and here we are again

Quiet Friday morning in the library of Lang, signed in as a “guest user” (this seems wrong), chai at my side.  A flute in a practice room, somewhere upstairs.  The Crum, gray.  Young people in ill-fitting clothes come in and out of the library.  Someday I’ll return to this world.  But for now I feel like a ghost.

GO TO THE WHITNEY!

I can’t believe I’m writing this — but the Whitney Museum just tweeted that their admission is reduced to $8 (down from $18) until Feb 24th, while they install the Whitney Biennial.  This means you can only see two exhibits, Collecting Biennials, and Omer Fast’s video installation, Nostalgia.  I can’t vouch for the former, but the tri-partite Nostalgia is worth $8 all on its own and is substantial enough to occupy an entire visit.  (After I saw it, I could barely focus on the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit that originally drew me to the Whitney.) Incredibly compelling, smart, gorgeous, horrifying — beloved art critic Holland Cotter puts it better than I ever could, and Time Out Magazine just gave it its stamp of hip approval.  Only up until the 14th, catch it while you can.

ddoi

I’ve been following the Canadian photoblog “daily dose of imagery” for about five years now.  The Iranian-Canadian photographer Sam posts a thoughtful and beautiful photo every day (and spends a lot of time on some of my favorite visual subjects: rain, snow, fog).  His recent post on the protocol and ethics surrounding photographing strangers is pretty AND interesting AND entertaining.  Yet another of these particularly 21st century challenges.

my ‘hood

still figuring this out…

found art

Last Friday, I walked clear across Brooklyn to the docks of Red Hook, which sit on the edge of the Upper Bay, where the Hudson flows into what becomes the Long Island Sound.   It’s fun to watch the brownstones of Park Slope give way to the industrial lots of Gowanus which shifts (beyond the steely border of the Gowanus Expressway) into wide-skyed Red Hook with its suddenly nautical flavor, cobble stones exposed where the hardtop is worn down.

Who knew that these Brooklyn neighborhoods also contain a number of modernist paintings disguised as walls and gates and fences!  Thanks to a wonderful wonderful friend, I was able to capture these escaped masterpieces with a Real Digital SLR, with which I am profoundly, deeply in love.  I declare it to the world.

the world of yesterday, part 1

At this point, I’d say gmail contains more of my brain than my own grey matter.  Not only does it house the entirety of my written correspondence (and several thousand hours of typed chatting), my google calender chronicles my weeks, my google reader archives most of my daily reading material, and my google drafts act as an electronic dream catcher for fragmented thoughts and plans. Perpetually hovering at a count in the lower 20s, my drafts serve as to-do lists, post-it note reminders, a journal, a diary.  At the moment, the oldest draft is from the summer of 2007 (an unfinished account of the steam pipe explosion at grand central station).  There are three unfinished emails (one never intended to be sent, but preserved nonetheless), several links to jobs and art schools, a number of slap dash nonsensical thoughts about music, art, and culture, and a transcription of facebook friends’ status from the hours following Obama’s election.

I generally don’t browse my drafts, thanks to its guilt-inducing “to do list” aspect (I love the act of making to do lists; I fear re-encountering them later).  This afternoon, however, I came across several pages worth of text I typed up this summer after reading Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday — I had to return the book to the library, but there were some passages I wasn’t ready to leave behind.  And so I typed.

This is Zweig on the Vienna of his childhood, at the turn of the twentieth century.  His chapter on the lives of young people, men and women, and the great difference between life before the wars and after, is entirely riveting.  In appropriately (and, more important, believably) Freudian manner, he explores the physical and psychological effects of the rigid Austrian society – for example he frankly describes of the draw of brothels (apparently every single young man frequented one at some point).  The section below concludes a long segment on the role of women – and makes me feel that, even though it was a hundred years ago, these people were truly alien, that their lives were different to the core.  As though they had green skin.  (Also, he’s just such a great writer.  I love the line, “a sort of mild confusion constantly irritated their conduct.”)

Now I cannot conceal the fact that this innocence lent the young girls of those days a secret charm.  These unfledged creatures sensed that besides their own world there was another of which they knew nothing and were not permitted to know anything, and this made them curious, dreaming, yearning, and covered them with an alluring confusion.  When we greeted them on the street they blushed – are there any young girls today who blush?  When they were among themselves, they giggled and whispered and laughed incessantly as if they were slightly tipsy.  Full of expectation for all this unknown experience from which they were locked out, they dreamed their lives romantically, but at the same time they were bashful lest someone discover how much their bodies yearned for a tenderness of which they knew nothing clearly.  A sort of mild confusion constantly irritated their conduct.  They walked differently from the girls of today whose bodies have been steeled by sports, who move about freely with young men of their own kind; in those days one could distinguish at a distance a young girl from a woman who had already known a man, simply by the way she walked.  They were more girlish, and less womanly, than the girls are today.  In their nature they were akin to a delicacy of a hothouse plant cultivated under glass in an artificially over-warmed atmosphere, protected against any strong gust of wind, the artfully tended product of a definite education and culture. (78-79)

sun light paper white

rainy day paper whites

oh, WOMEN

The top two most emailed articles on the times right now are on women excelling (in their careers and waiting on children) in Germany and more men marrying wealthier women in the States. The first article delves compellingly into Germany’s history in the process.  All this really makes me wonder how the gender landscape will evolve in coming decades and centuries; it’s both exciting — and somehow troubling.

keep calm and carry on

It’s very neat, it’s very tidy: a year ago, I set out for New York City to ring in the new year with a crew of college friends.  Today, the same journey, the same set of friends (mostly), the same host.  Symmetry, I’ve always liked it.

But of course the rest is different.  Last year on New Years Day, I boarded a bus back to Boston, gathered my belongings (a duffle bag of clothes, my two instruments, my creaking Dell), and returned to the city just two days later to begin life in a tiny room in Morningside Heights.  This year after the ball drops, I will walk home to wake on January 1 in Brooklyn surrounded by the Target nightstand, the Target table lamp, the Target curtains (installed in August), the desk built with zach’s assistance (still thankful!), the sweet macbook (thank u!), the sketches from my comic class, the pick-up inserted into my violin’s bridge — time has passed.

Where was the energy directed?  Soldier On Dear Friend (first and foremost), the two jobs, moving from Morningside to Park Slope, the friends, learning to eat, learning to sleep, learning the subway, learning the streets. Oh, and the opera.

I struggled to read.  Even things I wanted to read, like only-got-200-pages-in Moby Dick, evaded attention.  (I am determined to finish at some point.)  For a long time, the NYTimes and Arts & Letters Daily provided the only reading material consistently absorbable by my finicky brain. The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, the first triumph, didn’t land until June, but boy did the subway stops dissolve.  Then, in a rush: Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Vol 1, purchased used in a Martha’s Vineyard bookstore, began a WW I/II frenzy.  Volumes 1 and 3 of Leonard, tales of escaped Hungarian Jews, Alexander Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein, and, without a doubt, the book of my year, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday.  As suddenly as the madness descended in July, it lifted in September.  Attempts to extend the happy addiction with other works by young Waugh and Zweig were fruitless – these books slipped between fingertips to the floor, like the more academic art history readings in college.  Resurgence: a passing comment of a friend’s younger brother in a bar returned me to Salinger, untouched since ninth grade.  November: Franny & Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters — and then, suddenly, ten pages into Seymour: An Introduction — HALT.  Couldn’t read another page.  Was recommended Ann Pratchett’s Bel Canto, again, the subway stops dissolve.  Couldn’t quite manage Marilynne Robinson’s Home or Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.  Now, I leave the year hanging off of every word of Swarthmore’s darling Franzen, his The Corrections.

So, all in all, a slim reading year, frustrating in my inability to control my literary libido, as it were.  I wonder what force drives this temperament: I don’t think it’s a refined sense of what’s good versus what’s not (Marilynne Robinson is one of my favorite authors, and what I read of Home, I loved – it just didn’t stick).  Embarrassingly, I suspect it may have a social element.  So much of what I’ve read was spurred by a recommendation from a friend, a chance to draw nearer those around, to understand the minds of others, to participate in something larger than myself.  Perhaps that’s it: in a year of trying to figure out this life, a very personal task, I don’t want to sink into myself, lose myself to a private quest.  That’s where the embarrassment lies, we all so wish to be self-sufficient.  But if 2009 has taught me anything: we’re not.

As my taste (or, worse, inclination) for books has contracted, my taste, thank god, has expanded.  I’ve mastered the once elusive “a”s — asparagus, artichoke, avocado (and who could believe anyone would avoid such bliss!) — and there’s capers and olives and all things pickled and brined.  Does taste physically evolve?  Just more open-minded?  Am still wary of fish, mushrooms, and eggplant.  I’m unsure this will change.

Finally, some art has returned to this life.  I dreamed in watercolor recently for the first time in a long time – the world transformed into sparkling washes of raw sienna, alizarin crimson, cobalt blue.  I look out the window this morning (payne’s grey, burnt umber, some prussian blue) and that is what I resolve to do in 2010: make things.

On that note, I leave you with the two things I’ve repeated to myself with great frequency.  The first, a motivational poster issued by the British government during WWII; the second, one of the many parodies sprung into existence since the original poster’s rediscovery at the beginning of this decade.