closing time

YAMAMOTO Tarô, 2004

Image from http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~nipponga/works/04/04.html

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on this site. I opened it up when I started writing my “tenure” book. Which is now–cross your fingers–finished, and on fairly stable legs in the sea of the publishing process. This winter, I turned attention full-tilt to my book, and to day-job type writing, and put this blog on ice. I’m happily shocked, though, to see that there has been a lot of traffic lately, especially to the Captain Beefheart and the “parakeet of justice” posts.

Besides finishing the book, the parallel world that spun off this site, one further reason for shutting down–killing off this character, so to speak–is that I moved, so the small postage stamp of Atwater I used to write about is no longer my home. I moved just across the ‘5, to Silver Lake, in the hills, plausibly close to public transportation, and near cafés that stay open late at night–just like ‘real’ cities. !.

In any case, I”m re-starting a new blog, called Sengo, which I will post details on soon. Those of you who speak Japanese or know me from my day job know that this word means postwar (戦後) as well as, in the spoken vernacular, a thousand words (千語). I, along with some collaborators, will be posting 1000-word essays and translations–adorned by a single picture, worth 1000 words, naturally–mostly on Japanese pop culture, or things that connect current events in Japanese pop culture to more broad/deep/blurred swaths of history. I wanted to do something different than writing for purely scholarly audiences, and provide an alternative to the limited playbook of pieces from big news outlets on wacky/kooky Japan. This image is an example of such a group of 1000 words, yet to be written…

So, stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

square and flat no more

Harold Gregor, Ilinois Flatscape 101

I stopped by a couple of museums today, to case the joints on the last day of a couple of exhibitions. My second stop was the Museum of the American West, for the shows on “maverick art” and “bold caballeros/noble bandidas.” (The latter should be up for a couple months more.) The maverick exhibit–a mix of avant-garde strands of trad arts, vernacular arts, and frontier-y things–had a good number of landscape paintings, among which was this landscape, rendered as if from an airplane, in the dimensionality of an aerial view, in these strange bright harvest colors.

Harold Gregor was a renowned figure in my town, which despite its apparent sleepiness, has an undertow of skilled and cerebral materialist artists working in and around it–painters, ceramacists, woodworkers, other craftspeople. This piece was an interesting transition piece between old-school Illinois representation, and that of today. It reminded me of  JB Jackson, basically the guy who founded vernacular landscape studies in the US. If you have ever listened to The Magnetic Fields’ The Charm of the Highway Strip, you have listened to a concept album modeled on the thinking of JBJ. JBJ had some salty words for my stomping grounds. Basically, he said, “people come to resemble the landscapes they live in. The midwest is square and flat.” It figures, the salt, he was from New England.

This season’s red-blue intrigues in my home state, mingling upstate and downstate elements, have brought some new geometries to my eyes, apart from the 2-D flatness. Here, a roundup, more or less inorganically mixed (oops, betraying my metaphoric downstate roots there) set of new shapes…

–the cone:

I have literally been kept up nights by Michael Pollan’s account of how ag policies in the 1970’s, under the Earl Butz regime, have changed the food landscape. Actually, the story goes back to the 1850’s with the advent of commodity corn and the grading of corn in ways to make yield the sole criterion for which growers grew…but anyway. Above a “portable escalator” (57) that carries corn into the piles that are currently all over the prairie, with so much surplus corn. These policies, and new technologies of mono-culture farming, have made yields like crazy, but have made it harder to make a living, or to use all  the stuff. Thus, high fructose corn syrup. Given that the US population only increases about 1% a year, in most years a sorry rate of growth, food manufacturers have to keep finding more uses and desires for corn products to keep up consumption and profits. Don’t even get me started on how all this number 2 corn is destined for its biggest consumer, cattle–who are supposed to be ruminants, or grass-eaters, actually, and who do not suffer a corn diet easily.

–the wave:

…to be continued