Arc brings you a very productive activity for your afternoon; you can even create your own Warhol.
I picked up these little gems at a bookshop on Melrose this afternoon. The Cocktail Party, a play by T.S. Eliot from 1950 was praised by the New York Post back then, “The Cocktail Party is an authentic modern masterpiece, one of the two or three finest plays of the post-war English speaking stage. It is not only beautifully written but extraordinarily effective dramatically. This is the stage as its illustrious best,” reads the cover flap. The cover is beautifully, and simply designed and the play itself takes place in a London drawing room throughout, with the exception of Act two.
The other book entitled, Four Days, documents the days before and after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The photographic essay includes commentary and documentation including telegrams and eyewitness testimonies. A steal at $1.
The last in the Teen Angst Journals series. This one started my senior year and took me into college. There’s a lot more of my own photography, 0 pyrotechnics and it smells less like spray paint and more like emulsion. That year I took three consecutive quarters of photography so it was nice to keep a journal. Nowadays my journals are much more subdued with little or no photography. Mostly scrawl and sketches. Something just happens after college. Entitled, That was then, This is now, the cover features a friend of mine from High School at the basketball courts.
This book was made from a Maxim magazine. It’s been burned and torn, painting and peeled. There’s a lot going on from spread to spread, lots of interesting smells and mediums. I guess you could say this was my first “traveling exhibition” as people in gym class would pass it around and look through its horrifying pages. I can only imagine what they were thinking…
This journal is the second one. Used for about a year and every page has something on it or attached to it. There’s booklets hidden inside the pages and the journal is very fat, probably 500 pages. I remember taping the receipt on the back from the store that I purchased it from, hoping to save the date. The ink has since disappeared, leaving a wrinkled, blank piece of paper. Its titled ‘Inspirational Catalog‘.
In searching through my books I found a stack of my old journals, ranging from age 15 – 20. I never “journaled” until my high school art teacher made us. She encouraged us to complete an entry every day and to get introspective. I haven’t completely stopped doing this since then, however during that time I was doing a lot more of it. The days before livejournal, blogspot and ultimately sad-blog were without a keyboard, mouse and screen. These journals were mostly paint and ink, hand-carved stamps and xerox transparencies, fire and wax… the usual. Here’s the first one of six, entitled Experimental Shit.
And so it begins…
In looking through some of my old books I came across one from 1955, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The book is called The Family of Man, The greatest photographic exhibition of all time—503 pictures from 68 countries. The book is a wonderful record of photography, spanning from the earliest to the modern(50s) and with the quotes scattered throughout I thought it would be something worth sharing.
