Charles Biederman

"For the Young Who Want To"

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy

Baldomero Romero Ressendi

Anders Zorn

Marc Quinn

Tracey Emin

Fausto Olivares

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

Gore Vidal

Nogah Engler

Goya

"I do not want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you."

- Francis Bacon

Michaël Borremans

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville

"In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future."

Freud

George Wesley Bellows

Vermeer

Klimt

"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."

Werner Herzog

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Bertrand Russell

Odd Nerdrum

Nogah Engler

My feeble attempt at beer cellaring (cont'd)

The Abyss (2008) - Deschutes Brewery - Imperial Russian Stout x 6
Mirror Mirror (2009) - Deschutes Brewery - Barleywine x 8
Imperial Russian Stout (2008) - Rogue Brewery x 1
Stone Imperial Russian Stout (2008) - Stone Brewery x 2
Stone Imperial Russian Stout (2009) - Stone Brewery x 6
Stone Old Guardian (2008) - Stone Brewery - Barleywine x 2
Stone Old Guardian (2009) - Stone Brewery - Barleywine x 4
Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout (2008) - Stone Brewery x 1
Double Bastard (2008) - Stone Brewery - Strong Ale x 2
Vertical Epic (2008) - Stone Brewery - Belgian-style Strong Pale Ale x 2
Chimay Grande Réserve - Bières de Chimay - Belgian Dark Ale x 2
Gulden Draak - Brouwerij Van Steenberge - Belgian Dark Ale x 2
La Fin Du Monde - Unibroue - Tripel x 1
Don De Dieu - Unibroue - Belgian-style Strong Pale Ale x 2
Trois Pistoles - Unibroue - Belgian-style Strong Dark Ale x 1
Samuel Smith Imperial Russian Stout x 1

Emily Eveleth

Costigan

"The mirror paintings are the foundation of Pistoletto’s oeuvre—both of the artworks he makes and of his theoretical reflection in which he constantly returns to them to study their meaning in depth and to develop their implications. The essential characteristics the artist identifies in them, are: the dimension of time (not just represented, but presented in reality); the inclusion in the work of the viewer and his/her surroundings (which make “the self-portrait of the world”); the joining of couples of opposite polarity (static/dynamic, surface/depth, absolute/relative, etc.), constituted and activated by the interaction between the photographic image and what goes on in the virtual space generated by the reflecting surface; the placement of the mirror paintings no longer at window height, as paintings are traditionally hung, but on the floor (which creates a passage through which the space in which they are shown continues in the virtual space of the work, a door that opens between art and life)."

Michaël Borremans

Romaine Brooks
1923

An oil painting by Cara and me.

Presumably, someone in our neighborhood was keeping bees and lost a swarm.

Nikolai Fechin
1917

Julius LeBlanc Stewart

Lucian Freud

Sargent

Rembrandt

George Wesley Bellows

Francis Bacon

The Mirror
William Merritt Chase

Caravaggio

The Hermit
John Singer Sargent

Alice in the Shinnecock Studio
William Merritt Chase

The Milkmaid
Johannes Veemer
1658

John Singer Sargent
1911

Queen Victoria Lying in State
Emil Fuchs

Beers currently in my cellar (of doom)

I just started this a few weeks ago, so don't make fun of me.



(7) The Abyss (2008) - Imperial Stout - Deschutes Brewery, Oregon
(1) Imperial Stout - Rogue Brewery, Oregon
(2) Imperial Russian Stout - Stone Brewery, California
(2) Old Guardian Barley Wine Style Ale - Stone Brewery, California
(2) Double Bastard Ale - Stone Brewery, California
(1) 8/8/8 Vertical Epic Ale - Stone Brewery, California
(1) Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout - Stone Brewery, California

Songs that are often stuck in my head

Captain Beefheart - Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do
Ol Dirty Bastard - Got Your Money
ABBA - Dancing Queen

Moustache in fronte, moustache in animo.

"The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato downwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their estimation of dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight - the daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards..."
- Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols