Clate flexing some serious cooking guns They’re home, my three children. And all of them are seriously gastronomicized. They spent the last two days coming up with the 9 course menu for our Christmas feast which will include three styles of oysters from Island Creek, home made ravioli filled with butternut squash, seared scallops on […]
The Quiet Joy of Breathing and Living
A Body Was Given To Me A body was given to me – what to do with it, So unique and so much my own? For the quiet joy of breathing and living, Who is it, tell me, that I must thank? I am the gardener, I am the flower as well, In the dungeon […]
Nothing but Wows
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 […]