reasons to be cheerful*

Although it hasn't stopped me from planning a trip in February, I've been preoccupied with what I call, somewhat loosely, the end of the world. I find myself scanning news headlines obsessively, salting away tidbits and references in my mental eschatological clipping file: environmental catastrophes, genetically modified foods, religious extremism, obesity, technological singularity (that's a new one for me and, boy, its a doozy), heck, throw in zebo, and the decline of civility. From the absurd to the epic, it's all become a kind of drone that I'm always tuning in to. Perhaps that's why I found Niall Ferguson's piece in Vanity Fair, arguing that the decline of the West is not imminent-- its here, perversely gratifying. It won't win many (other) liberal hearts and minds, making sloppy shorthand of it all in equating NASCAR, illegal immigration, and, yes even tattoos, with signs of The End:

Shame has gone; so has civility. On Friday and Saturday nights, most English city centers become no-go zones where drunken, knife-wielding youths brawl with one another and the police. Another striking symptom of this new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire.

But I don't do him justice by merely quoting that, there's much more reasoned content. Somehow I found his cross-referenced kitchen sinkism compelling.

And what about the byzantine and loony mental machinations of Daniel Pinchbeck? I've got a reserve on The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the library! From a piece in LA Weekly:

In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, his part memoir, part anthropological journey through many things spiritual, metaphysical and just plain eerie, Pinchbeck illuminates not the world’s end but the many ways in which our social structures are disintegrating. “What I’m trying to show is that we’re already in a process of accelerated transformation,” he told me. “And I find that a reason to be hopeful.”

More salient is this comment (from a recent Rolling Stone hatchet job)

"We have to fix this situation right fucking now, or there's going to be nuclear wars and mass death, and it's not going to be very interesting. There's not going to be a United States in five years, OK?"

I think I'm with him on that...
A few months ago I saw a BBC documentary about Isaac Newton, 'outing' him as a religious obsessive, apocalyptic thinker and alchemist. He is said to have calculated AD 2060 as the time when there would be

a dramatic transition to a millennium of peace. In other words: the end of the secular world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God.

2012? 2045? 2060? Whichever date you choose to give credence to, something seems to be coming soonish.

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Kurt Anderson made an excellent observation in his End Days trend piece in New York magazine

I don’t think our mood is only a consequence of 9/11 (and the grim Middle East), or climate-change science, or Christians’ displaced fear of science and social change. It’s also a function of the baby-boomers’ becoming elderly. For half a century, they have dominated the culture, and now...I think their generational solipsism unconsciously extrapolates approaching personal doom: When I go, everything goes with me, my end will be the end.

The "Me Generation" indeed.

* "Why don't you get back into bed
Why don't you get back into bed
Why don't you get back into bed...
Reasons to be cheerful part 3"

(image from: Morse Library, Beloit College)

looks like a genocide, quacks like a genocide...

France has initiated a parliamentary bill to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915 and now Turkey is stamping its foot and giving Europe the evil eye. I'm aware that I can sometimes be appallingly uninformed and simplistic when it comes to political history, but --why can't the Turks just own up to their episode and everyone can move on? Germany's managed to! Twice! One can't be a Holocaust Denier, why can one be a Genocide Denier? Why do the Turks make it a criminal act to even speak about it in Turkey, but cry loss of freedom of speech with this bill? And (and!) the EU doesn't even require Turkey to acknowledge 1915 for its proposed membership, but Turkey is issuing blustery warnings anyway. Perhaps someone can explain this to me?

And another issue is why the US, UK and Israel acknowledge something went on but its sorta, maybe what other people might call "genocide." According to the BBC:

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route...
Whether or not the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate. Some countries have declared that a genocide took place, but others have resisted calls to do so.

Perhaps for the US what happened in Asia Minor sounds a wee bit too familiar. (If displacing and death-marching an entire ethnic community is genocide, that opens a whole other can of worms...). So what is the UK's and Israel's issue?

Highlights from the Collection

By popular demand (ie. my friend Clay expressed passing interest in the Holcottsville souvenir) I am posting some more generic landscape postcards. Left, from top, Nature Lovers' Utopia, a Dextone Beauty Scene, "Indian Summer," a Dextone Beauty Scene, Untitled [imprinted "Greetings from Wurtsboro, New York"].

The card below, right, is worth quoting in its entirety, "A color symphony deep in the autumn woods, reflected by the shining, limpid waters in this Dextone Beauty Scene." Ektachrome by Thomas A. Dexter.

minor casualties of the 21st century

My friend Doug and I are making some letterpress notecards (who isn't these days?) and we're looking for something to print and line the envelopes with. Onion skin I thought. Kind of like the old air mail paper. Its mottled translucence, theoretically, could be interesting and it has that crinkley, unusual sound. Nice. So I started calling some stationery shops and got some chuckles on the other end of the line. One nice man mused, surely with some hyperbole, "we sold that about 40 years ago." Another said, with amusement, " you have to talk to Abe, he remembers that," and put me on hold. Alas, when Abe, evidently too busy to be troubled with memories of antiquated stock, picked up he simply said, "No, we don't got that." Todd Bielen over at Papertec Inc, which specializes in, well, "specialty papers," was very helpful. They had onion skin that, according to their site, "was approved for use by the US government and meets military spec P-157A... used in the production of military flares, munitions, and detonators." Unfortunately it was the cockle finish I was looking for and there was none left. Not only that, the "only mill in North America" that made onion skin had just ceased production. "So whatever's out there now," said Mr. Bielen with sympathy,"that's it."

I thought of something I'd read somewhere about a group of sound engineers in the 1970s who went around with microphones and reel-to-reels recording everyday sounds that were "endangered" like hand cranks and, presciently, telephone rings...

Doug and I have several options (we can try eBay, we can try Bible paper, we can go another route entirely) but I find it strangely sad.

Addendum: I've gotten an (relatively) outrageous amount of traffic from onion skin queryists. Now, in the comments for this post, The Paper Mill Store reports they have onion skin-- although I do not see any of the much-celebrated cockle finish...

Young Americans

The "Reverend Rollin Heber Neale" and "Unknown Woman in 9 Views" (both c. 1850) are from the magnificent book Young America, the Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes. S&H were a daguerreotype studio "of the highest order" in Boston from the 1840s to early 60s and produced some of the finest examples of the process. In 10 to 30 second exposures, daguerreotypists attempted to represent the best likeness-- the 'inner soul'-- of the sitter. The daguerreotype fixed, on a highly polished silvered metal plate, a single unique image that, though exquisitely almost unnervingly detailed, would dissolve into an evanescent, shimmering mirror depending on the angle at which it was viewed. The French invention took hold in the US to such an extent that by 1851 the Americans took home all the gold medals in 'Works of Industry' at the Crystal Palace exposition and daguerreotypy became known as the "American process." About the same time the daguerreian mania hit US shores the Young America movement gained prominence -- a radical democratic/utopian spirit in the arts, and political thinking--bringing together a preening sense of superiority, idealism and expansionist fervor. Daguerreian process and product seemed to reflect, both literally and figuratively, the energy and nationalist and individualist spirit of the 1840s and 50s. At that time, America, and a good portion of Europe, really thought the "Great Experiment" would work. As Alan Trachtenberg relates in Young America:

Envisioning a continental "empire of liberty" Young America saw the American nationalist mission as the "hope of mankind." The prospects of the country seemed without parallel in human history

Looking at the many portraits in this book I feel oddly emotional. That type of boundless optimism, the sense that anything could be achieved, and anyone, anywhere, improved, with a little American Know-How is inconceivable... The earlier simplistic adolescent vigor, overreaching but potent and impressive, is now still-naive, still-overreaching (with a sense of entitlement to boot) but in its bloated Late Middle Age is not so "Great" anymore.
--------
I came across a haunting latin phrase: Vis consili expers mole ruit sua ("Strength without wisdom falls by its own weight")...
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The portrait of the Reverend Neale, shown at about age 42, is riveting. If it is possible to be swept off one's feet by someone who has been dead for 127 years, I have succumbed.

a new memento mori

I suppose it was inevitable, with this spate of fashion musings, that my attention would return to a topic I ineffectually tried to tackle--what 8? 9?-- years ago. It was after the much- editorialized "Heroin Chic." Prada had a stunning print campaign that I found so beautiful, so ...curious. (An image from the campaign, below left, by Glen Luchford) Why were dead women being used to sell designer clothing? Pornography, sure, bondage, ok, even kiddie porn (though Calvin Klein didn't get too far with that before it was pulled) but corpses? How, exactly, was that resonating with The Public? Fashion editorials that had formerly exuded an air of cultivated boredom were giving off more than a whiff of decay. Could it be that Sex had played itself out? Was Death simply the only (tittilating) thing left? Was there anything more to it? It struck me that a photography show I'd seen several years earlier, Andres Serrano's Morgue series (Aids-related Death II, 1992, below right) was, in hindsight, proving to be enormously influential. Or perhaps just ahead of the curve of what theorist Mark Dery came to call the "New Grotesque"...

And now years later, post-Damien Hirst formaldehyde fetishes, post-"Six Feet Under" we still have the same tortured relationship with that all too earth-bound, all too real body. We've decoded it, sliced it, stripped it of skin and put it on display. Suctioned, cut, capped, injected, pulled and polished "we" grow almost inert under growing mantles of flesh and have anorexia scares on the runways. The past century has been about the defiance of death through science, medicine and lifestyle, yet it appears that the more we negate death, the more we're preoccupied with it. Like any neurosis, it pops up in the most intriguing places.

fashion advertising: random notes II

This Dolce & Gabbana campaign is something I've tried to resist liking but can't--I absolutely love it. It's a loopy mash-up of this Delacroix or that Gericault as staged by Peter Greenaway. A waxen "tableau mortant" of campy dissipation.

fashion advertising: random notes I

I don't have any grand thesis formulated so this post won't lead anywhere significant. If something catches my attention I simply like to spend a bit of time figuring out why I'm interested.

At top, a current ad from third-tier Italian fashion house Cesare Paciotti, below, Giacometti's Woman with her Throat Cut, 1932. I was struck by the histrionic, overweening silliness of the ad. Telegraphing popular culture imagery's two greatest transgressives, Paciotti's model is both a mangled corpse on a morgue slab and a sweaty "live sex" peep show worker. I threw in the Giacometti, just because.

the Tyranny of Things

I just now looked up “the tyranny of things”, a somewhat overwrought but appealing phrase that I had seen somewhere a few years ago and filed away. According to Bill Brown, a professor at University of Chicago and co-editor of Critical Inquiry, it was the title of an anonymous essay that appeared in the May, 1906, Atlantic Monthly. The author lamented that,

we make 'collections,' we fill our rooms, our walls, our tables, our desks, with things, things, things.

I don't have specific collections (although for a while I collected ticket stubs) I just tend to acquire things. The common attributes being “old” and I suppose “odd.” Those two traits often amount to "worn", "rusted", "weathered", by default if not actually by choice. Paper ephemera and postcards, wooden objects, shells, green pottery, odd pieces of metal, naive paintings, hotel silver, flea market photos, letters/signs/numbers– I have been oppressed by this “tyranny” for a while now and I'm ambivalent about it. I love each thing, but am oppressed by things. Some collectible, most just collected.

Virtually none of this stuff is personal memorabilia. In a (somewhat windy) essay I found randomly, the Dutch artist Tjebbe van Tijen discusses personally meaningful objects:

There is a story with each of such objects, in most cases the story is not visible, the object does not depict a particular event, the event needs to be told. Language to make "the invisible visible" says Krzysztof Pomian in his study on the 'Origin of the museum' ... objects that have changed their status, from an object with use value to an object representing what can not be seen.

I feel that is true of my stuff, too, that somehow they hold stories I would not otherwise "see." Of course I also have, and acquire, things for "purely" aesthetic value, but I think that is ultimately a component of their "stories." By way of explanation of this sense that these things possess stories is the peculiar and poignant Japanese tradition of Harikuyo:

the Festival of Broken Needles. Harikuyo is a solemn rite of respect and thanksgiving [held on February 8] in which the worn and broken sewing needles used in the previous year are retired to a sacred resting place.

Quite different in its particular but similar in essence.

I began this post yesterday and it's a very odd coincidence that today's Times has a small article about a web site called zebo where members list and post their everyday possessions (as well as "wants"). The site's tagline is “Hi. What do you own?” Fascinating. I'd love it* if it wasn't so disturbing. This is where a discussion ensues on the nature of escalating consumption as illusory respite from psychic emptiness and its relation to the current state of American society...
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*I once had an idea for a 'conceptual art piece' where I would label every possession I own (mostly I was thinking of those of the "collectible" variety) with museum-like captions and provenance: what era the item is likely from, what it once was, why "important", where I purchased, what I paid.

Greetings from Anywhere

Souvenir, according to the dictionary, is something that serves as a reminder: a memento from the French: the act of remembering.
What is a souvenir from a non-place?
This is from my collection of generic postcards, scenes that are labeled "Dextone Beauty Scene," as though 'Dextone' conjured the very leaves, or, in this case,"A Ride in The Country." (Actually a road in the country.)

"The Country."
"Greetings from Somewhere I'm not Usually."

The back is imprinted with "Greetings from Holcottsville, NY" although Margaretville, Shandaken, or any other quaintly named upstate town may be selling the same scene.
I did, in fact, buy this card in Holcottsville so it is a souvenir but I couldn't really describe the town though--I don't remember it at all.
And now I'm going away for the weekend.

“size 4, in cement”

In rearranging papers last night, I came across this color chart from the English paint company Farrow & Ball (a section, above). There are a number of reasons why this is one of my favorite things of recent era: it's a combination of taxonomy, pure aesthetics, fanciful word-names and allusive, meandering explanatory text that spurs more questions than it answers. For example, there is a color called "Monkey Puzzle," a very dark green-gray.
The description reads:

A typical 19th century estate color which has, like so many successful colours, endured down the generations. Good with both brick and stone, and indeed furniture.

"?"
Another color, “Dauphin,” I realize in hindsight, is given a very elliptical explanation:

An earth pigment colour in the early 18th century school of ‘drab’

First, “school of ‘drab’” is just so... perfect, so Edward Gorey... second, how does one get “Dauphin” for a khaki olive brown? After some investigation, I see perhaps F&B are too genteel to explain that the color ‘caca-dauphin’ became fashionable when the much-longed-for French crown prince was born to Marie Antoinette, in the 1780s. Ah, Dauphin's Poo. With colors like "Ointment Pink", "Dead Salmon", "Archive", and "Mouse’s Back" how can you not want to know everything about this company?

Creating color names would be my dream job. I remember thinking this in-- what, the early 90s?-- when JCrew was changing popular culture with sweater choices like "Pool" and "Cement." Precious, yes, but in a certain way, how brilliant was that moment? [Didn't Saturday Night Live do a skit? Not sure. But its so easy for color-naming like that to go very, ham-handedly wrong]. Women’s cosmetics did interesting things with color naming but mostly of the punny, "Tickle Me Pink" and expected "Red Wine" variety. Before J Crew: "blue"and "grey", after: the welkin's the limit!
---
some interesting color words: gamboge, filemot, glaucous, dun

“vexatious” peaches and the nostalgic voice

On a tip from a friend, I turned to the Wednesday New York Times greenmarkets column, Bringing it Home, entitled "Ode to a Peach." As my eyes fell on the first sentence, “Peaches vex me,” I knew I was going to settle in on some entertaining reading. The piece, a perfectly lovely little meditation on flavor, home made desserts, domesticity and fetishistic description, had a tone that was immediately recognizable, but a difficult one to define exactly. The author CB, an acquaintance from long ago, is a former long-haul Martha Stewart Living editor and the voice she employs, what I call High Martha, is lyrical, allusive, nostalgic. For me, the writing style in general is gag-inducing but intriguing; I'm simultaneously drawn to it and repelled. It parlays the now-familiar commercial "romanticism" of Ralph Lauren (or even, at another price point, JCrew) that makes one yearn for weathered cedar shakes, heirloom candlesticks with evergreen bobeches and a compound on the Vineyard. I am forced, over and over, to "remember" the succulence of fresh-picked berries and pumpkin carving parties that, oh yeah, I never experienced growing up. This nostalgia for what one has never experienced is the most insidious --and fascinating--aspect. A longing for false memories. It is this tension of being both drawn in and repelled, comforted and disappointed, that leaves me with a faint malaise. It is this nostalgia that almost brings the term's medical origins back to the surface.
In CB's column, the tone has less of the prescriptive aloofness that is part of classic Martha, more "just us girls" :

But the best thing I’ve ever done with a peach isn’t something I’d serve to company, or even to my family. It falls into a category of things I think of as single-girl food, since it reminds me of the quirky indulgences that brightened my days before my husband came into my life....Purchases in hand, I rode the elevator upstairs and entered the remarkable quiet of our empty apartment. I set everything out on the dining table. First, I spread the fromage blanc on the bread, then sprinkled a bit of damp gray sea salt over it. With a little paring knife, I cut a peach into slim slices and laid them carefully on top. Then I dipped an old baby spoon into the honey and let it drizzle onto the peach slices.

A soft halo of light reflects back from that old baby spoon and envelopes the reader in the warmth of... mounting queasiness? Envy? Befuddlement. From whence this style? And I don't mean CB specifically, I mean all of it. The whole precious lot of it. I am guessing-- and I need more research and input here-- that the poetic, metaphorical tumbles of MFK Fisher and the arm-in arm, raconteurism of EB White have been distilled, or better still, left to ferment in the mouthblown heirloom glass decanter of self-consciousness...

I will be mulling this over further. [photos: polo.com; Gerry Manacsa]

Towards a New Architecture: "Bricolagism"

I read this little exchange on Brownstoner (where this image is from) about the particular hideousness of a recent residential development and it's as though someone proved to me that pigs were flying. Is it possible that buildings like this (left) and this are actually designed, on purpose, by architects?
A commenter from the Brownstoner article thought that the designers for this building were a firm called "Brickology" (which, though very wrong, is kind of brilliant). My quick google search for a company I thought might be called "bricology" yielded "bricology.com" which had a very architecturally-oriented definition of bricolage:

bricolage ("brE-kO-'läzh, "bri-):
• construction or something constructed by using whatever comes to hand • an assemblage improvised from materials ready to hand, or the practice of transforming 'found' materials by incorporating them into a new work

Now I've only recently waded into the pool of Brooklyn real estate gossip and goings-on so it was news to me when I subsequently found out that the firm Bricolage Design existed, and that owner/architect Henry Radusky was already on the "Wanted!" posters. Can it be true that these people named their firm without a trace of irony?
Not sure if BD are the designers of these exemplary instances of (Real Estate) Bubble Architecture but I am fascinated by the notion that Brooklyn is being reshaped by "design with whatever is at hand." Certainly many lower-end Do-It Yourself renovators appear to be schooled in the art of bricolage -- gleaning random material from the sale-price bin at Lowes. However this is often accompanied by the very sincere intent to improve the building and to display monetary status with the proud proclamation of one's taste. That, in my mind, is DIY-ism: owners/builders mimicking architecture and miming the gestures. DIY-ism is the karaoke of architecture. Most developer-driven real estate has neither the sincerity mitigating the mess nor any of the fun. This particular form of developer-driven architecture is Bricolagism. Architectural pastiche born of witless* economic expediency. Bricolagism is like Post-Modernism without the irony.
(*as opposed to Brutalism which was almost too smart for its own good)

the olfactory of facts*

(a "postcard" from Robert)

Its August in New York, the pavement is fermenting, there's an abundance of what my friend Robert calls, far too evocatively, "curb chowder," so perhaps its not quite synchronicity that the New York Times had an article about smells in the Real Estate section yesterday.I've been thinking about odors: good, bad, memories related to. The other day I passed a store that exhaled an odd combination of cat 'spray' and a very specific mustiness-- the kind that, to me, indicates old water pipes, a mossy dankness. Immediately a vision of myself at about 6 or 7 with my parents, visiting an aunt in Lynn, Massachusetts, popped into my head. At that time she lived in a very working class neighborhood, in a New England version of a rear tenement: three or four stories, 19th c., wooden. I remember my mother attempting to make tea and recoiling from the ring around the insides of cooking pots left by boiling water. A discussion ensued on the state of Lynn municipal water supply. All this, in an instant, came back to me on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn as I passed that store on my way to lunch. I have several olfactory connections that aren't typical, lyrical associations. Oil-based paint, for one. That will always bring back my grandmother. A small-statured but hefty woman in her early 70s, she was, in my memory, always up on step ladders painting her rooms colors I would never choose but seemed right back then, pale pink, yellow, a soft blue. A certain kind of diesel fuel reminds me of Paris. I was on my first trip there with my parents and we stayed in a small hotel-- the Ideal-- that had an astonishingly tiny--lilliputian!-- elevator that put-putted along on fumes of diesel... This elevator could accomodate 1 slim French person with, perhaps, a baguette. Large American baggage was sent up, unaccompanied, piece by piece.

A "trick" I have that seems so saccharine it belongs in Real Simple is to begin wearing a new perfume at the start of a trip. Thereafter, every detail of that trip--breakfasts, museum highlights, clouds, purchases, persons met--will be contained in that bottle. I haven't smelled the perfume I wore (I think it was my first bottle of perfume) on that Paris trip in years, but I remembered the commercial!

*see Luc Sante The Factory of Facts

42nd Street franks and patties 1996

authenticity?

Obvious, perhaps, and reductive, but something seemed to fall into place when I was in Times Square last week:
I suppose I'm one of those people who really annoys other more “pragmatic” people by taking issue with the renewal of Times Square, specifically the main stretch of 42nd Street. Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker went all Pete Hamill in ‘04, in describing this certain ‘affliction’:

There are, of course, people who miss the old Times Square, its picturesque squalor and violence and misery and exploitation. Those who pointed at the old Times Square as an instance of everything that capitalism can do wrong now point to the new Times Square as an instance of everything that capitalism can do worse. ...they end up being sentimental about anything, shedding tears about muggings and the shards of crack vials glittering like diamonds in the gutter.

Um, no. When I worked at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd, I would occasionally walk over to TS and was witness to its last long death spiral, from about 1990 to 1995. Its absolutely not that I liked the old Times Square or enjoyed the experience of having to brave drifters, hustlers, and the generally creepy electricity of the place. It didn't seem as though I had the much editorialized nostalgie de la boue. But rather, I think, the layering of signs, styles, architecture, shine, grit, old and new, the fleeting and the hold-out was, at very least, organic. It was built by use, if that makes any sense. What bothers me so much about 42nd street today is the sham "spectacle," the enforced antic gaiety of it all. The subway entrances are especially irksome, and empty, gestures. I'd had trouble reconciling my feelings about the old and the new Times Square and it bothered me that I couldn't quite define my opinion. I think its as simplistic as this: bad “authenticity” trumps bad “renewal.”

[I took this image of one of the 8th avenue subway entrances in around 1994. In relation to this view, behind me and to the left, there was a small arcade with two video games, a photobooth and an ancient “fortune telling” machine that I recall being something like this one. When I last went to that photobooth, it was, like the area around it, just about to give up the ghost. It spit out photo strips for free but because the developing fluid was shot the images were obscured by a disturbing black...miasma. For a moment while posting this I wondered why I didnt take more photos--I dont have any of the arcade. Then I remembered that, in the old TS, with my big honkin' camera around my neck, I was too nervous!]

shady business

Yesterday, Robert and I braved searing midday sun and muddled activist foment in Grand Army Plaza, doing our part to flesh out the slightly disappointing (as of about 2:45-ish) crowd at the Develop Don't Destroy anti- Ratner rally. Robert was generally game; I hollered and razzed at the appropriate moments, and bought a button. We signed lists, commiserated a bit with other outraged but heat-stricken neighbors, took some fliers and then fled to shadier areas to rest and review the literature. The brochure has the obvious but effective juxtaposition of Gehry-Ratner waking nightmare and leafy Prospect Heights streetscape. But wait--what's this? Inexplicably, someone at DDD actually thought it would be a good idea to up the contrast between the two scenarios by Photoshopping in more trees. There's even a stray bit of cloned building hovering, wraithlike, in the air (circled). Didn't we all just go through the outrage over Ratner's fudged renderings and deceptive advertorials? "Which of these is your Brooklyn?" Evidently neither!

dreaming in translation

I woke up the other day saying, “lipsmitten.” It was absolutely clear to me: spelling, pronunciation, meaning. One word. Lipsmitten. It means enjoying the sound of a word, independent and regardless of its meaning. As an aside, I have to say I dont actually like the sound or the look of "lipsmitten." (I find the word "smitten" irritating, and the assonance of the i's is dopey)

So why or how I coined this particular word is a psychological mystery. And irony.

Even more intriguing to me is the sense that "lipsmitten" sounds like its the translation into English of a foreign term. As if English were my second (dreaming) language. A possible clue is that in an earlier post I mentioned wanting a German term for "obvious but insightful" and of course 'lipsmitten' sounds german (cue audio: "lip • shmitt'n"). But I know no real German, only Germanesque terms used as comic asides or pidgin Germanesque ("Guinea Porken"). I am preoccupied by English's (?) dearth of terms for psychological/philosophical/verbal nuances, so maybe i just made up my own. "Yah, Gut!"

the past is a foreign country

I love that quote, though I have to admit I know nothing about its author, L P Hartley. My past is a foreign country and in this particular image from my past, above, I’m in a foreign country (I’m in the middle, a rotund little American on the scrawny little camel). But it is less foreign to me than the image of the disgruntled car seat passenger in Flushing, Queens. I have no specific recollection of either moment (though I do remember quite a lot from the Egypt trip) but it is the Queens image that seems like an artifact to me. You’d think that the trip photo, being in black and white, would feel all the more distant-- in time, place, and representation. Instead its the foreignness of the car-- the full width seat, the plastic, the triangular vent window, the crudeness of the car seat, and quaintness of my outfit that strike me. Its the really forgettable, everyday details that change imperceptibly that somehow become so...memorable.
From the bits and pieces I've read (I know a little about a lot of things, which is not only dangerous, it makes for confusing blog entries) about Viktor Shlovsky’s concept of defamiliarization, i think it's very much related:

The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”)

The active intent present in "Art" -making is not there, but the effect is similar. In this case its the distance of time that increases the “length of perception.” Simply looking at an image of “the past” --random family snapshot or historical view-- allows one to “experience the artfulness of an object” if you're open to seeing it.

“inexhaustibility”

By chance I came across this obvious but supremely insightful comment (there must be some fabulous German term I need to know meaning “obvious, but insightful”) by one Russell Davies, designer: “One of the things I hate about the design of most things ... is they're all designed to be new.” This immediately brought a number of thoughts together for me. It encapsulates the problem I have with a good deal of bad Modernist architecture, especially those of the Brutalist persuasion. I've hated Brutalism from the moment I set eyes on this particular building. When I 'knew' it, the building was about 25+ years old and was a disaster to be in and around. Corbusier and Rudolph, et al., had envisioned a gleaming Utopia. Unfortunately the bloom is off that “radiant” rose. Modernism in general and brutalism in particular do not age well--stained and chipped concrete just do not belong in Utopia!

One of the comments with Davies' post about the process of 'things aging gracefully' mentions the Japanese terms wabi and sabi. I learned of these a few years ago and was astonished (and oddly relieved) to have found a definition (a codification!) of the vague aesthetic ideas and ideals that I held but never pieced together and could never explain satisfactorily. Growing up, I often related to things around me as "the farthest thing" from what I would find appealing. What I was, what I liked, was opposite to a large part of what I found around me. (This was Queens in the 1970s and 80s, which explains a lot, and I will return to that in another post .)
Here is a quote from Andrew Juniper on wabi and sabi:

The term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview....an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.

Another essay about w-s I just read today adds in the term "inexhaustibility" saying, "the object resounds ... with endless possibilities and nuances, at once hidden and successively revealed." That goes far in describing some of what I felt at Ellis Island in 1976, and explicating the sense of loss upon my return after the renovation. Ruins (which I think deserve their own post) embody w-s. I think it makes sense to me now.