Heaven forbid a man become discomfited in front of the wrong woman…

PS: If you’re fluent in Swedish, you may want to read Peter Lindforss’s new book about his old friend Leonard Cohen, Mannen Som Förstörde Mitt Liv. En Bok Om Leonard Cohen (The Man Who Ruined My Life. A Book About Leonard Cohen) which has just been published by Ellerströms Förlag.

The illusion of gaining a smashing social capital determines people to get open to anything and anybody.
We smile at every single person, we bring compliments for everything, we’re bond to make best friends out of passerbys. In other words, we trained our inability to notice a difference and to make a difference. “Paradoxically”, this is the perfect built-in drive towards alienation of both the accepter and the accepted.
Every person longs for exclusivity. It’s natural. Every person wants to play either with you or against you. To be on everybody’s side is a serious insult at people’s ability of being unique, and certainly at your evaluation criteria.
We’ve never been less different and less kindhearted. But we’ve never smiled more.

PS: Very new canvas: “Woman With Rabbit”. It took me a long and intense time to finish it. Click on it, make it bigger.

PS2: I choose Lou Reed over Velvet Underground. What’s the purpose of an album like Squeeze (1973) (in spite of the song “Louise” which I actually find very charming)? Doug Yule got it all wrong…

The old age is a vague notion of a nebulous something that makes people cease willing to even think about death.
How on earth do they do that, you might ask? Simple. They are fully motivated to finally accomplish what the younger ones are unable to achieve: living for today, refusing to think ahead.
Have you ever opened a geriatrics magazine? Even NME is more pessimistic. Old age and health are redefined year after year. A deep and fascinating mentality (and demographic) revolution has started. The old age is not the old age anymore, it’s the new age. Old people make great patients, great consumers of fine hotels, great owners of luxury cars, great seekers of comfortable houses, great clients in general and great hedonists in particular. Furthermore, they are retired; so they have all the time in the world. And all their time is now. A never ending present.

PS: My newest (and most seizable) canvas: “Man with Rabbit”. Unfortunately, because of the size, I couldn’t take a better picture. Click on it for a (hardly) better view.

PS2: A ferociously good blog here.

PS3: Best on the new Springsteen album: “Radio Nowhere” (hmm…this single gives me a familiar feeling), “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” (wonderfully written and arranged), “You’ll Be Comin’ Down” (a classical Springsteen) and “Last To Die” (the most complex yet the most convincing track on the album in my opinion).

Cesare Pavese’s The business of living: Diaries 1935-1950: thick, uneasy, imperative. Unlike Julien Green’s, Pavese’s diary ideas, intentions and interpretations cut like a knife. The whole book is bleeding. Even the most theoretical pages perpetuate a turmoiled sense of sharpness that one usually saves for life matters only. But what did “a life matter” really mean for Pavese?

PS: These days, my player plays the latest Bruce Springsteen.

PS2: …by the way, any plans for mid-January 2008?

People keep telling me that my recent texts are no fun, no friendly, no gentle, no way to go on like this once you’ve got a modest journalistic sense.
But Lady Luck has smiled on me and some anonymous reader recently inflamed my unexcessive knowledge on rock stars and dared me to answer the following question:
you’ve made rock stars look a little silly with this post, like kids who don’t know who they are, as if corbijn is not only their photographer but also their mentor. does bono look like a kid to you? like someone who’s a stranger to himself? or gahan? or others?
I answered merrily and promptly, using the comment function. Then I realized this could be the next text written under a fictional label called “Easygoing Wednesday’s growing”. Enough argumentation, let’s get down to gibberish.
To me (an outsider), rock stars are grown-up people constrained by their living conditions (and standards and values) to act and react like kids; sometimes in spite of their (basic) will, they came to the point where they are not quite sure when, where and if the surreality ends.
Those who weren’t kids from the start, necessarily become kids along the way. A kid/star’s life hints at the following privileges and restrictions: he is taken care of, his acts are always encouraged and applauded, he relies on other people when it comes to vital needs like food, drink and shelter, he is however told what to do but he is easily forgiven if he doesn’t, his playing is encouraged by everybody and protected by law, he’s free of everyday worries, he is not responsible for not honoring his commitments, he breaks up like a little… boy, he is not always responsible for his looks, he is protected from strangers, violence, rain and other calamities, he receives free promotional items as well as toys, godis, a driver and an upright person to comb their hair.
When you’re talking with a kid, you find it hard to disagree with him, no wonder he gets mad whenever he hears a “no” while expecting a “yes”; therefore he’s pretty sure the earth moves precisely around him and not at all around the sun. He sometimes falls from coconut palm trees or takes to bed the wrong doll, but it’s all written in books of pedagogy: little kids hardly make a distinction between possible and impossible.
Occasionally, not too often, the kid grows up and becomes a teenager. And like all teenagers, he has big ideals: 1. he wants to be different, 2. he wants to – first – conquer and then save the world, 3. he wants others to make books, documentaries and movies about his life and consequently to become the hero of at least three generations, 4. he wants to owe the copyright to all the good songs ever written, and 5. he has absolutely no clue how to go down out of this carousel.
But I like them all. Supposing they weren’t chronically kids, they’d make kind-hearted people.

PS: Watercolors and ink above. I have re-done an old theme of mine and thought it fits the text.

PS2: I dedicate this post to my father who turns 55 today. He could have been one of these kids.

Anton Corbijn does something that no other rock photographer thought of doing: charging the individual (who, accidentally, has the apparent quality/qualification of being a rock star) with a new energy that pulls him off the limelight, de-constructs his notorious identity and rebuilds him anew on different, uncontaminated premises, within a re-calibrated reality.

Corbijn never counts on the rockstar’s ability of being a rockstar. He bets instead on the rock star’s ability to fall out of “grace”, to gradually disappear from view as a transient celebrity so that he can slowly emerge as an everlasting personality.

Think about the following contrast: Corbijn has an instinct for essence, intensity and autonomy; whilst today’s entertainment industry has an instinct for haste, hysteria, and hectics.
Today, a man with a guitar is advertising his own transience, he will never get an autonomous fame (as he used to get 25-35 years ago), he hardly gets a volatile, and somehow comical notoriety. Curiously enough, his very own audience is inhumanly indifferent to his humanity. Not to mention the cases when he himself forgets how to function out of the limelight.

Therefore, Anton Corbijn does something that, indirectly, borders on sarcasm: with a tremendous delicacy, he manages to set up a genuine durability and a self-referentiality for what it used to be  a notorious character.

In a way, he sabotages the one-project-oriented entertainment business by working less for the sake of today’s applauder and more for the atemporal witness : he kills the idol and saves the man. It’s like he’d use abrasive tools (raw, black-and-white takes) for “exfoliating” the hotshot tissue and reach the genuine person beneath. Once the essence is grasped, he turns it into a metaphor.

From here on, the new reality stays for itself: the light gets dark and the dark gains (a spectral) light, just like in Bergman’s movies; the individual gets rigid and the still object behind him gains humanity – together, they are assigned a new autonomous identity which stirs up an alarming combination of nervous excitement, artistic delight, existential concerns and metaphysical distress.
In a contemporary art world that compulsory seeks for abstraction, I know no other artist to be so focused on the human expression and on the quality of being distinctively human. And one is simply amazed to discover together with Corbijn the frightening human potential behind all those paper guys with flatulent looks and kinky doings. He treats them so gently, breaking down the shell, building up the soul.

PS: Tonight, from my couch: Warhol’s documentary The Velvet Underground & Nico (1966). Never really loved Warhol, but I always loved Reed and Cale and Nico and Mo. Tonight’s the right time to come to terms with their manager.

The abstract painting is (back) here to stay. The ARTnews writes it and I believe it. The main cause, one may read, is the computer-based thinking/imagination/worldview of today’s artists as well as the need for an universal, distilled, contemplative language. But hey, we are given the same reasons ever since the early 90s. The same call for scientific visual musing managed to back up every single abstraction tendency that took place in the latest 20 years, from some thoughtful decision of de-objectification to the incredibly common practice of using Photoshop for creating spellbounding decorative models and then transfer them on the canvas. To be very honest, I hardly believe in the abstraction reasons claimed by 85% of the contemporary artists. I’d rather believe in trends and political winds. For instance, a New York-based art dealer recently wrote that he suspects a certain “maturation” of the present art market to be involved in the abstract art revival. More exactly, the increasing number of new art collectors finally trained their eye and managed to feel more comfortable with their choices; and so they “dared” to move “on” from representative to abstract art and nonchalantly discuss their acquisitions at dinner. Voilà. Once the sales (pardon me, the trends) are going up, there are plenty of reasons to assist them.
Don’t get me wrong. I respect abstract painting and its fundamental reasons. I really deeply do. To my opinion, it was the “visible” force and, at the same time, the “visible” effect of desubstantialization of the subject in modernity and late modernity. The triumph of the “micro-emotions” to the detriment of the rudimental thrill (someday, when I’ll get a more gentle time-treatment, I will write about the avant-garde artists and the modern perception of death). The gradual disappearance of the object, the liberating attitude towards representation and towards existence in general, the “talking” painting medium as a new emerging artistic truth are plain judgments on abstract art that go beyond fashions and sales. But abstraction easily falls into banal strategies, compulsive techniques, visual tribulations, figurative tricks that often cannot raise beyond the boring standards of a boring everyday postmodernity. However, I believe that abstract art has the qualified tools to go beyond the premises that generated it and move its roots in the sky. Otherwise it will never manage to show distinct signs of durability. Meanwhile, mind the fashion.

PS: New canvas above. It’s called “The Death”. Click on it for a full-sized view.

PS2: Kate Bush’s Aerial is coming back to me. “Mrs. Bartolozzi” and “King of the Mountain” have their roots in the sky. Refined, painful musical pleasure that lasts an eternity.