I can see what's coming for me
By the way that it's bending the pines
Brother, me and these eighteen wheels
Are gonna hammer on down the line

 
Flying like a bat out of hell
Tearing out of North Alabama
Signs are saying, Jesus Saves
But the devil don't give a damn

 

Tryin' to keep all the rubber on 65
Might not make it out alive
White knuckling the wheel just to survive
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind

 

Sometimes, what drives a man
Ain't nothing but a matter of will
When a man's got a heavy load
He's just tryin' to make it over the hill
Burning the hours taking truck-stop showers
And sleeping in the cheap motels
Picking up speed on a mission to feed five kids with a CDL

 

Tryin' to keep all the rubber on 65
Might not make it out alive
White knuckling the wheel just to survive
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind

 

It's a fight in the dark of night
With another hundred miles to run
When your mind starts tryin' to find ways
To get you out from under the gun
This livin' ain't much of a life
But it's the only thing I know how to do
I miss you, honey but I gotta make some money
So I'm hoping I can make it through

 

Tryin' to keep all the rubber on 65
Might not make it out alive
White knuckling the wheel just to survive
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind
Caught in the crosswind, caught in the crosswind

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/nov/28/puffer-coat-winter-wear-fashion

 

Eddie Bauer – who understandably wanted to create a better layering option after nearly dying of exposure when wearing just a wool sweater on a fishing trip – created the first one in the 1930s. Norma Kamali cemented the trend 40 years later when she introduced her famed sleeping bag coat. According to Vox, Cher, Elton John, and the bouncers at Studio 54 were early adopters. People liked the cozy, cocooned shape. As someone who has put one on in a store (and promptly removed it after seeing a $1,200 price tag), I can attest to its womb-like quality.

After 9/11, when traumatized New Yorkers needed a way to feel safe, sleeping bag coat sales reportedly shot up. Nowadays, dupes abound from both noted designers and fast fashion joints, with some going for under $20 at H&M.

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/nov/19/what-jeff-bezos-cowboy-hats-say-about-ultra-rich-style

 

 https://www.ft.com/content/235e962c-4c0c-4348-ae44-fdcf7fa04ea5

kept meaning to say this for posterity but a while ago that classic motherfucker saatchi put this up for auction and just to say to whoever put it together for photography at the auction house or wherever - maybe you had too many prets on the way in, and you were tripping off gluten, but with respect its wrong you fuckin idiots.  you did it wrong. shame on you all. and your probably like 'no one cares mate' and your right. but I care. I care (stares off into distance with slightly narrowed eyes and clenched sphincter) so for reference:

wrong:

 

 

 

 

Right:

“Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,”

Springsteen had in fact read the book, watched the film, and listened to the song, before writing "The Ghost of Tom Joad"

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/who-is-oliver-anthony-rich-men-north-of-richmond-1234878370/

I gotta say I don't like where this world's headed
I just don't get it
I don't get it, don't get it

 

Teaching our kids how the good Lord blessed us
Calling out the stuff that the world done messed up
Right is right and God is the answer
Living this life the devil wants to cancel

 

Love ain't diamond rings
Bigger don't always mean better
The grass ain't always green
Money don't grow on trees ever
Can't make somebody be made for ya
God ain't going to do the praying for ya
Whiskey's best left up there on the shelf
You're gonna have to find the answers somewhere else
Note to self

 

Note to self
A truck only goes so far on half a tank

 

A few days 'fore he turned eighty
He was sitting out back in a rocker
He said, "What you been up to lately?"
I told him, "Chasing a dollar"
And in between sips of coffee
He poured this wisdom out
Said, "If you want my two cents on making a dollar count

 

Buy dirt
Find the one you can't live without
Get a ring, let your knee hit the ground
Do what you love but call it work
And throw a little money in the plate at church
Send your prayers up and your roots down deep
Add a few limbs to your family tree
And watch their pencil marks
And the grass in the yard
All grow up
'Cause the truth about it is
It all goes by real quick
You can't buy happiness
But you can buy dirt"

Before you get caught on that ladder
Let me tell you what it's all about
Find you a few things that matter
That you can put a fence around
And then he laid it out

 

Buy dirt
Find the one you can't live without
Get a ring, let your knee hit the ground
Do what you love but call it work
And throw a little money in the plate at church
Send your prayers up and your roots down deep
And add a few limbs to your family tree
And watch their pencil marks
And the grass in the yard
All grow up
'Cause the truth about it is
It all goes by real quick
You can't buy happiness
But you can buy dirt

You can buy dirt

And thank the good Lord for it
'Cause He ain't makin' any more of it

So buy dirt

 
Find the one you can't live without
Get a ring, let your knee hit the ground
Do what you love but call it work
And throw a little money in the plate at church
Send your prayers up and your roots down deep
Add a few limbs to your family tree
Watch their pencil marks
And the grass in the yard
All grow up
'Cause the truth about it is
It all goes by real quick
You can't buy happiness
 

Note to self 

You can buy dirt

 

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

— Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind" (1938)

The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. ... [T]he violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder winds
So many lives are on the breeze/ Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning.

— Bad Religion, "Los Angeles Is Burning" (2004)

 

 

 

 

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America

By Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.   

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.   

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.   

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?   

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.   

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.   

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.   

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?   

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.   

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.   

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America its them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.   

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black n*rs. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.   

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

 

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Tracy Chapman talked about Fast Car on the BBC radio in 2010: “In United States, “Fast Car” was the song that was played on the radio, more than “Talkin’Bout A Revolution” so it was something that turned out to take a significant role in shaping my first record and probably the public perception of me as a singer songwriter who is writing about stories, songs which tells stories about people lives and very generally represents the world that I saw it when I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, coming from a working class background. I’ve raised by single mom, I was just watching people, being in a community of people who were struggling. So everyone was really just 1. Working hard 2. hoping that things would get better.

In part everything that a person writes is autobiographical but the songs are directly so and most of them were not and Fast Car wasn’t one that was directly autobiographical. I never had a Fast Car, it’s just a story about a couple, how they are trying to make a life together and they face challenges.

I definitely felt the emotionality of the song that there were something… You never know how other people are going to respond to it and this is not that relevant but one thing I remember about writing the song that it was late in the evening and at the time I had a small dog, a Miniature Dachshund, and the dog was staying up with me. She didn’t always stay up if I stayed up late, I think she was sitting on the couch right next to me, when I first started writing the music and the first few lyrics, I think the first part of the song that came to me was the first line “You’ve got a fast car…” I just feel that I remember in a way that she seemed to be more procked up than usual. So I don’t know if she felt my energy or if she was just not as tired as she normally was but it was kind of funny to have her there for the process of the beginning of writing that song

 

 

 

I had so many people come up to me and say that they felt it was their song and someone told me at one point that they thought I’ve been reading their mail, they were saying “You seem to know my story” and people would come up and tell me about a car relationship and some detail that they felt was in the song that represented something that happened in their lives.”

From the ages of five to twelve, the middle years of childhood, young people explore their surroundings and find or construct private spaces. In these secret places, children develop and control environments of their own and enjoy freedom from the rules of the adult world. Children's Special Places enters these hidden worlds, reveals their importance to children's development and emotional health, and shows educators, parents, and other adults how they can foster a bond between young people and nature that is important to maturation.

Yet, once Louis, Ynys and their friend Pelumi had free rein of the living room, and were told they had to create a den so that I could record the process, they went at it with a vengeance. The sheer gusto with which they dismantled and reassembled the living room in a way that excluded adults made me feel bad that they hadn't been doing it every day.

The den in Gallavantia's bedroom was constructed so that she and her friend could, using knives, skewers and screwdrivers, dig through the wall and spy on the au pair on the toilet.

"The den is the child's sense of self being born," says David Sobel, a developmental psychologist at Antioch New England graduate school. He has researched dens extensively since the 70s, in Devon, England, and the Caribbean. "In the middle childhood, ages seven to 11, a den is the child's chance to create a home away from home that is secret, and becomes a manifestation of who they are. The den," Sobel argues, "is the chrysalis out of which the butterfly is born."

 

 

With its emphasis on sound, the Raven Row exhibition feels deeply haunted, full of disembodied voices, eerie instruments, a room of horses’ mute throats, the soft echo of steps on sand. Sound, according to Merriam-Webster, is ‘mechanical radiant energy’ – an apt description of Bacher’s work – which is ‘transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium’. In my stupider moments, I wonder: where does sound go? If you screamed in space, would your cry end up somewhere? The soundtrack to Untitled (Diana) is all bells, ceaselessly tolling.With its emphasis on sound, the Raven Row exhibition feels deeply haunted, full of disembodied voices, eerie instruments, a room of horses’ mute throats, the soft echo of steps on sand. Sound, according to Merriam-Webster, is ‘mechanical radiant energy’ – an apt description of Bacher’s work – which is ‘transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium’. In my stupider moments, I wonder: where does sound go? If you screamed in space, would your cry end up somewhere? The soundtrack to Untitled (Diana) is all bells, ceaselessly tolling.

https://www.frieze.com/article/lutz-bacher-one-take-239 

 

communication 

consumption

sociality 

 

dissolution of boundaries in the instance of the fake - particularly in the instance of the discovery of the fake

Here, as in every aspect of this small but rigorous exhibition, the viewer is engulfed in a vortex of digestion and regurgitation where, as he says in The Basement: “It should stop being a project, it is real.” Meaning, as a project—two months of revamping the filthy quarters of the Hermitage basement where the cats live amid asbestos and their own shit —these are real cats and his solution is merely cosmetic—an artist’s dalliance. In the end, they still look terrified and in need of medical care, and the overwhelmed, penniless female volunteers, whispering “there is no money,” break our hearts. The director, who is not a cat person or dog person and doesn’t even like humans, tells van Lieshout, “It is illegal to use state funding to care for the cats.” He’d rather discuss Rembrandt.

I'm living in an age 

 That calls darkness light  

Though my language is dead  

Still the shapes fill my head

Drawings are better than art because they're only schematics. A painting gets away with a lot by virtue of being a real thing in the world - it doesn't have to prove its existence. But a drawing is borderline immaterial. Burn a blueprint and the architecture's skeleton still exists in your head. 

 

cawd

https://www.collectorsagenda.com/in-the-studio/heimo-zobernig

 

 Your teacher prophesied that you would study art. Was there ever a specific time when you realized that you would like to earn money with art, to support your life with it? 
During my studies and also afterwards I did not think about such existential things. There were scholarships and promotions to apply for and on which to survive. That still exists. At that time we didn’t have much money, but I‘ve never felt it. On the contrary! I have felt very rich. When I created my first public work together with Alfons Egger in the Dramatic Center in Vienna we were asked how we intended to realize it, were we the sons of millionaires? We had just done our work and not thought about things like that. We researched the right institutions and addresses that would be prepared to provide support to us and we were able to realize what we had intended. However, not-doing was rather the thing to aspire towards at the time. Vienna’s art scene was quite transparent, a few intellectuals and artist-bohemians. The highest art was to be clever and to be able not to reveal oneself by somehow having to sell something. Not-doing was the highest art.

Has the relationship between professors and students changed? 
Yes, the hierarchical distance between students and teachers is not as great as I have experienced it in the past. During my time one was happy to leave the academy and go where one could receive a true response to what one was creating as a young contemporary artist. Today teachers and students understand each other so well and the students feel so comfortable that they don’t want to leave the academy.  As might be expected, revolt is no longer intrinsic to the academic experience.

One may get the impression that self-marketing as an artist or thinking in terms of market strategies during training is playing an increasingly bigger role. Is this impression deceptive?  
Yes, it is deceptive. I experience my students rather as interested in cultivating the improvement of the quality of artistic thinking and practice. In the process of speaking about what one is doing communication plays a big role. This was not the case thirty years ago. During their education, architects for example are taught how to speak with their clients, how to understand them and how to be able to present their plans better. That is exemplary. However, I tell the students time and again that talking about art is very important, but that it may be wiser to say nothing at the right moment. The artistic intention should be communicated primarily through the work itself. Strategies of marketing are not a complicated matter; they don’t need to be taught in a seminar.