flag n. a piece of cloth or similar material used as the symbol or emblem of a country or institution.
Because a flag is a flat object, it may signify flatness or the relative lack of depth in much modernist painting. The flag may of course function as an emblem of the United States and may in turn connote American art, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or the Vietnam War, depending on the date of Johns’ use of the image, the date of the viewer’s experience of it, or the nationality of the viewer. Or the flag may connote none of these things. In other words, the meaning of the flag in Johns’ art suggests the extent to which the “meaning” of this subject matter may be fluid and open to continual reinterpretation.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Flags, Fourth of July, Jasper Johns
shaman n. a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of good and evil spirits.
Whenever people sense the presence of a puzzling and momentous force, they want to believe there is a way to comprehend it. If you can convince them that you’re the key to comprehension, you can reach great stature. This fact has deeply shaped the evolution of religion, and it seems to have done so since very near the beginning. Once there was belief in the supernatural, there was a demand for people who claimed to fathom it.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Robert Wright, Evolution of God, gypsies, tramps and thieves, Cher
gone adj. no longer in existence 
If, in the immediate aftermath of Homo sapiens petrolerus, the tanks and towers of the Texas petrochemical patch all detonated together in one spectacular roar, after the oily smoke cleared, there would remain melted roads, twisted pipe, crumpled sheathing, and crumbled concrete. White hot incandescence would have jump-started the corrosion of scrap metals in the salt air, and the polymer chains in hydrocarbon residues would likewise have cracked into smaller, more digestible lengths, hastening biodegradation. Despite the expelled toxins, the soils would also be enriched with burnt carbon, and after a year of rains switchgrass would be growing. A few hardy wildflowers would appear. Gradually, life would resume.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Alan Weisman, Homo Sapiens, The World Without Us
Shocking adj. causing a feeling of surprise. 
Three weeks after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Coco Chanel had closed her atelier and without notice fired her entire staff, leaving only her perfume boutique open. On June 4, 1940, the outskirts of Paris were bombed. Chanel quickly packed up her apartment at the Hotel Ritz and, along with thousands of other Parisians, fled the city for the south of France. But at the end of August, she was back in Paris. By this time, the Ritz, like other luxury hotels, had been requisitioned by the Nazis. It was hung with a huge flag bearing swastika and no one without a special pass was permitted to enter. Chanel talked her way in, found that her apartment had been taken over by Nazis, and accepted the small room she was offered on the rue Cambon side of the hotel, where other well-connected French people also lived. Nazi officials lived on the other side of the hotel.
Shortly thereafter, she was joined at the Ritz by a German, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a somewhat mysterious figure nicknamed Spatz who had lived in Paris as a diplomat since 1928. The two become involved after Chanel sought his help on behalf of her nephew who had been interned by the Germans. Chanel and Spatz then lived together in the Ritz during the entire war. When they met, she was fifty-eight and still an attractive figure to the younger man who was thirteen years her junior. Although her friends warned her about consorting with an enemy diplomat, Coco had a ready if completely inadequate answer: “He isn’t German,” she said, “his mother was English.”
Categories: Word
Tagged: Avedon, Coco Chanel, Cougers
Play v. to engage in imaginative pretense
Q: What is the play instinct?
A: It is the instinct for order, the need for rules that, if broken, spoil the game, create uncertainty and irresolution. Play is tense. It is the element of tension and solution that governs all solitary games of skill. Without play, there would be no Picasso. Without play, there is no experimentation. Experimentation is the quest for answers.
Q: You design as though you were playing a game or piecing together a puzzle. Why don’t you just settle on a formula and follow it through to its logical conclusion?
A: There are no formulas in creative work. I do many variations, which is a question of curiosity. I arrive at many different configurations-some just slight variations, others more radical-of an original idea. It is a game of evolution.
Q: When you begin a project, regardless of medium, are you playing with forms?
A: I don’t just play around with form or forms. That implies a paucity of ideas. I always start with an idea, otherwise I’m working with mere abstractions. It’s like taking a trip without a destination. Form develops an idea. You see, form is the manipulation of ideas-or content, if you prefer. And that’s exactly what designers are, manipulators of content.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Paul Rand, Picasso, Grain Edit
hush v. to make someone be quiet or stop talking
Julia Cameron
Hush, mother says. Madeleine is sleeping. She is so beautiful when she sleeps, I do not want to wake her.
The small sisters and brothers creep about the bed, their gestures of silence becoming magnified and languorous, fingers floating to pursed lips, tip toes rising and descending as if weightless. Circling about her bed, their frantic activity slows; they are like tiny insects suspended in sap, kicking dreamily before they crystallize into amber. Together they inhale softly and the room fills with one endless exhalation of breath: Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Categories: Word
Tagged: dreamers, metamorphosis, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
baseball n. a ball game played between two teams of nine on a field with a diamond-shaped circuit of four bases. It is played chiefly in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and East Asia.
He runs up a shadowed ramp and into a crossweave of girders and pillars and spilling light. He hears the crescendoing last chords of the national anthem and sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped outside his life – the rubbed shine that sweeps and bends from the raked dirt of the infield out to the high green fences. It is the excitement of a revealed thing…
Categories: Word
Tagged: baseball, DeLillo, Derek Jeter's hair, Yankees
artifice n. clever or cunning devices or expedients, esp. as used to trick or deceive others
“Artifice, in general, feels very five years ago.”
The above quote was published in the NY Times yesterday, and may just be the best line we’ve heard in a good long while. It’s right up there with, “Cats are really accessories.” (which was uttered at a rom-com development meeting). But back to artifice…
Yesterday, the Times ran an interesting article about the controversy surrounding re-touching. The argument being: overzealous retouching (of models and actresses) creates a portrait that cannot be achieved by real people.
So, if artifice feels ‘very five years ago’, does that make ‘real’ the new black? And what is real anyway? Nothing in the news or media seems real these days. Even reality TV isn’t real! So why do we have to pretend it is? Is highlighting the acne and wrinkles of actresses and models the answer? Can’t we just approach ‘re-touching’ as a form of hyper-reality. It’s not MEANT to be copied, anymore than a Galliano haute couture dress is meant to be knocked off. And to tell the truth, looking at beautiful people really isn’t the problem…
The real problem, the insidious artifice that no one wants to talk about lies elsewhere… In the world of home decor magazines. The Grange has felt more self-loathing from Elle Decor and Architectural Digest, than from any cover of Marie Claire. Why is this? Keep reading →
Categories: Word
Tagged: accessories, dog hair, Galliano, zits
laugh v. to make the spontaneous sounds and movements of the face and body thatare the instinctive expressions of lively amusement and sometimes alsoof contempt or derision
Joe had been away for two months at Crosssland and when he got home and stood in the doorway he saw Violet’s dark girl body limp on the bed. She looked frail to him, and penetrable everyplace except at one foot, the left, where her man’s work shoe remained. Smiling, he took off his straw hat and sat down at the bottom of the bed. One of her hands held her face, the other rested on her thigh. He undid the laces of her shoe and eased it off. It must have helped something in her dream for she laughed then, a light happy laugh that he had never heard before, but which seemed to belong to her…
Categories: Word
Tagged: jazz, sharecropping, Toni Morrison, violets
peep v. to look quickly and furtively at something, esp. through a narrow opening
The Grange loves a good hipster, and no one is currently cooler than Hal Niedzviecki. In addition to writing a book on what he coined “Peep Culture” which explores self-exposure, surveillance and the future of voyeurism (and is available here); he has decided to put his money where his mouth is by allowing himself to become his own reality peep culture tv show. Basically, he’s allowing his own life to be turned into someone else’s voyeuristic entertainment. We at The Grange will of course be tuning in. For more on the documentary check out Hal’s blog here.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Hal Niedzviecki, Peep, reality TV
technology n. the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, esp. in industry
Some fret that the computer is a dehumanizing machine that so mesmerizes its aficionados that they lose their ability to emote, but as has happened repeatedly in the past, contemporary critics are at a disadvantage when trying to gauge the effects of the technological revolutions of their age. Trapped in the center of a spinning washing machine, it is difficult for anyone so positioned to appreciate that the clothes tumbling violently about are becoming cleaner.
Categories: Word
Tagged: Leonard Shlain, RIP
wrinkle n. a slight line of fold in something
Since all gravitating masses curve the surrounding space-time, we all (in our own way) make a slight wrinkle in the fabric of the universe.
Categories: Word
