From the top:
The two women in Vegetable Dinner are both images of Peter Blume's companion Elaine ... The woman on the left, with her fashionable clothing and lit cigarette, evokes his love of parties and freedom, while the woman on the right chops vegetables to represent commitment and domesticity. This expresses Blume's conflict between his affection for Elaine, who "had very competent hands," and his need to live the bohemian life of an artist ... The dramatic cropping of the two figures, together with the knife pointing ominously at one woman's thumb, transforms this ordinary scene into something far more menacing, and suggests that neither of Elaine's roles would have made the artist completely happy. Blume eventually parted from Elaine, remembering later that their relationship was "always in a state of high tension anyway. It could never have survived as a marriage."
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"No!" by Thomas Hood.
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Admiring all things patched and quilted at Carleen.
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Victorian glass and sterling hand and key pendant.
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Marsden Hartley, Landscape No. 25. Always think of this painting this time of year.
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Filed under fancy pants: Studio Hecha Matisse multicolor hand-painted vintage denim at West End Select.
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Humans have often looked at insects and seen themselves, or the selves they would like to be. Early-modern European naturalists peered into termite mounds, anthills, and beehives and saw microcosms of well-ordered states: monarchs, soldiers, laborers. (There was no general recognition that bee “kings” were actually female “queens” until the sixteen-seventies, when a Dutch microscopist, Jan Swammerdam, pointed out that bee kings had ovaries.)
Amina Srinivasan, "What Termites Can Teach Us." The New Yorker, 9/17/2018. (This article may be the single most enjoyable thing I've read in the past month.)
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Can you copyright a quilt?
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“Posing Modernity” has been organized by Denise Murrell, a former chief executive who recently earned a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University. The idea for the show — and the thesis that preceded it — came to her after sitting through a few too many art history lectures that pored over the white subject of “Olympia,” but barely mentioned its black one. Ms. Murrell sought to discover more about the model for the maid and other women like her, and what they could tell us about modernism.
Roberta Smith, "A Long Overdue Light on Black Models of Early Modernism." NYT, 11/1/2018.
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Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. . . . The acceptance of illusion and appearance as reality is another symptom of this same refusal to examine the realities of our lives. Let us seek “joy” rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness.
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, quoted by Becca Rothfield.
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Refusing to collude in injustice is, I’ve found, easier said than done. Collusion is written onto our way of life, and nearly every interaction among white people is an invitation to collusion. Being white is easy, in that nobody is expected to think about being white, but this is exactly what makes me uneasy about it. Without thinking, I would say that believing I am white doesn’t cost me anything, that it’s pure profit, but I suspect that isn’t true. I suspect whiteness is costing me, as Baldwin would say, my moral life.
Eula Biss, "White Debt." NYT 12/2/2015. I just finished Biss' Notes From No Man's Land.
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There is something dying in our society, in our culture, and there’s something dying in us individually. And what is dying, I think, is the willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. It’s always been happening, and when it happens in enough of us, in a short enough period of time at the same time, then you have a tipping point, and the culture begins to shift. And then, what I feel like people are at now is, “No, no, bring it on. I have to face it — we have to face it.”
angel Kyodo williams, Zen priest and activist, in conversation at OnBeing.
