“Blue,” the last song on the last album to be recorded by genuine art stars R.E.M., is a wonderful career summation with urgently spoken word verses that recall Out of Time‘s “Belong” and brings back Patti Smith to close it out with the ultimate embrace.
Maybe the next thing will be a poetry album. I like this verse from the middle quite a bit:
I am made by my times
I am a creation of now
Shaken with the cracks and crevices
I’m not giving up easy
I will not fold
I don’t have much
But what I have is gold
One sign of a really good poem, I think, is that when you read about a place or moment in time that could very much exist in the natural world, you still end up thinking of another work of art. James Merrill’s “Cloud Country,” which I just read in his staggering Collected Poems, made me picture Inness’s haunted trees before I thought about actual sunsets.
The landscape where we lie is creased with light
As a painting one might have folded and put away
And never wished to study until now.*
George Inness, "Sunset Glow" (1883, Montclair Art Museum, oil on canvas, 16 in. x 24 in).
*James Merrill, “Cloud Country,” First Poems, Knopf, 1951
So, last week I picked up a contemporary, strongly-hyped realist novel that I wasn’t planning to actually read, but was deeply pulled in by the opening. It did what fiction does; it tells something true and makes something up at the same time, and doesn’t care whether you’re hip to the artifice or not. It just is. I became excited about the book, and put down other things to read it. Then, about halfway through, my mood started to change. There were several occasions where I thought of throwing or at least slamming it on something, but still I read on, and still the feeling at the end was of supreme disappointment. The book had been written well enough, and with enough interesting ideas to keep my attention, but the reliance on novelistic conventions and dishonesty toward the characters gradually snuffed out any glimmer of originality promised by the beginning, and the ending offered nothing more than a mild gimmick.
At other times this fall, I picked up two other new books in the old-time realist genre. They were boring in ways that made them unreadable. To these big shot writers, I have only this to say:
Woman Igives me a chill whenever I see it, but the context of MoMA’s current de Kooning retrospective made me feel as though I were seeing it again for the first time.
I loved everything about this show, from the clear breakdown of eras to the spare wall-text and dramatic hanging of Excavation, the artist’s culmination of his breakthrough into abstraction, to the heart-stopping full-arm room with Merritt Parkway, Bolton Landing, and other immense canvases beaming at one another in a way that would shut up almost anyone who claims he could do that himself.
I’ve been hearing that writers are again looking back to modernism. One look at the “Six Stages of Woman One” (photographs by Rudy Burkhart) should help this out.
There were a few paintings that I’d only seen once or twice before (Secretary, for example, at the Hirshhorn in D.C.), which admittedly made less of an impression on me that first time. When you see a whole bunch of de Kooning’s work together, they crackle like nothing else. The second Woman series and the Abstract Parkway Landscapes might trigger the strongest emotional response, but I adore the earlier, smaller 1940s abstract pieces for their succinctness and clarity. Zurich, Orestes, Black Friday, etc. I like to call them the hieroglyph paintings.
Orestes, Willem de Kooning, 1947 paper collage with enamel paint on board, ca. 24 x 36 in
Today’s snowfall, which is keeping me indoors, just made me pick up Bellow’s Letters. It begins with an amazing excerpt from his 1977 Jefferson Lecture:
On winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter’s power of shrinking your face….what form could a higher development take? All you could say was that you accepted this condition as a gambler would accept absurd odds, as a patient accepted his rare disease. In a city of four million people, no more than a dozen had caught it. The only remedy for it was to read and write stories and novels.
Four recent deaths in Williamsburg, East Williamsburg and Bushwick highlight safety concerns for both cyclists and motorists, but the most troubling part is the NYPD’s failure, time and again, to investigate.
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Parents of Mathieu Lefevre, cyclist killed by hit-and-run driver, want NYPD to explain what happened to their son http://t.co/unx79ars
The intersection where the accident occurred, via Googlemaps A cyclist was struck and killed by a truck at the intersection of Gardner & Metropolitan Avenues yesterday morning around 8:30 a.m. Witnesses told police that the 29-year-old man attempted to pass the truck making a right onto Gardner, when the truck’s bumper hit the bike’s front wheel, sending the man under the vehicle, where he was killed instantly.
(Erica Abbott and the intersection near where she died) [UPDATE BELOW] A 29-year-old Brooklyn woman was killed while bicycling through Bushwick last night. According to the NYPD, Erica Abbott, a 29-year-old dancer who earned her BFA at SUNY Purchase, was biking southbound on Bushwick Avenue around 7 p.m.
The scene of the accident last night at Rodney Street and Borinquen Place (via Nicholas Morat / Gothamist) A 24-year-old cyclist was killed in Williamsburg last night by a SUV at the intersection of Rodney Street and Borinquen Place. Around 8:25 p.m., Nicola Djandji was biking with a friend eastbound on Borinquen.
The cyclist killed in Williamsburg just after midnight Wednesday has been identified by the NYPD as Mathieu Lefevre. The 30-year-old artist, who was originally from Alberta, Canada but had been residing in NYC, was killed by a flatbed truck while riding his bike on Morgan Avenue, at the intersection of Meserole Street.
“‘The pattern you see is that reckless driving is not taken seriously by the police,’ says Streetsblog editor Ben Fried….’When you do find out about the investigation, it just seems sloppy. We’ve had cases where witnesses say they gave their names to the police and they never got a call back, or they were turned away at the scene.’”
Innocent people harassed by cops for riding their bikes,
John Del Signore/Gothamist A few days ago City Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-Queens) lamented that he’s “never, never seen a cop car pull over a bicyclist for running through a red light. I wish they would, because those are the ones who are creating problems every day in the city.”
On Monday, cyclist message boards lit up with outrage over the story of a woman who was arrested after supposedly running a red light on her bicycle on Amsterdam Avenue. But it turns out the truth is actually more outrageous: Christina Thede, the cyclist in question, tells us she didn’t run a red light at all.
And speaking of messengers, alley cats have expanded to Tour de France style stage racing (and according to NYT, the culture has gone “Hollywood”?). Even with Marco from Philadelphia’s acknowledgement of ”messenger style” beer stops, this all sounds much safer.
Will Premium Rush ever be released? I saw them filming on Broadway almost two years ago. Looking at the official trailer, more questions are raised, such as:
1) How many times can one rider be hit?
2) Who says you can’t stop without brakes?
This movie looks even more ridiculous than Quicksilver, which reminds us that messenger culture already went Hollywood 25 years ago.
PREMIUM RUSH – Official Trailer – In Theaters 1/13
Recently I spent a day painting an apartment way up over the Hudson River and listened to the Patti Smith Just Kids playlist. The total running time is ten hours, and I made it through the first five. Among the many things I heard were Maria Callas’s Tosca, themes from Bonnie and Clyde and Midnight Cowboy, Ornette Coleman, lots of unfamiliar Beatles, Dylan and Doors covers (including Lotte Leyna’s hard-to-believe “Alabama Song“), some Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley, the haunting side of “Ruby Tuesday” that can be easily missed (unless you’re in the right mood, or watching The Royal Tennenbaums), Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech followed by Edward Kennedy’s eulogy for RFK, readings from T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga and William S. Burroughs (which made his influence on Tom Waits more transparent than anything else), and iconic woman vocal performances like “Ode to Billie Joe,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Farewell, Angelina,” “White Rabbit,” “Cry Baby,” and “Do I Move You” that made me think about their influence on Smith. The playlist, almost as much as the book (and more so in certain ways), is an amazing possible insight into a person, the sound of her thoughts, the colors of a day spent inside.
What definitely stuck out the most was Tim Buckley’s “Phantasmagoria in Two,” recorded at The Folklore Center, NYC in 1967. I don’t know his music very well, but I’ve seen Coming Home, so whenever his name comes up I think of that final scene with Bruce Dern walking into the ocean as “Once I Was” quivers on the soundtrack. Yes, we remember you.
I hope to make it to the photography exhibition in Hartford, which opened last week, and see how she saw, among other things, Bolaño’s chair.
The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s, by Francisca Aguirre, translated by Montana Ray
If I Were Born in Prague: Poems of Guy Jean, versions by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky
Argos Books, established last year by three poets and translators, has already built an impressive catalogue, with chapbooks, broadsheets, and collaborations between artists and poets, and they have now started a unique project of chapbooks in translation. It’s an interesting form, because it highlights the work of the translators as much as the authors themselves in ways that are more prominent than with a conventional long-form book. The selected work is given generous space, with translations or “versions” placed next to the original. The short length allows the translators’ introductions to stay in one’s head from beginning to end. Two translation chapbooks have appeared so far, and their release was celebrated earlier this month at Camel Art Space in Brooklyn.
New Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Ford (Princeton, 2011) Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Dalkey Archive, 2011)
Of Raymond Roussel’s two books with the word Africa in the title (both of which appeared this year in excellent new translations), the novel, Impressions of Africa, may be a bit more accessible, but the epic poem, New Impressions of Africa, is just as fun, and ultimately a lot more moving. John Ashbery called it Roussel’s masterpiece. Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of Roussel’s greatest fans, once wrote that “Roussel has nothing to say, and he says it badly,” but of course this isn’t exactly true. The seemingly oblique digressions and inventive wordplay offer a special challenge to the easily distracted, but reward with uncanny surprises.
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via wordswithoutborders.org (continue reading)
Today’s snowfall, which is keeping me indoors, just made me pick up Bellow’s 
Of Raymond Roussel’s two books with the word Africa in the title (both of which appeared this year in excellent new translations), the novel, 
