Francesca Woodman, a photographer who mostly made black and white photos of herself and others and body parts in the nude, sometimes blurred or obscured. She committed suicide at the age of 22 (wtf). A retrospective of her work (featuring 120 of her some 600 photographs) is going on at the Guggenheim. There is an incredibly comprehensive collection of her work here.
Richard Pryor Addresses A Tearful Nation, from the album Scar by Joe Henry, released in May of 2001.
I found this song through an article from the Paris Review and was attracted by the “slow blues number” label of the song and decided to give it a try. Since then I couldn’t stop listening to the album for the rest of the day (and into the night). I went back to the article and reread it in its (long) entirety.
The author, Sam Stephenson, writes beautifully both about his own encounter with Henry’s music (which to him, cuts deeper than Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft album, both released in hindsight in the context of 9/11 that marked the tone of that year forever) and about Henry’s music in general.
Over the past decade I’ve learned that my immediate transfixion with the Richard Pryor tune was an unusual entry to Henry’s work. His music requires patience; it rewards repeated attention, like writing by Sebald or Anne Carson. There are few hummable hooks or refrains; the seductions must be earned. His lyrics are compassionate, sad, and sometimes devastating, but never confessional; the blows are complex, more ambiguous, easy to feel and hard to see. His lyrics reference epic topics—love, war, and other inexorable plights and disasters—but his subject is the human response to those forces, not the forces themselves.
I’ve never heard of Joe Henry before today, but his wiki page makes him seem like a pretty famous person, a musician that defies different genre boundaries (folk, blues, jazz, rock, country, alternative). Some of his other albums are Civilians and his most recent, Reverie.
Irina Rozovsky photographs Prospect Park in New York
Having a bag of books curated by Pulitzer winner Jennifer Egan
“I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices, I don’t do recreational drugs any more. It was fun while it lasted but it became repetitive. But I did get a lot from it as a subject matter. The point is not to be debilitated by your pleasures. Maybe I have lucky genes or something but I’ve never been truly addicted to anything, except pleasure in general.” -Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and Brightness Falls
“The more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.” -Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, from 50 Pieces of Wisdom From Novels (the other 49 are kind of forgettable)
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shares her favorite records, as does Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain and Death In Venice
In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
A quote by DFW from Bwog’s Senior Wisdom, followed by this conclusion: “Read his books, and lots of other books that are not assigned. You can only study so much before it’s pointless and you should crack open a beer or two (or 5) and a book.”
A website that takes photographs of people reading in the subway with what book they’re reading. Whenever I see them I’m always curious about what they’re reading but feel really awkward about trying to read their cover, so this is really cool!
—Diddy, apparently.
—Claude Lanzmann: a friend to Jean-Paul Sartre and a lover to Simone de Beauvoir, and the director of one of the most important films in the history of cinema that no one has ever seen, Shoah.
“For the conservative of 1987, Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” struck many deserving targets—rock music, sexual promiscuity, the sixties, Black Power, divorce, feminism. Its most distinctive villain, though, was more abstract, a word: “relativism.” This term was already in the air, but Bloom’s huge best-seller both popularized it and gave it philosophical ballast as an accusation, though his own lament was more narrow. Relativism, he said, makes students conformist and incurious. Their supposed open-mindedness closes their actual minds…”
—Hand
Chithra and I saw Black Taxi perform at the Rockwood Music Hall in the LES last night. There were the taking off of shirts, scaling of walls, smashing of megaphones, and body paint on faces involved. We also saw Danny Pudi chilling at the bar there and chatted him up (but stupidly, we apparently couldn’t find anything interesting to say other than the fact that we were big fans), but that really has nothing to do with the fact that now I’m obsessed with their song Hand, from their album We Don’t Know Any Better. It’s funky and cool and catchy and full of attitude. Give it a listen.
If you like it, there is a free download of 3 songs from their album on their website.
This week I watched the pilot episode of Girls, a new show on HBO created by Lena Dunham (I also want to watch her movie Tiny Furniture). At first I thought it started off a little bit frivolously, about spoiled recent post-grads looking for their dream jobs in New York while living off of mom and pop’s money, but then it got really good.
There have been a lot of articles written about the series since it started (and even before it aired), but the most interesting one I thought so far is this article from Vogue that talks about how Lena Dunham might be the Woody Allen of her generation AND makes a jab at Allen at the same time.
“Dunham has often been compared to Woody Allen, and not unreasonably so. Both make movies about the comic tribulations of brainy, plain-looking people who are smarter and more humiliated than those around them. Yet Dunham already seems the more grown-up of the two… not only because she doesn’t romanticize Manhattan… Most important, she doesn’t duplicate Allen’s brand of adolescent fantasy in which his schlemielish alter ego, even as he ages into his 70s, keeps landing sexy women.”
Haha. I haven’t seen a lot of Woody Allen but now I want to. (Also, how has Lena Dunham made a Criterion Collection movie, a TV series, and yet IS ONLY 25?!??!?!)
Tomás Saraceno is coming to the roof of the MET on May 15!
I went to the Whitney Biennial this weekend. After reading about all its hype on hip and happenin’ culture websites, I was really excited about the visit, especially about this one floor dedicated solely to a series of performance artists.
Maybe I went on a wrong day, but the performance was not that interesting and featured a transvestite in the middle of a murder mystery. Trying too hard. A lot of the exhibits too were weird and too random for me. They had a room dedicated to some paintings by Forrest Bess, an eccentric artist from a tiny, remote place called Chinquapin Bay, Texas who believed that becoming a hermaphrodite was the key to immortality. So he drank a shitload of beer, performed surgery on his own genitals, and then took some pictures and sent them to President Eisenhower. A lot of his stuff is on display at the Menil Collection in Houston.
The one thing I really liked was a (kind of) film made by Werner Herzog, a German director, about the art of Hercules Segers, a relatively obscure Dutch artist who worked in the 1500-1600s, but whose style of landscapes was really different from the typical stuff that was made during that time period. Here are some of his drawings:
I really love this one: The Two Trees
Ship on a Stormy Sea
I’m really excited about the playoffs this year! OKC, Boston, even Chicago and Miami. I just can’t wait to see a good team really take a sucker punch to the balls and lose. I would love it if the lake show lost the grizzlies or something like that, or if Miami loses to the Bulls, or the other way around. I just really want one of those two teams to lose.. maybe I want to see derrick rose cry tears of sadness instead of joy.
P.S. Players drink the haterade too.
[Update] OMG I feel like this post is so inappropriate now in light of what’s happened. I wanted Derrick Rose to go down fighting, not due to an injury because of the compressed season that’s allowed no player any rest.
(Source: nba-4-life)
I went to the Brooklyn Museum last weekend for the Keith Haring exhibit, among other things. Keith Haring was this gay artist guy from New York who created a lot of drawings and collages and sculptures that revolved around penises and UFOs and pigs. He also made a lot of drawings in the New York City subways to protest against commercialism and later died of AIDS-related complications.
His stuff was kind of freaky and weird, but his sketches are mad cool.
This is a great segway into another artist on exhibit at the museum, Rachel Kneebone, a sculptor from Oxfordshire, who was also into crafting human nether regions. The exhibition was called “Regarding Rodin” and contrasted her sculptures with those of Rodin, whose work showed a similar preoccupation with the human body.
This one’s called “The Dream.” Don’t we all just dream of penises on legs.
The coolest thing by far that she made is this huge, round sculpture called “The Descent,” which was inspired by Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell.” It has all these freaky deeky shaped half-people falling into a huge hole.
Imagine if we looked like that.
Shit going down in hell.
I finished Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys a few weeks back. The novel takes place during the course of one extraordinarily hectic weekend during which a self-destructive middle-aged novelist, Professor Grady Tripp, manages to ruin two marriages, cause the death of a boa constrictor and a dog, save a student’s life, attend a disastrous seder and a chaotic writers’ conference, and lose the only copy of his manuscript. Here are some quotes I liked:
I drank for years, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.
Although it wasn’t raining anymore the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze. A fine mist of light hung in a cloud around the Gasketll’s illuminated house. I could see the panes of Sara’s greenhouse glinting black in the distance like wet iron.
“Oh, yeah,” said James, blushing a little—but only a little. he was feeling all tender and well-fucked and strange, you could see, crepey and delicate as the unfurling petal of a flower.
There was nowhere on earth I wanted to drive, but that was not the same thing as having a good reason to stay.
We stood there for a minute, a mangy, overweight purblind minotaur and a broken-down and toothless Theseus with a shaky shooting hand, facing each other at the common center of our disparate labyrinths. The wind had picked up considerably and the air around us was filled with dust devils and rattling gusts of rubbish.
The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight—and if possible operate complicated machinery—while immense shrieking nebulae are coming asunder in his brain. To fail at this—to be found out—carries a mysterious burden of anxiety and shame.
It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.
