Calder/Miro catalog from the Phillips Collection show; really well designed, and I think more pieces in the catalog than at the Phillips [and they aren't as crowded!] Calder has been on my mind since I read the Bruce Sterling piece about him. Now as I'm passing out at night I'm busy deconstructing the principles under Calder's work... maybe sculpture is in my cards. [Thanks, Sam.]

I picked up a copy of the High & Low catalog the other day from Kultura - primarily for the discussion of the relationship between Geo. Herriman and Philip Guston. In conversation with many folks lately, the refrain is to the effect that Guston had been aware of Crumb in the mid-60's, but I've always doubted this. Crumb borrowed much of the visual vocabulary of the early 20th century - an era that Guston lived through, copied comics in his closet, learning to draw. High/Low suggests that Guston wasn't aware of Crumb until the mid-70's.

An aside: recently Tyler pointed to a Thiebaud painting and remarked to me a possble connenction with Guston, perhaps a precursor? I doubt it - from the thumbnail, it looks like a flat, humorless Kline painting that never made it off the ground. Guston's work makes the social aspects extremely personal [therefore way more frightening] and wraps it in satire. James Joyce claimed he wanted Finnegans Wake to be a comic book, and I suspect passages would have looked like this: