Hitting The Links: 5/11/25
Lots of links, transcendence with Anselm Kiefer in Amsterdam, a run over The Swan, and maybe my last newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
I Brought You Flowers
[I’m sending this out before I board a flight to Newark, so we’ll see if I make it home alive today. I mean, seriously, there’s a non-zero chance this is the last newsletter I’ll ever send. Feel free to leave comments on the web-version of this one. And don’t let them make an AI version of my podcast.]
It was a rough week, but yesterday was beautiful. The Rotterdam part of this trip — Tue to Fri a.m. — was pretty unceasing with work, a lot of which involved conversations with pharma folks, which I’m good at, but it Just Never Stopped. Plus, I didn’t get much sleep, for various reasons, so I was a burned-out wreck, although still charming and witty.
I took the train to Amsterdam Friday morning, had one business meeting when I arrived, then checked into the hotel that I’d booked the night before. (It turned out to be perfect for me, which is why I’m not going to say where it was.)
The room wasn’t ready, so I walked for a few hours, hit a few bookstores, and took in the city, which I’d only visited once before, in December 2003. That was good, but I was still decompressing from the trade show and the jawboning I got during breakfast Friday morning by some attendees who didn’t get to talk to me during the show itself.
Saturday, though . . .
See, during my walkies on Friday, I saw that a big Anselm Kiefer exhibition was going on at the Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums. I checked out Peter Schjeldahl’s pieces on Kiefer, but they were from 1988 and ‘98, and didn’t tell me much about where AK was headed with his work. I tried reading Knausgaard’s piece on him from a few years ago and that was . . . not good, so I texted official Virtual Memories Art Advisor Dmitry Samarov about Kiefer that evening, & he strongly encouraged me to see it; I booked the earliest ticket left: 11:30 a.m.
I had plans to have late lunch with another past guest, Julie Phillips, over at the Rijksmuseum, so that gave me plenty of time to see the exhibition & get to the rest of the Van Gogh collection. (I didn’t get to see that on my previous trip here.)
I had no idea what to expect from the Kiefer show. I’d read descriptions of his art, seen reproductions, BUT AS IT TURNS OUT, nothing prepared me for the immensity of the here and now.
The first room contained a series of massive recent-ish works of his, enormous landscapes, Van Gogh-inspired fields, a cataclysmic take on Starry Night. I spent longer than I thought I would just getting close to some of them, taking in the layers of paint, plants, wood, and everything else he incorporated into his canvases. I studied the brittleness of the surfaces, the way they cracked like bark.
Work that big creates a weird tension for me. There are the challenges of taking in its entirety, of choosing any detail to focus attention on, of its surfaces, of refusing to let the scale intimidate. At the end of my figurative rope this past week, I stepped up and let the art speak, wall after wall, room after room.
I don’t have the capacity to write about it just now (which means likely never, knowing me), but I had some moments of transcendence, and those have been in short supply lately.
There were frustrations and there were works I found less interesting or too obvious, but I got swept into the massive Sag mir wo die Blumen sind artwork, which takes up all 4 walls of the top of the Stedelijk’s staircase.
And I took this picture of someone trying to take it in.
The work clothes, ragged and painted so heavily they were stiff, hanging at eye level, reminded me of the first time I saw Celia Paul in person in her painter’s dress, so I took a few pix & emailed them to her.
It was a world, a history of destruction, an ode to decay and maybe rebirth, that alchemy Kiefer has pursued in his later years, working with lead and then gold leaf.
I recentered myself in the lobby, then met up with Julie in the Rijksmuseum gardens. We had lunch and talked, and then she set me loose in the museum. But that’s a story for another newsletter (which means likely never, knowing me).
Birdy Of The Week
I was gone all week, but Amy sent this pic of Birdy & her boyfriend Teddy on their way to a walk around Skylands Manor:
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Vauhini Vara • Craig Thompson • Ari Richter • Dan Nadel • See Hear Speak • Peter Trachtenberg • David Shields
RIP David Souter . . . RIP James Foley . . . RIP Bobby Lozoff . . . RIP Clarence O. Smith . . .
Whitney Matheson wrote some loving words about the late Jill Sobule.
High-speed rail to nowhere.
Ann Telnaes won another Pulitzer for Illustrative Reporting and Commentating! You may remember she quit the Washington Post earlier this year after they spiked one of her cartoons. You can support her work at her Substack.
Darryl Pinckney writes about Murray Kempton; haven’t read it yet, but hope to on the flight.
Summer Pierre’s husband resigned in protest from his role as a civilian professor at West Point.
Related, AGNI lost its federal support. Maybe you could help out with a donation. I bet Sven Birkerts will thank you.
I enjoyed this Barry Diller excerpt about his 50-year romance with Diane von Fürstenberg, his homosexuality, and how love is love.
Current/Recent Reading
Where the Paths Do Not Go - Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Burton Pike)
Every Man For Himself And God Against All - Werner Herzog (tr. Michael Hoffmann)
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Don’t even get me started. Since last Sunday, I’ve gotten virtually no exercise at all. I haven’t even done my morning 15-min. routine since Monday, because tiny hotel rooms, no yoga mat, etc. Except for the not-quite-5k run on Thursday morning with my trade show cohort and a full 5k on the hotel treadmill yesterday, all I’ve done is walk places. On the plus side, I’ve walked a lot and I haven’t been eating abusively.
That not-quite-5k run was pretty good, though. The last stretch was over The Swan, that Rotterdam bridge I mentioned in the last newsletter, and that has a nice incline. Since my pharma pals didn’t grow up in Ringwood, NJ, they weren’t accustomed to HILLS HILLS HILLS. I just opened up and vroomed up the bridge.
I haven’t had a meditation session since Tuesday, and that one doubled as an occasion to doze off because I was so goddamned tired after the redeye flight. I was lucky that I only drifted for 15 minutes or so, so I could get to the night-before reception and schmooze a little before the trade show.
But in the second room of the Kiefer show, there was a tall canvas from the mid-’90s, maybe a more obvious work than the later stuff, but nonetheless resonant.
Kiefer is in savasana pose — my meditation pose of choice — near the bottom of the canvas, with a huge wilting black sunflower above, seeds raining down on his body.
I studied it for a while, then took a seat on the security guard’s chair and tried to breathe in Sol Invictus breathe out Unconquered Sun. I only got a few moments into it before the guard noticed me & came over to nudge me away. But I felt something of the immensity, like I needed a reminder, a post-it note of a 20’ tall canvas.
Inside I feel like everything’s falling apart, like body & mind have both strayed from themselves, and I don’t know how to restore them. I hope that experience helps me find a path.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, a new Instax, & maybe some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.
And you may say to yourself / My God, what have I done?,