Found art Friday 46

Today we continue our appreciation of Susan Sontag's seminal essay On Photography "All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.  Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."  And yet let's tango with her thinking in this moment of our twenty first century.  Melting, proliferating, exploding, repeating, receding, deciding, undying, unifying and fomenting with images.
Enuf of that.  Cam the new camera is trying to find out what he's good at.  Maybe it is sets of duets. 
Set one:

Set two:

And found by Diane Gage in San Diego

Iris Douglasiana  -  Didn't we go to elementary school with her?

(Again reaching for the duet).  Fashion by Hussein Chalayan that Lady Gaga is not wearing during her 60 minutes interview

Gaga was "Born this Way" at the Grammy's

 1980's famous shoulders of David Byrne's Stop Making Sense tour.

Have a rugged week, and please stop trying to make sense of the news.  Except that it does make sense.  It's our attempt to stop time's relentless melt.

Found Art Friday 45

Today's Found Art Friday is dedicated to our youngest offspring, one who can (at time of this writing) get just as delighted as his mother at the poignant sight of an abandoned orthopedic shoe left in a tidy asphalt parking lot and try to help photograph it. 
It's "found", in that the pieces emerged from amidst our son's school work.  While being a 6th grader equipped with pens and paper, the boy has created many drawn characters that repeat and vary.  He especially likes to draw during science class*.  Random Mother sees the characters evolve when she opens the binder.  She might learn something during a car ride and write it down on a postit note.  Over a few months time, we are building this story:
The Alien fell down to earth by accident while he was learning to drive or something:

Luckily, the mayor of the town where he landed has agreed to take the alien in. The mayor treats him like a king.  The mayor wears a suit to bed, a suit to breakfast and a suit to everywhere and he has two other children and a wife, a big dog, and a little kitten.  Although the mayor is wealthy, the alien doesn't need anything but occasional food, water, liquid carnival food injections, two pairs of shorts, and two shirts.

 "What does the alien do all day?" He goes to school.  Everybody loves him and wants to sit next to him and give him their school lunch desserts.  He hangs out. The Random Mother imagines playing ping pong with him in the mayor's basement.

Evidently, the alien has a petting booth (for just his head) in the local carnival, which is why he wears this special T-shirt.  One day, a little boy gave him some some balloons because the texture of his head was so magnificent, but the alien floated away from being so light, and had fun up there, almost reached heaven. But somehow he had to come down, so he popped the balloons on a bird's beak (shown below) then fell down to Earth, and wasn't harmed.

 

And he's not dancing, he just is. He does that when everything's cool.

Yes, the alien can change color according to moods and feelings.

He can also place thoughts in other people's heads and read people's minds.

Maybe the human foods are getting to him though.  For weeks, there was a hat squashed in the middle of a busy intersection.  One day, the hat was finally gone.  "My alien ate it" said the boy.  We decided that it must have been very chewy.

*The offspring and the alien are both doing very well in science class.

Found Art Friday 44

 We're all awash with the images of the BIG MOTHER earth shift with reminder of what tiny ragdoll humans we are.

Nonetheless, we do our jobs.  You know it's okay with the Ranger if the art isn't found on Friday: tiny art big art hearty art accidental art hot art not art.  You name it.  Photography the messenger.  They tell us it is a digitized digitization of a digital file, all compressed and uploaded.  Yet still lookable sortable thinkable.  Digits are also fingers. You have to do something about it.

More Grafitini from Friend in the Bay Area,  (a previous FAF image) now gets archaeological and reveals its Huey Newton* moniker under the shifting flotsam on the side of a garage.

Even after re-reading the great Susan Sontag's essays "On Photography" from the 1970's, what simply stokes the Ranger fire is this:  that moment inbetween what you saw, and what you actually get.  Some mystery left.  How or if we frame it.  Con text, or with the stories.  Other moments are noted by how unphotographable they are, such as a far off tree we can see from the bedroom.  How the clouds scratched with pink contrail have already changed too much to photograph by the time you find your apparatus.

A photo never finds the whole  -  disposition of this tree on its hill 

A warm welcome to Cam the camera, a new "point-and-shoot" that will accompany the Art Ranger's point of view.  Yah mom you need your own camera for all that random stuff you take pictures of.

Such as crinkled ultra-violet indecision

And from Susan Needleman's album Frozen Things This Morning: Ducks skating

 Anony Mouse brings a

 Friday Errand (held in words)
Holes in the knees is talking to his no phone self again

umbrella

Surrounded by yellow yellow flowers that are not dandelions

An angular man in a folding chair waters his lawn

Santa is off work with a bright orange hat, reading at the bus stop

Someone's tooth is un naturally white

* Huey P. Newton was the urban activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California.  He Brought us Power to the People and Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed ....

ABC Piano

The precursor to Found Art Friday was a do something about your art on Friday policy of  the pre-Art Ranger.  In the thicket of the Mothering years gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta go here gotta go there tries to swallow the  art will but can't.  Art maintenance duty frequently happens with the videocam (old Elura) who makes stretch-a-sketches.

When the offspring were about ages six to eight years old, it was decided by Random Mother that they should start with music lessons because of the raw sponge moment of their brains.  And so began the process of looking for a piano, a tuner, and a teacher.  At this time, Random Mother was often swirling amongst the unharnessed energy of two boys.  As soon as the car door opened, a wriggling cluster of energy careened into a piano store with thirteen X 97 white shining keys to touch and funny outrigger pedal paws on the bottoms.  Usually, very crusty, starchy people in the piano stores with their disapproving eyes let us know how riotous and impossible we were becoming and sent us away.  Until .... we found the Piano Man who would let us touch anything and everything in the shop, including insides. A Ukranian immigrant, named Oleg, who had raised four sons, he understood our chaos and laughed.  One day, he turned on two or three player pianos at the same time for us.  And laughed. 

The video below is a shortened impromptu interview with the man.  It doesn't do justice to  the feel of the door, the look of the shop or ceiling. Dozens of upended piano guts at every angle and every shade of wood finish and every level of decay and beautification. 

Rags and cans and tools all about the patient someday-to-be-restored instrument characters. Old quality brands with faded gold lettering embedded in the wood.  Having a small house, we ended up with a "mini piano" made for apartments in New York City in the 1930's.  For delivery, The Piano Man, who is about five feet two, arrived with his son in a sturdy coffee ice cream colored 1980's van.  They pushed the instrument  uphill and up three steps and around a tight corner.  Strong nimble hands sent slices of music vibrating through the floorboards of our home. 
http://vimeo.com/20422602
The first piano teacher was a giant willowy woman with pointy thoughts that did not inspire. Nonetheless, in the third week, our eldest learned Ode to Joy and exploded the theme into a set of jazzish variations. The the second piano teacher farted frequently.  The youngest offspring and I nearly had hernias and a beet red face contest while trying not to laugh audibly in the waiting area.  One day during the piano lesson,  the eldest saw out the window of the teacher's house a boy with longish hair cruise by on a skateboard.  That was the beginning of the end of studying piano.  But then came the guitar: http://www.population5.com

Artistic Thought of the Day:  "THE SOONER YOU MAKE YOUR FIRST FIVE THOUSAND MISTAKES, THE SOONER YOU WILL BE ABLE TO CORRECT THEM" from Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw