Little Glass Houses

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The architect Philip Johnson would have been 110 yesterday. He died in January 2005 at the age of 98, at his residence for the previous five decades: his famous Glass House (above), which he built in 1949.

The idea behind the house is intricately simple: walls are an interference (obviously) between us and the world. What if the views on your property provided your home’s natural walls? Of course, my cynical brain brings me to memories of neighborhoods in which I would have happily lived without any windows, where “the view” (not the TV show) was exactly what I did not want to see. Heck, my cynical brain brings me back to apartments in which there were not enough walls between me and … me.
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Today in History: July 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

David Hockney is 79 today.

As a painter, he is famous for his vibrant color scheme (blues and yellows) and honest portraits. I am fond of his paintings, and the fact that he is still a vital and active artist (in recent years he attracted notice for his “iPad paintings“), but I have long been fond of a project he called his “joiners.”

The “joiners” were a photo-collage idea that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. The one at top, called “Sun on the Pool,” was made in 1982. It is made of seventy-seven Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make seventy-seven Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one.
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False. Evidence. Appears. Real.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Hatred is its only reality. Racism is a part of nothing larger than itself. The simple word “Fear” yields many acronyms to reflect what fear is in its essence: “False Evidence Appearing Real” is a famous one. So is “Eff Everything And Run” or “Eff Everything And Retaliate.”

America. July 2016. The bitter angels of our nation’s nature seem to have won. Lately, part of me wants to declare victory for F.E.A.R and its glorious absence of nuance or shades of gray, its loving embrace of nothing except its own bright-red lust for violence for its own sake. “Hate Wins” would be the headline. “‘Just Hate Everyone,’ Experts Suggest” would be the sub-head.

Murder is murder. It is not an idea. It is a vacuum, and vacuums are totalitarian in their lack of purpose. I used to think that ideas can fill the vacuum, the murderous vacuum, but that is wrong. Ideas are ephemeral. No one kills for an idea. Many murderers will tell themselves that they are killing for a reason, for an idea; there is no human thought more corrosive, more dangerous, than self-justification.
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