dollshot

winter wonder wander

2012-01-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

It was so painfully cold on Saturday I did not leave the apartment, not once, didn't even dream of going out, because the cold seemed of an oppressive nature. And I found, as the hours passed, and N was at work, that it is very easy to remain locked in one's apartment in New York and slip into the comfortable delusions evoked by wearing a pair of fancy satin pajamas all day.
You can become so self-aware wearing the pajamas, as if this was an old movie, and suddenly, you are performing the chores around the house as if any moment the detective husband is about to storm in, having just got off duty (all day, hard business in cold hard weather)except he is still noticeably troubled by this case he had, can't get it off his mind and you don't want to inquire directly so you try to think of a good leading question but he is onto you, after all, he's a professional, and stops you before you finish and says, doggedly, 'darling, how about that drink and a nice steak dinner?,' and you laugh and say, 'yes, of course, dear, I was only worrying about you, as usual...' And the subject changes to something you don't have to pay attention to, so that while you're talking you wish he would unburden himself of these indelible, gruesome images and details, although, admittedly (and suddenly a little scandalized) the truth is you are fascinated by the crimes, but in a most removed and literary kind of sense.

lucky numbers

2012-01-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

We are so honored to be included, as lucky number 11, in Francis Davis' Top Ten of 2011!

http://www.rhapsody.com/blog/2012/01/davis

jaws and paws

2011-12-31T11:23:00.000-08:00

There is a mountain lion in the canyon.

Having just read John Vaillant's thriller (in the natural sense) The Tiger I am obsessed with big cats, especially tigers. This book described a peculiar incident of a tiger with a taste for men. Two men simply vanished into this tiger and my imagination, like the locals near Primorye, was reeling from the mythical power of the cat. Hunters told Vaillant that a tiger's stare is paralyzing, hypnotizing, entrancing. The tiger, though fatally dangerous, is considered a fair administer of justice in the wild, and will not attack unprovoked. All this insight made me feel as if I suddenly possessed an empathetic, intimate understanding of the tiger's world...

But as soon as I learned there was a mountain lion in the canyon, all of these feelings or false sense of knowledge vanished and I am too scared to hike for fear of not knowing the proper language in case of an encounter. It's so conflicting [frustrating] to love being in the wild (compared to NYC, anyway) and be too afraid to enjoy it!

Not of any help to mitigate my irrational fears was The Infamous Bengal Ming by Rajesh Parameswaran (from Granta 117)in which a tiger devours three souls (in Siberia they say the tiger literally ingests your soul when you're eaten). The Tiger tells the story, and the emotions (love, desire, hunger) seem absolutely accurate after I learned about the animal's behaviors. The tiger's life consists of hunting for food, usually failing several times, making and then eating a kill, then searching for prey again. The hunt will be interrupted with an intense, passionate mating period when two lover tigers will make it up to twenty times a day...!

And since my days have been filled lately with reading about these mystical cats, I want to quote my favorite poetic line about them, from Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock by Wallace Stevens:

Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

Happy New Year!

city at the edge of the world

2011-12-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

This title is from Lyonel Feininger after his wooden metropolis, which I saw at the Whitney in the fall.

Now that I have begun running, at a jogging pace, I truly appreciate how much faster you can get to where you are going. It is a special thrill because I don't have a bicycle or a car, and the subway is... something else altogether...so getting somewhere fast is just oh-so exciting.

And I have the most inspiring destination (see below):

This is the skyline as seen from Pier 6, the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I am alone with the seagulls. Quelle view, isn't it? Doesn't it look like a cluster of precious metals? In Paris, it seemed everyone jogged and I think it gives you a very intimate relationship with the city -- I know because I am in love with this little trip to the edge of Brooklyn.

happy holidays

2011-12-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

line's dead

2011-11-18T18:59:00.000-08:00

In an age where an iPhone is considered to be an extension of the self (see NYTimes Out of Our Brains Dec. 2010) I wonder why the nature of the phone remains to be mystifying and often spooky.

Like many, I don't even have a land line, but the early, now antiquated I guess, version of the telephone possesses a fantastical surrealism -- thousands of voice traveling through long, spidery wires across the most remote forests and arid deserts ... it's like tying a thread around the world. There is a movie I saw in Boston, I think it was Iranian, and a few men are pursuing a buried treasure and their desolate path follows an endless procession of telephone poles... Do you imagine in the near future the strings will be cut and coiled, the poles chopped, and tossed into a landfill?

Once I had a nightmare that someone close to me was dead, but I didn't realize because we lived apart from each other and we talked on the phone as if life was completely unchanged. Reality only happened when I visited an empty, silent room. In Ulysses, Bloom speculates that coffins ought to be furnished with telephones, in the case that you're buried alive, but suppose the dead could dial you from the box? Do you think the possibility for this occurrence is amplified with the invention of the wireless realm?

It's unsettling in the most romantic sense.

DOLLSHOT + CPARK @ DOUGLASS STREET

2011-11-14T06:37:00.000-08:00

the slipping glimpser part deux

2011-11-12T06:22:00.000-08:00

Last week, the de Kooning biography ended sadly with his death.
I guess I was prepared for this ending, but the biographers had so vividly brought the artist and all the characters in his world into being, I felt more the lucky eavesdropper than the solitary reader.

So then I went back to bright white MoMA (described by Martin Filler as 'soul-killing' in an NYRB article I read the other day... & I might agree) to review the exhibit with a mind newly edified.

But I was so distracted by all the other minds, the constant buzz of analysis because we've all read the book, and now we are all here to discuss it with affectation, or at least provide an intimate understanding for our unenlightened friends.
Quelle spectacle.

The paintings were a different experience on a second viewing, though, and the passage from first to last room was romantic, emotive, and magical.

My emerging favorites are Pink Angels (1945) and Woman (1948)(when she is looking wildly at that dark star) but the 'abstract urban landscape' series including Easter Monday and Gotham News with ephemeral headlines now immortalized in paint made me think of Bloom's words on newspaper in Ulysses:

....beyond the obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper.

Clank it. Clank it. Miles of it unreeled.

What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels:

various uses, thousand and one things.

I love to look at his paintings; they are so beautiful.

enchanted time

2011-10-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

Giacomo and Wes arranged Morton Feldman's Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety for dollshot and the piece has captivated me...

Here are the composer's own words on the piece, archived from a lecture at the University of Buffalo in 1973: 

"In 1970, something unexpected happened. After about 13 years  my  music again changed and changed radically...  This all began with a  composition in memory of my piano teacher called Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety.   The whole work is based on a repeated two-note figure alternating   between two flutes... 

The beginning harmonies of Madame Press are vaguely   Hollywoodian, then recall Edgard Varèse and slowly metamorphise into   something more my own. I was consciously attempting to relive my own   musical history while thinking of her. Those were the harmonies of my   youth. What was unconscious was the significance of putting the tempo   at quarter note equals ninety. It was also unconscious that I repeated   those falling thirds 87 times, very close to that fated number of her   death. The recapitulation at the end goes into double time as if to  symbolize all the  years I didn't see her which were passing so quickly." 

I find myself in an enchanted pocket of time when performing and practicing the constant cycle of the flutes, which requires a delicate kind of meditative endurance. The magical arpeggios of the celeste that begin and end Madame Press frame a spellbound, humming dimension of sound in which a major third is veiled by strange harmonies. The context changes with each passing measure... an atmospheric cluster of open tones will be suddenly transformed by the emergence of a dark undertone. It is enthralling to hear how 'the harmonies of my youth' are transfigured; to hear what diverse variations of character the major third possesses. Since my introduction to it, echoes of Madame Press issue from all around New York: the closing of subway doors, soft voices in concert, the blend of birdsong and machine noise. 

Isn't it incredible that with what may seem to be a minimal scale of motive and length -- a simple, constant figure moving through a shifting harmonic landscape -- this entrancing piece expresses life's passing with such profound mystery?

slipping glimpser (part I?)

2011-10-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

As so many of you have (swarms of eyes!), I have now seen the de Kooning exhibit at the MoMA, and it is as magnificent as advertised! "As seen on the subway!"

A complex, creative life is contained within those white walls, so last night I began Mark Stevens and Annalynn Swan's illuminating biography: De Kooning: An American Master.

I finally closed my eyes just when the young artist had moved to Manhattan, and dreamed strange dreams of squalid old world living conditions... the sounds of hooves drawing carts, the stink of wet wooden pubs (the descriptions of de Kooning's stepfather's establishment helped me to imagine Davy Byrne's pub in Ulysses...), and city scenes of bustling briny docks. It's such an evocative biography!

One de Kooning quote gave me pause, and I immediately scribbled it in my blue notebook... I'll print it in context here:

As he told the New York Times near the end of his life,

gesturing toward his paintings of the early 1980s,

"Classical training frees you to do this."

The work of the 1980s isn't my favorite, but I love the truth in the proclamation. The visual evidence abounds at MoMA, where you can view the artist's exploration of technique and style ranging from art nouveau to cubism... and these came after, as I learned, a rigorous classical education at the Academy in Rotterdam.

Still Life: Bowl, Pitcher, and Jug, c. 1921

AND LATER...

Woman, 1: 1950-52

This understanding of visual art, as a creative process informed by a history that is both rebelled against and appropriated, is like Harold Bloom's idea of literary influence "as a form of spirit that moves freely, covertly, and for the most part, deviantly through the history of literature." In Robert Harrison's recent review (from which the previous quote is taken) of Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence, he addresses the concept of clinamen, Lucretius' conclusion that atoms deflect or diverge in various directions from a straight fall into the abyss. I am obsessed with trying to understand it -- and I think it is very prevalent at the moment (have you also seen Stephen Greenblatt's new book, The Swerve?).

Bloom puts it so beautifully, in a way that applies perfectly to the slipping glimpser and all artists... "You must fall, but freedom is in the swerve, in falling with a difference."

upcoming

2011-09-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

lists

2011-09-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

We went to the Morgan Library to see lists. A storm was about to break over the city, so we had to fly down the street to make it indoors before we were drenched (in rain!).

The rain came down in great, loud torrents as we walked through Mr. Morgan's majestic book rooms, and I remembered a line from Rimbaud's poem Enfance (I quote the Ashbery translation):

I am the learned scholar in the dark armchair.
Branches and the rain hurl themselves at the library's
casement window.

There were precious fragments of great lives on display, including scores in the hand of Mozart, Liszt, and Schubert. I enjoyed reading a personal letter from Salinger's typewriter.

Upstairs were the lists.

As it turns out, everyone makes lists, even great thinkers and artists.
Which is a very encouraging fact, I think.

So, I am posting two of Noah's lists that I found in a notebook!

THE MARKET

NOTES FOR A MIXING SESSION

ghost towers

2011-09-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

A Study in Color & In a Snailery

2011-07-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

I simply haven't been able to gather my thoughts for the computer and have had to delay the second part, the big cliffhanger, of my last entry. But finally, back in Brooklyn, I can attend to it. And now there's an added nostalgia because dazzling wildflowers aren't at all bursting forth from the concrete slabs of my neighborhood...

The hike to Yosemite Falls is an arduous 7.6 mile loop in which you ascend a steep granite wall to the top of 1,430 waterfall. The trail has exquisite views and the dramatic elevation flourishes with a variety of boldly colored wildflowers:

A cluster of brilliant purple Elegant Brodiaea.

I love the feathery texture and ember glow of Indian Paintbrush. There was an abundance along the trail.

Halfway through the hike, rounding a switchback, we are greeted by a vibrant throng of Lupine, perhaps the emblem flower of Yosemite. According to my guide, Wildflowers of Yosemite, people held a belief that the flowers robbed the soil of nutrients and named it Lupinus for 'WOLF.' There is a view of Middle Yosemite Falls behind Noah.

Mountain Pride Penstemon is radiant at the top of the falls. Can you believe this modest stream becomes the majestic Yosemite Falls?

It's amazing how easily the natural world can seize the imagination, become a passionate obsession (comme Nabokov and his butterflies), and challenge conventional perceptions of time and space. Once I began paying attention to wildflowers, I suddenly and happily slipped into their dazzling microcosm of shape, color, texture, and life.

Last night, I finished reading The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, her profound meditation on the minimalist world of the snail, which proves to be a world of great intrigue and wonder. It was an immense pleasure to become absorbed in her descriptions and observations, and she quoted a beautiful passage from A Biologist Remembers by Karl von Frisch:

Every single species of the animal kingdom

challenges us with all... the mysteries of life.

Our Valley

2011-07-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

"...and I found new beauties and truths of all kinds." -- John Muir

Of course I must open with the words of Yosemite's great patron, the wild and radical John Muir. But on this trip, I also learned about the many 'patronesses' or, as my new book by Shirley Sargent calls them, Pioneers in Petticoats.

We have just returned from Yosemite National Park, quelle beautiful edenic place! We stayed in the historical Ahwahnee Hotel, which seems to be some kind of old world time machine -- the walls are covered with black and white pictures of old-fashioned ladies and gentlemen in ski attire, or playing croquet on the lawn, and the room we stayed in used to be a speakeasy, among other identities as a private dining room and a chapel.

We spent hours admiring the majestic views from the emerald lawn which is lined with flowers and spice bushes.

A spice bush in the Ahwahnee Yard

I love spotting and identifying wildflowers and between the lush Valley Floor, smooth granite cliffs, and hidden alpine meadows, there are approximately 1,450 species! I only have a few to share, unfortunately not including a singular blossom like the Mountain Lady's Slipper or the Phantom Orchid, but they are stunning nonetheless!

Tincture Plant

Pictured above is the Tincture Plant. I've seen it in abundance on the Valley Floor, my eye is always drawn to its open mouth, as if the blossoms are singing.

Golden Brodiaea

You can't miss the little stars of the Golden Brodiaea. This was an especially wet year (the waterfalls were swollen!) and provided excellent conditions for wildflowers!

Mock Orange

On the short walk to the grand view Lower Yosemite Falls, we came across flourishing Mock Orange bushes on the sandy banks of the river.

By the way, my guide is Wildflowers of Yosemite, by Lynn & Jim Wilson -- it's beautiful and thorough.

TO BE CONTINUED... 3,000 feet above the valley from the top of Yosemite Falls!

"glue em well"

2011-06-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

Each time I open Ulysses it seems to me an entirely new book than it was at 11:28 AM, or yesterday, or tomorrow. Each passage summons all kinds of associations; historical, personal, and today, much Munch. Below is The Lady from the Sea, & I think you will agree, after reading the excerpt, about the very natural connection they share...

"She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth her kiss. No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss."

Lines 392-400.

& I second the Munch character of these lines with Vampire, though this is not the piece's given name. But the moondling, candle-pale, melting twosome seem the perfect painted incarnation of Joyce's prose, no?

yes, this is goodbye

2011-05-31T15:49:00.000-07:00

goodbye attempted half of a dress

goodbye rotted pot that once, briefly, contained a mint plant and then for a few nights stay, a squirrel guest (see below)

goodbye red sun-stained curtains

goodbye loft, rabbithole floating bed and its rinkydink ladder

goodbye scummy blue tiled bathroom with the showerhead oddly placed in the center of the tub

goodbye miniature refrigerator that seemed always empty

the rest of it I do not even address, I shun it; and quelle refreshing swift, clean break, who knew I'd been harboring this mad desire for change in life? And what a thrill and I wonder, sitting in my new apartment, what things will be the permanent, adored fixtures and what will be tossed out with reckless abandon. oh, mysterious!

rapture cat

2011-05-25T05:51:00.000-07:00

a dead rat & a new project

2011-05-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

"Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul."

O, Ratty! I found this dead rat today on the sidewalk and, subsequently, was moved.

As you may have noticed, I have begun reading Ulysses, from which the above caption is quoted. A portentous conflation of experiences and events led to this endeavor.

One being the terribly distorted perception I've subjected time to lately, due to a habit of pinpointing a date and simply rushing through hours, days, and weeks looking forward, like a hard, slanting sleet, barreling through time and space. And I was so unsettled after Wozzeck (the terror of the Earth spinning madly) that I thought a perfect antidote would be an immense masterpiece stretched across one day.

I bought the edition with Carin Goldberg's magnificent cover, naturally, so it is an especially attractive object to hold and read.

Afterwards, I promptly left it in an ice cream parlor -- left but not lost.

Furthermore, I learned the publishing story of Ulysses months ago from a fantastic documentary, "Paris: The Luminous Years" in which James Joyce had been rejected by numerous publishers and was finally helped by Sylvia Beach, of the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore.

So you see, I had known for sometime this could not be helped. It was an imminent affair in my life and now it is finally taking place. And I hope to savor the arresting hours immersed in Joyce's sea of prose in a mindful mien.

headpiece

2011-04-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

TONIGHT! @ Galapagos Art Space
dollshot + plaz camel

nachtmahr

2011-04-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

A fantastic nightmare has a mesmerizing, obsessive, addictive quality that, when expressed through art, goes beyond the superficial conceits of horror and can become a transcendental experience. Berg's opera, Wozzeck, is such an exquisite, concentrated rendering of the most penetrating, soul-dwelling kind of terror & I was lucky enough to experience it on Saturday!

This opera, like several of the Modernist works I ❤, reaches far beyond a historical context rife with "Glitter & Doom" depravity in projecting an enduring vision of the terrifying reality of existence, time, and human nature. In the opening scene, the Captain describes his fear of eternity and how it makes him shudder to consider that "the world revolves around in one day." I simply haven't been able to get that idea out of my mind, & now it seems truly alarming that the world is spinning like mad.

The mind that constitutes this body of revelatory ideas is Berg's oceanic score; music that is a palette of Dix and a Freudian consciousness, with passages of ego, id, and super-ego abounding. I was utterly swallowed up in it (like pauvre Wozzeck).

Since Saturday, the opera lays heavily on my thoughts. Have you ever had the feeling, during a bad dream, of something go WHAM on your chest to startle you awake? And perhaps it was your heart banging in your ribcage, but I imagine it as the perching gargoyle in Fuseli's Nachtmahr. Perhaps the demon isn't there when the woman awakes, but the prevailing terror of Wozzeck lies outside dreams...

streamliner

2011-04-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

Of course I don't need a typewriter, and perhaps it seems painfully hip but...

Isn't it beautiful? The Remington Sperry Rand Streamliner typewriter! I visited a collector in Brooklyn over the weekend & fell in love with this one. It has wonderful action & the mechanics and sounds are so rhythmic... much like a piano. And like the instrument, I need to practice the precision of my fingering.

If an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters can reproduce Shakespeare, my odds aren't so bad, oui?

that is my love notes

2011-04-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

I bought a new recording of Schütz's Psalm 116 (Emmanuel Choir w/Craig Smith conducting) & remembered my old program notes for the piece, which were published for a performance at New England Conservatory!


	Heinrich Schütz... Das ist mir lieb (Psalm 116)
	In 1616, Burckhard Großmann, a tax collector, escaped a nearly fatal accident that sparked his zealous devotion to Christianity. In light of this religious epiphany, he commissioned sixteen Saxon composers to write a setting of Psalm 116 as a contribution to a collection entitled "Angst der Hellen und Friede der Seelen" (Fear of Hell and Peace of the Soul). Großmann's collection stands as a tribute to his love of music and his active resistance to the treatment of music in the 17th century — characterized by a general musical ignorance fed by the cultural damage wrought by the Thirty Years War and the artificial isolation of the leading composers and their compositions to the courts of the nobility. Großmann's contributors included many distinguished composers, such as Schein, Praetorius, Demantius, and Heinrich Schütz. Schütz's setting of Psalm 116 is utterly unequaled in its poignant, tender expression and flawless musical architecture. Schütz's sensitivity to text was the framework for his compositions, and Psalm 116 is a stunning example of his expressive musical vernacular. The declamatory opening "Das ist mir lieb" is immediately intensified by jarring dissonances that reflect the fervor of this sentiment. The first section of the piece closes with joyful vows of thanks ("Darum will ich ihn mein Leben lang anrufen") that are consequently deeply contrasted as the second part strikes with a syncopated rhythmic figure colored with chromatics ("Strikke des Todes"). Death's snares are made manifest as the voices eerily encircle each other with narrow intervals and distort the flow of text ("hatten mich umfangen"). The swift melodic descensions of "Hölle" illustrate both the depths of Hell and man's trembling fear of fate and subsequently grow into an anxious cry for salvation, "O Herr, errette meine Seele." The third part counters the previous restless pace with a steady affirmation — "Der Herr ist gnädig und gerecht" — as the music becomes mild and delicate. The fourth section allows the text to flow effortlessly through an abundance of pictorial musical devices, most obviously found in the melancholy dissonance of "Tränen" and the tripping melody of "mein' Fuss vom Gleiten." At the end of the fourth movement, Schütz creates a moment of profound stillness as the voices chant "Wie soll ich dem Herr vergeltn alle seine wohltat" ("How can I repay the Lord's goodness"). The answer is joyfully revealed in the fifth part ("Ich will meine Gelübde dem Herren"). The syncopated rhythm that previously illustrated the clutches of death ("Hatten mich 'troffen"), now in retrograde, depicts the broken chains and salvation ("Du hast meine Bande zerissen"). In the final section of the piece, the voices entwine in imitative counterpoint to shape "Jerusalem" before the texture settles into an utterly serene "Alleluja," ecstatic with stirring quietness. The pure simplicity of Schütz's "Alleluja" peacefully resolves the flourishing melodies of joyful celebration and grating dissonances of sorrow into humble piety. — Rosalie Schunter

storecats

2011-04-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

I can't have a cat of my own, because it would be too expensive and sometimes we leave for a while and the cat cannot fend for itself.

But I am so lucky, because there are many storecats around!

The bookstore has TWO cats -- a striped, very sociable feline, Tiny, and a black&white who is irascible & seems merely to tolerate me, at best. And so she is my favorite!

The copystore also has TWO cats, what an embarrassment of riches! All these cats! And you, like me, may find yourself calling the store "copycat" because these cats look (forgiving a few extra pounds on one) exactly alike! And sometimes a cat is reclining on the copier when you need it, but who can disrupt a cat in this tranquil state?

The petstore has a cat. I have never met this cat, because it simply is too obvious to have a cat in a petstore and I don't have a pet and therefore, no reason to visit this business. I can't imagine this cat has any interests outside of the domesticated animal "industry."

The conservatory has a cat! She's very skittish & petite, I haven't been able to lure her over... so naturally, this is my other favorite cat because she is so enigmatic.

Storecats are really very special but sometimes the experience is not all roses, if you know what I mean. Once I was in Bleecker Street Records and met a cat, the fattest cat I have ever seen, it was 'lugubrious' personified (can that apply to cats?). I had to confront the clerk, because they are the responsible party for this cat, "You know your cat is indecently overweight?!" and he said "SO?!" and then I said that was deplorable, a travesty, this poor cat, and I left in a huff. And I will never go back because quelle distressing situation & you can certainly judge a store by the keep of their cat!

avant le cinéma

2011-04-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

I like to go to movies sometimes at the Alliance Française on the Upper East Side -- a neighborhood I rarely go to, save the Museum Mile and some other old institutions. It takes an hour on the Q train, and I begin reading and then looking at the clock because I'm running late & the movie starts at 12:30! So I bolt from the underground and then pant for a few minutes after I'm secure in my seat in the FIAF theater, which is quite nice.

Today I saw 2 Days in Paris, or most of it. I had to skip out before the end to make it back to Brooklyn for work. Afterwards, I found the very same movie on the Instant Netflix! I had to consider, is it worth the travel and stress to view the films à la theater, when inevitably, some old lady (there are many old people [institutions] in the audience!) has brought her bag of chips and is sitting behind me, adding a crinkling, crackling soundtrack?

But I always find the experience to be intriguing in an appealing, displacement kind of way. It feels different; foreign, I guess. I always go alone... & it's an addictive kind of change of environment... I can hardly recall the titles of all the films I've seen there, but I remember the sensation of emerging from the theater, which is far below ground (you have to go down two staircases!) into new snow, or rain, and everything just feels different. And I have this kind of collage of scenes to recall, pieces from various films and seeing them in that space -- so, yes, I am convinced there is something substantial, real and irreplicable (is this a word?), about the moment.

me sugar-plum!

2011-03-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

I had a visitation the other week in Virginia (where I'm from)with my old pets. The Cat, Moonlight, is my second-in-line cat. The Dog, Heidi, is an overweight miniature dachshund -- she is not my personal pet, but is around.

Moonlight is deaf and thin as a rail; Heidi The Wonderdog's figure is like a Venus of Willendorf, except not artistic, and she is practically blind. Their deathly figures and failing senses lead me to imagine them as Nagg & Nell in Beckett's Endgame, acting out this dialogue:

NELL: Why this farce, day after day?
   (Pause.)
NAGG: I've lost me tooth.
NELL: When?
NAGG: I had it yesterday.
NELL (elegiac): Ah yesterday.
   (They turn painfully towards each other.)
NAGG: Can you see me?
NELL: Hardly. And you?
NAGG: What?
NELL: Can you see me?
NAGG: Hardly.
NELL: So much the better, so much the better.
NAGG: Don't say that.
   (Pause.)
   Our sight has failed.
NELL: Yes.
   (Pause. They turn away from each other.)
NAGG: Can you hear me?
NELL: Yes. And you?
NAGG: Yes.
   (Pause.)
   Our hearing hasn't failed.
NELL: Our what?
NAGG: Our hearing.
NELL: No.

And then I find their demented antics so endearing and also, somehow, profound.

schiele & the good time gang

2011-03-26T09:54:00.001-07:00

Noah Kaplan, 2009

dollshot + plaz camel @ galapagos

2011-03-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

DOLLSHOT + PLAZ CAMEL @ GALAPAGOS

Oh, I'm just wild about Harry!

2011-03-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

Today is cold and damp-- a real clamshell afternoon.

All I can think about it is "Yes, We Have No Bananas!" (Silver & Cohn)

I love playing through old songs & especially enjoy the lyrics... Mercer & the other fellows.

Here's a great one from "Button Up Your Overcoat" (DeSylva, Brown, Henderson):

Keep away from bootleg hootch
When you're on a spree
Take good care of yourself
you belong to me!

absolutely sweet, isn't it?
Mercer's flippant verse always makes me laugh:

Hooray for Hollywood!
You may be homely in your neighborhood,
but if you think that you can be an actor
see Mr. Factor,
he'd make a monkey look good!

I'm really taken with "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine," (Fisher & Bryan) at the moment. The dipping, swirling melody is perfect for the fantasy of flight. I like to imagine Josephine as a 'Bernice-Bobs-Her-Hair' type -- or rather, like Karen Blixen in the scenes from Out of Africa when she is flying with that English gentleman.

But I do have an enduring favorite stanza, from "Sidewalks of New York" (Blake & Lawlor):

Boys and girls together
Me and Mamie O'Rourke
Tripped the light fantastic
On the sidewalks of New York!

the many faces of

2011-03-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

Because I so loved Monteverdi's Orfeo I was inspired to watch director Marcel Camus's film Black Orpheus. What a knockout -- just look:

And what a dreamscape for a setting... terribly romantic.

Nature's Way

2011-03-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

I used to feel discouraged, even disgusted, by all of the dog shit on the sidewalks of New York.

Francis Bacon cured me of fearing dog shit. At an exhibit of his work I saw at the Met a couple years ago he was quoted saying “I remember looking at dog shit on the pavement and I suddenly realized, there it is—this is what life is like.” And now I think of that all the time when I see dog shit.

I've adjusted remarkably, because I can walk right by it now, even if I'm eating ice cream or something, and I don't lose my appetite. It's like being an animal in the woods.

twice is nice

2011-02-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

I'm in the thick of Barry Gifford's complete collection of the Sailor & Lula novels... it makes for some riveting reading, let me tell you! (The Lynch film turned me on to the books.)

There's an idea that's been expressed a couple times:
"When I wake up in the mornin' I like to know who I'm goin' to see that day. There's too many surprises here in the Big D." That's Glory Ann Blue Satisfy, and then there was Katy in Big Tuna:
"... it's a sight better than bein' in a place like Beaumont, where people come down the street you don't know 'em and never will. I like bein' in a place where I know who I'm gonna see every day."

What I keep learning is that there seems to be some crazy disparity between knowing and living, no matter in regards to where, who, or what!

l'amour l'amour

2011-02-14T06:50:00.000-08:00

happy valentine's day!

Et in Arcadia Ego

2011-02-14T06:44:00.000-08:00

I can't stop listening to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. It's left on 'repeat' in the day and the listening experience varies from a focused, blackout-eyes meditation to an intrusive eruption -- a piercing voice or a moving passage emerges from the background and defeats all diversions.

There's je ne sais quoi in the music that makes me think of the phrase Et in Arcadia Ego. It's such a melancholy experience, because we know too much -- what will happen to Orpheus, and the music is so achingly beautiful... Monteverdi knows, too, about the inevitably of tragedy, you can hear it and he takes such great care in the treatment. Afterwards, melodies persist like painful remembrances of the voices of the dead.

search & rescue

2011-02-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

This morning I read a review of Tony Judt's Memory Chalet. The reviewer explained the significance of the title as Judt's personal design of the "Memory Palace" method of committing to memory events, etc. in relation to a physical space. I've never heard of something that makes so much sense!

My first thoughts after learning of this concept were of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I went yesterday -- yes, of course, it houses the world's most spectacular art & artifacts, and in that sense is a palace, but I have spent many solitary hours wandering there, and remembering one trip through the Greek wing will in turn summon my childhood trip to Greece & the feeling of walking through the streets, and then the sensation of being twelve, and then one night I remember reading D'Aulaire's Book Of Greek Myths at the dining room table over a spaghetti dinner (I loved that book to pieces). But the path isn't always so logical, either -- sometimes the memory is totally unrelated to the present circumstances, and sometimes it isn't a pleasant memory.

I hate the creeping feeling of a bad memory coming on; it is very intense and one is completely helpless as it takes hold of one's present state. The decline of a friendship is reenacted in a dramatic, melancholy montage, (I do wonder how much cinematic technique has affected my vision, or revision, of the past) or a feeling of guilt or shame -- even over something trivial -- clenches the gut.

Luckily, when this happens in the museum, I'm not wanting for long to be rescued by some magnificent work of art.

winter light

2011-01-29T08:05:00.000-08:00

In the winter light & weather, the sidewalks change from hard glitter slabs to chalky, textured canvases, varied with footprints, salt, and snow. Day is white on white and night is black on black -- that must be what feels so different; it's like living in a black & white film, except that we're still in color, which is quite surreal.

The way red glows from behind a frozen layer of ice makes me think of a Rothko painting.

I recently saw the Rothko Chapel paintings at the National Gallery. Noah & I walked over from the train station during a layover and it was a singular experience. I mean, time always seems out of the ordinary during travel, and the setting of the paintings -- up a spiral staircase cloistered in the tower of the gallery (and with the Feldman piece playing, too!) -- it was transportive! And then suddenly, we were back on the train to New York, and it was as a dream.

In Los Angeles, we bought a recording of Feldman's "Rothko Chapel" and as it played we drove along the Pacific Ocean at dusk, and neon violets and blues coursed through the dark water and I had the exact feeling of being in the tower and it seemed these things were happening simultaneously.

function + form =

2011-01-24T17:41:00.000-08:00

The chair is my absolute favorite piece of furniture; I think it is the most sensible form ever created and the potential for creative design seems endless ... the variety between elaborate, embellished pieces and those that exhibit an ideal efficiency of line is so interesting -- I have heard that term, or style, used to describe the work of cartoonists Chuck Jones & Saul Steinberg. I love that quality, it is like contrapposto or something.

I visited Phillipe Starck's 'Louis Ghost' chair in its white-light Kartell home in Los Angeles. It represents the kind of blend of history, style, & playful experiment that is so exciting, n'est-ce pas?

immer immer immermaid

2011-01-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

I think often of The Little Mermaid (Edvard Eriksen). She is a sculpture that commands an emotional relationship, I think, like the Glenn Gould sculpture in Canada.
Here is a picture I took when I visited, when I was 19:

It was winter, and freezing, and it was just the two of us. You can see the beginnings of an industrial horizon in the background, surroundings that make her even more beautiful, I think!

When she was moved the Shanghai last year for the World's Fair, I thought quelle horreur! Quelle heartache! As you know, artist Ai Weiwei created a video installation in her place that streamed live footage from the new location.

This struck me as a travesty at first, but that was simply dismissive ignorance because I realize now it was brilliant. The live video keenly dramatized The Little Mermaid's absence from the sea, her helplessness against being transported ... oh, it was a tragedy! Experiencing her displacement in such a visceral way completely amplified the relief of her return. It seems to be an imaginative, techno-surreal extension of the fairy tale...

ajedrez chess echecs sccachi schaak schach

2011-01-07T18:07:00.000-08:00

Noah & I are playing checkers every night now. I lose every time. My tragic error, I think, is that I always play for kings. We have a book: Win At Checkers by Millard Hopper -- a checkers champion -- published in 1941 (he dedicated it to his wife, isn't that very sweet?).

He said "Even the streamlined Hollywood movie stars have become Checker-minded and find the game an ideal pastime between the sets." What a picture, no? Maybe Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews -- or even Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy! (Have you seen that movie Desk Set? Quelle charmer...)

Obviously, I haven't gotten past the introduction, but I look forward to learning "How the Beginner Loses," in Chapter 4.

Besides winning and losing, though, I suppose I enjoy the great metaphorical values of checkers.

monairs

2011-01-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

H adopted a balloon from the restaurant we went to last night to rrrring in 2011. Balloons, he explained, become attached to their owners and have a dynamic life (this is only helium balloons, please note); they're playful, coquettish even, and unpredictable in their behavior. I thought of that movie, The Red Balloon, which I saw once a long time ago. We took the balloon (it was a black balloon) in the car and he came to visit me in the front seat. Then H stopped for some cigarettes and his balloon followed him out of the car. "Come back!" we said, "Stay and wait in the car!" so it bobbed around in there, impatiently.
I thought this morning maybe there is another word for a balloon -- though I do love the sound of the designated word. It occurred to me that the manner of a group of balloons might be like Liebniz's monads and perhaps they could be called monairs which you could pronounce like Monet with a hint of 'r' and silent 's.'

Hedda Sterne

2010-12-31T11:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I read Sarah Boxer's beautiful article about Hedda Sterne in the New York Review. I'm not très familiar with her work, but I loved the personality Boxer revealed in this quote from a recorded meeting:

"When I was young I tried very hard. I wept every day in the studio because there was such a distance between what I wanted to do and what came out. Now I'm at peace, because of old age. It flows calmly now. I meditate for a long time. I work against ego. I think ego is an obnoxious bother. To a great extent I have lost all interest in this fiction, Hedda Sterne."

Here is the picture included, a famous photograph from Life magazine of the whole AbEx crowd.

galathea

2010-12-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

I love Redon's pastels and was so excited to discover this enchanting Galathea scenario in a picture book. This piece is from the exact same time period as Schoenberg's "Galathea" (from Brettl-Lieder) & I think they're wonderful companions... can't you imagine Redon's Cyclops whispering, "Galathea, beautiful child?"

dollshot release concert!

2010-12-10T18:02:00.000-08:00

Upcoming release concert at (le) poisson rouge!

dollshot @ (le) poisson rouge

Sunday, January 30 9:30 PM
$10 advance/$12 door