This is poetry. Oddly, reminded me very much of an all-time favorite I once saw on train on commute (Poetry in Motion) at a could-not-have-been-better time (as always happens with this kind of thing) & immediately memorized and have turned over, observed and sat quietly with in my mind many times since:

I had grasped God's garment in the void
But my hand slipped
On the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
Must have upheld my leaden weight
From falling, even so,
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.

ETA: see, tolja: just typing it up made me well up. I took only one liberty, and that was only punctuational. I think it's that they have similar intimate conversational rhythm.

I've always had trouble with the size of clouds.
I know they're huge. I can see their shapes.
But I don't really see them as objects
on the same scale as trees
and buildings.
They're a backdrop.

Stars are the same way.
I know they're scattered through an endless ocean,
but my gut insists they're a painting
on a domed ceiling.

If I try hard enough,
I get a glimmer of depth,
a dizzying sense of space.

But then everything snaps back.

So one summer afternoon

I set up two HD webcams
hundreds of feet apart,
pointed them at the sky,
and fed one stream to each of my eyes.

The parallax extended my depth perception
by a thousand times,
and I stood in my living room
at the bottom of an abyss
watching mountains drift by.

utterly charming

Joseph Cornell's 1957 "For Sale":



"Sequestered bower – numerous compartments, look-outs, guest rooms, cozy nooks (feather-lined), pine-scented lounge, ivy-covered observatory for early dawn views and romantic sunsets, cheese cellar, moss-lined alcoves with dripping water and large variety of snails, cool storage, chalet-view of valley, bird’s eye view of old chateau inhabited by storks, aquarium in base of trunk with rare deep forest specimens, salamanders' crannies, violet-banked approaches, musical waterfalls, natural mineral specimens, and easy walking distance to enchanted lake."

I love "violet-banked approaches" and especially the blithe final assertion. And of course the current inhabitant's leery, world-weary expression (rendered so by the text and context, I know) makes the whole thing.

I liked this a whole lot too, its warm succulent hues thrumming and fluctuating like its obvious Rothko antecedents, and unabashedly emotional:  Richard Mayhew's "Rhapsody":

Scrawled in pencil on otherwise-empty white museum wall:

What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words. - Max Frisch

Personal Values

I love Magritte for rewarding staring, and making the brain whir acceleratingly the longer you do...the inversion of object and human/subject, interior(s) and exterior(s), "useful"/necessary and "superfluous"; punnery, especially about reflection and the act of seeing; distortion cleaving signifier from signified. He's such a weirdo. Love, love, love.

I maintain now maybe not-so-wild hope that Bulger trades some kind of leniency for Gardner info, everything's been properly kept and is still in decent shape, and I will one day again spend a birthday afternoon with The Concert. Well, I gotta figure we're closer than we've been in 21 years.  Wish Smith were still alive.

LeWitt

However randomly the building blocks were placed, this was going to happen eventually, because of math.'l qualities of the building blocks' geometry; it just happened to happen here. Is it a coincidence or not? Yes. Nothing less than a comment on life and, as I choose to take it, nexus of free will and God's. Reminds me of the end of "Synecdoche." Breathtaking if one lets it be.

Coasting woozily on the pleasingly disorienting alternations of 6/4 with the occasional lone bar of 4/4 and cheeky perverse and (I'm guessing) deliberately obfuscatory enjambment across each bars-3-to-4 of aforementioned sprawl ii on repeat while roaming manhattan on this, the loveliest of all possible spring days.

like allie brosh, he evokes a world of personality and attitude with just a few straight lines (the student's body language).  It's art.

Knowing how to ask a question in another language turns out to be of limited utility when you discover you don't know enough of it to understand the response.

This trip threatens to full-blow my interest in art nouveau/Secession/Jugendstil into an obsession. Moser marquetry: love the use of natural grain to evoke fabric pattern

The land of Strauss and in every store etc. they're blasting, like, Livin' on a Prayer. This is depressing.

Eta this souvenir shop is blasting a "song" that consists of heavy sampling of "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", a tuneless bass thump, a woman occasionally singing random words, and a guy yelling "let's go, let's go" in a way that gives me strong urge to find and ponsch him. It's less a song and more an assaultive audio gallimaufry. Abominable

Never considered before that the Met (and Louvre, and their like) are just like the major metros they're in. Although you feel more and more ridiculous as you speedwalk past more and more literally priceless works that you may never pass by again, you really do have to just turn a disciplined blind eye to everything but the handful of items you've decided to see... or risk losing your dang mind. Come to think of it, I just described life, didn't I.

Recent occasion to reconsider the by far most thought-provoking, sometimes infuriating and (it must be said) sublime movie I've ever seen, has put me in a tizzy to complete (for now) my recollections of it. (As everyone knows my enjoyment of a thing is incomplete until expressed.) So:

I found "Synecdoche, New York" to be a lyrical, thought-provoking, gorgeous rumination on nothing less than the very nature of life itself, all its ugliness and intolerable beauty, seeming meaninglessness that gets transmuted into ultimate meaningfulness thanks to the unextinguishable, irrational, salmon-against-the-tide-type animal sheer force of human will, and especially the wild strangeness and extremity of subjectivity (which I for one take so much for granted in my daily coming and going - the movie stopped me in my tracks, put me in grateful, humbled, incredulous awe, especially as a believer- why would God *do* that? It's staggering).

It provoked the interesting thought, which I'd never before had, that all humor might be black humor at its heart. (Taking human mortality as a constant, how can it not be?) It suggests that much we consider entertainingly ironic, actually could not be less funny, in the face of the insane improbability and fragility of existence. (Signal example: the early scene in which Adele waffles about buying the house.)

It examines the peculiarity and possible futility of the creative impulse (which deserves many more words than I have time for right now), there's a quiet Mozart/Salieri thread throughout that does not take sides but does seem to goose the contemporary viewer for its lazy willingness to confuse creativity and psychosis.

I consider it a stunningly successful and generously fearless exploration of the fear, desire and identity concerns behind the question "No matter what they do or say, do we ever *truly* know how anyone else feels about us?", and the exhilarating, frankly terrifying answer, "Hell no, but love and believe them anyway!" (The only other movie I've seen that does that as well as this one does - or at all - is the Australian film PROOF, which I also love.)
Like snowboarding, the first days of which you spend being delightfully surprised by the unlimitedness of your ability to invent new ways to fall down and break every part of your body that you'd really rather keep intact, the movie keeps pouncing on your heart and *wrecking* it, then strolling casually away, only to return and do it again in some new awful way. It's easily the most brutal entertainment I remember ever experiencing (with the possible exception of a production of Titus Andronicus which, with apologies to Dave Barry, I will never forget as long as live as I happened to have just eaten a meatball sandwich at the time. OK not really, but there are only so many stringy bloodsoaked decapitated heads I want to see in one evening). You can't stand it; you want to leave. But life sometimes sucks, and the movie can't or won't lie.

Speaking of which - I can't begin to get into its surrealist mode and the importance of that choice to the movie's effectiveness - its contribution to both the movie's occasional opaqueness (when do we ever really fully understand anything IRL?) and, yet, somehow, with a palpable active perversity, its hyperrealism (which gives the emotions it evokes a dire, organic authenticity - there was not one I had that felt jerked out of me). I would like to say much more about that at some point, but for now: it reminded me again and again of Magritte's effects - the same at-once dreamy/overalert, serene/disturbing, unreal/hyperreal tensions - just see my last para here for my brief thoughts at the time.

Like the most interesting art of any kind, it sometimes confused, irritated and challenged me, and yet despite that (or maybe in part because of that), it moved and thrilled me. I still think about it often.

The Concert! "Is it a crime to want nice things? And then to steal them from a public museum, where any gum-chewing monkey in a Tufts University jacket can gawk at them? I think not!"

No one will believe this, but I am TWENTY MINUTES EARLY to meet my friend at MoMA. I cannot account for this fact at all.