In November during the first weeks at my new job the Whitney museum I noticed the sign for a book store above the Carlyle Hotel. It read Ursus Books. I was intrigued, but couldn’t see the entrance. When I asked colleagues they hadn’t been there and also weren’t sure of the location of the shop’s front door.

I forgot about it unless I was walking along Madison in that direction each time looking up at Ursus Books wanting to go in and look around. So right before the holiday break I decided to go into The Carlyle. Seeing a stairway to the first floor, up I went and there it was–a glass door to Ursus Books. I only needed to ring a bell and then I was in a room of what I then told Craig was “big danger” as I immediately wanted  three of the stunning art books one of the tables. It’s one of those places. I then read a bit about the store and saw that it was founded back in the 1970s!

I did allow myself the amazing Eva Hesse drawing book edited by Catherine de Zegher published by The Drawing Center and a stunning book in English and German on James Turrell (This is a link to James Turrell on PBS’s Art:21). And I’m going back for a book on Hiroshige to die for…here’s the book.

Coming to Arizona for the holidays, we first flew into Phoenix. The next morning needing coffee and wi-fi we also discovered a terrific used book store, Book Gallery. At the store I bought two books, C.S. Lewis‘ Out of the Silent Planet and The Poems of Dylan Thomas. I’ve always wanted to read Thomas, but never had found the time. The moment I flipped thought the book I was hooked.  I picked a few poems below.

LIGHT, I KNOW, TREADS THE TEN MILLION STARS

Light, I know, treads the ten million stars,
And blooms in the Hesperides. Light stirs
Out of the heavenly sea onto the moon’s shores.
Such light shall not illuminate my fears
And catch a turnip ghost in every cranny.
I have been frightened of the dark for years.
When the sun falls and the moon stares,
My heart hurls from my side and tears
Drip from my open eyes as honey
Drips from the humming darkness of the hive.
I am a timid child when light is dead.
Unless I learn the night I shall go mad.
It is night’s terrors I must learn to love,
Or pray for day to some attentive god
Who on his cloud hears all my wishes,
Hears and refuses.
Light walks the sky, leaving no print,
And there is always day, the shining of some sun,
In those high globes I cannot count,
And some shine for a second and are gone,
Leaving no print.
But lunar night will not glow in my blackness,
Make bright its corners where a skeleton
Sits back and smiles, A tiny corpse
Turns to the roof a hideous grimace,
Or mice play with an ivory tooth.
Stars’ light and sun’s light will not shine
As clearly as the light of my own brain,
Will only dim life, and light death.
I must lean night’s light or go mad.

HERE IN THIS SPRING

Here in this spring, stars float along the void;
Here in this ornamental winter
Down pelts the naked weather;
This summer buries a spring bird.

Symbols are selected from the years’
Slow rounding of fours seasons’ coasts,
In autumn teach three season’ fires
And four birds’ notes.

I should tell summer from the trees, the worms
Tell, if at all, the winter’s storms
Or the funeral of the sun;
I should learn spring by the cuckooing,
And the slug should teach me destruction.

A worm tells summer better than the clock,
The slug’s a living calendar of days;
What shall it tell me if a timeless insect
Says the world wears away?

(Both poems are from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1952)

There are at least THREE amazing animation films to see in New York this holiday season!

The most widely available and marketed is of course Wes Anderson’s THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, which is perhaps my favorite film of the year. I can’t get over the accomplishment of this film, the exquisite details throughout and the spot on teenage tensions, and the fabulous sense of humor throughout. And to top it off the nutty details such as how the possum’s pupils turn into spirals when he’s confused are so delicious.

Then there’s Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s  A TOWN CALLED PANIC now at Film Forum. I don’t want to give away the wild whimsy of this film*. I’ll just say it is insanely imaginative both in the way it’s made and the story itself.  I’d like to see it 3 times in a row to try to comprehend all the ideas used to tell this fabulous tale. *The film is based on a show of the same name which you can watch here.

And finally Nina Paley’s SITA SINGS THE BLUES will be a the IFC Center next week, Dec 25-31.  This film is sensationally original with its many levels of story telling and styles of animation. Here’s the IFC’s  film description:

“Tragedy, comedy and musical collide in this gloriously animated film from Nina Paley, New York’s own “One Woman Pixar” (Wired Magazine). Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three bickering shadow puppets with Indian accents act as comic narrators as these old and new stories are interwoven in a post-modern retelling of the ancient Indian epic, Ramayana, animated in a dazzling mix of traditional and collage animation style, and backed by a soundtrack from legendary 1920’s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw. SITA SINGS THE BLUES follows in the line of Triplets of Bellville, Spirited Away and Persepolis to exemplify animation as a “serious” art form—which does not stop it from being laugh-out-loud funny. A panoply of monsters, gods, goddesses, warriors, sages, pyromaniac monkeys and winged eyeballs fills the screen with vivid color from start to finish, while the narrators’ improvisational debates over the Rama legend join the filmmaker’s own tragicomic story to layer a modern feminist commentary on the ancient Indian legend. The result is a subtly subversive, visually stunning, highly original work that is as enjoyable for children as it is for adults.”

I meant to write this last week, but was quite busy with the announcement of the 2010, Whitney Biennial artists and such so had to take a week off. Now I need now give a shout out to the geeks of the world especially the one I live with. I asked him if “geek” was a positive term, i.e. if I was allowed to use it here, and he said yes.

In any given week, Craig Howarth, my life partner and wonderful pal, will point out to me at least one techie item that change the way I do things. The most recent example is Feedly. I’ve been griping about the Google Reader’s ugly interface for a while now and Craig mentioned Feedly as another way to look at the RSS feeds I’ve gathered. I’m still looking at whether Feedly will work for my needs, but it’s a much more elegant solution to the “how to I scan all this News” problem. In the same week Craig emailed me a new way to skim The New York Times-a kind of headline summation that The Times puts together by section. Again I’m just testing it out, but whether or not I end up using these tools it’s so lovely to have a geek on my side.

A few years ago my Mom gave me a subscription to Poetry magazine and I always have an issue on my bedside table. It’s hard to keep up! My favorite month is usually April’s Translation Issue. Here are two favorite poems, one from the 2007 edition and one from 2009:

This poem New York is by Valzhyna Mort, a young Belarusian poet:

New York

I looked over to my stack of books and saw that I have a very diverse reading list at the moment. I thought it would be fun to list the books and share a favorite quote.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

This is this first book by Stegner that I’m reading. Actually all the books that I’m reading at the moment are written by the authors who I’m reading for the first time. Crossing to Safety is my book group’s pick from last month which I wasn’t able to finish. (I had a good excuse with the new job. Yes I usually finish the book before we meet!) Here’s a favorite passage from the sections I’ve read already:

“In fact, if you forget mortality, and that used to be easier here than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.” pg 4

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho
Translated and introduced by Nobuyuki Yuasa

I’ve read Basho’s work before, but never this one which is of his most renown works. And when I was in the bookstore browsing, the thorough introduction by Nobuyuki Yuaka caught my eye. He places Basho in historic perspective and explains his significant part in the development of the Haiku.

Here’s one of Basho’s haikus at the beginning of a Travel Sketch entitled “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton”

In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald (More on Sebald in The Guardian)
Translated by Michael Hulse

I’ve had this book for several years, so I’m not sure where it came from. I’m guessing I read about W.G Sebald and nabbed it somewhere along the way and hadn’t found time to read it yet. He’s one of those authors I’ve been meaning to discover for a while and even though he is German, I’m reading him in English translation.

“  There they stayed for several days, visiting the famed underground galleries of the Hallein salt mines, where one of the miners made Mme Gherardi a present of a twig which was encrusted with thousands of crystals. When they returned to the surface of the earth once again, Beyle writes, the rays of the sun set off in it a manifold glittering such as he had only seen flashing from diamonds as ladies revolved with their partners in a ballroom blazing with light.
The protracted crystallisation process, which had transformed the dead twig into a truly miraculous object, appeared to Beyle, by his own account, as an allegory for the growth of love in the salt mines of the soul. He expounded this idea at length to Mme Gherardi. She for her part, however, was not prepared to sacrifice the childish bliss that filled her that day in order to explore with Beyle the deeper meaning of what was doubtless a very pretty allegory as she sardonically put it.” pgs.25-26

Code 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

I bought this book last March at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas where Lessig spoke. Lessing now at Harvard, was a Stanford Law professor and the founder of their Center for the Internet and Society, gave a masterful presentation and I wanted to dig deeper into his thinking. This is the next book I’m going to read. The blurb on the back says: “this foundational book as become a classic in its field” and “In this remarkably clear and elegantly written book [Lessig] takes apart many myths about cyberspace and analyzes its underlying architechture.”-Wired.

A new era in my working life begins on Monday and I’m thrilled.

I start my new job working on publicity for the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s an exciting time to be entering the museum. They just launched their new web site last week. And are planning a major building expansion downtown by the High Line. But even without all these major activities, I’d be thrilled to be entering this institution that’s long been one of my go to places in New York. Now I’ll be going to it everyday!

At The Wall

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago and I’m reflecting on how fate brought me to live in there around eight months prior to that historic moment.

I had taken a shine to a German guy who was visiting my college one summer. Having always wanted to immerse myself in another culture and language, I thought I should see if this relationship could work and discover Berlin. During my prior two visits I loved the city’s textures which reminded me of New York’s East Village and was intrigued by Berlin’s  history that is on every corner, branded into every building  and into each conversation. So two weeks after I graduated, I was on a plane at JFK heading for the Tegel airport to move.

I found out that you couldn’t go a day in Berlin without bumping into the Wall especially as I lived near Kreuzberg, which was on the border to East Berlin. And any time you drove to West Germany you had to go via the East-West German border crossing with a passport; you could never forget the division of the countries.

On November 9, 1989–the start of Die Wende (in English: The Turn? that’s an extact translation, or perhaps The Change)– I was a bit overwhelmed as the city was flooded with people and Trabants, the little cars that have become one of the symbols of East Germany. I don’t remember being on the streets, but in the days to come we all were out and about in a daze. West Germans were speaking the way we now talking about Obama: They never thought the Wall would fall in their lifetimes. They said this with tears in their eyes. It was a thrill to see.

At Checkpoint Charlie

My wonderful pal Drew told me the other day that he was reading the Greek poet C.P Cavafy’s work and one of his favorite poems was Hidden Things. Then he promptly read it out loud to me over the phone and I was riveted. I remembered that I had a book of Cavafy’s and went to look for it on the shelf. Finding it, I realized we had different translations and then we read them to each other line by line, liking bits and pieces of each. Below is the 1975 version translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

Hidden Things

From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there that changed the pattern
of my actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I’d begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing—
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.

When we were out in California this August I was finally able to see the incredible wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa (1926-)–by accident. Wandering around the new de Young museum in San Francisco we found them by the elevators.

I first heard of Asawa at Third Avenue Clay, the ceramic studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn where I made small sculptures. I saw her  on the cover of a magazine laying on the table. She was studied at the renown Black Mountain college  with Josef Albers among others. I immediately fell in love with her woven wire pieces with their organic undulations and outer-spacey forms. She was a special find, as besides Nancy Spero (1926-2009, Spero just passed away 0n Oct 18), I knew so few female artists of this generation to be inspire by and who had managed to break through with a language of their own.