Neil Young's box set, titled Archives, was released a couple of months ago to great acclaim. Made up of 10 Blu-ray discs, each holding 50 gigs of information, it is truly Neil Young's life in a box. There’s a beautiful moment we stumble upon in the box set where we see a film showing Young leaning out of an old car on
his property in the hills of California, a land that I am so intimately
connected to from having grown up here and watching the subtle changes
of coastal light, and he says, “No matter how many people are around
me, I keep talking about all the things that go on inside me.” The joy
and vulnerability on his face against the bright blue sky suddenly made
me see him as a dreamer, as someone who followed the only thing that he
could do and followed it fully, preserving all the evidence of that
journey in his music.

Humpday is the winner
of the 2009 Sundance Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence and screened at the Cannes Film
Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival
and the Seattle International Film Festival. I spoke with Lynn Shelton
when she was in San Francisco and you can find that interview on the Radio Tania website.
John Baldessari has been called an LA artist, a conceptual artist, a pop-artist, but is quite simply and completely an artist. Winner of the 2009 Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, Baldessari is one of the most important artists living and working today. In October, he will have a retrospective at the Tate that will travel to Barcelona, Los Angeles and New York. Stay tuned for an article on him in The Times.
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (detail)
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43)