Category: Architecture

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Under the Sun

Barring a major investor jumping in during a time of financial panic, it looks like the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth will be shutting down in a week. How’s today’s Arts+ section looking?

  1. Victor Davis Hanson reviews Martin Creveld’s The Culture of War: “he presents himself as a Thucydidean”!
  2. Steven Nadler reviews Joel Kramer’s biography on the Great RaMBaM: “From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses”!
  3. Eric Ormsby reviews Fernandoz Baez’ history of the destruction of books: “Unlike Borges, who delighted in inventing titles which don’t exist (but should), Mr. Báez describes books and whole libraries that fell prey not only to fire and flood but to sheer human malevolence”. . .
  4. And speaking of Borges, Alberto Manguel reviews William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel: “Mr. Bloch notes in his preface that the ideal reader of his book is Umberto Eco”!?
  5. Paula Deitz writes up the Venice Biennale of Architecture: “Two different exhibitions featured walls of refrigerators as stand-ins for enclosed spaces”?!
  6. In a rare disappointment for me, it turned out that Valerie Gladstone’s Bacon and Rothko in London does not actually involve pork products: “‘What I find amazing,’ Mr. Gale said, ‘is that even after all the preparation for this exhibition, looking at Bacon’s paintings still makes my spine tingle. I never stop being overwhelmed.'”

And a bonus! This weekend, the New York Times wrote about the Sun’s plight! While it can’t be bothered to mention the Sun’s top-notch arts coverage until a passing ref. 6 paragraphs from the end — presumably because it puts the Times’ coverage to shame — it does manage to include a quote from a writer at The Nation who called the Sun “a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews”! Awesome! Now I can miss it even more. . .

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Waiting for the eclipse

I haven’t slept well lately, so I assume my fourth estate alter ego has been working overtime on plumbing my mind for good arts articles. What’s in today’s edition of the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth?

  1. a walking tour of the architecture of Park Slope,
  2. a review of an exhibition on the origins of abstract painting in America,
  3. what we draw about when we draw Babar,
  4. Van Gogh: just because,
  5. and the coup de grace: the history (and sales record) of a possibly fictitious acolyte of Andy Warhol.

I guess this means I’ll get better nights of sleep once the Sun closes up shop, but my arts life is going to be a lot less interesting.

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Fables of the Reconstruction

I’m no knee-jerk fan of either major party, so the ugliness of this election season has triggered one of my depressions. For me, these are characterized by what I call “wheels within wheels” phases, in which the world seems to reduce to the meshing of an impossibly complicated set of gears. I get stuck probing away at the mechanisms, trying to make sense of a planetary gearset that leaves no room for randomness, irrationality, or serendipity. It’s paranoia both grand and personal, but I’ve gotten better about getting it under control.

More importantly my wife helps ground me and elevate me, and that’s why I love her so.

This morning, I considered what I want to share with you about 9/11 this time around, and that’s when I reached the conclusion that the reconstruction of Ground Zero should remain perpetually in progress. After all, anything that actually gets finished will only be a letdown after all this buildup. Plus, it’ll boost employment among construction workers, city-state-federal lobbyists, starchitects, and Sheldon Silver.

And most importantly, it’ll be a fitting symbol of our state of endless war.

In the words of James Brolin, “Happy 9/11!”

In the words of my wife, “I hope Josh got his mom’s brains. Whoever she is.”

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City of Glass

This week’s ish of New York Magazine has a neat article by Justin Davidson; it consists of a meditation on NYC’s architecture boom and how it fits in the city’s history, complemented by 50 before-and-afters of recent buildings. I’m conflicted about some of his points, especially on the relationship of new buildings with their neighborhoods, and the “walking travelogue” aspect gets a bit precious, but I think it’s an awfully worthwhile article, with some good conversation about the nature of the city. Mr. Davidson cops to a certain sadness to all the buildings that are lost, but, also understands that freezing any one moment in time is impossible:

Intelligent preservation is precious, but nostalgia is cheap, and every era nurtures its own variety. Those late-nineteenth-century Upper West Siders who still thought of Broadway as the bucolic, elm-lined Bloomingdale Road of their youths resented the incursion of brownstones in the 1880s. Their children must have been horrified in turn when those same houses were wiped away by the now-classic apartment buildings that line West End Avenue. Bitterness springs eternal.

I suppose I’ll always have Ben Katchor‘s Julius Knipl comics to fall back on, for That New York that I’ve lost.

As a plus, the article also turned me on to Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York!

Oh, and the “history of Columbus Circle” sidebar sent me spiraling back to 1982 or thereabouts, when my dad took me to a gift trade show at the New York Coliseum for work. I hadn’t thought of that day in decades, and thinking about it now makes me a little sad, because of all the other memories locked away in time’s vanishing city.

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This is getting ridiculous

Today, the NY Sun (Official Newspaper of Gil Roth) managed to put out more articles of interest to me than any other paper would in a month:

  1. Revising our views on Arcimboldo in light of the Allegorical Head of the Four Seasons
  2. Revising our views on neoconservatism via World Affairs magazine
  3. Revising our views on Columbus Circle post-TW Center
  4. Edward Hopper: Wanna see my etchings?
  5. Death of a niche magazine shop in NYC
  6. And an art installation by my favorite electronic band, Underworld . . . ?

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I half-expect tomorrow’s edition to include articles on Miller’s Crossing, Danny Wilson, and Roger Langridge.