The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.
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Graffiti
Murals and public art.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
This picture (via The Wooster Collective) of a wheatpasted painting by Yz in Paris, is about the most soothing, beautiful image I can imagine right now:
You can follow Yz's progress at her Facebook page, Vous Êtes Ici.
At The Wooster Collective today I found news of a fantastic street art intervention, Said Dokins' "Avionazo en la plazuela", "Plane crash in the square" -- wheat-pasted paper airplanes flying on the walls of the buildings around Plaza del Aguilita in Mexico City, and a metal and fiberglass sculpture in the center of the plaza. Beautiful! And it reminded me that I should ask: Ellen and I are thinking of taking a trip to Mexico City this summer, I'd love to get suggestions of things to do and see and avoid.
Update -- after looking at the Habitar: no autorizado web site (which is Flash, so I can't link to internal pieces of it; but click on Artistas | Said Dokins), I believe I've misunderstood -- it looks like Dokins is installing this mural in a number of places in the city; maybe Plaza del Aguilita is just a way of referring to somewhere that he has installed it. Do check the site, the photography there is very well done. ...And, yes! The site has a map of where the installations are located.
By way of the Wooster Collective I see that street artist Elbow-Toe has a new painting in Union Square, based on Rembrandt's drawing "Monk in a Cornfield" -- beautiful, I hope it is still there next time I am in the city! The Rembrandt drawing really captured my imagination when I saw it a few years ago at the Pierrepont-Morgan Library.
All they have in common is both being accessed from Crooked Timber this evening. The first is an Argentinian art video by BluBlu* that Kieran Healy posted without comment -- living graffiti!:
And the second is of a band recommended by xboy in comments to this post: Dr. Michael White's New Orleans jazz band plays some sweet sounding traditional jazz. Check out the "Christopher Columbus"** reference in the trombone solo. Right up my alley.
* Be sure to visit their web site if you enjoy this video -- there is lots more great stuff there including more videos of similar installations.
** And hey, I found a recording online of Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band doing "Christopher Columbus" -- the first version I ever heard, from a band close to my heart. It is the first couple of minutes of this podcast from Mike Pell.
The New York Timesreports on a large collection of old silent films, once thought lost, being archived and transferred from nitrate stock to more stable material.
"Reality is a membrane of the banal spread over the inconÂceivable" -- Robyn HitchÂcock talks with Daniel Brockman about living on the edge of apocalypse.
