A friend and I were wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, trying to find the exit. The Met being enormous and full of hallways that turn into other hallways and exhibition rooms, we were not having much success.

Finally, I approached a museum guard and said to him, “We’re looking for the way out.”

They don't want to show affection in public, so she taps his ankle.

As most New Yorkers know, the subway system is the lifeline of New York City. In 1946, Stanley Kubrick set out as a staff photographer for LOOK Magazine to capture the story of New York City’s subway commuters.

The human psyche is complex. We often live in our own minds rather than being present in the moment. Intangible thoughts have the power to limit our happiness and success in life. We therefore, become trapped by the limits we allow society to impose upon us. It is these seemingly ‘little things’, that become powerful inhibitors for human beings. Tanapol Kaewpring’s newest body of work gives form to these abstract challenges by using a curious glass cube in the natural and urban environment as a metaphor for the systems we are constrained by. These symbolic boxes can be physical such as a house and an apartment, as well as social frameworks of the family, religion, culture and politics.

Thai food in the United States is becoming bad. It’s getting sweeter—with excessive use of refined sugar—and the other flavors are growing weaker and less reliable. In absolute numbers, more excellent Thai restaurants exist than ever before, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for the average quality of Thai food in America these days.

One problem is that many Thai people have such a wonderful service ethic. I don’t think I have ever once been treated poorly in a Thai restaurant. That has made courting wide audiences relatively easy. Thai food also looks healthy and has beautiful colors—all those greens, reds, yellows, and oranges.

As a result, Thai food has become cool. I first saw this trend in California, in the 1980s, when young people in black started turning up in large numbers at Thai restaurants in Hollywood. It spread. Americans eating in a Thai restaurant are likely more hip than those eating in a Chinese restaurant. Yet hip people do not always have superb taste in food.

As Thai restaurants have become more popular, they have become unreliable. It is so easy to make the food too sweet, appealing to lowest-common-denominator tastes or masking deficiencies in the food’s preparation. The best sweet Thai dishes mix sweet with tart, but there’s been too much abuse on the sweet side and not enough use of fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste or ground white pepper. The most-reliable indicators of bad Thai restaurants are a large bar and sushi on the menu. Those are both signs that the restaurant isn’t that serious about food. Stay away.

Unlike Thai food, Vietnamese food hasn’t become extremely popular in the United States. A large number of Vietnamese restaurants operate in this country, but these are patronized mostly by Vietnamese. The cuisine’s failure to take off is interesting, because Vietnamese food rarely offends the American palate. It even has a notable French influence. You would think it could do better commercially, even if that might mean quality declines.

Vietnamese food has probably been saved from the mass market because most people never master the sauces and condiments that must be added to the food, at the table, for its glories to become apparent. It’s too much trouble, and a lot of people don’t like asking for help, especially if the interaction involves some linguistic awkwardness. (In my experience, it’s not uncommon for Vietnamese servers to speak poor English, so they may come across as confused or indifferent.) To outsiders, Vietnamese restaurants can feel like exclusive clubs for Vietnamese people, and that can be off-putting.

Art Is Boring

Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves — it’s a question of affluence.)

People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us. But most of the interesting art of our time is boring.

Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.

Maybe art has to be boring, now. (This doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good — obviously.) We should not expect art to entertain or divert anymore. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye — but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring ... e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented).

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

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On Intelligence

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”

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Why I Write

There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.

I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.

This is what I meant when I said Thursday evening to that offensive twerp who came up after that panel at MoMA to complain about my attack on [the American playwright Edward] Albee: “I don’t claim my opinions are right,” or “just because I have opinions doesn’t mean I’m right.”

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Love and Disease

Being in love (l’amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One “falls” in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time.

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On Licorice, Bach, Jews and Penknives

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long- haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.

Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, wagon-lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, penknives, aphorisms, hands.

Rachel Swainston made spot paintings for Damien Hirst in the mid-1990s, before becoming an upholsterer.

Painting spots was very dull. There's not a lot you can say about them. The canvases would arrive; they'd be stretched and pinned. Damien would specify spot size and we would mark them up and draw them. Then we'd have a massive delivery of household paints, which we'd mix into smaller pots of whatever colours we needed. We'd have hundreds of colours: no two were ever the same. A six-foot square canvas with spots four inches apart would take about a week. Every painting was sold.

It was quite simple really. With the spot paintings: it was, just a formula. Damian didn't need to have much input. Most of the time, there were two of us, although it would depend on how quickly he wanted them churned out. We were just the small fry. I came out of Goldsmiths [University] thinking I can't do anything, so I did these. Although they were all hand-painted, meaning each one is imperfect, there is no individual quality to the painting.

This installation consists of 2 pieces, a photograph and a sculpture. The sculpture, a sewage drain cover, taken from the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, is carved on the underside with lyrics from the Tupac Shakur’s song, “I Don’t Give a Fuck,” taken from his first solo album entitled “2pacalypse Now”. The lyrics read:

Fuck bailin’ hate

I bail and spray with my A-K

And even if they shoot me down

There’ll be another nigga bigger

from the mutha-fuckin’ underground

On the underside of another sewage drain cover are carved lyrics from young, aspiring Vietnamese rapper named Wowy. This sewage drain cover was then put in place of the original sewage drain cover in front of Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City. The English translation of Wowy’s lyrics reads:

My mom said that i was born to the wrong house

but i just quietly smile and answer that it’s okay

i know my mom won’t understand ‘cause the things i say have so much subtext

when my mom is me then she’ll understand the words of the underground

[original Vietnamese lyrics]

Má tao nói tao đẻ lộn nhà vì cách sống và nói của tao

Nhưng tao thì chỉ lặng cười và trả lời rằng chuyện đó không sao

Tao biết má sẽ không hiểu vì lời tao nói sẽ mang ẩn ý

Khi má là tao thì mẹ sẽ hiểu những từ ngữ của underground

Ryoji Ikeda