decent

Doctor.

How Doctor’s Think, Jerome Groopman. SOOOOO EXQUISITELY TAILORED TO THE NPR/NEW YORKER CREW. YIKES. So preciously tweedy and proper and bougie and hedged in ambivalence but in that sort of hemming and hawing way that seems like treading water. Lacks the killer instinct that I guess appeals to The Youths? I mean, don’t get me wrong. Appreciate it, in its own measured way, and it’s refreshing to see someone as venerable as Groopman explode some of big M Medicine’s pomp and circumstance, but. More blood? Idk. Something about it seems a bit tinny and hollow. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more when I get older and stuff. Aging be like thiiiis.

so.

Lee Friedlander and Don DeLillo. Think about it!

No, actually I thought about it. I don’t know how that makes me feel. But somehow? On a strict diet of non-fluids, like 24 hours after a horrible, involuntarily 3 days of master cleansing? They seemed to go together. Like crazy. And like, complement each other and bring out each others’ textures and flavors of like, um, saffon and truffles or something. Something luxe and so far-out that they come back to meet each other in a separate plane? You know?

If not, here’s more: Because here’s Lee Friedlander, and here he is photographing the American monuments one by one and at first it’s sort of. A dud? Can I say that without sounding like a total philistine? Anyway, at first pass, you can understand all the eye-rolls at contemporary art. I mean, it definitely smacks of ‘I could’ve done that’, because there’s no evident technical whizz-bang here, and, Jesus, it’s not as if the scenery - roadside relics, little pigeon-islands of forgotten bronze statues - is really anything spectacular. You can take any single photo and look at it alone, and it’ll seem like any single photo from any family camera. But, somehow, pooled together, they start gaining a momentum, and you get the sense of play that photography has. 

Maybe it’s just projecting (it could definitely be projecting) but you kind of get a whisper of Friedlander’s own feelings towards Event or Deep Feeling X that inspired the photographed monument. Friedlander shuns gradiosity. Big Guys, like Mount Rushmore, or Iwo Jima, are tucked away, playing peekaboo in bubbling tourist milieu that surround them. The majestic gets gets framed Just So, so we see how manufactured and, in a way, _small_ they are. We’ve very much made our own gods, and Friedlander emphasizes that point, a little merciless in his own mute way. There’s this one picture of Roosevelt Island (or… some other Roosevelt memorabilia? The not knowing’s the point!) where Some Roosevelt Thing sits in the center of the picture, barely in focus and ensnared in a bramble of closer branches and shrubs; Friedlander’s version of carelessness; of firing off a shot without even bothering to see the Thing. Roosevelt who?

But in the smaller town monuments, you can feel a slight thawing. The sad, modest shrines, wishing luck and safety and evincing a brittle kind of human frailty? Friedlander seems to Get those. He poses those in a methodical, studied way that makes them either poignant or witty or something else ALIVE. And there’s a very real sense of personality and locality in those little snapshots of Place. 

So, yeah, it’s very much the mundane framed in a way that snaps dimension into an image. Which, I guess, is what Art and Stuff is? And maybe where the Delillo comes in? I’m not sure. To be honest, I just thought that it would be bangin to have some of these American Monument photos placed in White Noise or something. Two off-kilter Americanas, head to head. Don’t overthink it, jeez.