August 2011
23 posts
“Things that seem invitations to delirium reveal themselves to be disciplined excursions into shareable joys and ordeals, with which the artist leaves us - happily or unhappily - dramatically alone.”
PETER SCHJELDAHL on PAUL THEK
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Watch
zanopticon:
SWAMP THING
V Staring out the window towards First Avenue, the inner self lectures. Vulnerability, it explains to the outer self, is a difficult mess. Yes, apply for the grant but not when the deadline is so long past. As for asking your lover to move in, perhaps you remember your stay in the swamp? The yellow eyes of those who see when you are nightly blinded? The...
“It is dangerous to objectify yourself, but given the alternative of others doing it for you, it’s perhaps necessary, or at least impossible to ignore thinking about. People dress purposefully to suggest themselves suitable for roles or jobs. Just because somebody looks like a thing does not mean they necessarily are that thing, but appearance really helps sometimes to lean into...
you’re an instrumental tune
“There is a broader context for Watch the Throne’s nonviolent collisions of highbrow and low, opulence and shame, artiste Kanye with ‘business, man’ Jay. Ours is an era of collaborative possibility, when anything from Dockers to a cellular phone pouch can seem desirable with the right synergistic pairing. This is how the business of buying and selling things continues to...
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the book is aching for the tree
“You can wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There’s nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and...
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons,...
“There are the friends you meet for the occasional happy hour, and there are friends with whom you have longstanding Taco Tuesdays. Taco Tuesday means a bottle of wine for each person and peeling back the business-casual mask of the weekday while relaying mortifying tales of performed adulthood to one another. You hit reply all. You cried at your desk. You said “I love you” when you...
