Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak II

9 January 2025

No. 6,385 (cartoon)

It is naught.

It is not.

That’s a damn poem right there, that is.

10 January 2025

Faux Center for the Unknown

Polly sent me an article about the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. I didn’t waste my time even glancing at it. If everyone knows where it is in Portugal, then it ain’t unknown, is it?

11 January 2025

Notting Hillbilly

David Shariatmadari did a great interview with Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno dba Eno, who’s peddling his new book. Here’s what made his piece worth reading: I lifted two quotes; here’s the first.

“What I really feel uncomfortable about is the thing that people do—which I think is a way of excusing themselves from being creative—where they go: ‘You’re so creative!’, and in that they’re saying: ‘I’m just a guy with a humdrum job who never thinks of anything new.’ And I want to say: ‘Just fucking get up off your knees and be proud of yourself! Don’t put it on me to be your agent in the world to do brilliant things.’”

Tough love!

And here’s the second extract: “I don’t like being admired. I don’t like being revered. That makes me feel very uncomfortable.”

Eno lives on Notting Hill, which may or may not make him a Notting Hillbilly. That’s why Eno needn’t stay up nights worrying that I revere him: he’s a great artist, but he can’t be all that terribly brilliant if he chooses to live in skeevy England.

12 January 2025

Loud Eyes

I think it would be fair to say that Melanie was not impressed with my series of Bucatini 15 photographs.

“Where does this crap come from?” she asked.

“I have very strong eyes, I explained. “I see real loud.”

She didn’t understand, and I didn’t either. That’s art for you ... and me!

13 January 2025

Burning the Trash

I’m noticing a curious thing about some of my older friends: they don’t understand the basic concept of recycling. One threw an old shirt in the grey bin, perhaps imagining that someone would use the fabric in a quilt. Another discarded cracked coffee mugs, as if there was a way to return ceramics to soft clay. And so on.

I may be a tad snarky but I’m not too critical, since I remember the olde days when we had a different way of dealing with waste sixty years ago.

We burned it in the backyard.

I have no idea how old I was at the time, but I remember one of my childhood rites of passage was being given a bag or two of combustibles and a book of matches to take to the rusty, charred steel drum at the back of the lot, but it was a Big Thing.

Good times!

I’m sure people still burn their trash in Mississippi and other backwaters, but here in the relatively civilized world I’ll be explaining to my dear old friends why they can’t recycle their old boots and shoes until my last breath.

14 January 2025

Two Leitz Tele-Elmarit Perspectives on Infinity (Metric and Imperial)

I have alluded to the cameras I use these days (Leicas and Nikons) after saying goodbye to film and the Hasselblads, Rolleiflexes, and Sinars that required it. I have also eluded the mention of specific cameras and lenses until today because the lens is the subject for the photograph, not the optic I used to make it to make Two Leitz Tele-Elmarit Perspectives on Infinity (Metric and Imperial).

I started out to make a triptych that I came up with during the depths of the night; I have no idea if I was dreaming or in some other altered state(s). The original premise for the aborted Three Perspectives on Infinity was simple: make a triptych of the infinity symbols on three of my Leica lenses. I’d intended them to look identical, but for technical reasons too tedious to mention I couldn’t do that with the Summicrons.

I should have stopped after the first paragraph instead of adding the irrelevant story about the fish I couldn’t land. On the other hand, I claim that this is an artist’s notebook of sorts, so it stays.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2025 David Glenn Rinehart