My heart is here. (See above.)
Just one of the photographs by Michael Eastman from his series Cuba. My world is covered in snow, here, and the rooms he has photographed in Cuba are more my inner temperature than this steady Michigan blizzard. They are wonderful to find (I found them via The Art Newspaper, my former employer, who headed to Art Basel Miami last week to report mainly on the baleful art market amidst baleful markets). (Also, did you catch the related joke about Miami on 30 Rock? Jack: “Why does anyone go to Miami? For ass, and the burgeoning art scene.”)
But back to my heart, this kitchen: could this kitchen only be in Cuba? I think so. Even though I would like it for my own, it is Cuba, and all that is loaded into Cuba from here, projected. Yet also its own tropical integrity: this kitchen is real and challenged and so green with exact living. And look at the floor, more like a pattern for nothing except to hold up what is happening on the wall. What is happening on the wall? Humidity, time, slipping. This is no perfect rock garden. It’s the kind of thing I want from art and more urgently, from poems: no perfect rock gardens. (Jasper Johns: “I thought, and I wanted to express that my work, perhaps, had coarser roots than a life of contemplation might.”)
Perhaps it’s the dismal spiral of trade publishing (the Drenka Willen, let go from Harcourt? WTF?) but I am all for half-escaping into to these real and flawed places right now. Gracias, Mr. Eastman.
Eat strong greens, your kitchens, your books. Hold fast to what sails you, dear friends.