‘Bldgs’ – Gus Blaisdell on Lewis Baltz’s New Industrial Parks

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

I’ve loved Blaisdell’s clever, trippy writing for some time now, but this piece, on the work of Lewis Baltz, is spectacular. Two years in the writing, Blaisdell begins by rubbishing the sort of curatorial discourse that attempted to set out Baltz’s work as a sort of sandbox containing all of the concerns of contemporary mainstream art. And he does this in a sentence so long and so elegant that it left me breathless twice over:

‘In Baltz’s case this usually results in his being all things to all camps – simultaneously a minimalist, a conceptualist, and a “definitive formalist,” because a minimalist holds that less is more and a conceptualist holds that it is no longer possible to make signifiant objects in paint, that one must in fact go wholly beyond objecthood (thus photography becomes essential to such enterprises), and a formalist (definitive or otherwise) holds that painting is capable of significance…

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GBC Review in RAIN TAXI by Geroge Kalamaras

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

“In the current land rush for the latest, hippest poetics, caught in the web of irony that so much contemporary poetry seems hell-bent to explore, much lineage that made current
movements possible is ignored.This is particularly problematic when that lineage encompasses counter-movements and personalities that served as necessary ballast to keep the ship of the art of its time from sinking. Independent thinkers often suffer obscurity for the sake of their ideals. The battle plains of poetic history are littered with such figures, whilst the monocled generals, astride white steeds on the hill, wax profoundly about the philosophical consequences of their actions. Publisher, poet, critic, bookstore owner, and provocateur, Gus Blaisdell (1935-2003), born Charles Augustus Blaisdell II in San Diego, was such a figure.” George Kalamaras

The Intellectuals at Okie’s Bar

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Gus 1969 © Arthur Lazar

The Intellectuals at Okie’s Bar for Gus Blaisdell

They are lovers of their own distortions who sit in such darkness music steaming about them beer swelling their muscles / sense and temperance tortured into hours of speech to dowse their minds’ reflection Ocean at night leaps up in tongues of green illuminated spume and dies on sand A residual humor flaps its wings evacuates into air The bar is headquarters for difficult gymnastics

There is nothing outside but stars and a sliced moon cold now in Novermber that arrogant Heaven peopled by the dead Cars wearing holsters cruise the boulevard at one with those harmonious seasons and cycles to which the balls of drunks aspire: to be contained in Purpose molten fluid pouring through strict cylinders to arrive at the laurel bush at last completely relieved done with hessian duty into the arms of a goddess more woman than ghost

We are not the mob that coils around Fortune’s rim Snake eyes inhabit our bones seeing fumes canopy all gay processions (prophesy also the pit where brains are buried) so we refuse to march hippity-hop through Hell instead our toes quick as red coals spend our laughter in heads of foam matching the need for bright occasions

Gene Frumkin (1928-2007) from Clouds and Red Earth Swallow Press

***First published in The Only Journal of the Tibetan Kite Society, 1969 edited by Howard McCord , The Tribal Press

DISCUSSING GUS Saturday January 5th 3:00 pm at Bookworks 4022 Rio Grande Albuquerque, New Mexico

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Join editors William Peterson and Nicole Blaisdell Ivey for the final GBC book event.

I KNOW A MAN

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

In 2002, a year before his death, Gus wrote the bio below to accompany his poems included in IN COMPANY: an anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960

photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Gus Blaisdell for twenty-seven years ran an “alternative to an absence,” the Living Batch Bookstore, always close to the Frontier Restaurant. He continues to teach film at the University of New Mexico. He runs a small press, Living Batch Books , that continues to present his alternative to absences. A special line of his books is called Drive, He Said, after Creeley’s poem “I Know A Man.”

Message from Momaday

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

A note from Pulitzer prize-winning author, N. Scott Momaday, discussing the GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED book (Gus was UNM Press editor on Momaday’s second book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, published by UNM press).

Dear Nicole,The book is a clear mirror of the man. It is beautiful and moving. Gus and I made a legendary journey to Rainy Mountain in the hard weather that shapes mind and memory. It was a quest, a journey eminently worth making.With deepest thanks.Scott

In Gus’s  “Holygraph” book (a blank dummy book for Ivor Winters’s Forms of Discovery run, filled with friends poems, drawings, autographs and insights) 

Scott writes,
 
“Dear Veering,
It has been good to be 
with you on the way to Rainy
Mountain. One day you must
go to the cemetery there, to
see the gravestones of some of
these red people you must at 
times feel that you know.
And I hope that the 
weather is particularly hard
on that occasion.

N Scott Momaday 
Christmas Eve 1968"



Gus writes,

"On an Inscription in my Holygraph Book
                                                 for Scott.

We have/ been tog/ether/ now these/ many/ months
each on his way to Rainy Mountain, a journey
taken in fact, in spirit, and imagination.
It is a labor of love without loss, finding
my way, finally, to that dark stone
that bears your grandmother’s name.

You wish me the hardest weather on my visit
Such weather is the weather of my spirit,
A semiarid terrain wild with winds, and,
At evening, reason’s rage and fury flaming,
When the wind blows and wind bells ring
Or the snow falls down and no bell rings."

Rainy Mountain from the archive of Gus Blaisdell

N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-Winning Native American Novelist, Dies at 89

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/books/n-scott-momaday-dead.html

A chance meeting in a bookstore

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

From Vincent Borrelli, Bookseller

I met Gus Blaisdell about thirty years ago – a chance meeting in a bookstore. I was photographing on my first cross-country road trip and I landed in Albuquerque at The Living Batch. Gus showed me Park City by Lewis Baltz. What he didn’t mention is that he wrote the essay for the book – one of the most brilliant essays I’ve ever read about photography and art.

Park City (and a few other influential books) heralded a seismic shift in photography. This astonishing work, which came to be known as the New Topographics, allowed us view the landscape with a new sense of passion, longing, and dread. The style continues to be widely emulated, letting some of us forget the vitality and authority of the original images.

Doors of Memory and Desire

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Photographer Arnold Gassan and Gus Blaisdell 1962-63 in Denver, Colorado Stockyard Earth

Photograph by Robert Voy Stark

NOTES ON THE FILM (GASSAN-BLAISDELL)

Tenative title: DOORS OF MEMORY AND DESIRE.

Chippewa Poem:

You are Walking around

Trying to remember

What you promised.

But you can’t remember.

I am walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember.

Can the narration run in a kind of counter-point to the images: first as, say, a description of what will happen next visually; then as a description of what is or has just happened– but always keeping to the tone of a specious present.

Camera catches M putting on cracked and broken shoes,

lacing them slowly, hastily, angrily. The laces break.

The foot kicks the shoes off. A hand reaches into the frame,

picks between the toes, moves out of frame.

“I have been walking, too long, too swiftly, sometimes much too swiftly

and much too slowly.”

Camera catches man as he moves towards table.

I have been walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember…can’t remember what I desired, what I promised…what it was that I desired so much that it made me promise…whatever it was I did promise.

Perhaps this is because I’m not used to promising,

to desiring, to remembering even.

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

Image

Writings on Lewis Baltz, John Gossage, Evan Connell, Frank Stella, Terry Conway, Guy Williams, Hitchcock, Wim Wenders, Kubrick, Joel-Peter Witkin, Thomas Barrow, Stanley Cavell, Robert Creeley, Plato’s Phaedrus, Ross Feld, Rachel Whiteread, James Baldwin, Allen Graham, Don Dudley, Carroll Dunham, …and then some…

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

Cover photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

CONTENTS:

Editor’s Preface: by William Peterson

Foreword: by Stanley Cavell

Introduction: “On Slipping Across: Reading, Friendship, Otherness” by David Morris

On Photographs:

Absorbing Inventories: Thomas Barrow’s “Libraries Series”
Afterworld: Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin
BLDGS: Photographs of Lewis Baltz
Space Begins Because We Look Away From Where We Are: Lewis Baltz, Candlestick Point
Buried Silk Exhumed: The Lewis Baltz Retrospective, Rule Without Exception
From Obscenity in Thy Mother’s Milk: John Gossage’s “HF!” Portfolio
Thirteen Ways of NOT Looking at a Gossage Photograph

On Movies:

Passion Misfits Us All: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas

Death’s Blue-Eyed Boy: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket
Still Moving
Highlighting Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Magic Marker

On Painting:

Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale
Passion and the Pine Breeze: The Paintings of Terry Conway
Guy Williams: On In: Outside
Original Face: Allan Graham’s Moon 2
Poem: Omoide No Tsukimi

On Reading & Writing:

A Gloss Annexed
Vatic Writing: Evan Connell’s Notes from a Bottle . . .
Tell It Like It Is: The Experimental Traditionalists
Rebus
What Was Called A Thought Echoed in Sight: Yvor Winters’ Centennial
Poem: Occasional Loquats: For Janet Lewis
For Robert Creeley on his 70^th Birthday
A Nobler Seduction
Slipping Across

Fiction: Radical Philosophical Reclamation & Wrecking, The TLP Hotel (4 Excerpts)

Shorts & Excerpts from Correspondence

Envoi: by Ira Jaffe

Chronology: by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Bibliography

blaisdell Ivey collected

Gus Blaisdell / Nicole Blaisidell Ivey

Tag Archives: photography

‘Bldgs’ – Gus Blaisdell on Lewis Baltz’s New Industrial Parks

GBC Review in RAIN TAXI by Geroge Kalamaras

The Intellectuals at Okie’s Bar

DISCUSSING GUS Saturday January 5th 3:00 pm at Bookworks 4022 Rio Grande Albuquerque, New Mexico

I KNOW A MAN

Message from Momaday

A chance meeting in a bookstore

Doors of Memory and Desire

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

Image

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