Mike Grill Update:

It's a composite. And according to the artist, the guy in the baseball cap appears three times in the photo.
Damned if I can spot that third appearance.

MIKE GRILL
RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS
CSA Space - July 13th - August 26

I don't know about you, but to me it looks like the fellow with the dog appears twice. Once going in, once coming out (his second self is missing the dog, the plastic bag and the bottles that made his backpack so tall, but everything else is the same - baseball cap, goatee, raincoat, pants, running shoes, posture.)
Word on the street is it's a straight photograph, so who knows. Maybe it's a doppleganger.

Some photographs by V of her place of employment, a small wholesale nursery located off a quiet country lane on the Saanich Peninsula. Work days apparently consist of watering seeds, potting plants, listening to birds and watching funny Youtube videos.





Here's where I work!

Which One of You Bitches Wants to Dance?

Bernard Black, the drunken, curmudgeonly owner of London's Black Books, finally hits on a way to not do the shop's accounting.

(For the drunken, curmudgeonly CJB)

the smell of oil
from the camera
the sea under my feet
is just firm enough
the shutter fires

the glare of sun on the
fallen snow
the ground under my feet
the sunlight recedes
the shutter sleeps

-Lomo

How Milk is Made

For Chris Harris, in apology for bailing on his friday night show in Victoria due to extreme Harry Potter pre-release customer service exhaustion.

Let's Dance.

Messages from the future, courtesy Mike Judge.

Carl's Jr.

Identification.

Fox News.

Pomona Queen - Kem Nunn *****
Heat - George Monbiot ****
You Don't Love Me Yet - Jonathan Lethem ***
Sailing The Wine Dark Sea - Thomas Cahill ****
The Mess They Made - Gwynn Dyer ***
Hokusai's Mount Fuji - Jocelyn Bouquillard *****
Vancouver Art and Economies - Melanie O'Brien ***

It's hot out there.

Some kind soul has finally posted a few choice excerpts from Ross Mcelwee's Sherman's March up on Youtube. It's hard for me to convey how influential this film was (and still is) for me. I've posted about it once before. A few short clips won't convey much of whats really going on in terms of structure and themes, but a quick trip to the nearest public library would probably turn up a dog-eared vhs copy if you're interested. I've watched at least three different tapes of it over the years, all from libraries.

“I think anybody who had been moderately competent, reasonably alert to the vitality of what was actually going on in the medium would have done the same thing I did,” he said several years ago. “I mean, the idea that Winogrand or Friedlander or Diane were somehow inventions of mine, I would regard, you know, as denigrating to them.”

John Szarkowski, 1925-2007.

I've posted excerpts from Szarkowski's essays here on more than one occasion.
His writings meant a lot to me.

Of all the enormously influential photographers that Szarkowski championed, William Eggleston seems to me the most vital. Pull him from the timeline, and the last thirty years of the medium really do collapse.
Hilton Kramer called William Eggleston's first one man show at the Museum of Modern Art (curated by Szarkowski) "perfectly banal" and "perfectly boring" (lazy, incurious remarks that are in fact, perfectly wrong.) The show, besides being shockingly good (to the point that it still looks contemporary 30 years later), was inarguably a major turning point in the history of the art form; a sudden, bewildering release from the predictable monochromatic poles of social-documentary moralism on one hand, and vacuous "zone-system" refinement on the other. Photography in the mid-70's (as practiced by people who referred to themselves as photographers, not 'artists using photography,') was dangerously close to a kind of formal calcification. William Eggleston, in effect, detonated the medium. And a lot of contemporary art photography is still operating in the chaotic, ear-ringing aftermath.
Legend has it that Ansel Adams himself sent a letter to Szarkowski protesting the hanging of Eggleston's pictures - irrefutable proof, if required, that Szarkowski was on the right track.

Here's Szarkowski's original introduction to Eggleston's first book of photographs, William Eggleston's Guide, published in 1976. Note the clean, lucid prose, the surplus of insight and ideas, and the absence of rarefied art jargon.

"Under the Constitution, the Senate has the unique power to try an impeachment. The decision as to whether to convict on each of the articles must be made separately. A conviction must be supported by a two-thirds majority of the Senators present. A conviction on any one of the articles of impeachment brought against an individual is sufficient to constitute conviction in the trial of the impeachment. Should a conviction occur, then the Senate must determine what the appropriate judgment is in the case. The Constitution limits the judgment to either removal from office or removal and prohibition against holding any future offices of "honor, Trust or Profit under the United States." The precedents in impeachment suggest that removal may flow automatically from conviction, but that the Senate must vote to prohibit the individual from holding future offices of public trust, if that judgment is also deemed appropriate. A simple majority vote is required on a judgment. Conviction on impeachment does not foreclose the possibility of criminal prosecution arising out of the same factual situation. The Constitution precludes the President from extending executive clemency to anyone to preclude their impeachment by the House or trial or conviction by the Senate."

In other news, the left now has it's own Bill O'Reilly. It's about time.
Here he is going off, at length, on MSNBC.

A tautly edited, extremely hot homo-erotic "Star Trek" video, courtesy Jim Affinito.

Old Lady: Do you have this new book by this englishman, Richard Dickins- or Dorkins something- or-other?

JT: Dawkins? The scientist?

Old Lady: I don't know, some nonsense about God being an illusion or something.

JT: Delusion. Yeah, that's Dawkins. It's over here in our "current culture" section, under "religion."

Old Lady: "Culture?" Hmpf. Should be in "sub-culture."

JT: Well, it was one of the best selling books of the year, so that kind of bumps it up out of the "sub-culture" category. Here it is... (arriving at the store's newly created culture-religion section [AKA the "Atheist Section"], which consists of two big shelves packed to the brim with titles like "The End of Faith," "God is Not Great," "In Defense of Atheism," "Coming to Our Senses," etc. etc.)

Old woman scans shelves, eyes bugging out like Wile E. Coyote going over a cliff.

Old Lady: This is just...unbelievable.

JT: Yes.

Old Lady: What is all this????

JT: (Grinning stupidly) Well, we recieved so many of these new atheist books in the last year or so, we decided to give them their own section. We seem to get a new one in every month or so. Big sellers, these.

Old Lady: (Examining a copy of "The God Delusion" up close, as if it were an invasive weed.) Unbelievable!!

JT: Isn't it?

Old Lady heads for the front register, book angrily in hand.
JT returns to the side desk, where an amusing surprise awaits him, buried in the morning's new stock.

A stunning opening to a stunning film: the creation myth sequence from Watership Down - still my favorite feature length animated film of all time, and still as beautiful and horrifying as it was when I was 12.

25, BHP, Victoria, B.C.
2007

Carrie Walker
The Storybooks Have Been Unfair
mixed media on rag paper, 22"x 30"

New watercolour/found-drawing mash-ups by Carrie Walker will be on display at Bjornson Kajiwara Gallery from July 5th to the 28th.