Saturday, April 17, 2010

Sleeping Outdoors


No, there wasn't an earthquake, and I haven't started camping yet.

My mind has been wandering a lot lately, so much so I feel like I'm traveling. My overstuffed bags safely stashed away (or is it just a head full of run on sentence) I can lay out on the patio and read until I nap, waking and drifting back to sleep, listening to the wind come through the ravine, the staggered response of the wind chimes next door, light flickering through the leaves and branches, a burst of bird songs and a determined helicopter darting across the hills.


This is a gorgeous logo. Proof plunder that I'm still burrowing into things Ost and Ostalgie, a German portmanteau combining "ost" (east) and "nostalgie" (nostalgia), and turned up this interesting legal ruling on discrimination against Ossis.

And then this 'outsider' artist Miroslav Tichý that I stumbled upon last week. He is having his first solo show now through May 9 at New York's International Centre of Photography (ICP).

New York Times' Karen Rosenberg in her "An Ogling Subversive With a Homemade Camera" review of the exhibition: "His photographs may look naïve, but they’re the product of a carefully orchestrated series of missteps that begins with crude, homemade cameras. As he says in the film ("Tarzan Retired," a 35-minute film from 2004 by Mr. Tichy's longtime neighbor and biographer, Roman Buxbaum), "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."

Here is a video slide show of some of his work and a related photo blog post. Thanks to WFMU Beware of the Blog's Iowa Firecracker for tipping me to Miroslav Tichy and his "Dargerfication."