Some people see leaves falling from a tree and see it as, leaves falling from
a tree.
Others see it as an inexhaustible mystery of the signified from the mundane
closed-off simulation of a world sign.
The world is intolerably dreary. You escape it by seeing and naming what had
heretofore been unspeakable.
Naming the unnamable and hearing it named.
Two gods are better than one.
You don't forget how to swim or ride a bicycle or fly an airplane.
"Travel may be eroticized by the media, but the erotic is never travelized,
Walker Percy
Want to free yourself from experience? Don't pay any attention to it.
Inside, insight, inner experience, inspiration, inner trips, inner voices,
invisibility, into it, in step, incrowd, Inside Daisy Clover, industrial
revolution, see through.
Outside, outerspace, out of sight, out of time, out of my head, Outerbridge,
under the volcano
Breakdown is breakthrough
You don't address an audience, you create an audience
My psychic is programmed.
Advertising's ultimate aim is to create a desire which is satisfied by buying
something.
Armchair sadism, willing victims.
Happiness, says Swift, is the possession of being perpetually well-decieved.
He didn't want excitement and he didn't want to be exciting.
The best images have sensations of unreality, illimitable vastness, brilliant
light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things.
Thorazine, Stelazine, Prolixin.
The death of affect, the concept of unlimited possibilities, guilt-free
enjoyment of all the minds possibilities.
I live inside a vast novel.
Pornography is a political form of fiction. It deals with how we use and
exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way.
The psychopath never goes out of fashion.
I'd like to do in reality what Tolstoy did in fiction.
Psychic ju-jitsu.
I want to be shot in the dark with tracer bullets. I want to see it coming.
Art is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. Only
those who have personality and emotions and sensitivity know what it means to
want to escape from these things.
The idea of it and reality of it.
Don't knock the rock.
The hillside of Bethel was a sea of mud, garbage, and bonfires.
Exterminate all the brutes.
The three-year old El Salvador International Airport is glassy and white and
splendidly isolated.
The road has become used less for travel, more for recreation.
When the Spaniards were besieging Leyden in 1574 leather money was issued.
But as hardship increased, the population boiled and ate the new currency.
Itchy scalp, hairy legs, greasy hair, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts,
receding gums, excess weight, tired blood, cleft-palette.
Synethesia: enchancing the feeling of imaginative life.
A joke is a reaction to the main event of any culture. It recovers the
intregal person.
I like consenting to be part of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially
contrived situation. In other words, I like to play the game.
Art is a way to stand aside of automation.
The higher you climb, the more I see of your ass.
Heavy metal is retriabalizing.
Synesthesia (again) unified sense rather than common sense.
Television is a sleeping giant.
What's purple and hums?
An electric grape.
Why does it hum.
Because it doesn't know the words.
Texture instead of semantic meanings.
Normality as a special effect might be another from of hysteria.
The Frug or the Watusi: the individual as a montage of loosely assembled
parts.
A point of view is a serious liability. I associate point of view with
rediscovery. Like the cubists rediscovering primitive values in everyday objects.
The most popular artists in America are Erte, Leroy Neiman, Marc Chagall, and
Henry Moore.
Art is an esoteric medium for the enjoyment of the few.
More popular artists. Chaplin, Gershwin, Walt Disney, Irving Berlin, Milton
Berle.
I never give people what they want. I have no concept of the good of the
people. I'm not a dictator who believes in fate, destiny or luck. I'm not a
hollywood producer, producing the same picture for the daydreams of men and women who sit in the darkened theater.
I'm so far underground I get the bends.
Box Office is the only way to measure success.
Plato was quite a guy.
Individuality is more characteristic of nonliterate people.
The ordinary person seeks security by numbing his perceptions. The artist
delights in novelty and creates situations to reveal and compensate for visual
gradiants.
Rephotography could be a form of re-adjusting sensory bias.
Common man would rather be entertained than educated. That's what newspapers discovered. Hollywood discovered that gentleman prefer blondes.
A pin-up girl is more sexy than a real naked woman.
My clock doesn't work. It coast four dollars. It's not a question whether my
wristwatch tells time correctly. The point is it coast four dollars.
Pornography is a fragmented emotion, a natural consequence of a high visual
gradient in any society. Not unlike sentimentality.
Media. Comes from the Greek character Medea. She was an enchantress. Out to
murder and maim her lovers. A terrifying beauty. Hard-boiled. Psychologically
hopped-up. Chopped up her brother and boiled his parts in a pot. Melodrama and revenge.
Air France is an outer fact. It's all over the world. You don't have to take
my word for it. So let's say Air France is my word. My word then becomes
immediately more interesting because my word has a real possibility of being true. My word has more chances of being true if it's already all over the world.
It's hard to have any imaginative response to the Bronx Zoo up in Harlem when
you've already seen the Bronx Zoo up in Harlem in an advertisement on T.V.
The zoo up in Harlem is not he same zoo that's in the ad. The zoo in the ad
was a lot more exciting than the zoo up in Harlem. It's hard not to remove
yourself when the closest thing to the real thing turns out better than the real
thing.
I would imagine my immediate audience are people just like me. People who are thirty-five. People who grew up in the suburbs in a house that had a
reproduction of a painting in the living room and an incomplete collection of
encyclopedia's from a to g.
I always thought I was taking out the picture. I never thought I was taking
in the picture. I don't believe I'm irrationally devoted to the picture before
or after I take it. Fetishism implies some kind of blocking, to the extent
the fixation may interfere with sexual expression. I don't think my pictures are
some kind of displacement of erotic interest. Maybe I'm all wrong about this
but my pictures happen to be psychologically necessary for other things
besides sex.
A chicken in every pot.
Aren't you hungry?
I have no interest in spanking Burger King. I'am interested in how
unbelievable their hamburgers look on T.V. On T.V. they look to good to be true. If you think your actually going to end up with a hamburger that looks that good in your stomach, then I suspect your anticipation is about wishful thinking.
I've never looked at an advertisement for a brand new car and felt I either
had to buy it or escape from it.
My photographs might appear to look rarefied, hunted down, made-up,
manipulated, concocted, played-out, to good to be true, not mine, bought in a store, sent away for, but I suppose in a sense they are.
The desired effect is to get an even, seamless look. An attempt at a virtuoso
real capable of instamatic ambiance.
I've heard that matters of art have nothing to do with consciousness. I like
to think that what I'm doing is completely self-conscious.
Vermeer lost over one hundred paintings in a ship wreck.
Second banana isn't that bad.
There's nothing like guilt-free enjoyment.
I have no personal history or memory of the body's, the postures, the
commodities, the scenes I have re-photographed. The absence of this history and memory makes me feel good about my photographs.
The idea that your own experience is special, well it isn't.
When that astronaut took that "giant step for mankind", was that "step" for
me and you?
An artist can represent a moral force, yes, a moral majority, no.
I'm more interested in baking the cake than eating it.
I grew up with Pop Art. I also grew up with my sister but haven't seen her in
fifteen years. What am I saying?
Practicing without a license, being unprofessional and having no degree or
diploma, how did I end up here?
Vote yes to vote no to:
The media isn't a mystery. Sometimes a nightmare sometimes a friend. Always
alive and independent, a nameless form of new life, a mutation so to speak, an
artificial, sexless bogeyman.
Vote yes to vote no to:
The media is the anti-Christ.
Every word was once an animal.
I wouldn't recommend alcohol and drugs to anyone. But they have always worked for me.
"You were a vanguard pre-abstract-expressionist in the late thirties, a
vanguard abstract-impressionist in the middle forties and a vanguard post-abstract expressionist in the early fifties, weren't you?" Who was this question posed to? Gorky, Reinhardt, DeKooning.
Answer: Ad Reinhardt
Woman who are not "ideal beauties" appear with increasing frequency in
today's communication media. Girls wearing glasses are no longer automatically put in the category of hopeless spinsters.
Blondes are associated with three well-defined prototypes. There's the dumb
blonde. Her specialty is sex. Then there is the wholesome freckle-faced blonde
who typifies the "girl next-door". She is the marrying type. Finally there's
the blonde on the motorcycle. She's usually topless, with nipples pierced, next
to the sign that says: Show Us Your Tits.
Flowers are as important to the sale of greeting cards as covers displaying
semi-nudes are to paperback books. Hearts, birds, bunnies, cherubs, pussycats, Santas, Easter eggs, and babies are the most common subject matter for
"friendship" cards.
When the midwife finally opened the door, all she needed to say to the
anxious father was, "It's a man". With these words, Man Ray was ushered in to the world in Philadelphia, on 27 August 1890, with the rare distinction of having his birth and sex announced and being named in the same breath.
Daniel Boorstin says in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America: that American life is becoming increasingly organized at every level, and that spontaneous events are being replaced by "pseudo-events". We find
ourselves in a situation where we accept reality as it is reported rather than as it really is: "We become so accustomed to our illusions, our images, that we
mistake them for reality.
Doubling, failing, stuttering, rejecting, these are all activities that are
not generally found in the literature on an important painter. They chafe
against that which conventionally constitutes painting positively.
Maybe, Maybe not. From a painting title from a Christopher Wool exhibition at
the Secession 2001
454. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. NY: Viking (1973) The uncorrected
proof copy of Pynchon's landmark third novel, winner of the National Book Award as well as the William Dean Howells Medal for the best work of fiction by an American over a five-year span. Gravity's Rainbow became the benchmark for postmodern American fiction upon publication and secured its mysterious and
reclusive author's place in the postwar American literary pantheon. It is also
widely considered the culminating novel of the sixties, the one which encapsulates and sums up the postwar events that resulted in the countercultural rejection of mainstream society and the quest for a plausible alternative view. Pynchon's identity and whereabouts have consistently remained mysterious, and his publications have increasingly tended to be well-guarded secrets up to the moment of publication. For a number of years it was reported that no proofs of Gravity's Rainbow had been done, with Viking itself reportedly having confirmed that; however, in the last decade a dozen or so examples of this massive 760 page proof have shown up on the market. This copy has been read and bears the reviewer's marks in the text and on the rear cover; the spine is dulled from blue to gray; moderate overall wear; still a very good copy in a custom clamshell box Bird Talk.