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The tagline of the magazine in question, Popular Western, was “Complete Quick-Trigger Stories,” which could apply to Ruscha’s photographs but not to his paintings. Even his silliest paintings are stately and brooding, often to a fault. The character of the brooding evolved over time. If the later paintings are often but not always to their detriment more explicit about our world on fire, the ’60s work prioritizes pleasure: the laid-back loops of the gas pump hoses, the blocky, confident reds, the crisp fluorescents, and the light and shadow on the glass façade provide little indication of the crises to come. ....
Glass instantiates a perpetual newness and eternal currency. Unlike seemingly more solid materials like steel-reinforced concrete, which unmaintained will rust away to ruin in five hundred years, glass is stable, unless it’s shattered. Perhaps because glass shows no patina, no material evidence of its past, it is the closest thing we have to a material from the future. ....
On the weather map on my phone, as I stood and consulted it at 81st and Central Park West, the color-coded diagram of the plumes scorching and stretching south from Ottawa looked exactly like a circa-2004 televised aerial heat map visualization of some especially deadly nighttime moment in a town somewhere in Basra. The colors populating my Instagram feed when I swiped over from the weather map filtered, balanced, enhanced were similarly vivid and lively, the colors of harvests and autumn leaves. In real life at midday, the chromatic effects on Central Park West were more like sepia, paprika, piss. ....
In my mind, Geller I always pairs with Casablanca, another instant classic that would have been in theaters when Breuer started drawing it up: a work of high-low insider-outsider hybridity, expressing a very particular old-world immigrant’s dream of the character of modern life among the Americans. Geller I remains somehow poised at that postwar moment of collective trauma and redemptive domesticity, in its contemporary description by House & Garden magazine forever “the house of tomorrow, today.” ....
The extent to which restaurants seem essential in any city is a measure of its failure to provide citizens with good places to assemble. That failure, in Manhattan’s case, may explain some of the peak-pandemic reverence for restaurants. But restaurants also show us the way. The best impact on the urban landscape of the long disruption has been the so-called streetery, with which in a rare instance of civic wisdom restaurants were able to encroach onto parking spaces. From the elaborate diorama-like versions in the West Village to the basic platforms in less would-be picturesque neighborhoods, these outdoor interventions are an answer to a question Manhattan has been asking for fifty years. ....