‘Random House (1934) … 1st Authorized American edition.’
Even the cover is hard to read.
(Source: , via cfbwe)
Synsepalum dulcificum at Smart Energy -
Uncanny!
“Deren died in 1961, at the age of 44, from a brain hemorrhage brought on by extreme malnutrition. Her condition was also weakened by the amphetamines she had been taking since she began working for Dunham in 1941…” —
Do check out her films sometime. Visually interesting, confusing, fun. Available streaming on Netflix.
Maya Deren - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Potter painted animals, mainly farm animals. In his short life (he died of tuberculosis) he became the most accomplished animalier of his age.” — Potter, Paulus: The Wolfhound (1650) - Great Works, Art - The Independent
I make cracks during the viewing of movies (not within theaters, however) and I feel no regret in expressing my displeasure with any work produced by man or woman. I have opinions and will let them be known. There’s no harm in it. I have prickly taste, perhaps. If you ask my wife, she will say that I am a snob.
And I will say that my wife has had the great fortune of never encountering a genuine snob at their full wrathful and transformative power within their great meditating-grounds of the lecture hall or, alternatively, the sinister pleasure-chamber of the post-workshop tavern.
In fact, I feel that I am all too catholic in my appreciation of artworks diverse in style and content. I am a sucker for that which I encounter by chance. I permit ideas and books and films and images to take shelter in my mind. Some small quarter of my mind perhaps, but they are given a chance to spin around the room a bit. And I measure the dancer on the floor.
Granting time to the foreign, odd, repellant, dense, and dull has, over time, proven valuable, enriching and rewarding.
I have a BS in Economics - which I came to after years of struggle and doubling in Art History and Creative Writing. Why such things are Capitalized, I don’t know. Most people can’t even understand the desire to study econ - I barely did, but found it tremendously beautiful.
Photography – As a pretty adept draftsman and wielder of brushes throughout high school and college I was a fine art snob. I saw photography as some kind of sub-art, what you did if you had no chops but did possess artistic pretensions. How you’re great grandmother views Jazz. Now, I see myself as a photographer. Only through the expedience of buying a dSLR (to photograph dogs - see next point) about 6 years ago, and practicing with it, did I gain a love of the medium.
Sloppy, stinky, noisy mutts. Despite growing up both in rural Virginia and then in a father-ruralized suburban Virginia I had only owned a dog and that, briefly and tragically. I did not want another one. They seemed demanding in every way. My wife was desperate for one. I relented. We have three now and I work with dogs as my day job.
Dozens of authors, books, and films that seemed for diverse reasons wholly unappealing or just unwelcoming but became favorites: L’Avventura, Wallace Stevens, Edith Wharton, Aleister Crowley, Damien Hirst (ok, maybe not a favorite, this one), High and Low, Dario Argento.
This vein is tapped - it’s understood. Things grow on you.
But, there, over there, in the doorway is the shit I just can’t get an angle on. Stuff that seems, from afar, pretty fucking bad. But so mysterious and tightly wrapped that I can’t help thinking that there’s got to be something to it and maybe I just don’t get it. I’m not equipped.
This is not the stuff that’s somewhat popular and more or less revered but which I hold to be, at the very least, a waste of time and attention. That’s baseball and Jonathan Franzen (sorry Plumtree).
These works, these things, are not popular. They may have acclaim and outsider status. But they seem on first contact the product of mental illness or a different kind of life form.
I could speak of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist here, but I’m not – I’m talking about something almost the opposite. I think.
I’ve come across the work of Tao Lin and Zachary German.
If you are not familiar, a few links to start you off:
Is the writing that you may have sampled comprehensible? To me it seems the product of a kind of passive-aggression that has attained new depths. Clinical depths. I feel like I want to open the phone lines for callers on this. I can’t find a way into appreciating what I’ve read of these two authors. I don’t want to let this stuff in the house.
I want to dismiss it as the product of hipsterism gone utterly flat, but I’m too curious and worried to do so. Can anyone decode this at all for me?
Otherwise, my conclusion is that these are two young guys who cannot write, but can substitute, somewhat convincingly, artifice of the merest type for sentences. And stories. Of course, I’ll read a little more, but I probably won’t finish.
I’ve been listening to The Books tonight.
My reaction at this time:
Fantastic.
I listened to their album “Lost and Safe” when it came out approx. twice. It didn’t connect with me at the time.
Why should this be?
I’m fascinated by different things being appealing and inviting at one time and not at another.
Perhaps you now expect a fast food metaphor.
Well the why to the riddle does not seem to be: education, mood, life stage. None of those things seem all that much different than the present.
Way too often we talk about evolution in terms of a species adapting to an environment without considering the changes in the environment. The environment also consisting of other species.
Perhaps some music and books enter into our lives at a time when our cultural bio-dome offers an environment too inhospitable for whatever reason. The other music to we which we listen overwhelms new entrants. Our ears are too acclimated to a particular genre/style/sound; conversely the new contestant resists approachability because of its musical characteristics.
And on occasion a new musical experience devastates the memory cells of what we know to like and love. Think of the kid you knew in high school that discovered Zeppelin or Pink Floyd and whom that experience radically altered. The environment was perfectly suited to these beasts in such cases.
Funnily enough, some things stick with you, though the time, at the time, was not quite right. Like little mammals scurrying within the Mesozoic of your gray matter.
Right now that’s The Books for me.
These things are so frustrating at times. So often I’m trying to recall a photograph or band name that I saw a year ago and having little to go on but the impression that has stuck around for a while.
And little notebooks and web clippers don’t help. Those things only work for material that strikes you immediately in some way.
Lots of things - they need to live a while in the skull. There’s no software for such subtle stuff.
“Duchamp, who is the youngest of this family of Norman artists, is, in my opinion, the most obviously talented and the most original. Having become a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve library, he catalogues books not far from the same Charles Henry whose scientific investigations concerning painting exerted a great influence on Seurat and ultimately led to the birth of divisionism. And that is why we have seen no painting by Marcel Duchamp anywhere for more than two years.” — Apollinaire, in Paris-Journal of May 19, 1914.
Walton Ford:
Now, Dürer somehow still got a sketch from Lisbon, with a written description and was able to make this sort of twisted rhinoceros that’s still accurate, in a way. It’s quite beautifully imagined – there are particulars that are real to a rhino, but it also looks kind of like a crustacean or a crab, which is really apt since this thing drowned.
So the moment of transformation, where this animal goes from an actual animal to being transformed into an icon that for 300 years people drew and believed to be a rhino, is the moment I painted. So here he’s dying, but he’ll be reborn from the ocean as this armored crustacean, and really live for another thousand years as this transmogrified creature.
So that was an art historical moment that had never been painted. It also gave me an opportunity to…I painted a rhino the way rhinos actually look. So this is a portrait of what Dürer never saw, though this is the moment at which he’s turning into Dürer’s rhino. So it’s a comment on the way we impose our culture on the natural world, but without it being dogmatic in message.”
From an interview, here.
Thanks to cfbwe for liking my recent post and prompting me thusly to check out his own site.
Which led me to many a pleasant thing, including the above.
Which I am thankful for now knowing about.
Walton Ford’s Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros