a sense of the real

When I was making A Sudden Gust of Wind I knew I wanted to show how the air would carry the papers. Hokusai had already solved some of those problems ... He composed something that had a feel of the accidental. It was not accidental, but he knew how to make it look that way ... There is no guide, it's just a feeling, a sense of the real, how things really are or would be.

jeff wall, in revolver (heft 10).

previously: katsushika hokusai reaches a marvellous stage.

international klein blue

5-11 mortimer street. (and previously.)

responsible for lemons

- that lemon—it's nice.
- it's good, isn't it?
- how often do you replace it?
- every week, in fact. it's an important detail.
- very nice.
- betty up there is responsible for the lemon. she terrorises the sainsburys staff.
- oh?
- it's difficult to find a lemon the same shape as the last one. but she always does.

kettle's yard
castle road, cambridge CB3 0AQ

spring

jingumae 3-16.

truth in advertising

231 bain street, singapore.

a thorough licking

under the sky

kan yasuda, "意心帰," tokyo midtown.

past and future

"Back, then, to skill and beauty? No, forward to it."

david esterly

a lump

hachiyamachō 9, tokyo.

the way around is through

sakuragaokachō 22-17, tokyo.

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