Lisa Yuskavage. I’m watching a stupid teen movie this weekend “The Girl Next Door”, and the three high school buddies that make up the movies core are shooting a movie on safe sex for teens and the female star is laying on a riser smoking a cigarette mostly undressed but just relaxed while the rest of the film crew is just bustling around her – and all I could think of was that this reminds me of a painting by Lisa Yuskavage. Recent writing about LY have stated that no one is painting like her right now – I could not agree more.
Jules Oltikski died. I’m reminded of the Bob Dylan quote. “people fade away until they are gone, and when they’re gone, it’s like they never faded away at all”
Modernism is the new “ism”. I mentioned something about this last year after reading a column by Matthew Collings in Modern Painters last year. I thought that was interesting but I really didn’t think that it was really the case. This year we saw the Brice Marden retrospective at MoMA, the Sean Scully at the Met, Jasper Johns at the NGA, and coming soon the Modernism show at the Corcoran. On top of this, I’m seeing more and more artists returning to reductive ideas of the late seventies/early eighties. With renewed interest in minimal/conceptual work recently I’m feeling this is a trend worth noting.
George 104.1 on your radio dial. This would be interesting if it was still 1980 and I was in high school, maybe.
Flavors Soul Food, Falls Church VA. I recently found out about Flavors and was dying to try it out for the last couple of weeks, and I could not be more pleased. I went for lunch with Harris and we tried a few of the dishes. The fried chicken is made to order which means thats it will take about 20 minutes – not a minute sooner. Add that to the list of great sides as well – we had macaroni and cheese, corn bread, yams, collard greens, and beans and rice.
We rolled out of there knowing we better not go back for at least a week or so.