today i bought a book
wow, i hear you gasp - you did what??? well, yes. i bought a book. i didn't go out intending to buy a book - i went out intending to have lunch with a friend (which i did) and buy some fat wool for a hat (which i didn't). i almost bought a pair of shoes, which i may go through with later in the week if the tube strike doesn't get in the way. but i did buy a book. so by now you're probably thoroughly bored of this post (and only 4 lines in - wow!) and just wishing i would tell you which book was actually bought, so here you go:
... and now you're probably sorry you asked. i do love mark rothko. i didn't get abstract art at all until i stumbled into the seagram murals room in the tate modern a couple of years ago and those paintings just sat and pulsed off the walls at me until i was ready to cry. it's still one of my very favourite places in london. and now he's one of my favourite-ever artists. i think it takes a lot of courage to put a couple of rectangles of colour onto a canvas and not be either taking the piss or totally up yourself but have it really mean something. i sometimes feel like that about music. it can seem so pretentious to be putting notes together, to be making something new for forces that truly great composers like stravinsky or debussy or britten wrote for. it can seem somehow redundant, and all the more so before you've worked out what it is you're trying to say. stravinsky once wrote (in relation to "programme music") that music, by its very nature, is powerless to express anything at all, but i suspect it might be more accurate to say that it is powerless to express anything other than itself. it's a piece of abstract art, but - as i believe rothko felt very strongly about - "abstract" doesn't mean that it's a void, that nothing was *intended* in its creation.
as you can see, the mere act of picking up this book and flipping through it was enough to make me start thinking profound and likely unreadable thoughts about art and life and the feeling was so strong and good that i just had to give that book a home. so i bought it (as you know). and some more knitting needles :-)
