I know I’m like music lightyears behind on this, but I just started listening to a leaked copy The National’s new album “Trouble Will Find Me,” and I have a feeling it’s going to be “Boxer” good. I’m prickling with goosebumps.
Violet is one of Franke’s only friends (and Violet is terrified of her).
(Source: backofhouse)
In the loving calm of your arms
One of the most difficult things about being really busy is adjusting to the lull of when you’re not so busy afterwards. For me, this is especially challenging when the lull comes in the middle of the week, while everyone else is working, and I’m just sitting in my apartment in my three-day old workout clothes, catching up on “Game of Thrones” and eating Half Baked ice cream at 1pm in the afternoon. That’s like what people normally do on Saturdays. If they’re fat. And lazy.
Yesterday, in an attempt to ward off the inevitable depression that usually accompanies guilt, I decided to do some challenging reading in my free afternoon. So I picked up Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse,” and tried to begin it. “A Lover’s Discourse” is the book that Madeleine, the main female character in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel “The Marriage Plot,” reads to get over her brilliant bipolar lover, Leonard. She met Leonard in a semiotics class at Brown University, the school I attended in real life.
May 16, 2013
Talitha Getty
John Paul Getty
Barthes
A lover's discourse
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
My life
At BKLYN Designs last week, Caleb and I shared a little corner of the St. Ann’s Warehouse with an older couple who have been living and working together for many, many years. Their names are Tim and Andrea — I thought, at first, that they must be in their 60s, but Tim told me that their son is 50, which means that unless they were children when they had him, they must be at least in their mid-70s. They do tromp l’oeil in rich people’s homes to make a living — on the side, they make gorgeous gilded art deco coffee tables in a tiny studio in Dumbo. Their son is a career bike messenger, still working in the city.
For the past 22 years, they’ve lived in my dream building — the lofty old school house on the corner of Vanderbilt and Sterling in Prospect Heights. When I first moved to the neighborhood in 2005, I swear I walked by that building every day, and said out loud, “I would give anything to live there.”
Today, it’s too expensive for all of us. But Tim & Andrea bought their 2-bedroom for a song in the early 1990s — when they sold it earlier this month, they made an 800% profit. They’re moving because the neighborhood has changed too rapidly. “They planted trees in the middle of Vanderbilt Avenue!” Tim exclaimed of the main street in Prospect Heights, which is bursting with new restaurants and artisanal food stores. Until a few years ago, all there were was barber shops, liquor stores and one tiny restaurant. In the summer, there were stoop parties. In the winter, desolation.
They’re also moving because it will give them a nice little nest egg for when the work runs dry, as it always does when you’re an artist, and you’re making a living from it. They bought a studio apartment in a doorman building — “A doorman building, can you imagine?” — in Brooklyn Heights. They’ll give away most of their belongings — “We’re tired of them anyway,” Andrea said — even though she admits that she’ll have trouble getting rid of her jackets and shoes. “My shoes!” she proclaimed. “I put so much working into taking care of them!”
The one thing they’ll keep is their full bed, which they’ve been sleeping in for many years. “When we travel, and the bed is a queen, I don’t like it, because I can’t find her in it,” Tim says. They still sleep close together. Tim has a big handlebar moustache. He gently squeezes your arm when you pass him. Andrea is tiny and dresses all in black. She has a white bob, and a face that, although she says she hasn’t gotten any treatments, looks as though it’s been lifted and tucked a few times. “Every night, I put cream on it,” she told me. When my sister, who works for a plastic surgeon, came to visit the booth, Andrea asked her for her card for the future.
They drank their daily allotment of free Modelos out of plastic cocktail cups. Throughout the weekend, people came to visit them. A man with tattoos and dreadlocks who does the metal work on the bases of their tables. An Icelandic woman who lives in the apartment next door to them. “They collect rare music, that’s their career,” Andrea told me. “When you walk in their apartment, there’s no furniture, just shelves and shelves and shelves of records.”
I see them, and sometimes I see myself and Caleb, although not this morning, after he gave me some lip when I asked him to take out the recycling. I knocked his bike over on purpose on my way out the door to walk Franke. I have a bad temper. Caleb likes to be the boss.
“Go get a room,” Tim and Andrea joked whenever I would lean against Caleb, and turn my face towards him for a kiss.
I asked them if I could interview them. But interviewing people is what I do for a living, and it can be a fucking pain in the ass to transcribe, and sift, and edit, and reorganize the way that people tell their own stories so that it fits some idea of what you think is interesting. So instead, I think that I’ll write a story about how Tim and Andrea met, entirely made up. It will probably really be a story about me.
“One of them, toothless, clad in a dirty tracksuit and a wool beanie, with a nebulous tattoo of a heart (which he gave himself when he was nineteen and in love with a cousin) partly covered over by a lion (which he gave himself six years later, when her father forbade her to marry him), told me one day, ‘When we were younger, we used to come here to swim and fish.’ And then, ‘Once, I was trying to pull a body from the river. The current was strong, I grabbed the body by its hand, and the arm came off.’”
I read “The River Martyrs,” an article by Luke Mogelson in The New Yorker, about the men who drag the bodies of people — men, women and children — out of the river in Aleppo after they’ve been killed by government forces. (I know, I’m weeks behind.)
I haven’t been paying much attention to the war — it seems so far away, and so unreal — which is why I think it’s important to read the piece. It brings the atrocities in Syria to life — I don’t know if we can, or should, do anything, but it certainly is more important than reading about failures in Benghazi, or whatever other nonsense is in the news this week.
Cannes Fashion: Nicole Kidman
I’m adoring everything about Nicole Kidman’s outfits so far at Cannes. She looks as gorgeous as Grace Kelly.
From her faux-hawk…
Speaking of reviews, this piece on Dan Brown’s new novel by Michael Deacon in The Telegraph might be one of the cleverest, funniest things I’ve ever read.
I feel sort of badly about the review I wrote in ArtReview of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors at Luhring Augustine, not least of all because everyone else I know completely loved it. I didn’t necessarily love it.
The problem with The Visitors is that it offers the same sort of pleasure as, say, daydreaming what life would be like if it were lived in a spread from Dwell. The work is aspirational rather than meaningful: you wish you were sitting on the columned patio of the house, listening to the music rise from within, but you don’t walk away suddenly believing in God (as I did, for example, after sitting in the midst of Janet Cardiff ’s Forty Part Motet, 2001, at MoMA PS1). Or maybe you do, if your God looks like one of the guys from Bon Iver.
I love writing reviews though, I think it might be one of my passions. In any case, you can read the full piece here, along with a review by DEH.
And for those of you who don’t know, Kjartansson is the artist and musician who had The National play “Sorrow” for 6 hours last weekend at MoMA PS1. (Last weekend? Maybe the weekend before last.)
And Rokeby Farm is the crumbling 43-room mansion where the Astors used to live. The New York Times recently wrote a piece about it that’s definitely worth reading — the photographs alone are ripe for fantasy.
I really enjoyed the Rain Room at the MoMA, which is an installation in which you walk into a room of pouring water, which detects your body, and stops falling around you as you walk through it.
“The effect is magical. You reach out your hand quickly, and the water withdraws. You try to fool the installation by making random movements, but it stays one step ahead of you. In the room’s humidity—the atmosphere is as balmy as a zoo’s reptile house—one begins to want to touch the water.”
Go if you have a chance to get up there and see it! And if not, read my little piece on it in Art in America.
Read the city focus feature in ArtReview that DEH, JTDN and I wrote on the current state of the New York art world. With pictures by the fantastically talented Frances Denny.
My favorite part of the whole thing? The way the piece opens with a long reference to House of Cards by JTDN, who is the New York editor of the publication. This is why I love ArtReview so fanatically.
(Painting above by Rosy Keyser.)
The Great Gatsby: A Review
I feel profoundly sad after watching The Great Gatsby; both because the story itself is so sad, and because the movie is such an epic failure. It’s not a bad movie, per se — it’s just not nearly good enough. I continue to be shocked by how high the film industry reaches, and how weak its grasp is — films see where they can go, but they’re just too lazy to get there.
I’m not going to write anything about the book in comparison to the movie because I don’t remember it that well. I remember reading it when I was in middle school, and not understanding it, and then reading it again during the epic, unnecessary, two-week long reading period between the end of classes and finals during my sophomore year of college. I also read “Tender Is the Night,” because I liked the title so much. I read them, and I cried that my boyfriend at the time would ever love me enough to either build me a mansion in Long Island, or stay by my side during a sojourn in a sanatorium in Europe.
