Living is easy with eyes closed… that’s how The Beatles song starts, but doesn’t really resonate with me lately, I’m much closer to “A day in the life”… I’d love to turn you on…

Went to New York this weekend. With Lauren to meet her brother Mike who lives there.

John Lennon was shot in Central Park. They now call it Strawberry Fields.

The big apple is a living organism. Decadent in some aspects, colorful in others. Fake and real at the same time, busy and laid back, cheap and fancy, so crazy that it’s unique, becomes a sanity of its own.

We went to the Guggenheim. They are rebuilding the MoMA so they moved it somewhere else… that’s why I couldn’t find the entrance in December! Shrug. Anyway, I just love museums of modern art. Well, I admit, some of the things exposed made you seriously think “either I don’t get it, or this is crap” (and my egocentricity tends to point me to the latter) but there were a few things that just impressed me: some for their soul and some for their minds.

There are two types of modern art, IMO, one contains tons of emotions, the other contains tons of reasoning.The first will be the one standing the test of time, the second, simply, won’t.

On the reasoning part: a piece named “Armageddon” composed of tens of thousands of house flies glued to a huge canvas. Disgusting but you can’t really stop thinking about it. Another one is called “Passport” and we were puzzled by the fact that it said “made by: endless stack of white paper. Please take one”. But there were none. Now, you might think that they ran out, but what if it was already empty and put there just to make you wonder? I mean, it’s called Passport. There should be endless passports right? it’s a piece of paper, right? you got the idea.

I’m still thinking if they ran out of paper or not.

Those are the rationally intelligent ones. Those who will dissolve as time dilutes them and their rationality will permeate the society membranes and become common sense, the emotionally intelligent ones will not.

I don’t like to read the plates in museums. If I have to read the plates, it means that the piece didn’t touch my soul. So, here we are wondering around until we enter the room dedicated to Umberto Boccioni, one of the most famous italian futurists and there is it Materia, exposed on the other wall.

Wow.

You know, there is something about human creativity that I can’t really explain: when something transcends its shape and your ability to process it and hits you straight, direct, with no semantic filtering and no crappy explanation of why this is good and cool and established… art is when you know this is cool even if you’ve never seen it before. Even if it’s a painting of a kid in an elementary school (which is no different from some Picasso’s indeed) or a huge building like this Frank Lloyd Wright’s one.

But Boccioni’s painting that kidnapped me was Visioni Simultanee.

Boy, they had to force me out of there.

Another thing about museums is that every time I get out I feel the urge to create stuff. I mean, I consider myself a software architect (that real architects consider an insult, ciao Vale!) and I do believe that aesthetic elegance yields better functional behavior (unlike the opposite), but software is soft! it’s not more noble because it’s abstract, it’s just a hack, a way to manipulate mental substance with less energy, but it always feels like a toy, even if you are trying to build the knowledge repository of mankind.

After the museum, we wanted to go see the new Charlie Kaufman‘s movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it was all sold out for the entire evening.

Kaufman represents to me the personification of the concept that emotional art emerges out of suffering. He is a genius. In the most completely disturbing sense of the term.

And every time I think about this it reminds me of Giacomo Leopardi, the italian poet and his poem “l’infinito”:

…
Immensity my thinking drowns:
And to shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea.

and I always wonder how many of the greatest artists would trade their posthumous glory for a happier life.