The Palimpsest Chronicles: more on Mark Bradford...

Friday, October 7, 2011

more on Mark Bradford...

Bradford’s career looks like an ongoing tussle between the impulse to answer the call of identity politics — to express and draw attention to political and personal injustices — and to reject that call. His works, at their best, transcend it. They are like palimpsests, quietly radiating meanings, emotions, and no end of visual satisfactions.

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Skaters Surf the Crete...RIP Don Hartley -maybe you can teach us something about "flow"...

Carver Don Hartley Rest In Peace from Don't Sleep Productions on Vimeo.

If you watch the way this 52 year old skater skates so smoothly with such grace, style, and "flow" maybe we can all learn something from such elegant and efficient use of flowing with life itself...sadly, although he normally wore a helmet, he fell on the day he didn't have one on and died from head injuries, leaving a wife and two sons. In his honor, forget the "cool factor" and wear a helmet...you will live to skate another day...

the whys of it all...

Maybe, just maybe, 25 years ago it was the solo half year journey through europe, greece, and turkey that started it all...or maybe it was the fact that instead of reading assigned college texts i was tearing through the pages of kerouac's "on the road" and marveling at my roommate daryl's incredible collection of william faulkner novels, or maybe it was it was the exposure to the writings of mythologist joseph campbell, or maybe it was the exposure to voices like michael meade (www.mosaicvoices.org), james salter, cormac mcarthy, tich nhat hanh, robert bingham, thom paine (read "scar vegas"), the other thomas paine and his "common sense", ginsberg's "howl", tom wolfe and his "elecric kool aid etc", the art writings of robert motherwell or robert henri, the visual exposure to the likes of basquiat, rothko, goya, corot, titian, julian schnabel, van gogh, terri winters, francis bacon, damien hirst, mathew barney, john haines, or maybe the friendships made on the football fields of middlebury college, or maybe those made with my occidental tennis teammates and college buddies - the list goes on and on, but somehow in the mix of it all, i knew way back then (as I quietly said to my sister with whom i went to college as well - "i just can't sit in an office in the years ahead"), or maybe it was simply the result of too many mindless late nights with too many of my fellow bungling peers, or maybe it was those incredible trips with my brother up the pacific coast (with camping stops nightly on glorious empty beaches) to eugene oregon and into the wilds of the southern sierras, but somehow, the journey of 20+ post college years has not been anything i would have scripted as it was written...but so it goes for most of us. i look forward to more art, more poetry, more oceans, more concrete skates, more friends, more family, more interesting dialogue, and yet, at the same time, less of the things we learn are very peripheral to lives truly well led. we journey on...cheers and safe travels...