City of texture

     Like? When it's itself,

     it's not like anything.

     This means, good inten-

     tion might not prevail.

     It's built to be unmade

     and made again, and all

     the world plays a part.

There are two struggles being waged these days in one place, the Museum of Modern Art. The design community is split along lines not merely of judgment but of 'team spirit,' a recurring risk in any city. Complaints abound with its leadership, a recurring risk wherever there is an institution. But nothing about New York belongs only to New York; the texture of that city extrudes, you could say, the keenest prayers of all. We implore it to be good as well as great. One building's indignity dooms its neighbor to yield; while across town, a lovely park is uplifted as if by a phoenix.

Cathedral Photo Valéry Lorenzo©

Jasper Johns, 1961, Coll MoMA

Saturday commute ci: GPS got me lost

  I dreamed, I used 
  a landline to get 
  back.










In the mode of the show-and-tell
blog, we exploit today's entry to 
report on recent travels. It has
been so imponderably cold in our
part of the world lately that we
have come to suspect a fault in
GPS, itself, with landlines sud-
denly surpassing Hermès device
sleeves in cachet. But who's to
doubt the diligence of the Fau-
bourg St Honoré, to whip up a
dreamy connective cord in calf?

Suppose it were Friday xci: Surely, we have plug-ins

  

   Busy hands are max-

   imised, but we have

   plug-ins to satisfy

   almost any consumer.

Lately in The NY Times, Mr Charles Blow,
a columnist of high conscience and clear
vision, presented a considerably moving
testament on the virtues of print media,
an axe which it might be hypocritical to
grind here, but fewer than 1 percent of
this page's citations are not drawn from
print. I felt, however, that his argument
in favour of a magic in books is altogeth-
er too applicable to alternative devices,
even though here I probably betray a mal-
adaptation to these toys. I think what is
missing in his exuberant perspective is a
quality inherent in the presence of the
volume in one's world after the first ex-
perience. A relationship is not debris. 
The society of books is irreplaceable.

   

Swagger stick

    Somebody always

    has a new idea.

  It's rather wonderful

  that we believe that.

Bad moment to glimpse the stats

Misericordia!

  All of Iberia,

  ingenuous pen-

  insula of sub-
  Pyrenean sway,

  rinsed off the

  google map for

  me, overnight.

  Back to Lisboa,

  no passing Goa.

A set, restored to print

In the back pages of rmbl there is

to be found an outcry on the adop-

tion of imagery of this conduct to

portray anything but self-destruc-

tion. It happens to suit a discus-

sion of David Leavitt's latest ef-

fort, The Two Hotel Francforts, an
impressively popular rumination on
survival.

The book comes to us with blurbs

immunising it almost against com-

prehension, much less any further

admiration. This is too bad. It's

worth reading, even if one cannot

qualify as such an innocent as to

share Edmund White's sense of be-

ing manipulated by a "master." It

is a totally serviceable portrait

of a set whose play with sex and

money is intimidated, and thereby

wasted, by indulgent privilege. I 
study the paradox, not quite as a
first impression.

Such is the patrimony of our con-

ception of homosexuality, that a

Hispano-Suiza is, like the Kelly

bag, or an indenture at Groton, 

simply neutered whenever it may

make its entrance. It does no

good to mourn the faux libera-

tionism in a tale of morbid mat- 

uring millionaires*, mouthing mi-

metic medial parts, when, after

all, there is much to mesmerise

in the allusions they can mus-

ter, to literature, painting or

sculpture which remain tragical-

ly alien to the common mind. And

such an enviable part, on these

occasions, too.

The common mind suspends its
natural truancy from works on
pompous parlour games, if sex
might be conjugated en route.
Intellectual tasting of life
will not supersede muscular
activity, Mr Emerson warned,
anatomising our experience. 
Drawing from Chaucer, Leavitt
goes so far as to ask its help. 
This is not the least of what

one can extract from this os-

tensibly superficial text, be-

cause it is not to be put past

this writer to be discomfiting
the settled, even as he might

hoist a living from the pruri-
ent, fashionbound, and dazed.

He has an attack to mount on

treachery to privilege, and, 

aw, shucks. Hear him out. It
isn't every day, our enter-
tainments dare go near the
water. He serves, who also 
shills.

  You know, you're wrong to       think I'm smart, [Edward         Freleng] said. The truth is,     I'm just a junk heap. All       these allusions and             references, these little         associations I draw - they're   junk. And all I do all day is   sift through them, line them     up, move them around. 

David Leavitt

The Two Hotel Francforts

  A Novel

Bloomsbury, 2013©

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series
  Experience
1844
David Mikics, editor
The Annotated Emerson
op. cit.

* the dollar in 1940

Boys will be, &c

I haven't any idea if
I'd care to drive the
thing.

But I'll toboggan down
its bonnet, right now,
if you'll let me.

Recommended: "Little Augury" on winter light

   It is not unusual for

   writers on the history

   of sensibilities to in-

   voke Marcel Proust, but

   it is not only rare, it

   is merciful, not to say

   elegant, to sample his

   taste by degrees. This,

   one would expect at LA.

Abbado

People follow musicians the way we follow wine estates, for the rapport of their terroir with the varietal - the composer - and sometimes under the influences of the vintage - the epoch, whether in society at large or in critical opinion. I hope I have made it plain - I’ve probably been remiss in this - that it would be a matter of serene indifference to me, what the season had been like, if certain wine estates had declared a vintage, and presented themselves to the candid assessments of our world.

When I was even more undeveloped than at present, a scrawny student of law in New Haven, Connecticut - which is to say, a passionate partisan of rustic walks in the neighborhood of Litchfield - there was a great vogue in Gustav Mahler. Sir Georg Solti had literally lifted the lid from that cauldron, and there were many who had rushed in, but this uproar had only chilled me off, as all vogues do. But I had read very widely in the Mahler literature, I had felt drawn equally to his austerity and his bombast, his humour and his passion. We had his shadows, Shostakovich and Britten, to reinforce this impression.

So I sent out for the 7th, with the Chicago Orchestra but with Abbado conducting. I have to say, that some years later I heard these same Chicagoans in San Francisco, but with Solti, in Sir John Barbirolli’s signature symphony of Mahler’s, the 5th. I believed then as I do now, that music can not be more magnificently played. But it was Claudio Abbado’s recording of the 7th, which had not been the first I had heard, that already had made of me an unreluctant listener to what someone unlike me is saying. How, by the way, do you do that?

Later, in my small experience, there were two corroborative epiphanies. The world had said, we now have Simon Boccanegra, with his recording from La Scala. Oh, please. We had Verdi. 

Still, as I wrote to a couple of youngsters of longstanding regard today, there came a time when the symphonies of the greatest lyric imagination of the 19th Century were recorded in bulk, yet again, but under Claudio Abbado with a difference which no one disputes. The 1st Symphony of Franz Schubert, in his way of seeing it, cast a light upon my world which will not go out. In music, too, the most radiant charisma is modesty. In time, as in the case of the very least flappable of our wine estates, this will be extremely plain.