The specificity of place and terms that do the work of aggregation like ‘landscape’ and ‘garden’ and ‘yard’ give way to radical individualization. Here, we spy flowers as if awakened protagonists, independent of their role in a ‘scenic’ and ‘idyllic’ place. In the dark, they are only themselves.
Leslie M. Wilson, Weathering, and other ways to survive. (Marisa Newman Projects)
[…] you can’t please everybody.
Even when I ran the club, I understood this. A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.
The Running Novelist, Haruki Murakami, New Yorker (060208)
Out came Sister Y, looking beautiful in the way someone will when she has just, against all sense, done exactly what she most wanted to.
Hypocrites, George Saunders
Bonus: Schjeldahl is forever!!
I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s famous “Puppy,” the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.
[…]
If you manage not to enjoy the lustrous pooch, I don’t understand you. But if you’re afflicted by an attendant feeling of intellectual free fall, in a vacuum of identifiable emotion, we can talk. Koons is hugely significant—grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death—while finally signifying precious little. That’s my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark.
Funhouse, Peter Schjeldahl
I run into the main road a car scream and I aieeee back (MJ)
ANIMALS is an all-encompassing, interactive exhibition that looks at the animals around us and how human interaction plays a role in endangerment and survival. From domestic household pets to wild invasive or endangered species, animals are presented through various methods including painting, sculpture, mixed media, and video. The Art and Culture Center/Hollywood, May 18 through August 18, 2024.
It comes down to an ordinary woman,
in a Marshall’s running suit
gently opening a doorway to the extraordinary.
Oracle, Jacqueline Johnson
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money. Prayer
as a last re-
sort. Pleasure
as a means,
Peanut Butter, Eileen Myles
“We now call for a boycott of the organization including all programming and events, affiliation, and related projects.” Heard out and about in Miami.
Merve Emre, in the New Yorker, on Freud’s ideas through many biographies.
An enthusiastic popularizer of his ideas, he imagined his audience as anyone who had not managed to turn “his wishful phantasies into reality”—not titans of industry or artists but ordinary people who longed for more than what they had. The act of attending to their substitutions—of fantasizing—provided a daily experience of creativity, surprise, humor, and interpretive activity. One needed to have only the “courage and determination,” Freud urged, to heed the minor poetry of the unconscious.
[…]
The greatest testament to the human sense of “oneness” is civilization itself, man’s “mastery over space and time” in the form of shared aesthetic and political projects—beauty, order, religion, nationhood.
Yet civilization had not “increased the amount of pleasure” that men could “expect from life.”
It’s going to hurt for a while.
It’s going to have to.
[…]
It’s going to be hard
to end soon.
It’s going to wipe out
your entire wildlife.
It’s going to be remembered fondly, your heart
unable to keep its hands to itself.
[…]
It’s going to make your metaphors make you,
even if you don’t want to.
[…]
It’s going to cost you.
This Living, Amber Tamblyn in newyorker
… and the radio love to love but my baby he loves to dance he wants to dance he loves to dance he’s got to dance
Leaving the empty ache
That always follows when beauty goes
Finis, Waring Cuney
Green. Varieties. Shades of. A name. A new deal. A proposal.
chartreuse buds beading above moss
dappled shamrocks
fragrant healing of sage, laurel,
mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle
amid the tall wonders of juniper
pine, olive, pear
even the meeting of sea and river—
the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons,
and cerulean clarity—
offers its green seafoam,
its seaweed pats,
the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh
its teeth open gritted in green
against the backdrop of hunter rainforest
dripping in green
making life on a palette, Raina J. León