ONE NIGHT STAND

Last night, looking past my beer, I noticed a guy a bit older than me saying grace over his slice of pizza. All I want to say is that it makes sense to come to some sort of understanding with anything that goes into your body.

ARGENTINA

I spent a week installing the work of Fernando Traverso at the College of Santa Fe's Marion Center. The show consists of ninety or so flags stenciled with a bicycle image and a number of photographs of the same stencil on walls in the streets of Argentina. The installation is a part of The Disappeared Collaborative Project, which has various exhibitions installed at SITE Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, and the Lannan Foundation Gallery. There's not much to say about the exhibition that isn't self-evident: it's sad and terrible. One super-compelling thing, though, from an aesthetic point of view, is how reliant all of the art is on objects that necessarily teem with nostalgia. There really is no way around it, because nobody'd appreciate the distance abstraction would give. Approximations like that would be mired in the current Art context (read: fashion), rather than significant content. This was the week after I got back from Texas.

E.S.

Before I left, though, I stopped in at 516 Arts to see Ghosts in the Machine, "an exhibition of internationally renowned video artists" that was developed with SITE. I'm a bad reviewer because I spent an inordinate amount of time with the Eve Sussman piece, and had to blow through most of the work upstairs to get to an appointment across town. But this is my basic take on the show: Eve Sussman is the shit. 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004)--which was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial--is a fluid docudrama inspired by Velasquez' painting Las Meninas that kept my brain rife with images of Bill Viola's The Greeting and a Steven Parrino film that was a part of Dave Hickey's 2001 biennial up in Santa Fe. I'm not alone in citing the similarities between The Greeting and 89 seconds at Alcazar, the two having a canonical painting as the anchor for the work. The experience of each of the dramas is only heightened through technological means as explorations in relationships, possibility and the everyday. A major difference between the two is that you felt more a part of the Sussman piece, mostly because Viola locks you out formally, with its reliance on super-slow motion. There's just this seamless cut/loop in 89 Seconds where the camera pans behind the canvas that knocked me out.

NATIONAL SUCKER

It's not uncommon for me to get hooked by a catchy pop album. I can't help it. Case in point: since stumbling across The National's Boxer recently, I've had a hard time not listening to it. It's just got this Pulp meets Leonard Cohen meets 80s Brat Pack soundtrack vibe that hooks me. It's like the stuff that could have been on the second disc of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack. And when I think back to how my musical teeth were cut (British shoe-gazing bands, mostly), this kind of offering just holds up, countering the jibby-jabby shiz that creeps through my stereo while I'm in the car. Some other pop albums that have had elicited a similar effect, in order of appearance:

The Stone Roses/The Stone Roses
The Charlatans UK/Some Friendly
Ned's Atomic Dustbin/God Fodder
Trash Can Sinatras/Cake
The Smiths/Hatful of Hollow
Catherine Wheel/Ferment
Beat Happening/You Turn Me On
The Wedding Present/Bizarro
PJ Harvey/Rid of Me
Pulp/Common People
The Verve/A Northern Soul
David Bowie/Hunky Dory
Radiohead/The Bends
Yo La Tengo/Electr-o-pura
Ryan Adams/Heartbreaker

LITTLE (ONAN) BASTARD

James Dean was killed in California in 1955. He made three major films: East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, the last of which was filmed in Marfa, Texas. I seem to recall a Dean biography I was thumbing through about ten years ago that had a photo, purported to be Dean, masturbating in a tree, and I never figured out the "why" of it all. I guess there's something here about youth and getting ideas out while you can, rather than falling into the stranglehold of self-criticism or old-age gravity.

MAP/SAP

So much has been written about Marfa and what it is and what it used to be. One thing that can be said with relative certainty: throughout its history, the town seems to have been viewed as a place worth investing inÑit was made the seat of Presidio County in 1885, troops were set up there around 1911 to guard the border with Mexico, and the U.S. used the area to train military pilots during World War II. Fast-forward a few decadesÑthe military base was closed and the town was in economic stagnation. Donald Judd came in and purchased much of the former base and used the existing structures to house his Minimalist dreams. Building upon that investment, Marfa took on its current role as art world beacon. (Most of this information was culled from the sites www.marfa.org and www.marfatx.com.

DONKEY SHOW

I used the recent Chinati open house (October 6,7) as an excuse for a road trip with the Donkeys. It was a kind of void we were driving to, where I don't think any of us expected anything from our destination. Maybe we just wanted to know what the big deal was, and I'll say up front that I don't think an answer ever revealed itself. the town merely became a space in which ideas settled into the ground or maybe passed between some of the 2000 people that flooded its streets. But it wasn't so much about art as it was a declaration, on some level, of one's presence in this sea of other artists, gallerists and collectors. And not a declaration that expects a response or an acknowledgment, but merely says "count me in until Monday".

1000 FEET

There was a moment, walking across the bridge into Juarez, where I wanted to stop and just stare at the divide; but I kept walking, dipped in the warm air of Mexico on the other side. I also heard somewhere that it's common for people who visit Jerusalem to get Jerusalem Syndrome, which sends them into an obsessive and psychotic tizzy, with the belief that they have suddenly been put on a divine, missionary path. That's the American in me, I guess.

BILLY JACK

We stumbled onto the movie Born Losers (the first in the Billy Jack series) in a motel room in Van Horn, Texas. From its scenes of bikini'd teenage girls riding around on Yamahas, to the weird Native American green beret-karate-fueled bar fights against hippie Harley riders, this might be one of the best and worst movies I've ever seenÑand that's disregarding the fact that none of us really understood what was going on. The plot seemed to revolve around Billy Jack protecting our heroine during a rape trial and busting the heads of the bikers that robbed his trailer, but apart from that it just seemed like the filmmakers threw in every available American stereotype and forced a story out of them.

YELLOW

I should have said that we were joined by the Peemaster* prior to departure, who locked his keys in his truck five minutes after we got to Marfa. We had to call on a shop around the corner from where we were parkedÑin front of the post office, across from the John Chamberlain buildingÑand a guy on a mobility scooter sent someone to break into the truck, although the guy he was sending wasn't as good at breaking into cars as his nephew. At some point, too, we stumbled into the good grace of David Bebe [my spelling] who offered up tacos, Bloody Marys, super-cold Lone Star beer, a killer jukebox and a shuffleboard table to use as long as we wanted. It was great. I think he said he was remodeling the space and next year it would be a music club. After a couple hours there, it was back to the center of town to get ready for the big free meal, but not before Senor Pee locked his keys in his truck again! No worries, though, we used a boat oar we found in the bed of the truck to crack the top of the door open and lift the keys off the seat with some wire we'd scraped up from the rain-soaked parking lot. It was great to see LB leveraging that yellow oar against that yellow truck as dusk set over Highland Avenue looking like the most natural thing in the world.

*Ze Peemaster ist Maddog