There are hundreds of books on my shelves, but the one that jumps out at me each time I’m scanning for something in particular is a mass market paperback for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. My eyes run right over the six-foot-long stretch of Modern Library classics, the complete Charles Dickens, and the stack of four fat, glossy Twilight books, and straight to this airport mystery, which has got a highlighter-yellow cover with safety-orange spots running up the spine.

Was it the release of the English-language translation of this book in 2008 that kickstarted the resurgence of neons? I’m old enough to remember the last time neons were in fashion – in the early 80’s, when we called them fluorescents – and foolish enough to want to wear them once again. There’s a little electric-pink shift from H+M in my closet right now, waiting for me to find the courage to actually put it on. What’s the fascination with these ungodly, unnatural hues? Quite simply, they’re impossible not to notice. If there’s a girl on the street sixty feet ahead of me with a screaming neon orange bag or blue pumps, I will very surely take a good look when she passes. These bright accessories are a perfect complement to the dark, fitted dress New Yorkers wear so much of the time. And other pieces that have been updated with neon accents, like running shoes, have a sharp, modern flash. But when used as a large field, or as a book cover, the colors are tawdry. They’re like a strong, sweet perfume.

August 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses

If last year belonged to Damien Hirst and his spots, then this year belongs to Yayoi Kusama and her spots. The Tokyo-based artist helped Louis Vuitton roll out spotted accessories, clothing and window displays, installed spotted earth art at Pier 45, and is being feted with a retrospective at the Whitney that highlights her spot performances and paintings. But while Hirst’s spots radiated happiness, and stripped painting to its syntactic, pleasure-giving essentials, Kusama’s spots are testimony to an obsessional, repetitive personality. They’re strange.

The introductory wall text at the Whitney describes Kusama as an outsider artist rather than a conceptualist, which is what I think she is. The fact that she voluntarily checked herself into an insane asylum in 1973, where she remains, is offered as irrefutable evidence. This description seemed insulting to me at first, but after seeing the exhibit I might agree. The work’s single-mindedness – its disregard for proportion and balance – make it hard to understand as art. This is particularly true of Kusama’s sculptures, conglomerations of stuffed biomorphic forms that resemble protozoa, sperm and phalluses. As we passed a particularly exuberant piece my companion, a strong and sophisticated lady, covered her eyes and said, “I just can’t take this." Kusama’s work is powerful and also unsettling. It reminds me that art always comes from a person, and that that person might have no choice about who she is.

August 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Some architects will tell you that the only way to represent a building fully is in film, but after seeing the short film that writer Esther McCoy made in 1965 as part of her mission to preserve Irving Gill’s legendary 1916 Dodge House in Los Angeles, I’m not so sure. In black and white photographs the house is a powerful emblem of California modernism: blazing white stucco, punched blank windows, and palm trees swaying behind.

But the film, restored in fulsome technicolor, doesn’t serve the status of the building well, and McCoy’s ordinarily energetic voice well either. The narration, written by McCoy and read by a stentorian male announcer, is ponderous. The film isn’t cinematic at all; it’s muddled and choppy, so that one doesn’t get a sense of moving through the house. And the views are scaled eccentrically, each one too broad or too close to give a good sense of the place. It goes to show how difficult it is to film modern architecture well. And it’s poignant testimony to McCoy’s mission. I’m sorry the house isn’t here to speak for itself.

August 13, 2012 by Nalina Moses

There’s been a fuss about the contents of Karl Knausgård’s memoir, particularly the account of his father’s descent into alcoholism and death. That description centers on the house in small-town Norway where the senior Knaussgård passed his final days, which is, when the writer and his brother arrive, layered in filth, and presided over by his still-happily-imbibing grandmother. The pages describing the storm of soiled laundry, food scraps, and bottles inside are terrifically vivid. The house has already been proclaimed one of the Top 10 Homes in Literature by one newspaper. (While the American paperback features an irrelevant splatter painting, the UK version features a white wood frame house.)

What I found most remarkable about the memoir weren’t the familial revelations (grandmother peeing in her seat) or brutal emotional honesty (apathy towards an about-to-give-birth wife), but the vividness of the physical descriptions. Even in translation (and the imaginative leap from Norwegian into English must be a big one) those passages that simply describe a thing (any thing, really) shine through. Each object is alive, a character that acts importantly on the author’s internal life. When just he, his brother and grandmother are inside the house “the rooms seemed to close around what had happened, as though we were too weak to open them." And after it’s is cleaned out and the windows are thrown open, "the movement of the air inside plus the sunlight falling over the floors and the overpowering smell of detergent on at least the second floor, allowed the house to open up, in a sense, and become a place the world flooded through…" It’s a wonderful way to write about buildings.

August 07, 2012 by Nalina Moses