Archive for December, 2010
ANNUM/HUMILITY/BOOM
In the face of vertiginous green borrowed from the eye of the precious twin (“we’re switching memories” as a matter of fact) in the costly sincere triangulous plaza alive, incommensurate kimidori, shinryoku, pattern wild & alive even in our bodies around this table, this weave of discourse genial and unakin against stultifying digits, discussing the [...]
SANPIETRINI
In faulty translation, still being mulled over years later, “saintpeterstones,” or faultier, cobblestones—containing within themselves the fire of hundreds of thousands of years ago, recalls Simon, hot reflection of Lazian basalt Catholicized in the sixteenth century, porphyrous petrus, absorbent of floods & unkind to motorized vehicles and feminized motility, another victim of the economic crisis, [...]
BUBBLES
And the anxiety of perched consciousness that here we are living in another, of an order of months: watching again the admittedly decent adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, with its big-screen filling in, vulgately opaque, of the contours of James’s every last floating it “swaying a little aloft as one of the objects [...]
WINTER
Even here, where the clarity of drier skies brings with it the general foreshortening and scratching at form so we can locate stricter historical trajectories in the panorama, Hadrianic, Jesuit here, 19th-century bureaucratic there, as restorers sprinkle the march of mustached Garibaldini busts with bleach at dusk, without digression from each once-illustrious story vis-à-vis the [...]
STONE AND WATER
And their continuity in limestone, on display everywhere our neighbor the master stonemason (against obsolescence) points: Bernini’s statuary histrionically drinking from the pool here; around the corner, faux cliffs worn by their falls, or allegorical riverfoot accumulating dripstone. In night specters of the beloved designs for Rome’s next fountain, & woozy thought of the stags [...]
ABLUTION
Water and water and more water, reduplicated in the monumental entryway by a mister Aquaviva announcing his own greatness in letters: but of Cecilia, heretic to be scalded, instead protectress of these eddies & of music surrounding the paleochristian jar for ritual washings, cantharus.
VIGIL, SPECTACLE, PUDDLE
And two species of it competing with—concomitant—conversant with one another this eve.
FOG LIBERTY
Style turning, with weather, into the dissolution of civic personae in place, as in the upcoming Philadelphia City Hall project shown last night at Janet Echelman’s shop talk: monumentality turning into naught but livid hue, and there, designingly, into a possible infrastructural x-ray.
SUN STANDING STILL
And in making up time one’s caving to eruptions of sheer cuteness which also make a day as much: two among twelve.
MOTIVES
On the Scalinata della Matrice, or Staircase of the Mother Church/Staircase of the Mold, the two being inextricable from one another in a town known for its ceramics tradition: the pilgrimage toward an end becoming an end in itself, the via, spectacular, occupied with lit-up nativity personages and designing flowers, the church facade not even [...]
PREECLIPSE
In the square of common value toward the debated feast of light: cop car decked out, nativial.
VAGARIES OF THE BAROQUE
In the yellow of the Reign of One of Two Sicilies, unideological, softening along every straight surface like sugar.
INFANT
Momentousness as infant hue captive in unexpressed digits, waiting to be discharged in the procession of daily remark, patient habit of this gift of time, of noticing presence, here inserted hurriedly in the place of the week’s missing record, wordless, taking on words: “[I]t is as if the acquisition of language were possible only through [...]
ARTIFICOUS
The shell become Ionically architectural, volute and cornice, and mer-boy graffitum stump, honey light standing in for water: Follies of fertility, artifice, drought and neglect within and beyond the confines of the eighteenth century, at the sacred wood of the nymph Furrina (“Thievish”; “Dusky”), where Gaius Graccus had himself murdered by his slave, where Caesar [...]
NORD/SUD: NO ALARM ALLOWED
Roberto Saviano, of Gomorrah fame, points exacting eyes at a mountain that would rise 15,600 meters high, far higher than Everest, of amalgamated waste illegally dumped by criminal organizations in traffic that nearly exceeds the profits of narcotics trafficking. And on the transit of toxins from the industrial centers of the North to the refuse-heaps [...]
APPIE ANTICHE
Listening in morning to the voices of Elena, Ivan, Jana, Michael who have dispersed alas—chatter, narrative, and noise thanks to Paul’s Zoom recorder in anticipation of our spring collaboration with Agency—restless in delight over possibilities of composition involving aural transcription, translation alone, lacking the touch and look and crutch of the printed letter: a seemingly [...]
CONTINUUM, UNWITTING, IN TIME
Of “trasmigratori”: Man-Horse-Moss, at EUR. Most frequently heard question of the morning: which came first, De Chirico or this? The artist.
1938-1954
Hefty years to straddle, architectonically: from the Fascist would-be Expo-42 (20th anniversary of the March on Rome) to the postwar EUR. Libera’s Carrara marble roof congress green & eminently animatable & reanimatable by disco or red tights.
MACULATE, CONCEPTUAL
The wintering flocks, lit from below, now, in instantaneous digital retrospect, writing on the sky, becoming-historical record of swoop tracks over the Capitoline, confettiish over the dutiful digital copy of Marcus Aurelius erect in state. Writing in Latin spilling in rays, rivulets down the Palazzo Spada’s mannerist facade, Council of State, glimpsed as quivering slice [...]
PAIN
As the radical leveler, counter to hypotactic thought: all orchestration of cognition vs. perception vs. emotion tired, collapsing in sliding equivalences of attention: As in Leslie Scalapino’s poetic, the freighters, dead bums, president, and man with dyed blonde hair in new wave pants occupying the same order of slot, same weight in the obsessive constellation, [...]
“VACATION” AS GENRE
Which renders the crowded pomegranate, arils, sacrality, phytochemicals & all, a contour alone: form.
MIES/CHRYSALIS
In the new wing of MACRO, Mies Van der Rohe’s Illinois house of modernism blanched of the paraphernalia of habitation, mechanically reproduced, becomes an aviary for butterflies laying claim to gaudery of flora faux and non, including the writer’s smoking jacket, chrysalis. “Here the purity of the cage is undisturbed. Neither the steel columns from [...]