Modern Kicks

"something is pushing them to the side of their own lives"

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

--Donald Justice

cold wind blowing

While I've been out of it, the tough news has continued to mount.  Yesterday I checked in to The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research only to learn that last week my alma mater had, along with other cuts, eliminated its gallery program and laid off its director, Judith Tolnick Champa (Greg Cook has continued to be on top of the story, adding details here and here.)  While I don't mean to minimize the importance of the other affected programs, I have to say that this particular development strikes me as a shortsighted and really damaging development.  Everyone knows about the difficult financial environment, but there's no equivalent for the program in the entire southern part of the state, or indeed within Rhode Island's system of higher education, in terms of range, ambition, and quality.  The Fine Arts Galleries have been a major asset for the University and their loss, along with a superb curator and educator, will have a negative impact on the school and the cultural life of the state.  I admit to being biased, as it was now close to 15 years ago that I first had the opportunity learn art history from Tolnick Champa and have my eyes opened by the exhibitions she curated (I still remember first seeing a Louisa Matthíasdóttir landscape in a show she curated; I also know I've written about at least one exhibition at URI, but can't find it now to link.)  My own experiences aside, however, this is a major blow.

Slightly further afield, Boston's Museum of Science also is cutting back, in a move that no doubt sent shudders throughout the Hub's non-profit world.  The Museum emphasizes in the article that these are not entirely budget-driven but strategic cuts (small comfort, I'm sure, to the newly jobless), and I do wonder how much they reflect a certain retrenchment after what seems like a period of rather heady growth.  Still, the Museum of Science has long been a powerhouse in its field, so when it catches a cold . . . you can fill in the rest.

let's stay together

The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80

“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.”
                                           —The Insight Lady

Dear old equivocal and closest friend,
Grand Vizier to a weak bewildered king,
Now we approach The Ecclesiastean Age
Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest
Like a party favor, or the brain blow a fuse
And the comic-book light-bulb of Idea black out
Forever, the idiot balloon of speech
Go blank, and we shall know, if it be knowing,
The world as it was before language once again;

Mighty Fortress, maybe already mined
And readying to blow up grievances
About the lifetime of your servitude,
The body of this death one talkative saint
Wanted to be delivered of (not yet!),
Aggressively asserting your ancient right
To our humiliation by the bowel
Or the rough justice of the elderly lecher’s
Retiring from this incontinence to that;

Dark horse, it’s you we’ve put the money on
Regardless, the parody and satire and
The nevertheless forgiveness of the soul
Or mind, self, spirit, will or whatever else
The ever-unknowable unknown is calling itself
This time around—shall we renew our vows?
How should we know by now how we might do
Divorced? Homely animal, in sickness and health,
For the duration; buddy, you know the drill.

--Howard Nemerov

never a dull moment

So, about this whole "no posts in weeks" thing.  The usual lassitude is to blame in part, of course, but a few other things have intruded as well.  You know the whole silly "blogging can kill you" thing that went around a few weeks ago?  True, I'm sure, for some tiny number of highly driven people who also take poor care of themselves and possibly have other underlying problems, and not a bad pretext for taking some space back for one's self.  As for me, it's been some time since I've been hell-bent on posting daily, so I've not been facing that kind of pressure--heck, I've been begging for ideas.  Nonetheless, I discovered that when life puts you flat on your back in a hospital bed, as happened to me three weeks ago, it's a good time to focus on things other than what might make a good blog post.  I'm doing well, much better now than then (though it was slightly interesting to have the mundane realization that when tv shows do the cliched first-person angle giving the view of someone looking up from a gurney being wheeled around, showing only bits of hallways and walls and hospital staff looking down--yup, it's pretty much like that), but still can't say that writing here has emerged once more as a priority.  Which isn't to say that I'm not planning to write more, or that I'm not reading, thinking, and (when opportunities arise) looking, but I'm trying to balance those aspects of life with a greater focus on the whole staying out of the hospital thing.  I owe emails to several people, which I hope to get to soon, as well as posts on various books, more thoughts on Pompeo Batoni and 18th century painting in Rome, and who knows? Perhaps I'll make to the MFA's El Greco/Velázquez show.

For now, though, I'll leave you with an update and a quick link: first, as many of you no doubt have already seen, Geoff Edgers had a recent follow-up article in the Globe on the MFA's fight over its Kokoschka painting.  In brief, his piece presents arguments from some disputing the museum's attempt to claim title to the painting on the grounds that its late 1930's sale by the then-owner, an Austrian Jew, was not a forced sale.  Criticisms by historians of the museum's stance and perceived lack of forthcoming regarding all details also figure in as well.  I'm simply noting the article right now, as I blogged about previous coverage, arguing (with reservations) in favor of the museum's position.  Obviously I know nothing of the exact facts of the case beyond what's been published, and reserve the right to change my mind about the case, as I indicated I might in previous posts.  Still, while I'm not going to go into detail at this time--I haven't read carefully enough--I remain concerned about what the exact standards are for determining whether a work should be restituted and how they apply here even as the public case for the museum has taken some hits.  More, perhaps, later.  On a different note, the quick link I mentioned is to the blog of The New Courtauld Mafia, bring you "cultural coverage from the students of the Courtauld Institute of Art.  They're just getting started, and could post more frequently (though I shouldn't talk of course), but I'm thinking it's a site worth watching, even if I admit to a certain bias in favor of almost anything Courtauld-related.  Check it out, and I'll be back when I can.

Updating on preview: whoa, the Courtauld Mafia site informs me that Anne d'Harnoncourt has died.  Terrible news that puts my experiences in perspective.  I second their post.

like that

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

my thoughts exactly

Busy and blocked.  But not displeased at the arrival of spring or without hope that my opportunities to post will improve.

Blue, Red and Grey - The Who

this is disgraceful and abominable

I don't believe I saw this story when it originally surfaced last year, but evidently it's still timely.  And while I've no desire to get into a debate about it, no, I don't think that famously elastic concept "art" is flexible enough to hold the actions described.  Their perpetrator has moved into another, far more debased, field of activity, and no appeal to the artworld's conceptual games or ratifying power can change that fact.  I'm not the activist type, but there is a petition here.

surfacing

Despite this site giving the appearance, the past few weeks, of my having fallen into a jar of Massic wine myself, I've merely been too busy and preoccupied by the disaster unfolding around us to think up thoughts about the art I've not been viewing.  I have some hope that the situation will change, so keep an eye out.  In the meantime, I've been reading.  January and early February found me happily gliding through all of A Dance to the Music of Time, about which I really should have had more to say at the time but found it too difficult to write of such a large work in the way it deserved.

So a few odd notes now, on the novels and some other things:

finding the level

I just couldn't bring myself to post about last week's news that Michele Maccarone was urging various figures in the Los Angeles art/academic world to boycott a program for young LA artists sponsored by Skadden Arps, MASS MoCA's lawyers in the Büchel affair, but I think Martin has found the appropriate comment.

the world is tref and grief too astray for tears

I imagine you have heard the terrible news.  That this will take some getting used to is an understatement.  I thought 2006 was bad, not to mention 2007, but this?  Dear lord.  Speaking of 2007, would it have killed the NFC to send up a representing team on the verge of implosion with a quarterback who had completely lost his game in the latter half of the season?  Was that too hard to do a second time?  Goddamn Mannings.  I guarantee you one thing: Eli will never will another Super Bowl.  I don't know if the Patriots will--I expect a lot of changes on the defense after this year, and who knows what the impact will be--but Manning?  Never.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to resume ignoring all news media while lying in a fetal position and moaning.  I do hope to write on other topics today, but I've still got some stages to go through--as this post probably shows, I'm still mired in anger, although there have been moments of bargaining as well.  But don't get me started on the dreams I had in which the Patriots somehow won, all ending with the realization that, oh no, that's right, they lost.  Over and over again.  Blah.

. . . Updating, Jeremy Shockey had an impressive number of glasses on the bar in front of him when the camera cut to show him watching the game.  Not that they were necessarily all his, of course, but it certainly looked like most of them were.  And oh, I think I link to and remark positively on stuff over at the Globe's website often enough to say screw this feature.  Dancing with the Stars?  The Beanpot?  You put this up the morning after the Super Bowl?  WTF?

More: "haven't watched too many games"?  And people complained about bandwagon Patriots fans.