![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe"Dolls and Feelings" / Ariel Levy
__ "But I’m obsessed with that part in the Bible when Jesus is given the opportunity to cure a person possessed by demons, and Jesus says, ‘What is your name?’ And the person replies, ‘My name is legion.’ Whatever is not normative is many.” She liked the idea of a person containing more than one self, more than one gender.
"The Wayfarer" / Ben McGrath
__ Hughes told me that, shortly after he picked Conant up, they ran into a young backpacker from Pittsburgh who turned out to be trekking from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, after having already made the opposite journey. Hughes took a picture of the two nomads. “We called them Surf and Turf,” he said.
__ They are by turns funny and sad and journalistic, stuffed with biographical information about ordinary strangers, as though Conant saw himself as the Studs Terkel of the waterfront.
__ In the afternoon, she went out for an errand, and she kept an eye out the window, looking at the water, but, like so many of Conant’s friends, she wasn’t fortunate enough to see him again.
"Tough Medicine" / Malcolm Gladwell
__ The social conditions that birthed a new idea in one place impeded the spread of that same idea in another.
In this respect, his position echoes that of Peter Huber, who in his 2013 book, “The Cure in the Code,” called on the F.D.A. to stop evaluating drugs as cures and start evaluating them as tools—“molecular scalpels, clamps, sutures, or dressings, to be picked off the shelf and used carefully but flexibly down at the molecular level.”
How Frank O’Hara began his poem “Naphtha:” “Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think of him / doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower / as a meteorologist / in 1922 / you know how wonderful the 20th Century / can be.”
"Steamed" / Zora O’Neill
__ The Empire State Building is remarkable not just for its height but because all hundred and two floors are heated with only one and a half pounds of steam pressure.
"Your Move" / David Owen
Among the very last players to be eliminated—and the only one to survive beyond his bedtime—was Abhimanyu Mishra, six years old, who had been taking swigs from a Lightning McQueen water bottle. Like most of the participants, he used chess notation to record the moves in his game, but, unlike most of them, he needed several sheets of paper: he’s still working on his letters and numerals.
"Swamped" / Dexter Filkins
After the hearing, the judge, William Hoeveler, an eighty-year-old senior judge in the Southern District of Florida, released an extraordinary court order, arguing that the law not only potentially violated the consent decree but had been passed in a shamelessly undemocratic way. “The treatment of the bill seemed calculated to avoid federal participation or public scrutiny,” he wrote... Hoeveler was so angry that he called several reporters to expand his remarks.
"What Money Can Buy" / Larissa MacFarquhar
__ The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it.
__ On the other hand, they knew that if you gave too large a grant an organization would expand rapidly to take advantage of it, because if the money wasn’t used it wouldn’t be replenished; but then you had created a totally new type of organization that was dependent on grants and, if they were withdrawn, would collapse. You could drown an organization with too much money the way you could drown a plant.
James Wood: Robert Alter’s scrupulous introduction, and the presence, in “The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai,” of no fewer than fourteen different translators (with many new versions by Alter), reminds us that translation is arduous, necessary, and unfinished. Many of Amichai’s references, puns, jokes, buried meanings—the creases of a culture, its age lines—are inevitably smoothed out of existence in translation.
"The Wall Dancer" / Nick Paumgarten
__ (Billy Wilder suggested that the widescreen technology might be best suited for filming “the love story of two dachshunds.”)
__ Fogelson has a knack for making Realpolitik seem reassuring. “We are fully committed to your realizing your vision at a price point that acknowledges that this hasn’t been tried before” sounds supportive, where the same message shorn of ornament—“We’ll make your iffy project but only dirt cheap”—might rankle.
"The Custodians" / Ben Lerner
Alex Ross: a few short minutes after the cosmic sadness of the so-called “black pearl” variation, Bach unleashes the Quodlibet, in which old folk songs irreverently intermingle. Levit caught that awesome doubleness: in his enigmatic brilliance, he is Bachian to the core.
__ "But I’m obsessed with that part in the Bible when Jesus is given the opportunity to cure a person possessed by demons, and Jesus says, ‘What is your name?’ And the person replies, ‘My name is legion.’ Whatever is not normative is many.” She liked the idea of a person containing more than one self, more than one gender.
"The Wayfarer" / Ben McGrath
__ Hughes told me that, shortly after he picked Conant up, they ran into a young backpacker from Pittsburgh who turned out to be trekking from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, after having already made the opposite journey. Hughes took a picture of the two nomads. “We called them Surf and Turf,” he said.
__ They are by turns funny and sad and journalistic, stuffed with biographical information about ordinary strangers, as though Conant saw himself as the Studs Terkel of the waterfront.
__ In the afternoon, she went out for an errand, and she kept an eye out the window, looking at the water, but, like so many of Conant’s friends, she wasn’t fortunate enough to see him again.
"Tough Medicine" / Malcolm Gladwell
__ The social conditions that birthed a new idea in one place impeded the spread of that same idea in another.
In this respect, his position echoes that of Peter Huber, who in his 2013 book, “The Cure in the Code,” called on the F.D.A. to stop evaluating drugs as cures and start evaluating them as tools—“molecular scalpels, clamps, sutures, or dressings, to be picked off the shelf and used carefully but flexibly down at the molecular level.”
How Frank O’Hara began his poem “Naphtha:” “Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think of him / doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower / as a meteorologist / in 1922 / you know how wonderful the 20th Century / can be.”
___________________________________________
Adam Gopnik: In a moment, like ours, of so much panicky uncertainty, the news that the most timeless of all big stone things may be as mobile as a trailer home is comforting. There is more give and flex and second thoughts and pentimenti in Neolithic societies than we might have imagined."Steamed" / Zora O’Neill
__ The Empire State Building is remarkable not just for its height but because all hundred and two floors are heated with only one and a half pounds of steam pressure.
"Your Move" / David Owen
Among the very last players to be eliminated—and the only one to survive beyond his bedtime—was Abhimanyu Mishra, six years old, who had been taking swigs from a Lightning McQueen water bottle. Like most of the participants, he used chess notation to record the moves in his game, but, unlike most of them, he needed several sheets of paper: he’s still working on his letters and numerals.
"Swamped" / Dexter Filkins
After the hearing, the judge, William Hoeveler, an eighty-year-old senior judge in the Southern District of Florida, released an extraordinary court order, arguing that the law not only potentially violated the consent decree but had been passed in a shamelessly undemocratic way. “The treatment of the bill seemed calculated to avoid federal participation or public scrutiny,” he wrote... Hoeveler was so angry that he called several reporters to expand his remarks.
"What Money Can Buy" / Larissa MacFarquhar
__ The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it.
__ On the other hand, they knew that if you gave too large a grant an organization would expand rapidly to take advantage of it, because if the money wasn’t used it wouldn’t be replenished; but then you had created a totally new type of organization that was dependent on grants and, if they were withdrawn, would collapse. You could drown an organization with too much money the way you could drown a plant.
James Wood: Robert Alter’s scrupulous introduction, and the presence, in “The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai,” of no fewer than fourteen different translators (with many new versions by Alter), reminds us that translation is arduous, necessary, and unfinished. Many of Amichai’s references, puns, jokes, buried meanings—the creases of a culture, its age lines—are inevitably smoothed out of existence in translation.
__________________________________________________
"The Wall Dancer" / Nick Paumgarten
- A civilian might think crudely of climbing as something like ascending a ladder—all reach and pull—but watching Ashima adjust the attitude of her hips, shoulders, or heels as she tries to move from one improbable hold to another gives the impression that the human body can arrange itself in an infinite number of forms, each of slightly different utility. <>She has an uncanny muscle memory, so thatonce she finds the right position for the problem she nails it. This economy of motion, both innate and learned, is, at the highest levels, an esoteric art.
- It is a route called Open Your Mind Direct, which was recently upgraded from a 5.14d to a 5.15a, owing to a handhold’s having broken off. She spent just four days “projecting” the route
- (Also Federer-like is her way of blending frank amazement at her own capabilities with an air of humility and ease.)
- the competitors got fifteen minutes to stalk the base of the wall, studying the routes. They moved in a cluster, gesturing at invisible handholds, as though reaching for fireflies,
__ (Billy Wilder suggested that the widescreen technology might be best suited for filming “the love story of two dachshunds.”)
__ Fogelson has a knack for making Realpolitik seem reassuring. “We are fully committed to your realizing your vision at a price point that acknowledges that this hasn’t been tried before” sounds supportive, where the same message shorn of ornament—“We’ll make your iffy project but only dirt cheap”—might rankle.
"The Custodians" / Ben Lerner
- the dematerialization of the art object in conceptual practice. To confront the severed head and fragmented body of a janitor in a museum space is a discomfiting reminder of the undocumented (in more than one sense) material labor from which such discourses can help distract us.
- Kline is reversing the traditional temporality of the “original” art work: what comes first are copies; the real work will arrive in the future.
- Attitudes in the field had shifted toward a more aesthetically oriented approach, in which conservators disguise losses, with the goal of enabling the work to be experienced as a picture, not just as an archeological artifact. In the nineties, Yale sent some of its Italian collection to the Getty Museum to be re-restored, undoing what Petryn had undone.
- He tasked her with making from scratch every black pigment listed in “Il Libro dell’Arte,” a Renaissance treatise. “To make ‘vine black,’ I had to use young tendrils from grapevines,” she recalled. “I got them from my Italian grandmother’s relatives. To make ‘ivory black,’ I gathered some discarded shards of ivory from a keyboard factory in Ivoryton, Connecticut.”
- and was preparing to reinforce an area of the back of the canvas with acupuncture needles, selected for their mixture of strength and flexibility.
- These debates are fundamentally about temporality: should we celebrate the patina of time or what’s beneath it?
- The guiding ethos of conservators is “reversibility”—making sure that the future has the right to a different vision of the past. <> Tratteggio might work on a Renaissance fresco, but what is the equivalent for an abstract painting, let alone a work of conceptual art?
- (According to the art historian John Richardson, a postwar public raised on glossy reproductions found the varnished look familiar; original paintings, he suggests, were being “restored” to resemble their color-plate copies.)
- the Artist Documentation Program, a series of interviews with artists about their “materials, working techniques, and intent for conservation of their works.” The interviews are both illuminating and a little eerie, because they are essentially living wills.
- most of the time—conservation is fundamentally an interpretive act.
- In 2007, Mancusi-Ungaro helped form a team to study the murals. The team developed a series of colored-light projections that, when thrown against the canvases, would return the works to their original colors. It was a radical, digital tratteggio.
- It’s hard not to joke about Oldenburg giving the Whitney a headache. According to an academic paper detailing its exhibition history, “ ‘Ice Bag’ never functioned for longer than a few days at a time, and, even then, it performed only part of its intended motion. Throughout its exhibition history, ‘Ice Bag’ had broken gears, exuded noxious fumes, leaked oil, ripped its own fabric exterior, growled, squeaked, and set itself on fire.” It is described in museum archives in psychological terms: the sculpture is reported to be “moody” at one point, “suicidal” at another.
- What will be the new tratteggio? I don’t mean a technique for covering losses in new media. I mean a strategy for acknowledging the hand of the institution in the life of the work—a way of showing when and how and why the museum has altered what it displays.
- Spending time among the replicators has helped me become aware of what it’s easy to acknowledge intellectually but more difficult to feel: that a piece of art is mortal; that it is the work of many hands, only some of which are coeval with the artist; that time is the medium of media; that one person’s damage is another’s patina; that the present’s notion of its past and future are changeable fictions; that a museum is at sea.
Alex Ross: a few short minutes after the cosmic sadness of the so-called “black pearl” variation, Bach unleashes the Quodlibet, in which old folk songs irreverently intermingle. Levit caught that awesome doubleness: in his enigmatic brilliance, he is Bachian to the core.
