et cetera

There are many useless ways to idle away time on the internet. And then there is this.

I am currently reading Alex Ross’s excellent history of twentieth century classical music, The Rest is Noise. In Chapter 5, “Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius” (an edited version of which is available online), Ross describes Sibelius’s descent into alcoholism by referring to a painting:

A widely discussed painting by the [...]

There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with [...]

Their breath came short and their pulses raced, but they were within those limits that had been predicted and considered safe.

Richard D. Lyons, “Apollo Doctors Pleased At Astronauts’ Reactions”, in New York Times, 21 July 1969, p. 5.

According to the publisher, Beckett is in good health and went swimming over the weekend.

“Beckett Accepts Nobel; Refuses [...]

From Mark Wilson, “Theory Façades”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 104, No. 1, December 2004, pp. 273–288.

From Alan Baker, “Complexity Unfavoured”, in Analysis, Vol. 68, No. 297, January 2008, pp. 85–88.

Martin Russocki, “Untitled Subway Portrait”, from The Threepenny Review, Issue 85, Spring 2001.

Reprinted in Harper’s, Vol. 304, No. 1820, January 2002, p. 28.

Nathan Coley, There Will Be No Miracles Here, 2006.

I was recently lucky to see (with Huw and Mike) the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World 1914—1939 at the Corcoran in Washington DC. One part of the exhibition that I particularly enjoyed was the graphic design of the Russian modernists, and in particular the work of El Lissitzky, who I knew from his many [...]

One of my favourite urban images is the light from a flickering television emerging from an apartment building late at night. The artist Todd Hido has created a wonderful series of photographs which capture the mood of these scenes perfectly—go to photographs and then homes at night. Via Vvork.

Women compete in a high-heel sprint in St. Petersburg on 21 July 2007. Approximately 100 women took part in the race wearing high-heeled shoes with a required minimum height of 9 centimetres to compete for a shopping voucher worth 50,000 roubles (approximately 2,000 US dollars). Via Feminist Philosophers.

Listening to Steve Reich’s wonderful Six Pianos it struck me—Ulrich Mühe and Steve Reich look very similar.

The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the Garos of Assam, “besides the sacrifices for individual cases of illness, there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year by a whole community or village, and are intended to [...]

I was lucky enough to come by the last ticket to the last performance of the Peter Weiss play Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade—or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum [...]

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789.

I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in [...]

(1) The Furies
(2) Flowers for Graven Image
(3) Rothko Doorbell
(4) Heaven and Hell, Sideways

The new Diagram is out, and includes one from yours truly.

(“Possible Changes In A Couple’s Relationship To Be Considered In Diagnosing Love”, from Henry A. Bowman, Marriage for Moderns, Fifth Edition, 1960, McGraw-Hill; lifted from the latest Diagram).

Australia,

you are a faded haze of sirens and drifting voices while one of yours sits alone in a bright white room. There appear to be two of us here as spectators. The other, he checks his phone. There are two minutes everybody. At least as many cameras as people. Boom mikes. Mobiles to be switched [...]

Duration Performance
Mike Parr
6pm Fri 2 May to Midnight Sat 3 May

I am not sure why this hasn’t been advertised very heavily, even on the Artspace website, but a flyer has just made it into my hands containing the following information. I remember reading a tiny article about Malevich, a similar performance by Parr last year, [...]

(Mike Parr, Blind Obedience, 1998)

(From the Surveillance Camera Players)