new york city

All day long I watched the light move through the trees and into the house, sending shadows shimmering across the floor. Sometimes when I am working like this, I feel like I am measuring time in the movement of light, and the world just seems to slow down. It’s a really peaceful feeling, especially when I am in a place like this.

I spent a beautiful day at Philip Johnson’s Glass House today. I absolutely love the simplicity of the house. It’s the magnificent landscape that dominates here. To quote Anish Kapoor, the house is a “quiet object.”

“ The house is a quiet object…For me, architecture is about the essentials of light, space, proportion and materials. I don’t want to live in a sculpture designed by an architect. I go crazy when I hear people say that the best new sculpture is by architects - meaning overexpressive buildings. I love making sculptures, and collaborating with architects, but I want to live in a house that’s a happy home, not an artwork.

—

Anish Kapoor, talking about his new home in Chelsea, the Guardian.

I feel the same about houses.

http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/

While You Were Sleeping by Jeff Sher

“When it rains, I get lost in the music of the rain and transfixed by the optical magic of the drops. There is also an exquisite sadness in watching the rain. It is so beautiful and melancholy, it makes me feel alone in the face of geological time and the cycles of nature that existed before life on earth.”

This beautiful little film was shot on a Beaulieu 16mm camera. Watching it made me miss my old super-8 camera, which had fade-out and dissolve features, allowing me to do most of the editing in the camera. Sigh.

“ I like to say that America is like my distant uncle who doesn’t remember my name but occasionally gives me pocket money. That phone call filled me with an enormous affection for my uncle!

—

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on winning the McArthur Foundation “genius” award. NYT

I saw her read from her book Half of a Yellow Sun last year, and she was fantastic.

“ Today we have become spectators of reality, which has become a photograph.

—

Stephen Spender, Introduction to the 1994 edition of World Within World.

Being a photographer, I am always grappling with this.

The The, Uncertain Smile

A howling wind blows the litter as the rain flows,
As street lamps pour orange coloured shapes through your window,
a broken soul stares from a pair of watering eyes,
uncertain emotions force an uncertain smile…

Lily put this song on today, and it brought me back to when I was 21 and living in Tokyo. I used to listen to this song obsessively on the headphone at the record shop, my only means of listening to music then. I still love it.

“ Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters ‘know’ that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be. In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process…What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

—

Nicholas D. Kristof, in the NYT.

I am very saddened by the racism that’s come to the surface in this election. As an Asian living in this country, I have been subjected to it, sometimes in very subtle ways, but other times not so subtle, like being called “a chink.” Nonetheless, I find it unbelievable the racism against Obama, which Kristof has so insightfully pointed out, is now veiled under a religious cloak.

We are frantically packing for our imminent move to Brooklyn, and I found this note for the tooth fairy that Lily wrote this summer.

“Morandi’s still lifes are beautiful, but with a distinctive kind of beauty: subterranean, germinating, the beauty of roots, seeds, relics, of things lost, then recovered, and soon to be lost again.” Holland Cutter, writing in the NYT about the Morandi show at the Met. He points out all that I love about Morandi, but most of all, the quiet, obsessive and contemplative nature and method of his work. “But the work goes on. Because it is controllable reality. It is a form of thinking that frees up thought. It is time-consuming, but time-slowing, isolating but self-fulfilling. It is a part of life, but also a metaphor for how life should be: with everything in place, every pattern clear, every rhyme exact, every goal near.”