Engineer's Daughter

pell-mell

Saul Leiter, Harlem, 1960 (USA).  Ah, I can feel the year really starting to wind down, can't you?  I'm thinking this might actually be my last post of 2008, and what better way to finish than with this Leiter photo of a dapper gent.  Maybe he's only now stumbling out of that bar into the bright light of day, but though his face remains in shadow the man looks good, just ever-so-slightly rumpled.  I wasn't properly introduced to Leiter's work until early in 2008, but he is a fantastic photographer for me to have discovered in this year where I continued my intense love affair with all things urban and city.  For more on Leiter and his exquisite New York and Paris street photography please visit the online magazine lens culture.  As for me, if I don't have anything else to say before New Year's Day I'll be back then with some 2008 wrap-up.  And here's to a 2009 filled with ever more art, music and travel.

gudgeon

John Deakin, The photographer Roger Mayne and friend, North Kensington, 1957 (UK).  A couple weeks ago I posted about Mayne's London street photography in the '50s and '60s, and I love how Deakin has captured him here while he's working with one of his young subjects.  Deakin was an awesome photographer himself and took fantastic portraits of people like Francis Bacon, Tennessee Williams and W.H. Auden as well as impromptu street shots in Paris and Rome.  I highly recommend browsing the online archive of Deakin's work on A Database.

doolally

Codex Mendoza, The Founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, 1541-42 (Aztec/Mexico).  The Codex was created by Aztec scribes about twenty years after the Spanish conquest and depicts 200 years of Aztec history as well as scenes from daily life before the Spanish.  There is some Spanish text but most of the information is given through ideograms, like on this opening page where the four boroughs of Tenochtitlan are represented along with the rulers since the founding of the city, all centered around the same eagle that would eventually end up on the Mexican flag (though here it doesn't have the snake in its beak).  I'm not sure if you can see them in this reproduction but I love all the mysterious symbols around the border of the page as well, the significance of which I can only guess at.  For more images from the Codex Mendoza, including pages illustrating the tributes rendered by conquered towns and the somewhat alarming punishments and chores of children, check out its page on Wikipedia here.

topiary

Roger Mayne, from The Southam Street Album, 1956-61 (UK).  If you're a kid growing up in the city all you need is a piece of chalk and the whole street is your canvas.  Mayne is a brilliant street photographer, and for five years in the late '50s and early '60s he documented the residents of London's Southam Street in Notting Dale which at that time was one of the poorer areas of the city.  I personally became acquainted with his work through Morrissey, of all people, who has used Mayne's pictures on his record sleeves and as backdrops at concerts.  You can see more of Mayne's photography on his Web site.

prolix

Richard Estes, Drugstore, 1970 (USA).  I like the appropriateness of this Estes image on a day I'm home from work trying to shake a sore throat that came on fast and that I hope will leave just as quickly.  At first glance I assumed the picture was a photograph, but it's actually a painting with even the reflective surfaces of the windows and chrome exteriors meticulously rendered by the artist.  Like many other photorealists Estes uses photography to set up the composition of his paintings, and he has captured city streets, storefronts and waterways from around the world.  For more of his work please click here.

cultivar

Vit Obrtel, Design for an Apartment Building, 1921 (Czechoslovakia).  Obrtel makes high-density city living look completely attractive to me in this architectural rendering thanks to his clean lines and use of black and white.  As long as there's room for me and two cats, I'm totally down.  Obrtel was not only an architect but also a poet and graphic artist, and you can see some of his amazing book designs here.

By the way, if you're looking for something to do tonight fellow ex-Addicted-To-Noise-contributor Jay Blakesberg is having a party at the Independent in honor of his new book Traveling on a High Frequency, Photographs 1978-2008.  Jay is one of the best rock photographers around, and I highly recommend picking up a copy of the book even if you can't make it to the club.  Your coffee table needs it, trust me.

But if you're feeling a little more literary and not so much rock 'n' roll the GLBT Historical Society will be hosting a talk by Dorothy Allison tonight as part of their "Passing on the Pen" series.  Normally the Society pairs up an established GLBT author with an emerging writer for this series, but Allison is such a pioneer she gets her own night all to herself.  If you had written Bastard Out of Carolina you would too.

maugre

Map from Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London, 1889 (UK).  "The colour-coding, inscribed at the bottom of the map, runs as follows: 'Black: Lowest class.  Vicious, semi-criminal.  Dark blue: Very poor, casual.  Chronic want.  Light blue: Poor.  18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family.  Gray: Mixed.  Some comfortable, others poor.  Pink: Fairly comfortable.  Good ordinary earnings.  Red: Middle class.  Well-to-do.  Gold: Upper-middle and Upper classes.  Wealthy.'"  It's one thing to understand on an intellectual level that Victorian London experienced incredible economic disparity, but it's quite another to see it all laid out in colors.  For the full map, side-by-side with a contemporary map of the city, please visit the Charles Booth Online Archive.

By the way, if you don't already have election night plans Yerba Buena is hosting a kick-ass Freedom of Art party featuring DJs, artists, dance performances, musicians and (most importantly) free pizza when the polls close.  Meanwhile over on my side of the Bay Carla Kihlstedt and fellow Sleepytime Gorilla Museum member Matthias Bossi will be headlining an election night party at the Uptown that also promises a ton of special guests.  I do believe we're going to have reason to celebrate.

continuance

Tarsila do Amaral, E.F.C.B. (Central Railway Station), 1924 (Brazil).  Growing up in southern California I had very little concept that trains could be used for, you know, travel.  It was when I lived in England and saw how cities were planned around the central station, that that the train tracks weren't just dropped somewhere on the edge of town as an afterthought, I just couldn't get over how liberating it felt to be able to walk to a train that could take me anywhere in the country.  Thus my appreciation for good public transportation (not to mention smart urban planning) was firmly cemented.  The London Tube helped a lot too, but that's a story for another day.  Tarsila do Amaral's modernist rendering here similarly places the station smack in the center of the city, walking distance from both homes and church, and she has painted the whole scene with bright, cheerful colors and a satisfying attention to geometry.  If you're unfamiliar with her work and would like to see more I recommend selecting a title at random from the drop-down menus here.

bidentate

I really loved Robert Olen Butler's last book Severance, in which he wrote 62 pieces, each exactly 240 words long, that were the fictional final thoughts of individuals who were unfortunate enough to have had their heads cut off, everyone from Marie Antoinette to Medusa.  Many were quite moving and some were downright tearjerkers.  Now he has moved from death to sex with his new tome Intercourse in which he imagines what might have been going through the heads of some particular couples while they were in the act of, um, coupling.  This time you've got your Adam and Eve, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Bill and Hillary.  Butler's appearance at Books Inc. tonight sadly has been canceled, but I think you should still buy a copy from them or your favorite local bookseller.

But for now I give you the first part of an excellent poem by Bertolt Brecht about the manifold pleasures of the urban life, just because I'm feeling it today:

1.
I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.

2.
In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
To the end mistrustful, lazy and content.

3.
I'm polite and friendly to people. I put on
A hard hat because that's what they do.
I say: they are animals with a quite peculiar smell.
And I say: does it matter? I am too.

4.
Before noon on my empty rocking chairs
I'll sit a woman or two, and with an untroubled eye
Look at them steadily and say to them:
Here you have someone on whom you can't rely.

5.
Towards evening it's men that I gather round me
And then we address one another as 'gentlemen'.
They're resting their feet on my table tops
And say: things will get better for us. And I don't ask when.

6.
In the grey light before morning the pine trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, raise their twitter and cheep.
At that hour in the city I drain my glass, then throw
The cigar butt away and worriedly go to sleep.

Bertolt Brecht, from Of Poor BB, 1925-28 (Germany)

univocalic

Tom Miller, Tokyo, 2003 (UK).  I have linked to Tom Miller before, and I'm doing it again because I think his city pics are just awesome.  And what is more important to a modern city than its garages and parking spaces?  As even just an occasional Bay Area driver it's safe to say I'm a little obsessed with parking, and you especially should see me trying to find a spot before my Sunday DJ shift near the Cal campus.  There is often much cursing and gnashing of teeth, all because I stubbornly look for free street parking instead of paying the cash and taking an easy spot in the garage right across the street.  Blame my frugal (some might say: miserly) Dutch nature.

In other news, my hero Art Spiegelman is in town tonight at Books Inc. to talk about his new memoir Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! which not only explores his early influences but also reprints some of his rarely-seen comics from the '70s.  I'd go and ask him to add something to my sketchbook but I'm literally too intimidated.