November 2011
1 post
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Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno. 2009.
The subject of this documentary - Clouzot’s unrealized film, Inferno - is mesmerizing and, for me personally, could not be more involving. The contours of the story will be familiar to anyone who’s read about some of Orson Welles’ fiascos, or to people who have seen the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, though that...
October 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Willem de Kooning: The Cat’s Meow.
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How many times have I had the same thought (about...
And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that’s just blowing out of the sulfurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It’s unstoppable, it’s uncorkable. There’s no way to make it end.
If we could just—just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just—everyone. Every poet. Just stop.
But of course...
August 2011
1 post
6 tags
July 2011
2 posts
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Cy Twombly died today at 83.
Here’s a nice tribute to him by Jerry Saltz.
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June 2011
7 posts
3 tags
My hatred of bookwarp has almost grown into physical revulsion. I can’t stand the feeling, I can’t stand the way it looks, I can’t stand having books fall victim to spine disease as soon as I get them. My friend, when I mentioned this annoyance of mine, thought it must be a projection of some other (more serious) stress, so fierce was it and, you might say (but I...
1 tag
This is awful. I draw the line at over-officious civic line drawing.
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Miscellaneous links
An Atlantic writer bemoans the end of the serve and volley game in professional tennis. If you’ve been watching tennis recently, you’ll recognize this summation of the game as it’s played today:
“The end result is tennis as we currently know it: the occasional change-of-pace and/or desperation net rush, increasingly quaint amid long, grinding rallies that, ironically,...
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There’s a good, short interview with Enrique Vila-Matas at the Paris Review (not a “Paris Review Interview” as such)…
Never Any End to Paris uses your youth in Paris to explore ideas of creativity, influence, and identity. The narrator is a writer whose facts and dates are similar to yours, though—I think—he both is and isn’t you. Do you think art requires certain...
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Terraria is the new 2D Minecraft (let’s admit it, a rip-off with a few extra things thrown in). For people who can’t do without fighting things in games, it apparently has a richer vocabulary of weapons and monsters than Minecraft. Personally, I think it loses something being in 2D, but the fun of designing buildings is still there. People love to put their own creativity to use....
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Edward Hopper: Hotel Window.
There’s a tendency to make Hopper into something quaint and kindly and to ignore the times when he’s not. He’s not allowed a trace of Europeanness. Documentaries smother him in big band jazz. But some of his pictures have an eerie side to them and the gaze, while I’d never say it wasn’t often compassionate, hardly strikes one as benign...
May 2011
4 posts
6 tags
Compare and Contrast (15)
1. Stephen Dunn: The Imagined. 2. Shakespeare: Sonnet 138.
The Imagined
If the imagined woman makes the real woman seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude, and if you come to realize the imagined woman can only satisfy your imagination, whereas the real woman with all her limitations can often make you feel good,...
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Another good blog, if you’re interested in design, typography, or books and magazines - Fonts in Use. If it sounds geeky, you should know that it really is. Commenters debate arcane matters of kerning and font “openness” as though there were a lot at stake. And that’s why I like it. Anyway, that’s where I learned about this beautiful, very limited (265) Arion...
4 tags
Miscellaneous links
My new favorite literature blog, not least for its decidedly anti-Franzen stance, is Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading. Esposito takes a pretty global view and - a man after my own heart - he makes a lot of lists and does geeky things like photographic size comparisons between big books (see below). Highly recommended.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, looking at the Nádas book...
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Pisanello: Portrait of a Princess.
This is one of those paintings whose every detail looks to have been chiseled into stone. I don’t find it a cold painting at all, but there’s not a hint of improvisation to be found, and nothing really moves except the odd butterfly, perhaps. The intricate flowers and the embroidery of the over-gown could be from Netherlandish painting of the period, and the...
April 2011
8 posts
1 tag
Dear Artforum...
Thanks for showing me who drank what at last night’s art world mixer, for showing me all the smiling professionals and what they had in the way of glasses and scarves. I can’t wait until we’re all comfy and rich (or at least myopic) like the people in your photos. Until then, here’s to pretending it’s about art.
5 tags
Miscellaneous links
Zadie Smith and Jerry Saltz on Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour film, The Clock. I’d really like to see this.
Though I’ve yet to post my first real tweet (I know how precious they are), I’ve been browsing those of the rich and famous this week. The most interesting ones so far have been the koans of Karl Lagerfeld. I don’t know if he’s the one writing them...
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Compare and Contrast (14)
1. Titian: Man with a Quilted Sleeve (detail). 2. Philip Guston: Sleeping.
This is another big stretch but, I’m telling you, I can’t look at that sleeve in the Titian and not think of Philip Guston. I may not even have the best Guston to illustrate the comparison, but there’s something about the strokes on that sleeve…
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My brain's desktop (4)
My semi-regular house-cleaning of links, desktop jpegs, miscellaneous likes and dislikes I might not otherwise post…
1. Steven Soderbergh, list-maker
A compulsive list-maker myself, I could relate to the impulse that led director Steven Soderbergh to keep track of all the movies, books, tv shows, plays, etc, he took in over the course of a year. I’ve done the same thing with books...
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Compare and Contrast (13)
1. Francis Bacon 2. Random Japanese postcard
…because I have an overdeveloped Bacon radar.
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Art Bullshit (6)
I’m calling bullshit on artist Mike Nelson and Modern Painters for collaborating to produce these awful photos in this month’s issue. I’m not sure which is the worst mistake - the coat, the coat from behind, or the hangdog expression. I was thinking what you are: that mopey expression is the worst offense. But now ask yourself Why would anyone want to see a picture of an artist...
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Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop, is about a journey the authors take from Paris to Marseilles during which they never leave the highway and its rest stops. Each day they travel for about 20 minutes in total, dividing the day in two, setting up camp and spending the night at every other stop. It’s a pretty lighthearted and low-effort book, at least it...
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The Gospel of Matthew
“Today we’ve got a kind of art that turns against the visual and sensual side of painting, and against the idea that content can ever really be merely in the look of something. The type of art now celebrated by Tate Modern concerns ideas alone, and a rather twisted notion of what “ideas” actually are: in this art if a bit of anger or some identity politics are referred to,...
March 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Elad Lassry: Woman (Camera).
I love this photograph and I kind of like what I’ve seen of Elad Lassry generally, though I sometimes wonder what it’d be without those magic frames, and I wonder also why contemporary art is content to come across so small - but that’s a separate thing.
What’s made this woman leap onto that shelf? My guess is that it’s nothing more...
Can you imagine the explosion that might have occured inside the brain of Your Average Seventeenth Century Man had he seen a photograph like the ones above? This kind of woman, at least in this particular sci-fi-ish guise, hadn’t been invented yet (while this docile Grecian eunuch type, or whatever, is clearly a throwback to the time when Grecian eunuchs roamed the earth looking to...
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Kurt Schwitters: Untitled (Elikan).
February 2011
13 posts
3 tags
Harmonica Alert
The woeful state pop music is in owes a lot to bands like Low Anthem, who owe a lot in turn to the New York Times for its commitment to writing them up. With antique instruments “which the band works on and repairs,” witheringly false lyrics that have their author traveling by train “to Ohio” (the state, one presumes, makes no difference, so long as it says Americana), and...
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Two quotes tied with a thin string here...
I’ve been having a great time reading poetry lately, specifically 17th century poetry, wading (very slowly) through William Empson’s lovingly, comically difficult Seven Types of Ambiguity and Harold Bloom’s 2004 poetry anthology from the end of whose introduction I wanted to quote this nice passage:
“Ultimately, we seek out the best poems because something in many, if not...
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The idea that [this taste] is likely to survive me I find almost painful.
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Hot Titles (12): Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger: The Red Shoes
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Prada, fall 2011
Inscrutable, lost-soul luxury. The horrid, addled faces of those models! These clothes are geared either at wealthy pubescent halfwits or women of untold and lonely strength; women with enough personality to contend with an intentionally cloying dollhouse chintziness, or, disappearing into the clothes, letting their sublime ditziness speak for them, lazy-eyed moth-girls, whose nameless bodies are...
Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, and getting there
Richard Diebenkorn is a painter whose output can been seen as having had equal significance in the histories of abstraction and landscape (if those are two separate histories - Diebenkorn makes it hard to divide them). His Ocean Park series is, I think, an underrated achievement in late 20th century painting, a group of around 150...
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Stanley Kubrick talks about the meaning of life,...
Via Stolen Moments.
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Artists in pictures: Sean Scully
Here’s Sean Scully with two of his gigantic paintings, a good abstract expressionist soldier back from battle, covered in the blood of his victims. You’d think this rather obsolete content would upstage the paintings, but it doesn’t (and I don’t necessarily have a problem with that content anyway). In fact, you get a real sense of the...
11 tags
Miscellaneous links
Zadie Smith talks about her new job as a book reviewer for Harper’s and the difference between being being a ‘critic’ and a ‘reviewer.’ (audio)
Ebert’s blog is getting tougher and tougher to read. Seriously. I have to skim at times to keep from getting too deeply mired in thoughts of mortality. I don’t know how many posts with titles like “Goodbye...
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Slavoj Zizek and Tariq Ramadan on Aljazeera
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Google’s Art Project
This is a detail view of part of the bed in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. I got it from Google’s new Art Project, a site where, apparently, those hoarders everyone feels ambivalent about plan to archive high resolution renderings of the world’s artworks like they’ve archived everything else. But after having spent a good hour on the site, I...
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Music: Mylène Farmer Picture: Richard Avedon
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My brain's desktop (3)
I know it’s kind of unbloggerly to put a bunch of stuff in one post when it could easily make seven or eight, but a lot of this is even more trivial than normal, or stuff I’ve already mentioned, and I’m going to do some grousing, and I’m going to talk about stuff I want to buy, which is not a cool thing to do, and certainly not worthy of a dedicated post. Odds and ends....
January 2011
7 posts
3 tags
It took me until the 5th season of 30 Rock, until Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey were arguing about a divorce in a lawyer’s office after accidentally getting married, to realize that it’s really a descendant of the screwball comedy. There has to be a divorce before there can be a marriage.
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Simile watch: J.G. Ballard
Besides being a lesson in repetition and anatomical vocabulary, Crash has enough perverted similes in it to satisfy even the greasiest fetishist…
“The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”
“This small space was crowded with angular control surfaces and rounded sections of human bodies interacting in...
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Sachiko Kobayashi, New Year’s Eve, 2010. (2009, 2008)
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Above are the Virago editions of a couple of Muriel Spark books; right, my penguinification of Loitering with Intent. I know it’s not worth upsetting myself over, but surely Muriel Spark doesn’t deserve this awful chick-lit treatment. I’m not just saying this because I resent having to shield these books when in public. (I could, if I were that insecure, adopt the Japanese...
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Some reasons to go ahead and read Anna Karenina...
1. Dining with Oblonsky. A cheating husband and a spendthrift but, next to Kitty maybe, the most likable character in the book. He seems to have an understanding of people, he seems to like people as they are, as opposed to Levin. And he knows how to enjoy himself at a restaurant. When he and Levin dine together near the beginning of the book, Levin preoccupied, thinking only of his proposal to...
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Willem de Kooning: Asheville.
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I’ve read most every interview in the four-volume Paris Review Interviews set by now. The first volume is by far my favorite. Borges, Hemingway, Bellow, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. - there are a lot of big names in there. But the piece in that volume I think I like best is one I didn’t really expect to care that much about: Robert Gottlieb, editor and former...
December 2010
11 posts
10 tags
I’m not going to limit myself entirely to things from this year because a) I cant find that many things I liked, and b) those lists tend to hold the present in dubiously high esteem. Nor am I aiming to be other than piecemeal here. This is just what’s coming to me today.
1. Two movies (that didn’t come out this year) that I liked:
I find film in particular pretty...
6 tags
Instapaper, and miscellaneous essay links
If you use the internet, if you read stuff on your iphone or ipad, you should look into Instapaper (if you haven’t already). Not only is it a clutter-free, reading-friendly environment, whether you’re using the app or the site on your browser, it’s also like a curated list of essays available on the web. You end up reading pieces you might not have ordinarily (when was the last...