Art Salon

Wonderland

Art Salon

Cup of coffee

"Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. ... Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise." -- Ezra Pound, American Poet

Writers

Some of my favorite writers include Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Banana Yashimoto, Fyodor Doestoevsky, Chekhov. One of my favorite books of all time is "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino. The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard intrigues me and I have read many of his novels, including "Gargoyle," "Cement," "Limeworks" and "Correction."

Artists

Favorite visual artists include Marc Chagall, Vincent Van Gogh, James Ensor, Gerhard Richter, and Maurice Utrillo.

Music:

Dead Can Dance, Kronos Quartet, Nick Drake, Bjork, Beth Orten. . .

Stream

Music listened to while updating this site:

Torch Song: Toward the Unknown Region, by William Orbit
Soundtrack to Farinelli, El Castrato
Is This Desire, by P.J. Harvey
Passion (Music for the Last Temptation of Christ), by Peter Gabriel
Tibet, sacred songs of Tibet, by YungChen Lhamo




Top Shelf, No Dust "The Devil's Larder" by Jim Crace, is sixty-four short fictions intertwined by the common subject of food. These bizarre, irridescent tales are poignant and involved, such as the one about the chemist who invents a drink he calls "Euphrosyne," which causes involuntary laughter in those who partake of it. He and his friend Victor try it out on tourists at a bar called the Passenger Bar, located in a nameless port town. Another story is about the narrator's baking of a "blind pie" in honor of the kind of pie his mother used to bake for he and his sisters -- five compartments are filled with food, but the sixth is filled with beans and pebbles and later replaced by marbles, jewelry, or other childhood treasures. Rather than inspiring excitement in the part of the narrator, the "blind pie" inspires fear of never being adequately loved.