Kellin at the Certosa Monastery (with a light and tonality that reminds me of a Giotto fresco) I’m back from Italy, and the intoxicating colors of that landscape are still projected on the back wall of my mind. That palette has been commented on ad infinitum, ad nauseam, but for good reason. No one can […]
Rite of Passage
Kellin at Galgano I will be off line (off blog?) for a week. We are in Italy celebrating our daughter Kellin’s completion of her Master’s Degree in Art History. On Friday she’ll put down her umbrella and will shoehorn all that wild passion into presenting her paper at a Symposium, The Speaking Hand: Gesture in […]
What’s Sound Got to Do With It?
More wisdom from Elliott Carter (see posting below for more). This is from an article in the Wall Street Journal and came to me by way of friend and artist George Wingate (thanks George): If the public doesn’t respond, it matters very little. Think of other complex works that had difficulty finding an audience, he […]
The Picasso Problem: V. S. Naipaul
Interest in the new biography of literary lion V. S. Naipaul continues. Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is was written with full cooperation from Naipaul, and that fact makes the horrific (and, we are led to believe, honest) accounts of his abusive personal relationships even more unsettling. At one level I am not […]
Throw Me In With The Throwbacks
As a follow on to an earlier posting here about awards for bad sex writing (11/26/08), I found myself fascinated by Toni Bentley’s captivating review of Ian Kelly’s new biography, Casanova in the Sunday Times Book Review. A biography about a legendary philanderer is not a topic I would ordinarily find compelling, but Bentley goes […]
Wisdom, at 100
Photo by Angela Rowlings From an interview with Elliott Carter (who turned 100 this year): Have you gone through periods of different styles? Elliott Carter: The way I think about it is that I’ve always considered my works as adventures. They were always adventures in something I didn’t know anything about, like finding a new […]
Catching Some Happy
OK. This is just a bit hard for me to swallow. My friends’ friends’ friends are impacting my happiness quotient? Are social contagions real, like obesity and smoking? And if these findings are in fact “true” (whatever that means) is there a moral obligation in all this as well? Weakened from my bout of FP […]
The Big E
Very interesting article on Slate about the emotion I crave most from everything in life—politics, friendships, painting, food, sex—and with a wonderful name all its own: Elevation. (I always did love that song by Bono of the same name…) And near the end there is a discussion of elevation’s counterweight, disgust. This is particularly poignant […]
The Peaceful Majority
Tom Friedman wrote an editorial in the Times on Wednesday titled, “Calling All Pakistanis.” His plea was for the average citizen in Pakistan to step forward and denounce this extremism—not just for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake as well: Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence […]
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Report from the North
It’s hard to not be cynical when the talking heads announce that the US economy is “officially” in a recession and has been since December 2007. The absurdity of not being able to name what everybody knew until a year after the fact is one more piece of what feels like the cold-blooded machinations of […]