Watteau's world

I'm reading Jed Perl's "Antoine's Alphabet," a book about the French painter Antoine Watteau. Perl makes an alphabetical attempt at putting Watteau at the center of modern Western painting. Every letter of the alphabet has entries that range from informative to descriptive to tangential. Under "F," for example, Perl writes about Fans, Flaubert, Flirtation, Fragments, and Friendship. Some of the entries are just anecdotes from Perl's life that have to do with Watteau's themes; others are stories about people indebted to Watteau or concerned about his influence. And what is Watteau all about? This paragraph struck me as an enticement: The human mind is artless, elegant, clumsy, penetrating, chaotic, obscure, a hopeless mix of serenity and hysteria, the lofty and the low-down, clarity and murk, and Watteau pulls his drawings and paintings straight out of this messy material, these moment-to-moment shifts in perception, apprehension, and feeling. His paintings suggest a mind that is, like all our minds, at once self-indulgent, unreliable, relentless, lucid, obtuse, unruly. And like the rest of us he allow his thoughts to drift, his moods to shit, his focus to go out of focus. We've all woken up in the morning feeling blue and then, an...

Davenport's Balthus

I just finished reading Guy Davenport's A Balthus Notebook. Lots of instigation in this book, and I thought I'd share one bit, if only because it speaks to my newfound love of cave painting: Centuries before Plato beauty was a kind of good, and the appreciation of it a pleasure. Beauty has also traditionally been an outward sign of the soul's beauty. Balthus integrates this ancient tradition with Darwinian naturalism (beauty as sexual attraction). Darwin suspected that there was always "something left over" after sexual attractiveness has done its work, and that this something was what we call beauty, and that it may have given rise to art. The grace of line in a Lascaux horse is not the horse, but something that has been abstracted from it....

Clapping music

Thanks to Matt, I'm rediscovering the music of Steve Reich. I liked his pieces from the 1970s and '80s, and then somewhere around "The Cave," I stopped listening. I found the classic piece from 1972 "Clapping Music" in its many permutations on YouTube. So much of Reich's music from this time is about phasing, the musical technique of repeating the same pattern in different tempos. To me, you can get a similar effect by playing Reich's music at slightly different times. You can phase his phasing in and out. So here are six embedded videos to phase in and out as you please. You can press stop and play and do the same thing Steve Reich used to spend hours doing when he was cutting tape....