LiFE is nO WaY TO TREat an aniMaL

  • cigarette phlegm - fever spots - constipated auteurs - synthesis spirals - morbidity graphics - True crime evocations of autoimmune archivists
  • saturnine blessings - neoliberal wrecking crews - cast-iron primacy - child-centered grooming stations - connoisseurs of funky cold medina
  • hieroglyphic panting - high volume rectitude - low brow pleurisy - fertile virgins - slinky flagellates - wizened rage of the pilgrims
  • Enervated monotheists - boorish swans - Bayesian speed dating - impact-wrench desire - benighted tote bags - the sound of trickling water filling encephalitic dungeons
  • Anthill museum - low-brow concept fracking - hood ornament deontology - sparkle casket - a pile of misnomers - effervescent spread of marauding dawn
  • convex mirror bluff - the flayed black coil - the tardy inside straight - corroded artery - caged marsupial - Slanted and disenchanted - aphasic musings of a disabled medicine man
  • Canadian ambivalence - shirking dervishes - splinter clique - fixed bayonet - discerning octogenarians- deep-in-the-money plastic options -slick optics of a mongrel empire
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Never give up, before it's too late!

 

INTRACTABLE SOMA ELLIPSES

A moment hidden inside another moment inside an involuntary tic, a matryoshkadoll of divvied-up present tense, sliced against the grain of conscious thought and as thin as suspiration makes possible. Good gracious, mind, please help me help you turn off. The beast at the end of the bed sighs and kicks and farts and pushes for more space, and tepid dry air is pushed up to the upper chambers in which all this gnashing takes place, a product of clinks and clanks and pneumatic feints of disguised origin

Distillation

in

Heisenberg = light is aware that we are looking.

Consequently, we may do well to greet the light

politely and not stand at a remove from it

before we probe.


What it is that we suss out

may show more about us

than it tells us

about light.


If this were unique, you could call yourself Friday

and I might be able to sleep

on top of something other than a chemical wave


You aren’t and can’t be my bodyguard

and I already was your long lost friend.

We remain stuck in the middle,

betrayed in equal parts

by entopical phenomena

and thuggish frailty.


I hoped we might slink into Abu Simbel

with a telephoto lens and be rid of our past

for one partial moment.
But before we will go clandestine outside

The all ages show with pilfered cigs

Standing ill-at-ease with the asymptote

Of unspoken mutual attraction.

But observational quarks will always catch

irksome shadows that we cast

by being present at the scene.

From that well-tilled soil, cheap grace is sown

Insight-peddlers flush with vig

occupy the field

Wielding shunted subtitles and indiscriminate colons

To cap the telomerase and seize up the rhizomes.

Their false light is so warm, though,

and it moves quite fast in its own right.

Being remiss, we accept acceptance

in lieu of exceptional experimental results.

We cease experiments altogether,

fearful of being found out.


Pussies, the lot of us.

Like it or love it or leave it or leaven it

There always exists a scene

and we will always be outpaced and outshone

And it will always be something less than clean.

That is the baseline - it does not excuse the task.

To greet the light with a stiff spine

seems the least that could be done

on behalf of our lowest interchangeable sign

Let the sacraments fall where they may and

the soothsayers claim what they will.

Say hello, and then get on with it.



Taking a line for a walk

in
 
[The guy on the bike next to the black car was offended by my presence. He peddled up to me, threw his bike down, yelled continuously in guttural tones the whole approach, and after I started walking away, pushed me in the back. Then he squared up, …

[The guy on the bike next to the black car was offended by my presence. He peddled up to me, threw his bike down, yelled continuously in guttural tones the whole approach, and after I started walking away, pushed me in the back. Then he squared up, hands up and seemed ready to go. I was flummoxed. Then he asked for a cigarette, in staccato English. I said, “fuck you, no.” and he seemed offended. I walked down the street, and as he biked past he gave me thumbs up and i gave the ole middle finger. So that happened.]

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[“lord give me a sign”]

[“lord give me a sign”]

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Endeavor to show the true more than the real because it is, outside the camera's view, more real than true

in

  “It’s the form that creates meaning, it’s what we do everyday without thinking that is the main event.” 

 

Dear Godfrey:

That the pontiff might serve as your personal Che Guevara reflects you as anachronism.  You affirm an obligation to tell young people that they must walk on water, must become heroic, and must ignore whatever attraction respectable, protected, stable middle-class living may hold.  This obligation bespeaks exactitude, without austerity – demands joy that need not be underwritten by consequentialism – and an audience that isn’t looking for instruction as inspiration or preemptive approval at the ecstasies of living life as an experiment. 

“The imperialism of the trivial sets limits on what seems possible” is me, not you, but it’s me trying to ape you in the same way you try to ape phenomenology from a god’s eye time-lapse view.  The same way that you marshal a great ape to hold up a mirror to the viewer (that unbroken, unbreakable gaze).  

             

 
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From the top floor of the hotel where I write this, I can look down on the cages of the baboon exhibit and the monkey (of various species) exhibit.  They are hemmed in by netting that must periodically be reset, as the trees that sit within the enclosure grow by the inch and expand by increment the space in which the monkeys are encaged. 

 

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Who’s on first, mutatis mutandis

 

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I showed the first movement of your trilogy film poem to a class of 15-16 year olds with whom I lived at the outer edge of the end of American civilization, though right in its geographic center.  I wanted to convey the idea that there are ways of naming the craziness of the world that apologize for it or accept it as the baseline of consensus reality.  You don’t cotton to didactic aesthetics, but embedded in the trilogy a theme – rejection of normalized ennui – shines through.  One among many themes, tropes, conversions, offerings.  And these shine through, as a form of how images gather and disperse in sequence.  Insomuch as the viewer agrees to have faith (as you insist), this sequence of images aspires to function as half of a conversation that is worth attending to. 

 

 

Covert activism and naïve DIY enthusiasm.  I think it an underwhelming interpretation to see the trilogy as working in the mode of the therapeutic or diagnostic – e.g., whereof one cannot think, thereof one should not speak, or scorn for Mittledt and amor fati – because there is a viewpoint expressed that is much more radical, that would require an overthrow of basic assumptions and not just a shift in who pulls on the levers.    “Direct montage” in the Armenian vein, filtered through Godard, filtered through St. Augustine. You show that this is may be more than a skit of improvisation, that we are come to be at play in the fields of the Lord whether we like it or not. 

 

 

“[Technology] has become the environment of life, it has replaced nature as the host of human habitation and the rest of nature pays the enormous price for that.”

 

On the cusp of going on a trip, I laid out my assembled grab bag of chargers, cords, camera, batteries, and cases/bags for carrying the same.  I walked miles, my cellphone logging each step, and kept the camera in one zipped-up coat of my jacket and a charging bank in the other.  As I looked at my phone to tell me where I was in relation to the monuments, eateries, and whatnot noted on the phone’s map application, I periodically plugged it into the charging bank in my pocket to make sure I could forestall the leakage that would led to the phone going temporarily dead. 

 

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I will cede to you the penultimate word:

 

I think it’s endemic to the way we live that “war” is the predicate.  But it’s beyond the war of the battlefield.  It’s much more insidious, much more pervasive, and a war that appears like not war, it looks normal.  We’ve gone to ware with the entire rest of the planet, the animal kingdom, the vegetation kingdom, the very air of earth itself, the vibrations within the planet, the relationship between the outer-core and the inner-core where we’re exploding nuclear devices underground for 50 years, I mean, we’re really messing around here.  We all have within our bodies elements that didn’t even exist a hundred years ago, they’re ingested like the air we breathe.  It all seems normal.  I mean, just to support this war of living, the price we pay for this technological happiness is off the charts and our life becomes predicated in speed, faster and faster and faster and faster.  We’ve outrun our future.  To me, the end’s already occurred, we’re living in the aftershock of the event, and to me that’s what I mean about being hopeless about this order, so that one can have the veracity of hope.  Hope is the substance of what you hope for, it’s the only term in theology that uses the term to define itself.  So it’s not just, “I hope things are fine,” that’s just willy-nilly.  It’s the substance of what you hope for that makes hope.  So I’m hopeful, but I’m hopeless.

  

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 Grab it by the thorns and pull, come what may. 

Inputs, 10/13-10/20

 
 
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READ TO COMPLETION
Books
How to get filthy rich in rising Asia. Mohsin hamad
The friend by sigrid Nunez
 


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READING
Books
Lectures on Proust in a Soviet prison camp. Jozef czapski
Essays, clinical and critical. Deleuze
Genet by Edmund white
Faust’s metropolis
Bonhoeffer by Eric metataxas
Preliminary Materials for a theory of the young girl 
 
Longform
Everything available and free online by jd Daniels
Everything available and free online about Julie Mehretu
Bunch of stuff by or about Hamid
David Byrne’s Perfect City
Making Sense with David Byrne
Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space by Trevor Paglen
 
 
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RE-READING
The pacific by Mark Helprin
The cost of discipleship by bonhoeffer
The correspondence by jd daniels
The last samurai by Helen Dewitt
Frank Auerbach monograph

Substituting the frisson of immediate but containable risk for the far grimmer reality of distant but uncontrollable perils

 
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Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired

J. Richardson



Dear Peter:

I am prompted to ask about violence. And I want to start with a line that i sometime find too clever by half and sometimes find to lay bare something about this country (America) that goes to the bone:

Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong.

Holly Near, from the song “Foolish Notion.”

Your painting, Pelican (Stag), shows the afterglow of violence – doesn’t glamorize the blood and guts of it, but (in my mind) follows through on the exchange of gazes between the violent actor and the witness to (not the victim of) the violent act. The fate of the preyed upon is already decided, and it’s the complications that follow that seem built into the idea of the painting and what it evokes. Still, the central figure – the man who stands and stares back from within the painting, dead bird in hand – shrinks no violets, hazards no apologies. I sense that you were not necessarily trying to capture what you and Chris saw – as a witness with any loyalty to a veracious account – but to conjure up, in paint, something that captured the surreal nature of that moment. Less what happened, more what reverberated in the course of it happening and being stared down, and the see-saw dynamic that followed. And the bathing of it in a swath of light, the aftermath of it, is akin to the inability not to look. A broken-necked bird, a wreck on the side of the road, the final words of someone who is (according to the official narrative) about to suffer at the hands of the state a fit punishment for the crime committed to one of its citizens and, writ large, the state itself.

And but what to make of the man with the net from Kerala? Might he suggest we are all fished for? Pelicans, stags, watchers, and makers – all source material.

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Scotland and Canada claim you. You now live in Trinidad, though it’s unsure if you call it home, given the escape to Exmouth Market and whatever space in New York you have hung a canvas. You have talked about trying to achieve in your paintings a place in between places. It is easier to talk about geography, perhaps, than to dig into particular readings of your paintings and the slack vibrancy they seem to achieve.

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I would like you to consider a statement from a theologian whose biography I am currently reading:

It is a consequence of the wide diffusion of the public word through the newspapers and the wireless that the essential character and the limits of the various different words are no longer clearly felt and that, for example, the special quality of the personal word is almost entirely destroyed. Genuine words are replaced by idle chatter. Words no longer possess any weight. There is too much talk. And when the limits of various words are obliterated, when words become rootless and homeless, then the word loses truth, and then indeed there must almost inevitably be lying. When the various orders of life no longer respect one another, words become untrue.

Bonhoeffer, letter to Bethge, December 1943.

Do you believe that paintings answer to the same dynamic – that images or figures can become rootless or homeless, so far disposed from what they are supposed to be, as to become false? Or at least untrue? Or is this the kind of loose talk that ought to prompt a clamp on lips?

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all. But Keats died so young. Maybe if he would have revised the sentiment had he not been consumed by consumption (an archly appropriate Romantic death). It is not hard to become enraptured by countervailing pulls that your work repeatedly has on me: the sense of seigniorial calm clashing with a hitch – an anxious pulling-up-short – that glosses the same beautiful surface with the latency on violence. I feel like you understand both poles – or if not “understand” – have an affinity with both. Is there a way to achieve an eerie effect, intentionally? Does it come down to linseed oil and turpentine, the eye that aspires to achieve a certain effect and the eye that is rapt at discovering something new and surprising unfold in search of that now-discarded aspiration?

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I’m not sure I agree that you and others of your ilk are only capable of painting one painting, again and again, in a single lifetime, but if that is the case I am eager to see what else you will do with it. It doesn’t seem right to invoke Sisyphus in the context - I don’t think you think it is a labor without satisfaction, a rote mechanical act that fate has assigned you to repeat again and again. [I am curious if you have seen Tom Thompson’s handwriting, and whether that biographical residue can hold a candle in comparison to your study of his brush strokes. I am curious if and when you read Guston’s notes on painting and if and when your ardor for his uncompromising line came to a point. I am curious if the layered tectonics of your families make sense to you – if you still feel imperious or feel perceived that way, astride a colossus of change moving inexorably forward, with a pointy aristocratic hat and a face that lacks a speck of haughtiness but offers no apology]

Don’t believe everything you think, obviously.

As if the priesthood was the sole remaining repository of joy

in
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Dear Sarah:

 I was reading in Suzuki the other day and he attempted to translate sabi as attaining to a primitive uncouthness.  I would like to know if your vortices would bear a family resemblance – if rounded edges and that line from Malkmus about wanting to look poor when you’re 15 resonated, at all.

        I won’t deign to stoop to aggrandize.   For a bit, at least.

I wrote a letter once to an author with whom you are socially acquainted.  This was back in the early-aughts.  I had designs on having coffee with her.  She may have read, if not gave an imprimatur of approval, this layered utterance:  “She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.” 

        Being alone without feeling alone, and speaking a kind of silence that might otherwise prove corrosive.  I wonder if your partner takes that on in reading poetry.  Or writing it.  Also if the nostril hairs in his nose get to you yet.

        Vortices and concatenations, the currency in which you traffic, carry so much of the meaning that sits behind my tongue, like dammed water, and I don’t know where to begin to let it seep.  It is said that your mind guillotines this from that without having to think too much, an accordion of separate, but connected concepts, that you cogitate and cogitate and cogitate away.   Is a sculptor a monkey grinder?  Does being awarded something for being a genius lessen the dull cramp of envy that pulsates inside even so generous a heart as yours?

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I like that you like tangerines.  That procreation neither defines nor obstructs what the next work may be.  That the foxes you depict are both ravenous and sprightly.  That you can be precise and accurate, simultaneously. 

Did you ever read the Inferno?  The souls whose heads are munched on by other souls, in a kind of circle-jerk of carnage and sin – sometimes I think of that.  I wonder if I would have better spent my time drawing birds in the upper branches of cottonwood trees that cling to the shores of the Missouri. Does the Renaissance and its piquant humanism ever read out of steam? 

Do you have in mind a tree that clings to shores of a middle-American river?  Is that part of your native taxonomy?  I watched a ten-year old lose a toe to a snapping turtle once, in what we thought to be an idyllic swimming hole, in the Big Sioux.  It was an angry brown river – too brown for the red blood of the severed toe to graduate to spectacle. 

In college I had a friend who used to go into a media library and randomly pick out recordings to copy.  I assume some were music, some were advertisement, some were found sound.   And part of the process was the unknown of the discovery.   What if . . .? seems a good an approximation of a spur to make art’s horse gallop or buck, twirl in circles to get you off its back.   Have you ever been thrown into the dust?  Ridden a wounded horse? 

If art is a thief, isn’t what you give it also stolen from you? 

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Sarah, now I shall stoop.  I like your quiet confidence, the active mis en scene of your art, and its reflective boisterousness . . . . then its chaste but not melancholic poise.  I think your art is a kind of innocence found.   I wish I lived in big exotic cities and knew people who worked for you assistants, who might gossip about the sparkle of your brilliance and the quiet sophistication underlying your semiotics.  That smell of turpentine on a cold-water walk-up, back when it was possible to paint in rooms that were not up to code.  The past is a different country. 

I am not far from the Spam Museum, it should be said. 

Sometimes I want to have access to a gallery to walk through, and a person to walk through it with, from whom astounding insight and delight will unspool.  To know the context, I suppose, is more than half the battle.  And when it seems like maybe the future has the upper hand – that the years that have not landed will trounce the present or wash it clean, like a frenzied squall – the next thought rejects its alibi.   That forever deferring function, flinging us out into the sweep of the future’s scythe, is the opposite of the kind of observer’s intimacy I want to occasion in writing you. 

Faith is the substance of . . . it escapes me. 

All I can say is that I got this way be being this way.  What is your story? 


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Insomnia is the tyranny of the future perfect tense

Insomnia is the tyranny of the future perfect tense.  A tickle or hitch invades breath right when calm sets in.  Begin anew.  A stray thought fires an eager synapse, and what fires, rewires.  Begin anew.  A four-legged mutt runs after some prey or joy, who knows, in the spirit world of four-legged mutts, kicking his legs and letting forth half-muted yips and barks.  Begin anew.

A straggly-haired child invents a reason (as though all reasons aren’t invented, in some way) to pad down the hall and inhabit a querulous moment.  Begin anew.  Mourning comes unbidden.  Begin anew.  Succumb to back-lit scrolling, a search for consoling distraction, a console squared and beaming and electrically connected to whomever else took the time to add to the eversprawl.  Begin anew.   

Special Calamity Physics

Sarah Sze , from a personal history essay, working off Susan Sontag:

In recent years, images on screens have become substitutes for materials and objects. I’m sent virtual glasses to try on, thanked with a virtual flower, or asked to light a virtual candle in honor of a death. A half century ago, Susan Sontag wrote, “All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.” To that material plenitude we have added virtual plenitude.

Sontag continued, “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” As a sculptor, I work with ephemeral materials such as live plants, water, and wind; I construct sprawling compositions with ambiguous beginnings and endings. For me, part of the challenge is to recover our sense of time through tactility—through materials, through texture, through the senses.

Sampling can be a common good

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Non sequitur: Eat your gun, Sze artist Statement

I.

Before retired detective Lance White Man Runs Him inserted his service revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger, he thought about what he might convey to those who wanted to know why. And he knew that the attempt to convey was essentially fraudulent, that the parade of horribles he had witnessed, been part of, or perpetrated were shadow reasons, appendages that might circulate through the gray nameless miasma he felt but that didn’t account for the thing itself. (Had he been a native English speaker, he would’ve known to say nameless gray miasma).

Babies:

There had been the baby who died of infection, malnutrition, and dehydration, left in a mechanical swing for something like a week, a diaper so soiled that maggots had begun to breed and hatch and burrow their way into the baby’s buttocks. He didn’t die from the maggots (e. Coli infection) but that detail sufficed for the jury to send the baby’s parents (yes, meth and childhood abuse for both) to jail for life. Which the good detective didn’t necessarily feel vindicated by, as it turned out.

There had been a baby who died of SIDS or something natural, he couldn’t remember - but whose mother - out of grief and drug-induced psychosis - put into a microwave to revive or reincarnate or whatever twisted thought might have infested her mind at the moment. It was hard to know what to charge her with, based on what the evidence showed - he couldn’t forget - but then a few days into it someone looked at the baby monitor and determined that a recorded file was recoverable and showed that the baby had stopped breathing in her crib before mom came to check on her in the morning. The mom took a leap off of Rapid City’s tallest building three days after being released.

There had been a baby who was left in a car that sat running outside a convenience store in Sturgis for three hours on a stifling August afternoon the week before the rally started. No one noticed until it was too late. That was a tragedy, not a murder - mom had gone into the bathroom, insulin in hand, but didn’t get herself in time, passed out, was taken to the hospital, and woke to ask the question that no doctor or nurse or anyone else, really, ever really knew the answer to.

Wrecks:

Lots of car wrecks. Sad, lonely, painful. Ugh.

Bullets:

Early on, a hunting accident maybe, or family. Then he saw or thought he saw lots of bullets.

And, though this remembrance of things past all passed over him in a matter of moments, he went from being emotionally crippled, to sort of halfway physically crippled, spiritually thwarted, etc, to just feeling plain old and tired.

He was readjusting his grip on the gun when he thought of a line about cops that always stuck with him: “the more maladjusted tend to be more satisfied with their work than the less maladjusted.” And it struck him that now that work was over, he was just that: one of the more maladjusted. Not sure what kind of mission, though.

 

Sarah Sze states:

Images in Debris is very much about the leftovers of an experiment, so, for example, you see a broken egg. But it’s kind of Darwinian: things die out, things stay around, things get added. For this show, I’m interested in the idea that, in some ways, images have replaced objects.

 

Data input 9-16 to 9-22

 
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Read (books):

THE PIECES FROM BERLIN, MICHAEL PYE


Read (short stories)

The Weirdoes, Otessa Moshfegh
The Surrogate, Otessa Moshfegh


Read (Longform/essays/reviews/articles):

The Comedic Beauty of Laura Owens by Roberta Smith (NY Times, Nov. 16, 2017)
Amy Sherald’s Shining Second Act by Roberta Smith (NY Times, Sept 16, 2019)
Playing it Cool by David Salle (review of Alex Katz – NY Review of Books 1/18/2018)
Good Manners in the Age of Wikileaks by Slavoj Zizek, (London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2011)
Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a  cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.
Art in Free Fall by David Salle (review of Laura Owens – NY Review of Books, 2/8/2018)
Owens’s work is the apotheosis of painting in the digital age. The defining feature of digital art—of digital information generally—is its weightlessness. Images, colors, marks, text, are essentially decals in a nondimensional electronic space. They exist, but only up to a point. They can excite the mind, but you can’t touch them. An air of weightlessness remains even when they are transferred to the physical surface of a painting. If these images were to fall, nothing would catch them. They’re like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, just before he realizes he’s churning air.
[.  . . . .}
The Unbearable Lightness of Painting by Thomas Lawson (MOCA, 2003)
The Whitney's Laura Owens Book Comes in 8,500 Different Covers by Michael Wilson (GARAGE, 11/8/2017)
L’1%, c’est moi? By Andrea Fraser
Jailbait, by Otessa Moshfegh
How to Shit, by Otessa Moshfegh
[Title actually unknown – real talk]    Andrew Durbin, Frieze (on Laura Owens)
Rachel Kushner interviewed by Laura Owens, [The Believer, [on Kushner’s the Flamethrowers]]
Johns, by William H. Gass (NY Review of Books, 2/2/1989)
The Key to Act Two, by Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com, 3/29/2018)
Becoming a key is about rewilding your identity as a human, breaking it out of its domesticated uniformity, putting the variation back into the natural selection, doing your bit to reclaim our species nature from this benighted degeneracy – the mathematical term for a system expressing less than its full potential complexity – that is our premium-mediocre civilization.


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Video:

Documentary on “Shoot,” F-Space performance piece by Chris Burden, 1971
Anthropocene:  the Humon Epoch  by Ed Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal et al.



Poems:

Sara in Her Father's Arms
Cell by cell the baby made herself, the cells
Made cells. That is to say
The baby is made largely of milk. Lying in her father's arms, the little seed eyes
Moving, trying to see, smiling for us
To see, she will make a household
To her need of these rooms—Sara, little seed,
Little violent, diligent seed. Come let us look at the world
Glittering: this seed will speak,
Max, words! There will be no other words in the world
But those our children speak. What will she make of a world
Do you suppose, Max, of which she is made.
—George Oppen
Men at 40, Donald Justice
A private singularity, John Koethe
Covers Band in a Small Bar, John Koethe
90% of the poems in Electric Arches by Eve Ewing
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Re-read (books)

LIFT HIGH THE ROOFBEAMS CARPENTERS (SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION)
KISSING IN MANHATTAN 
Re-read (short stories)
Wagner in the Desert, Greg Jackson



Reading:

WHISTLER, LIFE FOR ART’S SAKE, DANIEL SUTHERLAND
THE SILK ROADS
FAUST’S METROPOLIS

Sze Redux

I was reading a Zadie Smith essay about your work [The Tattered Ruins of the Map, from Feel Free] and it gradually became clear that you know each other.

Yes, I met her through an art critic, Hal Foster, and now we’re close friends with Zadie and Nick Laird, her husband, who is also a great writer.

 
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It all sounds very glamorous…

Spending time with Zadie and Nick is always interesting; they are absolutely brilliant. But as for glamorous… My teacher, Ursula von Rydingsvard, she’s an artist, and her husband, Paul Greengard, is a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist. I remember when I was a student, she was on stage and someone asked: “Ursula, you’re married to a scientist, you must have all these incredible conversations.” She said: “Yeah, I’m like, ‘Paul, did you play the plumbing bill?’”

So much of what we own materially, we make decisions about digitally

Cogitate on reference, echo, rhyme, and quotation, as these tropes function in paint and sculpture. If a MacArthur grant recipient says her work is influenced by Philip Guston, Andrea Kramer, and the mid-90s graffiti on the bathroom stalls at that one dive bar on Main Street, is that a thing we need to just accept? Is Barthes relevant here? How about Grant Wood? Does Barthes that angelic coterie of textual significance turn pirouettes on his heavenly cloud every time someone invokes him re: dead authors, live authors influenced by dead agonistes, live readers celebrating or mourning the death day of authors that may otherwise be alive? and so on?