Tom Carson has a piece at Vox about Rockwell becoming politicized in the 1960s, something I didn’t know about.
The first painting Rockwell did for Look magazine, after moving over from Saturday Evening Post, was a vivid statement about race in those tumultuous times. Alas, all the well-meaning actions at the time stalled and ended up meaning more as a symbolic nod than any radical change.
We’re still waiting for that.
A fascinating explanation of how modern elections turn not on swing voters choosing candidates, but the base voting against the other guys.
Which is why voters who dislike Trump have to remember to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who that is, in November. The Republicans, the Russians, the White Supremacists will try to get Dems and Independents to stay home, or vote for a third party candidate.
Don’t get fooled again!
The history of resistance is populated by lone wolves, some who are admirable. Some who are truly transgressive.
He also lived, after his transgression, something of an exemplary live, serving our society’s greater goals always.
I loved the Anarchist Cookbook when I was a teen, for the assumption of pure power anyone could have by building a bomb. It stroked my teenage dream of blowing things up to make things right.
But we all knew we were small potatoes compared to the international situation. Or we thought we were.
Today we know that a small potato with a big bomb can change everything, and while Powell may have known that, his amazing book is changed by that knowledge from an object of romantic upheaval to a harbinger of terror.
It’s the same thing, but the context changes everything. And I write now of my love for the book without apology, but with a much greater understanding of the obligations and costs of, well, revolution, especially as practiced by someone better equipped to blow stuff up and kill than to actually change things.
Time to head to the basement to find my copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book.
Yesterday the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announced a new shopping mall and Amtrak station adjoining the James A. Farley Post Office Building, across Eighth Avenue from the current Madison Square Garden. Call it the new Penn Station.
If you’re not familiar with New York you have no idea just what a disaster the current Penn Station, which currently resides under the Garden, is. For one thing, New Jersey Transit, Amtrak and the Long Island Railroad all come through the station, which is a tangle of platforms and stairways and levels, all with low ceilings and a sense of crushing crowdedness.
For another, it isn’t the glorious station that was built in 1910 and graced the site for 50 years before it was ingloriously torn down by greedy developers, a move that sparked New York’s historic preservation movement cum bureaucracy those many years ago.
If you are familiar with the station, you know all its horrors, but you might not guess that 650,000 people arrive and leave from it every day. It was designed to handle about 200,000.
As someone whose portal into the city when I was growing up was Penn Station, it was always a miserable place to be. Its dismal surroundings were ameliorated somewhat by the fact that you were either leaving or coming, you didn’t linger longer than necessary in Penn Station. Still, sometimes the wait was long.
I don’t know if it is by coincidence or plan, but the New York Times today has an elaborate suggestion for how to fix Penn Station. The beauty of the plan, which was developed by the architect Vishaan Chakrabarti, is to leave the massive cylinder that is Madison Square Garden intact, but to do away with all the innards.
No concrete shell, no hockey rink, no basketball court. No stairs or escalators. The shell would be replaced with something called blast-proof glass, and the space would be open to the sidewalk. No doors!
Though in cold weather the station may be sealed off by temporary walls. But the idea is that the sun beating down on a giant glass building would work like a greenhouse. Anyone who has ridden the escalator up with a full complement of luggage to the door on Eighth Avenue and 32nd Street knows how nice the elimination of door would be.
In any case, the Times presentation of this idea, written by Michael Kimmelman, the paper’s architecture critic, is not only beautiful, but it is beautifully presented. If there’s a reason to move from print to digital now, this is it.
And I’m not showing any of it. Be surprised!
Muhammad Ali’s star status was about personality and talent and show biz sense. His historical importance is built on his moral sense, which doesn’t get displayed more clearly and rightly than this:
I went to see Patti Smith talk with Kevin Baker about Albert Camus last night at the CUNY Graduate Center, in what they call the Altman Building.
It was an amiable chat about the great French writer’s first and last books, both unfinished before he died (The Happy Death and The First Man). Smith read from each and talked some about her love of reading, especially French literature in translation.
The talk ended with Smith telling a story and singing a song.
Pioneer Works is an art space in Red Hook Brooklyn.
Discovered/Founded/Developed by an artist named Dustin Yellin, Pioneer Works is a building, artist studios, a public space, a gallery and a garden.
What I know of Yellin’s work, he’s taken cut outs of mostly Victorian imagery and layered them between sheets of glass, so they become 3-d collages. I won’t mince words. These sculptures are beautiful and mind-blowing. And impossible to photograph. You have to be there.
Redwood’s is the installation of three on-site pieces in the Pioneer Works gallery. The photo only hints at their grandeur. The real payoff is the movie, which is an hour long, has no dialogue, and is about a young woman, presumably Lowe, finding a way to tell her family’s history through the fragmented memories of her demented grandmother.
The movie uses face and hand masks and lots of plastic design to render the story in a really real way and really unrealistic way. With emotion, but also with the understanding that emotions and memories get confused. That’s part of the story.
A Saturday afternoon well spent.
What could be more beautiful (other than the obvious)?
Color me bemused, but these (supposedly) authentic color images in the Temple of Dendur make me think that Matt Groening is perhaps older and more immortal than he at first appears. (It’s the colors!)
