Now you’re really not seeing something!
For some, describing a moment in which they saw nothing is difficult. After all, it’s easy to describe a person, but to describe the absence of a person? A place that no longer exists? That is not only awkward, it is downright borderline crazy, which is why it is what I do primarily.
An eclipse is for some reason different. The nothing then is illogically turned into a spectacle—a thing that must be witnessed, so much so that people have to be reminded in basically every news story about eclipses that they shouldn’t disregard their most basic instincts and look directly at the sun, nor the area where it once was.
Here in Portland, not being able to see the sun is the ordinary condition of our lives. The past few weeks, in which it has crept back through the clouds to warm our blood temperatures and burn our pale, naked-mole-rat-like skins, has frankly been frightening. Having our suffocating cloud coverage back today is like a thick woolen emergency blanket has been pulled over our heads again, shielding us from the terror of seeing the great space fire for another twelve hours of terrifyingly natural light. Heck, the clouds are so thick now that the whole thingmay have already happened because I frankly can’t tell where the sun even is supposed to be.
So, you could follow the rest who go out right now, disregarding all logic and sanity—let alone any measure of cool you may have—to stare at the flaming circle in the sky with your mouth agape, believing that you’re seeing one of this planet’s most spectacular events when in reality what you are seeing is the absence of one of the universe’s most spectacular things, or you could do the safe thing: retreat to your fortified bunker or other windowless panic room, turn off all the lights, close your eyes, and face in the opposite direction of wherever you think the sun might be until it finally goes away. I would advise that your bunker be refrigerated as well so as to mitigate any of the suspended ring of flame’s residual heat, but most properly built fallout shelters will be constructed with this in mind already.
Crazy? Possibly, but almost definitely cool (a subject I am a respected authority on). Your friends will definitely be jealous of how much less of the sun you witnessed than they did, unless they are from Portland, in which case they will just wonder why you are so excited about the way they wake up every single day.
Tomorrow is your last chance to rewrite history, or at least your last chance to do so without getting kicked out of the library. (Taken with Instagram at AB Gallery)
Taken with Instagram at AB Gallery
The bottom edge of each page left uncropped.
Throughout The Witch Man by Margaret Belle Houston (1922). Does not include metadata indicating library of origination or date of digitization.
Las Vegas’ story, perhaps unsurprisingly, begins with a foreclosed house. From it came two towns, both called Las Vegas. Hardly anyone remembers the first Las Vegas anymore, wiped away in drought and arson, and fewer still realize how much thought initially went into shaping the second into the opposite of what Las Vegas has come to mean in the place-name lexicon. Perhaps, then, this is why the city became what it is now: so absorbed with the notion of forgetting as to literally advertise itself as an lawless, unrecordable netherworld that must be forgotten.
But, I grew up there. Lots of people have. Las Vegas isn’t just some round-the-clock bacchanalia concluding with a mandatory memory wipe at the airport—it was also for twenty years the fastest growing city in the United States and a home to millions during its century in existence, even if the obsession with implosions and a parallel push for expansion have replaced much of the historic fabric of the city with fenced vacant lots. If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, perhaps that’s why the narratives with which the town began—foreclosure, premature abandonment, an unwinnable fight against the desert itself, and communal destruction—keep following the city from where little else of its past can be found.
Places of value can be recovered, though, from the memories of those who haven’t yet forgotten what their home meant to them. Displaced from my home town, I’ve spent the past year between there and here ensconced in memory, in search of what history can be salvaged from the scraps of urban fabric, diffusing the spectacles of implosive destruction, and monumenting it all in the city’s dust itself.
Several times in the past year, I’ve mentioned that I’m writing a dictionary of the city—not just about it, but describing it in form and experience. Most of you (rightfully) thought I was insane, but yet, I have done it. What’s more, I’ll be retracing it in graphite live for two weeks in the gallery, from 10am to 5pm weekdays, because just writing a dictionary is not itself crazy enough—I had to make it a self-destructive spectacle, too. Those who come to see it, who will surely bring something lost from the city everyone seems to know with them, can pick up pencils too and contribute to, correct, corrupt, or just read from the growing, fragile index of places not left behind in Las Vegas.
Join me, April 30th through May 10th in PSU’s Art Building and, by proxy, at historic place #87001892, for a look at a city always shifting into dust in Book of Sand.
Marc Dombrosky
FOR SALE, 2009
Embroidery on found cardboard box
(12 x 13 x 19.5 inches)
Hey, I know that guy!
I’ve quoted William Morris on this blog several times, here and here just to name a couple. It’s amazing to me how relevant his writings and ideas are to contemporary society. I’ve especially found his writings helpful when after having struggled thinking about how to communicate what it is I’m trying to do with my work, and then I’ll read a passage by good old WillMo and he goes and clears things right up.
The quote in the image above, “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life in elevating them by art”, speaks succinctly to what it is I find so exciting about social practice and creating work that engages with the public in daily life. That line was written in the late 1800s and published in a series of essays called “Signs of Change”.
In the beginning of the essay where that quote is taken from, he goes further into the idea of happiness with a clarity that really resonates with me:
In considering the Aims of Art, that is, why men toilsomely cherish and practise Art, I find myself compelled to generalize from the only specimen of humanity of which I know anything; to wit, myself. Now, when I think of what it is that I desire, I find that I can give it no other name than happiness. I want to be happy while I live; for as for death, I find that, never having experienced it, I have no conception of what it means, and so cannot even bring my mind to bear upon it. I know what it is to live; I cannot even guess what it is to be dead. Well, then, I want to be happy, and even sometimes, say generally, to be merry; and I find it difficult to believe that that is not the universal desire: so that, whatever tends towards that end I cherish with all my best endeavour. Now, when I consider my life further, I find out, or seem to, that it is under the influence of two dominating moods, which for lack of better words I must call the mood of energy and the mood of idleness: these two moods are now one, now the other, always crying out in me to be satisfied. When the mood of energy is upon me, I must be doing something, or I become mopish and unhappy; when the mood of idleness is on me, I find it hard indeed if I cannot rest and let my mind wander over the various pictures, pleasant or terrible, which my own experience or my communing with the thoughts of other men, dead or alive, have fashioned in it; and if circumstances will not allow me to cultivate this mood of idleness, I find I must at the best pass through a period of pain till I can manage to stimulate my mood of energy to take its place and make me happy again. And if I have no means wherewith to rouse up that mood of energy to do its duty in making me happy, and I have to toil while the idle mood is upon me, then am I unhappy indeed, and almost wish myself dead, though I do not know what that means.
If this writing resonates with you at all, I highly recommend reading News from Nowhere by William Morris, published in 1890.
“curious nu” on Metafilter:
Do you love Weatherscan? Sure, we all do. But what do you do when you want to listen to the soothing and comforting Weatherscan soundtrack but can’t get to a television? A kindly internet user has provided a playlist for just such an occasion. If your usual go-to weather is Local on the 8s, The Weather Channel also thoughtfully provides their month-by-month playlist.
This is possibly the best thing my information-screen deprived psyche could have at the moment.
Library statement contradicted by digitization and digital distribution.
To the construction workers on Lincoln Street, regarding the entire morning and now afternoon of Friday, March 16, 2012: THE GRAVEL IS FLAT. STOP HITTING IT.
071 of 366
Coming to Terms (with Mondrian, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Man Ray)
Image taken with an intentionally broken Kodak DC280 2.1 megapixel camera.
Via Laughing Squid, an extremely polite cat.
Jennifer West Piece
Essay with Avacado, Pregnancy Tea, Raspberry Vinaigrette, Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups, Skateboard
By Sean Schumacher & Will Bryant
Portland State’s plan for replacing Smith Memorial Student Union includes this rather notable bit of relocation not among the seven above-ground floors of the new building.
…a relocated Littman Gallery makes the Subbasement a destination for events.
The Subbasement: a must(y) visit destination!
