state of like-new quality.

31 | he/him/his 

[onthestrand]

How to Open a New Book

[80sanime]

[80sanime]

how do I unlock the cat player job class

[mntcndtn]

10.22

A truly cold weekday morning. Light dances on the walk way under the ginkgoes. Few others, I observe, are zipped and hooded so tightly as I am. Maybe my zeal for High Autumn is too sharp. Or the middle Atlantic, it’s mildness and it’s ease, has me changed.

Reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Cusset’s French Theory. Walking at weekends in the woods is fine-tuned by Dillard (not affected at all by Theory). Last time, R and I noted to each other the mass of mushrooms, apparently due to the rainy summer, and saw a man raking leaves on the trail for who-knows-what-purpose. All is well: the creek full, the moss bright, the old growth still entirely green, the creatures quite active.

Halloween in the quiet suburbs with L, a traditional dinner from S’s mother in Swann, eating gumbo and rice with the windows open at R’s jeweled sunlight palace. If you’d like, listen to Traversa from Geotic.

[ghibli-collector]

耳をすませば  Whisper of the Heart - Art Director Satoshi Kuroda (1995)

[sotlylaisse]

[mntcndtn]

Ilya Kabakov (1999) Wings (How to make yourself better or how to become an angel)

[yourhatisonfire]

Ilya Kabakov - The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1984)

[mntcndtn]

9.17

September. sunny today and the breeze is nice. i’m next to the windows, the light being interrupted now and again by the broad shadows of big silent clouds plodding eastward.

updates, then, in no particular order:

- an extended weekend in Northport, MI with friends – floating on the silent bay ensconced in moonlit clouds, devouring sunset after sunset from various points, fishing around for smooth stones in the Lake Michigan surf, woods and countryside – preceded by Eid with family at the Syrian mosque, and dinner and sunset over Walled Lake with M.

- again enrolled in a class, this time at the college downtown. on Tuesday evenings, sweaty and dazed from work, i roll into Later Twentieth Century Art, buzzing with the surrealistic campus intensity of early fall. we’ve been reading Judd and Greenberg and others, and i am getting much out of the many-threaded interface of AbEx and early contemporary, but i’ve been less than studious so far and the professor is a bit, shall we say, casual.

- the museum, much to my dismay, recently closed its permanent collection galleries as they busily reconfigure them for the season. meanwhile, the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov exhibition called “The Utopian Project” was launched. it consists mostly of maquettes, preliminary models for large-scale public art works, most of which have been fully realized in one place or another. been spending time studying these objects and their makers mostly with pleasure and sometimes finding myself surprised by my own sentimentality. it is, i think, the simple tragedy of failed human transcendence that speaks in plain religious terms directly to my soul. i have a new tour partner who is a very dedicated guide and she carries her printed-out notes everywhere and she emailed me from her Ivy league email address. she seems to also have some small-voice problems, though.

- as expected work is staking its claim over my life again. drafting memo after memo, delivering presentation after presentation, all the while trying and often not succeeding in staving off the bitterness that has grown inside of me. i think i am channeling my resentment productively, though. i’m making it known that i no longer wish to stay at the office until 9pm and waste my life away on trivialities and managerial politics.

question: why do we seek out the beautiful, the exquisite, the sensuous, as if it will illuminate every thing – knowing that we will ultimately forget all but the most insubstantial vapors of every experience, and then later, die anyway?

R and i have been making chocolate cake lately. i listened to the new alvvways record on the way to the library today. will write more soon.

[themodernartists]

Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), Untitled, 1959. Oil on paper mounted on canvas.

[thunderstruck9]

Jean-Paul Riopelle (Canadian, 1923-2002), Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 53.5 x 64.5 cm.

[mntcndtn]

8.20

one hour til dusk. a fine, cloudless and dry day, pierced by something like a breeze. there is good visibility into the distance, too; this after having endured a close bluish haze for a week or more. R and i took great pleasure in being outdoors this afternoon and evening. the city looks fairly stunning -- bridges, avenues, gardens, statues -- on those rare occasions when you can see it and the light is right.

finished Baxandall's Giotto and the Orators today. he writes forcefully and clearly. half the book is in neoclassical Latin, either via block quote or in a large textual appendix, which is sadly lost on me. but in the rest of it, after richly describing the systems of rhetoric embraced by early humanist writers, Baxandall connects the style, its governing metaphors, and its commonplaces to fifteenth century writing about early renaissance painting, terminating with a brief but thoughtful analysis of Alberti's De Pictura.

i liked it a lot. i also could not help but see much of contemporary political writing implicated in Baxandall's criticism of the early humanists' biggest failures: the phenomenon of new writers obsessing over the writing of certain icons, leading to the easy and unparticular repetition of certain formulae and conventions. Alberti, on the other hand, was a painter himself and paid attention to painting. perhaps it should not be surprising that knowing something about what you're writing about is a precondition to doing it well. aspire to be Alberti.

i took the past week off of work. with few exceptions, it was a time spent doing very little and without company. (e.g., a beautiful day at the ocean in Delaware with R; driving with R and S to Virginia in search of Bengali food and chai; meeting friends on a couple of occasions for reasons relating to politics, i suppose, but not work.) mostly though, i slept late, took long showers, read, and cooked, purposely avoiding the anxiety of things that must be done.

i should mention a few more things. me and S went to see the Theaster Gates exhibition, 'Minor Arts,' where she confided that she'd finally read Seven Storey Mountain which i gave her for her birthday years ago. i returned later in the week to look at Cezanne's pictures for which i have an eternal love, and some of the Italian renaissance galleries, where i routinely get distracted and become impatient and this time was no different. because i led a tour including it this week, i was also rather pleasantly introduced to Jean-Paul Riopelle's paintings this weekend. here's hoping for more and newer things.

[flemishgarden]

Jan Vermeer - The Art of Painting

1666 - 1668

oil on canvas

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

[immortart]

Johannes Vermeer, View on Delft, 1661.

[femalehyena]

Interior of the Buurkerk, Utrecht by Pieter Saenredam

[baroqueart]

The Buurkerk at Utrecht by Pieter Jansz. Saenredam

Date: 1654

[mntcndtn]

8.8

out on the roof of R’s building around sunset. tonight it’s unusually cool with a mostly clear view and a breeze. the big blue sorbet dome above is fading to green, orange, pink. a full moon rising in the east, always-busy air traffic on the southern horizon.

each year, the first rounded note of September sounds out sometime in July or August. this week i am hearing it many times, though admittedly i have not been so vigilant.

finished Alpers’s Art of Describing. her question, as i understand it, is how Dutch art can be appreciated on its own terms, not against that which was codified by the renaissance Italians. to attempt an answer, she carefully cites to the northern visual culture (cartography, Baconian empiricism, the artist as craftsperson, etc.) and concludes that Dutch pictures are descriptive as opposed to narrative, concerned principally with the Dutch project to record and possess knowledge about the natural world. in a way completing it feels not so momentous. but i will miss my time with it and i learned much about the joys of Saenredam’s church interiors and Vermeer’s city profile views and photography, incidentally.

i am not keeping pace with work and i know i will soon live to regret it. i’ve been given a solemn new charge by the senior management. you would think by how they’re talking about it that it’s somehow indispensable to the sustenance and continuation of the entire universe. but for now, i’m finding my peace in blocking it out when i leave the office, cooking with R, books with pictures, the moths hovering under the street lamps, the rare pause in this hot eternal summer. amen, amen.

[mntcndtn]

8.1

rain on three of the past four days. it’s been milder in the mornings and nights. this afternoon at work i watched the cumulus multiply on the horizon from the seventh floor windows, detectable only by their bright edges against the bluish haze. a quiet summertime background for the busy square below.

work is better since the health care vote. truthfully i have been cynical about all of it for a long time, so i don’t deserve catharsis. but after Friday morning’s spectacular failure even i’ve rediscovered a certain lightness. it is, however, on to the next thing at the office, it seems. my lists overflow again with the most urgent analyses, meetings, etc., and no dent is to be made. but i think if i have to do work anyway, there is at least no finer aim than to thoroughly and repeatedly embarrass these charlatans.

i moved over the weekend with R’s kind help. my new roommate is L and her partner, E, and i have the front room in her english basement. it’s about five minutes straight west by bike from my old apartment with J and it is closer to R’s, too. my life is at present neatly contained within six grey rubbermaid bins. i was disciplined about the move, spending no time before Sunday on much else, which i count as something of a mature thing to do.

then, on Sunday afternoon, i disappeared to the library where i read with focus and pleasure for the first time in a while. it’s a college library and not public, but it’s the only local collection with the Art of Describing by Alpers, so i’ve been going there to read it. i’m brimming with ideas because of this book, both on C17 Dutch art, and on the method, evidence, and interpretation. it is also a nice accident that the south side of the library’s fourth floor overlooks the river and, across it, the skyline of the city adjacent, all becoming quite theatrical around sunset. the show is visible from one’s reading location if he is discriminating about his spot. it is also a delicacy of the senses to descend from the hilltop campus on each summer night by bicycle, coasting by the perfect row houses and porch lights and spicy front gardens and cobblestone in the cool damp air. these days i wish only to read and to see these things and to be quiet.