I was feeling under the weather for most of the week. It’s crazy that the majority of the people I know, even those who live on different continents, have been sick lately. Thanks to ibuprofen, I was borderline functional despite feeling unwell.
We started watching True Detective Season 1. I heard that the first season was phenomenal but the later seasons were underwhelming, so we’re treating it as a miniseries. The show definitely hooked us from the first episode. With three episodes left in the season, I’m already feeling blue about its ending. I want more Nietzschean Rust in my life.
I finally went to the gym after a month-long hiatus. I’d missed lifting weights a lot.
Also, I don’t know why, but Instagram is bombarding me with kettlebell content. Either it’s a new craze in the fitness infosphere or I’m late to the party, but anyway, I gotta say I’m influenced. I looked around my gym for a kettlebell but couldn’t find one.I’m wondering whether to just buy one and drop my gym membership completely.
Reader, if you have any thoughts on this, please write to me!
I met with Derek Sivers in İstanbul and we had a lovely chat. He is one of those people with whom you don’t need to scrutinize what you’re about to say; you can just talk. These kinds of people are my favorite because with them you can witness yourself saying wonderful, novel things. I would love to be this kind of person for others, someone people can witness themselves with on their own terms.
We watched a play by one of our comrades. The play was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which a man is pushed to commit murder by an old man’s vulture-like pale blue eye. The narrator, the alleged murderer, is unreliable, so you never really know whether he actually committed the crime or is just describing his fantasy of killing his own father.
This week I took the new turntable for a spin and started working on a small sculpture in plastilina. It’s great to be able to work on something without the need to commute an hour to the studio.
I decided to sculpt a reclining female nude, a homage to a Lovis Corinth painting that I saw in the Kunsthalle Bremen. I spent hours working on the armature and then the gesture.
The armature is the hardest thing for me in my sculpting practice. I find it almost impossible to get it right. The smallest mistake in it has enormous consequences for the proportions, and everything looks off. I’m at a very frustrating point: my eye is developed enough to notice the mistakes, but my knowledge of the craft is not enough to fix them.
I’ll be in New York between October 29 and November 7. Do you want to meet me (and my wife) for a coffee? Do you know anyone whom I should meet there? Do you know somewhere I should visit?
Write to me.