Day 12 |
December 29, 1997 |
Outbound |
948 Miles Today: 0 Miles |
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Albion
River Campground Albion CA |
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| The book dream | Long lucid dream last night. I went into a bookstore, and saw on a display island a hardcover called "Time & Space" by Arata Isozaki and John Reyner Banham. I had to pick it up, given the title… It was set in glowing dark emerald green type on hand-bound thick creamy edge-torn pages. I started reading the introduction. It was written in heavily germanic/academic English, or badly translated out of German. Thesis seemed to be that too many books were being written and re-written about the same 50MB of things that were already known (I remember being startled by this precise number). The authors would propose, in the sequel, a method to prevent this needless duplication; something about a database… The text was illustrated with many florid 18th Century engravings of sculptures and gardens. The many quotes had been printed onto transparent acetate and then pasted onto the pages. In one case the original German quote was printed double-spaced on the paper, with a double-spaced English translation on acetate pasted over it (off-set by one line so that both could be read). There were frequently green cloverleaf shapes printed in the margins. | ||
 29 secs at 28.8 Picture list |
A quiet day: didn't go anywhere. Just pootled around the campsite, photographing the huge trestle bridge over the river. The Albion is a most wonderful whitish turquoise as it flows past, deep and wide and compelling. As it flows under the bridge to the beach, it's going so fast that I feel I'm being pulled into it. You can hear it rushing, in a softly murmuring flood. | ||
| Some way to go | I didn't realize how close to the edge I was until I had to spend half of yesterday doing work-work. I felt, again, the exhausted hopelessness that I thought I'd shaken off. It wasn't until I had to put on happy face to make some phone calls, and write some difficult documents, that the depression really hit. Seems I still have some way to go. | ||
| I'd become suspicious that I seemed to be so admirably adjusted; it just didn't seem to jibe with what I felt before I came on this trip. I had been feeling relaxed and fresh. I've even been getting 10 hours sleep/night, which seems to be what my body is most comfortable with - hell with this eight hour nonsense. | |||
| 'Intermittent Exhortation' piece
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The foghorn at the mouth of the river blaarts for three seconds every 29 seconds - incessantly. I'm fascinated by how I stop hearing it - until my attention is suddenly drawn back to it again. There's an idea for a sound piece in this. Should try longer intervals; I've mostly using less than four seconds. Running at half a minute meant it's quiet long enough that one forgets that there's a repetition; then there's that reminder again. Perhaps a five-way faux dialogue between Rush Limbaugh, Robert Reich, John Paul II, Billy Graham and Bill Gates, each repeating a pronouncement at a unique interval of around half a minute. | Like the clock piece in the lobby/store of the current Sensations show at the Royal Academy (didn't register the name of the artist): Huge digital clock over the entrance; every minute, as the minute flips over, there's a hugely grandiose crashing sound. | |
| What's wrong with art | Still, I at least started looking at art magazines today. I'm struck that most if not all the putative subject matter is so uninteresting. It's a choice between boring people sharing their boring hang-ups, conceptual explorations by people who haven't actually thought the issues through, and naïve ideological diatribes on socio-political issues that are more effectively debated in other media. In print, for example, where one can move beyond merely "posing the question" to proposing solutions. Take those superficial attributes away, and all you're left with is interesting stuff to look at - and since I'm no damn good at making that, my jealousy and alienation seems easily explained. I'm much more intrigued by the problems science tackles - and actually tries to solve. Though again, whether I'm any good at that is unclear. I'm just left fuming; sounds like I should be a critic. | "At this moment, with public patronage receding like the spring tide anyway and democracy supposedly proliferating throughout the art world, why don't all of us art types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue - that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage and talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do. […] Because art doesn't matter. What matters is how things look and the way we look at them in a democracy […]." | |
