we were just pretending
~ Miranda July
In 1916, painter John Sloan, dadaist Marcel Duchamp and three of their friends broke into the interior staircase of the arch. They climbed to the top, cooked food, lit Japanese lanterns, fired cap pistols, launched balloons and declared it the independent republic of New Bohemia.
That sounds like the most fun ever.
American cartoonist and author Lynda Barry (born January 2, 1956) is as much a storyteller as she is a visual philosopher. From her 1999 graphic-novel-turned-off-Broadway-hit The Good Times Are Killing Me, exploring the interracial relationship between two girls, to her long-running, deeply empathic weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Barry’s instantly recognizable works are invariably imbued with equal parts humor, irreverence, sensitivity, and wisdom.
In 2009, her graphic novel What Is, published the previous year, received an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. But perhaps the most remarkable quality of Barry’s work is precisely its defiance of reality — the whimsy and wit with which she blurs the line between the real and, to borrow Sartre’s term, the irreal to peel away at some simple truth or grand complexity of what it means to be human.
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“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) observed in her timeless meditation on the value of keeping a notebook. For the past half-century, the beloved author has been keeping American society on nodding terms with itself, despite the themes of cultural collapse and moral chaos that permeate Didion’s novels and her literary nonfiction.
A champion of the New Journalism movement, Didion has brought her exquisite amalgamation of narrative storytelling and nonfiction to such diverse subjects as mourning, museums, music, second-wave feminism, and the American political process. She lists Hemingway and Henry James among her handful of influences, but women writers like the Brontë sisters and George Eliot she sees as “models for a life, not for a style.”
Despite devastating personal tragedy — the sudden loss of her husband of nearly forty years, followed closely by the death of her daughter — Didion has continued to find in writing, above all, access to her own mind, in turn inviting the reader to access greater truths about what it means to be human in modern culture, implicitly asking, as she often does in her nonfiction, “Do you get the point?”
Learn more: The Paris Review | Brain Pickings | Wikipedia
(via torple)
THE Earth Room is a big roomful of dirt. Dirt as in dirt farming. Good dirt, as black as the Mississippi Delta. It looks like a rich plowed field that has somehow flung itself onto the second floor of an industrial building in SoHo.
About two feet deep, this earth covers 3,600 square feet, and it’s a work of art by Walter De Maria. The little brass plaque on the door downstairs reads, “The New York Earth Room, Dia Center for the Arts.” Just ring the bell and walk up.
HeadScapes (by RRR PPP MMM)
