Thee Culture Vulture

xxx-mas muzak

2009-12-16T20:07:00.000-08:00

ho ho ho,
samantha anne

x-mas ephemera v1

2009-12-15T20:57:00.000-08:00

cover me

2009-12-06T01:36:00.000-08:00

what are your favorite covers? care to hear mine, dear reader?

in solidarity,
samantha anne

how to buy meat

2009-12-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

USDA How to Buy Meat Pt. 1 circa 1970

USDA How to Buy Meat Pt. 2 circa 1970

joseph beuys, trickster (may 12, 1921 – january 23, 1986)

2009-12-05T21:29:00.000-08:00

Joseph Beuys' How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare circa 1965

"I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context." - Joseph Beuys

"Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) is widely understood to be the most important German artist of the post–World War II period. Highly provocative and always controversial, he and his peers reinvented a thriving avant-garde after the long period of Nazi repression. His influence is comparable to that of the American artist Andy Warhol, but whereas Warhol's work features a style and imagery that is readily accessible, Beuys intentionally devised a challenging formal vocabulary, layered with meaning and metaphor. The centerpiece of the gallery is a new acquisition: a set of five vitrines accompanied by two wall objects, constituting a mini-museum of works made between 1948 and 1982. Beuys often displayed assemblies of small sculptures in freestanding vitrines like those found in natural history museums. This form of presentation has become as synonymous with Beuys's work as his signature materials of fat and felt. During the 1960s and 1970s Beuys was a major pioneer of performance art. In his "actions," as he called them, he used time, sound, and objects as sculptural materials. Many of his sculptures, including those on view here, originated in actions and serve as relics of those events as much as autonomous works. The actions also survive in photographs, films, and video that capture the power with which the artist used his physical and psychic energy to create unforgettable scenarios infused with mythological, historical, and personal resonance. Beuys did not consider art to be separate from society, and he devoted the last twenty years of his life to both art and constant activism for socioeconomic reform (he was a founding member of Germany's Green Party). The blackboard diagrams he made during countless public lectures, evoking his early drawings as well as his experience as a professor of art, describe his "social sculpture": the application of creative strategies and ideals to the achievement of a free and democratic world community." - Courtesy of MoMA

Joseph Beuys' Infiltration homogen für Konzertflügel (Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano) circa 1966

Joseph Beuys' Die Haut (The Skin) circa 1984

"the space heater" by sharon olds

2009-12-05T02:10:00.000-08:00

On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire's heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises-
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn't seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, "If you're cold-are you cold? But if it's on
for me..." He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, "Of course," as if I had asked,
and he stood up and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down, behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message. If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me in my old
shame and horror, then I would rest
on his art-and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of heat,
the pleasure of power.

remember

2009-12-05T00:58:00.000-08:00

there is a reason to leave the house and participate in various styles of communication...

nostalgically,
samantha anne

"it's like a violent storm of fruit and ham..."

2009-12-04T03:13:00.000-08:00

no words, well, not mine anyhow. not just now.

"you like sweet smoky honeyed ham? and you like cocktails."

---

"why are you not wearing a meat belt? exactly."

---

"hollow fried and neon drain. it's a crawl, the day before."

faithfully,
samantha anne