Aung San Suu Kyi is free

After having spent 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest, where she was not even allowed to go out into her garden, Aung San Suu Kyi has finally been released. It's the best news I've read in months, although she can just be re-arrested again, as happened in the past. But for the moment, many people around the world are jubilant. Former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, a Peace Nobel Prize Laureate, and Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba gave a joint toast in her honor at a meeting to campaign against nuclear weapons. Archbishop Desmond Tutu lauded her as "a global symbol of moral courage."

The personal cost of her moral courage is unfathomable. She was not allowed to see her husband before he died of cancer in 1999, and she has not seen her children in 10 years. Today, she finally spoke on the phone to her younger son, who is in Thailand trying to get a visa to Burma.

President Obama claims her as a hero of his. She is certainly my hero.

Olympia

Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1510
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538
Manet, Olympia, 1863

Bryan Ferry titled his latest album Olympia, after Edouard Manet's infamous painting. "Olympia was a kind of early pin-up picture and in a sense a forerunner of some 20th century pop art, which I feel strongly connected to," he explains, choosing the model Kate Moss to convey the "glamorous notoriety" of the original Olympia nude.

I find Ferry's art-school reference a poor excuse for a rather boring photograph of a glammed up Kate Moss lying in bed with the "finest linen." There is nothing here that we have not seen before. Manet's Olympia, when it was first exhibited in 1863, was something not ever seen before in the history of painting. Manet's composition referred back to Renaissance paintings of Venuses, notably Titian's Venus of Urbino, which in turn refers back to Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (Titian was Giorgione's student and most likely finished Sleeping Venus when the latter died of the plague in 1510). Unlike the Renaissance Venuses, Manet's nude is not an idealized and mythic goddess, but a flesh and blood courtesan, attended by a maid holding a large bouquet of flowers. Manet painted his courtesan wearing nothing but a pair of mules and jewels, just as Manet's friend Beaudelaire described his lover in these lines:

La très chère était nue, et, connaissant mon coeur,

Elle n'avait gardé que ses bijoux sonore,

Dont le riche attirait lui donnait l'air vainqueur

Qu'ont dans leurs jours heureux les esclaves des Mores.

With her frank expression of sexuality staring back at the viewer, Manet's Olympia was shocking. The painting caused an uproar when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1865. After Manet's death in 1883, Claude Monet organized a public subscription to purchase the painting for the nation of France.

Olympia has had a lasting influence on modern art. Jean-Michel Basquiat referenced it in his 1982 work Detail of maid from "Olympia".

The fashion house Yves Saint Laurent reinterpreted it for their advertising campaign in 1998, replacing the nude figure of Olympia with a fully dressed male model attended by a scantily clad female figure holding a bouquet.

Photograph by Mario Sorrenti, Yves Saint Laurent ad, 1998

Unlike both of these instances, Bryan Ferry's interpretation of Olympia offers nothing new on the original, to which it pales by comparison. Incidentally, in the album, Ferry does a cover version of Tim Buckley's beautiful Song to the Siren. Again, Ferry's interpretation is a slick production, but it misses the point of Buckley's haunting lyrics. I much prefer the version by Mortal Coil, with the lyrics rendered so unforgettable by Liz Fraser's ethereal voice.

Halloween in Carroll Gardens

Lily trick or treating with the big kids
Pumpkins decoration
Severed head on a plate of hors d'oeuvres
Ann made this Don Quixote-like skeleton for Flavio
Ann, Sophie and Nick made this lovely horse out of cardboard boxes
Emilio as Michael Jackson
Edward as a matador
Lily as a hippie

I never liked Halloween until I moved to Carroll Gardens. The neighborhood really knows how to put on a great Halloween. The costumes are highly inventive and the community just comes together to put on the most festive party. Just another reason I heart Brooklyn.

Storm King Art Center

Alexander Calder, The Arch, 1975
Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King Wall, 1997-98
Maya Lin, Storm King Wavefield, 2007-08

Storm King on October 22, 2010

Storm King Art Center, located on the Hudson Valley just 60 miles from New York City, is a magnificent museum set in 500 acres of fields, meadows, and woodlands. The museum holds a large collection of sculptures set against the expansive landscape that changes with the seasons, celebrating the relationship between art and nature. The ever changing earth and sky define the background for these large scale pieces, allowing visitors to view them differently each time. Among the most popular site-specific installations are Andy Goldsworthy's Wall and Maya Lin's Wavefield. I particularly love Storm King in the autumn, when the foliage on the site and the surrounding hills explodes in fiery colors.

Fragments of Loss

Roland Barthes at 9 with his mother

Roland Barthes' diary entries chronicling his grief for his mother, with whom he lived most of his life. The entries are published in Mourning Diaries.

Here is Barthes at his most lucid and moving:

November 5th

Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà ("I'm here," a word we used with each other all our lives).

The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.

That's how I can grasp my mourning. Not directly in solitude, empirically, etc.; I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I'm suffering less than they would have imagined. But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment...

Translated from the French by Richard Howard

October

We've been having resplendent October days with a seamless blue sky and brilliant sunshine. The plantings on the High Line are looking achingly beautiful in their autumnal hues, turning into shades of gold, red and brown. Kinglets are back in town. Everyday I listen to unfamiliar birdsongs signaling the presence of migrating birds stopping on their way south. Mornings at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are my favorite time; just a few moment of solitary wandering around its ground will fill my heart for days.

October 10

Now constantly there is the sound,

quieter than air,

of the leaves falling

Under their loosening bright

gold, the sycamore limbs

bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers

are beeweed and asters spray

of their white and lavender

over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds

loud - a landmark - now

that the life of summer falls

silent, and the night grows.

Wendell Berry

MoMA

After days of heavy rain, we woke up to a brilliantly cloudless sky. We spent most of this magnificent day at MoMA, where there is an abundance of amazing exhibitions at the moment. Just to name a few: New Photography 2010, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront, and Dinh Q. Lê's installation entitled The Farmers and The Helicopters, all of which were interesting, thought-provoking and visually arresting. In the new photography, Alex Prager's work was the most engaging. There are so many great photos in the Pictures by Women show, which runs the gamut of works from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman. The models of New York with the rising sea level projected in 50 years are amazing to behold and contemplate. Dinh Q. Lê's work is an insightful exploration of the complex relationships between the Vietnamese people and helicopters, and their struggle to reshape this symbol of terror and destruction into one of peace and pride. The large three-channel video, weaving together the Vietnamese personal recollections of the war and clips depicting the war from Western films, was both moving and unsettling at the same time.

Outside, the Philip Johnson-designed sculpture garden, looking impeccably beautiful, is the site of a lovely piece by Yoko Ono, The Wish Tree. In the tradition of the Buddhist wish tree, visitors are invited to write their wish onto a tag, which they can tie to a tree. At the end of the day, the tags are collected into a large glass ball that is exhibited inside. Lily wrote a lovely wish list. Another Yoko Ono piece which she also enjoyed was called Voice Piece for Soprano in the museum grand Marron Atrium, where a microphone was set up with a pair of loudspeakers and visitors are invited to scream 1. against the wind, 2. against the wall, 3. against the sky. After much hesitation, Lily went up to the microphone and did an impressive bit of screaming. I wonder in which other museum can one do such a thing?