“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

(Via Wesley Hill.)

Gerald Murphy (American, 1888–1964). Razor, 1924. Oil on canvas, 32 1/16 x 36 1/2 in.

With its almost “pre-Pop” billboard-style oversizing and graphic boldness, Gerald Murphy’s Razor suggests the heraldic crest of a modern American man, whose necessary tools are a Gillette safety razor, a Parker Big Red pen, and Three Stars matches. As the son of the head of the Mark Cross company, known for fine leather goods, Murphy was attuned to product design, as well as to style and status. After taking up painting in Paris in 1921, he borrowed from the new, reductive decorative aesthetic of Purism to celebrate American machine-age design for an enthusiastic postwar French audience. The painting also resonates in the context of Murphy’s obsessive self-fashioning as ultramodern and unconventional—an expression, in part, of his own bisexuality.

Part of Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, now playing at the Brooklyn Museum.

We went into Sean’s bedroom – and there was a kid there setting up an Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.

(Via.)

Actually, as http://www.goodfellaspainting.com/ (perhaps my favorite single-serving site ever) points out, it’s a painting by  Nicholas Pileggi’s mom based on a photograph from the November 1978 issue of National Geographic.

I am, of course, not the first person to point this out, but this strikes me as one of those things that’s so utterly delightful it can’t be pointed out too many times.

Tommy’s (Joe Pesci’s) analysis of the painting is particularly delicious:

“One dog goes one way and the other dog goes the other way. And this guy’s saying, ‘Whaddya want from me?’”

Indeed.

From Olly Moss’s clever and charming “Paper Cuts” series.

Previously: Olly Moss’s Movie Poster Remakes.

Tom Waits in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

From Elizabeth Gilbert’s June 2002 GQ profile of Tom Waits:

“‘Children make up the best songs, anyway,’ he says. ‘Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.’ This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song ‘really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.’ ‘Some songs,’ he has learned, ‘don’t want to be recorded.’ You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes ‘is trying to trap birds.’ Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like ‘digging potatoes out of the ground.’ Others are sticky and weird, like ‘gum found under an old table.’ Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful ‘to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.’ Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you ‘like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.”

(Article via Austin Kleon.)

Further listening: Radiolab’s “Help!”

Required reading.

—Andy Warhol, From A to B & Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

—Melvin Sokolsky, Wraparound Magazine 1.4 (2004): 16.

—Diana Vreeland

—Richard Schickel

(Via Michael Leddy.)

(Via.)

(Via.)

Kenyon Cox, COLUMBIA & CUBA - MAGAZINE COVER - NUDE STUDY (1898)

In Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, Reynolds J. Scott-Childress has this to say about the above image:

Besides connoting the stronger/weaker sister relationship, the drawing plays on an older/younger sister or mother/daughter relationship. It suggests a scenario in which the older sister/mother (Columbia) has just finished disciplining the younger siter/daughter (Cuba) and is standing proudly while Cuba clings contritely to Columbia who wields a big stick, paddle, or bat…. [I]mages like this one need no support from male representatives of American power because such militantly masculinized images incorporate them already. However, Columbia’s muscular, mannish are leading down to the hand which grips the phallic stick may also be interpreted as leading back to these male representatives. The club is a clear reminder of the long arm of Uncle Sam and the “big-stick policy” articulated by Theodore Roosevelt. Both the Columbia and Cuba of Cox’s study gaze out at the viewer. One might imagine that this veiwer coule be a “New Woman” herself, a suffragette for whom such an image of female power, however imperialistic, might still have had emancipatory appeal. Nonetheless, the point to which the figure’s look is directed might just as easily be Uncle Sam’s controlling gaze. Columbia’s posture is remindful of that of a soldier standing at attention before this gaze which in the cartoon is not embodied by a corresponding cartoon character, but rather transparently conscripts the viewer.

This passage, though not without insight, in some ways exemplifies everything that is wrong with a lot of art criticism nowadays. As Susan Sontag explains, “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” In other words, I seriously doubt most people’s first reaction to the above image is, “Of course, it’s about American imperialism. How obvious!” To quote Sontag again: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

Winslow Homer, Incoming Tide, Scarboro Maine, 1883, watercolor on paper.

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea—“cruising,” it is called.

Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it,” some men say. What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security.” And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine, and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in, and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all in the material sense, and we know it.

But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by, the dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

—Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

Lovely, just lovely. More here and here.

Paul Cézanne, The Card Players

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.

—Malcolm Gladwell