March 20, 2005
Descriptions I like
Let artists and musicians and filmmakers be writers! Let novelists and poets be critics! Here's Tom Waits describing the first time he heard opera (Link via TMFTML):
I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I've never had spaghetti and meatballs—'Oh My God, Oh My God!'—and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.
And, another favorite, Caroll Dunham on Joe Zucker:
Zucker's offbeat subject matter opened many doors onto territory that was not common for his generation of New York painters. It is meaningless to consider his practice without it, but it is difficult to isolate a value there. New subjects have always prompted him to explore new ways of making things, and the reciprocity between the objects and their narrative equivalents is always active. In the past this reciprocity has been invoked to justify his odd subject choices (the history of cotton constructed of cotton balls), but ultimately this effort fails. He engages subjects the way folk music does, blurring the distinctions between history and folklore, personal and public, memory and story. The paintings are truly alchemical and, as such, somewhat mysterious and obscure. He has compulsively turned the usual inert materials of painting, mixed with flotsam from the world, into surprising artistic gold, and the very reimagining and reinvention is a lot of the point.
And an earlier post in appreciation of Zadie Smith's writing on other novelists.