this day.

GSD is one of the true fathers of grunge design.

Others may have carried it into the public eye, but all one needs to do is rifle through mid-to-late 80s issues of Skate Fate to see where crossed-out/truncated type and xerox crunk was “discovered”. The evidence is there, in xeroxed and stapled black and white.

I was Assistant AD to GSD when David Carson left Transworld and the AD title to him. At the advice of my film professor, I quit art school to work that dream job, and Garry gave me all the foundations in graphic design i still draw from to this day. He once made me adjust the leading of a long-ass article by a few picas. This was before pixels. When it required x-acto knifing each waxed line out and physically adjusting them all with a pica ruler and straight edge. He checked them all too. What a bastard. I still have the x-acto knife I borrowed from him to do it.

We’ve kept in touch since then, occasionally swapping envelopes of recent work and xeroxed ephemera. It appears I’ve got some catch-up to do, having recently received a copy of the long out-of-print skate art book, Dysfunctional which Garry authored with Aaron Rose and C.R.Stecyk III. It remains the pinnacle skateart book to this day — one just turned up on amazon.uk for $705. I was stoked to see a couple of my zines in there, along with so many others from that time.

Also included in the classically re-purposed envelope were a handful of Carpet Floor discs to add to my collection of Garry’s musical explorations. Having grown weary of most guitar-accompanied vocals, I was never as big a fan of Custom Floor as I wanted to be. Carpet Floor on the other hand, is right up there with a lot of the instrumental contemporary psyche and experimental stuff I’ve been digging so much lately. With the exception of some righteous chanting it’s pure, spontaneous instrumental goodness and has been filling my home since it arrived.

At a time when heroes were meant to be killed, GSD filled the role as an enigma, a good friend and an inspiration. He remains so on all accounts to this day.

Mass Ejection / Case Sensitive (3.4mb, mp3,mf)
Majestic / Discreet Meds (7.4mb, mp3, mf)
Hovering Pillows / On the Resurgance of Power Ballads (22.4mb, mp3, mf)
Blow Out / Pour Some Fructose On Me (8mb, mp3, mf)

GSD / Custom Floor / Carpet Floor /
TWS Interview / Apple Memorial Site / El Cortez session
Eye Deck reissue!

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Merzboy has gone conceptual and I’ve been following along. The latest post surrounds a stack of films by Toshio Matsumoto entitled, Experimental Film Works (1961-1987). The collection charts Matsumoto’s decades-long course of exploration in film, presented in downloadable AVI format. I haven’t dug through them all yet (time, how much and what to do with it…), but the few that i have seen are absolutely flooring.

For the Damaged Right Eye is a dual-lobed, split-screen montage charting the unrest, sexuality and pop-culture of the late 1960’s. Sexual topography, typography and riot police coupled with grooving heads and the intermittent overlay of grid-breaking sequences of film and imagery constitute the bulk of my favorite so far. Both FtDRE and Ectasis paved the way for, and were eventually incorporated into Matsumoto’s 1969 film, Funeral Parade of Roses.

True to the collection’s title, all of Matsumoto’s films trace a diverse trajectory through years of work and wide-ranging experimentation. The Weavers of Nishijin classically captures the process of Nishijin textile manufacture in rich black and white reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai era. The minimalist Atman explores the concept of the one-true-self in masked deity-form, set in a field of psychedelic (dis)coloration. A continuation of Matsumoto’s recurrent conjuring of Buddhist/Hindu deities in pulsing, interstitial fields of color and script that leaves me longing for subtitles.

Thanks no doubt to his roots in painting, Matsumoto’s films are the type that demand to be experienced rather than passively observed. Lucky for us, Merz has pointed the way toward a drove of them to dive through, via UBUWEB.

The Weavers of Nishijin (1961) (avi, 317mb)
For the Damaged Right Eye (1968) (avi, 154mb)
Ecstasis (1969) (avi, 123mb)
Atman (1975) (avi, 329mb)
Everything Visible Is Empty (1975) (avi, 167mb)
White hole (1979) (avi, 126mb)

via: Merzboy Goes Conceptual / The Grey Lodge / UBUWEB

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Dan McPharlin’s miniature scaled, cardboard models of analog audio equipment have made the rounds, but they’re just too incredible not to re-up. His illustration work is equally impressive on display in all their Mobius-esque sci-fi splendor — taking me back to the pages of early-80s OMNI and HeavyMetal magazine, minus the fantasy T+A.

McPharlin’s Flickr portfolio also grants us a glimpse into his ultra-mod dwelling, where Eames, Grcic and Noguchi share the floor with analog effects pedals and his canine familiar, Old Girl. Have a look around.

via: CH / cpluv / danmcp

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A couple years ago sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck saw an opportunity to transform two of Art League Houston’s studio buildings scheduled for demolition into the installation, Inversion. Although the post at designverb was spread far and wide, here’s another look at the project and it’s subsequent replacement.

ALH really should have commissioned a structurally sound replica of Inversion instead of the “contemporary design” now in it’s place.

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Ernst Haeckel’s masterpiece, Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) is available for hi-resolution download at Kurt Stüber’s site. I recall getting lost in the single plate archive when I first stumbled on the site many years ago. I don’t remember the hi-res PDF (272 MB), but it’s a welcome addition and an already great resource.

Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel

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