other choices, other rooms

Maybe I've become too attuned to 'New New Realism' in photography, fashion and otherwise? The flashlit anti-glamour of Juergen Teller for instance, or the mundane, affectless, almost documentary style of... well, if I knew slightly more about contemporary photography I could reel off the pertinent example. Martin Parr? Am I reaching here?: I was looking at real estate listings online and somehow ended up on Foxtons. (I am not looking for properties in the more far-flung reaches of Brooklyn so you get an idea, here, of how I waste my time.) The more I poked around, the more I was struck by the interior shots of each house. Presented without judgment, the rooms are neatened and posed as best they can be in all their beruffled (or benighted) glory. I think it's the naive aspirational quality mixed with a discomforting airlessness that I find interesting. It reminds me of a Sears studio portrait. Or perhaps its just the decor choices...

Addendum: "New York Loving Brit" (who under no circumstances should be confused with "New York Brit") writes that these scenes remind him of David Lynch. I can see where he's going with that. Although I wasn't initially seeing anything unnerving about these rooms, just a leaden unpleasantness, I've found a reference that seems to take things from the mundane to the menacing: Gregor Schneider.

Schneider, a German artist, has marshaled an ongoing 20-year work called "Dead House"– a transformation of his boyhood home in which he replicated and reconfigured spaces, creating false walls and dead end corridors. Another work Die Familie Schneider was an installation created in 2 identical houses in London's East End (image above). Members of the public were allowed to let themselves into the houses individually, by key, to view the homes and observe the inhabitants who went about their tasks– personal, unsavory, monotonous– unresponsive and unseeing. Schneider, as he is summed up: "Under his hand, the domestic environment becomes the site of an unrelenting existential confrontation." Amazing. I think I might have to get the book, if I can stand it...

Images, properties from Foxtons: Bed Stuy, Old Mill Basin, Cypress Hill, Marine Park, Sunset Park

for the repose of needles

February 8th marks the observance of Harikuyo, Japan's Festival of Broken Needles. A celebration thought to be several hundred years old (I've read it originated in the Edo period, or 16th century-19th century, and have also read that it stretches back to the 4th century AD!) Harikuyo is a memorial service and a ritual of thanks and respect for the tools of sewing. Broken sewing needles and bent pins that gave their "lives" during the past year are laid to rest in a bed of ritual tofu and buried or dropped at sea. Observed in shrines and temples across Japan, it reflects Shintoist traditions of veneration of the spirits of the dead and prayers said for the repose of souls.

Shintoism aspires to an ideal of harmony with nature and states that all things– living and nonliving – contains a kami or "spiritual essence" (sometimes translated as "god," "soul" or "spirit").

When a tool (in this case, a needle) has done its part– finished its valued service–it is relegated to a sacred place, and in some small sense, it is not forgotten.
image: "pin forest" by aleash

Frans Masereel

I came across my copy of The City (originally published in 1925) by Frans Masereel. I've had it for years and just recently was moved to look through it again. Masereel was born in Belgium in 1889 and lived first in Paris and then Berlin where, notably, he was friends with George Grosz. He worked as an artist for magazines and journals and created a number of 'graphic novels.' He worked in charcoal, paint and watercolor but it was his series of expressionistic woodcuts that made Masereel internationally known.

I've not seen any of Masereel's other woodcut series but this particular 'novel' bristles with social commentary: scenes of consumer frenzy, labor clashes, and bourgeois malaise. In a stark, flashcard views Masereel conjures instances that are at the same time highly detailed and universal: the anonymous scramble of the streets, the dynamic modern city and the hidden machinery that propels it. Glimpses of moneyed spectacle and louche feather-bedecked gaiety alternate with the squalor of back alleys and scenes of hushed personal desperation. A brilliant spray of fireworks or the insistent glare of a streetlight illuminates both a flash of domestic horror as well as the quiet padding of the cat down the back stairs...

the tumultuous (18)60s

I recently finished This Republic of Suffering, the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, about this country's relentless confrontations with death during the Civil War and its toll on the collective psyche. (That title is taken from–of all people–Frederick Law Olmsted and his description of the wounded and dying at Union hospital ships.) An unreservedly glowing review in last Sunday's Times surprised me a bit. While the book is a great achievement – it is thorough and rigorously detailed without being exhausting, it is sensitively crafted and intelligently presented– I still expected more.

Background: The Civil War's final tally stood at approximately 620,000 military deaths (I believe that figure does not contain what we would now call "collateral damage"), out of a total national population of about 31.5 million. It is no wonder that a Confederate soldier, quoted in the book, felt that, "death reigned with universal sway, ruling homes and lives." Nearly every household would have been mourning someone. Faust demonstrates, dramatically, that the experience of living through those years was limned by the presence of death—materially, politically, intellectually, and spiritually. Geoffrey Ward, in the Times review:

When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them....Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives.... So did wives and mothers dressed in black.

“The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” says Faust. The lasting impact of that sacrifice “created the modern American union,” she writes, “not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.” It also, she posits, changed Americans' understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But the book largely documents, often in moving first-hand accounts, what I believe were immediate tangibilities of the time: the struggle to account for the losses, to attend to the casualties, to reconcile death with the act of dying "well" (ars moriendi, or the good Christian death). Faust even discusses the arcane rituals of mourning (though she doesn't define what the differences between "heavy", "full", and "half" mourning are). When I finished reading, though, I was left wondering why I didn't have a better understanding of the cultural and psychological impact of all this. (Perhaps I just need to read more about the war!)

America in the 1860s witnessed mass killing, assassination, racial enmity, political strife and rioting, what effect did that tumult have on literature, or social change or even religion? The shadows of events of that magnitude don't pass away quietly. They are absorbed, instilled, repressed, passed on or refuted. What did that generation of children without fathers grow up to think? This country was literally rent apart. What was Europe thinking at the time? That this Great Experiment was imploding, surely.

Americans saw actual photographs of war--the battlefields, the dead-- for the first time, not an artist's rendering. In 1862, Mathew Brady shocked the public with an exhibit in his New York gallery, "The Dead of Antietam." Within hours after it was confirmed on September 19th that the Confederates had withdrawn, Brady's cameramen Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson began to record the aftermath and within a month the results were hanging on the walls. The New York Times said that if Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it... he has brought home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war."
(An interesting modern take on the "birth of photojournalism" on the battlefield at Antietam here.) How is it that religion and sentimentality became all the more entrenched in American society as a result? When the (mostly European, granted) wounded of WWI came back broken and disfigured 50 some odd years later their faces and bodies haunted painting, the graphic arts, and literature. Disillusionment, in some sense, propelled Modernity. How is it that this country faced the "terrible reality' of the Civil War and seemed to turn around.

The last Union body was recovered and reburied in 1871. The last Civil War veteran (though there is some dispute) died in 1956. In 2003 a man recounted stories about his father's experience during the Civil War for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It is history, but not totally out of reach. Faust's creates a vividness from a compilation of incident and fact. The book that traces the social and cultural legacy of those moments, that's the book I'd like to read next.

Images: from Library of Congress, a very romantic portrait of Confederate prisoners at Gettysburg, July, 1863 (detail; Union casualties at Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863; from old-picture.com, Civil War wounded, prepared by War Department, Surgeon General's Office.

reading: a methodology

A "Talk of the Town" in this past week's New Yorker recounts how Art Garfunkel has kept an index of the 1023 or so books he has read since June, 1968. The list, kept on loose leaf pages, reveals a predilection for classics and 'high literature' (James, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy), as well as more rarefied fare (St. Augustine, Hazlitt, Spinoza). "I avoid fluff," he announces with appealing surety. Managing and publicizing such a list (with its hint of intellectual "ostentation," as the New Yorker calls it) is rather like a charmingly analog Library Thing. (For those of you who like books, list making, and/or intellectual braggadocio, high-tail it over there at once!)

"Reading,” Garfunkel explains, "is a way to take downtime and make it stimulating." While I never actively thought of reading as an interstitial time-filler, I suppose it is for me, too: in bed on the runway toward sleep, on the subway to wile away the tedium, in a diner ("Bitter? Party of one?").

The New Yorker piece then goes on to detail Garfunkel's particular reading habits...

He writes vertical lines in the margin next to passages he finds exceptional, arrows next to references to places he’d like to visit, and a little circle next to any word he needs to look up....He once read the Random House Dictionary, back to front.

I never thought I'd say this but Art Garfunkel sounds like my type of guy.

My reading rationale, as it has evolved: A page dog-eared from the bottom means there is something particularly interesting or noteworthy or beautiful, which may or may not get underlined or called out with a vertical mark in the margin (like Art!) for extra emphasis. A page dog-eared from the top indicates something requires research, a word that needs looking up or an idea that needs further background explanation. No highlighters, no markers, occasional ballpoint.

Typically I'm not one for full-blown marginalia. I do not make detailed notes or rejoinders that travel along the edges of a page. These are things I always half-associated with student-groupies who fawned over seminar leaders or the annoying hyper-articulate wunderkind who theatrically engaged the professor in personal debate at every turn. But its not that I mind marking the pages, I am not precious about my books. (My mother is much more of an opinion-sharing, note-writing reader, especially with the disposable reading matter. A Vanity Fair, for instance, might be passed on to me punctuated with exclamation points, clarifications or definitive assessments like, "bastards.")

I do not like book jackets. This is ironic since I sometimes design them for a living, but I find them cumbersome and unwieldly. I always seem to rip or crease them, or my cat will try to chew on the edges.

Many of my books are softcover and I'm not very dainty with these at all. They get bruised, scuffed, wrinkled. When I take one to read on the subway I stuff it into my bag where it mixes with makeup (the page edges sometimes take on a rosey hue) and uncapped pens (angry erratic lines) and newspapers (smudges). And when I go out for breakfast with my book, there's always the danger of an errant drop of ketchup or egg yolk.

My habit is to often skip ahead or read chapters out of order, which is, as I read mostly non-fiction, not too disruptive .
What I cannot do, though, is force myself to finish a book I do not like. I can't understand friends who say things like, "Oh that, that was annoying—it wasn't very well-written." Page four? irritating narrative tics? stilted dialogue?—I'm outta there. In junior high school we had summer reading lists. One particularly difficult summer found me reading and rereading the same lines in Cry the Beloved Country with no hope of getting to the end before September. For the life of me, my seventh grade head could not reconcile having to read that book. So I created a crude reading aid:
1) Take one sheet of blank paper
2) cut out a narrow "window", exactly the height and length of one line of text
3) slowly move the window down the page, one line at a time, to keep eye focussed.

I can confidently say that, post-academia, all the books I have actually read—I like.

a fuseli moment

Somehow I felt like we'd been building toward a Henry Fuseli moment. The Owen Wilson wrist-slashing documentation (where are the scars?), the ghoulish video loops of Anna Nicole Smith slur-babbling in clown make up. There was the morbid preoccupation with defining Britney Spear's mental state, and pathetic images of her, wild-eyed, as they wheeled her off to the hospital. Frighteningly soulless online twitter of her obituary having been written and ready to go at the AP was supplanted only when Heath Ledger exited this mortal coil. Then I made the mistake of following the parasitical rush over to Gawker and watched hundreds of people snap photos of his body bag getting wheeled into an ambulance.

update-- a bit of synchronicity: Jon Pareles' piece in today's NY Times makes a more succinct statement than mine about the front row seat we all have to "celebrity" crack-up. (Of course, I also realize I neglected to include Amy Winehouse in the list above.) "There's a sleazy symbiosis that connects instantaneous worldwide visibility, publicity, marketing and narcissism."

oh and another thing: I can't help thinking, too, about the days when one could pay a penny and take a walk through Bedlam. Visitors "delighted in" the patients' 'frenzical extravagancies.'" The noisy crowd of gaping sightseers found it a rare diversion when not attending public executions...
(The History of Bethlem by Jonathan Andrews, Routledge - 1997)
------
Henry Fuseli, born Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741–1825) in Switzerland, produced dynamic, dark-themed and somewhat overwrought proto-Romantic works. He became a teacher at London's Royal Academy and was an influence on William Blake.
Images: Mad Kate 1806-07, 2 versions of The Nightmare 1782, 1790, Silence 1799-1801.

'return to angelica'

Robert Warner's ephemera collage art show at Pavel Zoubok gallery.
A wonderful display of vintage what-not and obscure commercial flotsam, expertly assembled.

There's Robert, who cleans up very well, out of "costume"--second row, right.

Lots of picture taking going on. (Samantha, at left, has an exceptionally keen eye and does the most unusual and hilarious things with fabric, beading, embroidery.)
In the background, at right, is "double Doody" (as in Howdy), which sold before the show even opened, to a man "covered in tattoos."

There was one very cute dog in attendance and one ridiculous pair of shoes.
A good time.

a ride on Stalin's cruise ship

Feeling somewhat expansive with the New Year, I've decided to simultaneously look outward from my navel-gazing and be more aesthetically open-minded.

Here: a Flickr cluster of Brutalist architecture (via Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy)

addendum: a Flickr set of the building that first started me wondering what possible merits rusticated concrete ever seemed to offer.

I've expressed my opinions about this sort of urban landscaping before: soul-deadening, dystopian, authoritarian, hermetic– and it ages badly. And yet.
The Flickr cluster is an impressive collection of images, much of it taken in London, put together by people who like and celebrate this sort of thing. The title of this post is from a brilliant comment on the photograph, above, of the National Theatre in London, by Paul Carstairs. In the past, when confronted with this type of building, I've been prompted to think "Death Star manqué" or "Eastern Bloc Futurism." I must admit, though, that the images have spurred in me qualified and begrudging appreciation of Brutalism. It was just as swift and revelatory as the time it struck me that the World Trade Center towers weren't just simplistic and heavy-handed and colorless. That in fact, formally, together, they were rather grand. (And then disturbingly, shortly thereafter, they were no more.)

I can now imagine how, but only in the most supremely competent hands, the orchestration of space and the gravitas created could seem ideal for government buildings in theory. (The reality often went terribly wrong.) But creating an abstract sense of strength and authority in a public forum is one thing-- asking people to live in stained concrete canyons is another.

I'd read about the renewed excitement, of those in the know, over the Barbican complex--especially the residential towers (see my scanned photo above). Built in 1982 by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon, it has the distinction of having been voted "London's Ugliest Building." True, it was an environment that prompted palpable anxiety, discomfort, and feelings of hopelessness in me–and I was just visiting for an afternoon. But it would have had to have beaten a lot of stiff competition for that title– and I, again grudgingly, just don't think it is so.

Why this near reversal has happened in me, I'm not sure. At this rate I'll be gushing over Thomas Kinkade and extolling the merits of Home Depot Baroque by February.

cheers

Instead of ushering in 2008 with a peevish list of "things I can do without", I'll leave 2007 with a couple of musical finds:

Ross & Laura
look: he, Paul Giamatti-ish and endearing, she, cute.
sound: Charming, low-fi pop noodlings. I cant stop thinking about "where did i meet u."
found: entertainment at local cynosure's enchanting party...

Vampire Weekend
Love the name
look: white boys
sound: low-fi hipster afro-beat? Neo garage Paul Simon?
found: the dazzlingly erudite and eclectic Northern stylings of Finn at mavo

Highlights from the Collection (part 6)

Postcards of questionable merit. (Not to be confused with a previous Highlight of generic landscape postcards.)
Of course I'm being completely disingenuous– each of these has its own rare charm, and merits closer inspection...

At top, a View of the Electrification on the N. & W. RY., Bluefield, W. VA. Stupefyingly dull and suffering from too many needless abbreviations, this postcard could prompt snide comments about West Virginia.

U.S.O. Building, Lawton, Okla. The USO (United Service Organizations) is cemented in my mind with brief film clips of Bob Hope entertaining the troops but evidently USO clubs and community centers were the GI's "Home away from Home" and quite cherished. I'm impressed with this card's fine artistic tinting, which expertly enlivens the row of cars at front. Note that most of the cars are of the bulbous ca. late-1940s vintage except for one model T and a woody station wagon. Also note the wonderful, slightly Bauhuasian lines of the building.

Lower Manhattan Skyline, New York City. Color Photo by Milt Price It is the genius of Milt Price that he can take the dynamic New York skyline and render it a grey, static backdrop for shipping containers. On the reverse is a tourist slogan I'd never heard before: Visit New York– The Wonder City. The scalloped edge, a vestigial throw-back to older photographic prints, is particularly nice. [Does anyone know why the scallop edge photograph came about and why it ended? It's still so iconic that evidently there are products out there to mimic it on your own photos.]

Gordon's Crab & Oyster House /America's Largest Crab Steaming Plant/ One Whole Block/ Baltimore Md.
This is my favorite card– where to begin? The surreal purgatorial limbo this building seems to inhabit is fascinating. It also appears amazingly small for the Largest Crab Steaming Plant in America, no? It is possible, I suppose, that the place is One Whole Block deep and about 12 feet wide. The building (and sidewalk) teeters downward to the left but is shored up with a sprightly yellow band at bottom, which appears to be what is called "artistic license." One would think, artistically speaking, it might have been nice to highlight the logo of the restaurant rather than covering it over in the same "wood tint" of the facade, but one would be wrong. Finally, the outrageously miniaturized evergreens grandly flanking the entrance are superb.

greetings from Pink Bemis

"and many of 'em

Perhaps you remember
a little song that goes
something like this–

Pink Bemis"

Letterpress card, c. 1930s. A little Googling tells us that Pink was Cornell, Class of 1909.

American nervousness

If the Eskimos, as the old saw goes, have a hundred words for "snow," I must have nearly as many for "tired." I'm weary, enervated, blah. So it was no coincidence that I finally got around to reading American Nervousness 1903 which had been stalled in my mental books-to-read cue for quite a while. An exploration of neurasthenia, an affliction that took on epidemic proportions at the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, the book inspired my visual collection of ennui, above.

Neurasthenia was a nebulous mental and physical diagnosis that covered a lot of territory from hysteria, anhedonia, and "brain collapse" to premature baldness, fatigue and hot flashes. There was a whole constellation of debilitating symptoms for which fainting couches, air baths, nerve tonics, electric trusses and the like purported to relieve. The concept of nerve disease was introduced as a medical condition in 1869 but became more prevalent as the 19th century drew to a close. George M Beard published one of first full-length studies of neurasthenia in 1881 and called it “American Nervousness.” He and other neurologists of the time developed theories of health and disease which were based on folk beliefs of bodily energy, and were expressed 'economic' terms.

“The idea of “dissipation” thus is based on a notion of dispersed rather then directed nerve force, spent without any possible return on the investment. Dissipation eventually led to “decadence,” the death and decay of nerve centers in the individual, and the death and decay of civilization at the social level.” The end result of processes of dissipation, or of any unwise nervous investment, was disease.

Conversely if patients were sensitive and refined enough to begin with, neurasthenia could be brought on by simple exposure to the hectic pace and excessive stimuli of modern life. Paradoxically, the disease could thus be a sign of moral laxity–or extreme moral sensitivity. It was seen as a particularly American syndrome, made manifest in this country as it roared into the 20th century-- straining at the continental frontiers, overrun by waves of immigration, stretched by imperialist expansion and bristling with industrial might. But certainly any thinking man (or woman) of the Mauve Decade could be struck by taedium vitae or acedie. I always saw it as the purview of European aristocratic families in decline, or Europeans anyway– from the relative vigor of Wilde's jaded drawing room wits, through Huysmans' languid decadents, to Egon Scheile's stricken husks...

-----
Some saw it as practically the natural given state for women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, portrays the worsening mental state of the narrator as she endures the "rest cure," enforced inactivity and seclusion based on real-life prescriptions of the well-known 19th century physician, S. Weir Mitchell. Gilman theorized that a proscribed daily existence made women feel their own backwardness–cramped and useless. "Confined to the home," Gilman says, "she begins to fill and overfill it with the effort of individual expression... and overfilling the house, like the overspending of energy is unhealthy." Hmmm. Interior decorating as neurotic displacement...
----

Next up in my mental book cue: the intriguingly titled "Philosophy of Disenchantment" by decadent wit and aesthete, Edgar Saltus.

Images: Ennui, 1914 Walter Sickert; The Lute, 1903 Thomas Wilmer Dewing; CMS Reading by Gaslight, 1879 William Stott; Woman in Plaid Shawl, 1872 Susan MacDowell Eakins; Yellow Scale, 1907 František Kupka; Tree of Nervous Illness, 1881 George Beard.

"the confidant of my thoughts"

I just finished a book on neurasthenia, that wonderfully evocative nervous disorder of tremulous aesthetes, profligates, and women (more next post), and decided to peruse some first-hand accounts. I started rereading the Goncourt Journals. The brothers Goncourt, Edmond (1822–96) and Jules (1830–70), lived together, wrote essays, plays and novels together (though little of that made it into the 20th let alone the 21st century) and, most notably, kept a journal together. Part of the Parisian Bohemian literary set, the brothers– sensitive, rarefied, and ultimately, rather spinsterish–recorded comings and goings with their friends (May 11, 1859– A ring at the door. It was Flaubert...), their insecurities about fame and the lack thereof, and most deliciously, a running social commentary (January 2, 1867– Dined at the princess's with Gautier, Feuillet and Amedee Achard, a wilted man of fashion, a mind without emphasis... the archetype of nonentity).

The brothers began their journal on what was to have been a momentous occasion–the publication of their novel. Unfortunately, day of all days, Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, called Napoleon III, chose that December 2nd to seize power and make himself dictator of France. The boys were positively apoplectic with annoyance:

In swept our cousin Blamount... full of asthma and peevishness. "By God," he panted; "It's done!"
"What? What's done?"
"The coup d'etat!"
"The Devil you say! And they're bringing out our novel today!"

The journal is filled with breathtakingly misogynistic pronouncements, pithy characterizations of social grandees, much self pity and hand-wringing, hilariously astute asides, and gluckschmerz. Sort of like Lord Whimsy meets Gawker.

A random sampling:

no date 1856—These past day a vague melancholy, discouragement, indolence, lethargy of mind and body. Feeling more than ever this despondency of my return [from Italy], which is like some great disappointment. We come back to find out life stagnating just where it was... I am bored by the few monotonous and repeatedly scrutinized ideas that trot back and forth through my head.And other people to whom I looked forward in the expectancy of entertainment, bore me as much as myself....Nothing has happened to them either; they have simply gone on existing... No one has even died amongst the people I know I am not actually unhappy: it is something worse than that.

April 24, 1858—Between the chocolate soufflé and the chartreuse Maria loosened her corsets and began the story of her life.

May 27, 1858–... After so many skinny graces, so many sad little faces, careworn and with the clouds of eviction on their foreheads, forever scheming to gouge something out of you... after all these shopworn gabbling creatures, these squawking parakeets with there miserable slang picked up in workshops and in the clattering cafes...what a satisfaction lies in Maria's peasant health... in her peasant speech, her strength... the heart that is evident in her with its lack of breeding...as if I've found myself eating simple and solid food in a farmhouse after a vile dinner in a filthy pothouse.

March 3 1864—At a ball, at Michelet's, the ladies were costumed as the oppressed nations– Poland Hungary, Venice, and so on. It was like watching the future revolutions of Europe dance.

December 14, 1868—Our admirer Zola came to lunch today... He talked about how hard his life was...He wants to do"big things" and not "those squalid, ignoble articles I have to write for the Tribune for people whose idiotic opinions I am forced to take..."


The brothers themselves noted that they attempted to sketch from nature, to "record those swiftly passing moments of emotion in which personality reveals itself." Their mission: to observe and document "le vrai." They could find meaning– divine character– in the ephemeral, telling, details of the day-to-day. Describing the journals in an author's preface Edmond announces, "... this work hastily set down on paper and sometimes not reread, the reader will find our syntax of the moment and our occasional passportless word, just as they came to us."

Never having been separated for much more than a day (30 hours to be exact) in their entire lives, their intense bond was broken only when Jules died of syphilis. Edmond considered the journals over at that point. However, before long he was compelled to continue (for 26 more years in fact) and decribed the diaries as "the confidant of my thoughts."

My copy of the Goncourt journals, Doubleday 1958, cover by Phillipe Jullian, typography by Edward Gorey.
Photograph of the brothers by Nadar, c mid-1860s.
This English edition, originally published 1937, is, unfortunately, quite abridged ("[this volume] translates the most informing and agreeable passages... the reader has been spared most of the pages where they bemoaned their lot or recorded their ills.") although the translation itself seems superb.

How Did I Get Here (part 2)

Wherein,
I transcribe verbatim Google searches that have led people to this blog,
as found on our sitemeter:

Andy Warhol peach slices
morgue slab
sentimental christmas card phrases
naked negresses
impalement eyewitness
rowdy Roman youths
printers aprons
empty Times Square
how a book impressed me
street scenes gossamer
what is olfactory
pictures of inbred people

Every now and then I find people have used Google like some kind of oracle.
My favorite example thus far: "what did Karl Blossfeldt do as a child"

• • • • || • • • • || • • • • || • • • •

Poetics of
The Beaufort Wind Scale
(an empirical measure for describing wind velocity, developed in 1805
by Sir Francis Beaufort)
with a nod to Matthew Weingarden
nb: there are many variations in the force descriptions;
I am taking these from several different sources

Sea like a mirror.
Small wavelets, crests glassy,
no breaking
Wind felt on face, leaves rustle
Flags extended
Small waves becoming longer, frequent white horses.
Dust, leaves, and loose paper
lifted,
Small trees in leaf begin to sway
whistling in telegraph wires, umbrellas are difficult to control.
Wave crests topple,
tumble
and roll over.
chimney pots and slates removed. Surface generally white.
Widespread damage.
Widespread damage.

• • • • || • • • • || • • • • || • • • •

A tantalizing roster of "psychometrics"
available on the Educational Testing Service web site.
Unfortunately these are accessible only with payment.

Achenbach Lewis Symptom Checklist
Alienation Scale
Awareness of Consequences Scale
Barratt Impulsiveness Scale
Daydreaming Inventory for Married Women
Fetler Self Rating Test
Illinois Index of Self Derogation (Form 3)
Kit of Selected Distraction Tests
Lemire Androgyny Scale
Moral Orientation Device
Rydell-Rosen Ambiguity Tolerance Scale
Self Actualizing Tendencies Test
Style of Mind Inventory Trait Value and Belief Patterns in Greek Roman
and Hebrew Perspectives
Ways of Looking at People Scale

image: kiddie ride, Brooklyn, 2005

a few words about the Haughwout Building

I've always liked the Haughwout Building. I remember in the early '90s when it was ghostly and blackened and the clock face stood out sharply; I had sort of liked it that way. The original color of the building, as described in a contemporary account, was "Turkish drab" though now its a brilliant warm ecru. Today I went and took a few photos.

The store, numbers 488-492 Broadway, was built at the corner of Broome Street in 1856 for retailer Eder Vreeland Haughwout (evidently pronouned "HOW-out"). It was designed by John Plant Gaynor, who was inspired by the Sansovino Library in Venice, although if I'd read he'd been inspired by French pastry I would believe that, too. The facade, one of two of the earliest surviving examples of cast iron architecture, is constructed from components fabricated by Daniel Badger's Architectural Iron Works and it is completely self-supporting. With 5 floors above ground, and 2 below, the building featured the first safely viable passenger elevator, by Otis. The elevator has long since been removed.

Like many of the retail "palaces" lining Broadway in the 19th century the store not only displayed and sold luxury items, it manufactured them as well. Haughwout's offered silver, antiques, bronzes, Parian statuettes and other goods on the main floor, glass, mirrors and china on the second , chandeliers on the third. Upper floors housed part of the manufactory with scores of women gilding and painting china, and men working on metalware. According to this site, Mary Todd Lincoln shopped at Haughwout's in 1861 and bought a set of custom china for the White House– an American eagle surrounded by a wide mauve border.

Saved from the path of Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway nightmare, the building was landmarked (surprising early) in 1965.

Top two illustrations from Art and the Empire City, New York 1825-1861, Yale University Press and Metropolitan Museum; b/w images from Tom Fletcher's NYC architecture

the joy for things

I've been bogged down. I've been thinking about what it is, exactly, I want to say about collecting. Rather, about living with, and amongst, clutter, stuff, things. Historically, I have not been a collector so much as a diffuse acquirer– flea market paintings? of course, 19th century paper ephemera?, yes! pottery? green please, antique shoe lasts, why not, mysterious wooden tools, pieces of bone and horn, hotel silver... and on and on. Each item, at time of purchase or discovery, feeling like an imperative. Each item inspiring a sense, too, of self-important grandiosity: This must come home with someone who understands the significance! someone who appreciates the singular peculiarity! This, this, is the possession of someone who rejects decor from a catalog!

Yet lately I've had to confront increasingly ambivalent feelings about these acquisitions and my life amongst them. What do these things say about me? What does it mean to live in... a display?

Meanwhile, I had a wonderful visit from my friend Robert, collage artist, Master Printer at Bowne & Co., and quasi-magical personage (that's R, above, who came calling armed with scissors, a bone folder and a large bag). "Oh, your apartment! It's like a Joseph Cornell box!" he exclaimed and part of me was overjoyed. Robert, I should explain, is the King of Things. He has a hidden studio in the West Village where he works, amidst piles of oddments, on his collages. A stop there, as described in a previous post:

A highlight of the evening was a chance to see Robert Warner's basement workshop in the Village. Though there was a little hesitation on his part-- too many people? delicate sensibilities likely to be offended? embarrassing things left in view? rat poison? -- we prevailed. Down the stairs, through a door, along a narrow dilapidated corridor, right, through another door, out into a small rear courtyard and to the left, by the wooden stairs. We all crowded into the workshop past jars of lamp black and springs, boxes marked "marbles" or "better photographs", piles of papers, Howdy Doody heads, books, toy eyeglasses, drawers open and quietly exploding, and an ample sprinkling of glitter.

During his visit with me Robert extracted from his bag, one by one, some of his recent works-in-progress and we proceeded to discuss:

"Oh, chandelier crystals?"
"Yes, glitter is perfect there."
"Perhaps a postcard, instead?"
"I'm not sure about Myopia"

He pointed to virtually every detail of my apartment, obvious and not so, that had thrilled me when back I first saw it (way too many) years ago. He picked out, without prompt, each of the prized objets that I had framed, hung, piled, leaned or fussed over. Then he brought out a box for me filled with antique bits, collage pieces and inspiration. Right then, and for a while after, I felt an unequivocal joy for things.

now and then

Devotion to the past [is] one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
Susan Sontag "Unguided Tour," quoted in The Past is a Foreign Country David Lowenthal

I was rereading an article from the April 16th New Yorker about an Amazonian tribe living in virtual isolation for thousands of years. Their language is, in certain respects, bafflingly "simple" and does not seem to adhere to current linguistic paradigms. They have no numbers beyond 2 or 3, no fixed color terms, no abstract ideas, no descriptive clauses, no perfect tense, no deep memory. That's what caught my attention:

Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience...“When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ” ...Everett...called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle.”

Essentially, they live eternally in the present. If something goes out of vision, it is out of experience and no longer of concern. This strikes me as humorously appealing only because, well, I need a little of that. It's very self-help and Power of Now, no?

In my endless preparation/procrastination for another post I've been lightly trying my hand at some Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, on recommendation from the frighteningly erudite Dylan Trigg of side effects. Although the reading is for my next post, this seemed particularly apt for me, right now:

The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.

The more reading I do, the more my once-discreet ideas on collecting, on the nature of the "museum", and on the past--personal, psychical--are now collapsing inwards and piling up. How ridiculous: to be caught in a stasis formulating ideas about the Past for some time in the future...

The incredible portraits of Pirahã, at top, by Martin Schoeller seemed so 'timeless' they, ironically, reminded me of the inscrutable 2500 year old "archaic smile" of Ancient Greek art (kouros, and a figure from Ephesus)