glorious pointlessness

a found poem

Most aesthetic concepts
are theological ones in disguise

The Romantics saw works of art
as mysteriously autonomous
conjuring themselves
from their own unfathomable depths

Self-originating, self-determining
a secular version of the Almighty

Both God and art belonged
to that rare category of objects
which existed entirely
for their own sake

Free of the vulgar taint of utility

In their freedom, independence
and glorious pointlessness
works of art were images of men and women

Or at least of what they could become

Art was a politics all of its own
a foretaste of utopia
in its very uselessness


Found in Terry Eagleton’s Coruscating on Thin Ice in the 24 January issue of the London Review of Books

made

made
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

I don't know what this marvelous thing is.

It was living in the landscape near Taos and I would have missed it if we had driven right by, given the way it folds into the shapes and colors of the land it lives on, but we stopped the car to walk back up the road a bit and take a shot of a wonderful little trailer (that didn't quite work out) and then coming back to the car I saw this, with a little mate alongside it.

Made. Beautiful. Just because.


Here's another shot of the pretty little thing »

nothing like the sun

All that is left of a person is their name.

Olivia Mostacilla of Columbia, quoted in the 5 October issue of the London Review of Books.

In the LRB Diary piece Michael Taussig goes on to say: “She wasn’t referring to the paramilitary massacres, which have stopped in the past few months because of the ongoing ‘demobilizations’ of the paras organized by President Uribe’s government, but to the craze for plastic surgery, especially the variety known as lipo-escultura or ‘fat sculpture.’”

I’ll spare you the accounts of the back room cut-rate surgeries: the enlarged eyes that won’t close, the infected breast enlargements that result in double mastectomies, the nose job that resulted in breathing like a cat. “You know how a cat breathes? You can hear her breathing several feet away.”

And just for good measure:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

~ That would be our boy Willy S.

p.s. I have more to say on the subject of female beauty, but right now I've gotta get prettied up for work, so it will have to be later.

[Video credit: Ad spot for Dove Evolution]