got this message through friendster today, from a person i'm connected to through two cal folks:

hey mondrian's really cool. i took history of art 186a last
semester at Cal, the course really gave me a new
appreciation for his works. they've got a kind of subtle
beauty.... very fragile but somehow loud at the same
time....

anyway i noticed the pocket constitution + fountainhead in
your self-description..... should i take by that that you're
libertarian/objectivist/classical liberal?

i'll comment here, since i think some might also be confused by these references in my friendster profile.

the pocket constitution is a sly reference to my summer school teacher mr. chris green, not a statement of a belief in the predominance of individuals' rights over the state. the fountainhead is a book that has been mentioned/offered/recommended to me many times throughout my life, yet i have never read it, and highly likely never will. many of the other things i list in my profile are also elusive, though oft-mentioned to me. it's strange how such things keep occurring in my life.

piet mondrian made me believe in art. when i saw "Broadway Boogie Woogie", i understood it immediately. it hit me in the chest. it just made sense. i'm not sure if i first saw it in an art history book in a library in birmingham or in new york city's moma. either way, it stuck with me.

while abroad, i wrote a paper comparing mondrian's piece with Camille Pissarro's"Le Pont Boieldieu a Rouen, soleil couchant":

The sensations of the painter (and by extension the viewer) are paramount in both works; a naturalistic representation of the cityscape is secondary or even unimportant to both artists. However, it would be incorrect to say that neither painter was concerned with realism; in fact, Mondrian wrote in 1942 that his main object was always realism. But he believed that natural representation revealed nothing about an object; he progressively came to see that the truth must be achieved by abstraction. Mondrian’s art was a reality of the mind, not of the eye. He wanted his paintings to be formations where “an emotion in the artist is evoked in the beholder through a situation offered to his senses, not through an account of the emotion itself.” In Broadway, this is achieved by the placement of repeated but randomly colored small blocks of color within the yellow bands. This construction represents Mondrian’s impression of the perpetual motion of people, traffic, and flashing lights that can be found in midtown Manhattan, especially in Times Square. Instead of simply reconstructing the scene realistically, he paints a scene that evokes the same awestruck, overwhelmed, and excited response from the viewer by assaulting the senses with flashy colors and commotion on the canvas. “The title points to the inspiration of music and dance, but without knowing the title, one world think of music in seeing this wonderfully lively, colorful, jazzy canvas,” writes Meyer Schapiro. Likewise, those who view it immediately understand the work, especially since it happens to be on display in midtown Manhattan at the Museum of Modern Art: the viewer feels what Mondrian felt because he/she is just steps away from it.

mondrian taught me to appreciate modern art. it's fun, it's playful, it's inquisitive, it's self-reflexive, it's socially conscious, it's meta. in my life, i think i'm always in pursuit of the feeling i felt the first time i saw mondrian's work: exhilaration, happiness, and that click where it all makes sense.