Shore bound. Back Tuesday. (Pier, Wildwood, New Jersey, 2006 35mm C-print)
Table of Contents: > Transmissions
Traveling Salesman
Door to door in Baltimore. Back Monday. If you’re here for a bit, could you please spend a little time with the cat. She’s shy and hangs out under the Categories menu a lot. Thanks.
(Alexis Smith, Lonesome Traveler, multimedia collage, 1989)
We Interrupt…
Aw geez… an unexpected advertising squall has knocked out the transmitter over here. Probably be dark for the rest of the week. But hey, coming up, Fredrico Fellini’s lost film idea begets an exquisite and now equally lost graphic novel with art by Milo Manara, the singular pop and ephemera based art of Greg Colson, concept art for the never made Sheena movie with Raquel Welch, Lester Bangs on Blondie, praps an ode to three envelope styles: collection, coin, and bill, and just maybe, the long promised light verse with Glenn Danzig. Till then, then…
Lunch Break
A Playroom break area is provided for all toys behind the bowling pins on the high shelf. It’s everyones responsibility to keep the break area clean and tidy. Thank you.
RT. 9, Albany
Travelling, again. Schenectady, Troy, Washington. Back tomorrow.
(Motel, LR Bollinger)
Traveling
Hi. Traveling today, back Wednesday. Help yourselves to anything.
(Natalie Wood presents Natalie Wood, 1962, Edward Quinn, A Cote d’Azur Album.)
AS YOU UNWIND, REMEMBER…
No, no. It’s not about the bear rug, hybrid shot/martini glasses, Capri pants or gold lamé flats, per se. It’s just a reminder to all of us that leisure always benefits from a touch of pageantry.
Phoenixville, PA
Phoenixville, PA, digital c-print, 2008
CLOSED FOR THE WEEK
Hello. Taking the gig on the road. Back next Monday. ‘Til then, then.
(William Eggleston, from 2 1/4, 1999, Twin Palms Publishers)
Crazy, Wonderful Believing
Closing Early
A postcard from a rainy day
Bell Jar Pastoral
Warren, MI, 35mm film, 2008
So strange… This suburban neighborhood was jammed between a cluster of extended stay hotels off a major trunk road in Warren, a suburb of Detroit. It seemed so cut off from its surroundings it might as well have had a glass dome over it. Everything seemed to stop at its perimeter: the pavement, the landscaping, even the weather and ambient light conditions seemed to terminate abruptly. The scale seemed surreal, just slightly shrunken. For the entire duration of my stay in the adjacent hotel I never saw a single instance of human activity. Adding a final ominous flourish to the vignette was the plume of clotted gray smoke rising in the distance.
That plume is the link to another oddity…
oh, and remember…
Discarded
Berkshires, Lancaster, Hudson respectively… all 35mm film.
Disco Volante!
It’s the the title of a a sock-knocker of a record by Cinerama, the retro-pop offshoot of David Gedge’s Wedding Present. It’s the name of the hydrofoil in Thunderball. It’s the nickname of the 1952 Alfa-Romeo Spider.
These associations alone would be enough to secure its unimpeachable cool. What sends it into the stratosphere is its actual definition – Disco volante is the Italian phrase for flying saucer. Can you imagine a sexier transposition of something geeky? Disco volante puts go-go boots on the spacesuit. Disco volante turns Ann Francis into Jane Fonda – Disco volante is the shortest distance from the Forbidden Planet to Barbarella. Could there be a more fetching phrase for such a boss concept?
For your pleasure, here’s Cinerama’s Because You’re Beautiful, from yes, Disco Volante:
[audio:https://shepelavy.com/audio/beautiful.mp3]
Blurry Williamsburg
6th floor of the Walter on North 5th street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn around 1999, digital
Why Pop?
We bargain in good faith, those of us who will read anything, hoping at least to complicate ourselves, at most to save our souls… we put up with a lot and forgive even more… in return for vitality, spontaneity, and the occasional hot flash, we pretend not to notice what’s skin-deep, addlepated, nasty, brutish, and short.
– John Leonard, review of ” The Diviners” by Rick Moody
New York Times, February 9, 2006