I love the Olympics. I want to go. That won’t be happening this summer, and so I am pouting. When I pout I often find myself on Google image search looking up whatever it is I can’t have, because apparently I enjoy rubbing salt in my own wounds.
books & travel
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton
“There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task.”
“Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our hearts.”
” ‘Happiness is good for the body,’ Proust tells us, ‘but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.’ It is perhaps only normal if we remain ignorant when things are blissful. [...] Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the autumn wind.”
*photos taken by me in Henry Clews studio in Mandelieu, France
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from my album: giverny
If you aren’t blind, you probably know by now what a Monet painting looks like. Last summer I was lucky enough to visit Monet’s home and garden at Giverny in northern France. Monet designed the entire garden himself, and it then became one of the most famous subjects of his painting career.
Didn’t realize Monet was a painter and a gardener, did you? Multi-tasking at its prettiest and most impressive, I think.
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wilder shores of love. april 25, 1928 – july 5, 2011
As most of you know, I hated Vienna the first time I passed through. I was just leaving Amsterdam, where I had taken cover in a flower market during a rainstorm one afternoon, had spent a few hours floating through the canals on a little boat on another afternoon, and had made a good friend who frolicked along with me through my last two afternoons. When I arrived in Vienna a day after that, it was raining, cold, ugly, and I had just spent 17 hours on the worst train ride anyone has ever taken.
As I have often done in the past, I took shelter in a museum. And then another. I don’t remember what the weather was like in Vienna because I spent nearly all of my time there indoors, walking my blistered feet around with only the artwork for company.
Cy Twombly was an artist I’d never heard of before. When I picked up the information pamphlet in his exhibit, the first word I saw was “math.” I set the pamphlet back down. I had to walk through his exhibit to get to the next room of the museum, and in doing so I passed a tableau that clipped the corner of my vision, and caused me to hesitate. “Wilder shores of love,” it read, in almost illegible script. In fact, I could hardly read it at all when I looked straight at the canvas, but when I had glanced the cursive writing out of the corner of my eye moments before, it had been perfectly clear.
Cy Twombly died yesterday in Rome at age 83. The little I know of his artwork is what I experienced first hand in the museum that day, along with the cursory research I performed when I returned to my hostel later that night. His death doesn’t mean anything to me in sentimental terms, but when I first read that he had died, I immediately pictured the canvas that had caught my eye in the museum. I had actually forgotten about Twombly and about my experiences in the exhibit, which made the sudden memory that much more pleasant.
He was known for incorporating mythology and epic poetry into his artwork, or sometimes mathematical equations (one of my favorites that day was a canvas that had an elaborate equation scribbled all over it in chalk, and after staring at it for several minutes, it looked to me like it was supposed to be an equation for love. I have no idea if that is what the equation actually stood for — I was too afraid to check the pamphlet for what it actually might have meant).
I like to think I do the same thing when I incorporate the books I read into memories or fantasies about my travel experiences. Going back and looking through pictures of Twombly’s work only makes me want to incorporate more mythology, poetry, and scraps of language into my travels and into the reflections that result.
I’m not sure I will ever love Vienna, but I will always really love this painting.
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Day 6: Watts Towers
Guys, I think I’ve found my favorite.
There are so many things I want to tell you about these towers. I guess I’ll start where the tour guide started with me: these towers comprise the largest artistic structure ever created by a single person in the history of the entire world.
I know.
The artist who created them, Simon Rodia, was about 4 feet, 10 inches tall. These towers took him 34 years to build. After 34 years, he simply stopped working — no one is sure if the towers were finished at this time, but it’s clear that Simon certainly was.
He used no scaffolding, nothing to protect himself while he climbed the towers to complete them, save one of those belts that window washers use.
The towers were constructed from a mixture of cement, sand, and concrete, and they were decorated with tiles, old plates and teacups, glass bottles, soda cans, seashells — any discarded glass, tile, or ceramic object he could find.
(look at the little rose designs on some of the plates in here…so pretty, I can’t even be my normal sarcastic self. You win this time, Simon Rodia.)
As you may know, California has seen many nasty earthquakes in its day. Naturally, a structure like this one was bound to raise someone’s eyebrows at some point, and so years after its completion, it was put to an earthquake test. They hooked up a crane to several parts of the middle of one tower and then pulled with 10,000 tons of weight….until finally the crane began to fall, not the towers.
The tour guide was one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. He grew up alongside the towers and he used to play on them as a child, before they were put behind giant white gates, to protect them.
He knew absolutely everything about them. I could tell that even though he’s probably given hundreds, maybe even thousands of tours, recited the same memorized facts, answered the same questions over and over again, he isn’t tired of any of it, at all. He seemed as entranced as we all were, gawking over every little shard of tile, every piece of a soda can whose name we recognized (lots of 7up and Mountain Dew), every line of every design carved into the cement ground that Simon Rodia paved by hand, all alone, for 34 years.
The grounds on which the towers stand were what used to be Simon Rodia’s backyard. There are three towers in a line down the middle, with smaller structures spread out sporadically around them, and everything is enclosed in tall, cement walls. He shaped the entire structure to look like a ship, to parallel a myth from his home country, Italy. One of the gazebo structures in the center is said to strongly resemble a structure from Naples, which he probably would have been familiar with during his childhood, before he moved to the states.
(Here you can see the ship-like shape, as well as the other two people on my tour, and our tour guide, on the back right)
He decorated the outside of the wall that faced the street, giving it a front door and mailbox and address and covering everything in his haphazard tilework, so that his house had what was and still is probably the prettiest curb appeal in the country, if not the world.
I love this place so much. I want to go back. I might go back again before I leave. If not to go in, (you have to pay 7.00) then at least to say good-bye…which sounds overly sentimental, but I can’t help it! Art kills me.
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31 Days of Los Angeles: Day 1
Let’s start with something pretty, shall we?
(I don’t know which is more impressive: the actual content of the picture or the fact that this might be the best picture I’ve ever taken in my life)
The Getty Villa in Malibu is a museum that houses J. Paul Getty’s collection of art and antiquities from ancient Greece and Rome. The villa is located on the coast, right off a little winding street you might have heard of: Pacific Coast Highway. The museum as it exists now is only about five years old; the original was completely redesigned and expanded, and they added a bunch of unreasonably pretty gardens and pools and walking paths because, you know, why settle for something gorgeous when you can have something ridiculously gorgeous.
The fun thing about the galleries is that each one has a different theme! I love themes. Themes in literature. Themed room decor. Themed birthday parties. My particular favorite was the Gods and Goddesses gallery:
…but I must say I also loved the random sculptures sunbathing in various pools, too:
The whole structure is designed to look like that of an ancient Roman house (a wealthy one, I assume?), and everything is made of marble and held up by columns and very tall and grand-looking.
The gardens are called “peristyles” and are designated as either “inner peristyle” or “outer peristyle.” As I understand it, “peristyle” is a pretentious word for a garden that’s enclosed by a colonnade, or row of columns. Some of the plants are arranged like mazes, and there are apparently over 300 different kinds of plants showcased in the gardens. If plants are your thing, you can go here to see a list of all of them.
My day at the Villa was spent in the company of my grandmother and my sister — my grandma is classy and goes to places like this all the time, so she’d already been here a few times, once even to see a performance of a Greek play — the museum hosts these plays seasonally, and they are held in an open-air theater styled after the real ones back in ancient Greek times.
Anyway, as you can see, my grandma and sister are fabulous, and the three of us had a great time together:
I’ve been to the other Getty several times — the one up in the hills near Sunset Boulevard — and that one feels like an art museum. It sounds kind of idiotic to say it that way — obviously it’s an art museum — but when you compare it to this Villa, it makes more sense. That Getty is an art museum; this Getty is where art goes on vacation.
One day down…30 to go.
