Marcella’s Roasted Belgian Endive recipe. 

[Photo Credit:  Ralph Smith for The New York Times. Food stylist: Michelle Gatton]

Thanks to Up North Trips for mentioning that this record was released on this date in 1994.

“Anemones with a Black Mirror” by Henri Matisse (1918-19)

Photographs by Mario Cravo Neto

at Everyday I Show. 

Winter is coming.

Peter Schjeldahl has a kind word for Norman Rockwell:

Rockwell’s populous American mythos is ever more to be valued as the shared beliefs that used to gird it devolve into hellish divisions. His lodestar was Charles Dickens, naturalized to New England towns and to suburbs anywhere. And he drew and painted angelically, with subtle technical ingenuity, involving layered colors, that is still underappreciated. I took instruction on this point from de Kooning, who opened a book to a reproduction, handed me a magnifying glass, and made me peruse Rockwell’s minuscule but almost fiercely animated painterly touch. “See?” said de Kooning. “Abstract Expressionism!” Solomon reports that de Kooning remarked of Rockwell’s astonishing imitation of a Pollock drip painting, being viewed by a fancy gent in “The Connoisseur” (1962), “Square inch by square inch, it’s better than Jackson!” I agree, though the pastiche is unpersuasive overall. Rockwell had labored mightily to get the Pollock look right, not as a parody but in homage. He said, “If I were young, I would paint that way myself.” Never anti-modernist, he was always in awe of Picasso.

But—or really and—Rockwell was an obsessive-compulsive, anxiety-riddled, miserable hypochondriac, as at least two of his three schoolteacher wives and his three emotionally stunted children could testify. He didn’t behave badly so much as he hardly behaved at all, outside his studios in, successively, New Rochelle, New York; Arlington, Vermont; and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His psychoanalyst—no less than the renowned developmental psychologist and pioneer of psychobiography Erik Erikson—is said to have remarked that Rockwell funneled all his happiness into his art. Solomon plumbs a suspicion (almost de rigueur in biography-writing lately) of homosexuality. Her verdict: temperamentally so, but moot in one who was puritanically shy of intimacy. I can almost imagine Edmund Wilson, whose “The Wound and the Bow” (1941) theorized a link between psychic trauma and creative genius, adding a chapter for Rockwell. (Wilson’s leadoff essay is about Dickens.) Certainly, there can be few more extreme endorsements of W.B. Yeats’s chilly dictum, “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.”

Sho ’nuff.

[Picture by Bags]

My man Diebenkorn photographed by Fred Lyon.

Back for another edition. And we’re talking about the noun here…

What’s the difference between a jerk off and a jag off?

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” –Teller

I forgot to mention this last month but check out this post: Chris Jones talks about storytelling and magic.

Great stuff.

And enjoy Glenn Stout’s 15 ways to survive as a freelance writer.  

[Photo Credit: Carlos Serrao; Peter Yang]

Diz.

[Photo Credit: Matthew Coleman via MPD]

Illustrations by Michael Sawtyruk.

Bounce, make ’em bounce, make ’em bounce…

I’d eat this. 

Patti remembers Lou. 

On Short Cuts. 

Jim Windolf asks: Can you ride a bike in the city without being an asshole?

The answer is “No.”

[Photo Credit: Andrew Savulich/N.Y. Daily News]

Dig this interview with my pal Kate Joyce. 

Painting by Karim Hamid.

You played yourself.

[Painting by Kelly Reemtsen]