July 28, 2008
Baden Baden and Strasbourg
Baden-Baden is a relaxing and quiet little town with one of the most beautiful little parks in the world: the Lichtentaler Allee with a paved waterway running beside it and many species of superb trees randomly scattered on the immaculate green lawn.
The casino where Dostoievsky lost his shirt is very low key and doesn't feel like a casino at all, a perfect image of teutonic restraint in face of Fate and Luck.
The baths are reason enough for a trip there. Friedrichbad is the one where you go through 15 stages, from saunas, soap massages, wet saunas, jacuzzis, warm water pools, cold water pools...and at the end you feel clean as you've never been. On Sundays both men and women are admitted - it's a textile free place, or else, you're naked as a baby - and we had fun spotting a japanese gentleman who seemed to be lost all the time and never seemed to stop more than 2 minutes at each station after checking out all the women in sight. Caracalla's ground floor is for families; pools at different temperatures, saunas, waterfalls and everyone wearing swimsuits. Now, the real fun is upstairs where there is a bridge to the mountain right beside it where there are log cabins with dry saunas inside and cold water showers for the brave. And it's all nude. It's like being back in San Francisco. Avoid evenings and nights because the towel clutching freaks show up. The type of people who don't understand it's a faux-pas to not be totally naked in a nudist place while staring at others.
Strasbourg was an unplanned visit. France was just around the corner and that's the place to go in search of a fine meal. The Cathedral is one of the most monumental buildings I've seen, stretching dramatically into the sky. The town is beautiful and lively, full of quaint streets and medieval looking buildings.
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July 27, 2008
Mad Detective
I have a weak spot for Hong Kong made thrillers. Maybe it's because they're so good as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters infested by terrible actors with pretty faces declaiming cliches.
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July 25, 2008
What's on Mundo de Claudia reading pile
Bouvard et Pécuchet is a treasure. R. has been reading it to me in the evenings, the perfect book to be shared as we follow the two gentlemen through their pursuit of knowledge and from failure to failure in putting it to practice.
The Rest is Noise is the proof that a lenient god exists as he answered my atheistic prayer for a book that would read like a long New Yorker article (the erudite yet accessible ones, not the Obama-is-our-God-and-all-Republicans-are-evil ones).
Carnegie's bio. I dunno, I was in the mood for a high brow excuse to peep into other people's lives. That's what bios are all about, no?
The Death of Virgil. I'm scared of it - shouldn't I be brushing up on my Aeneid beforehand? Thomas Mann says it's one of the most profound and extraordinary experiments to have been undertaken under the form of a novel. Steiner says it's the only genuine technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses. We'll see.
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July 24, 2008
Veronese's Allegories of Love: the Set
These paintings were destined to be hanging in a ceiling in a order that is unknown. They've been called different aspects of love or paired as the pleasures and pains of love. There seem to be only four of them if we are to trust Veronese's preparatory drawings for it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Whatever the narrative was supposed to be, there's an obvious moral purpose.
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You should avoid the easy woman because easy as she is, others will possess her and she will bring you no fortune or children. But, if you lust after a woman who doesn't give in to your desires, who is chaste and virtuous, by marrying her Fortune will bless you with peace and fertility.
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Veronese's Allegories of Love: Happy Union
A married couple (the two main characters from the other paintings) is rewarded by Fortune, the holder of the horn of plenty, abundance and fertility, who crowns the virtuous wife. Not only are they married as symbolized by the golden chain held by the putto, they are faithful - the dog - and peace and harmony reigns between them - the olive branch.
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Veronese's Allegory of Love: Jealousy
A half undressed woman is dividing her attentions between two men and although she seems to be holding the bearded gentleman's hand (our main character from the other paintings) she's discreetly giving a written piece of paper to the other man. The fig tree was believed to be so obstinate as to destroy even marble. It is depicted here as a symbol of decadence. Maybe it is a barren fig tree, destroying everything in its way and yet having no future, bearing no fruit. Eros seems dumbfounded by the whole scene while he plays the clavichord, music leading men out of their senses, the woman being the maestrina.
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Veronese's Allegories of Love: Respect
I wouldn't call it respect but restraint. A naked woman sleeping in a drunken stupor - note the half empty jar of wine - isn't respectful, she is easy. Eros as sexual temptation, once again rather than love, is quite graphically represented here as he holds the phallic sword and points at the woman's vagina with his arrow. An older man, certainly wisdom, pulls the main character away from the sleeping woman and the meaning of the allegory is further reinforced by a scene of the Continence of Scipio painted on the ceiling of the archway. Scipio, the roman general, having conquered Carthago Nova and being offered a beautiful captive shows his clemency and sexual restraint by giving her back to her fiancée.
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Veronese's Allegories of Love: Scorn
A man is tormented by desire for a chaste woman.
Eros is savagely hitting the man with his bow, embodying the pangs of desire and not those of love or why else there would be statues of Pan - holding his flute in a suggestive way - and a satyr in the background ruins? It's the male as a sexual animal and the woman-victim running away and shown the way by Chastity symbolized by an ermine, an animal which won't let its white fur get dirty.
The woman has the upper hand in the moral dispute.
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July 12, 2008
The latest random annotations
"...They were mostly 'His Master's Voice' and 'Columbia'; the latter, however, although easily pronounced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner.(...) It took me a least a decade to realize that 'His Master's voice' means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own barking, for I somehow took the phonograph's amplifier for a mouth piece too, and since dogs run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach."
--from the essay "Spoils of War", so far the only of Joseph Brodsky's writings I have enjoyed, a poignant account of his childhood and youth in the USSR and the meaning of foreign objects left behind by Americans after the WWII in his life.
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"Dearer to me than a host of base truths
is the delusion that enobles us." -- AS Pushkin
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"il n'y a de bonheur que dans les voies communes" - Chateaubriand
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"I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial - in other words, Americanized. I believe that I had already noticed traces of this in your letters, and I'm not sure I entirely approve."
Edmund Wilson's letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 14 Jan 1946
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"Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try."
"If you're a salesman worth the name at all, you can sell razors to a billiard ball."
"The salesman who will use his brains will spare himself a world of pains."
"Well kept hands that please the sight seize the trade and hold it tight, but bitten nails and grubby claws well may give the buyer pause."
maxims from Montague Egg's Salesman Handbook (the other Dorothy L Sayers detective)
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May 14, 2008
How to write about an exhibition you haven't attended
Matthew Bliss, Beyond Abstraction, May 3rd-June 2nd (extended until the 8th!) at Sharada Gallery, Rhinebeck, NY
I met Matthew only once in a cold February day in New York City; my memory of this event is not an accurate but a cinematographic one: I remember it as if it were the scene of a Wim Wenders movie, a gritty urban environment, the streets dirty with the recently melted snow and the feeling that this could only have happened in this particular place - a geographical appropriateness. In the back of a yellow cab, like members of an underworld in a country where art was forbidden, Matthew carefully and almost in stealth extracted from a canvas bag a small sculpture that fitted the palm of his hand, a restless hand, anxiously showing a treasure. And there it was, a sturdy object that despite its small scale was the antithesis of flimsiness and that looked the more minute in its creator's long and elegant fingers. And it quickly disappeared back into its case.
Probably because of the secretive and intimate atmosphere I associate with this encounter, I imagine that in order to see this exhibition you'd have to whisper a password to get through the door, like a speakeasy. You climb down a few steps and there is a room, darkened and damp as a wine cellar, where flickering lightbulbs throw a blanket of yellow light over the exquisite little sculptures set in holes cut into the walls. They would possibly be lit from below casting long shadows on the rugged walls, adding a hint of drama. Exit this Boltanski's The Candles inspired stage and back to the most natural gallery setting, the ever-ubiquituous white cube. I start imagining that each sculpture has the right to its own white pedestal, high enough for the viewer not need to bend over to examine it more carefully but not as high as to leave the work at eye level either. Somewhere in between, a perfect height to see the sculpture from the front but still have a good grasp of its depth and dimensions.
These assemblages could pass for objects trouvés, industrial debris from a giant contraption, abandoned and corroded by the elements and the relentless action of time. Better even, they could be attempts at its reconstruction, the plans being lost and its aim forgotten.
Oh. Soft jazz should be playing.
As for the drawings and watercolors, they would be hanging in a small back room with a skylight. The false Rothkos, more simulacra than forgery, should be here in a contrarian stance to the Rothko hall at Tate Modern, as if Man Ray had come by and solarized the entire room. Rather than a somber and meditative atmosphere reminiscent of a chapel, a room evocative of a joyful and bright afternoon in the sun drenched roof of a house in Alexandria, a blue sky dome stolen from Klein, where the Quartet's characters would be contriving dissertations on the philosophy of love.
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