quiddity (my own and others)

FROM August 23, 2006

"Where has she got off to?" you might be wondering, and I would have several answers. Being alone is the first, and feeling right in the solitude. Reading the essentials: This, and This, and This. (In an interview I did last year, and will repost here in about a week, Juvenile says NO to the Red Cross -- that the best way to go is hand-to-hand donations.) Classes: pilates, dance (funk, hip-hop, house, crump). Errday. Watching the director's commentary of Season Three (reading a new interview with creator David Simon). Writing. Getting up at the Met. Likitsakos on 87th and Lex for Greek yogurt. That is, my friends, what's up.

The Anglophile fashion exhibit at the Met is exquisitely displayed -- plastic mannequins in 19th century Brit royalty gowns and Vivienne Westwood / Malcolm McLaren punk-screened t-shirts, capped in fake mohawk hats of cigarettes and bird plumes -- but I was most fixated by the human skull, encased in glass, on a desk. As you know, the "skull" has become a cliche signifier of fashion both high and hipster this season, perhaps the first and only fashion trend attributable to Three 6 Mafia. I was thinking about how the "skull," the actual human skull, as an object, used to signify the transition into the age of reason -- now everywhere as commodity and symbol, not exactly desensitization i guess but symbolic of our total surrender to science, to war, and a surrender of mystery. Cheap existence, enabled by our general and supposed lack of proximity to the war(s) in which we participate. Before I get all NY Times trend piece I'd like to take you over to the Met's Susan Sontag "On Photography" exhibit, the real reason I went (tho I was derailed for a bit by the mind-blowingly symmetrical Frank Lloyd Wright installation in a wing I'd never seen before -- the Met is island-sized). In general I think Sontag was a better critic than philosopher (tho Gore Vidal has a terrific and terrifically mean decon of "Notes on Camp" readable here) but I love this quote, embossed on the wall above a couple of Edward Steicher's war images: "all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability." Documents of our lasting consequence.