Inspired again by the Three Beautiful Things blog, today I'm awestruck by:
1 - The many gorgeous body types, styles, colors and strides of the runners and walkers circumnavigating the Central Park Reservoir on a blue-skied August morning.
2 - The rainbows arcing up from the door men's spray, cleansing their real estate of the memories of yesterday and sharing what's expected of today with their comrades on either side
3 - 6 women around a table along the sands of the Sound; of Jamaica, of France; with ideas and opinions; spontaneous gathering for a Mediterranean lunch. Figs, apricots, cool cucumber soup, tuna nicoise, lemony ricotta cheese with fruit.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
IMAGES AND COLOR
The colors - inside of a shell, monochrome overlay. The colors are the movement.Now watch the trailer.
"Megane" (2007). Directed by Naoko Ogigami. Now showing at MOMA.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
DANCING HOUSE
Frank Gehry transformed a neo-Renaissance house in Prague to a structure known as the "Dancing House". It was initially named the Fred & Ginger building. It does conjure the dancing couple.Nationale-Nederlanden Building, Rašínovo Nábřeží 80, 120 00 Praha 2
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
TOUCH OF GREY
Today is President Obama's birthday. This morning my greatest of all muses, WFUV public radio played songs in his honor. I didn't realize until 10minutes ago that I have been singing this one to myself all day.
Monday, August 3, 2009
REQUIRED READING: ON HAPPINESS
Averted Vision written by Tim Kreider, Aug 2, 2009
In 1996 I rode the circus train to Mexico City where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone’s husband. (Don’t even ask.) I remember my time there as we remember most of our travels — vivid and thrilling, everything new and strange. My ex-fake-wife Carolyn and I often reminisce nostalgically about our honeymoon there: ordering un balde hielo from room service to cool our Coronas every afternoon, the black-velvet painting of the devil on the toilet that she made me buy, our shared hilarious terror of kidnapping and murder, the giant pork rind I wrangled through customs. Which is funny, since, if I think back honestly, while I was actually there I did not feel “happy.” In fact, as mi esposa did not hesitate to point out to me at the time, I griped incessantly about the noise and stink of the city — the car horns playing shrill, uptempo versions of the theme from “The Godfather” or “La Cucaracha” every second, the noxious mix of diesel fumes and urine, the air so filthy we’d been there a week before I learned we had a view of the mountains.
The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt.
I was similarly miserable throughout the happiest summer I ever spent in New York City. I was recovering from an affair that had ended badly, and during my convalescence I was subletting a cool, airy apartment a block from Tompkins Square Park, with a kitchen window that looked out on a community garden. A theater troupe was rehearsing a production of “The Tempest” out there, and I got used to the warped rattling crash of sheet-metal thunder in the evenings. I happened to catch “The Passion of St. Joan of Arc” on cable for the first time late one night, a film I knew nothing about — it was grotesque and beautiful, astonishing. One of the happiest memories of my life is of sitting on top of the little knoll in the park with my friend Ellen, eating a sweet Hawaiian pizza and waiting to see what movie would play on the outdoor screen that was being inflated in front of us. (It turned out to be “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”) Even though this whole time I was preoccupied with thoughts of the woman I’d lost and torturing myself with jealousy and insane fantasies of vengeance, in retrospect it’s obvious now that the main thing I was doing that summer was falling in love.
I wonder, sometimes, whether it is a perversity peculiar to my own mind or just the common lot of humanity to experience happiness mainly in retrospect. I have of course considered the theory that I am an idiot who fails to appreciate anything when he actually has it and only loves what he’s lost. Or perhaps this is all just what Michael Chabon called “the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past.” But I think I recall that summer with such clarity and affection for much the same reason that I remember my month in Mexico City so fondly. The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt. When you’re that unhappy, any glimmer of beauty or consolation feels like running into an old friend abroad, or seeing mountaintops through smog. Maybe we mistakenly think we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in very vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged intensity of experience.
We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But this kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, like blocking yourself from remembering a word by trying too hard to retrieve it. And our attempts to contrive this feeling through any kind of replicable method — with drinking or drugs or sexual seduction, buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers — never quite recapture the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a sure-fire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars.
There is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness.
I didn’t always enjoy being a cartoonist. During the 12 years of my career, if I can call it that, I bored my friends and colleagues by complaining bitterly about the insulting pay, the lack of recognition, the short half-life of political cartoons as art. And yet, if I’m allowed any final accounting of my days, I may find, to my surprise, that I reckon those Fridays when I woke up without an idea in my head and only started drawing around noon, calling friends at work for emergency humor consultations, doing frantic Google image searches for “Scott McClellan” or “chacmool,” eating whatever crud was in the fridge, laughing out loud at my own jokes, and somehow ended up getting a finished cartoon in by deadline, feeling like an evil genius, to have been among my best.
But during the time I was actually focused on drawing — whipping out a perfect line, spontaneous but precise, or gauging the exact cant of an eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the microscopic universe of cross-hatching — I wasn’t conscious of feeling “happy,” or of feeling anything at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of music or line of dialog I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time; the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief.
I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.
from The New York Times blog "The Pursuit of What Happens in Troubled Times"
In 1996 I rode the circus train to Mexico City where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone’s husband. (Don’t even ask.) I remember my time there as we remember most of our travels — vivid and thrilling, everything new and strange. My ex-fake-wife Carolyn and I often reminisce nostalgically about our honeymoon there: ordering un balde hielo from room service to cool our Coronas every afternoon, the black-velvet painting of the devil on the toilet that she made me buy, our shared hilarious terror of kidnapping and murder, the giant pork rind I wrangled through customs. Which is funny, since, if I think back honestly, while I was actually there I did not feel “happy.” In fact, as mi esposa did not hesitate to point out to me at the time, I griped incessantly about the noise and stink of the city — the car horns playing shrill, uptempo versions of the theme from “The Godfather” or “La Cucaracha” every second, the noxious mix of diesel fumes and urine, the air so filthy we’d been there a week before I learned we had a view of the mountains.
The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt.
I was similarly miserable throughout the happiest summer I ever spent in New York City. I was recovering from an affair that had ended badly, and during my convalescence I was subletting a cool, airy apartment a block from Tompkins Square Park, with a kitchen window that looked out on a community garden. A theater troupe was rehearsing a production of “The Tempest” out there, and I got used to the warped rattling crash of sheet-metal thunder in the evenings. I happened to catch “The Passion of St. Joan of Arc” on cable for the first time late one night, a film I knew nothing about — it was grotesque and beautiful, astonishing. One of the happiest memories of my life is of sitting on top of the little knoll in the park with my friend Ellen, eating a sweet Hawaiian pizza and waiting to see what movie would play on the outdoor screen that was being inflated in front of us. (It turned out to be “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”) Even though this whole time I was preoccupied with thoughts of the woman I’d lost and torturing myself with jealousy and insane fantasies of vengeance, in retrospect it’s obvious now that the main thing I was doing that summer was falling in love.
I wonder, sometimes, whether it is a perversity peculiar to my own mind or just the common lot of humanity to experience happiness mainly in retrospect. I have of course considered the theory that I am an idiot who fails to appreciate anything when he actually has it and only loves what he’s lost. Or perhaps this is all just what Michael Chabon called “the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past.” But I think I recall that summer with such clarity and affection for much the same reason that I remember my month in Mexico City so fondly. The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt. When you’re that unhappy, any glimmer of beauty or consolation feels like running into an old friend abroad, or seeing mountaintops through smog. Maybe we mistakenly think we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in very vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged intensity of experience.
We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But this kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, like blocking yourself from remembering a word by trying too hard to retrieve it. And our attempts to contrive this feeling through any kind of replicable method — with drinking or drugs or sexual seduction, buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers — never quite recapture the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a sure-fire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars.
There is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness.
I didn’t always enjoy being a cartoonist. During the 12 years of my career, if I can call it that, I bored my friends and colleagues by complaining bitterly about the insulting pay, the lack of recognition, the short half-life of political cartoons as art. And yet, if I’m allowed any final accounting of my days, I may find, to my surprise, that I reckon those Fridays when I woke up without an idea in my head and only started drawing around noon, calling friends at work for emergency humor consultations, doing frantic Google image searches for “Scott McClellan” or “chacmool,” eating whatever crud was in the fridge, laughing out loud at my own jokes, and somehow ended up getting a finished cartoon in by deadline, feeling like an evil genius, to have been among my best.
But during the time I was actually focused on drawing — whipping out a perfect line, spontaneous but precise, or gauging the exact cant of an eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the microscopic universe of cross-hatching — I wasn’t conscious of feeling “happy,” or of feeling anything at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of music or line of dialog I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time; the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief.
I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.
from The New York Times blog "The Pursuit of What Happens in Troubled Times"
Sunday, August 2, 2009
LUNA
Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot
Ma chandelle est morte
Je n'ai plus de feu
Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour l'amour de Dieu
(Under the moonlight,
My friend Pierrot
Lend me your pen,
So I could write a word
My candle is out,
I've no more light
Open your door for me,
For God's sake.)
Ma nouvelle chienne, Clair de Lune, "Luna", est arrive' ce soir. Nous l'adorons!!
My sweet new dog came to us this evening. Clair de Lune, "Luna". We love her!
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