Sunday Morning Coffee: Porcelain Old as Tomorrow: Weiser, Isupov, MacDowell, Boyle, Antemann

[Greg Weiser, Idle Hands, c. 2005]

[Greg Weiser, Many, 2005]

[Sergei Isupov]

[Kate MacDowell]

[Shary Boyle; Lobster is uncertain, but believes this and the next are from Lace Figures exhibition, 2006]

[Shary Boyle]

[Chris Antemann, Highboy, from "Battle of the Britches," 2009]

[Chris Antemann]
[All images copyrighted by the respective artists, and displayed here solely for purposes of commentary; please respect the artists' rights.]

Porcelain as an art form appears to be making something of a comeback in the U.S.A. (Perhaps related to the resurgence of China?) Several artists are creating work as technically adept and aesthetically captivating as anything produced by Meissen, Sevres and the other 18th/19th-century European masterworkers...and arguably on par with the imperial Chinese themselves.

Among the "New Masters": Sergei Isupov, Kate MacDowell, Kurt Weiser, Shary Boyle, and Chris Antemann. Sharing a dedication to craftsmanship, each of the five has a distinctive style...and each is distinctively modern in their themes, ironic senses of humor, and use of the medium for social commentary. We get the best of all worlds, i.e., a classic medium updated to meet our current concerns.

Here at Lobster & Canary we raved (November 21, 2010) about Isupov's current show at the Barry Friedman Gallery in NYC, and we had the great pleasure of interviewing MacDowell (September 19, 2009) as well as noting that her work featured prominently in the NY Times (January 30, 2010). Please go to those Lobster entries for more, and for links to the artists' work (and their gallery representation).

Weiser is a master potter, and possibly the most traditional in his themes and style. He does not experiment much with the form of the objects, but uses the teapot, the globe, etc. to paint lush scenes that appear didactic without the lesson being immediately clear. Another twist: his style and use of color reminds me of Baroque Spanish and Italian still life (bodegones) painters such as Zurbaran and Garzoni, a tradition that pre-dates European porcelain production. For more on Weiser, click here and here.

Boyle is a multimedia artist who uses the porcelain not as a canvas but as sculpture. Her figurines and tableaus make powerful statements about voice and identity. But she too is interrogating the past, for instance, in recent work responding to Foggini bronzes as part of a commission from the Art Gallery of Ontario. For more on Boyle, click here.

Antemann takes Meissenware to its licentious, decadent extreme...her set-pieces lure in the viewer, who thinks the scene is a reproduction, until close examination reveals otherwise. Her puckish sense of humor prevails: these are delightfully devious works that enthrall in every sense of the word. For more on Antemann, click here.

For years I have enjoyed the solitude of porcelain galleries at the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and at the Metropolitan in NYC. I wonder if I will soon get company!

Sunday Morning Coffee: Erik Mohr's Chizine Design; Deathly Hallows "Three Brothers" Animation

* Erik Mohr is the immensely talented creative director & designer who is responsible for the beauty of the books Toronto-based Chizine Publications produces (CZP is owned and run by Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory). Full disclosure: CZP published my novel The Choir Boats, the cover of which Mohr designed based on original art made by Deborah A. Mills. So, this is an unashamed plug for a colleague!

This week Mohr put up on his Facebook page all the CZP covers he has done-- a handsome sight.

If you sign in to Facebook, plug in this URL and you will see the covers: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2333902&id=540785915#!/album.php?aid=2008405&id=1493778832

For more on Mohr, click here. For CZP, click here. For Mills, click here.

* Enjoyed The Deathly Hallows, Part I this week...was most struck by the 3-minute animated "Tale of Three Brothers" segment...beautiful, shadowy puppet-like figures...by Swiss animator Ben Hibon...he is slated to direct a new version of Peter Pan...

Thanksgiving Thoughts: Laura Battle at Lohin Geduld; Bono and Spiderman; Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece

[Laura Battle, Numinosum, made 2010; all images by Battle are copyright of the artist, who is represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery, NYC]
[Battle, Charm, 2010]
[Battle, detail from Timeline, 2010]

[Van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium, completed 1432]

Thanksgiving here in the U.S.A.-- a calm, grey Hudson outside our window as we prepare a feast for friends. We thank the winds and tides that have brought us all together. We thank each other for each other. We thank creators for bringing beauty into the world.

One creator who grabbed our attention earlier this week is Laura Battle, whose third solo show of paintings and drawings opened Nov. 17 at Lohin Geduld. If you are in NYC, make this show a priority--it closes December 23.

Battle takes us to new territories, mapping them with the precision of NASA and the imagination of Paul Klee. (In Battle's deft hands, Klee's "taking a line for a walk" is given fresh discipline and direction.) Her images grip us with their finely balanced tension between exactitude and intuition. She uses color subtly, as the suffused substrate for the trajectories of her lines and glyphs, as the field for controlled wanderings. These are cadastral surveys of new-found places...places we want to go.

For more, click here and click here.

Another blessing this week: Peter Schjeldahl's article in The New Yorker
on the restoration of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece ("The Flip Side; The Secrets of Conserving the Wood Behind an Early Masterpiece," Nov. 29, pp. 42-47). Schjeldahl reminds us of "the eloquence of van Eyck's glazes, which pool like liquid radiance," which "generate a sweet and mighty visual music."

His main focus, however, is on the restoration of the altarpiece--the first in over fifty years--being done by an international team of all-stars funded by The Getty Foundation's Panel Paintings Initiative. Schjeldahl details all of the craftsmanship and connoisseurship that goes into making and preserving a piece like the Ghent Altarpiece. The wood bends and exhales, the paint blisters and seams, the restorers battle to mend and prevent.

Schjeldahl emphasizes the tactile nature of art-making and of art's enjoyment, an artisanal turn in a world where sight is privileged. The restoration experts distinguish themselves here "from academics who are numb to the muscular feel of planes and chisels wielded with hair's-breadth precision."

Another item that struck us this week: the Broadway version of Spiderman is nearing its opening, directed by Julie Taymor, with music by Bono and The Edge.

Bono is quoted in the NY Times (Nov. 23, article by Patrick Healy):

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others...[...] If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

I am not sure about Rilke, but I believe Blake would have liked the Spiderman epic...I can absolutely imagine Blake etching, lettering and inking Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, Doc Oc, and The Green Goblin, maybe including the story in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or The First Book of Urizen.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Sergei Isupov's Narrative Sculpture; Super-Cats Save San Francisco

[As always, all copyright held by the artist, in this case Sergei Isupov.]

Sergei Isupov is draftsman of the enigmatic, a craftsman of the uncanny. (Click here for Isupov's website.) We were enthralled yesterday at his new show, at the Barry Friedman gallery in Chelsea (NYC). We first encountered his magical creations as part of the Ferrin Gallery presentation at the SOFA show in NYC two years ago.

Isupov is hard to categorize, a visual polymath, a throwback to an earlier age of studied technique, connoisseurship, and historical research. He seems first and foremost a Rabelaisian teller of stories, a sketcher of epigram and mysterious vignette...who chose to paint his stories...and who then decided that traditional canvas and paper were not sufficient and so turned to porcelain and stoneware as his main media. So: enigmas draped over and around busts and boots, like minor deities protruding into our world from some other dimension.

His huge stoneware heads are serene, contemplative, but their foreheads and cheeks are covered by human bodies, or small faces, or limbs...and they usually have an utterly different face on the back of the skull. Further adding to the ambiguity are the tableaus painted on the base of the statues, scenes of nets, horses, naked bodies in flight, men and women reaching out uncertainly to one another. The thinker's thoughts made visible, the agitation beneath the surface.

My favorites are his polychromatic porcelain boots, each about two feet tall, with titles like "Flight in the Dreams and Awake." Frequently there are disembodied hands attached to the boot, like the hands of God so typical of religious imagery from the European Renaissance. Boots left by Mercury after a long night's travels, emblazoned with the stories of those he encountered along the way?

Isupov is a warm spirit, his grotesques presented with love and a genuine desire to understand humanity in all our strangeness.

Speaking of strangeness, I cannot resist sharing this image (which I found at io9):

To quote the io9 article by Annalee Newitz: "...a group of San Francisco artists decorated the front of the boarded-up Harding Theater with the greatest work of LOL-based art the world has ever seen.

Aggressive Panhandler's Andrew Dalton is responsible for spotting this artwork with his laser eyes....

Find out more about the artists who created this mural: Bunnie Reiss, Ezra Li Eismont, and Garrison Buxton."

Sunday Morning Coffee: Giants in the Earth Appearing Now on a Billboard Near You

While strolling around Tribeca yesterday afternoon, the lobster and the canary came upon this poster...a reminder that fantastical beings and the Old Ones are all around us, if we care to look... which reminded us of a few other Curious Creatures hidden in plain sight:

Sunday Afternoon Tea: NY Art Book Fair / Kate Castelli

The wonderful graphic designer & illustrator Kate Castelli visited us this weekend-- what a treat to explore The NY Art Book Fair at MOMA/PS 1 with her.

(For more on Kate, see the Lobster & Canary interview August 1, 2010, and her website http://katecastelli.com).

In only its fifth year, the NY Art Book Fair, organized by Printed Matter, Inc., has become a "must see" on the fall arts circuit. The show was utterly packed on Saturday afternoon, standing room only in some places...

...for good reason, as c. 300 exhibitors treated us to a riot of interstitial, interdisciplinary, innovative, beautiful, bizarre, and sometimes just plain "huh?"-inducing books, journals, (maga)zines, broadsides, posters, prints, text/object mash-ups, and other less definable items.

Kate, the lobster, and the canary left delightfully overwhelmed. A few notes from a pile of impressions:

The Center for Book Arts (NYC), for their poetry chapbook collaborations (co-curated by Sharon Dolin, who we interviewed here March 13 & May 22, 2010).

Studio on the Square Book Arts Collective (NYC), for crisp composition and stand-out craftsmanship. (The small book entitled "Sacred Tables" glowed with a Klee-like combination of formal gridwork and subtly leaping colors.) Plus, the Studio on the Square's Intima Press featured the "Goddard Declaration of Independence": "Many of the names associated with the Declaration of Independence-John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Samuel Chase-are household names. Another one-Mary Katherine Goddard-is probably not. But Goddard played a central role in this foundational American document-she printed it. At the time she was living in Baltimore and was in fact Baltimore’s Postmistress."

Artspeak (Vancouver) for intriguing dialogue between practitioners and critics. From their website: "Artspeak presents contemporary practices, innovative publications, bookworks, editions, talks and events that encourage a dialogue between visual art and writing."

The Department of Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College Chicago, for their Journal of Artists' Books.

Siglio Press for their exquisite productions, especially of work by Nancy Spero and by Denis Wood. From their website: "SIGLIO is a new, independent press in Los Angeles dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersections of art and literature. Siglio books defy categorization and ignite conversation: they are cross-disciplinary, hybrid works that subvert paradigms, reveal unexpected connections, rethink narrative forms, and thoroughly engage a reader's imagination and intellect."

Proteus Gowanus (NYC) for their boldness, their hints of melancholy and outright morbidity, and the sheer volume & variety of their output. As they put it, they "extend an interesting train of thought into print."

e-flux for international interconnections and clever use of the chalkboard. As they put it: "Established in January 1999 in New York, e-flux is an international network which reaches more than 50,000 visual art professionals on a daily basis through its website, e-mail list and special projects. Its news digest – e-flux announcements – distributes information on some of the world's most important contemporary art exhibitions, publications and symposia".

The Silas Finch Foundation (NYC) for arresting, make-you-think imagery. From their website: "We work collaboratively with artists to produce, publish and promote ambitious photographic projects. We also work to develop and support new platforms for the publication and distribution of photographic art in the 21st century."

De Appel (Amsterdam) for its public art projects. From their website: "Since 1975 it has functioned as a site for the research and presentation of contemporary visual art through exhibitions, publications and discursive events. De Appel also functions as a platform for performances by visual artists, choreographers and theatre makers. [...] It has a special thematic focus on 'context-responsive' curating and the presentator [sic] of art in the 'public sphere'."

And these worthies only head a long list of appealing presenters at the NY Art Book Fair in 2010.

Photographs from October Country: Sam Jury; Michael Kenna; Gail Olding

[Sam Jury, "Disjecta Membra 6"]



[Three from Michael Kenna, "Silent World" series]


[Two from Gail Olding, "Flunkus Mortati" series]


We've arrived at the harvest home, crossed the wet earth, watched the birds fly with Uncle Einar. We're arranging the feast for the visitors on All Hallow's Eve. We're deep into October Country, "that country [as Ray Bradbury says] where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay."

Others have sent back postcards from this liminal country. To see some of these, visit:

Olding's website here.

Kenna's website here.

Jury's website here.

Sunday Morning Coffee: A jizai okimono of a dragon; Amy Leach on a dragon's last thoughts

Bonhams offers at auction (in London, November 11th) "a fine, rare and large iron jizai (fully articulated) okimono of a dragon; Myochin School, Edo Period, 18th/19th century
Realistically rendered with a long serpentine and undulating body, forged with numerous hammered scales joined inside the body with karakuri tsunagi, the leg joints, head, mouth and ears each constructed of moving parts, unsigned; with wood storage box. 137cm (54in) overall length."

Canary & Lobster fell in love with this powerful beauty. To enlarge the picture and learn more, click on the Bonhams site here, and enter "jizai okimono" in the search panel (upper right of screen).

Here is more from Bonhams about the piece:

"Of all the categories of Edo-period artefacts eagerly collected outside Japan for the last century and a half, articulated animals have the least trace of documentary evidence concerning their origin and development. Even the Japanese word for them, jizai or jizai okimono, appears to be a post-Edo term. [...]

According to Harada Kazutoshi, Special Research Chair at the Tokyo National Museum, the earliest-known jizai okimono dates from 1713. It is not clear for what purpose they were made, or from where the complicated manufacturing techniques originated. [...]"

Canary thinks the jizai okimono are the equivalent of death-masks or funerary puppets, honoring a dragon who once lived regally among humans. Maybe the living dragon's memories are stored within the okimono, are stirred to life when the construction's hinged limbs are moved.

And what might those memories consist of? Who can say, who has not recently conversed with dragons? But Amy Leach offers some ideas in her essay "Complexions," published in the Autumn, 2010 issue of The Gettysburg Review:

" 'To whom, then, does the earth belong?' said the dragon as he was being slain. 'Sometimes it seems to belong to dragons; at other times to dragon gaggers. Sometimes it seems to belong to the hot harmattan wind . . . then to the descuernadragones, the wind that dehorns dragons . . . and then to the doldrums. Sometimes it seems to belong to the slaves, when the sea parts to let them through, and sometimes to the sea when the sea does not part. Now to the siskin finch and sablefish; now to smitheries and smelteries. Perhaps the earth is neutral, like a bridge between two cities, traveled on but possessed by no traveler.' Such are the behindhand ponderings of a doomed dragon."

Saturday Matinee: People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

Wickedly atmospheric trailer for People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess (Chizine Publications, fall 2010).

The trailer was directed by noted Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (Pontypool).

For more information, visit Chizine Publications's website (full disclosure: they published my novel, The Choir Boats). Click here.

Midweek Meditation: Kodomo ("Concept 16"); Mary Frey ("Imagining Fauna")

[Kodomo, "Concept 16" from Still Life, 2010]

After you listen to Kodomo, click here for photographer Mary Frey's "Imagining Fauna."

A Barn Owl stares right through you...mouth askew, a squirrel holds a nut...a crow is a blank...an egret poses in shadow...odd edges of very fine feathers...

Relics of a subtly altered past...inside a bell jar that fell through a worm-hole...

Here is Frey on her creatures:

"Photography invites us to pay attention. It describes with economy, precision and detail. It enables us to stare, scrutinize, and become voyeurs. Taxidermy allows us to do the same. Its complete replication of an animal’s stance, gesture and look provides us a way to study and comprehend its existence. Yet I find that these animals, often portrayed in suspended animation, seem simultaneously strange, ghostly and beautiful. Their gaze is both familiar and unknown. I intend this work to move beyond what is merely seen to the territory of the imagination, where what is remembered and known is transformed into something new."

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Acacia Trilogy by David Anthony Durham

David Anthony Durham's Acacia Trilogy is one of the most important projects within speculative fiction at the moment. (The first book-- The War with the Mein-- came out in 2007; the second-- The Other Lands-- in 2009; the third is due out fall, 2011; all from Random House). Having mastered the tropes of epic fantasy on his first time out (Durham won the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), he is exploring in the Acacia series the intent and self-mythologies of slavers and the impact of enslavement on a global-societal scale. Acacia is world-building as a means to sophisticated, ambitious ends, the use of fantasy to comment on social relations and to imagine alternative power dynamics in our own world-- without resorting to allegory or sermon. Acacia thus belongs to the lineage that includes Plato's Republic and Timaeus, Campanella's City of the Sun, Johnson's Rasselas, besides Persian Letters, Candide, Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, and so on down to Orwell.

Acacia is especially powerful because Durham's narrative style is understated, leanly descriptive, matter-of-fact. (Reminds me of Steinbeck, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sinclair Lewis). He understands that the real story is in the mundane details underpinning and connecting all the surface events. Call it the fictional equivalent of Annaliste deep history a la Braudel or Wallerstein. Without slowing down the quick-paced intricacies of the plot, Durham makes the bones of his world visible.

For instance (from The Other Lands, pb version, pg. 166):

"It was so much worse than when she had last been here. Even then, two years ago, the northern Talayans had been complaining about the lack of rainfall. [The Empress] Corinn had thought their fears exaggerated. To her eyes the fields looked like...well, like fields of growing plants, rows and rows of short trees, fields of golden grasses. She understood that this apparent bounty was achieved only because the staple crops that required the most most water had already been replaced by sturdier varieties. [...] Not so, as the scene before her eyes now confirmed. It was a vision of devastation, as full of death as any battlefield. ...withered trees stood naked of leaves or fruit, blackly skeletal...some grain crop glittered as if the stalks were silvered strings of glass, ready to shatter underfoot. [...] The irrigation channels were completely dry, their beds cracked."

Another example (also, The Other Lands, pb, pg.222):

"The trio traveled inland and together explored the region for several days. The area's loamy soil produced bountiful crops of sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, and massive turnips the size of a man's head. Unlike the plantations of northern Talay or the state-run croplands of the Mainland, the region was too rocky to be sectioned off in a grid pattern. The land was irregular, broken by hills and stands of recalcitrant short pines, and not suited to mass labor forces. Instead, small family farmsteads patchworked the area, as they had for centuries. And, as had been the case for centuries, these farmers were forced to pay such a large portion of their crops into the empire's coffers that they little more than subsisted from their labor and their land's bounty."

Such descriptions could be from Defoe's Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain (1726), Arthur Young's travel accounts from Ireland (1780) and France (1790), and particularly Cobbett's Rural Rides (1830). Or from the countless surveys, reports, and descriptions of pre-emancipation plantations in the Caribbean and the American South.

Durham takes the reader, with unadorned prose, into the heart of a relentlessly inhumane system. He is a master of the mysterious detail that freezes the heart when its meaning is revealed. For instance, we learn that the wooden slats shipped to the quota-plantations on the Outer Islands are for cribs, in which thousands of kidnapped children will be reared for a life enslaved.

He knows that Acacia's horrors are rendered all the more horrible for being described so clinically. Some of the enslaved children literally have their souls snatched and embedded in the bodies of their owners. Others are physically deformed and remolded to suit their master's whims, to "belong" (as it is called) within the owner's clan. Some fight and die for their masters, others work the fields that produce the poppy-like drug used to pay for fresh slaves...completing the circle of their damnation.

The quota cull evokes the miseries of Goree and Elmina, the soul-eating machine on Lithram Len calls up the horrors of Sullivan's Island. Reading the Acacia novels, one reaches for Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, for Du Bois, Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death and his Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. One turns to Ernst Moritz Arndt's History of Serfdom in Pomerania and Ruegen (1803), to Lampedusa's The Leopard, to accounts of mezzadria sharecropping systems throughout pre-industrial Italy, and so on and on...

In sum: read the Acacia novels, pay attention to Durham. He is not only a gifted storyteller, but a practitioner of speculative fiction as a moral science, a corrective to willful ignorance and the deliberate effacement of memory.

For more on Durham, click his website here.

Wednesday Evening Meditation: Dragon on Mt. Fuji; Seriously Deep

[Suzuki Kiitsu, "Rising Dragon & Mount Fuji," oil painting, first half 19th century C.E.; click on the image to enlarge]


[Eberhard Weber, "Seriously Deep," from Silent Feet, recorded 1977]

Why does the dragon ascend the mountain?

Will she reach the summit, to speak to the wind?

... on her silent feet...

Sunday Morning Coffee: KAHIBA; Gossart

[Jan Gossart, The Deposition, c. 1520; oil on panel; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg]


[Gossart, St. Anthony with a Donor, c. 1508; oil on panel; Galleria Doria-Pamphilis, Rome]


[Gossart, Jesus, The Virgin & the Baptist, c. 1510-1515; oil on panel; Prado, Madrid]


[Gossart, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, c. 1520-1525; oil on panel; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna]



["Rejoycing" by KAHIBA, 2008]

A gentle river, filled with one- and two-masted tall ships, the great black-backed gulls patrolling the marina and promenade, wings outstretched in a mild blue sky...the grace notes of summer's out-procession...

(The German-Swiss-Austrian trio KAHIBA plays music to fit the season in-between, a Mitteleuropaische village dance tune with jazz overtonings, lively as we bring in the gourds and beans, with the saxophone reminding us of winter to come.]

Fabulous show opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC last week: Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance. As the Metropolitan describes it:

"The first major exhibition in forty-five years devoted to the Burgundian Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532) brings together Gossart's paintings, drawings, and prints and places them in the context of the art and artists that influenced his transformation from Late Gothic Mannerism to the new Renaissance mode."

(For more on Gossart from the Met, click here, then scroll down second item on the left. For Roberta Smith's strong review in the New York Times, click here.)

One of the most deliciously exhausting shows we have seen in years, overflowing with embellishment and detail. The oil paintings transport the viewer with their vivid and innovative colors (not least the polychrome wings of Gossart's angels), the flesh you are certain you could touch, the folds of velvet and satin that you are certain you can see shift and rustle. Deborah said Gossart was "drunk on architecture," that we can "almost smell the fresh air" emanating from his paintings.

Gossart is a genius at expressing religious passion-- not through anguished faces and gouts of blood-- but through composition, gesture, and the contours of the flesh.

As impressive as the oil paintings are, Gossart's ink/chalk drawings draw a viewer into a teeming, ornamented world that repays close inspection. "The Conversion of Saul" (from the 1520s) is a thunder of horsemen, "The Lamentation" (also c. 1520s)a quiet study of grief.

The show at the Met is large, and includes not only many of Gossart's master-works on loan from collections across the world, but many smaller pieces rarely seen. I especially liked the sketches of "standing warriors in fantastic arms," with their wildly bouffant sleeves, exaggerated plumes and epaulettes, their encrusted breastplates.

The show runs through January 17, 2011.

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Queen of Elfland's Drummer, at Cabinet des Fees

Cabinet des Fees (and its offspring, Scheherezade's Bequest and Demeter's Spicebox) is a must-read if you love fairytale, folklore and myth, especially as reworked, re-configured, and re-imagined for modern times.

Last week the Cabinet des Fees blog featured a longish piece by me entitled "The Queen of Elfland's Drummer."

The essay starts this way:

"Music is a compass and pass-key to Faerie. We keep an ear cocked hoping to catch the notes of “a far distant post-horn across the silent, starlit land” as von Eichendorff put it…sometimes we are fortunate, most times we are not. Still, we persevere, seeking ever the chords to both express and guide our Sehnsucht. The kind of music is irrelevant – any and all kinds can take one beyond the fields we know (music of whatever sort poorly played is, of course, another matter altogether). Many conveyances, the same destination…"

To read more, and to add a comment to the blog thread (oh, oh, please do!), click here to the CdF main page and scroll down to find my essay on the left-hand side.

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Art Instinct; Herbie Hancock; Roy Hargrove; Frank Zappa; Jean-Luc Ponty; Dave Matthews

[Herbie Hancock & the Headhunters, "Chameleon", 1973]

[Roy Hargrove & RH Factor, "Riff," live 2005]

[Frank Zappa, with Jean-Luc Ponty, "Greggary Peccary Suite," live 1973]

[Dave Matthews Band, "You & Me," 2009]

Ever read a book that you agree with heartily...right up until the final few pages? Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct; Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2009)is that book for me right now. I recommend The Art Instinct-- it is cogent, thought-provoking, stylish (Dutton writes very well, as we would expect from the founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily).

Dutton is bold: he seeks to explain the arts as a necessary driver and outcome of our biological evolution. In doing so, he sets his views against both many biologists on the one side, and many philosophers of arts and aestheticians on the other. If you like books by Steven Pinker, Steven Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson, you'll like The Art Instinct.

I was nodding my head on just about every page...until I got to page 223 and the first of Dutton's four assertions about what makes a masterpiece:

"The arts are not essentially social."

The bolding and italics are in the original-- Dutton is stressing his assertion, and then takes the next four pages to support his point. Dutton-- as he is throughout the book-- is nuanced and balanced. He acknowledges that the arts demonstrably enhance empathy, group solidarity, and cooperation. But he argues ultimately that the primary, most important role of art-making is to enhance the individual's ability to compete for a mate.

"My [i.e., Dutton, page 226] own view is that traces of sexual selection, a process that pits suitors against each other in a competition with real winners and losers, tends partially to undermine the communal spirit as having a defining role in the arts. [...] The motives of art, as even Darwin knew, are ancient and complicated-- directed towards a community, perhaps, but also created to captivate an audience of one."

Fair enough, and nicely qualified... and no one could doubt that music can play a significant part in sexual display/ selection. I would just flip the priority, and emphasize instead the group dynamics.

Quick example:

Decades ago, I was a stagehand for a musical in college. As we dimmed the lights to signal the end of intermission at one of the shows, the pit orchestra began to tune up. Imagine the usual sounds of spectators rustling and talking as they return to their seats, and the musicians noodling around, with random toots, plinks, and honks. Suddenly-- and now the lights were out entirely-- one line cut through the hub-bub: the bass player thrumming the unmistakable opening riff from Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon."

"Boim boim boim boim bummmm-bump, boim boim boim boim bummmm-bump..."

Over and over. If you can hear a smile in the dark, spreading from face to face on silent feet, then we heard the broadest of collective smiles.

The drummer joined in, and then the guitarist. For a minute or so, in the shared darkness, entirely impromptu (as far as any of us outside the pit could tell), the band jammed and the audience murmured and clapped and whistled.

And then, with a flourish, the band shifted into the entirely unrelated overture to the musical and we brought up the lights and raised the curtain.

One of those moments in life when you are randomly yet very certainly, viscerally, connected to a hundred strangers. Music did that-- it could have been any one of the arts, a painting, a poem. We could not see each other, and I do not recall (though I could be wrong) audience members rushing to the band afterwards for post-play erotics. The impact was profound-- a spark to defy the dark, a human note to defeat the emptiness that stretches out into infinity.

YouTube is a trove of live music. I picked three from hundreds of favorites. Watch for the joy communicated from face to face.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Romanticism in Pomerania; Teofilo Olivieri; Graham Franciose

[Caspar David Friedrich, Greifswald in Moonlight, 1816/17]




[Three by Teofilo Olivieri]



[Two by Graham Franciose]

Fall is here at last in New York City: shadows ever longer, goldenrod coming into bloom on Chelsea Piers, the sun still fierce but knowing her power is waning, fleets of Monarch Butterflies sailing by (as far up as thirty stories)...

It is autumn in Pomerania too, along the southern shores of the Baltic, where I lived for over a year. The Pomeranian State Museum in Greifswald (where I spent a great deal of time) just opened what must be a wonderful exhibit on the "Birth of Romanticism," featuring work by three native sons: Friedrich, Runge and Klinkowstroem. Most exciting: the National Museum in Oslo (where I lived for six years) has sent Friedrich's Greifswald by Moonlight, the first time I believe that it has ever been displayed in its hometown. For more, click here.

Closer to home, the lobster and the canary last month stumbled across the artist Teofilo Olivieri and his work. He was selling his boldly delineated, vibrantly colored, enigmatic pieces on the street just south of Union Square-- we bought one of the ambiguous horned owl-people. For more, click here.

Graham Franciose sent me a link to his new website-- for which, click here. I love his mournful, pensive, rum little people...and the way they twine with and are entwined by the natural world (birds, roots, nests).

Sunday Evening Soup: Brooklyn Book Festival

Today the lobster and the canary enjoyed the fifth annual Brooklyn Book Festival, undeterred by a mizzle of rain.

Was good to talk with the ever-jovial Gavin Grant, staffing the booth at Small Beer Press.

Ditto our good friends at Brooklyn's own Greenlight Bookstore.

We also spoke with (and bought books from!) the good folks at:

* NY Review of Books Classics

* Archipelago Books

* Coffee House Press

* Poetry Society of America

* New Directions

* Europa Editions

If you are in or around Brooklyn next September, visit the Festival!

Click here for more information.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Visual Arts in NYC This Fall

[Jocelyn Hobbie, Pilgrim]

[TM Davy, untitled]

[Louise Despont, moonface & his carrier birds]

[Dante Horoiwa, Distracted, We'll Win]

[Alex Gross, Discrepancies]

[Flor Echevarria, Torres]

[Hugo Martinez Rapari, La Tierra Sopla-Tormenta! Earth Blows: Sand Storm!]

[Fred Tomaselli, Big Raven (2008)]

First cool breezes off the Hudson, the first slants of sunshine in Central Park this weekend...fall is on its way.

Some exhibitions we are looking forward to this autumn in the city:

* Fred Tomaselli at the Brooklyn Museum.

* Miro at the Metropolitan, and also the Gossarts at ditto.

* At the MoMA: "On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century," which (per the museum website)"...explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century, a period when numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of drawing to a critical examination and expanded the medium's definition in relation to gesture and form. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from the reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed line across the plane into real space, thus questioning the relation between the object of art and the world."

* The group show "Ain't I a Woman" at The Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts.

* Hugo Martinez Rapari, Flor Echevarria and others at Agora Gallery's "Masters of the Imagination" group show.

* Alex Gross at Jonathan Levine.

* Dante Horoiwa and others in RH Gallery's inaugural show, The Third Meaning.

* Louise Despont's House of Instruments show at Nicelle Beauchene.

* TM Davy at Eleven Rivington.

* Jocelyn Hobbie's "portraits of imaginary women" at Kerry Schuss.

And-- the lobster clacks his claws in anticipation, the canary whistles praise in advance!-- that just scratches the surface.