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

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit dities of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats, 1820

What can blue, green and brown do for you?

image credit united parcel service of america, incorporated

Beautiful People by Melanie Safka

Beautiful people
You live in the same world as I do
But somehow I never noticed you before today
I'm ashamed to say

Beautiful people
We share the same back door and it isn't right
We never met before but then
We may never meet again

If I weren't afraid you'd laugh at me
I would run and take all your hands and

I'd gather everyone together for a day
And when we gather'd
I'll pass buttons out that say: Beautiful People

Then you'd never be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you
Include him in everything you do.

Beautiful people
You ride the same subway as I do ev'ry morning
That's got to tell you something

We got so much in common
I go the same direction that you do
So if you take care of me
Maybe I'll take care of you

Beautiful people
You look like friends of mine
And it's about time
That someone said it here and now
I make a vow that some time, somehow
I'll have a meeting
Invite ev'ryone you know
I'll pass out buttons for
The ones who come to show

Beautiful people
You never have to be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you
Include him in ev'rything you do

He may be sitting right next to you
He may be beautiful people too

And if you take care of him
Well maybe he'll take care of you


'Cause all of the beautiful people do
And I'm a beautiful people too....

Beautiful People, words and music copyright Melanie Safka

Brave enough to accompany the beautiful

J. Ruth Gendler's astute and loving observations of our human condition are packed tight into The Book of Qualities. She brings forth a world where Beauty, Blame, Sensuality, Complacency, Guilt, Power and many, many others are neighbors, relatives, friends and enemies. Each of the 74 qualities she describes has its own personality traits--some of which you may expect, many you may not, yet few you will dispute. She is a wise woman with a weird and essential vision of who and how we are.

Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry. Beauty doesn't anger easily, but she was annoyed with the journalist who kept asking her about her favorites--as if she could have one favorite color or one favorite flower. She does not usually mind questions though, and she is especially fond of riddles. Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.*

The play of "young and old at once," "mathematics and poetry" and irriation over chosing favorities sent a flash of recognition through me. Still, I wasn't convinced of Gendler's vision here until "Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her." This is true, and I know it from both sides: the stunned and the stunning.

So often, we feel we won't measure up to our visions of greatness, of beauty, of integrity. When we shy away from them, safe, small, lame and ashamed we leave the greatness unattended and lonely.

Consider this in the most literal sense: there are babes aplenty too hot to talk to and few among us who can get beyond that and engage them. Everyone needs love and attention. Even the very, very, very attractive. People're always asking how Regular Joes end up with the knockouts they do. It may be money, it may be power, but those attributes are hollow without confidence and courage at their source.

Consider too, that sometimes it isn't just that we are now too little and lame, but that we don't even believe we should build ourselves into the greatness we can imagine.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. **

Liberate yourself. Liberate the others. Talk to all the 10s you can. Get right up close to the Sun, Apollo. Your blaze of glory is waiting.



*J. Ruth GendlerThe Book of Qualities. Turquoise Mountain Publications, 1984 (pg. 27). Thanks Mark!
**Marianne Williamson. A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3 (Pg. 190-191).

Eleven years ago...

...I bought this issue of Interview and knew I wasn't alone.

Inside, is a page of arty celebrities describing in a sentence or two what beauty is for them. There is such passion and intimacy in those lines. It was so good to know that people were thinking this way--cataloging what stirs their souls.

Elate: magazine cover

I love when ugly girls get pretty! It is my favorite cinematic cliche of all time. When the librairian's bun comes down! When the makeunder is revealed! When Oprah gets hotter every month! Terriffic.

Remember the Simpons episode when Moe gets to be a soap opera star like he always wanted but then Lindsay Negel says they want TV ugly, not ugly ugly? America Ferrera was clearly never ugly ugly, but this cover is so lush it doesn't matter what her show's about at all. Fantastic. Really.

I love these colors too. Any shade of blue-green with some smoky grey-brown cast is pretty much a perfect photograph for me. Plus gold? Totally.

Enrage: magazine cover

Oh man, I'm not sure why, but this cover is really getting to people. I keep overhearing conversations where the phrase "so obviously photoshopped" is hissed as the issue gets flung back on the rack. Why the rage? It's so photoshopped it's not tricking anyone right? Photoshop's complex digital processes don't leave behind toxins our children and our children's children will inherit, do they?

Maybe celebrities really shouldn't promote anything but their own movies. People always sound like such haters when they say this, but maybe it's true. Like, for instance, what's he scowling about? Is he scowling at me because I am polluting the earth? So is he! Movies are made of plastic, Leo. What movie's he coming out with anyway? He's not just on there for that damn Prius is he? Sigh. And to think how deeply I loved him on Growing Pains.

UPDATE DiCaprio's made a documentary about personal environmental responsibility called The 11th Hour, and is showing it at the Cannes Film Festival in France. 20MAY07

What is this thing called now?

Something's up: everything's hot off some presse, lovingly designed with art-deco-throw-back flair. The band names are from dreams of owl machines and everyone's drawing again. Perhaps the common thread is digital zeitgeist backlash: the power for hyperrealism has ceased to thrill the artistic and productive among us, and they've looked to the other end of the spectrum for inspiration.

Though Chris Ware's untouchable in this regard, I'm seeing a lot from the McSweeny's franchise as well. The covers of Wholphin, The Believer and their periodical anthologies are straight graphic nostalgia. They publish so much that I assume any new book I see with that look is theirs. (The cover of Dead Beat was designed by Milan Bozic, a contemporary designer who has nothing at all to do with McSweeny's. Astonishing.) What is this graphic trait called? McSweeny's-y is losing its appeal.

Labeled or labeless, I like what the trend implies:

With computers these days, we can do whatever we want whenever we want and for cheap. Remember when design was slow and expensive and our accomplishments felt momentous and important? Let's make it look like that again. That felt really good. Also there was more stuff everywhere, and stuff's not so bad. Clean design's had its fun—bring on the clutter!

Graphically, we can make anything look like anything we want, so, instead, we daydream about the aesthetic of yesteryear and create it with today's cool tools.

On Repeat: The Lamentable Power of the Gluttonous Loner

My name is Varsity Aesthete, and I repeat music. Repeatedly.

Years ago, when it finally became possible for me, I often enjoyed my music this way. Soundly out of the cassette ghetto, I was awash in the luxury of "repeat all" and "repeat one" - loving the songs more and more each time they played - and as ungrateful and dismissive of this power as the most blissfully spoiled child.

It wasn't until college that I began to push "repeat" with any twinge of anything, and even then it really wasn't much at all. After years of free time alone, I was suddenly 24-hour slumber-partying with all the other freshmen. We'd pile into eachothers' rooms soaking up the social, and it was terrific.

One night, I got to my room and found a bunch of my friends inside chatting - in silence. When I asked what'd happened to the music I'd left on, a pitying glance or two flickered amongst their faces. Finally, very calmly and with a bit of some pointed emotion, I was told that they'd turned it off because I "left it on repeat".

That "left it on repeat" was so loaded for me. The public/private protection was gone and I was out there exposed: naked and gluttonous.

It's only in the past few days as I've been trying to defend this quirk that I've gotten so far in understanding what may be wrong with it. Maybe what's wrong is that it's gross. Gross like eating the large all by yourself in your room alone is gross. You don't want company, it's all for you and no one else needs to know about it. Gross. It's also so bratty. So only child. Christ. What could be more the-world-is-my-oyster-and-always-has-been, oh-when-did-you-get-here? Yikes.

The troubling momentum of self-recrimination has sent me off the deep end here. This post has taken on a guilt-ridden, confessional life of its own. I am beat, I am sad, and I haven't even covered the aesthetic concerns at all.

In Six Names of Beauty, Crispin Sartwell investigates, among many other qualities, the aspect of beauty that comes from rareness, scarcity and innocence.

"My son Sam, now eleven, once crawled across a field at my mother's house toward a huge full moon on the horizon, trying to put it in his mouth. I myself saw the moon differently that night, and am now capable in a pinch of seeing it that way again. But it is a sad and necessary truth about people that the things we experience often become commonplace, that the green on the tree behind the house can no longer be for us a cause of rejoicing unless we receive with it a refreshment of experience in general. We cannot always achieve such a refreshment, and the dullness of the world emerges from our own dullness, from the bluntness of our desires and the and the surfeit of sensation in the course of a life."

Without meaning to, I am perhaps stripping my favorites of their appeal by indulging my desire to enjoy them over and over and over again. There is so much more to say about this, but I am exhausted and more than a little bummed out by this revelation.

Some other time, okay?

The French, Part One

Is it just me, or do the French have the grandeur and glory aesthetic on lock? Honestly, this rendering of their new concert hall, Philharmonie de Paris is alarming in its beauty. What must it be like to live in Paris (eww...I can't believe I just said that. I thought only a certain kind of person breathlessly dreamed of a Parisian life...and frankly I did not think I was one. Ah well. C'est la vie!) surrouned by large stone palaces, grand avenues and women whose blood is couture?

Joan Collins

"The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer."

Courage to be nice

Summoned some easy like sunday morning earlier and said hi to the guys selling "Newports. Newports. Packs and loosies."

My good morning beamed back to me tenfold from the warmed heart of the homeboy with a glistening apple cheeked smile and an appreciative nod to my W4th look.

So glad I had to courage to be nice.

Beauty Shmooty. Grandeur Blandeur

Beauty schmooty!! scoffs Hal Duncan. It's not about the universal grandeur of this or the ennobling glory of that. Your aesthetics are your business. They are the set of your own visceral responses to the stimuli of the world around you.

Those that elate you are just as much a part of your aesthetic as those that enrage you. Elate or enrage, "fight or fuck", you are a taste-making factory all your own.

So what? you say? Well, I'm not sure what other than I like having the conversation open to what we hate and not just what glorifies this priceless existence.

There is, as usual, so much more to this post (including the purpose of sentience and science experiements with angry monkeys), but I will not be tackling it now.

Accountability

I was recently asked how my blog was going.

Just as my cyber spirits lifted, "The Written Nerd's been reading me!", the hard facts burst through the shimmer, so gross and so familiar.

I punked out and joked that I was writing it in my head. This lame response was rightly and clearly noted as such. Off she and the conversation went like so many rolled eyes and fallen crests before.

Accountability is a beautiful thing really. Strong and simple, "Did you do what you said you would?" is always there to face squarely or slink away from. Always.

I must must must remember that the plain truth of what I've actually gotten done is the most accurate indication of who I am, far surpassing any to-do list, no matter how brilliant in scope or range or penmanship.

Integrity, honesty, and truth. The simple, the plain, and the uncluttered all beckon with the beauty of their strength.

"You will like it here. We are noble and unworried. No one at all can fuck with us."

Natural Affinity?

I have this visceral response when some greens and blues come together. I wonder sometimes if the appeal is universal. Are we wired as humans to enjoy the colors in nature?

I heart yes-no

Passed this gem on my bike. Hopped off with an ear-to-ear grin. Wanted to take a big bite! The red, the blue, the old, the new. My, my, my. Looks like candy, right? Mmmm....

Aesthete Guilt at the Movies

Two-thirds of the way through Open Water, I noticed the gorgeous Caribbean seascapes where the couple is dealing with their life and death decisions and desperation. As the skies became saturated in pinks and reds and the striking silhouettes of the clouds sharpened, beauty was again put in its place. Not once mentioned - aesthetically powerful yet irrelevant in light of the present human drama.

Spider release

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Glossary

aesthete: one having or affecting sensitivity to the beautiful especially in art

aesthetic: a particular theory or conception of beauty or art --
a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight

aesthetics: a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty--a pleasing appearance or effect

beauty: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit--a particularly graceful, ornamental, or excellent quality


photo by Cody Pomeroy via flickr

definitions from www.m-w.com

Yapha

It was one of those sparkly days. I'd just been fired and was so delighted to be free and undetermined. This shot was irresistable: the glowing debris so pefectly decorative in the gray-brown field--the yes-no so textbook. Who can gamble on laser eye surgery when vision is so delicious?

photo by Varsity Aesthete MAR06

Betty Borges

organic electric secret rockstar

casually mythical

riding that vein of beauty that fuels enviable existence

capiliaries tributaries dignitaries

disseminating magic

to those who don't know it's free

pirate buddies

stealing grandeur and glory

from where it is going to waste

twenty-six laps around the sun

don't stop now

my plundering sac's only half full

April 2005

photo by tearapen via flickr