last class of semester

Oh how interestingly the semester ends, so for my seminar in energetic aesthetics, great title, what? as we have discussed all manner of texts and art stuff, we will end with me bringing wine, a participant bringing chocolates and everyone talking (in turn, natch) about what everyone wrote (is writing, I know I know) as a final paper. This is the way I always end my seminars, and the point is that if you are going for an interview for some job, you have to be able to have a drink in one hand and talk about what you are good at or impassioned by, the other hand on the heart or the brain.  Wonderfully, many of our students get positions -- I don't think this is why, but you never know.

For my irregular but I hope delightful column in the Oxford Gazette (Magazine) which I've written for years and years, about the New York cultural scene, this time I got to add -- because the great editor, Tim Horder, tells me when I have another week before the deadline -- Mahler's Third, which we heard Saturday night and were (well, I was) astounded by. Really, the zarathustra coming in, and the soaring melody and the everything loud and less loud-- i loved the repetitions and want to think about that form, but, you know, when do you get to anything? I had the joy of writing my introduction to our translation (Nancy Kline and myself) of Lorand Gaspar's Sol Absolu (Earth Absolute) in the middle of the night, having lunch with the great John Richardson yesterday, writing and rewriting part of the catalogue for Picasso and the Camera for the Gagosian Gallery here in New York, hearing my friend Dean King talk about his book on the Feud between the Hatfields and McCoys (and Matthew has just finished a tour with Juliana Hatfield, so it seemed appropriate to go), and no, I haven't gotten back to the chapter on Painting and Sculpture for the Cambridge History of Modernism, but, um, I will before we leave for France on July 1. Or I think I will.

picasso, warhol, hodler

How typical, and that's what one tries not to mind (presumably) -- I wrote a piece for the Oxford Gazette, as usual, on the various exhibitions I'd been privileged to see recently, on and on about Picasso in Black and White, Matisse in twos and threes, and the 60 artists looking at Warhol, some of which was delightfully illuminating, AND the second time, they didn't pop the silver balloons in the last room.. thinking I would just transfer it to here, a blog i sometimes feels like writing, and guess what? now on AOL, I can't call up under "sent" the messages to find out what I wrote, AND THAT IS JUST FINE.

if you don't feel like writing something the second time, it may not have been worth it the first...

Anyway, and this is delightful, if on Fcebook you are looking up the Neue Galerie, and you had longed, as I  had, to see the Hodler show, and you hadn't gotten there (as so often happens, you are going but then, oh, you have time, and you don't), well, I do, another week, AND there is a 5 dollar off the admission if you are looking it up, so I will certainly (my "certainly" means, I hope) go sometimes when family has left (alas) and things are back to whatever one would consider normal... I love his doublings, and those strange symmetries and elongated figures -- like Jacques Bellange, that strange French mannerist I keep thinking of, well, sometimes..

we saw Amour.. and it truly is about just that, and I  have something to say about the pigeon, which comes from Kay Sage writing about the superstition of a bird coming in the house to announce death, well, that is actually what I have to say about the pigeon. Not just comic relief at all, and his writing at the end: I set it free, when he has smothered it, relates to the wife, WHAT a film...

Christmas Eve tonight, and my Acquacize class is again this morning, so I should go back to bed, I imagine. That doesn't mean I will. Interesting: what ever means what...