Tag Archives: books

Ernest Gaines awarded National Medal of Arts

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Photo by Jim Santana from the archives of Gus Blaisdell

Photo by Jim Santana from the archives of Gus Blaisdell

Photo of Ernest Gaines by Edward "Ned" Springs

Photo of Ernest Gaines by Edward “Ned” Springs

The guy in the picture with me is Edward "Ned" Spring. He was a very good friend of both Gus Blaisdell and me. We were at Stanford together back in the late 50s. We used to listen to a lot of Jazz together, drink wine and discuss literature. Ned use to write liner notes for 33 rpm dust jackets. He could be extremely funny...He died young. I think Gus was at his bed side when he died, Gus called to tell me he had gone to the big PAD in the sky. He left a wife and two children. Gus and I were at the memorial. It was very quiet. Betty, Ned's wife, wanted it that way. Just a few close friends. I think that was the only time I was ever seen to cry. Ned was quite thin, and Gus always called him The Snake. He called me Prez, because I wore a hat like the one Lester Young, the great jazz musician, wore. Gus was good at giving people different names. "Hey, Prez, the snake has left us " We had been out drinking at the No Name Bar in Sausalita only a couple of weeks before he died--Me, Gus and Ned.....Ernie>

The guy in the picture with me is Edward “Ned” Spring. He was a very good friend of both Gus Blaisdell and me. We were at Stanford together back in the late 50s. We used to listen to a lot of Jazz together, drink wine and discuss literature. Ned use to write liner notes for 33 rpm dust jackets. He could be extremely funny…He died young. I think Gus was at his bed side when he died, Gus called to tell me he had gone to the big PAD in the sky. He left a wife and two children. Gus and I were at the memorial. It was very quiet. Betty, Ned’s wife, wanted it that way. Just a few close friends. I think that was the only time I was ever seen to cry. Ned was quite thin, and Gus always called him The Snake. He called me Prez, because I wore a hat like the one Lester Young, the great jazz musician, wore. Gus was good at giving people different names. “Hey, Prez, the snake has left us ” We had been out drinking at the No Name Bar in Sausalita only a couple of weeks before he died–Me, Gus and Ned…..Ernie>

A chance meeting in a bookstore

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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.

For Jacket Copy / by JB Bryan

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For a jacket-copy intro to the author it would be hard to improve on the capsule snapshot by artist, poet, and publisher (and one-time Living Batch employee), J. B. Bryan, in the little Festschrift chapbook he prepared for the memorial “Celebration of Gus Blaisdell” in 2005:

Gus lived as a man of discerning mind & precise locution, as well as blurted expletive. The oppositional was his blessing & curse. Sharp, jagged, uncannily quick-witted, he sought how to see, how to know, how to lay it down. Outrageous, often enraged, he liked the scat in scatological, he could insult, he could adore, a mimic ribald & hilarious, elegant steel trap crankiness, photographic memory backed by a deep catalogue of reference wielded with fierce conviction. Within this shone profound appreciation for beauty (film, Monk, Matisse, Utamaro, photography, poetry, prose, mathematics, found objects, etc., etc.) & its precise articulation. His writings have hard-fought style with a content that requires slow, deliberate reading. Language & lingo, philosophy & logic argued toward revelation inside his own difficult critique.

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

Image

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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:

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

On Movies:

Passion Misfits Us All: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas

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

 

On Painting:

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

 

On Reading & Writing:

  1. A Gloss Annexed
  2. Vatic Writing: Evan Connell’s Notes from a Bottle . . .
  3. Tell It Like It Is: The Experimental Traditionalists
  4. Rebus
  5. What Was Called A Thought Echoed in Sight: Yvor Winters’ Centennial
  6. Poem: Occasional Loquats: For Janet Lewis
  7. For Robert Creeley on his 70th Birthday
  8. A Nobler Seduction
  9. 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

 

His Heaviness in cyber space

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For those of you living in the digital age Gus Blaisdell Collected is out and available on Kindle.
For those of us who need the heft of the good book in hand it will be arriving in early September.
For all who want a preview and to read the wonderful editor’s preface just click on the link below  then click on the handsome book cover and voila’ .
best,
Nicole

Welcome to the FOG

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Friends of Gus,

The countdown has begun. Gus Blaisdell Collected is nearly upon us. Due out in September. The launch party details coalescing. I will keep you posted.

Art • Film • Literature • New Mexico/Southwest • Photography

Gus Blaisdell Collected

 

William Peterson
Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

 

From the moment he arrived in New Mexico in 1964, Gus Blaisdell (1935–2003) was a legendary presence. Famous in Albuquerque as a writer, teacher, publisher, editor, and especially as the proprietor of the Living Batch bookstore, Blaisdell was also a brilliant critic whose essays influenced readers throughout the country and across the Atlantic. This long-awaited collection of Blaisdell’s critical writings includes essays on literature, art, and film, along with moving tributes by some of the distinguished writers who numbered Blaisdell among their friends. Introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell and literary critic David Morris join colleague Ira Jaffe’s poignant memoir to provide perspectives on the man by friends who knew him well. Glimpses of Blaisdell’s vivid personality can be had from the many photographs included, and the diligently researched chronology compiled by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey tracks the course of her father’s complicated life.

 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Art critic William Peterson lives in Albuquerque, where he is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. Longtime editor of ARTSPACE magazine, he has also been a correspondent for ARTnews and an associate editor at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Nicole Blaisdell Ivey is a photographer and writer. Her work has appeared in The Sun magazine, New Mexico Photographer, and others. She lives in Albuquerque.