John Constable, Weymouth Bay with Jordan Hill, 1816
1. Performance pioneer Robert Wilson has a wonderful little piece of autobiography in the Observer, speaking of his early exposure to figures like Yvonne Rainer and Martha Graham in New York. His description of Rainer, in particular, is interesting. I am not sure I would have had the same reaction under the same circumstances, which makes me want to know even more about Wilson's background:
http://observer.com/2015/07/robert-wilson-on-performance-art-now/
2. One of the pleasures of going to Helen Molesworth's new installation of MOCA's permanent collection are the photographs of Aaron Siskind, underrated yet key figure of Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina in the late 40s and 50s. I always forget about Siskind, and then upon encountering his photos again, an entire world opens up. I am pretty sure the term "abstract expressionist photographer" is ridiculous, but his photos definitely point to a sweet spot in the early 1950s that would have enthralled Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg.
http://www.nysun.com/arts/aaron-siskinds-romantic-notions-of-decay/79336/
3. Great Scott! Let's just hope it is more in line with Kubrick at LACMA and less Bjork.
http://press.moma.org/2015/07/what-lies-beneath-the-films-of-robert-zemeckis/
4. Bookstores are in dire straits, which is a horrible reality, but I do like the idea of curated bookstores. These stores cultivate books according to their customers, not attempting to cast the net so wide that they have to fill the store with popular fiction and cookbooks. A new store opening in Narrowsburg, New York called One Grand seems to have a particularly interesting idea, arranging the stores according to the favorite books of particular authors. The concept is that authors chose their top ten desert island books and that a customer can find those inspiring texts on the premises.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/24/reading-list-carrie-brownstein/?smid=tw-tmagazine
Okay, I can't resist:
1. Moby Dick
2. Collected Works of Shakespeare
3. Collected Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz
4. The Plays of Euripides
5. Dante's Collected Works
6. Infinite Jest
7. Collected Stories of Flannery O'Conner
8. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
9. Collected stories of Chekhov
10. National Geographic Ultimate Survival Manual (I'm on a desert island, after all).
Video of the Week
5. Full disclosure, I love Sons of Anarchy. So, imagine my surprise to find animated interview of Hunter S. Thompson describing his time with the Hell's Angels. What a strange voice Thompson has, those strange, quick, clips of speech. With the exception of Ayn Rand (who is a psychopath who I would recommend to no one), many of these interviews are fun and clever. I hope they keep posting.
http://blankonblank.org/interviews/hunter-thompson-hells-angels-motorcycles-fighting-violence-drinking/
Poem for the Week
6. I did not know the poetry of Lee Harwood, until I stumbled upon the article below in the London Review of Books. I link to his poem, Landscapes, which I found to be very mysterious, if not for any other reason than it is actually quite difficult to match the action of the poem to the painting that the poem claims to be thinking about, a landscape called Weymouth by John Constable. Constable painted many versions of Weymouth Bay, several of which are in the National Gallery of London. There is a gap between the real content of the painting, the memory of Harwood of the painting, and the liberties that Harwood's imagination can take from being spurred by the painting. There is something about the dark heart of art in this poem, about how the hard conditions of the thing itself are often subservient to other, more intangible, concerns.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/landscapes-9/
One Click Deeper:
7. Lee Harwood has often drawn comparisons with John Ashbery, and this article in the London Review of Books teases out the differences between the poets. The article is a pretty geeky read, but it is worth the effort. It is an irony, really, that often poets like Ashbery and Harwood, both of which can really speak to our distracted condition and the strange jolts of contemporary life that we experience daily, come across as hard to read or difficult. These jolts are natural in traffic or in the supermarket or at our computer but the page and poetry remains resistant to these exchanges for the common reader. It is a notion worth thinking about all week.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n10/august-kleinzahler/toss-the-monkey-wrench