Seeing in Reds, Greens, Blues

No Rainbow, Rainbow, No Rambo, Rambo

Two Floating Hands

Pairs of Letters, Pair of Lovers

Pots under Plexiglass, Petals beside Pipe

"Wedgwood" by Michaela Meise at Greene Naftali, 508 W 26th St

Petals on a Subway platform

New worlds exist in very old worlds (and continue to exist)

This quote concluded an article on NPR News today about the discovery of the oldest (30,000 to 40,000 years old) known musical instruments:

Music and art reveal that human beings are using abstractions and symbols: the hallmarks of humanity. "It gives us imagination. It gives us the possibility to create new worlds,"

A Little Flute Music To Warm The Cave, by Richard Harris

Circles on Stationary Vans

Favorite Moments from Dave Hickey's Air Guitar

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey

Dave's book opens with a quote that pleas with us the reader to maintain our patience with him, knowing his character, while he infuses his observations with his opinions. While his text was a delight to read it also tested my patience in a very particular way that I hope he will consider in future musings. The book operates like a near manifesto advocating for the rights of each person to live, make art, listen to music, etc., in the way they see fit, no matter how idiosyncratic. Hickey seems to trap himself nearly page by page, however, in us-vs.-them language, separating the democratic from the bureaucratic, the cool from the dodgy, and the colorful from the grayscale (literally). It begins to seem that Hickey's lifelong experience as an outsider has caused him to create a rigid club of insiders who define proper living standards. Other than that consistent vice, his observations and intuitions spin one's mind in many directions at once and open several avenues for interesting thought.

Here are some of the moments that got me thinking:

pg 39 - Defining the norm is [the government's] instrument of control over idiosyncrasy. Human art and language (as opposed to institutional art and language) always cite the exception.

pg 41 - We believed that social justice resides in the privilege of gathering about whatever hearth gives warmth, of living in a society where everyone, at least once, might see themselves in a Norman Rockwell.

pg 42 - My parents were always more concerned with my thoughtfulness than with my goodness.

pg 50 - There are thousands of colors in the world and only a few hundred words to describe them, and these include similitudes like peach and turquoise. So, the names we put on colors are hardly more than proper names, like Smith or Rodriguez, denoting vast, swarming, diverse families of living experience. Thus, when color signifies anything, it always signifies, as well, a respite from language and history - a position from which we may contemplate absence and death in the paradise of the moment.

pg 75 - I see that Chet Baker knew what all songwriters know, what singers like Judy Garland and Patsy Cline and Karen Carpenter knew most profoundly, that all songs are sad songs, borne as they are on the insubstantial substance of our fleeting breath.

pg 95 - Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world, simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it.

pg 106 - I had this idea... of an art that might embody the marriage of desire and esteem (which is, of course, what marriage is).

pg 109 - Art and money never touch. They exist in parallel universes of value at comparable levels of cultural generalization: Art does nothing to money but translate it. Money does nothing to art but facilitate its dissemination and buy the occasional bowl of Wheaties for an artist or art dealer. Thus, when you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you haven't bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything. You have translated your investment and your faith from one universe of value to another

pg 155 - At the time, the crowd went completely berserk. Even Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem's remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving's, since it was Kareem's perfect defense that made Erving's instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible - thus the joy, because everone behaved perfectly, eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened - thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules.

pg 169 - It seems to me that, living as we do in the midst of so much ordered light and noise, we must unavoidably internalize certain expectations about their optimal patternings - and that these expectations must be perpetually and involuntarily satisfied, frustrated, and subtly altered every day, all day long, in the midst of things, regardless of what those patterns of light and noise might otherwise signify.

Fire, Flowers

Red heart on a string, Red lady with a spring