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self-portrait
Friday, August 05, 2022
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Tuesday, August 02, 2022
hugh gallagher | college admissions essay
3A. ESSAY: IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:
ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
*
"It seems that Hugh Gallagher wrote this for a national writing contest, and that an Urban Legend has since arisen that he wrote it as an actual application essay.
"18 June 1998, update. Hugh Gallagher emailed me(!), and said: "I was happy to see my college essay on your site (by the the way, I did send it to colleges)". So that's that Urban Legend laid to rest, then? He also said "... and my first novel, Teeth, was published by Pocket Books this Spring. ... It's a coming of age tale about a guy with really messed up teeth, who goes travelling around the world instead of fixing his mouth." If it's told with anything like the style and wit of what follows, it should be great!"
Susan Stepney,
Professor of Computer Science, University of York, UK
Professor of Computer Science, University of York, UK
Saturday, July 23, 2022
shelley roden | i had fun making it
The cue sheet for “Lightyear” had more than a thousand entries. Not every cue would make it into the final mix, a reality the team addressed with admirable ego detachment. When a sound gets cut or drowned out, Roden told me, she tries to take the attitude “I had fun making it. I loved it. It was loved at one point.”
Shelley Roden, sound effects artist
Friday, July 22, 2022
ramon kubicek | bees of the invisible
Bees of the Invisible
In a 1925 letter the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of the artist’s task in transforming objects into art: “We are the bees of the invisible. We…gather the honey of the visible in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” [qtd in notes (p. 70) to Duino Elegies, North Point Press, 2001]. This task of working with materiality until it becomes a part of our inner lives and then offering it up to the world as “honey” or “art” is not about making money or a big social splash. It is about receiving, and then giving, to others, to the gods, a gift.
I like Rilke’s articulation. Art and honey. It might be easy to see each as non-essential, until one imagines them gone from the world. Today, we live in a time of ecological stress and our heedless treatment and killing of bees threatens both the natural world and our own survival. This mistreatment exists in parallel with our loss of inner life and our confusion about the role of art.
People have been making art for at least 10,000 years. The earliest cave paintings celebrate the sacred and the wondrous, be that through healing, giving thanks, or supplication to the gods.
Bee cultivation and honey gathering are at least 8,000 years old. Cave paintings in Spain show bees and the collection of honey. Other petroglyphs suggest that people collected honey from as long ago as 10,000 years. So, making art and raising bees for honey have a similarly ancient past.
We also know that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians built their temples on sites belonging to specific gods, and created temple art and rituals (afterwards changing to dramatic plays) to such an exacting standard that their enactment would attract the presence of the sacred. The theory being that the god had no choice but to come if the preparations were perfect. (See Jane Harrison on the theory of “dromenon”).
What a wonderful basis for the making of art! And wherever there are people gathered to appreciate art, the theory goes, the sacred is present—as long as the mood is not too somber or overly serious. The belief in such a construction maintained ancient Greek culture. People went to the ancient Greek drama festivals to see their favorite plays. In the process they might experience catharsis, healing, transformation and entertainment.
Similarly people have consumed honey for thousands of years because of its sweetness and as a base for herbal medicines. Bees were also studied as builders of communities and it has long been known their collection of pollen allowed for the fertilization of plants—both flowers and food-bearing crops. Bees do what they do; they gather, they transform. Honey is the result.
When Rilke writes in his letter that the artist enters the realm of the invisible (feelings, imaginings, spirit) as part of the process of making art, he is not simply referring to the work of great artists. Anyone who dedicates himself or herself to this process is included in this transformation. This process is seen as similar to collecting pollen for the making of honey. The resulting art, honey, is a gift.
In these paintings, I have explored the idea of making art and how it might connect to other activities, states, and even other realms.
I have deliberately chosen a bright, searing palette, using oil paint, acrylics, oil sticks, crayons, pens, minerals, glass, collage of drawings, and occasional photo fragments. I gather materials and mix them with intensity. And then I offer up.
artist's statement
Byzantium
Divo Goes Swimming
Melissae
Bee Lines
lauren groff on flannery o'connor
In some ways, I’m a Southern writer (though not exclusively one), and I think it’d be impossible to be any kind of Southern writer writing about the nineteen-fifties without thinking of Flannery O'Connor. I have a deeply complicated relationship with her work; though I do feel in conversation with it, it’s not always a civil conversation. Sometimes, it’s a blistering argument. I love so much about O’Connor—her wit, her daggers, her fury—and, at the same time, I also find her brand of Catholicism hard to take, or maybe internally incongruent, since her stories read to me as if she actually ascribes to the Calvinist idea of double predestination, that God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned. I get the impression that she sees nearly everyone as already damned, which strikes me as both cynical and fundamentally untrue. I love human beings enough to trust that they will try to do their best, and will always be disappointed when their worst selves take over. I think we’re all equally saved and damned, and all of our dark and light angels wrestle ceaselessly, and there will never be a clear winner even at the moment of death. In the case of some artists, those same angels will keep wrestling in the work after death, as long as there is an audience to witness it.
the new yorker, july 4, 2022
conversation about her short story To Sunland
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
ian frazier | bullshit detector
I do not have a bullshit detector. I used to have one, but I don’t even know where it is anymore—maybe out in the garage. It was an awkward thing, like one of those little roll-aboard briefcases, but made of bright-orange high-impact plastic, and it didn’t work very well. It was O.K. on ordinary, everyday bullshit, but it could not detect cant. It was also not too reliable on sanctimony or pomposity, and only so-so on hypocrisy. Supposedly, it could puncture self-importance, but I could never get that feature to turn on. Over all, the detector was more trouble than it was worth, so I quit using it.
I read recently about someone who had a “built-in” bullshit detector! I am completely unable to picture how that might work, but, then, I would not be the person to ask. Kids, I’m told, have built-in bullshit detectors, so maybe you need to be young. Like a lot of older consumers, I have not kept up on the technology.
Living without a bullshit detector can be peaceful and relaxing. As you know, there is a lot of bullshit out there, and I got sick of having the alarm go off all the time. On the other hand, I do feel a need for the ol’ detector occasionally.
etc...
Ian Frazier
The New Yorker | May 30, 2022
Sunday, July 10, 2022
tomas transtromer | allegro
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my hadynpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
by Tomas Transtromer
tr Robert Bly
Friday, July 08, 2022
tomas transtromer | the scattered congregation`
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I.
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
II.
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.
III.
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.
IV.
But the church bells have gone underground.
They're hanging in the sewage pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.
V.
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who's got the Address?
Don't know. But that's where we're going.
tr. Robert Bly
Tuesday, July 05, 2022
Monday, July 04, 2022
john shaw | for the 4th of july
We ate the flag,
a cheese cake one with
berry stripes, sweet
after the tangy barbeque and the bite of beer.
But all night long we burped up stars
bursting like fireworks
in the black bedroom.
I lie awake in the night
wondering why we celebrate our country?
Back on childhood’s Western Avenue,
the rows of corn stand knee-high next to the freeway.
In Summer’s thumping heat,
I had swimming lessons in the blue village pool.
My sister hung me out the upstairs window.
JFK turns to his side, in a car,
and dies. We rent a TV to see
the funeral, my father standing
on the linoleum
when they play the star spangled.
We are on holiday at Cape Cod,
and a shirt-ful of steamers
is set for boiling and bowls of butter.
My father took me to Chicago in the train,
and we rode in an elevator
to his desk in the sky-
scraper, and sat me in his leather chair
with my legs hanging down.
Later, Martin Luther King Jr. leans on a railing
holding the bullets inside,
but no one told me.
None of us stood up for him.
Nor did I understand my childhood’s war
in the other world
of bamboo and napalm, and the color
of the cake was agent orange
and there was so little sweetness.
2
And how we slid from being
an engine in the world,
full of zest and freshness,
to this fat self-interest.
How greed waxed, and joy waned,
until history was just trotted out
once a year to justify guns, or fresh excess.
How squabbles were fanned into fires
and we lost the union, consumed for
short profits and the gratification
of a few.
When our collapse came
we barely noticed:
we were bickering like spoilt kids
as the car left the asphalt,
The tires shuddering in the air.
As we tumble,
I wonder,
Are the words that choke us
grateful to be free of us at last,
so that life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness
can find new throats,
new champions with less
avarice and more need?
Saturday, July 02, 2022
Saturday, June 25, 2022
photo: rapture, 1985
This photo was taken by John Tlumacki on an unusually warm day in Boston in 1985. It is the only known documentation of the Rapture. Apparently these Christians were out walking on the water when, to their surprise, a trumpet sounded and they found themselves heaven-bound.
susan orlean | obsessions
"John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. Laroche is thirty-six years old....
"Laroche strikes many peole as eccentric. The Seminoles, for instance, have two nicknames for him: Troublemaker and Crazy White Man. Once, when Laroche was telling me about his childhood, he remarked, "Booy, I sure was a weird little kid." For as long as he can remember he has been exceptionally passionate and driven. When he was about nine or ten, his parents said he could pick out a pet. He decided to get a little turtle. Then he asked for ten more little turtles. Then he decided he wanted to breed the turtles, then started selling turtles to other kids, and then he could think of nothing but turtles and then then decided his life wasn’t worth living unless he acquired one of every single turtle species known to mankind, including one of those sofa-sized tortoises from the Galapagos. Then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils. He collected them, sold them, declared that he lived for them, then abandoned them for something else – lapidary I think – then he abandoned lapidary and became obsessed with collecting and resilvering old mirrors. Laroche's passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs."
Sunday, June 12, 2022
uta hagen | respect for acting
I called the book Respect for Acting for a very clear reason. I did not call the book Delight in Acting or Love of Acting or The Fun of Acting. I called that book what I called that book because of the shocking lack of respect that was creeping into both the teaching and the practicing of acting. Now? Forget it. We have allowed so much to recede or languish that I don't know what I could call a book today. Demand for Acting might work. ...
There was a time when people became bored and they took up bridge or golf; ladies had an affair or had their hair rinsed and joined a book club. Now they want to act. And there are fools with no standards who allow them into classes and theatre groups and tell them to live their dream. I don't care about dreams. I care about work and responsibility and truth and commitment. You can see how old-fashioned I am.
When you are bored or depressed, you might be advised to visit a museum, to look at the art. You are not, typically, advised to pick up a brush and become a painter. It is understood that this is a rare gift, and foolish to presume it might be yours. If your soul is crushed, it might be suggested that you listen to classical music or submit to opera. It is not suggested that you audition for the Metropolitan Opera, or even your local, provincial opera company. You haven't had the training. But acting? All you need, it seems, is the dream, and there are doors--doors that once meant something and once housed some standards behind them--that fly open and embrace you. And it enrages me.
If there is some small society that calls itself amateur or community or whatever, and they want to get up and do plays, that is fine. I'll contribute money and I'll support you in the joys of understanding plays, but do not call yourself an actor. Do not think that your dream is similar in weight or meaning to the years of training and commitment that I and all the many actors whose work I love and respect and envy have invested in this art. Respect what is an art. It is not a pastime, and it is not something to get you through a bad time, and it is not something that should be taught to everyone with a dream. The term seriousness of purpose comes to mind. Apparently, only mine.
Uta Hagen, Interview with James Grissom (1996)
Saturday, June 11, 2022
baseball all-"americans"
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In the nineties, a Japanese game designer had to make up "American" names for the players.
Sleve McDichael
Onson Sweemey
Darryl Archideld
Anatoli Smorin
Rey McSriff
Glenallen Mixon
Mario McAlwain
Raul Chamgerlain
Kevin Nogilny
Tony Smehrik
Bobson Dugnutt
Onson Sweemey
Darryl Archideld
Anatoli Smorin
Rey McSriff
Glenallen Mixon
Mario McAlwain
Raul Chamgerlain
Kevin Nogilny
Tony Smehrik
Bobson Dugnutt
Willie Dustice
Jeromy Gride
Scott Dourque
Shown Furcotte
Dean Wesrey
Mike Truk
Dwigt Rortugal
Tim Sandaele
Karl Danleton
Mike Sernandez
Todd Bonzalez
Sunday, June 05, 2022
annie dillard | living like weasels
Once, says Ernest Thompson Seton - once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and rop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
from Teaching A Stone To Talk
Thursday, June 02, 2022
tad friend | no pictures!
Ron Galella’s assignations with movie stars were legion. For decades, Galella was the world’s leading paparazzo, a tireless stalker with an Elmer Fudd laugh, so it was only natural that, when he jumped from behind a post with his Nikon flashing, the stars would respond to him. Often, they’d beckon coyly with a middle finger, or send over a bodyguard to suggest a tension-relieving service that he could perform upon himself. Yet melancholy suffuses any brief rendezvous, and the titles on the Kodak boxes of photographs in the basement of Galella’s white brick villa in Montville, New Jersey, tell a tale of serial disenchantment: “The Gabors, No Zsa Zsa”; “Marlo & Danny Thomas, No Phil”; “Marilyn Monroe Look-A-Likes”; “Anthony Quinn Alone.”
Only one relationship truly satisfied: his liaison with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Last week, Galella, who is seventy-nine, sat in what he calls his great room, dressed in black, and reminisced. Above him was a framed “Windblown Jackie,” his favorite shot of Onassis, snapped from the back of a taxi. “I was a bachelor until I met my wife at the ‘Superman’ première at the Kennedy Center with Christopher Reeve, in 1978,” he explained. “So for a long time Jackie was my girlfriend—I lived in the Bronx, and it was a big adventure to go into the city to stake her out. She was soft-voiced and mysterious and a great subject, because she didn’t stop and pose; she kept on moving, jogging away, ducking into restaurants.”
He continued, “The only time Jackie touched me, she was at the 21 Club, and she came out and grabbed my wrist and said”—his foghorn voice whispered—“‘You’ve been hunting me for three months now.’ She loved being pursued.” Some of her other endearments included, “You stay away from me!” and “I thought you were in jail!” Galella mused, “I think I brought out her beauty from within, an emotion revealed, usually surprise. I really put her on a pedestal. The only way she disappointed me was with the court battles.” First, Onassis won a verdict that required Galella to maintain a distance of fifty yards, and later, in a settlement after he had repeatedly violated that order, he agreed to stop photographing her altogether.
In a documentary about Galella, “Smash His Camera,” which premières on HBO next month, several observers say that he had no distinctive style. But, as Galella sifted through his trophy shots, he pointed out the aesthetic hallmarks: “When there’s two people, you focus on one. Like, with a bride and groom, the bride should be looking at the camera, the groom at the bride.” By way of example, he held up a “Love Story”-era photo of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, who wore a startled smile and, most noticeably, no bra. “Also her titties are showing, so that’s a good composition,” he added.
He pulled out a 1974 shot of Robert Redford striding away from his car. “Then there’s the bull’s-eye picture—a profile shot where you feature the better eye, the strong eye that holds your gaze, at the center. His is the right eye.” Redford was wearing mirrored shades, and his left eye was the centered one, but, still.
“My other technique is to shoot fast without permission,” he went on. “That way, I get the startled look. When I shot Farrah Fawcett’s baby, Edmond, or whatever the name was”—Redmond—“the baby was coöperative, the baby was into it, but Farrah got angry, so I honored her wishes and stopped. But I already had the shot.
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