The Green Fairy Resurrected

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Absinthe, ah the decadent wonder of late nights and green fairies. Ah the miraculous release from life’s troubles. The scintillating pleasure of dissolving sugar in its neon depths.

Absinthe has saturated bar menus in Manhattan of late as the drink du jour. As far as I’m concerned, that jour is past.

However cool it may be that Van Gogh might have cut his earlobe off because of it, it doesn’t taste so delicious. You see the face of the woman in Picasso’s 1901 Absinthe Drinker? Nobody smiles in the paintings of absinthe drinkers. It’s because a vile green herbal liquor is sitting in front of them, reflecting a sickly pallor upon them. Absinthe was deliciously illegal and hard to obtain in Manhattan (which would make even toadstools a luxury good) but now it’s plentifully available. It tends to taste like anise, a flavor that I’ve always detested.

So what is there to be said in favor of this over-available, under-tasty liquor? Vintage poster art for one, and paintings like the one by Picasso for another. Artists seem to love portraying absinthe, whether its advertisements of smiling people and lascivous green lady fairies or paintings of sallow, dejected loners in bars. Could absinthe have been different then?

Proust and Time

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Swann’s Way is the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), and I found it easy to dip into the lives of the boy Marcel and the dilettante Charles Swann for my first foray into Proust.

Where is the first volume going? Somewhere along the life of a little boy and a Mr. Swann, but apparently that will be wherever life takes them and not where plot demands. To enjoy this novel one must allow a companionable closeness with the protagonist, and if you do, you’ll find yourself as torn up as he is over the refusal of a mother or lover, and as overjoyed to see his beloved. How closely you can identify with a character when you know the minutest details of his thoughts!

Describing the charm of Proust’s writing is difficult because his virtues are old-fashioned and rare. He doesn’t skimp words. He is circuitous and his relates much more than is necessary for any plot; his writing is the opposite of what we are taught. His flow lacks the modernity of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, and yet has an expansive, naturally drifting quality that revolves around an intense personal consciousness. Unlike Joyce, reading Proust is the most easy, natural thing to dip into, but he requires patience. The longer read, the better sense you gain of the cumulative meanings that lend poignancy to his writing.

“the memory of a particular image is but the regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years”

Proust might be writing fiction, but it reminds me of Fernando Pessoa’s autobiographical The Book of Disquiet. À la recherche du temps perdu is to a great point autobiographical (I think that is what allows him to write it so well.) Proust names the protagonist Marcel, his own name, and his title suggests that he is trying to write his life back. What a lovely thing, to be able to write a fictional account of one’s own life. How much closer one might get to the heart of the matter, as Proust does.

Up with The Man! Save the Art!

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Edward Winkleman’s blog post yesterday on the hows and hopes that the new presidency would support the arts led me to thinking about funding. I appreciate an impressive amount of sponsorship from big corporations that in themselves I don’t always love. For instance in New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has Target First Saturdays, MoMA has Target First Fridays, and the Whitney After Hours program is sponsored by law firm Clifford Chance. Banks commonly sponsor major exhibitions.

This is not to say individuals do not play a role; on the contrary, the donations and loans by individuals are the traditional mainstay a museum depends on, for pieces of art as well as programs. Yet individuals don’t seem to be able to wholly fulfill that role anymore. Consider the Morgan Library. Once the home of art patron and financier Pierpont Morgan, the Morgan Library is a museum that was once a home, like the Frick Museum, but now made in to a public scpace and run by a board. Individuals still help support these institutions, but individuals are no longer the primary consumers or supporters of art. It’s a sea change from an individual to corporate level as a world of domineering steel age barons of America has given way to the dominate institutions of today.

Unfortunately, those institutions aren’t likely to be flush with money in 2009. Thomas Campbell, the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has a plan to my liking: utilize the parts of the collection in storage rather than host expensive traveling exhibitions. Some are excited by the potential sales of private art collections that recent financial collapses have encouraged, but they should be more nervous about the future of sponsorship that also signals, as institutions become less likely to pledge funds. All the more reason for the hopes that a new White House administration can fix everything. Rings a tad naïve to my ears, but here’s to hoping.