I finally got around to seeing the DADA exhibit at MoMA Yesterday.

This is the only picture I was allowed to take.

The guard said, “No pictures on the 6th floor.”
I said, “even if I don’t use a flash?”
He said, “Yeah, they don’t like people taking pictures of new exhibitions.”
I said, “OK.”

When you think of Dada you probably think of smart dudes in bowler hats making bad-assed art jokes.

Or maybe you think of paintings with a mannered hysteria about them—pictures of meaty-looking dudes with their legs blown off, maybe with some collaged bits of gears thrown in.

It was WWI, after all, and people were dying horrible deaths all around so I guess I can forgive Otto Dix for painting the way he did, but still they look pretty bad.

Duchamp’s art looks good: all these strange deadpan objects—like a freaky looking wine bottle holder—sending off their bad vibes throughout the gallery space. Yikes, readymades are creepy!

I like how little work Duchamp made in his lifetime—it makes me feel OK that I’m not producing a lot of work at the moment. Although I can’t play chess and Duchamp was a very good chess-player.

But still, Duchamp is pretty ice-cold and after a while you think, “I don’t care about this coat rack.”

Though, what you forget about with Dada is how lovely some of it is. How esthetic.

Man, I was really blown away by Jean Arp. Why hadn’t I thought about Arp? I think about Tuttle all the time and Jean Arp was doing Tuttle long before Tuttle. Some people called him “Hans.”

Look at this thing:

He would do some automatic drawings of shapes and then send those off to a carpenter to be cut out in wood and then he’d screw them together and paint them. Pretty good plan, I’d say. There are a few of these in the show. I love how gentle and unassuming they are. But also kind of tough and sloppy. He also made some great paintings and collages.

Kurt Schwitters is great too. I’ll take Kurt Schwitters over Rauschenberg. Yeah, I said it. I mean, wasn’t that Combine show at the Met disappointing? Didn’t you think, “Eh, these are kind of pompous. Who needs ‘em?”

Anyway, the biggest revelation of the Dada show was finding the work of Sophie Taeuber. Who the hell is Sophie Taeuber? I guess she was married to Jean “Hans” Arp. She made some really great needlepoint “paintings”:

I don’t remember if this one was in the show. Taeuber also did a series of small wood sculptures that are fantastic. Here is one of them:

I think she might have made these cool marionettes in the show too.

So Sophie Taeuber is great.

Here’s her picture:

Here’s a very cool picture of Jean Arp:

I was in Providence last week.

The people of Rhode Island pride themselves on their strange and miserable food—milk with coffee-flavored syrup, stuffed clams, lemon slush, vaguely clam-flavored fried dough. These are Rhode Island specialties, each with its own peculiar local name.

Another specialty item is the New York Hot Weiner or the New York System:

This particular style of hot dog has only a tangential relation to New York City, being brought over to Rhode Island in the 1920s by a pair of Greek immigrants living in Brooklyn.

The New York System is: a hot dog, a bun, a “meat sauce,” mustard, chopped onions, celery salt. I’m actually really eager to try one. If this type of hot dog ever existed in New York, it has long since vanished, replaced by the “papaya”-style frankfurter. And of course, Chicago is truly the place to go if you have any interest in hot dogs.

But ultimately, you really should be eating less meat, for a host of reasons.

So I was in Providence visiting Kaveri. Hopefully, I’m going to move my art studio there for a couple of weeks. While I was there, Kaveri and I fought terribly. We are both stressed out. And living apart while she’s off at graduate school has been tough. So, tough, in fact, that I appear to have developed a cold sore.

Here is a picture of Kaveri in Providence:

Hello Netflix.