Lucy Jones.
In this essay Sara Nolan affirms with wit and grain her sense of the “godliness of the everyday” brought home by the birth of babies of any species. I glimpsed it with sugar ants.
We are just creation playing its long dice game, no better or more important than anything with wings, hind legs, scales.
(Sara Nolan, “What Parrots Taught Me,” NYTimes, 8-2-19)
(c) 2019 JMN
“Food is constantly implicated in economic and political processes, as well as in social and historical processes… Because of the recent events in the Middle East, even something as innocent looking as a ground chickpea ball can be used as a weapon of sorts.” (Yael Raviv)
(Quoted by Dene Mullen, “Does Egypt have the best falafel in the world”? BBC.com, 7-16-19)
Exploding falafel is on a par with the heart attack sandwiches flogged relentlessly by American fast food giants: stealth bombs targeting a population in the belly.
I wonder if the bacon cheeseburger will poison the West slowly but surely just as leached wine flagon lead is said to have poisoned Rome?
(c) 2019 JMN
The influence of fashion and grooming on art (and vice versa?) is of great interest to me. The mention of Sonia Delaunay brings back pleasant memories of being thrilled at a receptive age by her work and that of her husband.
Italian artist Emanuela Di Filippo uses oil pastels to create sinuous images of women wearing bold outfits in the style of Biba, the swinging 60s fashion store set up by Barbara Hulanicki.
Influenced by the vibrant colours of artist Sonia Delaunay and the slender portraits of Modigliani, Di Filippo trained in fine art in Rome before moving to the UK.
“I was inspired by abstract, minimal, contemporary artists. But then I came back to my first loves: art and fashion,” she says.
Biba’s designs are reminiscent of the classic Italian fashion Di Filippo grew up with: “They have a simplicity of shape, and I loved the colours.” Hulanicki referred to these as “auntie colours”, such as olive, rust, and “bruised purple”.
(Dominic Holbrook, “Inspired by Biba: oil pastel fashion — in pictures,” The Guardian, 3-2-18)
(c) 2019 JMN
This year-old piece from The Guardian has some charming, free-and-easy-seeming sketching that I would dearly love to be able to pull off myself.
Earlier this month, London-based artist Joey Yu headed to Field Day, a two-day music festival held in south London’s Brockwell Park, to record the action with crayons, pencils and paper…
All drawings were done in situ and took between 10 minutes and half an hour, though she did finish a couple at home because of the weather.
“I can’t express the pure joy of drawing in the moment, connecting eyes and ears to hands. It’s like meditation or dancing,” she says. “I think it really gives a different feel for the atmosphere that photographs just can’t grasp. It was a good adventure.”
(Georgia Simcox, “Sketches of Festival Life — In Pictures,” The Guardian, 7-16-18)
(c) 2019 JMN
Australia’s Steve Smith maintained his mastery over England on the third day at Edgbaston. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images.
I’ve excerpted this piece with love and impish selectivity from Vic Marks’s excellent cricket bloviation.
While [Steve Smith] is still at the crease nothing can be guaranteed… England made some solid progress: a first-innings lead of 90 and three early scalps… But… [by] the close Australia were 124 for three from 31 overs and with Smith still at the crease….
… Smith has already mangled a few minds. Upon his arrival at the crease England reverted to funkiness… For the seamers there might be two men on the leg side one moment, five the next, maybe with a cunning leg slip and short mid-on….
Smith was in clover as England forgot… that even the great batsmen… do not like being tied down and compelled to work for their runs….
… Why offer Smith so many easy options to jog off strike?… Hide your eyes if necessary and try a length just outside off stump along with the occasional bouncer.
So Smith was there unbeaten on 46 at the close and Australia’s lead was 34… Cameron Bancroft was caught at bat and pad by Jos Buttler at short-leg.
Burns finally square-drove a boundary… Out came Moeen… He kicked four leg-byes and defended three deliveries… [then] shouldered arms and lost his off stump.
Next, Bairstow wafted against Peter Siddle to be caught at slip… Often Broad swishes in these circumstances but he buckled down… nudging singles and occasionally slog-sweeping….
The packed Hollies Stand applauded jubilantly at the addition of every run in between chanting “He’s got sandpaper in his pants” to Bancroft….
Eventually Broad was caught at long-leg off a short delivery from Cummins….
The challenge ahead was clear: England were going to have to win this match without the assistance of [Jimmy Anderson] their champion bowler, a circumstance that is bound to be repeated at Lord’s next week.
(Vic Marks, “Steve Smith stands firm again as Australia establish lead against England,” The Guardian, 8-3-19)
(c) 2019 JMN
Like the blogs of yore, podcasts… are today’s de rigueur medium… And yet the frequency with which podcasts start (and then end, or “podfade,” as it’s coming to be known in the trade) has produced a degree of cultural exhaustion.
(Jennifer Miller, “Have We Hit Peak Podcast?” NYTimes, 7-18-19)
The cyber picnic, my friends, has moved on.
The Kardizzians and Kewdipies have pitched blanket in a far meadow. The Influenced track their spoor and veer thither like droves of skittish wildebeest.
Where moments ago blogs capered and podcasts tramped, sugar ants coat petit fours discarded in the bent grasses.
The wind hums on wire.
A dove coos.
Already the grass is unbending.
(c) 2019 JMN
The Bed Science Made Better
Can your bed make you feel this good?
(Ad in NYTimes online)
Can my bed make me feel that good?
Probably not. But the improved bed science created by an elided subordinating conjunction, and Henry Raeburn’s brushwork, are helping me feel pretty fine.
(c) 2019 JMN
“The eye of Texas is upon you…” (State Anthem modified)
If past experience (cough, blogs) is any indication, a shakeout is nigh.
(Jennifer Miller, “Have We Hit Peak Podcast?” NYTimes, 7-18-19)
A bigger shakeout than podcasting (cough, climate change) is nigh. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon in which the iconic doomsday prophesier stands on the corner with a sign reading “The End is Nigh-ish.”
Disaster comes in its own good time but is always nigh-ish. Past experience is never an indication of anything. As Faulkner said, it’s not even past. There’s little evidence that humans have ever profited from experience. War, for example, is permanent.
Vogues, on the other hand, are vagaries that skitter and ripple over surfaces at click speed; they go, and sometimes they come.
According to Jennifer Miller, podcasts are going and blogs are way gone. I’ve listened to only one podcast, and already podcasts are gone-ish. Email, it seems, is gone or close to it, having given way to messaging. Using smart phones as telephones is gone. Facebook, though obscenely wealthy, is gone; it’s the reduct of pensioners now, having given way to Instagram, which is probably close on getting gone by now.
The thing most nigh, next to death, is the next veering of the herd.
It’s comforting now to blog, to be a straggler, stranded in a stagnant backwater, a johnny-come-lately to the digital picnic. Blogging is intimate and viral-free. A conversation of adepts away from whom the herd has veered. A refuge from the toxic circle of narcissism that drives likeaholics to fall off cliffs and strangle porpoises while taking their selfies.
Goodbye, bloggers. And hello. Let’s keep going.
(c) 2019 JMN
EthicalDative 
Feminine Manet
One of Manet’s last paintings, “Jeanne (Spring),” from 1881, is the centerpiece of the exhibition. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired it in 2014 after more than a century in the shadows. Credit The J. Paul Getty Museum.
My favorite touch on this painting is the mauve-against-yellow bonnet garnish — purple-yellow adjacencies enthuse me. Otherwise, the mannequin with the bee-sting pucker and doe-stupid gaze is both masterful and tiresome.
Jason Farago writes about the exhibition “Manet and Modern Beauty,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition “focuses on the art of Manet’s last six or seven years before his early death in 1883, at the age of 51.”
Farago says art historians tended to dismiss these later genre scenes, portraits and still lifes “with the three Fs: frivolous, fashionable and (worst of all) feminine.”
The trouble I have with Farago’s art criticism is in keeping excerpts from it lean and crisp — my standard for blogging. His comments tend to be maddeningly on point vis-à-vis my personal tastes — making it difficult to omit things.
Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) set off a nearly riotous scandal when it was first displayed at the 1865 Salon. It resides in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Credit Francois Guillot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
This peep of history on how Manet’s “Olympia” was received in its day is amusing for what it reveals of the perennial clueless bawling of mobs:
“Flowers in a Crystal Vase,” circa 1882. Credit National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
“The Café-Concert,” circa 1879. Jason Farago writes that Manet treated the cafes and parks of Paris as “venues where new life was made from scratch.” Credit The Walters Art Museum.
(c) 2019 JMN