“Five paintings by Helen Frankenthaler are currently holding court in the Museum’s Marron Family Atrium. Spanning over 30 years—from 1957 to 1988—each marks a significant moment in the arc of the artist’s career.” Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep.
Zachary Fine raps to them in The New Yorker.
How like a star you rose upon my life,
Shedding fair radiance o’er my darkened hour!
At your uprise swift fled the turbid strife
Of grief and fear,—so mighty was your power!
And I must weed that you now disappear,
Casting eclipse upon my cheerless night—
My heaven deserting for another sphere,
Shedding elsewhere your aye-regretted light.
An Hesperus no more to gild my eve,
You glad the morning of another heart;
And my fond soul must mutely learn to grieve,
While thus from every joy it swells apart.
Yet I may worship still those gentle beams,
Though not on me they shed their silver rain;
And thought of you may linger in my dreams,
And Memory pour balm upon my pain.
Stanzas [How like a star you rose upon my life,], Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
It sifts from Leaden Sieves -
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road -
It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain -
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again -
It reaches to the Fence -
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces -
It deals Celestial Vail
To Stump, and Stack - and Stem -
A Summer’s empty Room -
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,
Recordless, but for them -
It Ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen -
Then stills its Artisans - like Ghosts -
Denying they have been -
It sifts from Leaden Sieves – (311), Emily Dickinson
What is it?
with its flotilla of votive candles in the window
close enough to set our coats on fire
and cupcakes at Billy’s afterwards,
[…]
I love going back.
I think, in a way, going back
is the subway to love.
Easy, noisy, and very close.
Going Back, Roger Mitchell
Small flowers bloom in the waving grass
And birds are singing in the pine
Where once between tall columns rose
The Zeus whom Phidias made divine.
The thunderbolt was in his hand,
Men dared not look upon his face,
The fluted earth was but his throne,
The bright sky was his dwelling-place.
Now his proud temple strews the ground,
His altars are but broken stones,
His gold-and-ivory flesh is dust
Mixed with his violators’ bones.
Brief is the hour of gods and men–
Their carved fame falls that was so fair,
While wilful beauty blooms in flowers
And floats in song upon the air.
Olympia, Harriet Monroe, (Poetry, Number 1)
The Attic on Monroe and Poetry.
Upon a second viewing, Tenet is interesting mostly in its narrative sequences and choreography of bodies, moving and running, for the camera.
“Above all, there is Barbara’s instruction, as she ushers the Protagonist into the wonders of temporal inversion. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” she says to him. The echo is clear: “Do not try to understand. Just believe.” That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles his film with reverse-motion images, but each one of them gives off a lyrical shimmer, and when a dead woman, lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her body springs to the perpendicular as if reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch and lift in response.” Antony Lane, New Yorker, 2020.
“For minoritarian subjects, the discourse of attention has little relevance because it is structurally difficult to occupy the position of attentiveness, historically, we have always been the objects of others’ attention”
“Distraction is not opposed to attention but is a type of attention -it’s not individual and intrinsic but social and relational”
“medication seeks to treat biologically a set of behavioural and environmental conditions”
“greater collective happiness in all its wild plurality”
“This book … admits that it fiddles while Rome burns”
Disordered Attention, How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Claire Bishop (Verso)
