17 august 2002
right before i woke up i was dreaming, for an hour or so, that i was standing in front of a sundae bar, and i tried a spoonful of one flavor, went to get a cup, and when i came back that flavor had disappeared. i think it was gelato, because i remember hunching over the labels and seeing "crema" be one of the flavors.
another waking thought i had was, what if i made a record and made this the album cover?
mr. rivers had come to art almost by accident. as a young saxophonist in a band playing the resort circuit in maine in 1945, he was shown a book about modern art one day by the band's pianist, jack freilicher.walking up avenue b after twenty minutes with the economist and the stairmaster at the gym, there's a young woman walking her dog. she's got brown hair in a bun and glasses and a t-shirt with STUPID PEOPLE shouldn't BREED handwritten on the back.
"i wanted to say, 'what's cubism?'" mr. rivers recalled in his autobiography, "what did i do?" "but suddenly i knew what cubism was. cubism told a young man from the bronx he didn't know very much. cubism didn't know about him or his nights walking all over greenwich village with his big horn slung over his shoulder looking for a joint where he could sit and blow with a lot of other desperados. cubism certainly didn't smoke pot or get high, cubism was history in which he played no part. where could i catch up?"
- michael kimmelman, "larry rivers, who shook up american art, is dead at 78," the new york times 15 august 2002
14 august 2002
i finished things fall apart this weekend after miraculously getting through a commie pinko third world lit major in school without ever having it on a reading list. perhaps because of that, i feel guilty that i didn't like it. i've read a decent number of african authors and like the non-linear storytelling style that they sometimes exude, but with this one i felt like i read a book and missed some chapters—interesting stories within stories never got finished, characters reached some point of change or threat and then disappeared from the book altogether. i'm not hatin', i'm just saying i wanted more. have anything to say about the book, mr. achebe, or otherwise?
just to keep on my toes, i'm gonna give ulysses a shot. two reasons: my high school english teacher said that it was the one book he couldn't get through, and it's #1 on the modern library 100 best novels of the 20th century (fall was on st. mark's bookshop's additional one hundred). also, because one of the fencers on avenue a was selling a vintage hardback edition for $5.
i'm dying to see blue crush. what's up with that? but i really have wanted to learn to surf for a while now—if i'm gonna admit that moms' side of the family is from hawaii, i oughta at least try to keep it real.
one of the pleasures of the east village is discovering a restaurant that's been sitting across the backyard from your place after all this time, eating an amazing (if pricey) dinner there and being able to see into your third-floor window and wonder what the other patrons have seen over the years.
the n.e.r.d. (i'd bootlegged their mp3s but finally got the album, and the tracks are all different and there's all these little hidden beats or backup vocals or samples going on in them), jack johnson (one of the most beautiful album covers, kinda reminds me of matthew sweet's girlfriend cover), and soon-to-be-released coldplay (any brit band where the new york times refers to their use of ostinatos is a winner in my book) albums all freaking blow me away. hearing them when i get ready for work in the morning and then again when i settle into my tune-out-all-marketing-chicks-and-write-and-design-and-code interior narrative almost make the workweek alright. and for a month/summer/year like this, that's saying a lot.
