Path following, reconsidered: Not sure where this one is going other than away (Sidewalk markings in Boston) Looking back over the last few months, I have been sensing a particular leitmotif in my thoughts, postings, concerns. It isn’t as easily identifiable as a melodic sequence in music, but I can feel something taking form, as […]
A Recess of the Nuptial Kind
Steely and brilliant Jessica (AKA Dr. Salt) with her Uncle Dave, several years before she was mowed down by love…it happens! I’m out of town for a couple of days to celebrate the wedding of my niece Jessica. I’ll be back next Monday.
Aware, Aware, Aware
Points of light: From the Kiki Smith installation at the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. Every single thing is unique. Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. It’s a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that […]
Open Hand, Open Mind
A moment of homage to the hand. My hand. Your hand. I started the morning reading about the relationship between a person’s problem solving skills and their ability to work with his or her hands. The correlation is significant enough that some recruiters look for cerebral problem solving candidates with car repair experience on their […]
- Anthropology
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Making Room
Seafaring Hokule’a Wade Davis is an anthropologist and ethno-botanist whose passion for unsung and underserved cultures has made him a TED talk repeater. His compelling book, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, is transcripts of radio lectures he delivered two years ago. Each chapter highlights his experiences with indigenous people all […]
The Evanescent, the Mysterious and the Intuitive
Stadia II, by Julie Mehretu (Photo credit: Richard Stoner, Copyright 2007 Julie Mehretu) I’m just coming out of what feels like a deep sleep. It was in fact not a sleep at all but a protracted and extremely focused period of time working in my studio. Making: it’s a strange state of mind, hard to […]
Occultation
I’m Going to Start Living Like a Mystic Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering. Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies are the ciphers of a […]
Transitional Space
Istanbul: a child connects with her grandmother (Photo: Collin Key) Every once in a while you find a post that says it just the way you would have. Here’s one at All Girls by Sally Reed, regular reader of Slow Muse, about so many themes and ideas that I find compelling—the work of D. W. […]
- Technology
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Discreteness
A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]
- Aesthetics
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Painting is Dead, Long Live Painting
Roberta Smith keep the dialogue about contemporary painting current and vital. Regarding that old saw, “painting is dead,” Smith is consistent in her refusal to buy in. In today’s New York Times Arts section (I refuse to call that part of the paper by its full title, Arts & Leisure since it is irritatingly effete, […]