In the grueling hours I spend avoiding being in my studio (at least I'm honest about it) I've been getting a lot of reading done. Yesterday I got and finished Augusten Burrough's book Dry, which I found pretty interesting. I don't think I'm that dark, really. But this memoir about an alcoholic's descent and rise and descent along with several semi-disturbing side-stories did amount to light reading. I sometimes wonder if people who've been in car crashes still rubber-neck on the highways, desperate to get a glimpse and re-live the un-relivable. To put it a bit more how I mean it: I wonder if people who've had loved ones be in car crashes without them and wind up paralyzed stare at car crashes where other people were paralyzed and try to understand it better.

I've also been reading a biography called Young Stalin, which is interesting because I know almost nothing about Stalin except that he has a moustache and wore a lot of those Nehru-collared military jackets. At least in my mind he did. What little I know about the horrors of his time 'in office' I won't demean with trying to explain it. So it's this funny thing of discovering some things that nobody knew about a man everybody knows about but me.

I also applied to a show in a local art collective dealing with ideas of written communication. I entered these three pieces, and hopefully they will be accepted. Or at least the triptych - I'm dying to get rid of it.

(note: apparently this is a big as i can post images for now. I'll fix these when I figure out the frame system)

Uwe Niggemeier

In the course of transcribing some interviews to pick up some extra cash from my mom (who runs an art-friendly transcription company) I listened to an interview with Uwe Niggemeier, a photographer from Germany who specializes in industrial photography. The focus is on metalworking factories: steel mills, iron mills, coke plants, etc. The photographs are shot either black-and-white or color on large or medium format cameras, and then scanned into a computer and printed digitally. The depth of field and strange lighting are interesting. I have a personal preference for the more abstract images, the ones that maybe lean more toward the aesthetic than the documentary. The site is navigable in German and English, and the photos are organized by location or by type of factory.