omote-sando

minami-aoyama 5-5-10, tokyo.

organic sound

big band in the air, at approximately 13 bell street, NW1 5BZ, followed soon after by diligently layered fiteer just a few doors down. adequate hydration was not a problem.

beneath the pavement lies the beach

commune, in goodhood; 151 curtain road.


"the longest party table in the world," priestmangoode; 150 great portland street.


birthday celebrations at mother's milk; 124 little portland street.


green serpentine and portland stone (perhaps), langham house; 32-33 gosfield street.

in the west

chepstow crescent, w11.

the awfully pleasant scooter association

246 great portland street, london.

questions

I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves ... As the questions go up, the performance level goes down—and that's natural, since people don't yet know how to act on those questions, they're stumbling around in a fog—whereas when performance goes up the quality of the questions tends to go down.

robert irwin

in lawrence weschler's seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees

sandcast

lee simmons's grandioso, the door at 77 wimpole street.

what to read and why

... it's good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

franz kafka to oskar pollak (27.1.1904)

the benefits of pouncing

above—autumn: the pig slaughter; below—the numbering at bethlehem. pieter brueghel the younger, in "the bad shepherd," until 16 january 2015 at christie's on new bond street.

aesthetic value

Theorists are apt to vex themselves with vain efforts to remove uncertainty just where it has a high aesthetic value.

donald francis tovey, essays in musical analysis, vol. 3 (1936).

groups and individuals

The concept of intelligence is ambiguous when action and learning occur simultaneously at several nested levels of a system ... [s]ince experimentation often benefits those who copy successes more than it does the experimenting organization, managerial illusions of control, risk taking, and playful experimentation may be more intelligent from the point of view of a community of organizations than from the point of view of organizations that experiment.

barbara levitt and james march, "organizational learning" p335.

a morandi in the living room

among the several highlights of frieze masters was helly nahmad's booth. this consisted of a lavishly detailed art collector's apartment over-full of the many accumulations of the pursuit of what is currently very premium art—a fabrication that required a long list of prop rental facilities and the services of a very good set designer. it brought to mind tibor fischer's the collector collector, which is worth reading.

lonesome cowboy

richard tuttle, 1988. at sperone westwater.

blue brownie

john chamberlain, 1979.

chuck close up close

a small self-portrait, in acrylic, at pace london; frieze 2014.

melancholic stem cells

assume vivid astro focus at peres projects; frieze 2014.

cauliflower

drewes meats

an old-skool sort of butcher. 1706 church st, san francisco.

after dinner

the mayday rooms. 88 fleet street, across from goldman sachs.

late in the east midlands

on the dalmatian coast

chez bob de tunis

10 rue richer, paris 75009.

klub bakalar

bakalar is croatian for bacalao, which is spanish for dried salt cod—a health food.

this is the split klubhouse of a secretive invitation-only organisation of cod aficionados which maintains its own network of cod fishermen and bacalao makers so that the bacalao it has access to can be made to the most exacting of specifications. it owns a share of a private croatian bacalao-making island where a luxury resort has recently been completed that offers cod-themed vacations (members and cod fishermen get a discount). klub bakalar's members use the klub's own currency—the bakalar—to buy and sell cod-related foods, accessories, and financial instruments. the only way to earn bakalar is by eating bacalao.

they would not reveal their initiation rites but just visible in the photo, at the foot of the stairs, is the tip of the dorsal fin of a cod outfit that would accommodate a girthy croat.

valencia street

the future of money

rangeley, me

darnicle hill

an old pumping station still in the process of being converted into a home. upstairs, a temporary yurt surrounded by crayon drawings illustrating various functions of elimination. a kitchen garden provided lemon mint for the drinks. by the time i arrived, all the cooking had been done. the day before, they had smoked a lamb shoulder then cooked it overnight in a crock pot, finally flinging it on a blazing charcoal fire. a vast tray of pork had also been pulled to shreds by an assortment of naked and partly clad children. when the irish terrier arrived, the chickens went back behind their electric fence.

british summer time

when you say it is "cherry red," what exactly do you mean?

transformations

charles harlan's concrete sacks at max wigram's group show ice fishing. mcarthur binion's crayon panels in the same show are denser than might be expected and worthwhile.

art from a strict procedure

stephen scrivener, at GV art.

moxon street

paint

nicholas pope at richard saltoun and mehran elminia at rosenfeld porcini.

the illusion of mechanical reproduction

many of bridget riley's stripe paintings are currently on show at david zwirner. riley directed the installation of the entire gallery space and this is the first time i have seen her paintings installed in a way that gives the viewer enough space to see them correctly. the lighting, some of which is natural, is mostly excellent. her work is often interpreted as being about creating optical illusions because it is apparently mechanical and banally decorative—in fact, it is distinctive, thought-provoking, and manually intensive. to produce something by hand is to be exposed to the minor modulations and irregularities that characterise hand work (and which are usually absent from work executed entirely by machine)—a topic on which david pye was eloquent and penetrating. producing work whose effect on the viewer is almost entirely dependent on the perfect execution of precise spacings is one thing. combining that apparent mechanical precision with the liveliness and particularity of manual application is another.


at david zwirner in london, until july 25.

english summer