Lauren Greenfield

I looked at her portfolio this morning. I had seen her work before. I specially remember Fast Forward. Four years shooting the youth of L.A. where she grew up. I found it provocative and thoughtful. These photographs illustrate how "You grow up really fast when you grow up in L.A. It seems like everyone is in a rush to be an adult. It's not cool to be a kid."

Her last work, Girl Culture is her personal journey as a photographer, as an observer of culture, as part of the media, as a media critic, as a woman, as a girl. "In this work, I have been drawn to the pathological in the everyday. I am interested in the tyranny of the popular and thin girls over the ones who don’t fit that mold. I am interested in the competition suffered by the popular girls, and their sense that being popular is not as satisfying as it appears. I am interested in the costly and time-consuming beauty rituals that are an integral part of daily life. I am interested in the fact that to fall outside the ideal body type is to be a modern-day pariah. I am interested in how girls’ feelings of frustration, anger, and sadness are expressed in physical and self-destructive ways: controlling their food intake, cutting their bodies, being sexually promiscuous. Most of all, I am interested in the element of performance and exhibitionism that seems to define the contemporary experience of being a girl."

Worth checking out if you haven't done so already.

Ground Zero

Gloria hizo estas fotos de la zona cero cuando estuvo de visita en marzo.
Gracias!

De la Vega

The poet of the sidewalks. These pictures were taken on Union Square, but you can always see his work in his gallery at 103rd and Lexington Ave.

Happy Birthday Jimmy!

Jaume is TREINTA Y UNO hoy. Qué viejo! Besitos.

Cangrejillo erótico

Este fin de semana aprendí finalmente a serigrafiar camisetas. Existen diferentes sistemas, pero yo lo hice con el más prehistórico porque me parecía que tenía más encanto. Mi primera creación: el cangrejillo erótico, que corre por la camiseta para pellizcarte el pezón. O el ombligo. Quieres una?

Janine Antoni

"If I could walk along the rope and as it dipped that—just for a moment—I would touch the horizon, which would really talk about the incredible struggle to get to that place of the imagination.
I call the piece "Touch" because it is about that moment or that desire to walk on the horizon, which is obviously an impossibility and only an illusion that can be accomplished through the video camera. And you can see I’m hardly balancing there in that place of my desire. Thinking
about what the horizon means to us, it’s sort of a place of contemplation... But for me, I’m interested in it as a place that doesn’t really exist. That if we were to try to go to that place, the horizon would just recede further."
Watch video

Trailers & Previews

El viernes 26 finalmente estrenan "Mi vida sin mi" de Isabel Coixet. Buscando el trailer online me di cuenta de que existen dos: el americano y el y el español . Haz el experimento, es curioso. Descubre miles de pequeñas diferencias en cómo nos gusta que nos cuenten las historias, nuestra capacidad de esperar, lo dispuestos que estamos a las sorpresas, lo que queremos, lo que nos atrae, lo que nos motiva, lo que nos mueve. Y sobretodo, no veáis el americano si no habéis visto la peli. En cuanto la vea la comentamos, vale?
Me pregunto si somos personas diferentes cuando hablamos en otro idioma. Pero eso es probablemente, otra historia.

Next week is the opening of the movie "My life without me" written and directed by Isabel Coixet, one of my favorite Spanish directors. We should all go check it out. I have heard great things from my friends in Spain, where it was released almost a year ago. If you want a preview you can choose whether to see the Spanish or the American one. That turned out to be a pretty interesting experiment. It's the same movie, so why are the previews so different? Maybe it just reflects how differently we like stories to be told, products to be presented, how much we like surprises, what moves us, what intrigues us, etc. My recommendation is not to watch the American preview until after watching the movie. But I am an Spaniard, so... go figure.
I wonder if we are different people when we speak in a different language too. But that's a whole different story.

Mirrors

What do you do when you realize you are in front of a mirror? Does that sudden self-consciousness changes anything? Do you take a picture?
Anything can be an idea to start a movement, or at least, to put together a website. Check out The Mirror Project

Despiértate

Esta mañana en la estación de metro estaba Gonzalo tocando otra vez. Si algo tiene esta ciudad es que los conciertos espontáneos en los sucios andenes merecen la pena perder uno o diez trenes. Hay algo especial en oirle allí. Quizás es la forma en que redunda su voz, quizás es el disfrute de que algo sea gratis, quizás es que no existe forma más dulce de despertarse.
Y como todo aquí, este chileno tiene una web donde podeis oír alguna de sus canciones.

Margaret Kilgallen

I have been wanting to put this up for the past couple of days, but the food poisoning kept me pretty busy.
I saw her work for the first time in the article that print magazine dedicated her a year after her early death. I loved the work. Her inspiration came from the handmade signs in the neighbourhood of La Misión in San Francisco, one of my favorite places in this country. So this is my little, modest homage to this great artist.

Kara Walker

I saw her work at the Guggenheim a while ago, and it has stayed with me. She decorates big spaces with life-size cut-out silhoutted figures that recount the brutal and often repressed history of American race relations. She simplifies the racial struggle into easily readable, caricatured forms that embody scenes of bestiality, castration murder and cannibalism.
But appart from the figures, in her latest work she includes projected backgrounds and colored lights. That way, when viewers walk in front of these projections, their shadows are introduced into the scene denying them the comfortable position of spectator and implicating them in the events.
"I knew that if I was going to make work that had to deal with race issues, they were going to be full of contradictions. Because I always felt that it's really a love affair that we've got going in this country, a love affair with the idea of it [race issues], with the notion of major conflict that needs to be overcome and maybe a fear of what happens when that thing is overcome-- And, of course, these issues also translate into [the] very personal: Who am I beyond this skin I'm in?"

Nueva York

12.387 taxistas, 887 restaurantes chinos, 10.560 kg. de basura diarios, 7.420.166 habitantes, 611 galerías de arte, 3.984 km. de calles, 20.000 mendigos, 468 estaciones de metro, 72 millones de ratas, 250 idiomas, 1.931 restaurantes en la guía zagat's, 80.000 bagels al día, 40 grados en verano y -10 en invierno, 332 paseadores profesionales de perros, 9.972 artistas, ... pero me sigue gustando más la definición de Manu:
"Lo que tiene esta ciudad es que crea situaciones extremas en las que rebosa la sinceridad y es divertido ver como esto sirve de desahogo para sentirse luego mucho mejor. Es increíble, pero Manhattan es como una gran consulta de psicoanálisis en la que las terapias de grupo son algo totalmente espontáneo. Creo que uno se conoce mejor a sí mismo aquí. Lo malo es que a algunos no les gusta nada lo que ven de sí mismos y se vuelven locos."

The view from my office on a rainy day

Jimmy came to pick me up and took the pictures.

Josua Krause

Check out this really cool illustrator. Thanks April.
www.krauseart.com

What time is it?

Check out this pretty cool web watch.
Gracies Xavi!

American Splendor

El otro día fuimos a ver la peli de la que todo el mundo habla últimamente: American Splendor. Un documental sobre la vida de Harvey Pekar, escritor de la serie cómics undergrounds de los años 70 que da título a la película. Entre los dibujantes que colaboraron quizás el más conocido fue Robert Crumb del que también hay un documental.
Nos gustó. Es muy experimental en la realización, la manera en que alterna la narración de la historia entre el propio Harvey y el actor que le da vida en la ficción y el cómo introduce técnicas de cómic. Es como si contase la historia en muchas dimensiones distintas para añadir así profundidad al personaje: es un loco? es un genio? es un loser? se rien de él o con él?
A nivel humano te hace plantearte hasta que punto los personajes que crea el showbusiness están de acuerdo o no con su éxito. Especialmente en la era de los freak shows. Y hablando de caricaturas extrañas, tiene un personaje totalmente marciano por el que simplemente, vale la pena ver la película.