Category Archives: media

On a Bell Krater and Oinochoe from the Spina necropolis, seen at the Dallas Museum of Art

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Art discussed in this post, on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art:

Red Figure Bell Krater, featuring Theseus and Sinis. Greek: Attic, 5th c. BC. From the Spina necropolis; attributed to the Sini Ferrara painter. On loan to the DMA from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ferrara, inv. 3066.

Red Figure Oinochoe, featuring Polynices offering a necklace to Eriphyle. Greek: Attic, 435-430 BC. From the Spina necropolis; attributed to the Shuvalov painter. On loan to the DMA from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ferrara, inv. 2509.

Not the best picture, but the Oinochoe is at the extreme left. You can see Eriphyle reclining and some of Polynices. The Krater is central, and Theseus bending the tree, about to execute the naked robber, is pretty clear.

Theseus, about to kill one of the robbers famed for plaguing a road, will earn his initial fame as a hero. This robber, Sinis, either threw unsuspecting victims into the air with a bent pine or tore them in two. Theseus appears a well-dressed man, almost a gentleman. He wears a sun hat and a diadem; the robber is naked. The inscription only calls Theseus kalos, though: noble or beautiful, not a gentleman (also known as kalos kai agathos, noble and good).

Justice might be the outstanding question. Apollo or some kind of established, noble figure crowned with a laurel watches the execution. Even though I didn’t see the other side of the Krater fully (it is turned to the wall), I was told it was two men talking, and I glimpsed that one of them was dressed more like Apollo. I suspect there’s no justice here, just reputation and civilization. Apollo, god of music, gives us stories without which we are frightfully naked. Those stories hide a certain darkness. The expression on Sinis’ face is pained, terrified, human.

What’s on the Krater may make narrative sense and have narrative depth. On the Oinochoe, which pours wine, we could be dealing with one half of a story. Three figures are presented. Polynices, who robbed of his kingship of Thebes by his brother Eteocles, tries to conquer the city with the assistance of six other leaders. He is offering a necklace to a reclining Eriphyle. He does bribe her into goading her husband to war with Thebes, even though she knows her husband will die. And there’s a servant holding an (the?) Oinochoe and a Kylix, a drinking cup. As these objects were found in a tomb, part of a funeral banquet before burial, one wonders several things. First, whether there is a Kylix meant to go with the Oinochoe, giving another story to go along with this one. Second, while the servant holding these objects foreshadows the death of Polynices, Eriphyle’s husband, and Eriphyle herself, it also connects with the burial of whoever was rich enough to have these objects at their funeral. Who on earth wants to be buried with such a morbid, awful story? Polynices is vengeful, unpatriotic, and totally justified in his cause. Eriphyle is greedy, reckless, and hateful. The servant depicted is female, and maybe the two women can tell us about the potential complementary Kylix. A matching Kylix perhaps features Antigone and Ismene, sisters of the feuding brothers. Both would be mourning. One because of crazy, Polynices-like claims about family and the identification of death with justice. The other in mourning simply.

Everything I learned in life I learned from Lana Del Rey’s Twitter

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soundtrack for this art project

5. Thank you so much to Yuri Milner for giving away millions at the breakthrough awards at NASA and bringing the world’s most outstanding physicists to our attention. Was incredible to see Sergey Brin and Mark and all of the deserving winners

YES. PHYSICS.

4. There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

- Walt Whitman

He talked at length about receiving impressions from the world around us, impacts upon our senses, then our minds selectively filtering them, yielding useful information. She was skeptical. Maybe some objects dictate to us, never let us go.

3. Paris

I remember being rejected, walking those streets. It was a giant joke. There were so many people with real problems. What right did I have to feel bad in a rich, glamorous city?

2. Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt

The experience of nothingness.

1. You are, therefore I am

At first, a corny statement about love – adoring or being adored. At first.

On the Dallas Museum of Art’s “Alexandre Hogue: The Erosion Series”

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To say Hogue was concerned with the Dust Bowl would be like saying Einstein was pretty smart – a gross, gross understatement. The curators note that the Dust Bowl wasn’t just a natural disaster. It was exacerbated to terrible heights by practices that didn’t make much sense except for making a quick buck. Long-term benefits and treating the land well were very distant considerations. The scale of devastation was something else to behold. Floods of sand that overwhelmed rail lines and buildings; swirls of dirt that blotted out the sun.

Hogue created iconic images to make these points. In Grim Reaper, the lines in the wood echo the torn landscape and turbulent ash that is the sky. The haunted face blows away, and the import is all too clear. We are the Grim Reaper unto nature and ourselves. Written into our very actions are the results.

Sometimes there’s a bit more subtlety on the artist’s part. Red Earth Canyon takes a bit of time to absorb, but one can’t help but eventually be disgusted by it. The colors make the landscape look fleshy and diseased. The human construction resembles a pox, a thoroughly unnatural condition.

Hogue overwhelms with lines. There are always repeating patterns of them, and it isn’t just a stylistic feature of the works in “The Erosion Series.” Rather, the immensity, scope, and awfulness of the disaster conveys itself to us in patterns. If we face a grave danger, we may see some kind of dark beauty, a semblance of order. There’s a reason why we can be deer in headlights, as we fixate on something.

Another thought I had about Alexandre Hogue while at the exhibit was the following. Ad after ad on television has candidate X proclaiming how much he fought Obama, followed by candidate Y saying how candidate X can’t be trusted since Y fought Obama more. There are Texas liberals, real ones, from generations ago. And if Hogue is any indication, they can be very thoughtful and talented. This state has some aspect of “blue” in it that’s of tougher stock than the cheap and thoughtless “red” I see at times nowadays.

On Museum Jokes

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Andy Warhol’s famous “Brillo” box, made out of exquisitely crafted prints, makes the essential point. Credit to Paul Drozdowski (btw, happy birthday!) for talking me through it. Here’s an everyday piece of design that we all take for granted. But add a famous artist’s name and technique to it, and it’s in a museum.

The DMA is featuring a bunch of works that are “museum jokes.” I saw a bunch of them in one of the current exhibitions, Form/Unformed: Design from 1960 to the Present. Shiro Kuramata’s “Miss Blanche” armchair, inspired by a corsage of Vivien Leigh’s and presented to a woman named Rose, makes me think of being shot in a mob movie, falling back and spilling roses everywhere.

I laughed out loud and said “well played” at what might be a Robert Venturi Chippendale chair. I didn’t think anyone was paying attention, but someone asked me why I was laughing. I explained what I thought was the joke, that Chippendale chairs depend on slender proportions for their beauty. Here, the width of the chair distorts that beauty, and the result is that you get a chair that is probably way more stable (for bigger rears?) but looks like a cello has been splayed apart. I suspect the woman and her mother who listened to me walked away with the impression that I was some kind of Neanderthal incapable of serious critique. I did point at another work entitled “Chair” and said it was a file cabinet that had a hatchet taken to it, that the artist was like “woah man, I can rip the lid off a file cabinet and get a chair out of it.”

Honestly, I do like museum jokes. I don’t think they’re a waste of time. You can’t just go from Monet to Rembrandt to Michelangelo and do “higher” art all the time, for this reason: what we consider ridiculous now is what another age might find the most serious part of our culture. What ends up in a museum is in large part a matter of chance, a matter of arbitrariness. It isn’t wholly that, of course, but the reminder that we’re in a dialogue about art over which we don’t need to seriously obsess is very helpful. Sometimes, we don’t need to analyze as much as respond. And maybe we should be more attentive to work outside a museum. – Well, that’s if we’re actually there for the art. -

Gerald Murphy, “Razor”

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Gerald Murphy, “Razor”

Was at the Dallas Museum of Art and this leaped out at me. As S.S. Fair notes in the review above, it features “a vividly rendered matchbox, Parker fountain pen, and Gillette safety razor.” They look “fresh and modern,” and yeah, in this age it looks like an “elegy to everyday tools beautifully rendered but quaint in today’s plastic, junk-tastic universe.”

I got a bit something different out of it. The theme is safety. In addition to “safety” matches and the safety razor, the background is composed of box and file-like shapes, boxes and files protecting and compartmentalizing their contents. The lid of the matches and the crossed razor and pen below resemble some kind of coat of arms. This is our flag, our declaration – oh wait, one of these things doesn’t belong. The fountain pen doesn’t really claim to be safe, especially when one considers what constitutes real writing. The “safe” world is that of design and marketing. The pen reminds of what truly lasts.

“Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal”

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Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

It wasn’t even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.

- Hazel, in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars

Well, Hazel’s got me thinking.

As I’m reading, I’m trying to be attentive to craft. It goes without saying Green is extremely skilled. His sentences have punch, giving nearly all his characters their say, memorably. If they don’t really have their say, like Hazel’s mother, their condition can be felt. In her case, the pains are seen by any except the most oblivious reader. His details focus on how the characters act in the world; there are few objects in Green’s telling that can be separated from an action or outlook. All of this sounds like anything any competent writer would do, but I encourage you to think of how many times you’ve run into details that did everything but advance story, or dialogue that said nothing worthwhile. There’s more, as none of this would matter if Green couldn’t give his characters voices that stand out but are still conventional enough. Hazel is a sarcastic, too-smart-for-her-own-good teen that walks into ironies. She falls in love in 10 seconds with a guy who has cheesy one liners and too much bravado. We know these types well. (I know them far too well as I’m around campus quite a bit.) The types are recognizable but distinct, and I’m becoming much more aware of how tough this is to pull off. In telling a more realistic story, one without Batman and ninjas, one has to make regular people anything but and still convincing. It is a ridiculous set of demands. It really helps that at some point, there’s a story to tell and get through.

So much for my impression of craft. I wonder if I’ll look back at that paragraph of mine a week from now and conclude I said nothing. Regarding Hazel’s extremely personal relation to An Imperial Affliction, I can’t think of the last book I read which had anything like that effect. Probably Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, which I refused to reread or examine closely after I went through it once. I sorta wanted to talk about it, but not really, and not because I saw myself in any of the characters. It was tough reading when Demosthenes, Nicias, Athenians, and allies – 40,000 strong, I think – were completely destroyed fighting over Syracuse. Not because they deserved to win, but because all the delusional thinking, all the efforts made, all the problems that were the slightest degree away from being strengths didn’t just remind how tough losing is. When you’re pouring everything into something, a win is the very least you’re asking for. I suspect, at the least, I’ve said something about Hazel’s character, maybe about what it means to have to make a book your own.

Hendrick ter Brugghen, “The Adoration of the Magi” (1619)

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Hendrick ter Brugghen, "The Adoration of the Magi" (1619)

Hendrick ter Brugghen, “The Adoration of the Magi” (1619)

If you would like to see this in more detail, this link is very helpful.

The people in the painting gaze in three different ways: looking down, looking away, looking toward. Our attention is focused, like Joseph’s, on the Magi and their age. His eyes are toward, the only person really engaging the persons of the Magi. He, like us, has something in common with them. The white folds of their garments and turbans remind one of sagging flesh. They wear their age, like Joseph. They have come to see new life. The old one kneeling intently stares at the child, trying desperately to understand what he has journeyed for.

Christ does not look back at him, but his wrinkly flesh mirrors their concern. Ter Brugghen understands why Christ in icons was depicted a homunculus – he is the Son of Man, fully Man. He readies himself for the sacrifice in accepting the gifts. The wonder of the Magi is not satisfied; no one wants to see new life end or begin in tragedy.

Still, the bright colors and sunlight of this painting do not exist for irony’s sake. This is a majestic painting, and Christ is not the only one who understands us. Mary beams and focuses on her child. In loving Him, she sees humanity. I wonder if the silver and gold of the canisters is meant to contrast with her. She stands out, perhaps to show that God’s love for man can become man’s love for each other.

Hendrick ter Brugghen, “The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John” (1624-5)

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Hendrick ter Brugghen, "The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John" (1624-5)

Hendrick ter Brugghen, “The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John” (1624-5)


Please do read what the Met has to say about this painting: this might have been done for a “hidden” Catholic church in an overwhelmingly Protestant city. There is a marked emphasis on suffering, but I think it is leading to a more expansive theme.

For me, the painting divides into two. There’s the symbolism at the foot of the cross. Skull, bones, broken wood and a sapling. There’s the matter of Christ’s flowing blood, His being the lamb. All of that leads to this question: how exactly does a triumph over death lead to new life? It’s a juxtaposition that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The symbolism contrasts with the three figures above it. Mary is stunned at what has been done to her son. Her gaze seems to be on his body, his wounds. Her complexion is the same deathly color as his skin. She steps toward him, in a pose both pleading and ready to embrace. The Mother of God is not some ethereal, spiritual entity divorced from the world. To love the Creator is to love life, to be horrified at the evil men do against life, not just against some abstract concept of God.

Mary’s grief is not quite St. John’s. He’s stunned, too, and his feet are in exactly the same position as Mary’s, yet they are part of a radically different pose. He’s focused on Christ’s head, maybe the quiet glow coming from it. Looking upward, his hands are not in a prayerful position. He’s contemplating the sort of man the Son of Man was, even without seeing his face.

Mary’s and John’s are two aspects of loss, united in the figure of Christ. Christ’s body is pale and looks withered in a way. His blood is still pouring. The symbols at the foot of the cross don’t lead to the question the portraits do: What does it mean to triumph over death? It means you become death, you become the point of judgment. All of humanity is judged by the inhumanity of what occurred. Christ and Mary are divine in their pallor.

The only hint there is something good for us sinners in this moment of overwhelming tragedy is John seeing the glow. The beaten, worn body of Christ did suffer and now wears that suffering. New life was always within Creation. The question always was when we would see it.

Addendum: I should say something more, as I’m surrounded by people who think lashing themselves gets grace and others who think cursing gets people sent to hell. What’s amazing about this painting is how seriously it takes the human, how seriously it takes our suffering in this life. It acknowledges that life is hard: people lose their children every day. It does not do what we do, which is watch the news and then say outright that people could have done something to not lose their children. It does not promise resurrection or mana from heaven as solving all our problems if we follow a bunch of rules. It simply looks at a moment of utter horror and wonders how anything could be redeemed by it. It does not hint at an afterlife or anything in that afterlife. Now that I say that, I do wonder if other ages understood morality better than us. Probably, this much is true: ter Brugghen is a genius, and I’m privileged to view his art.

Trying “Medium” and Failing Hard

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You’re probably aware that one of the guys who brought you twitter has now brought forth “Medium.” It’s a blogging service dedicated to quality, longform reads and other things that readers/media junkies like, such as photojournalism and editorial cartoons.

It should be paradise for me. I love the large, gorgeous font you compose posts with; the headings, subheadings, and subtitles make everything look like its from the New Yorker or Atlantic or something. The notes feature is great for commenting as you read. You don’t even have to read the whole piece to engage the author thoughtfully. For a while, Medium paid professional writers to get their community started at a certain quality. The lure of having someone educated, media savvy, and appreciative critique and read your work is not a small one.

So here’s my first piece for Medium: Blogging Emily Dickinson. Those of you who’ve been with this blog for a while know this may sound like a list of posts with an abrupt, weird tangent at the end if read too quickly. You also know that it is the culmination of 8 years of wrestling with Dickinson and wondering why her thought matters. It’s a lot of experiences, thoughts, and fumbling turned into a compact read so that way someone can get a glimpse of something genuinely different. Of course, the only person who has recommended this piece on Medium is me.

It’s not a “Top 5 ways to destress” listicle or “The Secret to Viral Content” marketing spam, you know, the junk that cluttered blogging at its inception and is cluttering Medium. It isn’t something that has immediate value in the sense of value defined by people who have absolutely no imagination.

Yeah, I’m pissed. I’ve been blogging a long time, and more importantly, I’ve watched new media blossom. You can talk to anyone who wrote a piece you like on Twitter; you can see how events are covered in a way that wasn’t possible before. The openness coincides with a remarkable breadth of coverage. The nytimes is running a philosophy blog, as you all know; video game journalism is some of the most serious and thoughtful writing on the web. And sports journalism has a new life and large objects. Deadspin’s appeal, to take one example, is that it is a tabloid. Its real significance is that it might actually precipitate a cultural change that ends the NCAA.

To put it bluntly, we live in a golden age of journalism, and because we do, my voice counts less. The criticism where one carefully examines the nuts and bolts of reading, of the assumptions one brings to the text, doesn’t count for anything. What matters is telling a story where problems are complicated at most because people have differing interests and won’t/shouldn’t back down. Ours is a purposely unreflective media. We can get the details and the biases logged. To try and make sense of it all, that’s for pundits, all of whom have convenient and profitable ideologies.

That lack of reflection is like a snowball going downhill when we consider the consequences. It’s just taken for granted that you should write and put on the air stories that get eyeballs, no matter what consequence they are. The crass materialism underlying nearly everything we do in society – whether we’re talking about fine artists using “art” to promote a brand, education being more about unions and corporations than creating independent thinkers, people even thinking that God is a way to get stuff – is almost completely unchallenged. Again, we’ve got better writing, better coverage, smooth speech and terrific technical capabilities. And we’re incapable of taking a few sentences by someone and really thinking about what they could mean, really trying to appreciate another opinion in its fullness. I’m not perfect, not by a long shot. But I try to know my faults.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “An Apodyterium” (1886)

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema, "An Apodyterium"

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “An Apodyterium” (1886)

We are in public bath, where the woman on the right searching us is supposed to undress in order to bathe. The heart of this painting is her portrait; the ambiguity of her expression is a narrative unto itself.

Much builds to that portrait. The painting divides into quarters. The lower left quarter, which descends, is bordered such that it leads the eye to the upper left. There we see a fusion of exteriority and interiority. A servant and another look to be walking out; some parents are dealing with children near the colonnade? Light and dark are stark, right at the entrances. Clean classical marble and flowing robes attempt to keep sexuality – the obvious – hidden.

The nude woman at the lower right is out of sight of anyone else. She pays us no mind, her clothes will end up in the crevices at the upper right. She is not bashful at all. Perhaps we are not bashful either, and this has taken the young woman looking at us aback. She’s aware of shame – she’s a lot more reluctant to get in the baths than the woman next to her – but this painting isn’t really about her being modest and lovely or some crap like that. Of course she has a demure beauty.

The painting is more about the weirdness of beauty and its concealment. The interiority/exteriority of the upper left suggests we should be thinking about her inner beauty and the soft gaze, but again, that’s just part of the puzzle. The structure of the work and the structure of the building mirror the structure of her robes. The light and dark in arrangement conceal. But that’s the funniest thing of all: how is it possible to conceal when light and dark themselves suggest an inside and an outside? When light and dark actually involve going inside and outside? To truly conceal, something has to be a near-impossible thought, not fully naked right next to you.

The very means of concealing only lead to the object of desire. It’s like we train ourselves to avert our gaze so that way the everyday becomes that more appealing. Modesty is only part of beauty itself. I’m not saying this painting is a subversive excuse for lust. Something stranger is going on; we’re not exactly repulsed by shame or modesty. Nor does it look like this painting is a strictly moral exercise, locating “virtue” in reluctance to get in a bath. It’s something more like this: beauty is the concealment itself, as it is beauty alone which makes us ask who is truly beautiful. If there is a subversion, it has to do with the subordinate position of morality, but that is almost a technical point in this context.