Richard Craig at home in Nucla, where owning a gun isn’t only allowed, it’s required of the head of each household. Credit Daniel Brenner for The New York Times.
“The only way you persuade someone is to listen harder.” [While setting aside the guns?]
(John Hickenlooper, quoted by Roger Cohen, “Can Colorado Save America?”, NYTimes, 10-26-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Calvin Klein, spring 2018.
[stifled guffaw]
“Generally people don’t like to live with complicated subject matter,” Mr. Simons said. “But I have to feel the artwork stands for something that is important to me. I don’t like the idea that it has to fit my environment at all. I think that’s why I started looking at art and reading about it and embracing it — because it takes me away from my own work.”
(Raf Simons, chief creative officer of Calvin Klein, quoted by Vanessa Friedman, “Warhol & I,” NYTimes, 10-24-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Detail from Photo Illustration by Tracy Ma.
Maybe it’s always been naïve to think about culture in a moral vacuum. Art comes from someplace and brings with it at least a little of wherever it has come from or whoever has made it. Why not keep those things in mind as you consume it? It also feels important not to let those considerations consume you.
(Wesley Morris, “Should Art Be a Battleground for Social Justice?,” NYTimes Magazine, 10-2-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Alex Honnold peering over the edge of Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. He had just climbed 2,000 feet from the valley floor, as shown in the film “Free Solo.” Credit Jimmy Chin/National Geographic.
[Reminds me of my mother — a historian, teacher, librarian, scribbler. (Ahem. I wonder who follows in her wake!) At her funeral I said of her grammarian and authorial chops: “For her, there was a good way and a better way to talk and write. She had no truck with the wrong way.”]
How Honnold gets it exactly right is the real heart of “Free Solo,” and why the movie is worth studying. Honnold is not a thrill seeker. He’s a perfectionist who understands that the achievement of one supreme thing depends on the mastery of a thousand small things. Much of the perfectionism seems to come from his mother, Dierdre Wolownick, a retired French professor for whom, as Honnold puts it, “good enough, isn’t.”
(Bret Stephens, “Alex Honnold, A Soul Freed in ‘Free Solo’,” NYTimes, 10-25-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
When Walt Whitman was a Washington correspondent for The New York Times, the Capitol dome, like the nation, was still under construction. Credit via Library of Congress.
“None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s [Lincoln’s] face,” he wrote. “They have only caught the surface. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.”
(Will Dudding, “When Walt Whitman Reported for The New York Times,” NYTimes, 10-24-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
I apologize for leaning on this group. I follow in Martha’s footprints insofar as craving an outlet for my thoughts. It’s odd to me that I feel more affinity with Hubbard than with where I live now. Hence this misuse. The sense of not quite belonging anywhere is not unfamiliar. I ape fitting but don’t quite fit as a general rule.
I look back on my stint as a “teacher” at Hubbard High with a jaundiced eye. It was horrifying, for me and for students. Eventually, I found some rapport with the role I was supposed to play, but not before wreaking insignificant havoc in a puny way and attracting widespread indifference.
An uptick in the narrative of my forgettable performance is that good times were had. My problem, if it be one, is that the difficult days are receding from memory. I’m stuck, increasingly, with mental images of the good days. The more I remember my students, the more I love them in hindsight. Remarkable young people passed through my classroom. And so… Hubbard is stuck with me.
(c) 2018 JMN.
CAUTION AHEAD — CREAMED ASPARAGUS: A whiff of épater le bourgeois crossed with nostalgie de la boue i.e. Eighties effluvia insulting propriety, decorum, decency, good taste, all the sensitivities of right-thinking persons i.e. Depraved frippery from a “low dishonest decade” blessedly relegated to our collective past i.e. Horrid, callous, vestigial hiccup of barbarism from an era put firmly behind us i.e. Visceral venting of frolicking, wonky stinkpots i.e. That’s as much unctuous apologia pro vita sua as I can proffer for wrenching this text-stream from its well-earned obscurity. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
[From CB to HH & JMN:]
I sat relishing the feel of the florescent light on the cheap fabric of my imitation Henry Grenthel shirt and listened as Teena’s phone conversation wafted up the ventilation system like the plaintive cry of a chicken hawk across the dark, gothic prairie. Suddenly, I was borne on the wings of remembrance to those cherished moments when, a boy of twelve, I would sit pensively in Grandmother’s parlor rocker and listen as, upstairs, she thrilled herself with the tapered end of the late Mr. B***’s powder horn. I knew that I would soon be required to don the ill-fitting WWI Army uniform and, bowl of creamed asparagus in hand, climb the stair….
[From HH to CB & JMN:]
They arrived, first one, then the other. Pristine envelopes lent them a superficial dignity, but they stank a stray-cat scent of expired literary license. First there was JMN, with his thinly-masked discourse on uvula angst. On his heel CB, cesspool-of-consciousness’s unclaimed master. I should have known there’d always be some punk poe-taster writing into town. They were rank all right, but not amateur; they were prose. How to retort? “I think — therefore iamb?” No…, that would be putting Descartes before the horses….
(c) 2018 JMN.
Jenny Saville’s “Propped,” first shown in 1992, set an auction high for a living female artist when it sold for 9.5 million pounds, or about $12.4 million, at Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening sale of contemporary art. Credit 2018 Jenny Saville / 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS); New York / DACS; London; Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The nude self-portrait “Propped,” by Jenny Saville, was bought by a telephone bidder at Sotheby’s on Friday night for 9.5 million pounds, or about $12.4 million… But before anyone had time to reflect on its significance, Banksy’s $1.4 million “self-destructing” painting intervened, and the world was talking about a sensational stunt, rather than the way that female artists, and artists from other long-disempowered sectors of society, were reconfiguring the art world.
(Scott Reyburn, “A Landmark Achievement for a Painting by a Woman, Upstaged by a Man,” NYTimes, 10-12-18)
‘I wouldn’t write a song called Second Referendum Now, even though I think there should be one’ … Neil Tennant. Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans.
[Neil Tennant is one half of The Pet Shop Boys, a long-running pop music duo (unknown to me) whose other half is Chris Lowe. At age 64, Tennant comes across In The Guardian interview as articulate, witty, and thoughtful in his comments on writing lyrics, the music scene, and the AIDS epidemic.]
“I remember as a boy hearing Strawberry Fields Forever and also reading John Lennon’s explanation that he wanted it to be like a conversation, and that had a very powerful impact on me,” he says. “And I remember reading an interview with Frank Sinatra where he said you should phrase lyrics like a conversation. I’ve always tried to do that. Someone who you might not think of as the world’s best lyricist is Madonna, but she always gets the emphasis on the right syllable.”
(Alex Needham, “Sometimes I think: ‘Where’s the art, the poetry in all of this?’,” The Guardian, 10-21-18)
EthicalDative 
How I Roll
CAUTION AHEAD! — Compromised veracity. Drive skeptically.
For a time I lunched once or twice a week with two other coltish scapegraces. One was a professional poet fellowshipping in the public schools under an arts grant. The other was the executive director of the local arts council that funded the poet. We would hack out witticisms and read them to each other over table talk.
One of my eruptions, which I titled “A Fable,” was a mini-paean to a local restaurant named Casa Ramico’s (anglicized with the possessive affix). The arts counselor said, “If you wanted us to eat Mexican food, why didn’t you just say so?” He had a point. After reflection I said, “Because I have passive-aggressive neurosis. I never ask for what I want. I resort to circumlocutory misdirection and elaborate self-effacement to express my needs. That’s how I roll.”
(I added that jaunty last part. It lends vernacular impudence to the retort.)
(c) 2018 JMN.