"As the categories have gotten, well, weirder, I’ve tried to create balance by not mixing tricky wordplay with hard trivia, so that there’s a path to a solution."

"If there’s a particularly hard-to-spot category, I might try to include a hint on the board. While cards are usually arranged to mislead the solver, sometimes the arrangement can be used to help, too. The category of 'Anagrams of Famous Painters' was tough, for example, so the top row of that board read 'EGADS SCRAMBLE ARTIST NAME' (EGADS is an anagram of 'Degas')...."

From "I Make Connections. Here’s What I’m Actually Thinking. The 1,000th Connections puzzle is out today. Wyna Liu, the writer behind the game, knows you have thoughts" (NYT)(gift link).

"I’ve... learned that some people hate when a word on the board is repeated in a category name. So I was honored when a friend showed me a post in the subreddit r/NYTConnections, with the heading 'In celebration of the single worst purple connections category ever …' A solver shared an image of what appeared to be a tattoo: a clam encircled by the words 'Things That Open Like a Clam.' (COMPACT, LAPTOP, WAFFLE IRON and … CLAM.)"

I think the problem is that a clam isn't like a clam. A clam's a clam. It was a great category, just named inaccurately.

Now, that I've got my "mollusks" tag on this post, I'm motivated to blog this other thing. I didn't even know about nudibranchs — lovely colorful mollusks — but I learned about them today when somebody at Metafilter linked to Wool Creature Lab a place that uses the craft of felting to make (to order) images of quite specific nudibranchs. They're beautiful, too beautiful to believe they are accurate images of real creatures. But the scientific name is listed with the felt item, and you can look it up and see photos of the living nudibranch. It's accurate.

"There are no bedrooms. The sleeping area for Yoichiro, a painter and metal guitarist, is little more than a bed in a corner..."

"... with one real wall and three makeshift ones fashioned out of a painting rack, a stereo cabinet atop a dolly, a bookcase and a bureau. The area is decorated with stuffed animals sitting atop a canvas; Yoichiro’s drawing of a departed family cat; and photographs of his muse, Laura Ingalls from the 1970s television show 'Little House on the Prairie.' His parents’ sleeping area is tucked in a more secluded corner of the labyrinth, reached by navigating among yet more canvases, under a clothesline strung with coats and through a passage no wider than a goat path. On the walls hang fuse boxes and Yoichiro’s paintings. A typical morning begins with Toshihisa rising around 6:30 to make tea, which the Yodas use in a prayer ritual at a Shinto shrine that sits atop an old dresser. Then they work...."

From "A Family of Three in a SoHo Loft Without Walls/Toshihisa and Junko Yoda and their son, Yoichiro, have been making art in a 4,000-square-foot space on Mercer Street for 35 years, each following their own muse" (NYT)(gift link, because there are cool photos of artwork and arty interiors).

It's a big living space, and right in a beautiful part of NYC. A 53-year-old man lives with his 85- and 82-year-old parents. And no walls! "In lieu of walls, the Yodas have divided the vast space into an eccentric warren of 'rooms' with hundreds of stacked canvases and boxes, some adorned with a Japanese moving company’s logo of a mother cat carrying a kitten in her mouth."

You can see that logo — and the children's drawings it's based on — at "The Cat that Carried a Nation/What Kuroneko Teaches Us About Brand Trust" (Medley): "A black cat carrying her kitten. No text. No slogan. Just a gentle silhouette, frozen mid-step. In Japan, you don’t even need to see the full image. A flash of yellow and black, the curl of a tail, and you already know — it’s Kuroneko. And your package is in safe hands. What makes it brilliant isn’t just recognizability. It’s emotion...." 

"Then I just stopped listening to everybody, and everybody stopped talking to me. I was getting very little feedback."

"I began to perceive that my real interest was light. The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on light, and the glass held the light.... "

Said Janet Fish, quoted in "Janet Fish, Painter of Luminous Still Lifes, Dies at 87/From her student days, she stubbornly refused to follow popular artistic trends. Instead, she spent decades exploring the effects of light on glass" (NYT)(gift links, because there are some pretty cool photos of Fish's paintings).

"In the eyes of just about everyone at Yale, Ms. Fish later recalled, she was just 'this girl who’s painting flowers.' Upon arriving in New York in 1965, she continued to follow her own path. 'I just stuck to my work,' she said. 'And one thing led to another.'"

Raise your culinary aspirations.

Do you have any idea of the heights of imagination and achievement that are available to you?

"It was almost like a magical object...."

"It brought New Yorkers together, that everyone had one in their wallet and we had that in common, and it's the way of the world — you can't stop it...."

"It might seem strange that a gigantic, staggeringly good new Cecily Brown work has emerged in a former flophouse where Jack Kerouac hacked out his scrolls..."

"... on the same block as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios—though it’s been established that Hendrix is very much a Cecily Brown muse. The work usually comes to, say, Paula Cooper Gallery, where there’s a long line of buyers, collectors who otherwise have to shell out millions for her paintings at auction. And yet Brown herself could not be more pleased. She’s a scholar of the restaurant mural: paintings that enhance the space without completely overwhelming it, and seem like they’ve been there forever. Her favorites: the Maxfield Parrish at the St. Regis’s King Cole Bar, where Dalí and Duchamp used to carouse. The Howard Chandler Christy series in the restaurant at Hotel des Artistes, where Norman Rockwell lived. And, of course, the murals of Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel...."

From "Cecily Brown on the 'Unsexy' Art Market and Her New Restaurant Mural: 'It Can’t be Moved. It’s Not for Sale'/Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel has a new mural by one of the world’s great painters—whose works sell for millions at auction—and it’s already in a league with the famous wall paintings at Bemelmans Bar" (Vanity Fair)(click through to see the busy, cheerful mural).

The article has a link on Jack Kerouac that goes to another Vanity Fair article, one that begins with this Jack Kerouac quote: "As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk."

Was Jack talking about rooms like that fancy-schmancy Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel? And was he really an indoorsy guy? Challenged, I sought out the context of that quote, which appears on a lot of "famous quotes" page. But it's in something from 1960 called "The Vanishing American Hobo." No hobos Chez Nous, I suppose. Here's Jack:

There's something strange going on, you cant even be alone any more in the primitive wilderness... there's always a helicopter comes and snoops around, you need camouflage. -- Then they begin to demand that you observe strange aircraft for Civil Defense as though you knew the difference between regular strange aircraft and any kind of strange aircraft. -- As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk and give up your hoboing and your camping ambitions because there aint a sheriff or fire warden in any of the new fifty states who will let you cook a little meal over some burning sticks in the tule brake or the hidden valley or anyplace any more because he has nothing to do but pick on what he sees out there on the landscape moving independently of the gasoline power army police station. -- I have no ax to grind: I'm simply going to another world.

Ray Rademacher, a fellow staying at the Mission in the Bowery, said recently, "I wish things was like they was when my father was known as Johnny the Walker of the White Mountains. -- He once straightened out a young boy's bones after an accident, for a meal, and left. The French people around there called him 'Le Passant' (He who passes through.)

The hobos of America who can still travel in a healthy way are still in good shape, they can go hide in cemeteries and drink wine under cemetery groves of trees and micturate and sleep on cardboards and smash bottles on the tombstones and not care and not be scared of the dead but serious and humorous in the cop-avoiding night and even amused and leave litters of their picnic between the grizzled slabs of Imagined Death, cussing what they think are real days, but Oh the poor bum of the skid row! There he sleeps in the doorway, back to wall, head down, with his right hand palm-up as if to receive from the night, the other hand hanging, strong, firm, like Joe Louis hands, pathetic, made tragic by unavoidable circumstance -- the hand like a beggar's upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips, as though on the tip of the tongue he's about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldnt say awake: "Why have you taken this away from me, that I cant draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling stoop I have to sit waiting for the wheels of the city to roll," and further, "I dont want to show my hand but in sleep I'm helpless to straighten it, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I'm alone, I'm sick, I'm dying -- see my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the emerald mountains beyond the city, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile -- I'm too tired now of everything else, I've had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night -- take me home, lock me in safe, take me to where all is peace and amity, to the family of life, my mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend -- but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I'd give a million dollars to be in my own bed -- O Lord save me --" In evil roads behind gas tanks where murderous dogs snarl from behind wire fences cruisers suddenly leap out like getaway cars but from a crime more secret, more baneful than words can tell.

The woods are full of wardens.

"A public toilet neutralizes and suspends the dualism between … what remains private and what is meant to be shared."

Wrote Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele in the notes for the Fall 2025 Runway Show, which had a set with "red toilet stalls, where models changed in and out of gender-fluid looks."

Quoted in "The Next Big Thing in Pop Culture: Public Bathrooms/In fashion, film and beyond, restrooms have become sites of creative inspiration" (NYT).

The NYT instructs us to think of a public bathrooms as "an apt setting for art exploring identity, the body and discretion"... which is so not what I'm looking for in a public bathroom. Ah, but I'm talking about basic human needs, not art. Art is supposed to challenge you and to upset you, if you are bourgeois.

"But what if there was a missing layer, a lost generation of artists whose work ran hot-to-feverish in temperature and was driven by a Whitmanesque love of the human body and its longings?"

"This is the question raised with appropriate hippie optimism in 'Sixties Surreal,' an ambitiously revisionist exhibition opening on Sept. 24 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It brings together about 150 works by 111 painters, sculptors, photographers, collagists, cartoonists, junk assemblage-ists, and at least one Kabballah-ist, most of whom were pushed to the sidelines of the ’60s art scene for various unkind reasons...."

From "Roll Over, Warhol: Taking the ’60s Beyond Pop Art/A thrillingly revisionist history of the era at the Whitney Museum uncovers a current of art that sprang from eros and the uncensored minds of R. Crumb, Martha Edelheit and others" (NYT).

"Of the 111 artists in the show, 47 are women... On a recent afternoon, I visited the studio of Martha Edelheit, a little-known, twice-widowed Manhattanite, now 94, who is about to make her Whitney debut.... She was part of a generation of proto-feminists who painted explicit nudes. In 1965, she recalled, she had a show at the Byron Gallery in Manhattan. The New York Times critic John Canaday came in to look, only to politely explain to the gallery owner that he couldn’t review 'that obscene woman.' Stretching 16 feet wide, across three panels, ['Flesh Wall With Table' (1965)']... embeds a group of female nudes in the space surrounding her drawing table. Languid bodies sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, snoozing comfortably, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples."

Suggestive!

I've been inside the museums and I've scrawled my way through many life drawing classes, and it's never occurred to me to refer to nudes as "suggestive."

But this morning I'm reading The New York Times....

A key congressional committee on Monday released a note and sexually suggestive drawing containing what appeared to be Donald J. Trump’s signature that was included in a book for the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003 — a drawing that Mr. Trump has insisted he did not create.

And The Washington Post...

... Democrats on the committee released portions of the book — including a suggestive picture and note allegedly drawn by President Donald Trump when he and Epstein were friends.

A nude is suggestive? A line drawing of a nude???

Cover your eyes, children, we're in the Henri Matisse gallery!

A quote from Henri Matisse: "I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity… but as a means deliberately simplified so as to give simplicity and spontaneity to the expression, which should speak without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator."

When Henri — or Donald — speaks without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator, what does he suggest?

When a nude purportedly drawn by Donald Trump is called "suggestive" in the NYT or the Washington Post, we're supposed to think that the message is... what? Rape this? 

"There Must Be More to Life Than..."

"The Mysterious Cover Artist Who Captured the Decline of the Rich/Mary Petty was reclusive, uncompromising, but she peered into a fading world with unmatched warmth and brilliance."

I hope you can get past the New Yorker pay wall to see this article, with writing by the artist Chris Ware, and many wonderful New Yorker covers by Mary Petty.

Excerpt:

Her eye was extraordinary, conjuring an Edwardian era through its tiniest features: the brocaded wallpaper, the finely tiled kitchen floors, the thin brass faucets, the plush upholstery.

James Thurber, in an introduction to “This Petty Pace” (1945), the sole published collection of the artist’s work, describes the young Petty as a “slip of a girl.” Like her husband, she initially preferred to mail in her submissions, but by the nineteen-forties she had become a “common sight” at the magazine’s office, “sitting, cool and almost undismayed, on the edge of a chair.” Thurber reports that she would spend three weeks on a drawing; when she was done, she would say that she hated it and herself. “Everybody else, of course, loves it and her,” Thurber adds, observing that what Petty offered in her work was “not a trick, but a magic. . . . She catches time in a foreshortened crouch that intensifies her satirical effects.”

Time in a foreshortened crouch — is anyone catching that anymore?

Example:

ADDED: Ware notes that Petty seems to have influenced Edward Gorey. And I'll just note that the book title — "This Petty Pace" — is a reference to a Shakespeare soliloquy, from "MacBeth," which also has something to say about time.

"Juvenal said that being a gladiator turned an ugly man into an Adonis in women’s eyes. 'It’s the steel they love,' the poet wrote."

"Men were obsessed too. Maecenas, a patron of the arts under the emperor Augustus, discussed the warriors’ form on a carriage ride with the poet Horace; the playwright Terence complained that one of his performances had been ruined by a crowd rushing in thinking that gladiators were fighting. The Romans felt it was good luck to part a bride’s hair with a spear that had been thrust into a gladiator’s body and drank tinctures of their blood to cure epilepsy...."

From "Sex, sesterces and status — the perks of being a gladiator/Those Who Are About Die is a myth-slaying history of the world of Roman fighters by the classicist and novelist Harry Sidebottom" (London Times).

The Department of Homeland Security — on Facebook — invites us to reveal ourselves in the discussion of a painting.

Here's the link to the Facebook page, where the image is quite large and clear and it's easy to read the comments. The government's caption is: "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending."

"Proud"? "Worth defending"? This sets some people off.

Even if you like that European-Americans moved across the continent and made it their own — and now your own — you may be taken aback to see America symbolized by a gigantic white woman in a diaphanous gown that whirls and swirls in the breeze — but doesn't slip off of her tenacious left tit — as she brings light, a telegraph line, and a school book westward.

The painting, "American Progress," was done by John Gast in 1872. Here's the Wikipedia article. The piece is very well composed and executed, and it's a good thing to stare at to contemplate Manifest Destiny. The Department of Homeland Security is challenging us to step up and feel proud, to see the westward expansion as beautiful... as beautiful as a half-naked woman.

"I mean, the crazy idea — but in the spirit of crazy ideas — is that if the world — there's like 8, roughly 8 billion people in the world — if the world can generate, like, 8 quintillion tokens per year..."

"... if that's the world, let, let, actually, let's say the world can generate 20 trillion quin- 20 quintillion tokens per year, each word generated by an AI — okay, just making up a huge number here, okay? — we'll say, okay, 12 of those go to, you know, the normal capitalistic system. But 8 of those 8 quintillion tokens are gonna get divided up equally among 8 billion people. So everybody gets 1 trillion tokens. And that's your kind of universal basic wealth globally. And people can sell those tokens. Like, if I don't need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for some like new art project we wanna do. But, but instead of just like getting a check, you're getting — everybody on earth is getting — like a slice of the world's AI capacity, and then we're letting the, like, massively distributed human ingenuity and creativity and economic engine do its thing. I mean, that's like a crazy idea. Maybe it's a bad one, but that's the kind of thing that I think sounds like someone should think about it more."

Said Sam Altman, in the new episode of Theo Von's podcast (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

The word in boldface is the word that I said out loud as I was listening to the podcast, through earbuds, as I walked in the woods just now. I would describe my tone of voice as: derisive. Art! Art reared its goofball head in the midst of that insanity. I've heard it before, this notion that if only we were set free from the limitations of the workaday world, what we would do would be to make art.

"Amy Sherald — the artist who rocketed to fame with her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama — has withdrawn her upcoming solo show from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery..."

"... because she said she had been told the museum was considering removing her painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid provoking President Trump. 'American Sublime,' set to arrive at the museum in September, is a much heralded exhibition of works by Ms. Sherald and would have been the first by a Black contemporary artist at the Portrait Gallery... Ms. Sherald said that [Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, which runs the Portrait Gallery]... had proposed replacing the painting with a video of people reacting to the painting and discussing transgender issues, an idea she rejected because she said it would have included anti-trans views. 'When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel,' she said. 'The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the "American Sublime" narrative.’"

From "Amy Sherald Cancels Her Smithsonian Show, Citing Censorship/The artist said that she made the decision after she said she learned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking President Trump" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see photos of the paintings).

Whatever you think of the painting — "Tranforming Liberty" — it really is an awful idea to replace it with a video that included people critiquing the artist's point of view. Show the artist. She has a point of view. If you don't admire her, don't give her a show. But don't weave in the critics! They're not even art critics as far as I can tell. They just seem to be discordant voices about the visibility of trans people. Ridiculous! Embarrassing! Let the people see the paintings as painted and talk about them amongst themselves or write about them in social media or, as critics, in traditional media. Don't muck up the show!

As for the share of blame that belongs to Trump...

"For 35 years, Bill Dilworth tended a Manhattan loft filled with dirt, otherwise known as 'The New York Earth Room,' a monumental artwork by Walter De Maria.... 280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep..."

"... on the second floor of an early artists’ co-op in a former manufacturing building on Wooster Street, in the heart of SoHo. It was installed in 1977, in what used to be the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, and it was intended to be temporary, a three-month-long exhibit.... [T]he artists who colonized the building and the area have mostly moved on, and the neighborhood, like the city itself, has evolved. 'That’s what makes the Earth Room so radical,' Mr. Dilworth said.... 'It’s here, and it remains the same.'... He watered and raked the soil, plucking the odd weed or mushroom. (The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.)... 'I found the art world to be something that doesn’t appeal to me.... This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to it. But making art has been vital to me always. So how do you make art and not be in the art world? This job allows me to stay tuned to my own art-making — just by the freedom of thought and all that.'"

From "Bill Dilworth, Caretaker of ‘The New York Earth Room,’ Is Dead at 70/For decades, he tended a SoHo loft filled with dirt, made by the conceptual artist Walter De Maria. People made pilgrimages to see it — and Mr. Dilworth, its magnetic steward" (NYT).

"The recurring anti-war messaging that pops up throughout the display, particularly in his scratchy drawings, is both a Japanese artistic trope — think Yoko Ono..."

"... and an unstated recognition of something we forget too easily in the West: that we dropped two atom bombs on Japan to fast-forward the end of the Second World War, and that this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation. What we have here is kids v annihilation."

I'm reading "Drawing like a kid isn’t child’s play — but does it deserve an exhibition?/Picasso and Miró prized naivety and there’s more to the infantile cartoons of Yoshitomo Nara at the Hayward Gallery than meets the eye" (London Times). 

I was surprised at "this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation." "Never" is a strong word. The war with Germany was over by the time the atom bomb was ready, but we had other bombs and we used them very harshly against the Germans. We used dehumanizing stereotypes against the Japanese and also against the Germans. I'm disgusted to see "this racist assault would never have been inflicted on a European nation" in the London Times.

The Times art critic is Waldemar Januszczak, who was born in England to parents who were Polish refugees of WWII. 

Here's the Yoshitomo Nara art:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hayward Gallery (@hayward.gallery)

"Hundreds of intrepid people would organize themselves into themed gangs and set out in homemade crafts of dubious seaworthiness..."

"... through Jamaica Bay to compete, 'American Gladiators'-style, with various props and pseudo-weapons. The 'boats' disintegrated once the shenanigans were over.... Mr. McNeill’s most ambitious project was... a 500-mile trip along the Ganges River... called... 'The Swimming Cities of the Ocean of Blood.' Mr. McNeill and a group of collaborators built five metal pontoon boats in Brooklyn — three of them powered by motorcycles, one by sail and oars, and another by paddle wheel — which he would captain. The boats were designed to lock together for camping on the water.... It was an arduous monthslong trip. Marauding monkeys attacked their camp..... Mr. McNeill’s godfather was the author William S. Burroughs, with whom the elder Mr. McNeill had collaborated on a graphic novel. Mr. Burroughs baptized Orien with a dab of vodka from his afternoon drink...."

From "Orien McNeill, Artist Who Made Mischief on the Water, Dies at 45/He was the pied piper of a loose community of DIY artists homesteading on New York City’s waterways, which he used as his canvas and stage" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the photos).

McNeill died on May 15 on his 52-foot-long ferryboat, and we are not told the cause of death.

"I learnt to paint looking at my own photographs; I used to love looking at a photograph with a magnifying glass and getting ideas about how to put paint on."

"I just simplify and use the shapes. I would never paint a whole house, for instance; I would paint part of one, something that tells a little story but not the whole story."

From "Gretchen Dow Simpson obituary: Artist for The New Yorker/Creator known for the rigid geometry of her depictions of staircases, beaches and exteriors of New England houses, dies aged 85" (London Times).

You can view her work at her website, here.

And check out her mural in Rhode Island:

"I hope Grounded in the Stars will instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity."

Says the sculptor Thomas J. Price at his website, linked at the New York Times in "Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point. A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity."

Wow! That headline says so much about "meaningful connections," "intimate emotional states," and "deeper reflection around the human condition."

What could be more meaningfully connected, intimately emotional, or more deeply reflected upon than to call you a big old racist if you scorn a monumental statue of a casually dressed black woman?

Price's hopes are dashed. And the Times doesn't even tell us the title of the statue — "Grounded in the Stars" — until the 7th paragraph. After the headline calls it "Times Sq. Sculpture" and "a 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman," the text calls it "the bronze sculpture," "the 12-foot statue," "the sculpture," and — quoting others — "a statue of an 'angry Black lady,'" "a D.E.I. statue." 

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?