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houston – the menil collection
Rothko Chapel couldn’t have been built in a better place. The surrounding neighborhood is a verdant combination of suburban multiplexes and private art collections. This oasis is itself within an oasis, however: Houston is a giant pockmark on the face of Texas, itself a cyst on the awkward nose of the United States. Yet the [...]
vulgarity
Theodore Dalrymple (neé Anthony Daniels) has this to say on vulgarity in this month’s New Criterion:
Are there primary qualities so indisputable that all other qualities are ultimately reducible to combinations of them, so that we can know for certain, at least in theory, that we are all talking about precisely the same thing? Personally, I [...]
Also posted in criticism Tagged anthony daniels, decadence, new criterion, theodore dalrymple, vulgarity Leave a comment
Review: Savage Detectives
Science fiction it keeps cropping up in my dilletantish adventures in reading. What do you make of realism in novels when the best examples seem to flout the carefully-established norms? The novels whose margins I write in most, the ones with the coffee stains from all that reading during breakfast—are the novels most likely to [...]
Also posted in criticism, philosophy, reading Tagged borges, philip k. dick, Plato, reviews, roberto bolaño, savage detectives, spanish art Leave a comment
for posterity
I have a secret fetish for hypothetical questions, especially ones that elicit me to long digressions about my tastes and opinions. Thus Norman Geras’s provocation:
The story is that, civilization approaching its possible doom (not really, but it’s the premise of the poll), the normblog readership has been assigned the task of assembling for posterity a [...]
Tony Oursler – “Cell Phones Diagrams Cigarettes Searches and Scratch Cards”
I checked out a few galleries in Chelsea this past saturday. 24th was clotted with the white plexiglass vans and panelling which accompany movie sets everywhere they go. Fortunately the movie crew had given every gallery on the street a table of doughnuts, coffee, champagne and fruit: I was pleasantly drunk and had defeated the [...]
coraline
Found a great set of production stills (if they can be so called) from an upcoming film by Henry Selick entitled “Coraline“. I’m really digging the effervescent qualitites of this film–sharp ballpoint lines juxtaposed with watercolor and vector effects. Apparently the film is already out, and one assumes that the rest of the blogosphere has [...]
Las Meninas
I don’t know what to write about at the moment, so schoolwork is proving a modest foil for my impulse to write. I’m taking a class on 17th-century Spanish painting. I’ve quickly realized that academics have more or less invented the genre in order to try and fit some context around the painting above.
The painting [...]
sunday smells