randomly, randomly

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  • The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is almost as nice as browsing Terrence Kilmartin’s Reader’s Guide to Remembrance of Things Past.
  • The Naumann Daughters of Dada show is very well documented, if the art isn’t, for the most part, quite as nice as one might hope. The best work there is that of Mina Loy, done in the 1950s, like this collaged piece, “Christ on a Clothesline”:

    • christ on a clothesline

    (There’s a higher resolution version at the NYTimes, though that’s cropped.)

  • And finally, bad phone pictures of the Toynbee tile on the west side of the intersection of 36th Street & Park Avenue:

    • west side of 36th + park

    toynbee tile

    random things to remember

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    posted here so I don’t forget them:

  • A show of the women of Dada at Francis Naumann. Through July 28.
  • Hans Richter at Maya Stendhal. Through September 16.
  • San Fran MOCA has audio of conversations with Robert Rauschenberg that can be downloaded. Also a fair bit of other stuff there.
  • Cosima von Bonin has a New York show at Friedrich Petzel. Connected somehow to German band Phantom/Ghost. Through July 14. 

    • mr. danger

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    Greg Grandin explains why Hugo Chavez calls Bush “Mr. Danger”: it’s a reference to Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, evidently the most famous Venezualan novel. Chavez’s epithet has been repeatedly trotted out as evidence of his craziness – why has nobody in the press bothered to talk to an educated Venezualan, who would presumably recognize the reference? One wonders if all reporting about South America is so elementarily flawed.

    variously, mostly translation

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  • A collection of Surrealist poetry translated by David Gascoyne.
  • Ekaterina Likhtik’s translation of “La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France”. Not sure what I think of it; certainly it seems naked without Sonia Delaunay’s illustrations & the original typography.
  • David Mendel comments on translations of and by Primo Levi. He complains (as do many British reviewers) of grating Americanisms in the existing translations; why do American reviewers never complain of Britishisms?

    • various new(ish) things at ubuweb

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  • Three radio broadcasts by Glenn Gould
  • Yves Klein’s Selected Writing 1928–1962
  • Performances of Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays
  • films by Stefan & Franciszka Themerson
  • Agnès Varda’s film Black Panthers – Huey!
  • A rendition by Ethel Waters of “The Da Da Strain”, an old jazz standard.
  • Primary Texts of American and British Conceptual Art (1965–1971)

    • and many more things I haven’t had time to sift through.

    menu 3

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    “A luncheon which may be difficult, unless you can prevent two of the mail guests revealing to each other that one considers himself a reincarnation of Proust, and another that, though he knows no French, Proust wrote solely for him. It rests with you to steer the conversation away from dangerous subjects, such as cattleyas, light railways, Jews, duchesses and madeleines.

    CROQUES MONSIEUR
    OR
    ALGERIAN RISOTTO

    *

    PRESSED BEEF OR RÔTI DE VEAU

    *

    MUSHROOMS AND CELERY

    *

    PURÉE À LA JANE OR RASPBERRY ICE
    WITH CHERRY SAUCE

    (from Ruth Lowinsky, More Lovely Food, 1935, The Nonesuch Press, London, pp. 13–14. This particular menu is llustrated with a drawing of “an accumulator jar holding water, goldfish, and a miniature ruined temple, made of wood, painted white” by Thomas Lowinsky.)