I rented a huge new studio in May, then spent the next six weeks painting the walls, painting out the dark blue carpet, building desks, tables and shelves, and basically transforming it into a great workspace. Here is a view of it – click on the photo to see a larger version:
This view from the stairs shows the main workspace, but the studio also has an office, a back room (the “cut and spray” room), a half-kitchen, and upstairs another room and a mezzanine for storage. After years in a series of cramped spaces, now I really have room to work, and ironically all the work I’m doing right now is small.
This storefront used to be a piano store, but my (very cool) landlord John dubbed it “A Mound of Space“, after seeing the Snarkbook drawing of that name. If there’s a better name for the studio, I’ve yet to find it.
Sam “Golden Rule” Jones writes and publishes several excellent blogs, including, Wandering with Robert Walser, “A project dedicated to Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956)”, a great writer I only recently discovered.
The fact that Robert Walser was Swiss, ended up in an insane asylum, and wrote stories and articles in a fantastically small microscript handwriting, put me in mind of Adolf Wölfli. Above is a side-by-side comparison of a famous Wölfli drawing (beating Warhol to Campbell’s Soup by four decades or so) with in image of Walser’s (described below) that I cribbed from Sam’s Flickr set of Walser images (apologies).
Here is Sam’s description of the Walser image: (more…)
This is a nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog [2024: now long gone, replaced by a page in Russian] of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko [2024: here’s another, Chunko blog that’s still up an running, though not updated since 2007 and doesn’t seem to include any Cage material; oh well].
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a John Cage recording, Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger website [updated 2024] that he turned me on to, which has several pages of John Cage material. The recorded Cage readings that strike me in this hearing as unexpected cousins of Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, two characters I’ve never connected before, and hope to never do so again.
Wikipedia: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a 1990 period black comedy film written and directed by Tom Stoppard based on his 1966 play. Like the play, the film depicts two minor characters from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”
–James Joyce (1882–1941) from a Dec. 7, 1906, letter to his brother, written from Rome in a state of disillusion. Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2 (1966).
This image of “Nano-Explosions” won first prize in at the November 2007 Materials Research Society (MRS) “Science As Art” competition.
“Nano-Explosions Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level. (Image: Fanny Beron, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada)”
The fiction featured in the August 6, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, So It Is in Life, is by Daniil Kharms, a Russian author with a short, hard life extinguished under Stalin in 1942. His work, just now published in English for the first time, has drawn critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco. Wrote Kharms in 1937: “I am interested only in nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning.” (more…)
In honor of the passing of the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni last month, here is a shot of the ink spilling scene in L’avventura, and then three alterations of the image as it passes into memory.
Thinking more about the work of linguist Simon Kirby, featured in the New York Times book review that I wrote about a couple days ago, so I Googled him. That led me to the rich vein of glorious word ore that is Linguistic Typology, an academic journal about, well, linguistic typology, stupid.
The LT website features an index of all the articles and book reviews published in the journal’s ten-year history. Here is a mashup list of titles from this page — beginning with good old Simon Kirby, who leads off this list with a jaw-dropping title from 1997: (more…)
Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
Mr. Stingel is also heir to the uses of chance and silence, or in his case emptiness, encouraged by the composer John Cage. This is perhaps clearest in an expanse of cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that spent six months on the floor of Mr. Stingel’s studio accumulating footprints and splatters, flecks and stains of black paint. Covering an immense wall at the Whitney, it initially resembles a huge swath of ancient parchment. When you recognize it as carpet, the thick familiar texture and the random, delicacy of the marks can create an unusual spatial push-pull. Focus on the marks, and they float in a creamy space. Focus on the carpet, and you may feel that you are doing the floating, looking down on it from above.
…The implication is that artists in particular should do as little as possible. The sign of a successful artwork is its ability to derive the greatest effect from the least means. Another lesson to be extracted from this elegant show is the oxymoronic nature of the notion of “empty beauty” that has been bruited about extensively in the last decade. This show suggests that if art is empty, it is not beautiful and vice versa. If something is beautiful in any sustained way, it contains, at the least, an idea about beauty and usually much more. It is the result of something being worked on and worked out. Beauty is the state of operating at stunning efficiency, a triumph that can’t be empty. Mr. Stingel’s work makes this perfectly clear.
“Rudolf Stingel” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct. 14, 2007.
Here is a poem I love that I found in an old paperback anthology of Yugoslavian poetry. It is by the Macedonian poet Bogomil Gjuzel (1939-2021).
Professional Poet
The last word, the last hasty swallow
you get up from the table, after your working day
and catch the first bus to the kitchen
you tear off a hunk of bread, inhale the good oven odors
Your body, leaden with weariness, the mold
you cram with rich food
Switch on the set
and inspect the backyard
through another screen
with a wet finger
you flip the pages of the sky. (more…)
Bob on Bob, Louis Menand’s review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, in the September 4, 2006 issue of the New Yorker. A great review of a book that sounds less than great, due to Dylan’s mumbling indifference to most interviewers, at least during the early days of his career. Menand zeroes in on Dylan’s interest in the sound of music, more than lyrics, and how artists, either out of creative exploration or commercial necessity, often explore a greater range of interests than their fans, who want to put their prey into boxes: (more…)
K.C. Cole has a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Weird Science: Why editors must dare to be dumb, about how science editors tend to be uncomfortable with advanced science topics they do not understand. What it boils down to, in Cole’s opinion, is a fundamental discomfort with uncertainty and senselessness: (more…)
From a recent column in the SF Chronicle by John Flinn, Culture shock still souvenir of Japan, comes the following excellent examples of Japanese T-shirt English, which I have made bold:
About the only place I saw English used consistently was on T-shirts worn by young people, and (as Japanophiles here are well aware) this was a weird, jabberwocky form of English. “Don’t mess with juicy,” read one shirt. “Hurry up the cakes,” read another.
After a while, I began to collect these slogans in my journal. They were, I thought, a peculiarly addictive form of poetry:
“Why waste lucky?”
“Oh my goodness. Don’t scully me.”
“Mischievous blue rabbit skunk.”
“Oranges now!”
(My guess is that if a Japanese speaker saw the kanji characters tattooed on ankles and shoulder blades all over America, he’d find them equally nonsensical.)
Happy 100th Bloomsday! The 100th anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s wandering Dublin day chronicled in James Joyce’s Ulysses – June 16, 1904.
If you’re in the neighborhood, you might want to check out ReJoyce Dublin 2004, though if you’re fortunate enough to be in Dublin, you probably can’t escape the old man today.
Here is a passage from Ulysses, picked at random (p. 685): (more…)
