Photo-shooto!!

Current t-shirt: snowy owl and autumn leaves (gray background)

Current music: The Decembrists "The Tain," rock song-cycle based on the Tain Bo Cuailnge "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley."

I went to my first photo-shoot today. No, I wasn't that subject. The subjects were Anita Durst and Leslie Hampton. Leslie is one of the artists who has a studio in Anita's arts organization, Chashama. The piece is for Contribute Magazine.

Ok - now that I think of it, it wasn't my first shoot. That was for a piece on The Joy of Cooking, where I went to The Joy of Cooking test kitchens. A freelancer took a lovely picture of some barbecue-style baked ribs.

The photographer's main talent, and most necessary one, seemed to be to lower the temperature of the room, and to put people at ease, which he did mightily.

I did some interviewing afterwards. Found out that artists often spend a third of their 'art-time' off chasing grants to enable the to - do - their art. This strikes me as wrong. Being an artist is about playing with paint, or sculptural items, or whatever. It's not about writing grant proposals. As far as I know, no grant proposal has ever been exhibited at The Whitney.

But that's what they have to do: write extensive project plans, come up with budgets, give out personal information about their finances. One of the things the two artists liked so much about Chashama was that the application process took about twenty minutes and six slides.

Twenty minutes, six slides, and Leslie Hampton has a studio for $130 a month for a year.

Kewl.

Oh, nifty new book:

Lost Paradise, by Cees Nooteboom (Grove Press, October)
One of those cute, slim European books that never got fat thighs, only this one isn't tragically chic and really works. Based in Brazil, two friends of German extraction fantasize incessantly about the dreamtime of the Australian aborigines, and one of the two girls gets raped...

That's as far as I've read, but it's really good. Ms. Nootebeem's paragraphs keep my mind thinking and have great depth of heart.

Love and Gazpacho,
The Red Pooka!