a bundle of nerves

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the present, painting, Kim Salmon

“That’s from 2021,” he says of a large, blood red canvas depicting what looks like a bundle of nerves.

(Michael Dwyer, “‘Where rock’n’roll comes from’: Kim Salmon rises from the black lagoon”, The Age, 14 Jan. 2023)

the paint on Cy Twombly’s sculptures

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sculpture, Boston, Cy Twombly

In fact, they are improvised, nailed-together constructions of wood, plaster, and sometimes plastic leaves or flowers, painted off-white to give them an aged patina.

(Sebastian Smee, ‘I’ve been waiting half my life for this show. It’s magnificent.’ The Washington Post, 14 Jan. 2023)

side-whiskers, knife-creased skirt-like Oxford bags, a sleeveless zip-fastened shirt, its horizontal stripes, a pug’s three teeth, a camel’s, the pug’s bored face

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clothing, Dylan Thomas, fauna, hair, mid-century, skin, teeth

Pale young men with larded hair and Valentino-black side-whiskers, fags struck to their lower lips, squinted along their swivel-sighted rifles and aimed at ping-pong balls dancing on fountains.
In knife-creased, silver-grey, skirt-like Oxford bags, and a sleeveless, scarlet, zip-fastened shirt with yellow horizontal stripes, a collier at the strength-machine spat on his hands, raised the hammer, and brought it Thor-ing down. The bell rang for Blaina.
Outside the booth stood a bitten-eared and barn-door chested pug with a nose like a twisted swede and hair that started from his eyebrows and three teeth yellow as a camel’s inviting any sportsman to a sudden and sickening basting in the sandy ring or a quid if he lasted a round; and wiry, cocky, bow-legged, coal-scarred, boozed, sportsmen by the dozen strutted in and reeled out; and still those teeth remained, chipped and camel-yellow in the bored, teak face.

(Dylan Thomas, Holiday Memory)

cars with parking citations in the City of New York

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cars, Dask, data science, New York City, Python

The important thing to note about this is Dask uses these boundaries as an alphabetically sorted half-closed interval. This means that you won’t have partitions that only contain the color defined by their boundary. For example, because green is alphabetically between blue and red, green cars will fall into the red partition. The “red partition” is actually all colors that are alphabetically greater than blue and alphabetically less than or equal to red. This isn’t really intuitive at first and can take some getting used to.

(Jesse C. Daniel, Data Science with Python and Dask, 4.2)

jade, century eggs, a mountain peak, moss that grew in a graveyard, the cloth covers of tiny books or boxes, the ribbon tying them together

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comestibles, flora, jewellery

Some of the jade was white and opaque, or brown and translucent, not unlike the darkened century eggs that they had eaten in the days before. Others were a deep, creamy green, and reminded her of the mountain peak or the moss that grew in the graveyard. Eventually though, my sister had chosen not jewellery, but something that was more like a toy. On the counter there was a stack of what looked like tiny books, or boxes, with green and blue cloth covers, tied together with red ribbon.

(Jessica Au, Cold enough for Snow)

the velvet covering a couch in Cy Twombly’s Roman apartment, a sweep of paint on his Thyrsis

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70s, Boston, Cy Twombly, décor, photography, Rome

The couch was covered in green velvet (according to d’Huart), either echoing or inspiring the green-black sweep of paint in the nearby canvas.

(Boston Museum of Fine Arts, caption to Annabelle d’Huart’s Interior of CY Twombly’s apartment in Rome, 1978, in Making the Past Present: Cy Twombly )

writing-like strokes that move from left to right

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70s, Boston, Cy Twombly, painting, writing

This monumental and rare composition of thirty individual drawings features blue, writing-like strokes that move from left to right.

(Boston Museum of Fine Arts, caption to Untitled, 1970, in Making the Past Present: Cy Twombly)

a buffer of newly planted woodland

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London, LRB, near future

Futuristic projections depict a better than real vision of uniform crescents inspired by Bath, and long straight avenues out of Haussmann, all wrapped in a green buffer of newly planted woodland with a strip of river frontage ‘accessible for walks and cycling as well as bird and seal watching’.

(Iain Sinclair, ‘Negative equivalent’, LRB, 19 Jan. 2023)

a nice apple

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fruit, hydraulics, London, LRB, mechanics

‘If you bowled a nice red apple down the tunnel at Acton,’ the official storyteller for the Super Sewer told me, ‘it would roll all the way to Chambers Wharf, the shaft beyond Tower Bridge.’

(Iain Sinclair, ‘Negative equivalent: In the super sewer’, LRB, 19 Jan. 2023)

la lumière de vos longs yeux

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Baudelaire, yeux

J’aime de vos longs yeux la lumière verdâtre,
Douce beauté, mais tout aujourd’hui m’est amer,

(Baudelaire, Chante d’automne)