2026.07.27
arrived with today's mail
Although my initial impression a couple of months ago, when then commencing to read a borrowed from the Free Library copy of Alice Goldfarb Marquis's Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare, was more negative than positive, a month or so ago, and upon reading the chapters in reverse order, the biography became much more interesting, so much so that I decided to procure a copy of the book for myself. Turns out that a text written by someone who takes the life and artistic activities of Marcel Duchamp with a grain of salt is quite refreshing.
2025.07.27
Stephen Lauf wondering if this is the first time these two images have been photographed together 2025.07.27
2024.07.27
Stephen Lauf done for now 2024.07.27
2018.07.27
Sontag on Manhood
This coolness of tone--combined with a great intelligence and subtlety about motives--makes Manhood an attractive book in a fairly familiar sense. To its other qualities, though, we may react with impatience, for they violate many preconceptions. Apart from the brilliant prefatory essay, Manhood meanders, circles, and doubles back; there is no reason for it to end where it does; such types of insight are interminable. The book has no movement or direction and provides no consummation or climax. Manhood is another of those very modern books which are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life: we are to take the book as an action, giving on to other actions. This type of literature, item by item, rather than retrospectively viewed as part of a body of work, is often hermetic and opaque, sometimes boring. Now, it is not hard to make out a defense for hermeticism and opaqueness as a possible condition for literary works of an extreme density. But what about boredom? Can that ever be justified? I think it can, sometimes. (Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.) We should acknowledge certain uses of boredom as one of the most creative stylistic features of modern literature--as the conventionally ugly and messy have already become essential resources of modern painting, and silence (since Webern) a positive, structural element in contemporary music.
Susan Sontag, "Michel Leiris' Manhood" (1964) in Against Interpretation, pp. 67-8.
3D CAD database
18072701.db Working Title Museum 002 working model
2017.07.27
zero six seven
2016.07.27
slow at CAD
It was July 9th, Saturday night. I was drawing while relaxing in the pool. A deer jumped over the fence, and the tablet fell in the water. I quick took a picture.
2015.07.27
Art college professor suggests makeover for brutalist Boston City Hall
If you actually read The Wizard of Oz, you find that all the citizens of the Emerald City were required by law to always wear green tinted eyeglasses.
2008.07.27
I smell a Vorläufer
"What do you mean, Shock of the not?!?"
"You know, that energizing sensation when you ultimately realize that you're ultimately realizing there's this lack in your realizations."
Making Plans
Ease versus difficulty is hardly a sufficient gauge here.
I learn from the history of all the plans that are ignored, along with the schematics behind the ignorance. Architecture Not Now indeed!
2006.07.27
fetching Ruff Ruff stuff? 004
2005.07.27
What is the Best Design Ever?
Among other things, because it made a lot of 20th century architectural theorists and architects write and say completely wrong things about it.
1967.07.27
1967. Thursday, Frankfurt-am-Main
On the eve of his 80th birthday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung publishes an interview accorded recently by Duchamp to Werner Spies.
Ephemerides
1936.07.27
1936. Monday, West Redding
Seventeen pounds of putty, five glass strips and silver cement are collected from Charles F. Biele & Sons, New York, and delivered to The Haven for the assembling [15.7.1936] and installation of the Large Glass [5.2.1923] in the library of Miss Dreier's house. Duchamp has two hours' help from Carl Rasmussen, the builder.
Ephemerides
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