she wasn't over anything
second, there were, i have to admit, sparks of humanity in christie's pretensions, and in her desires, that i felt were missing in the rest of my life. she had coveted a huge diamond ring. she had hoped to land a guy with money. she had wanted her wedding to be an extravaganza, a day she'd remember for the rest of her life. she wasn't "over it." she wasn't over anything. she knew what she wanted, and she wanted the kinds of things that the marketers of luxury goods describe as "the best"—jacuzzis, chandeliers, access to the tropics in the middle of winter. third, and finally, what got me, i suppose, were the indications of humanity in christie's life that had nothing to do with her pretensions. the family crest on the christmas card had been embossed onto a picture of the bruewalds and their new baby in matching red-and-green velvet outfits. the little girl looked exactly like thomas—an odd-featured brown-haired old man. she wouldn't have the advantage of christie's looks, and, for someone as christie was, that must have been hard to take. you could say that i felt sorry for her.
- caitlin macy, "christie," the new yorker 10 march 2003
posted March 31, 2003 in printshe is forthright about her francophilia
"paris is the breeding ground of fashion at all levels," she said. "whether it is belgian designers out in the burbs putting on cool shows, bourgeois ladies putting on the chic for chantilly races, or those couture seamstresses with their gossamer handstitching. it's the taxi-driver thing: the london cabbies care about sport; the new york cabs care how many blocks you are going, and the parisian taxi-drivers care about how john galliano is doing at dior.
[words learned through reading this article: louche, febrile]
- john seabrook, "a samurai in paris," the new yorker 17 march 2003
posted March 31, 2003 in art, printif it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art
my post-adolescent mind thrilled to the opulent negativity of adorno's proclamations, some of which i can still recite off the top of my head: "to write poetry after auschwitz is barbaric." "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." "every work of art is an uncommitted crime." "the whole is the false" . . . but he is not quite as solemn as he seems; he can be hilariously bitchy. here he is on the nascent american gym culture of the forties: "the very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy." on young left-wing intellectuals: "to see them as renegades is to asses them too high; they mask mediocre faces with horn-rimmed spectacles betokening 'brilliance,' though with plain-glass lenses, solely in order to better themselves in their own eyes and in the general rat-race."a key concept in the lachenmannian weltanschauung is contamination . . . and goes back to schoenberg's epic epigram, "if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." the notion that popularity destroys the purity of art is so cherished in german-speaking lands—and, it should be said, on american college campuses—that it takes on the solidity of religious belief. but . . . every variety of dissonance, microtonal writing, and unpitched noise has been used in a hundred horror movies and suspense thrillers. and there is something creepy about the talk of "contamination" and "taint" . . . at the very least, hitler still casts a mysterious spell over the music scene: the project of writing according to his likes and dislikes gives him a power that should long ago have been denied.
- alex ross, "ghost sonata: what happened to german music?" the new yorker 24 march 2003
posted March 31, 2003 in art, music, printhail to the thief
toppa tha rainy, cold sunday mid-morning in nyc to ya. the new radiohead album leaked and now it's making me leak right there.
continuing yesterday's thread, last night i bump into a senior-year roommate on avenue a and 11th street. i recognized her walk and knew it was her, and i've heard other friends say they recognized her this way before too. she's a big girl, but it's all breastisses and ba-bump ba-bump bump/ga-donk ga-donk donk so she gets much love. she was going home, headed from no malice palace, and i was going to 7b, headed from da slide. maybe this is a real neighborhood after all.
posted March 30, 2003 in delivery, musicthere is nothing brave about being one of the "loved ones"
of the warfighters or whatever you wanna call 'em that's in the middle east. when people say that i'm brave because my little brother is out there, why? because i'm not curled under my desk crying? care about him, not about me.
it really is true that once you can do 100 crunches, you get numb and can just keep going and going until you get sick of it.
during sigur ros, i was just high enough to start thinking that they were singing in english, "you suffer alone . . . you sidle on."
i'm starting to see what she means that we're both kinda lois weisberg-ian—thursday night bumped into a guy i went to school with. he was also a clarinet major and dated the last girl i crushed on as a breeder (i still get crushes on girls but stay the per/in[eum]vert that i am), and then went to yale, and then back home to argentina, and apparently the last time i saw him was at the union square greenmarket while i was holding a cucumber (he remembers this, not me). not once but twice i bumped into a great girl that i used to work with, while i was walking around east river park and she was jogging. both times she's running hard and can't stop and chat but we wave and say hellos and she yells "DRINKS!" and shakes her finger at me (because i suck and lose touch with people all the time) as she runs off. the first time i had my cam and was taking pitchers, and this time i had my soccer ball and was kicking it around and drilling and dribbling and exploring the southern reaches of the park. did you know there's nice tennis courts and an abandoned bandshell with wood bleachers and when you go south of the williamsburg bridge, the fencing is gone and you can actually be by the water with an unobstructed view again?
posted March 29, 2003 in crap, delivery, politicssigur ros last night rocked extremely hard posted March 22, 2003 in delivery, music, performance
protest rally in union square
matthew barney and st. patrick's day
attempted to see matthew barney exhibit at the guggenheim today, forgetting that it's st. patrick's day and therefore, everything will go wrong. throngs of green chickenheads made the 6 train, the walk from lexington to 5th, and 5th avenue itself all crappy, then (after i bought my ticket) i found out that the theater was full and no, i couldn't stand. tried to walk to the met, but the streets were barricaded for the parade, and then i remembered that the met's freaking eurotrash hours means that it's closed on monday. the weather finally decided to be 70 degrees, and i got sweaty (i.e., cranky).
next time.
i started writing this:
why can't there be a decent site about art and artists? you google nan goldin and get things that use the phrase "homosexual underground" and still have the background-patterned left column that means it was last updated in 1997.
but bumped into this, which i looked at years ago and forgot about:
artandculture.com. do searches and remember when you used to click on links and get lost in the web.
lower east side, chinatown
an existentialist and a nerd
his favorite themes—alienation, distrust, technology—mark him as an existentialist and a nerd; he says he took his album title from a guidebook, "the hundredth window: protecting your privacy and security in the age of the internet," and at a time when pop music is increasingly made by computer whizzes on laptops, let us hope a trend is not afoot—will we see a spate of theme albums inspired by p.d.a. owner's manuals and the perils of downloading adobe acrobat? in any case, mr. del naja makes something of the connections between microsoft windows and the double-glazed kind; his songs brood in staccato phrases about human isolation in a world of inhuman surveillance.
- jody rosen, "bleak, like bristol, but beautiful," the new york times 16 march 2003
posted March 16, 2003 in music, printhe has an eye for beauty but knows no moderation
looked at art in northwest chelsea while bewaring the ides of march. on 24th street, there's some wood construction work, and on the wall someone had posted this. pretty sure it's iraqis that have been killed recently:
holla back if you've seen stuff like this here or anywhere.
at matthew marks on 22nd and 10th, there's a new nan goldin exhibit and part of it is slides of her work set to sacred music by john taverner, sung by björk. it is hard sometimes to not use clichéd words when you talk about visual things, but there was something sad and beautiful about seeing those photos click and flip by in those progressions where you see people courting each other, then becoming close, then becoming very close, then touches of jealousy and estrangement and resignation. at least that's what i got outta it.
nikolai fine art appears to be gone, which sucks.
on 26th, you step outside (i think it's gorney bravin & lee) and it's all scaffolding, which i saw for the first time around my house when i was a little kid. i loved it then and even though i dread walking under it, i love it now too.
and when you cross the street you end up at james cohan for an exhibit by trenton doyle hancock. the front room has this written all over the walls, which is the starting point of the story:
for a floor of florathis is a story about an average prehistoric ape family. the father's name is homerbuctas. he is married to almacroyn. together, they have two ape children, a son, brouthescam, and a daughter, cromalyna. the father, homerbuctas, has the features of any prehistoric ape man, i.e. low hanging brow and protruding muzzle mouth, but he differs fundamentally from other ape men. ya' see, homerbuctas has a knack for turning impulsion into compulsion. he has an eye for beauty but knows no moderation. his desire to be satiated in the presence of beauty ultimately creates a rift between himself and his ape family. and so it began.
if you walk over to 11th avenue, there's desolate buildings like it's what got excreted westward from the galleries.
houston street, lafayette street, crosby street, prince street
latinpussyboy
taught myself how to use the timer, turn off the flash, and then went to the ryan mcginley exhibit at the whitney (some good stuff, some downtown hipster insider stuff that i can't stand—he is, however, 25, which is inspirationally depressing no matter how you slice and dice it) with jami. ran into dori while meeting in union square.
who is cody banks?
walking to avenue c, then avenue d, then over the pedestrian bridge to the east river is one of my favorite things. so yesterday i did it with the cam in hand after eating a quick, free breakfast at home, and you know what? it feels so boring to spend weekends having brunch instead of doing something like this, now.
just lower your face into it and drink
dinner party at mo's where i was unable to get any shots besides people stirring things on the stove, followed by birthday party at the russian vodka lounge. an expert bartendress tapped my shoulder, gave me a glass with two golfball-sized olives in it to hold, then poured a belvedere martini up to the rim. then the girl to my left bumped into me, things started to get hectic, and mark, the birthday boy, said just lower your face into it and drink before it spills.
it can be awkward getting to know the new boyfriends and girlfriends of your close friends. there's the whole getting left behind thing that you have to face and get over as quickly as possible—it's immature and not like you want your friends to be single like you forever and it gets on your nerves when the shoe's on the other foot. but what's harder to get over is meeting the new people and thinking oh. this is what my friend was looking for. and walking away with a feeling maybe similar to the one you got the first time you paid a lot of money for a haircut or restaurant meal.
posted March 09, 2003 in deliveryding dong daddy
from louis, a wine bar on 9th and c.
up avenue a
snowed in with the tat and the window
the first gulf war
on npr at 7am, the anchor accidentally referred to "the first gulf war," then quickly corrected herself to say "the last gulf war."
posted March 05, 2003 in politicsi also didn't know that maybe coltrane and hindemith influenced each other
on saturday time warner came over and disconnected my cable box. after they left i called the good ole lower east side (goles) thrift shop, found out they take donated TVs, clambered mine into a pearl paint shopping bag and hauled it over. then i walked back up the stairs, disconnected my VCR, and set it on top of a trash can. by the time i went to the gym an hour later it was gone, just like i knew it would.
this weekend i also finally finished chasin' the trane. all about coltrane's life and work. i learned a lot from reading it, and it feels good to listen to the recordings and look at the photos and understand what these people were doing together. and i fuckin love alice coltrane. i want to be her before she met john and then meet my john. and there were weird things in the book that i didn't think anyone else related to before i read them on the page, like wanting to hold out chords in really fast passages because you wanted to hear them for a long time, or wanting to play layers of discordant rhythms all by yourself, or wanting to be the music you're hearing. i also didn't know that maybe coltrane and hindemith influenced each other. two of my favorite composers. why didn't i clue in to that before?
over the last few months i've tried to simplify, eliminate bad (or, more accurately, unproductive) things from my life. some of this is spurred by necessity (less money, less time), some by good intentions. but i'm scared to take the next step because it probably would be me quitting my unproductive job.
i did buy a digital camera at last. should be arriving in a day or two. what's $25 in shipping when you demand instant (1-day) gratification? so maybe you'll see more pictures or something. something.
posted March 03, 2003 in delivery, music, print