cuts a circle

"the moon-woman cuts a circle", 1942.

Classified '4-F: unfit for service" in 1941 on psychological grounds, Pollock began work on a series of paintings which would form the basis for his first solo exhibition, at Peggy Guggenheim’s 'Art of This Century' gallery two years later. This new period coincided with the dissolving of the WPA - specifically, The Federal Arts Project - a government relief program which provided funding to Pollock and millions of others through the Great Depression from its inception in 1935. While the WPA undoubtably provided a desperately needed source of income in rural and western areas - primarily through its major construction projects - in Pollock's case, as a publicly funded muralist and student in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York City, it also indirectly sustained or fueled his binge drinking and notoriously out of control alcohol dependency.

For the first time, essentially, the thirty-year-old Pollock found himself a respite from the constraints of working more or less to order, or at least the notion of an end product fit for public consumption. More pressingly, it prompted the painter to redefine his entire work ethic.

detail from the figurative
oil, "going west", 1934-5.

"The Moon-Woman" is striking in its indebtedness to Pablo Picasso, certainly.

Produced some five years prior to his adopting those principles which would come to define action painting, it nonetheless seems to contain elements of greater things to come; an underlying sense of restlessness and resistence to conformity which would ultimately demand uninhibited dissolution through the less considered mechanics of fluidity.

The anticipation of devolution of form and the revealing of those chaotic forces which serve to agitate. Above and below the surface.

Not so much a groundbreaking piece as the embodiment of an open question, it also helped secure the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim; the material relief of a one year contract at $150 per month, against sales, and the opportunity not just to paint full-time but to reach an - very well-heeled - audience.

▼ THIN WHITE ROPE: MOONHEAD from "Moonhead" LP (Frontier / Zippo) 1987 (US)

glendale real estate

from his glendale series, 1990-1993. photograph by wayzata camerone.

Directly inspired by Nothin' Says Somethin's featuring of an image by Wayzata Camerone in his recent post on L.A. punksters, The Brainiacs. Camerone was vocalist and saxophonist for the band from 1979 to 1981, in addition to teaching a class in photography at Art Center in Pasadena in the 90's.

Some of his arresting imagery immediately makes me think of his more famous New York contemporary, Richard Kern, yet there is something decidedly more film noir than theatrical in content which manifests itself the closer one examines his photographs; a hardboiled eroticism perfectly at home in the seedier Californian haunts once home to would-be Hollywood screenwriters and miscreants. There is little of the deliberate staginess which separates fact from imitation in Kern's own work. In his "Glendale" series in particular, shot on a Yashica 2 ¼ format camera and printed at home in a darkroom in Glendale, one can almost smell and taste a pervading desperation. The kind of raw and gritty reportage one is more used to confronting in photojournalism and street photography.

This is an artist I hitherto knew absolutely nothing about and am glad to have been introduced to. Somewhat belatedly. The following blog is "administered by executors of the estate"; I can find no mention of his demise, or the circumstances which fueled it. Beyond those references on Nothin' Says Somethin' and his link to that site, there is sadly an absence of information on Camerone elsewhere on the net.

Given the quality of those images I have seen, that situation deserves to be addressed and rectified.

If Lydia Lunch or Sonic Youth spring to mind at the mere mention of Richard Kern, what captures or illustrates the darker tones of Camerone's minor expositions ? Beyond the music of The Brainiacs themselves, or those nocturnal after hours visitors to the club he ran in tandem ?

The selection I finally settled on is at odds with the era Wayzata Camerone occupied in time. But then again, so are his images. The vulnerable jazz of journeyman trumpeter and sometime vocalist, Chet Baker, seems to suit the monochromatic flavour rather well. The composition was written for Baker by Elvis Costello. He had no real expectation that Chet would ultimately record it, sweet as nicotine and laced with weary resignation.

▼ CHET BAKER: ALMOST BLUE from "Bespoke Songs, Lost dogs, Detours & Rendezvous" LP (Rhino) 1987 (US)

WAYZATA CAMERONE PHOTOGRAPHY @ WORD PRESS

the wrestler

I'm almost embarrassed to admit to it - though brazen enough in the final analysis - but I went to see Alan Parker's "Angel Heart" in the same theatre three days running in 1987. It was not the 'surprise' dénouement which had me coming back, really there was no surprise to be had, but it was one of those movies which inexplicably finds a willing ally behind the eyes where half dreams wrestle and break; where the ghosts of Jim Thompson and Steve Fisher adjourn to peek through shutters. Three fingers in a shot glass.

On all three occasions, I went in and came out on my own. A Travis Bickle moment without the same degree of attendant lunacy.

I have never been to New Orleans. I don't imagine to ever get there. But Parker's lazy lingering camera work leaves more of an imprint on the retina than a month's worth of reportage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Some of you siblings may perhaps be a little startled by the decision to feature Courtney Pine, a saxophonist I invariably - and wholly absentmindedly - refer to much of the time, when citing this soundtrack, as Courtney Cox. I have no idea whether this is a subconscious insult or not.

Say hello to Epiphany Proudfoot in the rain. Lisa Bonet never looked so damn fine.

▼ TREVOR JONES & COURTNEY PINE: BLOODMARE (DOG TAGS) from "Angel Heart (Original Soundtrack)" LP (Island) 1987 (UK)

▼ TREVOR JONES & COURTNEY PINE: JOHNNY FAVOURITE from "Angel Heart (Original Soundtrack)" LP (Island) 1987 (UK)

PURCHASE ANGEL HEART (SPECIAL EDITION) ON DVD

shriveler's block

study for "rotten apple core", 1987, by claes oldenberg.

The air in the corridor presently
is frozen and makes museum pieces
of rotten fruit and spilled fluids.
Oldenberg and Jackson Pollock.
The smell is not pronounced,
but scarcely less palateble. It
remains close to the floor; hovers
there like a soul unable to flee.
Even the paint on the walls reminds
one of dead flesh. Traumatised
where once it was simply distressed.

Outside it feels less cold than in.
Primary colours in the wan sun.

Reds and golds and a bruised clear sky.

Halitosis puffs of vapour on the wind.
Dying insects trying to get back up
and right themselves over on the grass.

There is no turning the corner.

Shriveler's Block:

I haven't felt much like writing lately. I sat down at the keyboard and
tossed this off as an exercise in shaking the mental arthritis loose a little,
of stirring up the petri dish; just to see what words might come.
I had no intention of sounding quite so bleak.

Oldenberg's apple core reminds me of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse
for some reason. I think it's the buttons on his pants.

levitate me

design by vaughn oliver, of 23 envelope.

Recorded March, 1987 (1987-03) at Fort Apache Studios, Roxbury, Massachusetts. Originally released on British independent, 4AD - a subsidiary of Beggars Banquet - under Ivo Watts-Russell.

Black Francis: guitar, vocals; Kim Deal (Mrs. John Murphy): bass, vocals; Joey Santiago: guitar; David Lovering: drums.

Written by Black Francis, Mrs. John Murphy, David Lovering, and Jean Walsh. Produced by Gary Smith; engineered by Paul Kolderie.

"Come on pilgrim, you know He loves you."

▼ PIXIES: LEVITATE ME from "Come On Pilgrim" LP (4AD) 1987 (US)

PURCHASE COME ON PILGRIM REMASTERED

i'm so lonesome i could cry

cowboy's lament.

Recorded in Toronto, Ontario's Church of the Holy Trinity on November 27th, 1987. Which no doubt must have felt vaguely like bad news - from the pews - if your name happens to be Alan Anton.

But, my, what acoustics. What an eerie atmosphere of inconsolable loss.

Margo Timmins: vocals; Michael Timmins: guitar; Alan Anton: bass; Peter Timmins: drums.

Originally written and recorded, of course, by the inimitable Hank Williams back in 1949; a #1 position on the Billboard Country Singles chart, four years before his demise in the back seat of a Cadillac.

A cowboy junkie with a bad case of the blues.

▼ COWBOY JUNKIES: I'M SO LONESOME I COULD CRY from "The Trinity Session" LP (Latent) 1988 (Canada)

PURCHASE THE TRINITY SESSION

mixing up the medicine

photograph by jeanloup sieff.

Like a lot of people, I spend much of my time looking out my window. Like a lot of people who live more than twenty floors above street level, I spend more time looking out my window than most.

It has not always been this way. For a period of time I lived in a basement flat, like Johnny in Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Most of the time all I was able to see were people passing from the waist down. The view was much better in the summer. I probably have that bedsit to thank for my appreciation for a well-turned ankle. Or the development of something approaching a foot fetish.

I did not idle away my time hatching revolutionary plots. On the contrary, I whiled away the hours drinking red wine, white wine, cheap cider and the cheapest of spirits. Sometimes I banged away on a typewriter. When I was lucky, I banged away on the mattress on the floor which served as a double bed. When I was sober enough to even think about getting it up, that is.

And through it all the grind of the job. The monotony of servitude. Which seems much healthier in retrospect. And unobtainable.

Of course. The view from on high is much different. Things take on an altogether eyrie hue; events unfold in minute detail like scenes from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Sometimes one can't help but feel a little like a general surveying the battlefield from a distant hill. Or a refugee in waiting for the tsunami to roll in through the valley, laying waste to one and all. I have dreamed that particular recurring nightmare since I was a child. A delirium born out of I don't know what.

Another thing. I have lived in a number of apartments overlooking railway lines. Three now in succession, over the past sixteen years. Each apartment higher than the last. Why is that, exactly ? What a strange turn of events.

Edward Hopper was a master painter of lives lived furtively behind windows. I began this post fully intending to host a detail from his "Hotel by a Railroad", 1952, to illustrate that very point; but I changed my mind at the last moment and chose something else instead. I am weary of the window frame. And the drafts which creep in between it and the glass.

The east winds do not trouble me unduly. It is those gales which blow in from the west which cause me the greatest concern.

▼ BERT JANSCH & JOHN RENBOURN: EAST WIND from "Bert And John" LP (Transatlantic) 1966 (UK)

PURCHASE BERT AND JOHN

volare: hip priest in the house of love

nel blu, di pinto di blu.

Written by Domenico Modugno and Franco Migliacci in 1958, and a huge hit for Ratpacker, Dean Martin.

From Wiki:

'"Nel blu dipinto di blu" was presented by Domenico Modugno and Johnny Dorelli at the 1958 Sanremo Music Festival, winning the contest and achieving instant popularity. It was then chosen to represent Italy in the 1958 Eurovision Song Contest and came third.'

▼ ALEX CHILTON: VOLARE from "High Priest" LP (New Rose) 1987 (US)

▼ DEAN MARTIN: VOLARE from "This Is Dean Martin" LP (Capitol) 1958 (US)

butthole surfers

on air
More from the mighty Buttholes. We all know Charlie don't surf, butt do you ?

▼ BUTTHOLE SURFERS: 22 GOING ON 23 from "Locust Abortion Technician" LP/CD (Touch & Go) 1987 (US)