June 2013
28 posts
Two Dreams I Just Recalled Having Had Last Night
1. I went to a Cold Stone creamery for the first time and attempted to order some kind of ice cream sundae. I wanted to take it to go, but they gave it to me in a porcelain bowl so I stayed inside to eat it, about halfway through complaining and pointing out a plastic container they could have put it in for me. (In my actual existence I still have never been to a Cold Stone but am contemplating going now as there appears to be one two stores down from the coffee house where I’m typing this.)
2. I wanted to make eggs, so I looked in the refrigerator and saw both liquid egg whites from some brand or another as well as real whole eggs. I thought “fuck it” and went for the whole eggs. Somehow, I cooked them on a toaster. Then I woke up.
“Thirteen years is a pretty long time. Long enough to make a man, according to Jewish tradition. Long enough, I’ll declare here, for the sake of argument, to get a gauge on a planet’s cultural climate and start making grand proclamations about subjective issues. Like this: Kanye West is the most important artist, in any art form, any genre, of the 21st Century.”
—
Kanye West is the Most Important Artist of the 21st Century | Complex (via weirddeals)
NB the critic goes on to say:
In the early part of the last century, just about a hundred years ago, actually, Pablo Picasso (along with Georges Braque, but I like Picasso better) pioneered a style of painting called Cubism that, umm, became very important to art history. (I always feel dumb talking about art because I don’t know a huge amount about it. I do like looking at art, but I dropped out of the one art history class I took in college.
…but maybe, putting aside for a moment that [I hope] the lead quotation and headline are pseudo-serious in the their claim, someone with just this paucity of prior historical and art knowledge is the only sort of person who can claim the dominance of an individual artist in the current century?
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.”
—William Faulkner (via theparisreview)
no touching
“I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
—Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
