I miss you every day.

Doin' some reading

The following is from Margot Lovejoy's Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (1989)

"Refusal [to outright embrace of "the new" as a positive act of renewal] takes several forms. For some artists, it takes the form of a conservative, obstinate refusal of modernity involving loyalty to the traditional practice of art and the patient pleasures of hand gesture and experiment through slow manipulation using time-honored practices. For others, it takes the form of a refusal of the present by turning inward to a private metaphorical world apart from time itself. For yet others, the refusal may be aggressive or derisive -- a political refusal or denunciation of technological civilization in which man is seen as a powerless endangered species in a system where technology is owned and manipulated by those in power to control and direct the culture and society as a whole.

....

If artists can liberate tefchnology from those who own and manipulate its use for goals of power or profit, technology can be used constructively as an enlightening influence to gain new insight, to seek new meaning, to open higher levels of communication and perception. For example, commercial television commonly portrays as the truth sensationalist news stories and documentaries to a mass audience which is increasingly passive and addicted to it as their major form of access to the outside world. The Wizard of Oz is the ultimate metaphor for the manipulation of consciousness by television. Finally unmasked as a fragile mortal playing God behind a screen of lights and a thunder of noise, the Wizard of Oz characterizes the power of the media to confuse truth and fiction. We often mistake highly edited presentations of an event as factual truth. "Our absorption and belief in media's second-hand information can distract us from home truths that we sorely need to deal with, or -- to use the metaphor of Oz once again -- [it distracts us] from getting back to the reality of Kansas." (Barry Blinderman, "Ed Paschke," p. 131.) As artist Ed Paschke has remarked: "I don't really think we realize how ingrained in us that way of seeing that format really is. There's life and there's T.V.""

(Latest) Love of my life

Sheesh. Mr. Dylan, if I thought I could ever get over the constant air of self-righteousness, I most certainly would invent a time machine and marry you back when you looked like this. (Well, we'd at least have a tumultuous affair.)

A Little Romance

Joan Mitchell, La ligne de la Rupture.

Paul Gauguin, Nevermore.





I know you swine aren't used to such delicate sentiment, but I owe it to society to at least try.

Subterrainean mine fires are for lovers.

For you folks from Coal Region, PA, the story of Centralia is old news, but for the rest of you that didn't get to go there every time you couldn't think of a new idea for your high school photo class, I figured I'd put together this little post.

I won't include the whole history of the town, since you can just read about it on Wikipedia, but here are the basics. Centralia, PA used to be a normal* little coal patch town (*as normal, of course, as any PA coal town can be...) when the huge vein of anthracite coal beneath it was ignited. Unable to extinguish the blaze, the government deemed the town unlivable and ordered its evacuation - because APPARENTLY when the ground beneath your home cracks open and starts to spew carbon monoxide fumes into it, it's not very healthy. Or, you know, the government just wanted to steal the citizens' mineral rights. Tough call.

Today, there are only a few stubborn folks living in the town while the rest of the buildings have been mostly demolished. Centralia is visited frequently by curious folks with cameras, so Will and I decided to take a drive out to the steaming ghost town and take some photos of our own.


Above is a shot of steam rising from a chasm in what was once Route 61 created by the heat of the fire burning below the ground. A section of the highway was destroyed by the fire, so traffic is rerouted around the damaged section, but you can still walk around old 61.


There's Will walking in the northbound lane of old 61. The twigs toward the center of the image are growing from what was once the highway's median.

In the town itself, my trusty car, The Blue Bomber hangs out on what used to be a public road running through a neighborhood of row houses.
Something, perhaps, is missing from this photo.





At the end of Wood Street, you can see the entire hillside venting steam from the fire.



So, there you have it, my photos of the mine fire. Go visit Centralia and get some of your own since every high school student in the coal region already does.