Saturday, March 29
8:55 PMOn Wednesday I found out that Frank Black and the Catholics were playing in Detroit that night, so I took an impromptu trip up there that night to see them. I was so glad I did, because it was amazing. Frank Black is so cool. He had on this western style black shirt. He screamed. The band was tight. It became swelteringly hot. It just rocked.
Here's the setlist:
Where Is My Mind?
Robert Onion
Bullet
California Bound
Mr. Grieves
Los Angeles
Headache
New House of the Pope (?)
Whiskey in Your Shoes
Nimrod's Son
Velvety
Six Sixty-Six
Cold Heart of Stone
Jane the Queen of Love
Gouge Away
Heloise
Hermaphroditos
Crackity Jones
I Want Rock and Roll
encore:
Sign I Was Looking For (?)
Monkey Gone to Heaven
The Black Rider
Today I went up to Cranbrook for a lecture by some guy called Virgil Marti and to talk to the Print/Media professor ("artist in residence"). I've been getting more cautious about Cranbrook because of the small-community thing it has going, and the guy was upfront, saying it can be insular. If I go there, I could certainly be without outside distractions. But that kind of scares me, because what if it's claustrophobic and you want to go do something fun, and there's only Detroit (not to say Detroit's all bad)? Or I don't like the other students who I have to be around all the time (there will be 15 students). This is the professor's first year, and he's had to reinvent the program, which was old and dusty, and discouraging ("nobody was making prints anymore"). The facilities aren't top-notch, but people go there more for the reputation and the intellectual atmosphere. It's in this snooty-looking rich white suburb. I come from a sort of snooty, rich, white suburb (despite being neither snooty[?] nor rich), but I just don't know if it's the right place for me. (You can look at some of the students' work here.)
MCAD is problematic too. They're in the process of hiring a new printmaking professor (the position has been vacant for a few years!), and they won't have decided until after I accept or decline, which makes it a crapshoot. They have a mentor program, which means you pick a faculty member to work closely with the whole time. That sort of scares me too. Maybe just the idea of so much criticism, being sort of molded by somebody else, scares me. I want feedback that is helpful, but I don't want to be unduly influenced by someone and made in their image. My personality is perhaps too weak to fend for myself, intellectually.
I want to visit Cincinnati next week, then make a decision. I still haven't heard back from Pratt, and I got rejected by the other two. It looks like I'll have three choices, all very different. It might come down to a matter of finances, but it'll probably be about idealogy.
Monday, March 24
3:44 PMI got a rejection letter from RISD today. I wasn't expecting anything else, actually.
The first BFA show starts this week, reception Friday. I saw them putting up the work last night, and it looked good. But it hits me that my show is only four weeks later. I've got lots of framing to do.
I could barely sleep last night, just anxious for too many reasons. I wrote a handful of poems, some better than others.
Saturday, March 22
1:38 AMI still haven't written about my trip, have I? OK.
Saturday (March 8): I arrived in the afternoon. I just remember that we went to a birthday party in the afternoon and it was filled with theater hipsters. They had good food, and they were nice, but I didn't have much to say to anybody, since I only knew Shannon. I overheard a conversation (more like a monologue) in which a girl lambasted Morrissey and boys who like him for his sensitivity. "Give me Neil Diamond," she said. Someone else told a good story about his friend who worked at Cheapo records reprimanding Prince for complaining about the store selling promo cds.
As previously mentioned, we watched The Good Girl.
Sunday: I don't remember what we did this day. I think mostly we went around getting stuff for the projects Shannon was planning to teach that week. She inventively used styrofoam plates to make relief prints (she taught them about Kollwitz).
Monday: I dropped Shannon off at school in the morning, then I went to visit MCAD to check on something about financial aid and to take a tour. The tour guide took me all over the school and the facilities were impressive. In sculpture, they had this machine that I had never heard of that can take a 3d computer model and render it in real life by building up layers of this material (I forget what it was). There was a skull whose image had been taken from x-rays, and then rendered; there was also a miniature version of a sculptor professor's head.
I wasn't blown away by the students' work, however. I might have been accepted because their standards aren't terribly high, or maybe I'm awesome and don't know it.
I don't remember if Shannon and I went out that evening.
Tuesday: I slept in and felt guilty for being a bum. I think this was the night we saw The Pianist, which I loved. Also, earlier that day (or was it Monday?) we went to this good indie bookstore called Ruminator and I nearly bought some books, but didn't want to spend any money.
Wednesday: Dropped off Shannon again, got a haircut, went to the MIA for a couple of hours. I had been there last time, so I'd already seen most of the stuff in the museum, but it was still good.
I went to Half Price Books and bought REM's Reckoning. Now my collection is complete.
That night we went to see Joanna, a friend of Shannon's, play at a bowling alley. It sounds weird, but the bowling alley also has a restaurant, and the place where she performed was separate from the bowling and the eating, and was soundproof. We got there late, but the first song she played was incredible. Most of the songs are very emotional (like a cover of "Hallelujah", Jeff Buckley-style), but she did a couple of silly things. She did a duet with another girl of "The Boy Is Mine", which was classic, and a dirty interpretation of Pat the Bunny. I wanted to buy her cd but I guess she didn't have any and doesn't sell them anymore.
Thursday: (Again, while Shannon was teaching) I went to the Walker because that's the free day. There was a pretty interesting exhibition on urbanization and globalization, etc. I liked a lot of things in the show: Robin Rhode did a performance (a video recording of it played) in which he drew a car onto the museum wall, then proceeded to attempt to break into the car. You could see the smudge mark on the door handle of the drawing. Yin Xiuzhen makes "portable cities", miniature versions of cities that capture the essence of them, made from clothing and other things and each contained in a suitcase. There were Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, and Minneapolis (with a little Spoonbridge with Cherry). Song Dong's work deals with Zen Buddhism. He has made a ritual of writing a water diary, using a brush dipped in water on a stone. As he writes, the water evaporates. In his video "Jump", he stands in a crowded station in front of a camera and jumps. That's all, but it's interesting to watch.
That evening, Shannon had her film club, but very few people showed up. The movie was subUrbia and I liked it. I hadn't realized beforehand that it was written by Eric Bogosian, but I could definitely tell it was an adaptation of a play.
Friday: I went with Shannon to her Friday class, senior seminar, a class for art students who are about to graduate. Critiques were going on, and I kind of felt like participating, but I chose not to for some reason. A lot of the work I saw I didn't like, and I didn't want to be overly critical.
We went to Half Price Books and I bought a Del Amitri cd. Then we went walking along the river because the weather was perfect, except for mud and unmelted ice.
Saturday: We went to the science museum to see Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees at the IMAX theater. It was really entertaining and interesting - I only wish it had been a little longer. They did some good intercuts between footage of Goodall in the 1960s in black and white and in the present day.
Then we went walking around downtown, trying to find the section of town by the open market. We walked for quite a while but didn't find it, so we got in the car and found it very quickly. There's a cool artists' co-op building that we'd like to live in. There are a lot of buildings around there that Shannon is interested in, and I think I'd be happy to live in any one of them as well.
Sunday (March 16): We went to breakfast at the Copper Dome (where I ate twice before that week) and Shannon made funny drawings on the placemat. Then we were off to the airport, and... well, I took off and things were pretty predictable after that.
Monday, March 17
11:16 PMfrom my very recent visit i'll write about the trip a little later
we independently chose to wear the same color that day. we must be meant for each other.
Monday, March 10
1:39 PMSo I should probably write about the symposium, how great it was, even though there's not that much to tell. Friday (feb 28) there was a panel discussion among Joseph Kosuth, Ann Hamilton, Jonathan Fineberg, Xu Bing, Nancy Princenthal, and Buzz Spector. Each artist showed some slides (Xu Bing's work is amazing), then there was some discussion about text and art for a couple of hours. Kosuth was probably the most inflammatory (maybe to the audience, when he made a comment about his miserable childhood in Toledo), but there weren't really any hot arguments (which is not to say it wasn't interesting). A lot of stuff was over my head, things I haven't read or even heard about, but I'm interested in finding out more. At the reception afterwards, I couldn't think of anything to say to the panelists, so I didn't. I introduced myself to Ann Hamilton because her niece was my girlfriend's roommate last semester.
I recorded the panel discussion to minidisc and it sounds pretty good, so I'm going to try to put it on a cd for Mysoon (who organized the symposium).
Saturday morning and afternoon there were papers presented at the library. It was much more dry and academic, and only the last presentation focused more on artwork (and work actually in the exhibition at the museum) than on text surrounding it. Still, it was good to be there, and I learned some things, even though I didn't make a recording of it.
Sunday, March 9
11:49 AMMade it here to St. Paul yesterday afternoon. Shannon and I went to a birthday party, then we rented The Good Girl.
Friday, March 7
9:53 PMWhoops, still haven't had time to write about it. Soon, really.
Sunday, March 2
11:59 PMVery good weekend. I'll write about it tomorrow.