#portrait of sunday with his most and least favorite birds

[fishkisst]

Do, Re, and Me

[gagosiangallery]

Richard Prince at Gagosian Beverly Hills

January 15, 2020

RICHARD PRINCE New Portraits Opening reception: Thursday, February 6, 6–8pm February 6–March 21, 2020 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills __________ In 1984 I took some portraits. The way I did it was different. The way had nothing to do with the tradition of portraiture. If you wanted me to do your portrait, you would give me at least five photographs that had already been taken of yourself, that were in your possession (you owned them, they were yours), and more importantly . . . that you were already happy with. You would give me the five you liked and I would pick the one I liked. I would rephotograph the one I liked and that would be your portrait. Simple. Direct. To the point . . . Foolproof. I started off doing friends. Peter Nadin. Anne Kennedy. Jeff Koons. Cookie Mueller. Gary Indiana. Colin de Land.

They didn’t have to sit for their portraits. They didn’t have to make an appointment and come over and sit in front of some cyclone or in front of a neutral background or on an artist’s stool. They didn’t have to show up at all. And they wouldn’t be disappointed with the result. How could they? It wasn’t like they were giving me photos of themselves that were embarrassing.

Social Science Fiction.

Another advantage was the “time line.” If you were in your sixties and you gave me a photograph that had been taken thirty years earlier, and that’s the one I chose, your portrait ended up in a kind of time machine. I couldn’t go forward, but I could go backward. Vanity. Most of the people I did liked the younger version of themselves. So the future didn’t really matter. Half of H. G. Wells was better than no half at all.

Who knew?

After friends, I did people I didn’t know.

I had access to Warner Bros. Records and their publicity files. The files were filled with 8 × 10 glossies of recording stars that they had under contract. How I had access is beside the point. It was a long time ago. Let’s just say an A&R guy gave me access, “permission.”

I spent time in their LA headquarters, in Burbank, and went thru the metal cabinets and took the “publicities” I wanted, took them home, put them in front of my camera, and made a new photograph. The first one I did was Dee Dee Ramone.

I did Tina Weymouth, Tom Verlaine, Jonathan Richman, Laurie Anderson. I did the two girls from the B-52s.

Not knowing these people, having never met them, or talked to them, but still being able to do their portraits, excited me. Satisfaction. I spent weeks in the basement of Warner Bros. I thought I had an advantage. My method, if you could call it that, was far more flexible than the regular way portraits were taken. I didn’t need a studio. A darkroom. A receptionist. A calendar. Makeup. Stylists. I didn’t have to deal with agents or the “personality,” good or bad, of the sitter. My overhead was minimal and I could do the portrait all by myself.

By myself. That was the best.

Why I Go To The Movies Alone.

At first I thought this could be a business.

Up till then none of the art that I was making sold . . . or sold enough to make a living. I had just quit my job at Time Life the year before and was trying to make a go of it living near Venice Beach in LA . . . sharing a house with three roommates and living off the occasional sales that Hudson, my friend from Chicago, would make selling my “cartoon” drawings.

This idea of a “portrait business” made sense to me. Who wouldn’t want their portrait done this way?

I continued to do friends. Paula Greif. Dike Blair. Meyer Vaisman. I did everybody’s portraits for Wild History, a book that I put together for Tanam Press of downtown writing. The author’s portrait accompanied their contribution. Wharton Tiers. Spalding Gray. Tina L’Hotsky.

By the end of ’84 it was over.

I’m not sure if it was the lack of interest in me, or in others. (My energy evaporated.) Maybe it was the inability to convince people to commit to a commission. It was a good idea, but after doing about forty of them, I put them in a drawer and moved on. Bored? Restless? I don’t know. Let’s just say it didn’t take off.

Leave it at that.

My cartoon drawings turned into jokes and the jokes started taking up everything. In the end, I think most people would rather have their portrait done by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Thirty years. Time passes.

The social network.

I looked over my daughter’s shoulder and saw that she was scrolling thru pictures on her phone. I asked her what she was looking at. “It’s my Tumblr.” “What’s a tumbler?” I asked.

That was . . . four years ago?

About three years ago I bought an iPhone. Someone had shown me the photographs you could take with the phone. I had given up taking pictures after they got rid of color slide film. I tried digital, but couldn’t make the adjustment. I never liked carrying a camera and was pretty much inkjetting and painting anyway . . . so the idea of using a big boxy camera with all its new whistles and bows wasn’t for me.

Enter the sandman.

The iPhone was just what I needed. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to point and shoot. You didn’t have to focus. You didn’t have to load film. You didn’t have to ASA. You didn’t have to set a speed. The clarity . . .

I could see for miles.

The photos you took were stored in the phone. And when you wanted to see them, they appeared on a grid. The best part: you could send a photo immediately to a friend, to an e-mail, to a printer . . . or, you could organize your photos, like my daughter had, and post them publicly or privately.

When worlds collide.

I asked my daughter more about Tumblr. Are those your photos? Where did you get that one? Did you need permission? How did you get that kind of crop? You can delete them? Really? What about these “followers?” Who are they? Are they people you know? What if you don’t want to share? How many of your friends have Tumblrs?

What’s yours is mine.

My daughter’s “grid” on Tumblr reminded me of my Gangs I did back in ’85 . . . where I organized a set of nine images on a single piece of photo paper and blew the paper up to 86 × 48. The gangs were a way to deal with marginal or subsets of lifestyles that I needed to see on a wall but not a whole wall. Each gang was its own exhibition. Girlfriends, Heavy Metal Bands, Giant Waves, Bigfoot Trucks, Sex, War, Cartoons, Lyrics . . . were all rephotographed with slide film, and when the slides returned, they were “deejayed” and moved around on a custom-made light box until the best nine made the cut. The “cut” was then taped together (the edges of the slide mounts were pushed up against each other and Scotch-taped), the nine taped slides were sent to a lab where an 8 × 10 internegative was made, and from the internegative the final photo was blown up. I’ve probably lost you. Technical stuff . . . application and technique. Sometimes it’s better to leave the “background” out of it. Better to “take it for granted.” Why should I care how a photograph is made?

Only sometimes.

How was it called back then? Sampling?

Primitive now, but back then . . . 50-inch photo drums were few and far between. The paper was 50 inches wide and came in a huge roll. If you wanted to, you could take a roll and roll it down the street, roll it down the sidewalk, roll it all the way down the West Side Highway.

Shakespeare’s in the alley?

No. Philip Roth is in the alley.

Joan Didion is in the alley.

Don DeLillo is in the alley.

What’s up, pussycat?

There’s a lot of cats on Instagram. Food too.

And there’s tons of photos of people who take photographs of themselves. (Yes, I know the word.)

On the gram. I was just asked why I like Instagram. I said, “Because there’s rules. And if you break the rules, you get kicked off.”

I got to Instagram thru Twitter.

Twitter first.

I’m not sure when I first started tweeting, but I liked trying to fit a whole story into 140 characters.

I call it Birdtalk.

I used to bird in the early ’90s for Purple magazine and birded in my first catalogue for Barbara Gladstone in ’87.

Short sentences that were funny, sweet, dumb, profound, absurd, stupid, jokey, Finnegans Wake meets MAD magazine meets ad copy for Calvin Klein. Think Dylan’s Tarantula. Then think some more and think Kathy Acker’s Tarantula.

Or, don’t think at all. I know I don’t.

Sometimes.

Sometimes I write down the first sentence that starts off my favorite novel.

Relative. I’m not much of a theory guy. But sometimes I think there was a reason why Einstein was a technical assistant in the Swiss patent office.

Let me fill your cup.

Twitter accepts photos, but is mainly text-based. I like to combine the two and tweet both photo and text.

I called the photo/text tweets I was posting . . . “The Family.”

I posted photos of my extended family . . . mother, brother, sister, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts, in-laws, stepchildren, boy- and girlfriends. I would caption the photos with a short description of who, what, why . . . measuring my words so that they fit into the guidelines of the platform.

After posting the photo/text, I sent the information to my printer and inkjetted an 11 × 14 print of the marriage. I made thirty-eight “Family” tweets.

Distribution.

I placed each “Family” tweet in a plastic sleeve and pushpinned the sleeve to the wall. The wall was at Karma. I put all thirty-eight up. Salon style. It was Saturday. The doors opened at 12 pm. By 12:15 pm all thirty-seven were gone. One to a customer. I kept the one that had my father, mother, and sister in it. (My father and mother were naked, and my sister was sitting in between. My family wasn’t like yours. Hobnob doesn’t begin to describe them.) I sold the “Family Tweets” for $12 each. First come, first served.

Well, well, well . . .

In ma ma ma my wheeeeeeeel house.

I used to stutter. By the ninth grade, the sparkle was in my eye. It got so bad, the impediment turned me into a clam. I slept all day, every day. I wouldn’t get up until Sunday. I waited for Bonanza to come on the TV. I loved the cowboy father and his three sons.

Two summers ago, my niece was working for me out on Long Island and she showed me how to screen save. I didn’t know about the option. What other options don’t I know about?

Screen Save.

This might be one of the best applications in an apparatus that I’ve ever encountered. All-time. Hall of fame. First place. Just what I need. MORE photographs.

Hey kids . . . what time is it?

Now I have a theory.

I was beside myself.

Congratulations.

This past spring, and half the summer, the iPhone became my studio. I signed up for Instagram. I pushed things aside. I made room. It was easy. I ignored Tumblr, and Facebook had never interested me. But Instagram . . .

I started off being RichardPrince4.

I quickly recognized the device was a way to get the lead out. If Twitter was editorial . . . then Instagram was advertising.

A gazillion people.

Besides cats, dogs, and food, people put out photos of themselves and their friends all the time, every day, and, yes, some people put themselves out twice on Mondays. I started “following” people I knew, people I didn’t know, and people who knew each other. It was innocent. I was on the phone talking to Jessica Hart and had just looked at her “gram” feed before picking up the phone. I asked about a picture she posted of herself standing in front of a fireplace wearing what looked to be ski clothes and big fur boots. The post was in black and white, head to toe, full figure, and behind her, above the mantel, there was a portrait of Brigitte Bardot. I told her someone should make a portrait out of this photo. She said, “Why don’t you?”

Come to think of it.

I’m not sure if she knew about my Family Tweets. She might have. I think we even talked about them after she came to my studio for a visit. After I got off the phone, I thought about her suggestion: “Why don’t you?”

I went back to her feed and screen saved her “winter” photo. I sent the save to my computer, pressed “empty subject,” pressed “actual size,” and waited for it to appear in a doc, checked the margins and crop, clicked on the doc, and sent it to my printer. My inkjet printer printed out an 11 × 14-inch photo on paper . . . I took the photo out of the tray and put it on my desk.

Looking at Jessica’s feed reminded me of 1984. Except this time I had more than five photos to choose from. I went back to her feed a second time. I scrolled thru maybe a hundred photos she had posted and looked at all the ones that included her. The one in front of the fireplace was still the best.

Walk on.

Jessica had tons of followers. Thousands. And a lot of them had “commented” on what she posted. I read all the comments that had been posted under her fireplace photo. There was one comment I wish I could have gotten in my original screen save. When you screen save an Instagram image, you can get maybe three, four comments in the save if you include the person’s “profile” icon that appears on the upper left of the page. I decided early on I wanted the person’s icon to be part of the save. But what else could I save?

I went back to my desk and kept staring at the printout of Jessica. What do I do now?

I didn’t want to paint it.

I didn’t want to mark it.

I didn’t want to add a sticker.

Whatever I did, I wanted it to happen INSIDE and before the save. I wanted my contribution to be part of the “gram.” I didn’t want to do anything physical to the photograph after it was printed.

Five cents.

I went back to the comment.

I commented on Jessica’s photo in front of the fireplace, but my comment was one of hundreds and showed up outside, way down at the bottom . . . out of the frame.

If I wanted my comment to show up near her picture . . . how?

I got lucky.

I’m terrible when it comes to the tech side of technology. But somehow I figured out how to hack into Jessica’s feed and swipe away all her comments and add my own so that it would appear under her post. The hack is pretty simple and anyone can do it. You hit the gray comment bar and pick a comment you don’t want and swipe with your finger to the left, and a red exclamation mark appears. You press on the exclamation mark and four things come onto the bottom of your screen.

1. Why are you reporting this comment?

2. Spam or Scam

3. Abusive Content

4. Cancel

To get rid of the comment, you click on Spam or Scam. It’s gone. Just like that I could control other people’s comments and Jessica’s own comments. And the comment that I added could now be near enough to Jessica’s photo that when I screen saved it, my comment would “show up.” Make sense? It’s about as good as I can do. What can I say? Einstein and cuckoo . . .

So now . . .

So now I was in.

Waiting to follow.

Richardprince4 would appear at the bottom of Jessica’s final portrait. My comment, whatever it would be, would always be the last comment. The last say so. Say so. That’s good. That could work. My “in” was what I ended up saying. And what I would say would be everything I ever knew . . . what I knew now and what I would know in the future.

Tell Me Everything.

Finnegans Wake meets MAD magazine.

Zoot Horn Rollo. You seem to be where I belong (emoji).

The first three portraits I did were of women I knew. Or almost knew. Jessica, I knew. Pam Anderson, I knew. Sky Ferreira? I didn’t know, but was following her and had been reading about her new album and seeing posters of her album broadsided on sheets of ply on the Bowery and on Lafayette near Bond. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or why I chose these three. I just had lunch with Pam and had seen Jessica in LA. Sky, I was following because she seemed interesting. There was nothing more. No attraction. No fan. No desire. No date. No wanting anything from her. And the pictures she posted were candid, boozy, and seemed to be letting the viewer in on some kind of backstage diary. She also had thousands of people following her, and I could tap into her followers and follow them. I can do that? I didn’t even know I could follow the followers. Like I said, the hardware was all new . . . and I was just getting started.

The shoreline is never the same. (Like it should be.)

When I first started getting rid of comments, I thought the person whose comments I was getting rid of might get pissed. “What happened to all my comments?” I found out quickly that “the getting rid of” only affected my feed. The deleted comments didn’t affect the followers’ feeds. Their comments were still there even though they were gone from mine. All that happened is that MY comment showed up below their photo. Was I allowed? Yes. I guess so. It’s hard to explain. But the process is open, and at the moment, it’s the way it works and anyone and everyone can do it.

The language I started using to make “comments” was based on Birdtalk. Non sequitur. Gobbledygook. Jokes. Oxymorons. “Psychic Jujitsu.”

Some of the language came directly from TV. If I’m selecting a photo of someone and adding a comment to their gram and an advertisement comes on . . . I use the language that I hear in the ad. Inferior language. It works. It sounds like it means something. What’s it mean? I don’t know. Does it have to mean anything at all? I think about James Joyce confessing to Nora Barnacle. I think about opening up to page 323 of Finnegans Wake. Then I think about notes and lyricism. Policy. Whisper. Murmurs. Mantra. Quotation. Advice.

Chamber Music.

Didn’t Duke Ellington say, “If it sounds good, it is good”? He did say that, didn’t he?

Who are these people?

Larry Clark, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe take great portraits. I’ve watched Larry take photos and I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I could never go up to a stranger and ask them if I could take their picture. I’ve done it maybe two or three times and didn’t enjoy it. That part of art is in Larry. It isn’t in me. I feel more comfortable in my bedroom looking thru Easyriders and poring over pictures of “girlfriends” that are right there on the page. Page after page. Looking. Wondering. Anticipating. Hoping. What will be on the next page? Will I find a girlfriend that I really like? That’s my relationship with what’s out there. It’s as close as I want to get. That’s what’s in me.

IG is a bedroom magazine.

I can start out with someone I know and then check out who they follow or who’s following them, and the rabbit hole takes on an out-of-body experience where you suddenly look at the clock and it’s three in the morning. I end up on people’s grids that are so far removed from where I began, it feels psychedelic. Further. I’m on the bus. I feel like I’m part of Kesey’s merry tribe. I’m reminded of Timothy Leary’s journals, which I purchased years ago from John McWhinnie, and the concentration that came over me when I discovered his hand-drawn map of his escape from jail. How he literally shimmied on a wire that had been strung up from an outer utility building to the perimeter prison wall . . . and how I would trace with my finger his overland express to Tangier, where he hooked up with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and spent the next year seeking asylum in different parts of North Africa, ultimately ending up in Switzerland where his ex-wife ratted him out, and how fighting extradition took up the rest of his life. Wow, now it’s four in the morning.

Tune In, Turn On, Come Out.

“Trolling.”

If you say so.

I never thought about it that way. The word has been used to describe part of the process of making my new portraits. I guess so. It’s not like I’m on the back of a boat throwing out chum.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Included.

Everyone is fair.

Game.

An even playing field.

“Outside my cabin door. Said the girl from the red river shore.”

Men. Women. Men and women. Men and men. Women and women. Blacks Whites Latinos Asian Arabs Jews Straights Gays Transgender. Tattoos and scars. Hairy.

I don’t really know the score.

The ones I adore.

I just know where I belong.

“Oh, there I go. From a man to a memory.”

How do I tell you who or why I pick? I can’t. It would be like telling you why I pick that joke. WHY THAT ONE? There’s thousands of jokes. I read them all. It takes days to read just one joke book. 101 of the World’s Funniest Jokes. Days. If I get one, find one, like one, out of the 101, it’s a good day.

People on IG lead me to other people. I spend hours surfing, saving, and deleting. Sometimes I look for photos that are straightforward portraits (or at least look straightforward). Other times I look for photos that would only appear, or better still . . . exist on IG. Photos that look the way they do because they’re on the gram. Selfies? Not really. Self-portraits. I’m not interested in abbreviation. I look for portraits that are upside down, sideways, at arm’s length, taken within the space that a body can hold a camera phone. What did de Kooning say? “When I spread my arms out, it’s all the space I need.”

At first I wasn’t sure how to print the portrait. I tried different surfaces, different papers. Presentation? Frame? Matt? Shadowbox? I tried them all. Finally this past spring my lab introduced me to a new canvas, one that was tightly wound, a surface with hardly any tooth. Smooth to the touch. Almost as if the canvas were photo paper. It was also brilliantly white. I don’t think it could be any whiter. And . . . the way the ink jetted into the canvas was a surprise. It fused in a way that made the image slightly out of focus. Just enough. The ink was IN and ON the canvas at the same time. When I first saw the final result, I didn’t really know what I was looking at. A photographic work or a work on canvas? The surprise was perfect. Perfect doesn’t come along very often. The color that had been transferred from the file of the computer to the jet, from jet to canvas, was intense, saturated, rich. If someone I followed had blue hair, their hair looked like it had been dyed directly onto the canvas. Dye job. Rinsed. Beauty salon. It was brilliant, great color. You might call it “vibrant.” The vibe between the image and the process was “sent away for,” seamless, effortless . . . all descriptions I used to use when I tried describing my early “pens, watches, and cowboys.” (Has it really been forty years?) The ingredients, the recipe, “the manufacture,” whatever you want to call it . . . was familiar but had changed into something I had never seen before. I wasn’t sure it even looked like art. And that was the best part. Not looking like art. The new portraits were in that gray area. Undefined. In-between. They had no history, no past, no name. A life of their own. They’ll learn. They’ll find their own way. I have no responsibility. They do. Friendly monsters.

Speak for yourself.

To fit in the world takes time.

For now, all I can say is . . . they’re the only thing I’ve ever done that has made me happy.

http://www.richardprince.com/writings/bird-talk

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[crimsonblackrose]

One of the first things that I learned when I picked up all my passes at the Big Bus information office was that the Louvre required a reservation. The museum is always busy so making a reservation online is highly suggested. For general admission or special exhibits check here. Since I had a museum pass I picked a time slot and filled out the forms here. Because I was so tired rather than make my reservation at 9am like I had planned I made it for 9:30am. I didn’t have any difficulty getting the date or time I wanted, which is lucky. I also was in Paris during the off season. I was sent an e-mail with the information for my pass and then I screenshot it so that I could show it to the guards when I arrived. I highly suggest doing this just to make your life easier. You enter via the glass pyramid.

My plan for my second full day in Paris included cramming three museums into one day. So I had a goal of just seeing the highlights in the Louvre. Anything else I managed to see would be a bonus. The main goal was to, of course, find the Mona Lisa.  But first, because I’d gotten such a late start and then felt rushed to be at the Louvre exactly at 9:30 so I wouldn’t miss my spot I hadn’t eaten. So within the Louvre I popped into a cafe right before going through with my museum pass and quickly ate a brioches suisses which was absolutely delightful. Brioches suisses is a french bread (brioche) with chocolate chips and vanilla custard in the middle. There wasn’t any seating within the cafe but there was some seating outside of it under a pillar with tables every couple of feet. So I sat there to eat my breakfast before going through with my museum pass to enter the actual Louvre. I felt the same sort of rush that I felt when trying to get into Harry Potter at USJ the first time.

While some highlights are included on the map so you can easily make a goal of what to see, others are not. On my way to find the Mona Lisa I ran into a couple famous statues.

First was the Venus de Milo or Aphrodite from 100 BC which is located in the Sully wing on the ground floor in the Parthenon room (room 346).

Then in one of the stair cases on my way to the Mona Lisa I found the Winged Victory of Samothrace which is thought to be from 190 BC and is located in the Denon Wing on the ground floor in the staircase (room 703).

If you’re lost and looking for it just ask because the “gallery” it’s in is the Winged Victory of Samothrace stairwell. 

Mona Lisa is an Italian painting also known as Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo by Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was located in the Denon wing on the first floor in the Mona Lisa Room (room 711) Please note that sometimes it moves.

You don’t get much time with the Mona Lisa. It’s probably one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre, let alone maybe THE most popular part of the Louvre in general. To deal with crowds they’ve created a line with two entrances, you can either go up to the left or you can go up to the right and then security will give you a couple minutes to take a few photos before sending you on your way. While the rest of the Louvre is set up so you can sit and take in the paintings and sculptures due to the large amount of people who want to see Mona Lisa it is not possible. In the grand scheme of things when I visited it probably wasn’t that busy. The line didn’t spill out past at least half way through the winding ropes they’d made for the queue.

The Louvre actually doesn’t insure the Mona Lisa. And no one knows how much it’s worth. It’s one of the world’s most famous paintings and instead the Louvre puts it’s money towards protection for it. The Mona Lisa has been stolen, someone’s tried to graffiti it and someone else has tried to throw a rock at it. Security seems to be a better idea then insuring it anyway.

Because I was in the area, an area of vast paintings I decided to stop and taken in July 28. Liberty Leading the People a painting I remember seeing often in my high school French classes.  the painting is by Eugène Delacroix and is located in the department of paintings near Mona Lisa. No matter how many times I saw it in my French book or online I never realized just how massive of a painting it was.

After checking out a couple other giant paintings in the area I stopped at the in-Louvre cafe for a special Louvre tea called thé du Louvre Côté Cour: Courtyard tea. The little pouch the tea came in was quite pretty and the area around The Café Mollien was beautiful.

If you’re there I highly suggest trying to get a window seat. They’re the most popular and even though the cafe wasn’t busy all of those seats were taken when I visited. They have a stunning view and during the summer the terrace is open so you can enjoy your drink or snacks outside while enjoying the view of Cour Napoléon and the garden.

After a nice tea break I went off in search of more art. My main goals were to see The Coronation of Napoleon , Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, and The Lamassu. 

The Coronation of Napoleon, also known as The Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I and the Crowning of the Empress Joséphine in Notre-Dame Cathedral on December 2, 1804 was quite easy to find. It was painted by Jacques-Louis David and is located in the Denon Wing on the first floor in Daru, room 702.

The painting was mentioned on the tour of Versailles, about how the painting was requested done by Napoleon with some subtle changes. Some things including his mother who refused to attend being painted in the background. It shows Napoleon crowning his wife as Empress after being crowned himself.

The Lamassu was also quite easy to find though a bit further away. They’re located in the Richelieu wing on the ground floor in the Mesopotamia, Assyria Khorsabad section in room 229.

The Lamassu  are protective genies that guard entrances in Dur Sharrukin which is now in modern day Khorsabad, northern Iraq. These creatures are part man, part bird and part bull and known as shedu or lamassu.

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss  however I had an awful time trying to find. The reason why is because the museum is broken up into three main wings. The Richelieu, Sully, and Denon. I had gone down to the ground floor on the Richelieu side and thought I was crossing through Sully and into Denon, but in reality what I was doing was walking in circles around a statue courtyard in the 200’s rooms of the Richelieu. It took me awhile to figure it out. Too long. Embarrassingly too long. I didn’t realize the grey space in the center of Richelieu map was a courtyard. I thought it was the main one with the pyramid. And I couldn’t figure out how to cross over. It was very frustrating. I’ve circled on the map of the ground floor below the area in which I kept walking in circles.

Eventually I asked security for directions and they told me I had to leave and re-enter. Apparently you can do that, at least twice. So I popped out, went back into the main lobby, scanned for the Denon wing and went back in.

I think in other areas and on other floors it’s easy to travel between the three wings, but for some reason when I got down to the ground floor I had an awful time of it. But I did eventually find Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss which is located in the Denon wing on the ground floor in the Michelangelo gallery in room 403.

I saw a lot of other really cool things as I rushed around. I’ll make sure to list the wing, level, and room number for each of them if you click on the image or below it.

Daphnis et Chloé by François Gérard Denon Wing 1st floor Mollien room 700

I think the Louvre is massive. The way you’re suppose to enjoy art is to sit with it and take it in, but I think because of the Louvre if there’s a lot you want to see in a short period of time it makes it difficult. I think because I was also trying to run around on my Museum pass before it expired I felt extra pressure to rush, which isn’t the way you’re suppose to enjoy a museum let alone art. If you have more time I think it’ll be better.

My favorite part of the museum was really seeing other people enjoying it. The amount of artists I saw camped out in the Louvre sketching the sculptures just instilled something warm and fuzzy in me. I wanted to grab a notebook and join them, like I did in my high school art trips. But I just felt like there was no time.

Crown of Louis XV: Denon wing, 1st floor Galerie d’Apollon Room 705

The Louvre is open from Wednesday through Monday. They are closed on Tuesdays, January 1st, May 1st and December 25th. On Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays they are open from 9am until 6pm. On Wednesdays and Fridays they are open from 9am until 9:45pm. Double check online that they are open and their hours before you go. When I went the strikes were happening so they warned that some rooms/galleries might be closed and that the museum might close early. It’s considered fastest to book your tickets online ahead of time and to arrive in the morning.

Hercules, Dejanira and the Centaur Nessus Richelieu wing 1st floor Rotonde Jean Boulogne Room 526

Grand sphinx Sully wing Lower ground floor Crypt of the Sphinx Room 338

The Athena of Velletri

Attached to the Louvre is also a mall like area called Carrousel du Louvre. There’s a food court here with a McDonalds and various other restaurants as well as shopping. I grabbed a late lunch here, debating between different things because all I needed/wanted to do was find a corner to sit in and charge my wifi buddy because it had died suddenly. (The fuse at my hotel had blown for all my outlets so nothing had charged, I didn’t realize it until that night) I wandered around the food court trying to decide what I should get. I felt like I had to get French food, even though there were other options and it had a long line. The McDonalds had more available seating and less of a wait and while McDonalds tends to be better in any country outside of the U.S. it felt like a bad choice for my limited amount of time in France. I hadn’t even scratched the surface of my dream food list.

quiche lorraine set 13.60 euro

So I got in line, looked at what they had and ordered a quiche lorraine. It came with a salad that I didn’t particularly want but couldn’t turn down because it was a set. It only came with one type of dressing, an oil and balsamic dressing that needed to be shaken up. They took it off the bar and popped my quiche back into an oven to reheat. During my trip I had two quiche lorraines, both had to be reheated and came inexplicably with a side salad with the same oil and balsamic dressing. This was the better of the two.

The Carrousel du Louvre is open Wednesday through Monday from 10am until 8pm. On Tuesdays they are open from 11am until 7pm.

“Artemis with a Doe” Sully wing Ground floor Salle des Caryatides Room 348

Hercules Wrestling Achelous Room 105, Richelieu wing

galerie d’apollon

    The Louvre One of the first things that I learned when I picked up all my passes at the Big Bus information office was that the Louvre required a reservation.

[acollectionofcontemplations]

Memories That You Call Home

They say “home is where the heart is”. My heart was born and raised at the Hampton's, and when my family lost everything and were forced to move out half way across the state, it didn't come with me. If home is where the heart is, then my home is the three-story house at the end of Arcadia drive.

With most of our belongings moved into the Brooklyn flat, Arcadia is quiet and empty. Mom tells us we’re only staying downtown temporarily until dad finds his bearings again, but I know better than to keep my hopes up. They’ve already listed the house for sale; it’s only a matter of time before someone else falls in love with the place and moves in. I wouldn't blame them if they did, it’s beautiful. I keep telling myself I just need time to adjust, but even the simplest details of living in that place - like not being able to hear the ice-cream truck drive by every Sunday afternoon - breaks my heart.

Looking out the window of the train, I zoom past landscapes at 80 miles per hour on my way back to Arcadia - the rising sun casting an orange glow on the forest and open space. I told myself before leaving today that if I could just see the house again, really take it all in; I’d be able to tuck it in my pocket and bring it back with me.

The driveway leading to the house is long. I wanted to savor every step I took walking up the hill, but the sound of gravel crunching beneath my feet ends all too soon as I happen upon the grand entrance to the Sinclair estate. My heart is roaring. The heavy mahogany door lets me in with much ease, a mutual understanding that this visit will be our little secret.

Echoes of my footsteps fill the empty space as I walk through the grand reception, trying to take in every delicate. I remember sitting in my favorite recliner in front of the faux fireplace in the separate glass dome overlooking the beach. The snow globe was a sanctuary, granting me privacy from the music and not-so-quiet murmurs coming from the parties my parents use to throw for every possible occasion. The smell of brewed coffee and champagne linger in the air. My lips quirk as I recall the time I burned the turkey last Thanksgiving evening, the fire alarm going off, drenching all of us in our dinner seats. Ditching the formalities, the whole family sat cross-legged and spent the holiday getting pizza stains on the monopoly board.

The paintings and pictures lean against the couch not yet packed up. I flick through the framed artwork one by one until I find a portrait of the whole family. Dad stands in the back, an immobile pillar of strength, his eyes gleaming with pride. Strands of silver peak through his mass of brown hair. His hand squeezes the shoulder of my eldest sibling Greyson, handsome as ever in his black suit and tie, looking into the camera with that infamous grin. “At least you don’t need money to be a pain in my ass, big bro.” I roll my eyes. Mom stands on dad’s other side, her blond curls full and silky, resting one hand on his chest - the diamond on her ring finger a technicolor prism. I stare at the doe-eyed girl sitting in front of father. I was once that girl, but she’s been left behind in this empty shell of a house. Two identical twins sit on either side of portrait me, their legs dangle in mid-air crossed at the ankle, not long enough to touch the floor yet. That was the Sinclairs; a perfect family with a perfect life living in their perfect house.

Moving into the library, I walk over to my undisturbed bookshelves proudly displaying the abundance of books I have collected over the years. There isn’t enough room in the flat back in Brooklyn to hold all my collection, so they stay here for now. As I brush my fingers gently over the spine of each book, I can’t help but smile at the memories of this room. The hours I spent arranging and rearranging books - in chromatic order, then alphabetical, then back to chromatic... It’s heartbreaking knowing they will be plucked off their shelves and stuffed into cardboard boxes sooner or later. 

My bedroom is on the third floor facing the vast ocean just a few yards away. It’s the smallest and most intimate out of all the bedrooms in the house - just big enough to fit a bed, closet, bureau, and of course more book shelves. Now with everything moved out the walls feel distant - light patches on the plush carpet and nails sticking out from the beige wall the only indication I was ever here.

I open the French doors and step onto the balcony to get some fresh air. Clasping my hands together, I lean my arms on the railing and look down. The pool is now empty, but I remember how it use to glow at night like a turquoise gem. The deck chairs that were spread out evenly along the edge of the pool now lay stacked in a pile against the wall of the garage, providing shelter for spiders and dust bunnies. Lush green hedges line the garden separating the green lawn from the asphalt road that leads to the city. The fountain planted in the middle of the flower beds remains broken just as it has been for the past ten years ago. Rainwater collected in the tiers keep afloat the red and yellow leaves falling from the trees, each landing leaf causing a light ripple of water which drips off the edge.  

The little ones, Jamie and Jezalia, always used to hide behind the trimmed bushes and spy to see if the birds and squirrels bathing in the fountain would do anything miraculous to prove that everything in those princess movies I watched with them were real. They were perfect little angels, always up to mischief and always getting away with it. Arcadia is going to miss the sight of their bouncing blond pigtails and simultaneous clicks of their shoes as they descended the stairs with as much grace seven-year-olds could possess.

Back in my room I sling my purse across my shoulder and climb out the window, making my way down the fire escape a foot at a time until I land on the wood that lines the perimeter of the house. I slip my feet one at a time out of my wedges and stumble the last few steps before my bare feet sinks into the liquid sand. I keep walking towards the shore until I’m met with the cold of the water, the cuts from my shoes on my heel sting as the waves lap against my ankle. The wind caresses my arms, blowing wisps of brown hair across my lips, wrapping me in the scent of the ocean. I stand there as time stops, squinting at the blinding sun, shoes dangling from one hand.

I breathe in.

An eternity passes.

I breathe out.

The waves crash and time hurls me forward.

I twist around and look at the magnificent house. A memory box full of good and bad recollections, a reminder of what we once were.

The whole way home, as I watched the buildings blur, I couldn’t help but feel like every mile farther away from Arcadia was one more mile I am separated from my heart - the heavy thumping of it this morning now no more than a faint pitter-patter.

Back in Brooklyn, I climb breathlessly to the 6th floor only to be greeted by a dimly lit hallway. Walking straight down to the end, I let out a defeated sigh as I face the door. My keys jingle as I stick it into the key hole. Turning the lock, I give the door two kicks and a hard tug before it finally gives way. Tears well in my eyes. I notice the smell of coffee and champagne at the entry and something flutters inside me as the twin’s laughter and dad’s grumble vertebrates throughout the entire flat. I pad barefoot down the corridor to the living room and rub my tears away at the sight of my family sitting on the carpet, the same grease stained monopoly board laid out in front of them.

Mom beckons with one hand, and with the other pats the empty space next to her. “Honey, we've missed you! We’ve only just started, and Jezalia insisted we save you the dog token since it’s your favourite. Come join us now that you’re finally home.”

Indeed. With my family sitting all together – Greyson sandwiched between mom and dad, Jamie on dad’s lap and Jezalia making her way onto mine – I am surprised to find it suddenly hard to believe home is anywhere, but here.

written in 2015. Revised.

[evakfanficsrecs]

hello! can you help me with really frickin cute n fluff fics? please please please! thank you so much!

Hi, lovely!

As it turns out, I haven’t made an updated list of (mostly pure) fluff for about two freaking months and that is just unacceptable, sooo… long story short, here are my favorite, most recently-read, fluffy fics :)

*

Right in Front of My Salad by cuteandtwistedSummary: “Let me guess. You’re the type of guy who eats salad,” said Isak. “Among other things,” Even winked. * Or Isak doesn’t believe in love until he meets the new cashier at the supermarket who makes him realize that vegetables aren’t actually that bad. 

feelings that i adore by thekardemommeSummary: Isak loves Even’s dog, and Even loves Isak. Turns out it’s more mutual than they think.

kjærlighet by thekardemommeSummary: Love letters or suicide notes. (Alternatively: Even finds a love letter Isak wrote to him.)

the privilege of being yours by toboldlyflySummary: “You said my nose was cute and squishy!” Isak replies, pouting. “You’re right, I lied. Your nose is the squishiest, and it’s gorgeous. It’s my most favourite thing about you.” Even touches the tip of Isak’s nose, pushing it left and right. He laughs at the face of annoyance Isak is probably making. He always did say that grumpy and pouty Isak was the one he enjoyed the most. * Or, Isak and Even spend a morning in bed together laughing, kissing and falling in love all over again (but what’s new about that).

i feel your energy rushing through me by babygayisakSummary: Isak and Even are soft in a bed on a Sunday afternoon.

To Burn With Desire by photographer_of_thoughtsSummary: “Um, Even?” “Yeah?” “Do friends kiss other friends?” Isak asked. Even looked amused again. “Sometimes.“ Or, the AU in which Isak and Even are neighbours and Isak’s father has a secret job that unintentionally helps Isak realize he’s in love with his best friend.

Can I? by AifaSkamSummary: “Why did you want to get a live portrait?” “Actually, my friends kind of dared me to do it.” says Isak. “if you don’t want it, can I keep it?”

And you use it only for me by SkamisakoSummary: “Just wait ‘till I tell you how wrong you were about this, Isak!” Even sing-songs making Isak blink a couple of times and then smile bashfully, looking down at his phone again. Even grins to no one in particular as he pushes through the door and decides that making Isak blush will definitely be his favorite hobby from now on. OR: Isak works at a bookstore and Even can’t stop buying ridiculous books to make him blush.

friends don’t treat me like you do by hippopotamusSummary: Isak’s going to humiliate himself in front of Even’s friends because he has no idea how to be - pretend to be - in a relationship. What is Even expecting him to do? Hold his hand? Kiss him? Hold eye contact with him for more than two seconds? Isak can’t do any of that. And he also can’t sleep.

Sleep on it by unsungyellowraincoatSummary: ”I can’t deal with you right now,” Isak says, turning his head away. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

Not in my bed by TaraxacusSummary: Even is in Isak’s room, soaked wet. He’s staying for the night, and he and Isak will have to share Isak’s bed. Considering they are just friends, it shouldn’t be this nerve wracking. And yet. Isak’s heart is beating loud, louder than the thunder inside, and all the while Even is looking like a dream. Fluff ensues. 

Destinations set by imminentinertiaSummary: Isak hasn’t planned anything. Even has, or at least he’s had a flash of inspiration. He doesn’t get his Amazing Magical Extra Special Pool First Kiss, though. 

Bigsby the Matchmaking Cat by smilexdarlingSummary: Even owes his future love life with a grumpy kitten-man to a grumpy actual-cat.  

quantum mechanics of fate by thekardemommeSummary: Isak is scared of thunderstorms, and Even is the only one home to help him sleep.

i could not want you more than i did right then by chasingflower Summary: “Isak?” Even calls, sounding faintly amused. Isak groans again in response, and he hears muffled snickering by the door frame. “Any particular reason that you’re on my bed?” Isak groans again. “I’m not moving.” Even moves and sits at the end of his bed, gaze fixed on Isak’s face. “But, as I’ve said, it’s my bed.” “My day was fucked, Even,” Isak whines, and rolls over to give Even a pout. “I’m tired and I don’t want to move. It’s my bed now.”

Notes by bashfulisakSummary: Even writes Isak little notes for him to see every morning while he has work-and sometimes, roles change.

sweet taste of love by toboldlyflySummary: They’re both meme-lords, but this turns Isak on a little. Even likes to make inappropriate noises in public; Isak is chill about this on most days. There is neglect of ice cream, boys in love and sweet sugary kisses.

Nourishing Courage by colazitronSummary: Isak somehow finds himself part of the revue and Even helps him practice.

Not a Bird, Not a Plane by shakespeareandsunshineSummary: "May I ask what led to your loss of consciousness?” Isak asks. “Would you believe me if I said I flew headfirst into the eighteenth floor windows of the MagnussCorp building?” Isak looks at him, unimpressed. “Not in the slightest.” “Well then,” Even says, smiling. “I flew headfirst into the eighteenth floor windows of the MagnussCorp building.” Or, 5 times Isak refused to see what was right in front of him + 1 time he did.

when i’m close to you (we blend into my favourite colour) by BehindthecitiesSummary: In which Isak and Even are boy-friends with a hyphen in the middle. Or the the 5 times Isak forgets that he’s not dating Even and the 1 time he does something about it.

Between You and Me (and Them Too) by Rashu89Summary: The five times Even and Isak’s friends witness them sharing a private moment of their relationship and the one time they get to enjoy it all on their own.

can’t you feel my heart beat fast, i want this to last by ourlovelybonesSummary: Saturday nights are for staring at beautiful things and falling in love with you.

I Think I’m Falling (I Think I’m Falling For You) by EvensDramaticShenanigansSummary: Isak isn’t sure if it’s this guy’s incredibly endearing face or the fact that he didn’t just order a fucking Pumpkin Spice Latte, but he suddenly really really wants to kiss him.

Strawberry Milkshake Boy by photographer_of_thoughtsSummary: “I don’t want to hear about strawberry milkshake boy anymore, Even.” Yousef snapped, turning the volume up on the TV. Even bit down on his bottom lip, feeling embarrassed. He’d spent the last hour going on about how perfect the boy was; how the boy had quickly drank the milkshake and then licked the rim of the cup afterwards and… He really has a problem. Or, Even has an epic crush on a boy who he keeps seeing at the diner. A boy who only orders strawberry milkshakes.

You’re such a heavenly view by LostInAdmirationSummary: Even loved nights with this, after a good party with his close friends, and he and Isak getting to go back to their home together. It was an indescribable sort of joy, and Even was revelling in it.

If that’s not enough, you can find much more in our Fluff tag!

I hope you enjoy ♥

–A

[sdotpdotmedia]

Portraits of SXSW 2019

_by shedrick pelt

 As the story goes, you land in Austin on a Sunday for SXSW, perform at a few showcases, and by the following Monday you’ve blown up into an internationally known recording artist. But for the majority of artists, the importance of the trip south is in connecting the dots. Rubbing elbows with like-minded individuals that can give you some insight into their experiences and maybe offer some idea of how to navigate the landmine-laden landscape of the music industry. Most people I’ve met have started out as a business transaction, but now it’s a lot more personal. There’s a lot more hugs than daps when we pull up. SXSW offers these rare opportunities because it is an event that welcomes an array of people, no matter their race, gender, or sexual orientation, to a place full of energy where there’s always somewhere to plug in. This opportunity gives some their one shot during the year to really build and network.

‘Portraits of SXSW’ is an examination of the artists who are bringing themselves to SXSW on blood, sweat, and tears – and sometimes their own back account – to further their career, meet genuinely good people, and connect with the industry. The eclectic group featured, shot at Austin-centric locations, represent different backgrounds and regions of the United States. Some have been scarred by life but you can’t tell and some have a legendary folklore attached to their art. All come here with a passion for the community and a love for the culture.

photos & words by shedrick pelt (@sdotpdotmedia)       #sxswportraits

Artist: (In Order)

Lamour Supreme, Dotti J, Koran Streets, Teeta, Willy Peso

For almost a year and a half during my design internship at OG streetwear brand Mishka.  I watched the man, the myth, the legend Lamour Supreme create masterful works of art seemingly out of thin air. Sometimes on a paint can or a mailing sticker or even the back of an office chair.  And while you would naturally big up his god given talent, striking up a conversation with him you’d soon realize he is a student of the game and an all around genuine person. Growing up in the Bronx circa 1980 Lamour spent his time interested in street art and witnessing the birth of hip hop. Giving him plenty of street cred. Made obvious with a multitude of collaborations with  NYC culture institutions including KATZ Deli. It was great catching up with him at SXSW during his Secret Walls live painting session. We chatted about the warehouse days and old New York.

The next artist featured was a very special session for me. Dotti J a singer/songwriter/choreographer out of Orlando, Florida is also a really close friend of mine. Watching this young woman fight for every inch early in her career to now gracing a stage on 6th Street in Austin, Texas tugs at my heartstrings a little bit. She is talented, strong-willed, and gracious: three character traits that will help her traverse through the industry. It only made sense that we took the photos on the infamous block, at the heart of the city. Dotti is destined for the limelight and with new music on the way I have no doubt you’ll be a lot more familiar with her in the near future.

My session with Berkeley rapper/actor/director Koran Streets features a well known Austin landmark the Cathedral of Junk. Located due east of downtown, this art installation is anything but junk. Vince Hannemann started his collecting and construction in 1989. He placed a castle at the center of the property stretching into the clouds. And at the apex of it, a thrown for a king or queen -- whoever braves the climb to the top that day. Koran arrives with open arms and a spirit to match. Jeremy Karelis and the Steady Leanin team are not far behind because it’s a family thang. We skipped the line on the things you’d expect us to talk about like the music industry and past tragedies, and went straight to current inspirations and what the future holds. Everything about the shoot was organic. We’re just a couple flowers trying to flourish in the desert sand. 

   If you visit a city as many times as I’ve visited ATX for SXSW it’d be disrespectful not to connect with the local folk. And nothing says hometown like your favorite pizza shop or the kid born and raised in the area. So with my fourth session I killed two birds with one stone and tapped rapper Teeta for the link up. Shot at the go to pie shop Home Slice Pizza on South Congress. An establishment visited by thousands and thousands of people like me since it’s 2005 opening. I felt comfortable like my grandmothers living room. With all the nostalgia flowing the shoot was primed to be a moment full of flavor.

This last artist, and certainly not the least, is one that I really connected with on a “spiritual” level. Willy Peso representing Detroit, Michigan is easily one of hip hop’s most pro-cannabis influencers. Along with curating events and seminars teaching the benefits of medical/recreational bud. He has also created a lifestyle brand ‘Stoned Like Willy’ to promote cannabis related clothing. In bringing the two communities together, Willy has garnered much respect in both industries. He is no stranger to making plays, sharing time on the road with legends like Devin The Dude, Curren$y, and Smoke DZA to name a few. He also headlines major festivals like Hightimes Cannabis Cup and DC Flower Fest (where I first met him). So with all that in tow, it was only right that we shot at Austin’s one and only bohemian style fine art studio Casa Neverlandia. A multi-room installation, south of the Colorado River, created by James Talbot in his home. It’s been 30 years in the making and ever changing. Each room has an experience of its own. There’s a fire, ice, and water temple. A 60ft tower with chain linked bridge. A dojo, and what can only be explained as a Geisha’s sleeping quarters. This was a perfect way to end my series.

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

  Archive

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

    June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

  November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

  November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

  September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Artist Turns Police Cruiser into a Tribute to Law & Order Detective Lennie Briscoe

Detail view of hood art for the “Orbach” car by artist Brandon Bird and airbrush artist Oscar Mendoza (all images courtesy Brandon Bird)

LOS ANGELES — Artist Brandon Bird has been mashing up pop cultural references for years. His odd twists of culture have most often come in the form of whimsical oil paintings, including Christopher Walken tinkering with a robot in his garage workshop (“Lazy Sunday Afternoon”) and Bea Arthur wrestling raptors (“Killing Machine”). Bird also likes to place contemporary celebrities in art historical tableaux. “I like being able to drop Mr. T into the middle of a robustly painted scene from Greek mythology and have people be like, ‘Wait, what the heck am I even looking at here?'” said Bird, in an email interview with Hyperallergic. “The things that are funniest (at least to me) are the things that you cannot expect to exist, and when you encounter them in some form it’s like your brain short-circuits.”

Among his most popular characters are the various cast members of the Law & Order franchise, including Bird’s especial favorite, actor Jerry Orbach, who played detective Lennie Briscoe on the original Law & Order for 12 seasons.

The “Orbach Car,” surveying Los Angeles from on high

“Most of my subjects are dudes,” said Bird, “and that’s because I’m trying to use humor to either make fun of or subvert really stupid forms of masculinity, or play up what I think are more positive male archetypes. Jerry Orbach falls into the latter category. He’s everyone’s favorite uncle. He projects a certain world-weariness, but never cynicism. His character on Law & Order is someone who is confronted daily by death, but always chooses humor over despair.”

Detective Lennie Briscoe, played by late actor Jerry Orbach

Most recently, Bird launched a Kickstarter campaign, raising more than $23,000 to fund a long-gestating plan for “ORBACH1,” which transformed a formerly black 2008 police cruiser found on Craigslist into an airbrushed rolling masterpiece commemorating his hero. This is Bird’s first foray into car painting, but his second crowdfunded art venture — the first being a cross-country road trip he undertook to painting the Sears department stores of the nation en plein air.

Repainting a classic police cruiser is a natural fit to commemorate the iconic TV detective, but there is also perhaps something quietly subversive about commandeering a vehicle once used by real-life police officers and claiming it for artistic purposes. The car was sanded down, re-primed, and given a candy paint job in “pagan gold” (really a combination of two colors, an opaque yellow-gold base coat and a coppery translucent overspray). To execute his vision, Bird worked with airbrush artist Oscar Mendoza and the Santa Ana body shop Diamond Coats.

“We walked around the car and plotted out the rough ideas for the graphics (i.e. ‘portrait of Jerry on the hood, like a votive candle, with rays of light behind him’),” said Bird. The final product is truly a wonder to behold, and has been soliciting responses, ranging from delight to bafflement, any time Bird takes it out for a spin.

Trunk detail from the “Orbach” car

“My favorite response so far happened on an early morning while I was parked on a residential street in San Diego,” said Bird, “when a cowboy literally walked out of the mist to tell me how much he enjoyed watching Law & Order reruns with his wife.” Bird quotes the cowboy: “Sometimes it’s an older [episode] before he came on the show, but I say, ‘Give me a Lennie.'”

While Bird draws interest and a great deal of support from the Comic Con crowd, he delineates a distinction between his work and the more generalized practice of “fan art.”

“’Fan art’ generally has one purpose, which is to help the person making it to relive or process the emotional experience they had with a movie, book, or TV show,” said Bird. “I’m trying to come up with things like a subscription box where I send people weird items and products that should never exist — so whether it’s a painting, or a Nic Cage colorforms set, or an Orbach car, what I want is for people to think, ‘Where did this come from? What dimension am I in?’”

It’s certainly a world that’s a little brighter, with this rolling memorial to justice on the streets — and the power to intervene in reality is, after all, part of the function of the artist in society. Bird is realistic about the impact of this latest project, but also conveys a kind of optimism that would make Lennie Briscoe proud. “I don’t think an Orbach car is going to defeat Trump or whatever,” he said, “but I do think that all we can do in the face of shit bags doing shitty things is to double-down on our own efforts to do enjoyable, non-terrible things.”

The post Artist Turns Police Cruiser into a Tribute to <i>Law & Order</i> Detective Lennie Briscoe appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[dream-love210]

In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of the year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend’s past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S.S?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa’s grandfather in 1908, and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, “for reasons of health” (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells.

When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police…

Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla…She flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await her further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing a letter...She looked up--and of course no dark spectacles and make-up could for a moment fool her.

Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before, and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid snew ebanumf, “A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.” And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa’s case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending her a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire… I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

She seemed also calmer than before; her self-control had improved. During the previous meetings, and throughout their marital life in Zembla, there had been, on her part, dreadful outbursts of temper. When in the first years of marriage he had wished to cope with those blazes and blasts, trying to make her take a rational view of her misfortune, he had found them very annoying; but gradually he learned to take advantage of them and welcomed them as giving him opportunity of getting rid of her presence for lengthening periods of time by not calling her back after a sequence of doors had slammed ever more distantly, or by leaving the palace himself for some rural hideout.

In the beginning of their calamitous marriage he had strenuously tried to possess her but to no avail. He informed her he had never made love before (which was perfectly true insofar as the implied object would only mean one thing to her), upon which he was forced to endure the ridicule of having her dutiful purity involuntarily enact the ways of a courtesan with a client too young or too old; he said something to that effect (mainly to relieve the ordeal), and she made an atrocious scene. He farced himself with aphrodisiacs, but the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off. One night when he tried tiger tea, and hopes rose high, he made the mistake of begging her to comply with an expedient which she made the mistake of denouncing as unnatural and disgusting. Finally he told her than an old riding accident was incapacitating him but that a cruise with his pals and a lot of sea bathing would be sure to restore his strength.

She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succombed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily--especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore...Curdy Buff--as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers--had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught…

What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of this dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.

He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rendering dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into a strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness--and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection--but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.

Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first sold her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden--rose, black araucarius, rusty, greenish hydrangeas--one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.

The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in theme came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her--prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron--and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object--a riding boot in his bed--establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness. Sweat beaded her pale, naked forehead--but she had to listen to the prattle of a chance visitor or direct the movements of a workman with a ladder who was nodding his head and looking up as he carried it in his arms to the broken window. One might bear--a strong merciless dreamer might bear--the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be canceling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave--and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile. As one watched the light on her face, one foresaw it would fade in a moment, to be replaced--as soon as the visitor left--by that impossible little frown the dreamer could never forget. He would help her again to her feet on the same lakeside lawn, with parts of the lake fitting themselves into the spaces between the rising balusters, and presently he and she would be walking side by side along an anonymous alley, and he would feel she was looking at him out of the corner of a faint smile but when he forced himself to confront that questioning glimmer, she was no longer there. Everything had changed, everybody was happy. And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains… But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to the Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared.) That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. “I do have some business matters to discuss,” he said. “And there are papers you have to sign.” Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the rose. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white manilla, brought certain documents from Disa’s boudoir. Upon hearing the King’s mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by this excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycenes. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot.

They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? By and large the interview was proceeding in a most satisfactory manner-though her fingers trembled a little when her hand touched the elbow rest of his chair. Careful now.

“What are you plans?” she inquired. “Why can’t you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I’ll be going to Rome soon, you’ll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves.” (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)

He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow.

Why America? What would he do there?

Teach. Examine literary masterpieces with brilliant and charming young people. A hobby he could now freely indulge.

“And, of course, I don’t know,” she mumbled looking away, “I don’t know perhaps if you’d have nothing against it, I might visit New York--I mean, just for a week or two, and not this year but the next.”

He complimented her on her silver-spangled jacket. She persevered: “Well?” “And your hairdo is most becoming.” “Oh what does it matter,” she wailed, “what on earth does it matter!” “I must be on my way,” he whispered with a smile and got up. “Kiss me,” she said, and was like a limp, shivering ragdoll in this arms for a moment.

He walked to the gate. At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Flyer collecting the documents left among the tea things. (See note 80).

When in the course of an evening stroll in May or June, 1959, I offered Shade all this marvelous material, he looked at me quizzically and said: “That’s all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions. How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about who, presumably, are still alive?”

“My dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”

“Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.”

“And moreover,” I continued as we walked down the road into a vast sunset, “as soon as your poem is ready, as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret, that will put your mind completely at rest.”

[yespoetry]

Carla Carlson: Special Feature & Interview

THE GIFT OF SOUNDS

The way they sayeverything is within you now yet integrated—he plays his jazz. I just want birds, andinsects.   Wince on and off.  Lovely never works on fixing men though.  She has no real qualms.

I’m of course busy for aset amount of time.  It’s not my job to mistabout in nightgowns as perhaps it once was. All I must do is murmur positives.  When I am good, it will sound like love.  

AIRPLANES

We are all flyingdifferent places. I’m so happy I want tothank these girls beside me— they are clean.  No I cannot handle emergencies. The pilot has a personality like college.   I worry about the other’s whereabouts— my husband will stay underwater for a long time at the beach and get applause later on.  One idea was to remain within the scenery.   Last Sunday he listed fifty reasons for being angry. It took all morning.  I said to myself:  “be a cake.” Cakes are silent, wide-eyed, sweet, waiting for when the eater’s finally hungry.  No one was crying the moment it all began.  As usual the truth was buried. If I could, I’d scream myself to sleep like a terrible baby.  What I love about planes though is people drinking Bloody Mary’s at eight am and talking like morning radio shows.  No this is not exactly what I prefer.  A little girl sings high notes. This is when all the people say Thank God.   They want to capture her and keep her like a flower or grasshopper.  He must know I’m lost without him.  

MEMOIR

I.

As a little girl, I disappeared from my mother’s gaze.  She’d look away, mouthing phrases.  I stared like a ghost. “Mom?  Mom?” And so on.

I could be anything I wanted to be— I swam in races, tried dancing, played piano.

And yet, my mother thought something was wrong with me— I was so small at birth, she named me Carla, meaning strong.  Still, I disappeared like a weed in her silence.

II.

Most of my life, when I wanted to say, “go away, I’m busy,” I said, “you’re sweet,” my smile tense and pretty.

 III.

One grandmother was light, sent sparkle cards, the other dark.  For this, we kept Mary out. I am the one who loved the light.  

But after a while the light was hell. I craved the night.  Like, I am angry for ten years. I shun cloying greeting cards

like the grandmother I hardly knew. She’s dead, and now, I dig in her icy grave, my claws breaking one by one.

IV.

Years ago, I sent Mary a picture of my baby girl. She wrote back, “the baby’s a dumpling.”  

In pictures, Mary is a soft portrait. Her mouth, a thin line, her dress cut from a table cloth. 

V.

Long ago, we visited my mother’s childhood home where Mary set three cakes on the stove— one apple, the others a blur. But something went wrong with the adults.

We went away.  So I never thanked her for the moon or the stars, or anything at all.

Q & A with Carla Carlson and editor Joanna C. Valente  

JV: Talk to me about your line breaks. How do you determine them?

CC: Ending a line is very much a gut decision for me at this point; the line feels right, or it doesn’t–  yet, in thinking further, I will say this:  the decision is rarely based on a visual standard such as length, and it’s rarely based on a sound pattern.  I believe each line should mean enough, ideally, such that the reader gets a real satisfaction, a full lick from the ice cream cone, or the eyes a cliff-side view to pause at, before traversing to the next section of line.

JV: What would you say is your obsession right now? As poets & artists, we are sometimes defined by these obsessions in our work.

CC: I am obsessed with- allowing what’s been unspoken to rise up in my poem, subtly, or maybe suddenly, yet ladylike.  I wonder if this comes from being a female, ie., looking at any little girl, or lovely woman at any age, “people” have not expected to hear a full scope of emotion, in my personal history.  They want to remain charmed.  They are often surprised to find out what’s behind the lovely skin, hair, body.  I’m obsessed with making these behavioral constraints conscious, and fiddling with them.

JV: How does New York’s landscape affect your poems? 

CC: New York is of course a living embodiment of surrealism.  Walking through neighborhoods,  millions of moments are running into each other, and running into my ongoing story.  I like to write what I see in the city, then break stories, and interchange fragments in ways that are somehow believable in my memoir.  A horse, clopping sadly in Central Park becomes the man in my love poem.

JV: Who writes your poems—what part of you? 

CC: I have at least two speakers within me.  One of them is a proper woman who speaks in pert detail.  She always dresses well.  She can impose logic on herself, as well as offer herself choices in how to deal with quibbles, her way.  Another speaker in me is an eight year old child who’s just a little too honest.  The child, appearing innocent, can ask questions of the adult world; and remind us, at time bitterly, of our vulnerabilities, failures, and all we bury.  It’s fair to say that these two speakers intersect, and also complicate each other’s clarity.

JV: I’ve always felt my poems come alive after they’ve been edited—as if I’m carving a poem, rather than writing it. Would you agree or disagree with this?

CC: My favorite part of writing a poem is collecting its pieces in the morning, like collecting colorful tiles to make a mosaic design, then playing with them for hours on the floor to see what may come.  Editing can feel upsetting for me, in that, I feel as though I must decide the thing I want to say, thus much of the other good stuff has to be placed elsewhere.  Still, when a clear poem finally surfaces, I’m pretty ecstatic for hours, and quickly heartless with the rest.

Editor's Note: These poems originally appeared on our old site.

Carla Carlson’s poetry is engaged with domestic concerns, with the emotional negotiations required by every marriage and long-term relationship, and with the bliss and sometimes painful solitude that accompanies these experiences.  She tries to keep her work focused on everyday reality, images, and objects.  Her poems are written in a style both open and layered, lyrical yet direct, and willing to experiment with a variety of poetic modes.

She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA writing program.  Her poems have appeared in print and online journals such as The Westchester Review, Chronogram Magazine,The Mom Egg, and Catch and Release -Columbia Journal.  Her first chapbook is currently being published by Finishing Line Press, and will be released in 2015.

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

  Archive

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

    June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

  November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

  November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

  September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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