“A guy told me one time don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
DeNiro in Heat
I’m not sayin’ I’m just sayin’. Also, speaking of the virtues of mobility, can someone please code up an iphone app which allows me to geocode my itunes library and dynamically generate playlists based on where I am in the city? A weather-based version would be nice too — where I could link songs to specific weather conditions so that those songs would automatically appear in a playlist based on a given day’s weather? Get on it, Internet!
I’m not asking whether or not the republic is worth saving, just whether art has that kind of potential. I’m leaning toward yes, for reasons that remain fuzzy in my brain, but maybe that’s just what I want to believe. I know for sure that art can destabilize institutions and remake the world in violent ways — I just wonder if it can also heal and preserve.
A quick thank you to everyone who stopped by the opening of Polyfarm… Pussy Peak… DIS Friday night. It felt good to finally get the work out in front of people, and the response has been variously great and troubling and therefore perfect. More on the future in a little bit.
Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (detail)
At the heart of Manet’s work is an unalloyed erotic sensitivity — similar to Baudelaire’s but without the poet’s rhetoric of torment. Manet responded to the sensuous charge in things and in paint and to the sexual charge in people, not as anything hidden and shadowy but as the very flavor of civilized existence. His contemporaries, bemused by their changing world, could not relax enough to appreciate his life-affirming joke: that in rendering the animal in the bonnet or frock coat, he conferred an integrity on living men and women that made them proof against whatever dehumanizing forces the world could inflict.
