A Kolya-n tapestry?
For those who lurked about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the early 2000s, Kolya, or Nicholas as many of us knew him, was a familiar face. He was a sans-papiers from Eastern Europe with a entrepreneurial flair that boggled the mind. He devised elaborate hustles to fleece department stores of money, recruiting many an empty-pocketed Shakespearean to abet him along the way. He resold cheap Chinese jewelry to tourists at a 1,000 per cent mark up. He painted henna tattoos on the legs, backs, and breasts of the young and foolish at the Les Halles park for 50 or 100 francs a pop, often using KMZ friends Tom Pancake or Ryan McGlynn as a sidekick. And, yes, suspicions were rife that perhaps he lifted a book or three from Shakespeare and sold them down the road.
Well, like most everybody from that time, Kolya moved on from Paris. He drifted to America where, once again living without papers, he lived for a long time by selling contraband punk rock T-shirts. Now, he has surfaced again with a Kickstarter project that seems to defy logic. Kolya, the man of the thousand scams, has discovered a love for tapestry.
From what we can tell, Kolya hopes to create a series of contemporary tapestries and donate them to modern art museums across the United States. ”Coming to America, I was excited to explore native American tapestry as well as contemporary tapestry,” he writes. “[U]nfortunately I was also disappointed that such great tradition was somewhat shunned away by commercialization of the art scene.” Continue reading →
Reading in a book, I came across the following Zen koan:
Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply raised a finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.
Do you get it? I don’t know if I get it. How does the boy become enlightened? What does the visitor make of it all? What does the master do with the finger?
Zen koans are famous for simultaneously suggesting and resisting meaning. This one however I cracked. Through a process of ‘inductive leapfrog-thinking’ I realised there had been an error in the translation. The translator had consistently rendered “raised a finger” for what in the original Japanese had in fact been “gave the finger”. Thus the true koan reads:
Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply gave people the finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy gave him the finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei gave him the finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.
Makes much better sense. Still, not very Zen.
All or nothing for Tiger Woods?
Tiger Woods has long been one of the most dominant figures in all of sport. He’s won 71 PGA golf tournaments and an astonishing 14 majors. And thanks to his golfing prowess, he’s earned more than $1 billion in combined prize money and endorsements.
But, as those of you who follow the scandal sheets know, Tiger has suffered a spell of personal trouble. Despite marketing himself as a loving family man, Tiger was actually a raging horndog who had affairs with a sordid collection of women. When the seamy mess became public, Tiger’s marriage imploded and he took a leave from professional golf.
What’s now truly stunning is how poorly Tiger has played since returning to the pro golf tour in April 2010. He’s gone from being the top player in the game to a mundane also-ran. He hasn’t won a single tournament in the past 17 months and he’s even missed the cut a handful of times, something that was unheard of for pre-scandal Tiger. His poor form has golf pundits abuzz: Is it residual anxiety from the marriage break-up? Lingering effects of an old knee injury? A change in caddies? Or simply a question of age?
Well, based on the theories of Roy Baumeister, there may be another explanation: Tiger is expending so much mental energy resisting the urge to horn it up with skanks that he can no longer focus on the golf course. Continue reading →
Onna Solomon has a new collection out with Press 34. Onna’s poetic reputation is prospering; she recently won the Chad Walsh poetry prize. And the concept underpinning Press 34 is compelling: it’s an art book project which produces 34 hand-crafted copies of each title produce. Read away:
What It Takes
A man who lost his family
—two kids and a wife—
in a blameless accident.
He knows whatever there is
can’t imagine
how we sustain ourselves,
whatever there is must also be
surprised when we are
consumed by senselessness:
Continue reading →
The seriousness of the recent riots across England has inspired a period of serious reflection. The search for the reasons why has looked instinctively to deep-level problems, with heavy-faced politicians and commentators alike theorising over social deprivation, financial exclusion, latent criminality, pervasive greed, moral atrophy, heinous influences, bad grammar, poor parenting, the enervation of authority, the erosion of community, unemployment, recession, and the all-encompassing concept of a broken society. While these represent various political and ideological positions, what is striking is that almost all the explanations on offer are characterised by a brooding introspection (that the problem must be within us), and a focus on long-term issues. The sense is that, be it through poverty or the corrupting touch of welfare, Britain has been grinding darkly year after year toward this dire and profoundly inevitable conclusion. Fittingly this is to be met, as we are beginning to see in the court results coming through, with the handing out of equally grinding and long-term custodial sentences.
The most natural response to something extremely surprising, as the rioting indeed was, is to declare immediately that it was always going to happen and a long time coming. It’s an emotional, if rather irrational way to recapture our balance after taking a destabilising hit. We feel we need to reinstate big causal links, and so start drawing them out from the richness of history. Continue reading →
A harmonograph is Continue reading →
