Nico
Muhly,

It’s nice to know that taking the train is the same price as “nice” coffee no matter where you go; I had a coffee for £2.20 and a train trip for the same this morning and was…horrified but somehow reassured. I vowed that I would wildly underschedule this trip, and have been successful. Today, after a lunch in Kentish Town, I took the train to the Tate Modern and saw the Louise Bourgeois retrospective which was so great. I love her. I think her vocabulary has, in a lot of ways, heavily influenced my own in its insistence in using the same “ambiguous shapes” (in my case, harmonies) to create a sense of anxiety. Here is one of my favorite works of hers, a bronze called Give or Take (or How do you feel this morning?):

When I was in high school, I took a million photographs of people’s arms with their veins exposed and taped them together in these long, perverted strands, and was really thinking of these Bourgeois pieces. The most outrageous thing, though, is look at this drawing of hers (Untitled, 1986):

and now look at this thing that my friends Urs and Pasquale just sent me, also dating from the late 80’s, drawn by me (I would have been about six years old):

(It’s really important to click to enlarge so you can see the spelling.)

The conclusion is obvious: she totally ripped me off. It’s okay, though. She’s allowed. I am so in love with her Giant Spider (also in her mythology called “Mother”). If you have any opportunity to see anything of hers, run, don’t walk!

Oh, also on display at the Tate is Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth which people have gotten really worked up about for no good reason. The accompanying notes for it, I will say, are really heavy handed: “Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world.” Eh, I thought. But then actually I heard a bunch of people explaining to their children that artists get paid a lot of money to do foolish things (okay, true enough…? but as a thing to tell your kids?) and then I saw, like, nine thousand people doing straddling the crack and having their friends take pictures and then I saw this one Londonish girl doing an erotic photo shoot (at left) and then I thought, you know what? Maybe you do deserve these heavy handed notes, dear Museumgoers.

n addition to reading Carolyn Jessop‘s memoir about her escape from her polygamist family, I have been reading a book about the history of nighttime called At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past which is sort of as fascinating and as boring as it sounds. One of the things I keep on searching for in the book (which perhaps I will encounter later as I’m only halfway through) is the lovely turn of phrase at the end of the Evensong service:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I always liked the “perils and dangers of this night;” there is something nice about the image of people rushing home from church and the implied coziness of the home after having braved such perils. As it turns out (or as might well have been imagined), people in the 16th and 17th centuries were really freaked out by Devils and Hobgoblins and Dank Odours (personal favorite).