one piece

"Sharks' Teeth"

Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark's-tooth

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned,

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of a tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

By Kay Ryan

"Moonlit Seascape"

Moonlit Seascape

about 1883

John La Farge, American, 1835–1910

Transparent and opaque watercolor on paper

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 1944-56"

Exploring the concept of "Good Design" via iconic pieces by designers like Charles and Ray Eames and Hans Wegner, alongside everyday objects including an iron, a hamper, a rake, a cheese slicer and Tupperware -- Curators: Juliet Kinchin, Aidan O’Connor

What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 

1944-56 Museum of Modern Art

May 6, 2009-Nov. 30, 2009

Ace Hotel, Palm Springs

Set in the desert outpost of Palm Springs just east of LA, the Ace Palm Springs is a sprawling, high-design 1970’s throwback – recently renovated from a 1965 Howard Johnson motor Lodge. Entirely solar-powered (thanks to the 354 days of sunshine the Springs receive per year), the hotel is a lot more than just a sepia-toned, rough and ready take on the design hotel.

With spongy, tanned-leather seating, a rope-festooned lobby from costumier Michael Schmidt, a giant Swim Club pool, and rooms replete with vintage vinyl and Americana aplenty.

via: Wallpaper/Travel

Staging Area

Donald Oenslager, the great American set designer and a professor at the Yale School of Drama, wrote that “a sketch for a scene is as short-lived as the life of the theater it supports.”

Mr. Oenslager, who died in 1975, was being a bit disingenuous, as he was a major collector of such sketches. In 1982 his widow gave some 1,600 drawings, prints and books on set design to the Morgan Library and Museum. About 50 of these drawings, including two by Mr. Oenslager, are on view there in “Creating the Modern Stage: Designs for Theater and opera.” They present a concise summary of 20th-century stagecraft, one that appeals equally to Museum of Modern Art mavens and seasoned theatergoers.

link: Where All the World’s an Atmospheric Stage By KAREN ROSENBERG, The New York Times

Happy Independence Day

AMAGANSETT, N.Y.—1969.

© Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos

"We let swimmers swim."

To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up. 

Excerpt from the poem: 

What I Know  By Patrick Dubost

 David Hockney -- (Pool with two figures), 1972 acrylic on canvas, 84x120 in.

Girl Watcher

The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim and Read, is a group exhibition of women artists depicting the female form. This exhibition attempts to debunk the notion of the male gaze by providing a group of works in which the artist and subject do not relate as "voyeur" and "object," but as woman and woman. It would be interesting to ask the question how we would feel about the works in the exhibition if we were told they were made by a man.

Solitary Birds

For more than thirty years, French artist Jean Luc Mylayne has explored the intimate bond between subject and photographer through a non-traditional approach that combines exacting conception, visionary inventiveness, and infinite patience. Mylayne’s photographic subjects, commonplace birds such as sparrows, starlings, and bluebirds, belie the wholly unique experience that Mylayne captures in his photography. His work embodies exploration and a philosophical meditation on the nature of being in the world.

link: Jean Luc Mylayne June 28 - September 20, 2009 Parrish Museum of Art

Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff Koons.

 Provocative conceptual artist Jeff Koons has made a career of turning tabletop kitsch and American novelties into megalithic icons, and Jackson was not immune. Koons’s porcelain statue of the singer esthetically recalls the precious glass tchotchkes your grandmother might have kept, but the sculpture's message was more suggestive. Part of Koons’s Banality series, the piece is outsized (more than six feet long) and depicts Jackson’s young, male pet chimpanzee nestled in the singer’s arms. It sold for $5.6 million at auction.

via: Jackson in Five: Iconic Artworks of the Late Singer