wsj: the opposite flaws of trump and mueller
splicetoday: art and capitalism in bentonville
times literary supplement: an authoritative but anti-authoritarian account of 'the dawn of civilization' (review of the great james c. scott's against the grain) [drive]
times higher eduction: teaching beauty and existentialism to the students of now {drive}
larb philosophical salon: western philosophy as white supremacism
wsj: hatred enhances your self-esteem
Rolling pretty good these days!
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for a week or two there i was a reporter, embedded in the monument wars (piece for citylab). there really is some great public art in philly right now; today might be a good one to check out monument lab before the rain hits.
karen olivier, "the battle is joined," in vernon park
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Seriously, I'd like to know who likes Bruce Nauman's work and why, or who actually gets something out of it and what. He's the latest inductee in the suckme Hall of Fame! joining the likes of John Ashbery, Stephen Hawking, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and David Bowie.
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[contd from below] and, since we saw the dome, i am pondering 'the apotheosis of washington' by constantino brumidi (1865). perhaps some of the people on our tour were a bit surprised to see washington approved of by roman gods rather than jesus, for some believe we live in a christian nation. but you'd have to say, looking around the mall, that the imagery is fundamentally pagan: consider lincoln enthroned in his parthenon like a trans athena. the tour guide did his little rap about roman republicanism, and how appropriate this fresco is to the next great republic after rome, etc.
but, when you get the whole thing straight, it's about elevating washington to the status of a god, and the best roman parallel would be...caligula and all those political leaders who claimed and enforced their godhead or that of their predecessors by decree. this sort of worship of human beings goes well beyond paganism into sheer groveling.
the iconographic program is likely based on vasari/zuccari's ceiling for the duomo in florence, which, like the italian renaissance in general, apparently represents a wildly incoherent new religion in which jesus cavorts with the roman gods.
in particular, 'the apotheosis of washington' subs in gw for christ enthroned at the last judgment, which appears at the analogous place in the (much larger) duomo composition. we've gone very far very fast from 'all men are created equal.'
one thing i believe we can safely say: this cannot be an iconography of republicanism.
so this has just fully struck me, but the italian renaissance really did develop a new syncretic religion. however, the combination of christianity with the classical gods is quite literally absurd, on so many grounds i am not going to enumerate them now. ummmm, what did jesus say in the gospels about your little warrior and sex gods etc? or how about the stuff on humility?
i say, looking at it squarely, that the religious beliefs of a michelangelo, as expressed in his work, are an unbelievable historical, conceptual, and spiritual mess. try his apollo/christ on for size. he's back! a big beefy sexy channing-tatum christ who's all geared up for that assignation with venus or mars, or an earth girl of either gender.
it's not that this didn't occur to people at the time, one way or another: martin luther was quite clear about it, i think. or savanarola and sandro botticelli: he realized after awhile that his art had been obviously incompatible with his professed christianity and that of his continent. of course, just seeing clearly the actual iconography does not entail that one starts burning its products. but the tensions would have been hard to miss for anyone, and the reconciliations took a lot of work. they'll take a lot more, because these things are irreconcilable.
this is part of what necessitated a counter-reformation, and one might look at caravaggio's work after the initial wave of pagan/homoerotic images. the depictions of christ and all the associated figures are relentlessly human, peasant, humble, and yet exalted. it is a rechristianizing of art and of catholic europe in the face of the new, flatly heretical religion (which was the religion, mind, of an ultra-corrupt papacy). at that moment, and until we get to the neo-classical phase, we seem to be less in need of flitting cherubim and all the accoutrements of the greek pantheon. the story of jesus is the story of god becoming human, not of humans becoming gods.
of course, just because the belief system underlying it is a farrago of irreconcilable confusions and bizarrely conflicted psychological complexes doesn't mean the art doesn't have something going for it.
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spending new year's in my hometown, dc, with the lovely jane irish. we took a tour of the capitol, because irish is working on baroque ceiling-type paintings and she wanted to see the dome. when i was a kid, you could just walk in and wander around (indeed, when i was 15 or so we cased the joint as thoroughly as we could; the plan was a thorough stinkbombing, making the place uninhabitable.) now it's most regimented and security-oriented experience you could imagine. i really am a knee-jerk anti-authoritarian, and walking with me around downtown dc, i'm afraid, is listening to me make nasty cracks, vicious historical observations, and hostile remarks about each organization/building as we pass.
all the classical temples and the pseudo-classical concrete agency monstrosities have an 'ideological' quality, harped on continuously in our capitol tour guide's tribute to the greatness of our republic and its amazing institutions. but, it's quite like imperial rome: republican decoration and the overwhelming reality of worldwide deathdealing empire.
the headquarters of the fbi, however, is a classic piece of brutalism, and not pseudo-classical at all. it is the most repulsive building near the mall. and it is the only honest one.
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jane sartwell's working on an election project in her photo class. we got some good stuff over the weekend!
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the world's most unreadable magazine is artforum. obviously, i am interested in the relation of art and politics. but artforum is exclusively obsessed by it. well, it's particularly insanely bad in the summer 'art and identity' issue. look, whatever your admirable ideals, the magazine you're publishing is unreadably boring, hectoring, unbelievably repetitive. the politics is apparently entirely unanimous, the range of voices a millimeter wide, and it consists mostly of repeating the same words over and over ('neo-liberalism,' for example). it reads like the writers are all parodying each other and plagiarizing frederic jameson or something. for god's sake i can read actual political theorists; i don't need art and art criticism that is nothing but semi-competent expressions of other people's ideas. and just sayin: i've been bludgeoned by identity politics and neo-late-post-marxism in art galleries and museums for decades, and that's not really why i go. it is so, so tired, so uncreative, so boring, so self-righteous, so grim, so stupid.
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['Accessible, expandable, affordable,' 1989. 36"x36" approx]
my sweetie jane irish, who's in sicily at the moment painting interiors, was living and working on the lower east side in the 1980s, contemporary with, you know, nan goldin and robert mapplethorpe, cindy sherman and barbara kruger, basquiat and haring, koons and schnabel. i feel that her work in that period has been severely under-recognized. she was calling the style 'post-painterly nihilism' (her current work might be termed 'post-colonial rococo'). it is conceptual yet painterly, highly political and highly optical, beautifully rendered and hilarious, very of its moment and also traditional: it should be a paradigm of high post-modernism.
a number of works juxtaposed brutalist or banal american architecture rendered in egg tempera, with parodic yet lovely renoirish oil surrounds. it's a commentary at once on the history of painting and contemporary american culture, making you see both differently.
['It was the best of times,' 1989 36"x36"]
she was particularly obsessed with shea stadium (having gone to school at queens college), though i don't seem to have those images. i think one reason for the neglect is that she is a rather shy and unassuming person, though an incredibly bold artist. but she might have beeen a little hard to notice in a world of wild boys and girls and their big problems. still i think we shouldn't be narrating this segment of art history - now so central, the big figures sainted rock stars - without these paintings.
she used appropriation, text, grid forms, and so on - many elements that came to be understood as central to post-modernism - but folded them all into something resembling traditional painting, which might have been another reason people missed her perfect contemporaneity.
['Penn centre,' 1986. 5'x6']
she was often read through a half-assed freudian structure of phallic and vaginal symbols, masculine and feminine elements. gender is there - fundamentally in a comical way, though also feminist - but this was a sad simplistic distortion.
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as much fun as it is to be floundering around with the alligators in the swamping problem, i think that beauty promises more happiness, whatever that is. what i actually want to blog about is art and books, it may shock you to hear. so i am re-opening a blog i had for a class in 2013: writing the arts. first entry: the hilarious book of the incomparable designer raymond loewy.
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it is a proud tradition of feisty backyard feminism and amazing american art: kitty wells, patsy cline, tammy wynette, loretta lynn, emmylous harris, reba mcentire, patty loveless. miranda lambert is a worthy daughter of this regal line. here i'll prove it to you:
that's a perfect performance of a perfect country song. that whole album is great. buy it. oh, miranda, i ended up giving everything for you and not, as i had planned, for lucinda williams.
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ladies and gentlemen: marques haynes and the fabulous magicians!
the nut graph:
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anyone who likes these and who wants to understand where they're coming from should read six names of beauty. one thing i'll point out: mountains are actually very large stones, and stones are very small mountains. the relationship is not like a picture to its object or motif.
i realize i have been studying and thinking about and teaching about japanese aesthetics for a quarter century. i've sampled calligraphy and ikebana, been seeing in particular all of very rural life in terms of a wabi sabi aesthetics, and i have been teaching about and in my own way trying to practice zen (or, for me, even more fundamentallly) taoism for a very long time very seriously. all these go together with what i think about myself as a cult of the ordinary, and a continuous cultivation of attention. the tao te ching is how i made my peace with the 'spiritual side' of 12-step programs. i call my higher power the tao! i hear the same thing in zen buddhism.
so i love about suiseki that it calls attention to things that are already there, rather than creating new ones. if you simply attend to things that are already there, your art can't be an achievement; you're not doing it in order to score; it's just happening through you. i want people to see these rocks as i do, and i could never in the rest of my lifetime design any of them, and they are just ordinary rocks. for me, they open up a peephole on how infinitely beautiful the universe is and how far beyond human capacities to describe or envision or see clearly. but you see more if you really attend. it requires no hand skills. i was always one of those kids who couldn't draw, had abominable penmanship, and so on. well i'm not drawing or painting here, just drawing things together from the world.
the best introduction i know to japanese aesthetics is mokoto ueda's book literary and art theories of japan, long out of print. get it on inter-library loan! he knows a lot more about this than i do, but i find myself intuiting it or using it confidently and spontaneously by my own lights, and my ability to do this is bringing me great peace and joy even in a time of wild emotional and practical swings.
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more views of mount latimore: "the inexhaustible." now more thoroughly cleaned and still wet.
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when i was working on the wabi-sabi chapter of six names of beauty, i became obsessed with the art of suiseki. i was trying to at least sample all the arts i was writing about, but i wanted this one more than any other. my son sam (12, perhaps) and i had been taking 'nature walks' since he was little; he got excited too and we searched day after day for stones, perhaps came up with a couple of decent ones. i live about 40 miles away from there now, and i suddenly realized: every damn stone in latimore township is a suiseki. jane irish and i were at an abandoned 18th-century quarry yesterday and gathered 40 great stones of all carryable sizes in as many minutes, including wild fossiles and big chunks of petrified wood. but really, a characteristic rock of this region is rounded, glittering quartz in all colors, not geodes exactly but honeycombed with crystal caves. i cannot believe it, really.
i have always wanted to have some visual practice, and i have never been as attracted to any one as much as this. so, i am just beginning. but i am going to explore a latimore-style suiseki thing, with local stone and found trays. here is a very first effort, using some of the most humble stones, only washed, arranged in a minute or two. a foot wide or so.
here are some of the smaller stones.
lake on about a 9" stone:
5" quartz mountain, wet but otherwise untreated:
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by bird at black vulture, fishtown. thanks, bro.
i'll give you a good closeup when the bandage comes off!
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if you're wondering why so much blogging: well, i decided to quit pitching to publications and just recommit to the blog. and then it just started flowing and i was writing again like i once did: a lot, with great pleasure. as zora put it: polishing my sentences with a soft cloth.
alright, even though i love lucinda inordinately, i hated the last album. let me give you my first impression of the ghosts of highway 20. it is incredibly beautiful and wonderful. right she is still sounding pretty depressed (well, the theme is death), but now that is deepening everything. i still want her joy very much, but maybe that's a quality of my fantasy marriage to lucinda williams (sorry, john rawls). (i was always going to heal her; let's say i tried that approach here and there and it wouldn't have worked out.)
on the other hand, speaking of zora neale hurston as well as people whose bodies have actually been in my proximity [let's make it five times altogether counting those two; those are my big loves] i have fallen in love with women because of their art, or partly, or inseparably. sometimes experiencing her music, or her prose style, or her painting, is looking deep into her eyes, but at the same time from her eyes into yourself, for a long time, seeing all the way in, and then you really might fall in love, you know, and it can change the way you hear or see or read things; that's when i've had the biggest changes of perception, as well as the most intense experiences of beauty. there has to be an opening in her art into her. she has to be there, be findable, all of her, in her art, and not even all good artists are, and then you have to be moved by what you find, what is emerging from her and into you, and then you have to somehow pour it back into the world too, toward her if she's really there and right around you both until you are embedded together in the same sweet and bittersweet life. that's when the loss begins.
good heavens lucinda, thank you so much for teaching me that. thank you for expressing it so completely.:
[among other things, that is a perfect country song, and the guitar just kills.]
you can't bring someone joy at a distance, or insist that she be joyful. but maybe being here will make joy possible again. oh my god this is so intensely lovely and sad. and i think she has made the decisive turn: she's pretty ok with the age she is now; she's inhabiting her body as it is now, and thinking about her life elegiacally. (i am a little worried though, because she keeps saying how ready she is to die. maybe those are personae, though. um, i want 16 more albums, so go right on.) man she is writing good poetry in her distinctive way too. i am so happy to be able to say this. maybe this is her best album, though that seems impossible considering what she has done before. she is making me cry again. harder.
i've had a lot of death. and now i can explore its implications for the mandolin. at the moment i first heard 'sweet old world,' my brother had just committed suicide. also i was really in love for the first time, and early in recovery. i was trying to change everything in my life so i wouldn't want to die. i listened to that song hundreds of times. i still love it so much and i can't stand it. i don't know whether to let it play. i might shatter. it is my favorite song. and it is my candidate for 'most beautiful thing in the world.' so when something like that happens it's hard not to start thinking about what the person who wrote that song knows that made it possible for her to write it, and the guts and self-knowledge it took to just write it and record it and let everyone hear it. she didn't make any big show about it, but in that song she just let people see who she was, kind of all the way down. i started thinking about her life, and how if she can say that she must have really been through the shit, something like the same shit, but she understood what it meant and i didn't. and it's not just a piece of writing; it is her actual voice embodying and conveying the life and my life. and it is a beautiful woman's voice, knowing you, healing you by tearing you to shreds. how do you not fall in love? when she is in despair on her next album, you just want to heal her back, with the very things she gave you. you want to teach her the melancholy but total affirmation of life she taught you, because now you can't live without it. plus the whole thing yielded the professional benefit of refuting kant's aesthetics once and for all forever; i got a theory of beauty from it. amazingly, there is a song about her little brother on that album that i swear could be a description of mine.
also, it says that love redeems. you could have said that to me all day every day at that point and i wouldn't have believed it. when she sang it, i started trying to believe it; i knew what i needed to believe if i was ever going to wend my way back to joy. and i did actually fall in love with the person who showed it to me. she could play it on the guitar and sing it ok, and i could do something with it on the harmonica. we played it in the subway one time. then it was really mine and ours. it's the acoustics in there; it's like you're vibrating the whole planet. people threw money, and she paid her rent. at the time, her father was dying. the presents she gave me were clothes she made with her own hands, some of the few things i could never throw away. i don't know where she is.
i can't seem to get exactly what i want on youtube right now, so go stream/download etc 'death came'. ok? 'if my love could kill.' "can't close the door on love.' then go watch the videos on that first post.
[don't worry, i'm clear on the difference between really digging someone's novels and, like, dating her etc. i've never needed to talk to luci, but also have never not been. i've gotten quite a bit of writing out our relationship, though. i remember when i really couldn't stop writing about zora neale hurston; i had to swear off. well, sadly, you do sometimes! one good thing about loving the dead or distant star is that if you fuck around on her, or get a sudden crush, she doesn't even notice. dead women, or distant women you've never met, are polyamorous, which is good because you can't actually cuddle up with them anyway, and you might want that. so, every few years luci might put out a bad album and i might get pretty pissed off and turn to edna st. vincent millay or chrissie hynde for solace, or just to feel like a man. taylor swift would be wrong for an old man like me. i had my mid-life crisis long ago with one of the 5 - but still. dude, have you ever had daughters? that's pretty romantic too, and then you watch them begin to fill the space, and read and sing and write and play and paint and you do those things with them, loving them so much and losing them too as you do, and loving even that you are losing them; that's the job. i'm afraid i'm not going to be able entirely to avoid the cliches on this; sometimes that is what is most particularly true. maybe you don't think so, but i've noticed that all of taylor is in fact in her art. it's a different kind of art, but it has to be.]
i don't know whether i would think lucinda williams was beautiful if i just happened to run into her perched on a barstool somewhere. i have forgotten to think about that at all for the last 20-some years. i know she is beautiful. that is a completely unaffected and unguarded performance. and it is also masterful.
i think that art is one of the best ways we show that the human self is not contained in the skin, that it is assembled bits of other people and broken pieces of the world. maybe as you gather it, you haphazarardly or systematically try to mend. that's what zora kept trying to show us. it's notorious that you can't know what someone is really thinking or feeling; i feel that is false. right, there is no such thing as telepathy; but you're picturing the human mind as this mysterious little box inside the body. when you love a real artist, you see how her mind extends and is available, because it is reshaping and inhabiting the environment you share. sometimes someone's selfhood is remaking your visual environment or filling your house and head with sound. sometimes her words are running through your head, merging with your internal monologue in a kind of counterpoint. also it isn't just mind, is it? it's the physical activity, skill, craft; it's her body too. lucinda's body is singing. i think that's why i've found artists especially compelling and transforming, sexually and lovily and aesthetically and stuff. it's better than telepathy.
yes i'm sorry it is important to me that it is a woman and i think there's something a little different about the way women typically do art; maybe something a little more generous or true or sincere, or a little less filled with preening and ego and armor: those things are isolating rather than enveloping. i want to be enveloped. with the right person, that doesn't make you disappear, it makes you more. or, well, i'm fascinated by women, ok, irritated with men. picasso might be trying to blow you away, control you, or bludgeon you or something. not georgia o'keeffe. richard wright, but not hurston. i believe i know who were the better artists. obviously these are waytoobig generalizations. but i don't actually think anyone's aesthetics are entirely separate from their sexuality, and i think that's good as long as it isn't too oppressive or something. i just don't think it is that surprising that someone like me keeps gravitating back to the art of women - certain women, and i'm definitely not trying to establish a norm or something. i'm just trying to say what this heterosexual love thing is like for me.
[i just watched that 17 times.]
i want to tell you why i am able to do this now. it's because i am loving and being loved by jane irish. she is a painter. we met here and there a couple of times; i liked her vaguely but didn't form that much of an impression. she's kind of a quiet person. then i went to her place. it was filled with art, a whole life, +minimalist sculpture by her lover, the late bill walton, and other stuff. a whole lifetime was in there, like i was surrounded by it, inside it, and it is so beautiful, but so pointed and smart too. then we made love. since then, my taste in visual arts - which i love - has broken wide open. she is taking me to museums and helping me see. for forty years my approach was "if it doesn't look like a vermeer, it sucks.' even i was getting tired of myself.
i'm writing this at a rest stop on pa turnpike, on my way to see her. i don't know what it will be like, because i have spent the last 48 hours crying, listening, yearning. like this is where i always thought i might get, but now that i'm here at the rest stop i don't know whether i'm having a breakdown or reaching the peace i never could have. i could feel this bit by bit. but i could not let myself feel all of it at once. then suddenly after 57 years i couldn't not feel it all: the adam part (fuck, two other brothers too). the judith part. the marion part. the jane and emma part, and the jane part. here it all is in the truest thing i ever wrote, ok? now what?
i really did just set out to write a record review, but every time i have had a new idea, and many times i have had a new feeling, i was actually at that moment typing. writing and thinking and feeling are sort of the same thing for me. the most genuine, most sustained, most various example i can think of like that - the person in all of history who i think thought and felt about writing the most like i do - is zora neale hurston.
they are playing 'passionate kisses' here at the rest stop. i am not kidding. oh dang now they're on steely dan. on the way here my random ipod was hitting everything i couldn't take in just the order i was imagining, like emmylou's version of 'sweet old world' or lucinda and emmylou on 'greenville.'
[update: the second i got down there i knew it was more of a breakthrough than a breakdown. i am in an excellent mood. love redeems, bro! ok i can listen to it now,]
[this entry, really quite the swoon, might be yinyanged with this one.]
i feel the link should be forwarded to all female artists and writers. love.
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addendum. text exchange with my daughter jane, still in process:
[picture of her 15-year-old self in a formal gown]
j: semi-formal tonight!
c: aww baby, got a date?
j: kinda
c: i added a bit about daughter love to that piece.
j: he's more my friend than a real date
aww good.
c: givin' up a name?
j: [actual name here, first time ever!] BUT WE'RE JUST FRIENDS
c: he better not be. christ.
j: hillary clinton won in nevada
c: believe me i saw it. i am coming off my lovefest for all women.
[after that she wasn't responding.]
c: trump wins sc
dance while you can
jeb dropping out
i was sick of him before he began.
baby?
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right now, i'm teaching both the analects of confucius and the republic of plato, as i often do. i think it's worth saying that both of these texts, and the 'golden ages' of human thought in which they emerged, were characterized by extremely fragmented prolitical situations, situations of wars and struggles between small states in close proximity and quick transition. without having done any very elaborate research to try to back this up, i'm going to say it's my impression that periods like that are characterized by creativity and innovation, whereas periods of well-consolidated large nations or empires have the opposite effect. another case: renaissance italy. really, even to try to understand the political landscape of 15th and 16th century on the italian peninsula is crazy. well you get machiavelli and humanism, michelangelo and leonardo and raphael, etc etc.
the roman period in philosophy is often undervalued for its interest and even its originality, but there is no denying that in many ways they were basically ramifying greek ideas and arts. or once china consolidated into an empire, there was far less creative thought, etc. in some ways the reasons are obvious; i do think that both the greeks and the chinese of the spring and autumn and warring states periods had to grapple with different social/political/aesthetic arrangements in close proximity. and if you don't, i don't think you start asking questions like, what is the best political system? also these big nations think they should be running the arts and philosophies, and characteristically take direct measures to establish an official ideology and crush outliers.
so, i'd say, if you want to make, profess, think, create, etc, you should pursue decentralization of political power everywhere all the time. or try this: the state is a force inimical to human thought and art. the more thorough state power, the less thinking and creating takes place. i say i could show that historically. that would be an argument for anarchism, y'all. and if you are casually contemplating a worldstate as our inevitable future, just let it occur to you that that's sort of the end of philosophy and art.
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