24 Hours From Tulsa (The Devil Went On)
I’m going to Tulsa tomorrow. On a private plane. I normally wouldn’t brag about that, but that is pretty fucking baller. Who gets to go to Tulsa on a private plane? Basically no one. Except me. And a few other people. Tomorrow. I feel comfortable basking in the glory of this because it will no doubt be the first and only time in my life I will fly anything but coach.
I’m going for the opening of the Philbrook Museum Downtown, a satellite of the city’s main art institution. I’m writing a piece on it for a publication, so you’ll have to wait to hear more on that until it comes out.
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
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.
A Great Story: Come To BKLYN Designs Tomorrow
I have like 20 minutes of dead time between one project and another, so rather than lying down — I’ll never get up — I thought I’d write a post on this stupid fucking blog. I love writing on this stupid fucking blog.
I’m a little bit superstitious. On Saturday morning, I got one disappointing piece of news — a print piece I had written had been pushed online, a fact that the editor assured me was actually good news because it would “get more readers.” For me, bad news comes in threes. So I searched for the other two disappointing events for the rest of the weekend, and found them, willfully.
There was a point when Caleb and I looked at each other yesterday, and both started hysterically crying. He from the stress of finishing his booth for BKLYN Design by tomorrow; me from the pressure of deadlines.
The good news is that there are lilacs blooming like weeds all over Brooklyn. In the rain today, they bow.
