A twofer post.
To close the year in style

Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary

Paul Dickson
Melville House, 2009

Is it lack of visual focus that inspires wordplay?

   

Benjamin Franklin, in his Drinker’s Dictionary from 1737, was the first person to collect and publish a sampling of English slang for drunkenness. Here now we have a latest offering. ‘A record-breaking 2.964 synonyms for tipsy, roasted, three sheets, whazooed and Boris Yeltsinned. With annotations, and illustrations. (the back cover)
 
Not every one of the 2,964 synonyms is actually illuminating, but this handy little hardcover dictionary is often funny as hell and looks like a mighty fine stocking stuffer.
 
Here is one:
Dead drunk: also Laying out dead drunk: So intoxicated as to be wholly powerless.

“Pythagoras has finely observed that a man is not to be considered dead drunk till he lies on the floor and stretches out his arms and legs to prevent his going lower.”
 
Nice.
 

Bank Notes: A Collection of Bank Robbery Notes

Compiled by Ken Habarta
Self Published, 2009

“U Better Hope I Make It Out!”

Robbing a bank is as simple as putting pen to paper.
 
Here in one volume is a collection of original bank notes used in actual robberies some successful, others not. For the reader already familiar with bank robbery, this book should serve as a desirable source of inspiration; for the reader not familiar with it, BANK NOTES should be an ideal introduction.

Pretty funny and appropriately sad. 

And another footnote:
http://www.newmuseumstore.org/viewItem.asp?ItemID=10018919&UnitCde=1
 
 
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Roberto Calasso
Knopf, 2009

“The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him—but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo’s series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo’s art.  Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.”
(The publisher)

SNAKES ARE CONSTANT.

“Because he was born in a city where women were in the habit of wearing masks and hence could afford “to do absolutely what they wish” (as a traveler put it), his metamorphic inclinations do not seem unnatural. Renowned above all for his speed and sureness of touch, he was in demand even outside the boundaries of La Serenissima, although the kingdoms of France and England remained closed to him. But nowhere was he recognized for what he was, nor did anyone grasp the peculiarity the spell cast by his hand. Just as he arrived without meeting any resistance, so he departed without arousing any regret, losing himself among the names of those of whom there is a confused, shadowy memory. No one suspected that with him vanished the last point of equilibrium in the visible. Elusive, precarious, and bewitching. Yet such was the case. Thereafter, even the possibility that that point existed was forgotten.”

Every new book by Roberto Calasso  provokes epiphanies. His exploration  now of Tiepolo’s 33 obsessively esoteric etchings – 10 Capricci and 23 Scherzi – at the heart of Tiepolo Pink, his latest book, beautifully translated into English by Alastair McEwen, is just as baffling and achingly illuminating as his astonishing works on Indian and Greek mythologies, on Kafka, Talleyrand and their concepts of sacrifice, or his many essays on the return of the gods through ‘absolute literature’. All ramify and converge in an endlessly engaging exploration of things that have seemingly gone out of this world only to eternally return in shapes and forms ever changing but always the same. For Calasso, Tiepolo, painter of clouds, animals and angels, presents in the Scherzi a sort of countermelody to the European Enlightenment. His silent radicalism in allusions was a “last breath of happiness in Europe. And, like all true happiness, it was full of dark sides destined not to fade away, but to get the upper hand.” One can’t help but get lost in Tiepolo’s images in the book, the troubled gravities of the etchings and the “skies and continents” of the Wurzburg ceilings (”pleasure accompanied by light”) and Calasso’s magnificent prose draws you into that mystery filled with “mocking and caustic details”, gestures and rituals and various forms of the invisible.

A great, great book.
Give it to someone you love - and respect.

Rizzoli, 2009

“Why not treat an important twentieth-century rock and roll band with the same finesse with which we treat important twentieth-century artists – with a voluminous artist’s monograph that attempts to trace their life and work through what primary and secondary source material one can gather? Found within these boards is a plethora of photographic evidence of the band’s existence, most of it unseen. A multitude of handbills, posters, and ephemera relating to a band that works as a curated showcase of the visual transition from pop to hippie and on to punk, reverberating against the monolithic, outcast individuality of the band’s sound.” * 
 

This newly published edition contains a truly astonishing assembly of rare objects, artworks, and texts on the Velvet Underground and the Lower East Side milieu that produced them. 
 
 *from the introduction by Johan Kugelberg, who curated the 2007 exhibition c/o The Velvet Underground

Edited by Robert Gober and Cynthia Burlingham
Published by Prestel on the occasion of the exhibition at the Hammer Museum,
Los Angeles.
October 4, 2009 - January 10, 2010

“Working almost exclusively in watercolor, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) focused on his immediate surroundings-his garden, the views from his windows, snow turning to slush, sudden atmospheric changes, or the forest at dusk. He often imbued these subjects with highly expressionistic light, creating at times a clear-eyed description of the world and at other times, a unique mystical and visionary experience of nature. The book includes drawings from his 1917 sketchbook, Conventions for Abstract Thoughts”; watercolors from 1916-18 that were the focus of the first one-person exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1930; camouflage designs from his tour in the army and wallpaper designs from the 1920s; watercolors from the 1940s showing the artist’s unique technique of expanding and reworking earlier works by pasting large strips of paper around them to dramatically increase their size; and finally Burchfield’s large, transcendental watercolors from the 1950s and 1960s”. (The Publisher)

“…At the height of my pain remembering the little field mouse I mutilated when a boy.”

(Charles Burchfield, hospitalized for major surgery, November 1955)

Burchfield’s transcendental and morbidly moody landscapes in watercolors are visual symphonies of symbols and seasons as epiphanies of ideas and senses.  They are full of ‘the humming of insects, rustling leaves, bells, moonbeams, and vibrating telephone lines’. They are stuffed with visions of ‘eerie puritan animism’ and American darkness (“an overpowering black presence – A feeling of forsakenness, grotesqueness; of north woods.” - C.B.) - almost Gnostic at times.

His nostalgic ‘garden of memories’ is a difficult place, and hard to return from.

The essays in the book suggest connections with the giant Walt Whitman and the ruined mind of the later John Ruskin . They are  informative and often beautiful. David Hickey’s ‘Burchfield’s Highway’ especially-:

“Burchfield was alone in his endeavor well into his maturity, and it speaks well of his character that he could live so elegantly with his addiction, that he would attract so many thoughtful supporters and enthusiasts to keep the wolves at bay, that he could love and imbibe so deeply in classical music, high literature, philosophy, and theology, while living at the brink of evaporation.”

This is the beautiful 184 page , fully illustrated catalogue for the first major Charles Burchfield exhibition to be mounted on the west coast and the first in New York for more than 20 years. It was edited by Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober, with essays by Robert Gober,  Dave Hickey and others.

The exhibition will travel to the Whitney Museum of American art in the Summer of 2010.