“It’s funny to have a priest with a high salary. An artist with a large income is in the same position.”
Ad Reinhardt (interview in Artforum, October 1970)
Archives for 2005
TT: Almanac
“It’s funny to have a priest with a high salary. An artist with a large income is in the same position.”
Ad Reinhardt (interview in Artforum, October 1970)
TT: Number, please
– Raymond Chandler’s fee in 1943 for thirteen weeks of work on the screenplay of Double Indemnity: $9,750
– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $110,517.13
(Source: Chandler: Stories & Early Novels)
TT: Number, please
– Raymond Chandler’s fee in 1943 for thirteen weeks of work on the screenplay of Double Indemnity: $9,750
– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $110,517.13
(Source: Chandler: Stories & Early Novels)
TT: Almanac
At the Museum of Modern Art you can sit in the lobby
on the foam-rubber couch; you can rest and smoke,
and view whatever the revolving doors express.
You don’t have to go into the galleries at all.
In this arena the exhibits are free and have all
the surprises of art–besides something extra:
sensory restlessness, the play of alternation,
expectation in an incessant spray
thrown from heads, hands, the tendons of ankles.
The shifts and strollings of feet
engender compositions on the shining tiles,
and glide together and pose gambits,
gestures of design, that scatter, rearrange,
trickle into lines, and turn clicking through a wicket
into rooms where caged colors blotch the walls.
You don’t have to go to the movie downstairs
to sit on red plush in the snow and fog
of old-fashioned silence. You can see contemporary
Garbos and Chaplins go by right here.
And there’s a mesmeric experimental film
constantly reflected on the flat side of the wide
steel-plate pillar opposite the crenellated window.
Non-objective taxis surging west, on Fifty-third,
liquefy in slippery yellows, dusky crimsons,
pearly mauves–and accelerated sunset, a roiled
surf, or cloud-curls undulating–their tubular ribbons
elongations of the coils of light itself
(engine of color) and motion (motor of form).
May Swenson, “At the Museum of Modern Art”
TT: Almanac
At the Museum of Modern Art you can sit in the lobby
on the foam-rubber couch; you can rest and smoke,
and view whatever the revolving doors express.
You don’t have to go into the galleries at all.
In this arena the exhibits are free and have all
the surprises of art–besides something extra:
sensory restlessness, the play of alternation,
expectation in an incessant spray
thrown from heads, hands, the tendons of ankles.
The shifts and strollings of feet
engender compositions on the shining tiles,
and glide together and pose gambits,
gestures of design, that scatter, rearrange,
trickle into lines, and turn clicking through a wicket
into rooms where caged colors blotch the walls.
You don’t have to go to the movie downstairs
to sit on red plush in the snow and fog
of old-fashioned silence. You can see contemporary
Garbos and Chaplins go by right here.
And there’s a mesmeric experimental film
constantly reflected on the flat side of the wide
steel-plate pillar opposite the crenellated window.
Non-objective taxis surging west, on Fifty-third,
liquefy in slippery yellows, dusky crimsons,
pearly mauves–and accelerated sunset, a roiled
surf, or cloud-curls undulating–their tubular ribbons
elongations of the coils of light itself
(engine of color) and motion (motor of form).
May Swenson, “At the Museum of Modern Art”
TT: Thanks for the memories
Here are two pieces of e-mail I received apropos of my article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal about spending the night in two Frank Lloyd Wright houses:
– “For the past sixteen years, my wife and I (together with our five children) have resided in a 1901 Wright-designed house in Oak Park, Illinois. During this time, we have come to know quite a few Wright homeowners and many other fans of his. While we have known some to ‘suffer in silence’ (and some not so silently) when sitting through a long dinner on reproductions of his famous straight-backed chairs, I have never heard any of the homeowners express anything but praise and joy concerning the pleasure of living in their homes and the magic interplay of space and light that Wright managed to create in them. Many consider our home to be one of the early
TT: Thanks for the memories
Here are two pieces of e-mail I received apropos of my article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal about spending the night in two Frank Lloyd Wright houses:
– “For the past sixteen years, my wife and I (together with our five children) have resided in a 1901 Wright-designed house in Oak Park, Illinois. During this time, we have come to know quite a few Wright homeowners and many other fans of his. While we have known some to ‘suffer in silence’ (and some not so silently) when sitting through a long dinner on reproductions of his famous straight-backed chairs, I have never heard any of the homeowners express anything but praise and joy concerning the pleasure of living in their homes and the magic interplay of space and light that Wright managed to create in them. Many consider our home to be one of the early