lovely synchronicity
others are reminding patrons that if they return books on time, their records are purged automatically, which must strike library workers as a lovely synchronicity of civil libertarian and housekeeping goals.
- margaret talbot, "subversive reading," new york times magazine september 28, 2003
posted September 28, 2003 in politics, printi don't like liking it
the other people i like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work. sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. but sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven’t heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. and when i found it form (it was an old reggae thing, "happy go lucky girl" by the paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though i was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental ...
maybe i missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of her way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when i was younger, the knowledge that i was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me pathetically grateful. when you’re with someone permanently, you don’t get that: if laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. and when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn’t, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me ...
"you’re just saying that to make me look stupid."
"no, i’m not. i enjoy my work. it’s stimulating, i like the people i work with, i’ve got used to the money … but i don’t like liking it. it confuses me. i’m not who i wanted to be when i grew up."
"who did you want to be?"
"not some woman in a suit, with a secretary and half an eye on a partnership. i wanted to be a legal-aid lawyer with a dj boyfriend, and it’s all going wrong."
"so find yourself a dj. what do you want me to do about it?"
"i don’t want you to do anything about it. i just want you to see that i’m not entirely defined by my relationship with you. i want you to see that just because we’re getting sorted out, it doesn’t mean that i’m getting sorted out ..."
- nick hornby, high fidelity
posted September 27, 2003 in music, printi was right. it worked.
art chantry: i truly believe that in the very best design the hand and mind of the designer is utterly invisible. by this very standard, the extreme stylism of my work is a contradiction to 'quality' design. however, i chose this path very consciously back in the early 1980's, when i first saw what computers were capable of. i quickly realized that if i continued on a true design path, i would be put out of work by a computer program. i figured that in ten to twenty years there would be only, say, 10% of what i was trained to think of as 'graphic designers' left still practicing. these would be the idea people that everybody else would 'emulate'. this is where i wanted to be positioned. the rest of the pack would be 'graphic technicians' or 'graphic decorators' whose job it would be to make things look nice for businessmen. i was right. it worked.
- christopher may, "interview with art chantry," speak up november 18, 2002
posted September 27, 2003 in art, print, speechthe more encumbered our judgment, the better.
the idea of writing about his dilemma came to him in 1980, when as a senior at cornell university, he helped organize a protest at a nuclear reactor in seabrook, n.h.
the protest failed—the plant stayed open—but it caused [william] vollmann to reconsider his position on violence. "i started thinking: if this nuclear plant was as serious a risk to the environment as people claim, would violence have been worthwhile? i started wondering how you would determine that. if you could be pretty sure that this nuclear plant was going to have a meltdown at some point and kill 20,000 people, would you be justified in killing 15,000 people to prevent it? if not, why not?" ...
at the end of the book, he compiles his findings. a 78-page synopsis, dense with disclaimers, caveats, clauses and subclauses, this is mr. vollmann's moral calculus. and in instructing readers how to use it, he reveals just how unwieldy, subjective and conditional a tool it is.
"the best way to apply this calculus to a particular act is to examine the rules for every sort of justification which might possibly be applicable to it," he explains, offering this example: "what claim to righteousness might a palestinian suicide bomber possess? to evaluate that claim, one could apply the calculus to him—and to his enemies—regarding (1) the justifications concerning (a) homeland (b) creed (c) war aims (not neglecting proportionality and discrimination), (d) ground (e) honor and (f) authority; (2) the policies of (a) deterrence, (b) retaliation and (c) punishment, and (3) the fate-invocation of inevitability."
never mind that two people consulting the calculus might well arrive at different conclusions. or that it fails to deliver a definitive answer to the quandary—killing in the name of preventing nuclear holocaust—that prompted the book in the first place. users are apt to get lost just trying to navigate the thicket of categories and subcategories.
"this whole moral calculus is of course insanely impractical," mr. vollmann conceded.
nevertheless, he said, the exercise has value if it gets people to think before they act. "the more encumbered our judgment, the better," he said.
- emily eakin, "novelist's new math: a calculus of violence," new york times september 27, 2003
posted September 27, 2003 in politics, printhuman gems
a utopia i would join in a minute is a society which could be communist or capitalist, anything, except that no woman member of it ever underwent sex unless she was hot. pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it’s a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear ... he had been married twice, each time to a flawless woman, if their photographs were to be trusted. one of them was thai. the pictures of his exes were propaganda: who were you to resist a man who had won such human gems? denoon once said that if martians conquered the earth and ran an ethnic beauty contest to decide who should be given control of the planet on the basis of sheer beauty, it would go to thai women and cretan men. I remember I said speaking for my fellow colleens I am outraged.
- norman rush, "guilty repose," mating
posted September 25, 2003 in print, sexrichard serra's fucking me
wake, blindspot, catwalk, and vice-versa at gagosian gallery, 9/20–10/25/03
once i got fucked by a guy who was not richard serra, and the thing i remember most is the combination of how hard he was pounding me (my legs were over his shoulders and my butt cheeks were bruised the next day) and how gentle his face was (soft eyes, loving kisses). richard serra's four new sculptures, wake, blindspot, catwalk, and vice-versa, opening at gagosian gallery in chelsea, brings back the tender bullet of that brutishness and grace.
gay men and thin women glower when you walk into the chelsea art galleries where they work. it doesn't bother me anymore—ipods are magical at mitigating small talk and greeting, and most gallerinas look away, or duck back into their back offices, or let their tall reception desks obscure them as you walk in—but this art neighborhood can sometimes be a little too prissy for its own good. serra's work, particularly wake, exude masculine sinew; i can imagine an almost chemical reaction between hypermasculine and femininized sensibilities frothing up. it strikes me not just because the exhibit is striking, but because there's a pushed, rough-and-tumble feel, literally from the docks and piers of the hudson river, to the white-walled, tastefully hip scene of the far-west 20s.
luckily gagosian is used to and set up to show beefy art (they hosted serra's torqued spirals, toruses and spheres in october 2001), and while it's pushed to its limits by the four sculptures on display, i can't imagine any other space around here getting away with it. wake, the largest of the sculptures, consists of five pairs of locked toroid forms (each form is 14 feet high, 48 feet long, and six feet wide). it is inescapably nautical, with hull-like torques and skin-like rust suggesting that it hoisted its selves out of the river for this exhibition. blindspot instead references the shipyard, with a spiraling out from a visually elusive center. their scale, especially within the gallery walls, is exquisitely intimidating—forget the neighborhood's sexuality, i too feel a little bit like a wuss when this is towering over me. vice-versa follows similar gestures as wake, with two vertical sheets' slight curves opposing each other to create a corridor. catwalk (reverse camber) cuts its title off with a simple plane laid on the ground, but is the only work on display that diverges from curves and vertical shapes.
to see serra's work is to be humbled by it, but making yourself vulnerable like this also gives you rare opportunities to see the beauty of imposition. the difference between my small body and the sculptures is welcome rather than something to be nervous about it, while the pelvic curves and arcs reaffirm a confident, comfortable relationship with the body. the evident force required to bend steel into submission is in the air, but you can also feel the sensitivity that draws eloquence out of the structures. as if that guy fucking me turned into steel mid-thrust, but maybe metal can be this supple all on its own.
posted September 25, 2003 in art, delivery, printwhere did you learn to screw like that?
"that was the fuck of my life! where did you learn to screw like that?"
"new york, baby!"
- nick waplington and miguel calderon, terry painter, l'artiste: a graphic novel
posted September 24, 2003 in art, sexgood vampire movies are really about sexual submission
good vampire movies are really about sexual submission, good werewolf movies are really about sexual aggression.
- alex pappademas, "a vampires and werewolves dud: fangs but no thangs," village voice september 17, 2003
posted September 24, 2003 in crap, film, print, sexconspiracy of you and your friends
what has kept [stephen] trask going is what he calls his nonmonetary "trust fund," the reservoir of confidence and fearlessness that his parents, a therapist and an auto parts salesman, instilled in him. without it, he says, he would have quit at 28, when his health collapsed from overwork, sleeplessness and hard living. his pragmatic brand of optimism is distilled in a maxim he once heard on the radio: "even though it's not true, you have to think of the world as being run by a conspiracy of you and your friends."
- stephen holden, "the other half of hedwig is film's hottest composer," new york times september 21, 2003
posted September 23, 2003 in music, performance, print, sexi have no more skins.
in a car crash on june 26th, [arshile] gorky's neck was broken and his painting arm was temporarily paralyzed. writhing in traction, he raged at the nurses who urged him to be brave: "why on earth should i be brave? i've spent my whole life making myself tremble like a leaf at whatever happens, and now you want me to be like an unpeeled onion. i have no more skins."
in another encomium, [willem] de kooning made startling use of the future tense: "i tell you one thing, some of his paintings will be much better than some of the ones by picasso, matisse, el greco." the implication is that quality is not inherent in works of art but is something that happens to them.
- peter schjeldahl, "self-made man: how arshile gorky changed art," new yorker september 8, 2003
posted September 22, 2003 in art, print