In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on Mona Lisa and titled it “L.H.O.O.Q.,” phonetically Elle a chaud au cul, or “she has a hot ass,” and more loosely, “there is fire down below.” He made multiple versions, including one called “L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved”; that her mustache was not shaved directs our attention elsewhere. It is a cynical piece, as with most of his work, though if one considers the fury of cameras as cicadas coming out in the Louvre, their masters’ faces sharing the frame with hers, then maybe that’s warranted. In 2011, Urban Outfitters would sell a sort of non-functional shade (Sunstache, $8.00) adorned with a plastic mustache, mostly a gag gift. Its wearers would be seen going to or coming back from a party, ostentatiously on public transportation in that loud oblivious yet confident twenty-somethings manner, saying to the world #toomuchfreedom. The one time I went to the Louvre, I waited in line for three hours while the soft balm of French spoken by young girls behind me inspired me to “hold on” a little longer for the fleshy canvases awaiting inside. To render light loyally finding the full contour of an arse ends the argument of what is art. That night, I ate a crepe along the Seine, gazed up at Notre Dame, and felt an odd bulge growing on my back; some hours later, three Irishmen would find me in our hostel room, on the top bunk, another odd bulge growing from under the sheets as I imagined the slender pale hands which had made my crepe, reconfiguring each finger around my poetry. I was sure to peek, and did, inside the Mona Lisa room for good measure, of grave responsibility almost. Her smile could only flicker in between mounds of black asian hair in front of me, the entropy of a million languages as a car bomb under the Tower of Babel. In the room the asians come and go, talking of Michelangelo (which rhymes better than da Vinci). I’ve always wondered where that winding road past her right shoulder leads to, ideally a monk’s hut, if we consider the asian landscape-y vibe, paper light and flecked with ink. “Let us go then, you and I,” is the solicitation to come back to my hostel which I never used. She handed me the crepe, said voila and smiled. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

I existentialized via photoshop Adrian Tomine comic to commemorate preceding david fi卐hkind post; original after the break. “Seems bleak” or “fml” was supposed to be in thought bubble, but then I felt was it better with nothing.

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Cornel West got hipstamaticed recently carrying a funny sign. He, among his compatriots, want to occupy wall street. I walked down wall street once, remember seeing a bronze bull with huge testicles. If males had two penises and one ball, everyone would want to suck the ball. This is called market economy theory. Hipstamatic makes photos look older than when they were taken, the inverse way old sci-fi movies tried to make everything look new. Though they were filmed in black and white. Somebody with borderline personality disorder is said to see the world in black and white, as in impulsive and erratic abstractions of “good” and “bad,” implying that well rounded people see things in grey, like an old dog. Movements with hashtags feel like phone numbers, like if I called #occupywallstreet I’d get put on hold with Rage Against the Machine playing. A cutie like Miranda July shouldn’t talk about holes and fingers without my thinking about her MFA. (I liked her “))<>((” thing more than Salinger’s parenthesis bouquet “(((((((((()))))))))).”) I like corporations because they take care of things. Sure it’s dishonest, but so is love. They’re like bad parents who don’t care enough but at least there’s food on the table and running water. If it wasn’t for Comcast, I’d be without internet and tv and I would have to binge on Indian food, and two hours later Pepto-Bismol would have themselves a “return customer.” I’d have no choice but to pick up War and Peace and use it for a pillow. In 1965, Bob Dylan was supposedly “[...] on the pavement, thinking about the government,” which is called loitering. Robert Zimmerman found himself a more gentile name on behalf of America; sorta sad, jew know what I’m sayin? Most revolution logos include a fist, a family of fingers inside a cave. I would rather they just flip me off.

A rare Vermeer painting “The Little Street” (c. 1658) shows the side of a street in Holland spotted with a cast of the painter’s usual subjects, who may be taking a break from their role at the windows above. His sole painting of this nature, nobody knows why, that day, he decided to leave his room and paint from outside. Some art historians suggest that the scene in entirely imagined. I imagine the daylight, however dimmed by the clouds, entering the black windows — the soft angular light, the new shapes presented, and the intricate narratives unfolding inside. Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945,” which begins the only girl I’ve ever loved/was born with roses in her eyes/but then they buried her alive/one evening 1945 may well be about Anne Frank, her legacy one of edifice: of her building, of the bookshelf that led to her secret annex, the published cover of her diary proposing how one might look at it. This one sees her in her room, the way Vermeer would have imagined, reading a letter from a boy, or writing one; and while history congratulates composing letters, decomposing bodies has the final say. Buildings haven’t changed much in Holland, at least I’m guessing. I’ve never been. Who needs Amsterdam when you have rush hour traffic jam in front of you. At a red light, I imagine things in a glass room moving in an anthropologically sound way. We list our wars I and II, as if we were counting on something.

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Thanks to Lorian for counsel, and deflecting any calls of misogyny.

Linda

In 1982, one fictional Brad Hamilton, the mascot of every boy’s autobiography, watched from the bathroom — only he wasn’t eye, but mind watching, lids and palm closed over his eyes and penis, respectively — a fictional Linda remove her red bikini and approach him with that timeless face of two nipples, nose of a navel, and nether smile, to open mouth him with chlorine-flavored lips. I must have watched that scene ∞ times in my life, each time saddened by what I had missed, my hetero-normative tastes so vanilla ice-cream you’ll need a brownie to help it go down. We’ll accept the disembodied rain or sprinkler behind Linda, placed, mind you, by woman director Amy Heckerling, as some natural timely event, for the best muse has a production team working behind her; or rather, in front of her, behind the cameras. The trick of painting a nude in a landscape is not the nude, but the landscape — the wiggle and waddle of foliage so natural, it goes unnoticed. Heckerling’s faint dabs of purple play with Monet’s Giverny, at times breached by the Seine, which the latter painted numerous times, the schizophrenic morning light never loyal to the day before. So Monet kept painting the same scene, the same Seine, retroactively polishing memory into a final sheen. Phoebe Cates goes on to Private School…for Girls (1983), a sex comedy in which you know what happens without watching. Voyeurism was always mental anyways.

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When photographer Michael Wolf, as part of his “Real Fake Art” (2006) series, asked our Chinese copy artist to pose next to his copy of Gerhard Richter’s “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)” while being on a staircase himself, we might wonder if accidents are wonderment. The original painting (1966), shown right, is “better” in its purposeful degradation of oil paint’s capacity, by way of demoting it to flaws of the photograph: the blurriness, the bleached colors, the overexposure from the camera’s unconscious flash. For Richter, paint was a dumb thing, like toothpaste, whose only remaining relevance could be to pay tribute to photography. Of course, when he was in the mood. And his moods often changed. Short of any more research, I wonder who Ema is — his wife perhaps. The staircase is institutional-like, i.e. not domestic, and, if wonderment is still this siren’s call, I wonder where the hell they are. As for Ching Chong, should that be his name, may his time spent with Ema be clouded with the toxic high of turpentine, alone in his no doubt ventless studio, turning fake into real, or the other way around, for commerce, the sad advanced stages of Warhol’s once silly threat. Dude needs to take a large fan brush and go back and forth over the canvas left to right, wax on wax off, obscuring Ema into flatness like the shallow lens of a disposable camera.

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On December 25, 1956, Robert Walser died from a heart attack during a walk near the asylum where he had spent the last 23 years of his life. Cezanne is said to have died (1906) in similar fashion, during a walk, but no pictures had been taken, a painter’s ironic affront to photography perhaps. There are various angles from which a handful of pictures of Walser’s death were taken, each version collated into an incident. On December 2, 2010, a girl took a picture of herself as Walser, only the exclamation mark formed by her arm and hat were too close to each other. Things tend to roll farther when they are dropped rather than placed. Walser abruptly gave up writing in 1933, checking himself into a mental asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. As an extension of his genius, “I am not here to write,” he said, “but to be mad.” Duchamp similarly disowned visual art — degrading it as “retinal,” a glimmer for the mere receiving lens of the eye — to move towards math and chess. These of course, are not suicides, no more than Suicide (2008), which may be read as author Edouard Levé’s (who killed himself in 2007) glorified suicide letter. He was also a painter and photographer, burning all his canvases in his early career to make mental room for photography, a photographer’s non-ironic affront to painting. Here’s the deal though: they are both rectangular windows of conceit, fake life in a box. The second-person “you” in Suicide eerily takes on the semblance of instruction, and you find yourself slowly disappearing with each page, as if the toner was running out of ink.

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