Scene Stealer

Craigslist can change your life, people. Behold what it did for our fellow Austonian Elisa of What theVita? fame, who scored a sweet Moravian Star fixture after reading a CL post that I wrote:

Remind me why I didn't buy that sucker again? Because it's almost like a real star sashayed into her window and took up residence, except better since you can actually turn that mofo off and catch some shut eye. Real stars just don't know when to simmer down, now do they? Anyhow, her bedroom looks supah flossy. Good job, Elisa!

I'm really star-ting (oh god, I hate myself) to think I need one of these guys for the bedroom. Although I would not kick that bad boy out of my fancy man cave library, either.

I really wish we could do a ceiling mounted fixture in the bathroom. This would be a 1000000000000% improvement over the tacky builder grade bar lights. Oh the shame!

So, I have a miserable spray painted chandelier in the bedroom that needs to be kicked to the curb and replaced with a flush mount fixture because Better Half Ben is as tall as I am short, and I think he is developing a dent in his bead where the top of said chandy has grazed him (lovingly, I am sure) a zillion times. I want a flush Moravian Star, but it's out of stock everywhere... grrrrr. Anyone have a lead?

Today is Ike's first day at day camp so I'm signing off and either A) jumping all over the couches and having a one woman dance party, or B) twiddling my thumbs while checking the time til pickup every 5 minutes.

Hopefully there is a C option available.

[What the Vita, Mikkel Vang, Rue]

Happy Birthday Cancerians!

October must have been a busy month for boom chicka boom boom, because I sure do know a lot of July babies. Besides myself and my baby brother who share the same birthday (July 25, and we're Leos of course), there is my dear sweet dad, whose birthday is today.

How cute is my dad?! Ignore the chubby flower girl.

Besides my dad, there's also Better Half Ben (who turns a million next week), and there are several friends plus most of my cousins. But most pressingly there is Ike, who turned TWO FREAKING YEARS OLD yesterday. Yikes! I won't get crazy with the long letter writing like I did last year, but I do want to share a couple of my favorite recent pics.

That's my little baby face. Too bad I accidentally gave him a bowl cut yesterday... just in time for his big birthday party this weekend.

Oh well. It wouldn't be much of a childhood without ugly hairdos, now would it?

Happy weekend, y'all!

Your Kid Could Not Do This

I confess to more than a little snobbery when I was in art school. I wasn't a snob about status or money, because those things seemed far too pedestrian to me. I was a snob about work. I was immensely impressed by craft and labor. This is not to say that I didn't appreciate conceptualism, because I absolutely did. I just expected to see it -- to have some tangible proof of the time and suffering inherent in the birth of an idea.

I was a naive idiot, and is there anything worse than a stupid snob?

I scoffed at Cy Twombly's work (all those dots and scribbles -- I could make that in my sleep!). But if I am honest with myself, I didn't like his work because I didn't understand it. I couldn't discern any method to his art or craft whatsoever.

It's been eight years since I finished school, and the art world was different back then. Art was about something -- your gender, your home, your race, your pet chickens. What didn't really matter, but there damn well better be a metaphorical SOMETHING in there somewhere.

And so, as a young photographer I was quite sure Twombly's work was outdated, superficial, and self absorbed.

After all, photography in the late twentieth century threatened old school gestural painters like Twombly much in the same way photography threatened painting back in the early nineteenth century, leading Paul Delaroche to utter most famously, "Painting is dead."

And after all, Cy Twombly lived in relative obscurity for decades -- a recluse doing his own thing off the coast of Italy. An irrelevant person of little interest. At least that's what I thought.

So it's really rather funny that Twombly is undeniably popular now; it's funny that it has become such a fad to scribble all over a canvas and call it Art with a capital A.

But the difference between Twombly and all the trendsters, the thing that I did not understand about his work when I was in school, the thing that perhaps most people were too jaded and eager to dismiss about him when he first started painting amidst all the splashy ab ex guys and minimalists years and years ago, is intent. Or INTENT, rather. Yes, with capital letters. Purpose is the key.

And to make that appear effortless is the mark of a virtuoso.

If you doubt that, read his own words regarding his work: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.”

Spoken like a man well versed in the wisdom of the classics. I hope it's not too late for me to learn to follow suit.

Rest in peace Cy Twombly.

[NY Times Arts Beat, Photos of Cy Twombly's studio by Francois Halard]