Frederic Edwin Church's Olana in upstate New York
Good morning art reads:
1. Summer is ripe for the road trip and everyone knows it (why else would gas climb a full dollar in price for no apparent reason in July and August). Jarrett Earnest in the Village Voice suggests that New Yorkers flee to Olana, the Hudson River retreat of painter Frederic Edwin Church. I've always wanted to go to this odd mansion in the woods, fully designed by Church himself as a fantasia of his extensive 19th century travels and imaginings.
http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/take-a-summer-trip-up-the-hudson-to-reacquaint-yourself-with-frederic-edwin-church-s-cosmic-landscapes-7387677
2. In terms of road trip books, I wouldn't recommend even half of the books mentioned in the following article, but it includes a great map of stops of many of the road trip icons, including Roughing It, On the Road, and Travels with Charley. I admit I spent some time pouring over the details of the map and figuring out my own epic road trip novel. I am not sure why, but I would start in Charleston, South Carolina, and end up in Fairbanks, Alaska.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-obsessively-detailed-map-of-american-literatures-most-epic-road-trips
3. MoMA's film department is famous world-wide, and this short Art Forum piece is a testament to why. I had not only never heard of ciné negro from Mexico, but I would have had no context for even discovering the genre. In all honestly, my knowledge of south of the border cinema stops with Argentina and Brazil. However, this article not only gives the context, but gives a compelling argument about why I should care about Mexican film noir. Perhaps it is the recent prison escape, perhaps it is the grotesque ongoing violence in Mexico, but I am going to seek these films out and get to work on studying them:
http://artforum.com/film/id=53910
4. The glut of contemporary information is overwhelming, but I admit I did not know just how staggering the numbers were in terms of how much data hits contemporary eyes per day. And while I've been encountering art work and writing attempting to deal with this reality for decades now (it seems to be my generation's great subject), I had not pounded the pavement to round up the historical roots for such pursuits. Paul Stephens, in his Guernica piece on the rise of information, gives a nice overview from late-19th century poetry, through Dada, and into the present:
https://www.guernicamag.com/features/stars-in-my-pocket-like-bits-of-data/
Video of the Week:
5. I was recently sent a video produced by a guy who calls himself the Nerd Writer, who tackles a variety of cultural subjects. The video that I was sent analyzed Cezanne's Large Bathers, and I admit it is pretty damn good, especially the explanation of the formal details of the painting. I learned a great deal from the short piece so I post it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z68CQkD7mz4
Poem for the Week:
Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me is, without a doubt, the most important book of the moment. I read it this weekend, in response to the fact that it seemed to be on the lips of any serious person I've encountered recently, which is usually a sign to get right on something. Coates's central thesis is a disturbing one: that the assumed ownership and subsequent violence towards the black body is so ingrained in the American consciousness that it is now the fundamental condition by which society itself is organized. I will say more about this later, but the title of the book comes from a specific poem by Richard Wright called Between the World and Me about encountering the aftermath of a lynching and how the narrator naturally became implicated in the scene. It is only appropriate that it is my poem of the week:
http://www.mun.ca/educ/faculty/hammett/between.htm
One Click Deeper:
Coates's book, if you've never heard of it, is haunting not only because it claims to speaks to our particular moment, the world of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, but shows how that moment is basically the same condition that has existed in America for centuries. It is a troubling thesis that has its supporters and its critics. I admit that I am still lingering over Coates's powerful words myself. The following article is a great primer for the book. I suggest reading the three article that are linked in the opening paragraph first and them proceeding into the critical passages of the article itself: .
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/readers-critical-between-world-me-ta-nehisi-coates/399641/