Picabia from Zach

Do other animals experience beauty?

"...we want to be swept away. It's particular to our species."
-Michael Cunningham on Radio Lab's "Space Capsules" episode

Beauty isn't the Hand of God. It's much more exciting than that.

Just heard someone on a Studio 360 podcast describe jellyfish as thin layers of cells illuminated from within, and thought, "The world is too beautiful to have no Creator."

I'd just finished mining three recent issues of National Geographic for collage-worthy images, and was still reeling from the page-upon-page assault of obscenely and absurdly beautiful images of our world this magazine unfailingly provides.

Found I had to force myself to finish that glory-of-the-Creator's-hand sentence even though it was only a thought. Felt the drama of each word as if, though mental and private--not carved in stone and borne upon my back as I walked the streets, say--once complete, the sentence would doom me to a small and religious existence.

Happily, as I set these words in the the somewhat more forgiving stone of cyberspace and your eyes and your opinions, I've begun to unpack the idea a bit and have hit upon a far more palatable rational consequence of the overwhelming beauty in the world:

If it is not the hand of a benevolent creator that makes my eyes and brain sing out "Jackpot!" like the hymn of some drunken angel when I see antlers, deltas, jellyfish, sunsets, runners' legs and the like, then that can only mean that from the random fact of the Big Bang (That's still all we're working with origin-wise: God or Boom, right?) we lucked the fuck out and were born onto a stage so too our liking.

Ramifications of this line of thinking and other things to consider as I walk blissfully down the avenue of this hypothesis:

• Perhaps (generous, I know) not every human experiences the beauty of the world as viscerally as I do despite our common Big Bang ancestry.

• What is the neuroscience behind beauty and perception?

• If, like every other thing that's happened since the Big Bang, perceivable beauty exists due to the will of nothing and has continued because it works to keep this Earth party going, then there is a purpose for the world being so appealing, an evolutionary purpose for joy and bliss. Awesome!

image source: http://blogs.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/worldcup/2007/03/extreme_swimming.html

Posting from my phone?

Totally!

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Oh Em Gee! ohemgeeohemgeeohemgeeohemgee

Monu #06: Beautiful Urbanism is a collection of contributions addressing beauty and the urban environment.

Editors Bernd Upmeyer and Thomas Soehl write, "And even though the concept beauty remains elusive we think our issue is successful in shining some spotlights on the issue. One of the themes from the articles is that beauty in urbanism is what one could call an emergent quality. It rarely is in the object itself. It exists in the way we perceive spaces and objects, our vantage point. It is while wandering though the city, resolving contradictions, when we see things that jolt our imaginations that we experience beauty."

Paulina handed the issue to me during a buying meeting at the SoHo offices of Phillip Galgiani, a distributer of European art, photo, and design books. I held it for a minute or two before I realized what I had: special little thing called Monu: magazine on urbanism that's black and white all over with a stern layout aesthetic that very nearly blinded me to its possibly luscious content.

http://www.monu.org/

Cultivating a beautiful, cat-like, nonchalance

"I remember that I would wake up in morning and hear her saying things like, 'You are so beautiful! You are a princess! Look at you!' and as I'd open my eyes I'd realize that she's talking not to me but to the cat."

"You felt like the third wheel."

"Mmm hmm. You know, I know if there'd been another woman, I would have compared myself to her physically. Sort of what does she look like? What kinds of things is my girlfriend attracted to that that I could aspire to? You know, what personality traits? Is she funny? Ah, you know.... But there was just...I didn't know what it was about Sid. I mean I could see that she was a-attractive as a cat. I could see that...she had this nonchalance that was beautiful. She didn't seem to care, really, that she was loved. So those, those were things that I did think about, really--cultivating even."

"You thought about cultivating a nonchalance."

Laughing, "That I was this concerned about it shows you that it would've been a fake, but, yeah, I thought about cultivating -- that."

Since a pet can engage our affection, it also engages all the other feelings that can go with affection: jealousy, and dependence and anger, and all the others. And as soon as any one feeling kicks in, all of the complicated dynamics that happen between any people, any household, any family, inevitably kick in. As with Heather and Sid the cat.

"I felt sort of the same way I felt um you know how when you have a crush on someone and you're friends with their significant other? and all the awkardness as you pretend that, you know, you sort of don't have the feelings you do for this other person? I sort of felt that Sid was the significant other of the person for whom I had feelings. So I felt awkward around Sid. ... I felt like they were together before I was around, and I was an interloper. Y'know all the awkwardness surrounding that."

"And, so, what's it like to be in a love triangle with with, a-another woman and, and a -- cat?"

"Well it was pretty ah diminishing. I mean, it was a beautiful cat."

Excerpt from This American Life Episode #154.
Image from http://luminouslens.baltiblogs.com/whitelight/about.html

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

With The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, George Saunders gives us an hilarious, harrowing, and charming fable for these times. Within this small package are biomechanical creatures you will adore in a setting that raises your IQ to envision, facing the major personal and civic trials of our times. Saunders winks at us throughout, boiling the terrifying complexities of character and politics and ethics down to a cartoonish essence and when through winking, delivers an ending that may make you weep the sweetest tears.

Justin Torres writes beautifully

I met Justin Torres earlier this year in New York working at McNally Robinson Booksellers. He is funny and real and quick and well-read and a dear, dear friend.

Though we have been friends for many months now (during which he'd been published, gotten an agent, gone to Bread Loaf, and received public praise from Dorothy Allison), I hadn't had a chance to read any of his work aside from his staff picks. These book reviews stood out in a I'm-reading-staff-picks-right?-Why-do-I-feel-breathless? kind of way, but I still hadn't experienced his talent left to its own devices.

He moved to Austin, Texas recently but was back in town reading two of his stories at Dixon's Place last week, and I got to hear him then. His simple, lush writing flows so easily and, unencumbered by language, we can be fully present to the stories of pain and intimacy and the complexity of redemption.

It is an exalting pleasure indeed to see skill presented so effortlessly. Witnessing such talent evokes the nonchalant magnificence of nature where eagles and leaves, lions and rivers, whales and orchids exist just as they were designed to and inspire you to do the same.

Most Beautiful Thing of the Day

Last night, looking for a midtown theater, I left a cold, wet, Gothamy street for the warmer, but puzzling interior of 314 West 54th Street. I was off to see Dancer for Money: An Evening of 10-Minute Plays one of which was written by a friend of mine. The address on my ticket lead me to a building bearing two banners: "The Midtown Community Court" and "The American Theater of Actors". What?

I ran into a friend outside and left him to go in and get seats for our group. "It's cool in there," I think he said. "You should check it out." Knowing I was going to a play but reading that I was entering a court, maybe I expected the baroque, wooden interior of an ancient courthouse lending itself easily to a home for the arts. I found nothing of the sort. What I found was much better.

The front door opens onto an oppressively civic hallway of cinder block walls painted white, illuminated by too much cold white fluorescent light with an elevator likely leading to administrative offices you hope you'll never know, bearing subway and neighborhood maps from the Metropolitan Transit Authority. At its end, there is an elevator with an awkward hallway to the right and a small area of many doors and another elevator to the left. The signposts at this crucial intersection? Computer paper framed by Scotch tape intending permanence affixed to various surfaces saying little about theater.

What to do what to do? Having just passed through that blinding cinder block tunnel, the awkward hallway was unappealing, so I headed to the left wondering when this place would start to make sense.

Moments later, the sour aesthetic of modern, public-sector architecture parted, and through a boring doorframe, this exquisite staircase beckoned me to it with silent ballads of public neglect and hymns of private love. My steps and breath slowed. My heart and mind raced. Where did this come from? Who built it? Where are they? Wish I could meet them. Who knows about this? I love this secretive city! Woah, it goes all the way up! Look at that part. And what's down there? Thank you. Thank you Thank you.

I floated in this underwater reverie of confusion, discovery and quiet for many minutes until others came my way, also looking for theater. I called them to me, and once they got there shared this vision with them. Coming up for air, and back in the ordinary world of men, I realized I'd forgotten long ago about finding the theater and made a note to tell you about all this.

Live Action Role Playing

Listening to this week's podcast of On the Media just now, I heard a segment about a LARP documentary called Darkon in which beauty was noted twice. Daniel McArthur, one of the game's participants mentioned, "I've actually got a relationship trying to go on in character with a certain nomad, and I've been following and helping this person more than anybody else, and it's cost me several things -- like my life on several occasions -- but it's beautiful." A few minutes later, Andrew Neel, the documentary's co-director with Luke Meyer said, "I think television, and online role-playing games, and video games, they're kind of the opposite of Darkon because they feed you the fantasy. They remove you from the process of creation and destruction, and that's one of the things that I think makes Darkon so warty and idiosyncratic and in that way beautiful. And so, while Darkon seems so weird, it's actually very human and makes perfect sense to me." It was such a pleasure to come across these words because, while I'm doing this work in part to open more people to the experiences of beauty possible in life, it is unnerving at this point to encounter and consider those that are closed off, and while they both used the word "beauty" to refer to different embodiments of it, these two men had an encouraging ease and familiarity with the concept.

Heart-warmed, and faith in humanity stable, I am left only with the intriguing work of sorting out what each man meant precisely. Neel's comment is easiest to tag as the beauty of imperfection and challenge and agency while McArthur's might be the beauty of giving oneself over to something greater.

Honor your interests, read the news and live beautifully. This is important work.

"What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? Beauty?? Am I kidding?!"

Horrified and violently ashamed, these thoughts raced through my heart, and mind, and gut as I watched The Kite Runner at a preview screening in Maryland Monday night. Khaled Hosseini's novel of loyalty, shame, and hard-won redemption has been made into a powerfully emotional film by director Marc Forster. Immaturity and weakness of character have life-and-death-consequences in this story, and the protagonist confronts internal and external demons at its climax set in the Taliban's fear-and-violence-ridden Afghanistan.

Stunned and weeping, I sat in the theater wondering how I could possibly have chosen to devote my life to beauty when the world is so ugly and violent. "Beauty?" I thought. "Really, Adjua? Beauty? What an irrelevant luxury. Grow up, and do your part. Fix this!" I shouted at the cacophonous volume of thoughts held in the mind.

As I write this, I am riding the train home from Baltimore and am calmer now – assured anew by a few thoughts:

One: Not everyone has to fight on the front lines. The most courageous generals need solace and peace and art and beauty to come home to after the most important battles. The reality of war need not mean the irrelevance of beauty.

Two: There is no sense in dishonoring your strengths straining to fill positions for which you are unfit but which you hold in higher esteem.

Three: With each of us in the role we are best suited to play our team is stronger as a whole.

Four: I have been born in a time and place that do not demand I struggle and fight for every aspect of my existence. This good fortune has allowed me to enjoy a good life including the intellectual awareness and emotional energy to address the problems I encounter and learn of in the world. Guilt at my good fortune is a form of ungratefulness. My day-to-day life is not hard. It is delightful. My responsibility is to enjoy this gift, remain aware of is rarity – its fragility – and fight for a better world for all of us through the work I love and am fortunate to do.

Five: The Indigo Girls sang "Shine my life like a light" and hearing those words at sixteen, I was inspired to live as I wished others did. This deeply challenging directive requires so much to take on but seems the most likely way to change the world.

While I am somewhat soothed by all this, I am not wholly convinced. Afghanistan's recent troubles were made real for me tonight in Forster's film, and I had to reevaluate how I'm choosing to live. Only a fraction of the world's problems will be given such a presentation. As I continue my research on beauty, I must remain aware of battles that need fighting at home and abroad. I don't want to be caught painting pictures of war when it is finally time to get in there and fight.

Darjeeling Limited

Off to see this movie with a bunch of friends from college and work tonight. I read recently that the problem with Wes Anderson's films is that "...they're all good, even when they're not."

Visually, they're so satisfying and emotionally so rich, yet understated, that I always feel I am hypnotized into loving them. Rushmore though, never resonated for me. Maybe because the kid's angst is so familiar in its tragedy - too close to home somehow. Or maybe cause that movie isn't gorgeous in the lush way that The Royal Tennenbaums or The Life Aquatic are.

I'm still wrestling with Life Aquatic. I own it now and watch it sometimes wondering, "Is it because this is good? or just visually (deeply) pleasing? or now familiar?"

I'm going to see Darjeeling Limited for wholly aesthetic reasons. Anderson's cinematographic palette and Adrian Brody's amazing face.

Neuroscience, Bio Class, Day Dreams, Imagination

At times, it is hard to know where to begin.

Should I tell you first that there is, in this exceptional city, a place called The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination? How long should I wait before adding that I recently attended an event there called "Daydreaming, Night-Dreaming, and Stimulus-Independent Thought." And how about that is was a roundtable discussion among five men and women whose work in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry brought them there? Also, it was free. And open to the public. And simulcast on the web. Christ.

I have a crush on this place. If you are not already with me on this, take a look at their events calendar and events archive, and see if you don't fall in love.

Exactly.

Sasha told me about this place and attended the roundtable with me. About fifty of us made up the audience. We surrounded the participants, listening for the first hour and asking questions for the second. Many in attendence were psychologists, and psychiatrists or students on their way to becoming such. Others were like Sasha and I -- credential-free and curious -- there to absorb this heavenly city-as-school experience.

As I sat there listening to scientists talk about the mind, and behavior and day-dreaming, I was taken back to the lecture halls of my early college career as a biology student. I'd attend lectures dutifully, and for a while took notes with the best of them. Some aspect of this did not agree with me though, and my notebooks became festooned with more and more elaborate drawings and less and less information about the biological sciences.

At the time, I thought, "I absorb this information better when I am not distracted by the task of note-taking." This may have been true, but to secure the grades I'd need to continue in the sciences, this plan needed a level of support on the bent-over-a-textbook-in-your-dorm-room end of things that I was unwilling to provide. I like listening to scientists, but do not care to do what it takes to be one. No matter. This frees me up to be a fan of the sciences, a role I happily found myself in last Saturday at the Philoctetes Center.

Oy - another surprisingly confessional post.

All I meant to say was that, hearing neuroscientists talk about what they do, and do not, know about the mind is exciting and humbling and beautiful because they don't know much. Just like the universe is right out there, and we know so little about it, the mind is right in here and just as alien.

During the Q&A, John Antrobus mentioned that there are 100,000,000,000 neurons in a human brain and 100,000,000,000,000 synapses amongst them. Here is a video showing how they work together -- a video which says, but does not show, that this neural collaboration is what creates new ideas.

Stalin was gorgeous. Discuss.

There's a new book out called Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. The first photo you see here, of Stalin at 24 years old, graces the cover and caused an uproar of blushing and deep ambivalence among my fellow booksellers when we saw it last week. Even now, as fountain-haired young Joseph stares back at me, I search the nobly un-smitten crevices of my mind for words to tell you what I am feeling. Words don't come, but this image does.

The 20th century has morphed into a lush, primeval jungle swamp, and I stare, enchanted, at this face which is now the massive siren bloom of some bewitchingly decorative, flesh-fueled monster plant. My life-and-death encounter is scored by the chirping, whirring creature sounds of fellow swamp-dwellers. Their disinterested emissions become a horror film's tension-inflating string section and within me, the signal "Threat! Threat! Threat!" struggles to overpower my urge to gaze on with abandon. Beneath me, my froggy legs shudder and twitch as I summon the survival-loving restraint of my raw amphibian brain to keep from springing forth into the smug and gaping mouth of this gorgeous carnivore.

Back here, in the 21st century, I crave information about this man for the first time ever. Well-done Montefiore.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Eight hundred years ago, on September 30, 1207 CE, in what is now Afghanistan, the Persian philosopher Rumi was born. Upon his death in 1273, his followers founded the Mevlevi Order within Islam's mystical Sufi tradition. Its members are commonly known as the Whirling Dervishes. Deep reverence and affection for this man and his work can be found in religious and secular contexts all over the world.

Two lines from one of his many poems inspired the name of this blog. My dear, dear high school friend Elizabeth once sent me a card including the words "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. -Rumi" - a brief, yet potent introduction.

Here they are again in their original context:

SPRING GIDDINESS

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

The lines "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." are the perfect touchstone for the work I am doing here. They remind me to occupy myself with the pursuit of beauty through my intellect and my actions, and that the efforts and successes that come with this work are celebrations of the glory of existence.

http://www.rumi.net/

Rumi's Wikipedia article

UK Rumi website - with biography

Crime and Ornament

Found this gem of a book at The New York Art Book Fair Friday afternoon. I can't dive in just yet cause I've got to finish Crispin Sartwell's book Six Names of Beauty for my art and beauty book club, but I'm so ready for this one when the time comes. [link to Sartwell's website]

Walking around the city passing the old, stone structures that remain from an older New York I often sigh and lament the obvious temporal and financial constraints that keep us from living with such earthy grandeur.

What rarely finds a way into that lament is any notion that people might not build The Ansonia, The Dakota or The Metropolitan Museum of Art today - even if they could.

The book is an anthology of essays responding to a hundred-year old essay by Adolf Loos about the deep, societal problems ornament exposes.

Email conversation October 2005

ADJUA
Do you know the word in Japanese for the feeling you get watching geese take off for flight or how I can look that up?

DUSTIN
Well, which feeling do you mean? Like the small but enveloping sadness that comes from an ennobled moment of beauty? And do you want the noun form of it (like "beauty), or the adjective form (like"beautiful")?

ADJUA
Yes exactly. I don't know that I would have said sadness, but well said. I want to know how it's different and differently used if you have that information too.

DUSTIN
Okay, so the words you're looking for are probably "wabi" and "sabi". They come as a coherent set, adjectives for the much vaunted Japanese aesthetic. Wabi means, essentially, simplicity. It is more loaded than that, but that's the best, and probably most accurate translation. Sabi is loneliness, and the character used here is actually the root for the basic word for "lonely" in Japanese: sabishii. Sabi can be translated as an elegant loneliness if need be, but loneliness is better. The same character can, according to my dictionary, indicate the death of a priest in the buddhist canon. Also, it is a homophone for rust, which I thought fitting. The real reason these words are difficult to describe is really just usage history.

The words, in the way I've described them to you, together, came to be used for the Japanese aesthetic about three hundred and fifty years ago, at the same time as the devolpment of what we now see as traditional Japanese art forms. That is, the art and the lexical means to describe them were developed together. These concepts are not as ancient as might be expected. Part of that has to do with our perception, as westerners, of the whole kanji system as unchanging and primitive and beautiful. Another part might have to do with the Japanese use of these terms. These words, indicating as they do an idea inevitably wrapped into Japaneseness, are political. This was more true during the end of the nineteenth century, and had more to do with the struggle between the old Japanese empire and its new nationhood, but is still true to a lesser extent now.

The terms are also highly commodified. The aesthetic they describe sells for a lot of money when well executed, and no one is willing to pay more than those Japanese desperate to buy into the myth of their own poignant, existential appreciation. That said, they do indicate an emotion that I think everybody feels, and I wish more people were aware of the simplicity and loneliness around them.

In use, by the way, things are said to have more or less wabi or sabi. For example, grey geese that fly with the moon on their wings (thank you Julie Andrews) have a whole hell of a lot of Sabi. While I was in Japan, I spent some time learning tea ceremony where these ideas are paramount.

Why do you ask anyways? Also, sorry to write all that shit. I had a minute to think about it today. By the way, if your feeling is less loneliness and more ecstatic upwelling, try something from the Sufi tradition. Read some Rumi, maybe.

http://content.ornith.cornell.edu/UEWebApp/images/fig2_1083.jpg

Sean Kingston-Beautiful Girls

Music Videos - Beautiful Girls

Christina Aguilera-Beautiful-Alternate version

Worrying about Emerson

At a lecture on Jack Kerouac earlier this month, I remembered how important the Transcendentalists were to me when we learned about them in high school and how this work I'm doing now emerged around that time.

So, I've been looking forward to reading their work again and said as much to a friend's roommate the other night at their Williamsburg apartment. She surprised me by asking why I liked them so much. When I told her because they tapped into the sublime, transcendent, life-affirming moments available to us, she pursed her lips and shook her head and held forth for a while on the limited relevance of their work due to their privilege of time, leisure, solitude and intellect.

Her question was: What good is this work? What good is wonder? What good beauty, awe, transcendence and all the rest if it can only be pondered by the privileged?

My question is: Is it even true these concepts are only pondered by the financially and socially privileged, or is it that they are the only ones whose intellectual work is documented and disseminated?

The biggest question is: Why let class guilt deter us from contemplating the human condition - ever? We ought to accept privilege, use privilege, do the work and be sure to take on the challenge of communicating and applying what we discover as broadly as we can. If the Transcendentalists were conceptually incestuous and insularly self-reflective in their privileged, intellectual pursuits, then it is the work of the rest of us - privileged and not - to get at what they discovered and unlock its worth.

Emerson's essay, The Transcendentalist

image credit http://www.writespirit.net/authors/emerson

At the Fishtank

A few hours ago, Dustin and I stood before this fishtank in a beloved Brooklyn dive bar at 4 something in the morning regarding the crudely-rudely moldy-grouted in-tank plexiglass divider whose purpose he will have to explain to me again at some point.

Encountering this shameful hack job of aquarium alteration with my aesthetic ally, I confessed somewhat conspiratorily, something like, "Uggchhh! You see this? This is what I originally thought my aesthetic revoultion was going to be: ridding the world of shit like this."

Bless his heart, he scoffed even as I hurriedly began alluding to how my work is happily about so much more than "good design" already, and offered up this gem of insight and recognition, "No. No. No. Somewhere, this is beautiful precisely because it looks like this. Your revolution is about the fact that this is beautiful in a way you're not seeing. Your revolution is about awakening people to all forms of awe and beauty."

Indeed.

Discussing the subtleties of beauty with Fabio.

I met a man named Fabio the other night, and in this case he was a neatly dressed, friendly Italian graphic designer living in New York City. When he asked what I did, and I told him that I write about beauty, he nodded politely, paused and confessed his difficulties with that word.

Fabio's boss often says his work is beautiful, and that makes Fabio cringe. Not because the man abuses the word making it mean less each time, but because for this designer, the word smacks of inconsequential, meritless surface fluff--nothing he wants his work to embody.

I countered that there is more to beauty than its surface and that in terms of design, beauty can refer to the excellence of form and function working together as in nature where everything looks the way it does because it must.

He hadn't considered that aspect of beauty before, and appreciated my perspective.

Terrific.

Relating can be beautiful

Chat that transcended past betrayals with friend I thought I'd have to hate.

Noticing the huge grey eyes of my customer crush for the first time today. Traveling with him past custy/worker border into the sweet dance of flirtatious special attention before and after those eyes.

image credit screenshot from http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/Language-Basics/Log.htm

Sincerity: Finally talking with my manager about being frustrated and unhappy at work. Months of tension and anxiety transformed by openness and honesty and valuing my perspective into calm realism in the face of an imperfect world.

Universe: Big bright moon tonight. At some point in highschool, the terrific Dermot O'Reilly gave us an astronomy test with the True/False question "The moon is a hole in the sky through which sunlight appears." That beautifully absurd notion often surfaces when I'm confronted with a full, and shining moon--the magic-eye moment when it looks true is awesome. All my best, Mr. O'Reilly.

Deception: Remembering that despite the powerfully sexy look and feel of Monocle magazine, I have yet to be wowed by its content after four issues--and not snatching one up immediately, like I usually do.

Courage: Reading a preview copy of Pierre Bayard's new book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. This brave and serene Frenchman, no less than a professor of literature, has written a book-length essay on the virtues of skimming and not being ashamed all in the service of experiencing literature as a whole rather than in fractured parts. The emperor doesn't read. Long, live the emperor.


image credit Jason Ku and Brian Chan [link]

Beautiful like a Movie

Watching Miranda July's film, Me, You and Everyone We Know tonight, I wept several times, panicked and forgetful wondering where all the beautiful moments were in my life. Then I remembered a fully transcendent hour I spent diving for plastic stick-on gems that had fallen off swimmers one summer.


I was a camp counselor, she was a little camper kid. She found the first one, then lost it in the hectic pool. I dove under to help her find this tiny sparkling speck in the huge and sparkling pool. After the miracle of finding it and the accident of finding others as we searched, we continued on like that for what thankfully felt like forever.


We glorified a fad and made treasure of debris. We made time wait and were nameless. We were young and old pirates and mermaids together.

Thanks, Sunshine. It's been six years since then, and it can be harder at 13, but I hope you're still having beautiful afternoons like that one.

image credit Tim Laman

What if campaign posters were gorgeous? What if we didn't have to look at shoddy art as a matter of course? What if everyone loved what we loved?

Beautiful propaganda is more effective.

image credit http://www.gotellmama.org/

Miru Kim: Naked City Spleen

photo credit Miru Kim

New York Times article on urban explorers

META + WEE HOURS + THE UNIVERSE = SOUL SOCK

A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe. Robert Heinlein

One year in

Happy Anniversary, Hundreds of Ways. A toast of love and thanks to you for reminding me who I am and what I can do. You are surprising and challenging and easy. You are wonderful, and we can do anything we envision. Be brave, be good, have fun, love tons.

photo credit Jeff Ragovin

My favorite story is a beautiful one

An invaluable tale for leaders and dreamers, hopeful outsiders, stifled insiders, budding pilots and budding mystics. It is the story of a seagull who believes there is more to life than scavenging, sets out to follow his dream and creates so much more than he ever could have imagined. Fear, failure, shame, dedication, passion, wonder and glory are all present in this gorgeous story. It is desert-island, time-capsule worthy.

To purchase the book from Simon and Schuster click here. To read it now, click here for the virtual book (cool!) or here for plain text.

Art and Beauty Bookclub at McNally Robinson Booksellers NYC

I started a bookclub at McNally Robinson Booksellers in New York City earlier this year. Our first three books were on fundamental aspects of the visual arts. The first was a catalog of the perceived artistic temperament; the second was an investigation of the experience of viewing images--paintings in particular; and the third was on the existence and signifcance of photographs.

On September 12th, at 7pm we will be discussing Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff's study of the psychological and biological characteristics in humans that respond to physical beauty. I'm particularly excited about this book because Etcoff's premise is that while beauty can be analyzed into abstraction, it remains fundamentally powerful to human beings on a physiological level.

The bookclub is open to all and free of charge. Come through, it's a great time.

"That's what we're here for."

Physical beauty is what many people first think of when I tell them about this project. In the beginning, I was resistant to that aspect of beauty being a part of this work--muddling my lofty endeavors, but in my meanderings, I've found that's where my mind is at too. There's power and privilege and oppression and standards to think of when you talk of physical beauty. It's worthy. Plus, we're human beings.

Still there's more so much more. Beyond sex, there's the ethereal beauty of the universe. There's the beauty of peace and tranquility. There's the beauty of elegant design. And of course, there's the beauty of integrity, which, I'd like to think, runs through it all.

I'm working on a longer post now though, which is alas--no not alas, damn it--which is about the beauty of intimacy and dedication as experienced through the physical qualities of our bedfellows.

It's righteous and all to push ourselves beyond sex, but as a co-worker explained some months ago, "That's what we're here for."

photo credit unknown as per source

On Hotness, Part Two

I found myself in bed with a beautiful friend a few weeks ago touched by the beauty of his body, his discipline, and his sacrifices--knowing it was a gift.

Despite the years I logged charting and listing and inspirational collaging, it wasn't the pages of Shape, Self, Runner's World, Vogue or Elle that made the difference.

Seeing a beautiful man lain out before me, bathed in natural light and looking like a woodland-nymph Adonis, or towering above me ripped like David, made me want to make the best of my flesh in a way no magazine ever could.

Vive la sexualite.

That Vein of Beauty

A few years ago, I wasn’t feeling well and told a dear friend as much. She wrote back a beautiful, beautiful letter, and in it, among other, spectacularly loving things, she reminded me, “You have direct access to that vein of beauty that is fading ever faster from the sights of daily life.” Two years later, I wrote another dear friend a poem for his birthday and passed along the gift of that phrase calling him an “organic, electric, secret rock star, casually mythical, riding that vein of beauty that fuels enviable existence.”

In the complex expanse of human existence, there is running through the joys, irritations and boredom we all may experience, a beauty which takes many forms and which can be accessed “hundreds of ways.” That vein of beauty stirs my soul, and the project of finding people who know it, and figuring out how to connect others to it, is the deep joy of my life.

When beautiful moments resonate for me, I get chills down my arms and legs. It is happening more and more, and it’s a sign that I am closer to that vein than I ever have been before. This physical reaction is especially convincing when it happens in the middle of the afternoon at work because it’s easy to transcend ordinary existence in the wee hours of the day blogging about aesthetic experience listening, as I often do, to a mix of beautiful, contemporary music made for me by the first boy I ever loved, and who I still have the pleasure to know, even in this anonymous city.

When I’m writing here, each post is a chill of sorts that I’ve identified, worked out, verbalized and sometimes illustrated. From the outset, at 15 years old, my goal in this beauty project was to stay connected to those moments when I saw the beauty in the world clearly. I could not be happier that it is happening already, even through these first several months of blogging experiential aesthetics—merely the first stage of this work.

Transcendence, Part 1

I'm reading a fascinating, scholarly account of the eccentric artistic temperment in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower's Born Under Saturn. The book is 300 pages enumerating the oddities of artists from Greek and Roman antiquity through the French Revolution.

I'm especially interested in the idea that in order to tap into the artistic element available in man's existence, perhaps these artists had to, or found they were only able to, access it by consciously or unconsciously altering their existence as compared to that default of ordinary men.

Beauty's so meta

I once wrote myself a note that said, “I want to marry a scientist and live in New York forever.”

New York is infinite, and I want its changing continuity to be the backdrop of my whole life. I want to give myself over to it on the faith of my 27 years here and commit—all the while knowing that long, slow stays in forests and oceans are part of that commitment. I want to make a life with someone who’s voraciously curious about how things work and whose passion can overtake them keeping them up at night running on fumes like mine does. I want to make children who are the products of an artist’s and a scientist’s lusts for life.

It’s so poetic too, the marriage of art and science, but I don’t know any young scientists really well yet so it’s hard to say if my poetry can withstand the reality of it all.

I found very encouraging support for this plan a few weeks ago while listening to NPR’s art and culture radio program Studio 360. Astrophysicist Michael Salamon was talking about the beauty he experiences in his work and his frustration with Walt Whitman for being blind to the beauty so present in that field. He defends his profession valiantly here and scoffs easily at Whitman's disinterest knowing deeply that he is blessed with an understanding Whitman lacked. He also believes that given the chance, he could turn Whitman on to the analytical side of astrophysics.

Salamon was a freshman at MIT when he first experienced beauty in physics. Janis Joplin played in the background as he sank into a deep meditation struggling to understand Maxwell's four elegant equations explaining electrodynamics. After many hours of this, the concept opened up to him in an explosive moment of beautiful clarity. He works at NASA now--in the Universe Division.

Here’s the Whitman:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Salamon loves this poem, but it also bothers him to hear Whitman, of all people, dismissing the beauty of physics because for him, knowing the workings of the universe makes its beauty that much more beautiful.

I understand Whitman's dismissal though because I'm fully guilty of it myself. Aesthetic theory frustrates me to no end, and I continually find myself walking away from books telling myself that focusing on the way we experience beauty is more essential to this work than reading the work of these criminally detached scholars. Ultimately though, it’s just dense complex material I haven’t mastered yet, and I have to be honest with myself and acknowledge that what I am seeking with my study of experience are the very nuts and bolts these theories provide.

Eventually, by studying both experience and theory, I may come to an explosive understanding of my own when the warm, murky mystery of beauty becomes crisp and clear and solid. I used to worry that knowing too much about beauty would ruin it, but if I get to experience what Salamon has, it'll only be that much more beautiful.

Bring on the Kant.

Michael Salamon, http://www.physics.utah.edu/people/faculty/salamon.html
Eagle Nebula http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_314.html
Walt Whitman http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/477bg.jpg

Sweet Fat Yes

Earlier tonight, sitting here in the dark, before this glowing screen, I raised my head and saw, outside—tan, and warm, and somehow plump—a gorgeous, gorgeous moon. Instantly crushing on the Universe, I sat here bewitched remembering where we are.

We are living on Earth. Every wonderful, irritating, ordinary thing that happens to any of us during a day is happening on a pretty blue sphere spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning through a dark and mysterious sea of nothing.

There is something about seeing the Moon—knowing it more intimately, more quietly, than the Sun—that reminds me that this ground below me—knowable and sure—is actually the surface of ball I am stuck to somehow, and above me, over my head, higher than my roof, past the tallest building around, above the clouds, and past the air, there is a sweet, fat moon, then other things, and then nothing.

Outside, without anything built or growing above me, I reach up and touch the Universe.

Jerome, mid-30s, MTA transit worker, NYC 09MAY07

Varsity Aesthete: What is beautiful to you?
Jerome: Something new and different.
VA: How do you react to beauty?
J: Stare, fantasize, imagine.
VA: How often do you experience beauty?
J: I don't know.

Beauty is Different

Sometimes, when people list what is beautiful to them, that list gets corrupted by what they merely like. When something is “beautiful”, the key difference is the transcendent quality of the reaction to it.

Yesterday, I was reading one of my own lists from 1997, and this corruption is evident. Beauty has a slowing, contemplative power that listing won’t often support. It’s so easy to be distracted by good feelings, get lax with my criteria and realize I’m so totally in love with the world. I might start with “the ocean” recalling times spent floating in it and the sense I had of being part of something enormous, powerful, sparkling and delightful, and a few lines later find myself writing, “Strawberry Mentos” because they’re, you know, really, really good.

“Strawberry Mentos” is the clearest anomaly on my 1997 list, but there are many entries that don’t truly fit. In my defense, my whole sense of this project and of myself was so different then. I was spending a lot of time alone and outdoors, and was just often in a woozy, dreamy state in general. Those Mentos weren’t actually beautiful, but I discovered them at a time when everything was lofty and elevated and special, so they easily made the cut.

Comedian Eddie Izzard does a great bit on the word “awesome” that is useful here. “Awesome” used to be a word with deep theological connotations. The idea or presence of God was awesome. It struck fear—all-encompassing, fully glorious, thoroughly humbling fear—into the hearts of men. Izzard complains specifically about the use of “awesome” in marketing copy (“Awesome!”), but whenever we say someone’s party was awesome, or their haircut is awesome, it’s a very different usage than the original. With beauty, word usage is important because if you aren’t clear you can end up moony-eyed and overly sentimental in a hurry. The difference between liking something and thinking it’s beautiful is that the beautiful thing will alter your state, even if only momentarily, sending you beyond yourself and into it.

Living in New York City, getting to see the sky in full is rare, so when, on the waterfront, or an outdoor subway line, I find myself with a clear view of the sky and am really open to its presence, my heart beat changes, and small thoughts fall away. I find myself thinking about the unique expansiveness of the sky, and how I want to lay under it for hours and hours and lose myself contemplating its endlessness. Alternatively, when it’s, say, really nice and sunny out, I can, you know, note that and go about my business. I’m not mesmerized by it or internally transported anywhere. It’s simply nice out. I’m really happy, sure, but there’s not the heavy take-me-from-myself-and-into-what-you-are that true beauty elicits.

This is an exciting distinction. I’m not so interested in what people like. I’m interested in what sends them and in their ability to be sent. I’m interested in their vulnerability to beauty.

On Hotness, Part One

I’m a leg man myself, and Regina Spektor is wrong.

A few weeks ago, we had the first glorious days of new, good weather here. Downtown Manhattan, the aesthetic capital of this great nation, parades beauty like pigeons and litter year-round: it has nothing to do with you, it's not a big deal, and it's fucking everywhere. Everything changes though when the weather becomes kind and we can wear what we like. That’s when the 10s come out, and, in this city, the 10s go up to 11.

As I strolled along that week, Spektor's Summer in the City was on repeat in my mind, and it's not cleavage, cleavage, cleavage. Summer in the city is hamstrings, hamstrings, hamstrings.

As a woman, I feel such one of the cool kids when I see men struck dumb with delight as the bold and beautiful strut past, and, in those days, I saw much pedestrian traffic stall in the presence of the hot-pantsed and shiny-legged. The best was two men walking down the street, one ancient and struggling with a serious cane, his companion bopping slow alongside him, young and able-bodied.

Here comes a 10 in shades, a chic black top, killer killer khaki hot pants (tailored cuff!) and the legs and gait to match. At first, Able Bodied is just basking in the passing eyeful with Struggling Cane at his side wrapped up in his all-too-familiar physical drama letting the 10s of the world pass him by, as usual. It's too good a show though, so Able Bodied stops him and gently turns him around saying, “Come on man. You can’t miss this.” A noble companion. She passes and they stand there, off track and male gazing with abandon.

I felt so good seeing Struggling smile through his difficulties, that moment so improved by a glimpse of a woman he will never be with. I loved, too, that Able knew it was worth disrupting Struggling’s flow to share the hotness.

This kind of scene romanticizes the objectification of the female body for me and brings up all kinds of inconvenient questions. I will not bore you with those questions.



*Jessica Alba, by Terry Richardson for GQ cover June 2007

Who Broke My Window?

"I told the truuuuuuuuuth!" Give me chills everytime. Beautiful.

Standing Ovation

Standing ovations are heavy. The performance is over, applause has begun, and I often find myself assessing my cojones for the boldness to be first out of my seat. Some tight-fisted little thing in me says I am weighing the critical merits of the performance when what I actually am is chicken and facing a tragic glitch in my constitution.

I recently saw Stephen Petronio's work onstage at the Joyce Theater and absurdly faced this dilemma. At turns sexy and powerful, accessible yet deliciously opaque, Petronio's dancers and choreography answered the nagging "Why dance?" with more grace, pathos and sex appeal than I've ever seen before.

So why wasn't I first out of my seat when the applause began?

Because I find it difficult sometimes to be open and generous with my love. It's a small and rotten thing this feeling and requires an almost physical redirection of self to make the shift. The times I feel most beautiful are when that wrenching shift isn't necessary to let out the words "I love you", or "Thank you" or "Bravo!" and I am free enough inside to pour love out.

UPDATE Since writing this post, I've found myself markedly more open with my love. Lots of good things are coming together, and that's part of the change, but writing through this helped a great deal

A Thing of Beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
-John Keats, 1818