Twombly.

Instinctively, I understood.

I'm thinking about "Reds" this morning.

John Reed and Louise Bryant.

Ten Days that Shook the World.

Louise Bryant.

From the film: The intrepid journalist couple covering the Bolshevik revolution.

Adventures in fashion.

For carrying my spelling book and report card home to Mama.



I sprang from my father's head. Then I sewed some sequins onto my shoulders.




To be worn while tumbleweeds roll past an anemic mule in the background.








It goes without saying, I think, that, to be a little fashion forward, you sometimes have to wear ugly clothes. Not ugly, per se, but something wobbling right on that fine line between cool and ridiculously stupid-looking. You go backwards into the style mistakes of previous decades, or you mine the ethnographic possibilities of, say, marginalized non-white cultures. Or you fish through your parents' basement for artifacts from your childhood. Yes?






All items can be purchased at Milan Vintage.

Superstudio was so hot.

On "Dumb" Art.

"A favourite writer of mine, an American, an animal trainer, a Yale philosopher, Vicki Hearne, has written of the acute awkwardness and embarrassment of those who work with magnificent animals, and find themselves at a moment of reckoning, summed up in those deep and difficult eyes. Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent. Better to pretend that art is dumb, or at least has nothing to say that makes sense to us. If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now. By making islands of separation out of the unbreakable chain of human creativity, we are able to set up false comparisons, false expectations, all the while lamenting that the music, poetry, painting, prose, performance art of Now, fails to live up to the art of Then, which is why, we say, it does not affect us. In fact, we are no more moved by a past we are busy inventing, than by a present we are busy denying. If you love a Cezanne, you can love a Hockney, can love a Boyd, can love a Rao. If you love a Cezanne rather than lip-service it."

-Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects, 1995

Classic Italian.

I die for this. Was just reading about the woman who took over this line, Etro, which is her family's, in Vogue last week.

Alien child.

Reminds me of Edward Hopper. Via.

best piece from the bauhaus show at moma.

Joself Albers' folded paper.

Brian Jungen's Strange Comfort at NMAI, DC.

Details from "People's Flag," made from thrift store finds.









"Skull," made from baseballs, softballs.

Marquand House.

At Marquand Park, Princeton, NJ.

.

The whole drive back, I couldn't speak. I kept remembering him as a child, as a teenager. He used to run around the house, his white socks dangling so that the bright athletic stripes, which were supposed to be around his calves, were slumped down to his ankles. He croaked his mother's name, swung an alarm clock by its cord from the second-floor balcony. He was a clownish, reckless spectacle, wild with life.

I adored him. For the rest of my childhood, I would fantasize about having an older brother. This older brother. The one who drew fat, bug-eyed cartoon carrots on his school notebooks, who let me win at Connect Four, Rubik's Race.

But all this freedom and abandon resulted in accidents. Often. Stooping to spy on his sister and us playing from an outside window, he banged his head coming up and cut a gash in his scalp. Adults were always rushing to his side, exclaiming, making a tremendous fuss over him. He was injured. He broke his arm, he cut his head open. Then he would heal again. And the cycle would start all over.

Baum.

Photo by Elisabeth Dunker.