Category: Blog

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Troglodyte lodgings.

Hey, Les.

For your global itinerary:

  • Les Hautes Roches, Rochecorbon (“From $252 for a double.”)
  • Alexander’s Boutique Hotel of Oia, Santorini (“180-degree views of the Aegean Sea.”)
  • The Laleh Kandovan, International Rocky Hotel, Kandovan (“Rooms once hid residents from invading Mongols.”)
  • The Caves, Negril (“All-inclusive rates start at $798 for double rooms during high season.”)
  • Cuevas Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Guadix (“Once sheltered those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Now they house half the town’s population.”)
  • Kelebek Hotel, Göreme (“Views of—and rooms carved out of—the rock formations known as ‘fairy chimneys’.”)

What are self-respecting, miserly, monadic troglodytes like you and I supposed to do when word like this from Afar* starts getting out?

Somehow, though, I think the panoramic views place isn’t doing the cave thing quite right. Caves that “make you feel like you’ve taken a vow of chicness”? No, thanks.

Yrs,

* “Sleep Like a Rock in a Cave.” Afar 2, no. 1 (March/April 2010), p. 47. Thanks a lot, Amy Cortese. You can keep the Italian place for yourself.

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T-shirt problem FIXED

For those of you who tried to order a LBM T-shirt or Lost Boy Mountain zine before 3 p.m. today, we were having issues with our orders. Your order most likely did not go through. Please check your pay-pal and re-order these items you will not be double charged, but please check your pay-pal account to be sure. sorry for the problems and inconvenience!

If you have any problems or questions, please feel free to contact LBM at:

contact@littlebrownmushroom.com

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24 pieces by Allen Ruppersberg

Since listing Allen Ruppersberg’s fantastic exhibition catalog in my list of Top 10 Photobooks of 2009, I’ve been doing more investigation on Ruppersberg. In the late 60’s and early 70’s he experimented with the way banal images, once combined, create narrative. Ruppersberg published three books juxtaposing pictures of motel rooms with other ordinary pictures sometimes containing narrative clues (ketchup drizzled on a table, a picture removed from a wall). These three books were called 23 Pieces (1968), 24 Pieces (1970) and 25 Pieces (1971).

I was able to track down a copy of 24 Pieces. See the whole thing here.

Note the colophon: “Design and Photography by Gary Krueger.”

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From RWE’s “Self-Reliance.”

Hey, Les.

You up on your Transcendentalism? This is from Emerson, and I found it moving, today:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

I feel like so many are caught in the bind of admiring, and seeking to emulate, what someone else has created. Seeing success, and thinking it takes only a set of procedures to accomplish it. A sequence, set and named, more than a bravely, unwittingly followed interior agenda, something moving you forward that can hardly be identified, quantified, or labeled.

What do we learn from teachers, except to ignore their lessons? Or, rather, to ignore the model they set, for it worked for them in the unique circumstances of a life’s evolution and is unlikely to yield similar results if tried in another context.

Oh, where have I been today, to be thinking these thoughts…mucking about in the hills of suburbia, where so many lives seem to emulate each other.

Yrs,

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First Book: Brian Ulrich

I have been going around to photographers asking them one question:

What was the first photo book that you can remember buying or seeing that really had a strong affect on you?

Here is Brian Ulrich’s response:

“In my early disastrous days as a  graphic design student, I recall wandering into the photography classroom. Sitting upon one of the long cardboard covered tables was a copy of ‘An American Visionary: Ralph Eugene Meatyard’. Simply out of curiosity or boredom I picked it up, and began leafing through the pages but then immediately slowed. Here were all this strange photographs made for some unknown reason; kids in masks, ghostly figures in forgotten southern landscapes, aggressive camera experiments (who has the balls today to open the shutter and kick the tripod legs out from underneath them?). The photographs had a profound aura, mystique and atmosphere. I was transfixed by the fact that this man had spent so much of his time and formed his entire life and family around making these odd pictures… for what reason?

Luckily some of those answers existed in the preface by a curator named Barbara Tannenbaum. I decided then that I was going to have to find out who this woman was, even if just to thank her for making this book so it would lay upon a table for me to discover.”

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Instax Interview: Maya de Forest

During one of my lunchtime book search sessions I found the book, I love here now, by Maya de Forest. I decided to ask her a few questions.

Carrie Elizabeth Thompson: What sparked this project about your mother?

Maya de Forest: I was visiting Winnipeg about once a year and was becoming more aware of my mom’s physical aging year to year. At the same time she was becoming really active in the things that interested her like cooking and painting. At one point she was taking three flamenco dance classes a week, things of that nature. She was just so passionate about everything and it made me see her in this new light, like who is this person? These things all really prompted me to start taking photos of her. I then got an opportunity to move back home for a month in the middle of winter and decided to make a book project about her.

CET: Do you think of this as a project about your mother? Or is she a surrogate for aging women?

Maya: It could definitely act as a surrogate for aging women but I think it’s primarily about my mother’s own immigrant story and how that’s informed her identity as an aging person.

CET: There are a lot of images taken at night, is there something that happens to your mother at night that made you decide to use many night images?

Maya: It was more a process of what I thought was working sequentially and fit the overall tone of the book. Of course I was taking a lot of night shots at the time…there is something about snow at night that’s so beautifully quiet and kind of sad. I think the winter landscapes end up acting as kind of an existential backdrop to the whole thing. I suppose I was expressing my own feelings about her mortality as well as the hardships that I know she’s faced growing up in Japan during the war and making a life in a new country.

CET: How did you decide to add your mother’s writing?

Maya: I wanted to give the book some breathing room between sequenced photos initially. I like sequencing images in small groups and building those into a whole. The writing was originally very simple and secondary to break these sequences up, but I later realized that it could act as a

tool to really fill in the gaps of what the photos were not able to express. I ended up interviewing my mom at length and taking relevant text from there.

CET: Can you explain the title?  When did your mother say this and what did you ask her to prompt this answer?

Maya: The title comes from her answer to my interview question  “How do you feel about living in Winnipeg?”  Her English has never been great but in the last 5 years her spoken English has deteriorated to the point where I now really struggle to understand her. She reads and

communicates with friends almost exclusively now  in Japanese outside of talking with her immediate family, so, she’s very much immersed back into her culture. I used “I love here now” as the title because I think it both expresses and embodies her acceptance of these two worlds that

she lives in.

CET: Do you feel this project is complete, or will we see more images in the future?

Maya: The project to me is done, since its really documenting a very specific point in time in her life which doesn’t exist for her anymore. She just survived a major stroke last spring and it feels like she’s aged about 10 years overnight. I’ve been really taken aback by how rapidly people can age in their seventies, similar to how quickly people mature in their teen years. It’s fascinating, but its also hard to watch.  I do still take photos though of my mother because she’s become such a great model. Maybe there’s a future project in there somewhere…

You can see more images here

Buy book here

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Troll-smor

In a recent post on 5b4, Mr. Whiskets mentioned that my book is packaged with ‘floor sweepings.’ These are in fact perfectly safe agaric fungal fragments, (not dried troll-smor). If Mr. Whiskets has a Valentine sweetie like Alec Soth, I’d recommend she give him Mushrooms, Russia and History by Valentina Pavlovna and R. Gordon Wasson. The two volume set was printed in 1975 in an edition of 517 and now costs about $3000 (but I downloaded it for free here … you book collectors are stupid).

Chapter 5: Mucus, Mushrooms and Love is especially good Valentines Day reading:

We have seen on an earlier page that ‘spunk’ in English is a name for the seminal flow of the human male, that the ordinary mushroom stipe sunk in the pileus is the symbol of the sexual act, and that the Greek P.UXYJC; means not only ‘mushroom’ (or ‘morel’) but the membrum virile. Perhaps the same idea lies enfolded in the Indo-European root of the Russian smorchok. There is a Norwegian word, troll-smor, or the demon’s butter, for the yellowish slimemoulds that are often found spilling over rotten stumps and that scientists call ‘myxomycetes’. It is our suggestion that ‘butter’ in such fungal words scarce conceals the erotic meaning, corresponding to the erotic vulgarism frontage in the French langue verte, and the special meaning of ‘spunk’ in England. In low English ‘cheese’ is the designation for smegma…

We now call to the reader’s attention certain further semantic associations with fire that link together the two Greek words. The word for mushroom also meant the half-carbonized end of a wick, which in English is called the snuff- a word with nasal ties. This half charred end of a wick is of course tinder. The Greek word for mucus also meant the nozzle of a lamp. This same Greek word for mucus crops out in Latin as myxa, and in Latin it meant ‘wick’, and we discover that in Latin fungus was the snuff of a wick. The Latin word for ‘wick’ in turn gave to the French their meche, and from the French the English acquired ‘match’. Why should the match that we strike come down to us from Greek words for mucus and mushroom? Why this persistent association between fire on the one hand, and mucus and mushrooms on the other, with the membrum virile also playing a role in the same affair? In low English ‘wick’ is still potent with erotic meaning, as the English soldierlets us know when he ‘dips his wick’ or complains that someone ‘gets on his wick’. The cap of a morel suggests a burnt clump of tinder, and what is a nozzle but a ‘cock’? Both ‘nozzle’ and ‘schnozzle’ are variants of’nose’…

Here then is a persistent association of ideas, triangular in design, between mucus, mushrooms, and candles or lamps. Like the candle-wick itself, the ideas are plaited together, weaving in and out in a slow measure down the centuries. It is easy to see why the mycophobic Greeks regarded mushrooms as globs of mucus. But why the lamp nozzle? Why the burnt end of the wicke? Why the candle? Perhaps the reader has already discovered the common denominator that underlies these disparate ideas. Relying on certain straws of evidence, we have conjectured a deep-seated semantic association between nasal mucus and seminal fluid. The primary use of the fungi among the primitive Europeans was for the making of fire, a rite instinct with sexual associations. In the burning candle guttering with heat, in the dripping nozzle of the hot antique lamp, we discover the supreme figure of dynamic sexual metaphor, wherein the discordant ideas of mucus and fire are suddenly and boldly reconciled.

Happy Valentines Day,

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Dissection table writings

For Valentines Day, Nurse Rachel gave me a copy of  Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930. It might not seem romantic, but it sure is interesting. In the 19th century, anatomy professors had a hard time legally obtaining bodies for their students. So they hired “resurrectionists” to dig up recently buried bodies from graveyards. The process was shrouded in secrecy. Professors and janitors guarded the dissection room and students were expelled if they divulged the identity of their subjects.

Despite all of this secrecy, there was a strong compulsion to document and commemorate the process. As photography became more accessible in the 1880’s, medical students across America began posing for group portraits in front of their cadavers. Through the 1920’s, this genre of medical photography became a quasi-ritual. Of the hundred or so pictures compiled in Dissected, many share remarkable consistencies. To me the most fascinating stylistic attribute is the phrases students would write in chalk on dissection table:

Happy Valentines…

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Travelog

My recent post on Viaggio sul Reno, Settembre 1974, brought to mind David Hockney’s photographs from roughly the same period. I’m particularly fond of Hockney’s story that accompanies these two photographs:

“In the winter of 1968 Peter and I took the Orient Express to Munich, to see a show of mine. I remember one morning when we were both on the bottom bed, we opened the curtains, and it was snowing. It was fantastic to lie in the little couch with a nice warm body next to you, gazing out the window at the cute little Bavarian villages half hidden under the snow. It’s a wonderful way to travel. I never photographed it, but I remember it vividly.

Later, we went onto Vienna. We took the subway and Peter went in the next carriage; there he stood, looking back at me as I photographed him. At the next station he joined me and I again took a photograph, still looking at the same place, and he is gone. It was not planned, it just happened that way.“

From David Hockney Photographs (Petersburg Press, London, 1982). This book is unusual in that it emphasizes his single images rather than the better known photo collages.