CLXL

I was a framing device for the FBI

In our culture, women are subject to and must channel male fear, integrating it into their own.

Since male fear is taboo, they are obligated, despite and in addition to the vicissitudes of womanhood, to protect men from any reflection of male fear by absorbing and embodying it.

This may come close to a describing the mechanics of what is called patriarchy.

It also puts a different spin on the Medusa myth.

The Steamroller McTeige’s Polka

Graywash

Call me ephemeral

Deep Pharma

Gwyneth Paltrow, 44, looks amazing in the April issue of Women’s Health, in which she says, “I’m knee-deep in figuring out ways to clear [heavy metals and parasites] from the body.” [New York Post, 3/8/17]

In one the eight “palaces,” of the sixty-four hexagrams, Thunder is the inner, or lower trigram. In each situation, the strong (solid) line in the first position moves upward and forward, representing movement stirring, excitation and shock: the birth of something new, movement after stillness.

The hexagram above, Zhen, is formed by thunder above and below. The strong yang line at the bottom moves up to join with the fourth yang line, which also moves upward. The yang lines below the weaker yin (broken) lines move upward forcefully, shocking and startling.

This kind of shock carries an element of fear, the excitation making one alert and wary, ridding one of laziness and indolence. Shock and fear can lead to self-cultivation and self-examination… [Bisio, op. cit. p. 120]

When the drawers of perception are cleansed

You can find (some of) those missing sox…

Knee deep in the Big Muddy…

L’eau qui guérit

One Fragonardish afternoon in 1789, the ailing Marquis De Lessert for went for a stroll on the property of his friend, a certain M. Cachat. Feeling crevé – though the inflatable tire had yet to be invented – Le Marquis sat down by a spring named for Sainte Catherine, and there he slaked his thirst.

Miraculeuse à raconter, after only one draught, his liver grew chipper, and his kidney stones evaporated – in short, Le Marquis a été guéri instantanément!

Thus was born, and soon flourished, Évian Cachat, more commonly known as Évian water, le brand, et Évian-Les-Bains, a spa town and resort visited by Tsars, Prince(esse)s, landed and industrial Robber Barons and every species of parvenu – all seeking the miracle of health.

And then, further down the line, in 1938, the Conference comes to Évian, in search of a cure for the Jewish refugee problem. An initiative of FDR, the gathering is attended by thirty-two countries and a couple of dozen observing organizations. The net result: a modest increase in quotas on the part of Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

And the rest tastes somewhat redolent of minerals, sulphur and perhaps a trace of cyanide in a gaseous form.

evian : naïve

“As Dubai’s Skyline Adds a Trophy, the Architect Calls It Stolen,” runs the Times headline [3/9/17]. The lede: “The designer of a new landmark building is suing over copyright infringement, describing an entrenched system in which power can trump sanctity of law.”

Hmmm. Trump again, even in Felix Arabia. Power dug into the trenches, or rather sand dunes. And wasn’t “sanctity of law” always a dubaious proposition?

Sanctity, my left

This is an express Number 3 train to New Lots Avenue.

Hey, what about Lot’s wife and his Daughters? Shouldn’t they have Avenues and Subway stops too?

What’s the martyr with you?

There is no innocent surveying

Not just one, but many tons of fools get on and off the train at Fool Ton Street

Gloss – sorry

Take the Subway® to Footlongistan

The glass ménage-à-trois

Monog-a-trois

I’m in an open ménage

Un ménagerie est un établissement historique pour mantenir et présenter des animaux sauvages et exotiques…

I’m afraid I’ve sprained my uncle

The last of the eight configurations in the “Palace of Thunder” is Following [Sui]: thunder (movement) below and Lake (joy) above. The hard below the soft. Strong and active thunder follows Lake’s gentle joy and, by following, can initiate movement at the right time. Rather than using direct force, one seizes the moment, choosing an alternative course or path to follow in order to prevail. [Bisio, op. cit., p. 121]

The failure of the mediating systems heralding the collapse of the ensemble itself

Fractilides, the chaotic philosopher, known to his friends as Snowflake, or Chris (short for Crystal)…

It’s all bizarro world now, Jim

By depicting them heroically in his ceiling fresco, Michelangelo did much to restore the Sybil rights the Church had hystorically undermined…

But the farther they strayed into the darkness, the more she argued that her friends were back at the party, and that they should return. Without a word, she later said in a lawsuit, the 6-foot-3, 250-pound linebacker picked up the 5-3 freshman and made his violent intentions clear… [“Baylor’s Pride Turns to Shame in Rape Scandal,” NYT, 3/10/17. A1:2]

All the Bodices That Are Fit to Rip

“How am I supposed to feed my family?” Ms. Riveros asked.

She now has an unlikely option: growing marijuana with the government’s blessing instead [of FARC’s].

A Canadian company called PharmaCielo, with the government’s approval, is working to produce the drug legally in Colombia and is looking to hire… [“After Long Drug War, Colombia Joins Pot Trade.” NYT, 3/10/17 A1:2]

PharmaCielos no tiene limitaciones…

Porque PharmaCielo es alto. Como siempre.

They descend on towns and villages, plundering crops and rampaging through homes. They occasionally attack humans. But perhaps most dangerous of all, the marauders carry with them highly radioactive material.

Hundreds of toxic wild boars have been roaming across northern Japan, where the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant six years ago forced thousands of residents to desert their homes, pets and livestock.

As Japan prepares to lift some evacuation orders… officials are struggling to clear out the contaminated boars…

Wild boar meat is a delicacy in northern Japan… [but] some of the boars have shown levels of radioactive element cesium-137 that are 300 times higher than the safety standards…

Officials have also expressed concern that returning residents may be attacked by the animals, some of which have settled comfortably in abandoned homes and have reportedly lost their shyness to humans…

[The situation is] reminiscent of Chernobyl, where wildlife continues to thrive despite high radiation levels… [and] has become a refuge for all kinds of animals, including moose, [flying squirrels wearing leather aviator helmet and goggles] deer, brown bear, lynx and even wolves…

The local Fukushima government recently published a guidebook of suggestions to help officials tackle the wild boar problem, including building special traps and using drones to ward off the animals…

“We need a strong hunting plan, “ Hidekiyo Trchiya, the mayor of Soma, told the Asahi Shimbun at the opening of an incinerator last year. “I wish for the day to come when we can eat wild game again.” [“Six Years After the Fukishima Disaster, a New Danger Looms: Radioactive Boars,” NYT, 3/10/17.]

Fractal fairy tales

We were trying to develop our understanding of the area and that includes the people as well as other materials. Said General Joseph Votel, head of CENTCOM, to a Senate Committee regarding American military operations in Syria, civilian casualties from airstrikes and the absence of captive Al Quaida to interrogate…[NYT, 3/10/17, A12:1]

In expanding and contracting, coming and going, distinguish the terrain: the distances and defiles, whether it is broad or narrow, whether it contains dead or living things. [Sun Lutant, Bagua Quan Xue, quoted in Bisio, op. cit., p. 16]

If you’re not part of dissolution, you’re part of the problem

It’s easy to introduce some savage beasts into a city (there are plenty of them in the outskirts). From out of a traffic jam suddenly come three or four black panthers, who, though beside themselves, can endure the most painful wounds. This is Spectacle Number 72. Wrote Henri Michaux in Voyage en Grand Garabagne, 1936.

Leading toward and away from Gare Montparnasse, in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, are two parallel streets: Rue de l’Arrivée, and Rue du Départ.

Distinguish…

Fukushima’d Up Beyond All Recognition

Baylor University motto: Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana

Location: Waco, TX

Distinguish the terroir, mon amour

CLXXXIX

I’ve been sent an unsolicited photo of a penis. How do I respond?

Are you the unhappy owner of an unwanted dick pic? There are a few next steps for you to choose from, from ridicule to revenge. [Headline and lede, The Guardian online, 3/3/17]

A day without penises

Boil, boil…

Will Snap’s Value Disappear?

Investors Focus on the Positive

Snapchat is a business built in large part on disappearing messages and adding animated dog ears and flower crowns to users’ selfies.

As of Thursday, that business is worth about $34 billion… [Headline, lede and opening lines, NYT, 3/3/13, A1:6]

Melania Trump Reads Dr. Seuss to Sick Children

WASHINGTON – Melania Trump made her first solo foray in public as first lady on Thursday, visiting a hospital pediatric ward to read to sick children…?”

“So you know what is today?” she asked the children, who wore hospital gowns and gathered in a playroom in the pediatric wing of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan…

“It’s a reading day. So I came to encourage you to read, and to think about what you want to achieve in life.”

Mrs. Trump, whose aides had arranged for a small pool of reporters and photographers to cover the visit, then proceeded to read “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!,” a Dr. Seuss classic with an inspirational message that she said was a favorite of hers.

“You’ll be as famous as famous can be,” Mrs. Trump read from the book, “With the whole wide world watching you on TV.” [from somewhere in the dark heart of the 3/3/17 Times A section]

SCENE I. A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron.

Thunder. Enter the three Witches

First Witch: Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.

Second Witch: Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.

Third Witch: Harpier cries ‘Tis time, ‘tis time.

First Witch: Round about the cauldron go;

In the poison’d entrails throw.

Toad, that under cold stone

Days and nights has thirty-one

Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

Boil thou first I’ the charmed pot.

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Second Witch: Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Third Witch: Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf

Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,

Root of hemlock digg’d I’ the dark,

Liver of blaspheming Jew,

Gall of goat, and slips of yew

Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse,

Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,

Finger of birth-strangled babe

Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,

Make the gruel thick and slab:

Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

For the ingredients of our cauldron.

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Second Witch: Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

Enter HECATE to the other three Witches

HECATE: O well done! I commend your pains;

And every one shall share I’ the gains;

And now about the cauldron sing,

Live elves and fairies in a ring,

Enchanting all that you put in.

Music and a song: ‘Black spirits,’ & c

HECATE retires

Second Witch: By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.

Open, locks,

Whoever knocks!

Enter MACBETH…

Of things that make the myriad things move, none is swifter than Thunder. Of things that make the myriad things bend, none is swifter than Wind. Of things that make the myriad things dry, none is a better drying agent than Fire. Of things that make the myriad things rejoice, none is more joy giving than Lake. Of things that moisten the myriad things, none is more effective than Water. Of things that provide the myriad things with ends and beginnings, none is more resourceful than Restraint [Mountain]. That is why Water and Fire drive each other on, why Thunder and Wind do not work against each other, and why Mountain and Lake reciprocally circulate. [Bisio, op. cit. p. 95-96 citing Wang Bi’s description of the ba gua]

            Mountain and Lake can also represent human interaction. The Mountain is solitary, aloof, and restrained, while the Lake represents gathering together, the delight and joy of human interaction. [ibid.]

The chapel takes its name from Pope Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere), who decided to have it built in 1477. It has the same proportions as the Temple of Solomon constructed in Jerusalem in the tenth century BC, being 40.23 metres long, 20.7 metres high and 13.41 meters wide, almost the same as those recorded in the Bible in the Book of Kings (60 x 30 x 20 cubits).

Sixtus IV had wished to repeat the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon in order to demonstrate that there is no opposition between the Jewish and Christian religions and that the one is the continuation of the other. [Enrico Bruschini. Liz Heron, trans. The Vatican Masterpieces, London: Scala Publishers, Ltd., 2004, p. 87]

Bile them cabbage

I was a struggling retail sector for the FBI

I was an intransigent verb for the…

Some years prior to the installation of the Bronze Bull of Bowling Green, the Director General and Council of New Netherland issued a notice: To all who hear, see or read these presents. Greeting. Experience has shown that this decayed fortress, formerly in fair condition, has mostly been trodden down by hogs, goats and sheep and we are now engaged, in obedience to our Masters Patroons, in reparing the same, but it is to be feared that the fort may again be damaged by goats, sheep, hogs or other animals climbing the walls. – Therefore the Director General and Council hereby warn all and every inhabitant of this place, not to allow hogs, sheep, goats, horses or cows to run free between the Fort, the Company’s Bouwery at the end of the Heeren Wegh [Broadway] now tenanted by Thomas Hall, and the house of Master Isaack Allerton, without herder or driver, except within their closed fences, under a fine of 6 florins for the first time for each horse, cow, etc. found within the aforesaid limits on the public streets near the Fort, twice as much for the second time and confiscation of all for the third time. Thus done etc. June 27, 1650.

$6 Foot-long Subway® Sub-of-the-Day: Sweet onion chicken teriyaki…

What you doing up so blight and oily?

With fifty thousand of ‘em on the NYC streets, one’s chances get better every day of ending up unter an Uber

The literal abuse, misuse, of the word “literal.”

Strategoi: erroneous (or strategic) Gk. misspelling of Old Yiddish “strategoy,” meaning gentile generals hired to confound the barbarians…

I almost drowned, littorally…

Patience is not passive

Fish-flavored coffee: carpuccino

Language itself is the slippery slope

Lust for life

D. J. Drumpf’s Pestilential Reel

Dead signifiers wilding

Give your hardened souls to me

And life will always be

La viande rose

And Lady Mondogreen

Universal standards aren’t

They tell me Billie Joe Maimonides jumped off the Guadalquivir Bridge

Breaking news: Billie Joe Machiavelli’s jumped off the Oltrarno Bridge!

‘Scuse me while I kiss this spy…

It is said that one day in Milan, in 1841,Verdi and Bartolomeo Merelli, impresario of La Scala met by chance on the street near the opera house. Merelli was carrying Temistiocle Solera’s libretto for Nabucco.It had just been rejected by the composer Otto Nicolai so Merelli handed it off to Verdi who, in his own words “took it home and threw it on the table with an almost violent gesture… In falling, it had opened of itself; without my realising it, my eyes clung to the open page and to one special line: ‘Va pensiero, sull’ ali dorate,’” (Fly, thought, on golden wings).

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul:

Here Clarence comes…

I was a wanton ambling nymph for the FBI

Twenty fleshtoned torqued ignudi supported by forty frisky caryatids (in gray monochrome) all witnessing the Biblical drama, yet physically and psychologically set apart from the events around them and which they, along with trompe l’oeil columns and vaulting visually con(s)t(r)ain. This within a grand “painted architectural structure,” as Michelangelo, spoke of his ceiling.

In his depiction of the action round the Tree of Knowledge, M. veers precipitously off script. The Devil hands the fruit to a languid and recumbent Eve. Who does not bite and pass it on to her mate. Rather Adam leaps to his feet, and reaches toward an upper branch to grab a share for himself.

And then there is the matter of the Expulsion itself, wherein a wingless angel, somehow aloft, thrusts his sword into the fleeing Adam’s jugular, even as the First Man halfheartedly attempts to ward off the blow, and perhaps shield his gaze from the angel’s radiance. Here, Adam, and even moreso Eve, have been transformed from lushly-fleshed heroic pre-knowledge nudes into lumpy, malproportioned troll-like figures, now merely naked and unprettily so.

Their bodies placed entirely outside the four corners of the Garden quadrangle, the ignudi seem entirely unaffected by the scene, almost narcissistically so. Only one of them so much as glances at the drama of the Fall of Man.

Ekphrasis, mon amour

And what about those Sybils?

Hey hey Michel A.,

How many ignudi didja paint today?

Remind me again, exactly how does one distinguish between ornament and structure?

CLXXXVIII

A detail, among details: the lettering cast in relief within the ellipse at the base of the iron pilaster, just to the right of HOURS, reads: D.ESDHOR. 155.EAST 53,ST. NY.

This address no longer exists: the lot was subsumed into the footprint of 601 Lexington Avenue, aka, Citigroup Center, built as the bank’s HQ in 1977 with a distinctive-from-afar chisel-slanted roof. The tower is around a thousand feet high, comprising fifty-nine stories and a million and change feetsworth of office space.

According to http://www.waltergrutchfield.net, D. Esdohr, owner of the foundry at 155 East 53rd Street, is listed as both Dederick Esdohr and John D. Esdohr in city directories from 1873 to 1903. The 1880 U.S. Census has him residing at 893 Third Avenue and gives his age at the time as 42. Esdhor, an immigrant from Germany, was the father of two daughters, one aged 16 and born in Bremen, the other, age 12 and born in New York. Esdohr’s widow, Johanna Esdohr, appears in the 1900 Census, age 58, living in Brooklyn and employed as a “housekeeper.”

893 Third Avenue, where Esdhor lived, would have been less than a two block walk from the foundry. Neither the building, nor the address, still exist. The space is now occupied by the northeast section of the Lipstick Building’s plaza. On cross streets nearby, however, one finds occasional row house, singly, doubly or in multiple clusters, of the general type that the Esdhor’s lived in, dating from the 1860s and ‘70s and today housing a restaurant, nail salon, dry cleaner or other service business in the storefront, generally several steps below street grade.

The exposed pilaster in the photo above came to light recently, as a result of the high retail turnover rate along the Avenue. For years, perhaps generations, it had been hidden by whatever more modern-seeming street-level façade the building owner had stuck up there. Then a new Thai restaurant replaced I forget what, and the renovation revealed the castings of Mr. Esdhor and his workmen. It is likely that under the metal sheathing of the neighboring hardware store stands an identical pilaster waiting on its moment in the sun.

BECOME A NYC FIREFIGHTER –

IT’S EASY IF YOU’RE SAMOAN!

The truth will set you back

An orientation (or occidentation) leads to a system of practices

Which in turn affirm, legitimize and concretize one’s orientation…

The truth will set you up

Flying

Now is the weiner of our discontent made so much longer by this…

Ha-a-ha-a… Ha-truth!

Gesundheit

Tartuffe will set you free

La truffe est dans le pou-deeng

True or false: brushing frequently prevents truth decay…

Hol(e)y pedagogy, Batman!

Deep code, mon amour

Circular accelerating force

Et voilà, la chute!

Clausewitz is a continuation of Kant by other means

Success, by whatever means* carries with it a legitimacy of its own

*and for whatever causes

The machine has a lot of moving parts.

And the machine is not a machine.

One supona time, ca. 1125, the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, daughter of Irene Doukaina and Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, used her physician’s mindseye to describe a certain Norman knight, Bohemond, Prince of Oranto: “[He had] a wit that was manifold and crafty and able to find a way of escape in every emergency. For in the whole of his body the entire man showed implacable and savage both in his size and glance, or so I believe, and even his laughter sounded like roaring. He was so made in mind and body that courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war.”

In addition to her medical practice, and the management of hospitals, she was trained in literature, rhetoric, astronomy, history, mathematics, geography and military strategy. Born porphyrogenita, literally “to the purple” – meaning after her father became Emperor – she also wrote the Alexiad, an account of her father’s reign, illuminating the Crusades from a Byzantine perspective.

This is not even the merest fraction of what we know about her…

Substitution game: “The Times” for “The Truth…”

For the times they are a changeling…

Diplomacy, as Anna Komnena knew, is ineffective in dealing with Normans. Their own eleventh and twelfth century chroniclers ascribe their success in conquest to a “set of innate psychological characteristics, rather than advanced technology or strength” per se. The Normans cultivated, to some degree deliberately, “an image of irrational brutality in order to foster terror and submission in their opponents. This combined with their rugged mindset and prowess at arms, enabled them to achieve their immediate aims: gaining land, wealth, and titles in lands as far-flung as Sicily, Ireland, and, for a time, the Holy Lands of the Middle East.” [Bisio, op. cit. pp. 74-75]

More systematically, the Romans cultivated internally, and externalized militarily, a strategy of terribilitia – the word, when used in Italian with an accent on the final “a” was frequently applied to Michelangelo, in particular to the quality of his Old Testament sculptures, as well as to his neoplatonist followers, Ficino et al. The Romans have been cited often as an example of how “violence can acquire its own legitimacy as a strategy.”[ibid.]

“Only in the most unusual circumstances,” writers military historian Alvin Bernstein, “did the Romans not go to war.” Further, the threat of violence, in this case Roman “armed suasion,” allowed for the conservation of forces, i.e. troops need not be stationed all along the empire’s borders. This depended, to some degree, “on a willingness to do battle and a demonstrated ruthlessness.” [ibid.]

Chronologically as well as philosophically closer to our moment, a certain Georgian, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, aka Joe Steel,

when asked about the hostility of the Church to the Soviet Union is reported to have retorted: “The Pope! How many divisions does he have?”

Stalin also reportedly once mused that quantity has a quality of its own.

Happy bullshit noises

Festival of false parenting

It’s all the same to the calm

Int’l House of Panic

I’ve looked at pork from both sides now…

I’d like the gluten-free borderline crêpe with cheese extensions and rat.

Ratatouille?

No, rat.

We’re out of rat, sorry.

Mouse then, or wait, do you have coati tails?

Yep, just in fresh this morning.

Great, but hold the rings…

The buildings, bombs and phones are smart so the people can be stupid

And yet… “In Daoist meditation and inner alchemy, the inside of the body is visualized as a mountainous landscape that reflects the forces of Heaven and Earth that are manifest in human beings.

“Diagrams like the Nei Jing Tu show a person seated in meditation configured like a Chinese landscape painting. In the head, there are high mountain peaks; in the spine, a winding mountain path; in the neck, a many-storied pagoda; in the lower abdomen, a deep body of water. The word for lanscape in Chinese is Shan-Shui (mountain-water). The Chinese view mountains and water as the very quintessence of nature. Hence mountains have been referred to as the ‘bones’ of the earth, and water as its ‘blood…’

“The inner world depicted in the Nei Jing Tu is not just a representtion. This landscape depicts the movements of the Qi and breath through the human body. However the Qi it depicts flows not just through the body but through Heaven and Earth as well.

“What shapes and transforms the terrain ‘out there,’ equally shapes and transforms the terrain within us. When looking at a landscape, the painter sees the places where Qi collects and dissipates, the interplay of coming into being and fading back into the indeterminate primordial state. In Chinese landscape painting, the painting is permeatied with precisely the same Qi that permeates the landscape itself. The Qi / Xiang or Qi / Breath / Image is exactly the same externally as it is ‘inside’ the painting.

“In the Nei Jing Tu what is ‘outside us,’ perceived in terms of configurations of the Qi in the world around us, is depicted as simultaneously ‘inside us.’ There is no separation, because the same configurations of Qi and breath bring into being and flow through everything – the world around us, the landscape, the painting of the landscape, the inner landscape of our body and even the painting of the inner landscape of our body.” [Tom Bisio, “Monks, Meditation, and Mountains: The Body as a Sacred Landscape in Daoism: Part 1,” New York Internal Arts Newsletter, February 28, 2017]

What is the etiology and progression of Male Hysteria?

When our perceptions and awareness are damaged or depleted, we compensate by projecting. We tend to project in inverse proportion to our lack of awareness.

There is the un-naming and the unnamable.

Boil them cabbage down

Strategy as a “mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforseen world of many bewildering events and changing intentions and many contending interests.” [Bisio, op. cit. citing Col. John Boyd, p. 88

The feelings of mountains and streams, grasses and trees, are not far from those of humans, and it is wrong to think of them as nonsentient. That a stream should dry up in times of disorder is an ordinary, natural reaction. Wrote Liu Zheng, seven hundred-odd years ago.

Butter-fly has wings of gold.

Fire-fly wings of flame.

Bed-bug got no wings at all,

But he gets there just the same.

Boil them cabbage down, down

Turn them ho-cakes round, round

Only tune that I can sing is

Boil them cabbage down

CLXXXVII

From the countenances of children or women or the manly countenance,

From the open countanences of animals or from inanimate things,

From the landscape or waters or from the exquisite apparition of the sky,

From our countenances, mine and yours, faithfully returning them,

Every day in public appearing without fail, but never twice with the same companions… [Whitman, “Song of the Rolling Earth,” op. cit.]

Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves: this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity of writers. It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today meand mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequatesly masks the American panic. [from James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited and with and introduction by Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Source: New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962]

Instead of ordering a flat white, try the round black

Or five hundred shades of…

Back to back emails plink into your inbox:

From Reader Supported News: Report Details Web of Russian Influence Within Trump’s Inner Circle

From Julia: 30,000+ Russian Babes Desperately Need Boyfriends

Wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, six-toed horses, giant tree sloths, animal aliens all: watch out for the ICE age(nts)!

Wonderful word “naturalization.”

Whatever does it mean?

Prosaic, NJ, where cascades of words power the text(ile) mills…

Élan vital

The flat white hope

Déjuner sur la lune

Formez Fermez vos bataillons

Oh those deck chairs! Ah that Titanic!

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Barnum

In another moment, another city, another Washington Square, you might have taught James Baldwin qi gongs.

Early morning, Seventh Avenue and 22nd Street, beneath the sidewalk bridging of a falling down-building. Two homeless men move listlessly about the strewn objects of their encampment. The less bent and listless of the pair addresses the more bent and listless in a tone part diagnostic, part accusatory: “You have trouble walking, talking, seeing…”

In rough academic seas, adopt a cork curriculum

For a well-regulated militia, choose Milk of Magnesia!

Ah, if only our dicators ruled over a benigner republic…

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead…

But no, Grace, that is not what happens.

They do not fall, but rather transmute into the all-too-rigorous dead…

To wit, neary six hundred years after Alberti taught the chickens to hypnotize themselves, the perspectival art has transmuted into:

The above caption from image in Martin Filler, “New York’s Vast Flop,” NYRB, 3/9/17, p. 11.

Whence emerges from an infinity of possible pixels this cyborgnetic extraordinary rendition of a scenario – one cannot call it a landscape – absent any visual coherence, Renaissancian or Oriental.

Whatever the point may have once been, it has well and truly vanished. And what appears is multply-skewed, and seemingly not grounded in any known or intuited optical “laws,” or order.

For example, the reflecting pools, which are not speculative, but actually exist, were designed and constructed to replicate the footprints of the twin towers: offset from one another, but exactly square, and parallel.

While overhead, a digitally severe clear presides…

Now is the time to make common gauze

If I had an I, I’d mind it in the morning…

If I had a mind, I’d eye it in the evening…

Now I’ve got a mind, and I’ve got an aye…

Scientific American: “Four New Ways to Judge Robot Intelligence”

The press, the press – o ppression – freedom from

Freedom from the press!

Yo yo yo! – just because there’s a top don’t mean there’s a bottom

It is not necessary to be stubborn in training [internal arts] boxing skills. If strength is sought on purpose, it can be restricted by strength. If qi is sought on purpose, it can be restricted by qi. If heavy ability is sought on purpose, it can be restricted by heavy ability. If light and floating ability is sought on purpose, it can be dispersed by light and floating ability.

Therefore, in those with smooth training forms, strength can take place naturally. In those with harmony in the interior, qi can generate itself and the spiritual intention can return to the Dantian area and the body can be as heavy as Mt. Taishan.

In those who could transform the spirit into voidness, their body can be as light as a piece of feather naturally.

Conclusively, it is not necessary to seek it on purpose. [Guo Yun-shen, a famous Xing Yi master. From Sun Lu-Tang, trans. Huang Guo-qi, The Real Explanation of Boxing Meaning, in Bisio, op. cit., p. 60.]

Dionysus time at the Apollo

Cyber chicken qu’est-ce que c’est?

And now they tell me Billie Joe Pulaski

Has jumped off the Kosciuszko Bridge

Meet me at the piano bar La Poupée Noir

Some disupute among musicologists as to whether the original title is “O’Neal’s Olfactory Reel,” or “O’Neil’s Old Factory Reel.” But whatever the truth of the matter, the tune’s a rare one.

And now they tell me Billie Joe Maxentius

Has jumped off the Milvian Bridge…

Vorrei un caffè Pragmaticano, per favore…

Sluggo and His Brothers

What’s in, or rather, on a palette?

Comparing their pictures, one can only conclude that Constable snuck into Turner’s studio every night and stole all of his green paints, oil and watercolour, leaving JMW, like Regulus, completely in the light.

…Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing groaning Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common light of day.

Sorry, Bill

Comedy central: Says Constantine to Pope Sylvester: Take my Rome… please!

Archaeologists and art historians have argued over whether, in many a red and black figure depiction, Achilles and Ajax are playing dice or morra. The answer is neither. Nor are they not doing a jigsaw puzzle; they are collaborating on a mosaic – tèssara.

This tapestry [“The Resurrection of Christ,” designed by 16th century followers of Raphael] does not just demonstrate a good use of perspective, but also, for the first time… the use of ‘shifting perspective.’

As we approach… from the left, the large rectangular stone that sealed the tomb appears to have fallen in our direction, and Jesus’ gaze and [upraised] right arm are turned toward us. Incredibly, when we move toward the tapestry, the stone appears to move. When we stand directly in front… we will be amazed to see that the stone appears in the centre of the tapestry, Jesus’ feet are above the stone and his eyes are fixed on us.

As we draw away from the tapestry… finally and astonishingly, we will see the stone turned to the right, Jesus’ feet resting on the other side of the stone and both his arm and his body still turned toward us…

With the modern technologies of our own day it is extremely hard to achieve a similar effect. This one was created five centuries ago, using silk and wool, but above all with the resources of an incredible mathematical brain! [Enrico Bruschini. Liz Heron, trans. The Vatican Masterpieces, London: Scala Publishers, Ltd., 2004]

Things have ascended into chaos!

I was a lapsed dancer for the…

London School of Gnomix

It is useful to understand that the ideal of military strategy in China… is to be like water. Water connot be grasped, yet it is powerful; it has no form, yet can take the shape of a container. Water is flexible, adaptable and always changing and flowing. Whe one attempts to block it, it flows around the obstacle, never confronting it head-on.

Water does not move in straight lines but rushes, spirals, and eddies unpredictably. It is substantial, yet when one attempts to grasp it, it slips away. Water is soft and yielding, yet it is powerful, like a pounding wave containing a heavy mass of water that can exert tremendous force.

Water shapes its current

            From the lie of the land.

            The warrior shapes his victory

            from the dynamic of the enemy.

            Water has no

            Constant dynamic;

            Water has no

            Constant Form

            Supreme military skill lies

            In deriving victory

            From the changing circumstances

            Of the enemy.

François Jullien writes:

True strength is definitely characterzed by the fact that it is not forced. Chinese thought never tires of this theme: it is the nature of water to flow downward; and the reason why it can even carry stones along with it is that it is content to follow the slope offered it. “The conformation of troops must resemble water. Just as it is in the conformation of water to avoid what is high and incline toward that which is low, similarly, the conformation of troops must be to avoid the points at which the enemy is strong and attack where it is weak.”

The strong points are where the enemy is full and may act as a barrage [dam]; the weak points are where the enemy is empty – deficient or unprepared. The general, like water, steers clear of obstacles and insinuates himself wherever the way before him is free; like water, he always sticks closely to the line of least resistance and at every moment seeks out where it is easiest to proceed. [From “It is useful…” (above), Bisio, Beyond the Battleground, Berkerley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2016. pp. 67-68, quoting Sun Tzu, The Art of War and François Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking]

CLXXXVI

Stand away from the closing doors, please.

The baritone is male, recorded, and, unlike the live announcements of the majority of the subway conductors, deeply white.

When men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go…

Vrag naroda, “enemy of the people,” attributed to Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, but certainly uttered by him publicly for the first time on November 28, 1917, a month after the Bolsheviks took power.

Trader Vic, Bolshy-vik, Bikram vic, what’s the difference?

A Song of the Rolling Earth

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead

And the White Knight is talking backward

And the Red Queen’s off with her head

Remember…

Mondo green

Coffee out West: Cowpunchino

An unending stream of clouds moves upward over the BMW’s windshield. Canticle of birds and garbage trucks. Look again: the stream has gone blank.

Not a cloud left in this sky.

When, in 1940, the Germans quickly crossed the Meuse River creating multiple breakthroughs, threatening myriad objectives, they threw the French forces, numerically superior, both physically and psychologically off balance.

Blitzkrieg, mon amour.

Colonel John R. Boyd described the blitzkrieg principle as “presenting many (fast-breaking) simultaneous and sequential happenings to generate confusion and disorder thereby stretching out time for the adversary to respond in a directed fashion…”

This has the result of creating shock, panic and disorder, ultimately destroying the adversary’s cohesion, bringing about paralysis and collapse. Boyd further notes that blitzkrieg employs “multiple thrusts, bundles of multiple thrusts, or bundles of thrusts inside bundles of thrusts.” [Bisio, Beyond the Battleground, Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2016. pp. 30-31.]

Crime and consequences

Truth and its discontents

I’ll have the Heisenberger, medium rare, please – that is, I mean, if that’s how it turns out…

How did the once-inevitable-seeming Hapsburgs become the haplessburgs?

Born nasty. Live nasty. Dynasty.

‘sonly a matter of time. And bloodline.

Father Time Overcome By Love, Hope, Beauty and Rock and Roll

A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? those

Curves, angles, dots?

No those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea,

They are in the air, they are in you. [Whitman, Book XVI, “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” Leaves of Grass]

“’The Great Wall’ Topples at North American Box Office” pronounceth the Times, reporting on a extravagantly hyped film and fervently-hoped blockbuster that failed, spectacularly, in its opening weekend, to draw the mongrel hordes in.

Apart from what merits the film may or may not have, is its non-appeal to Americans perhaps grounded in the have difficulty we have constructing the Chinese as an “real” adversary? Particularly in our present Russia-obsessed moment.

Truly, we have never really had a “slot” for China.

But it wouldn’t have taken a PR genius or a ton of focus groups to figure out that the Great Wall, however spectacular, is known for failing to do what it was intended to do. If that wall didn’t work out, then how will ours possibly keep Mexico south of the Rio Grande?

And then, we don’t want to look outside… much less compete with anyone else’s wall…

“You look what’s happening in Sweden, Sweden! Who would believe this – Sweden! They took in large numbers, they’re having problems like they never thought possible…” [D.T. referring to a terrorist non-event as reported in the Daily News, 2/20/17, p. 9]

The Augean horse is listed in stable condition…

The short, but not reductive answer is that you cannot keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.

But from where did Paree, breath by breath, stone by stone by breath emerge, and over how many eons of flux and flow? Sous le ciel, mes amis, sous le ciel, et de la mer(d)(e).

And how many farms did it take to raise those hôtels, and fan those faubourgs?

9:45 a.m. and the horrible carillon of the General Theological Seminary clangs out a hymn. It sounds like a medley of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Deutschland Über Alles,” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which, I guess, is where we’ve arrived.

Circle walking in the Shore’s driveway as a Latina woman of middle years passes by. You’ve nodded to one another before, with a smile. This time she salutes you with her just-bought sponge mop and says: “Good!”

Return to Table 4, on which someone has left a note on lined paper, torn out of a small spiral book, in penciled caps: THE END IS NEAR.

A time crepuscule.

In Pergamon, Ismir is near.

Smyrna.

Prudentia Montone and Orazio Gentileschi’s celebrated daughter Artemisia, was named for the legendary queen of Halicarnassus and Kos [though the name derives from Artemis] who, among other things, led a squadron of ships against Greece in the second Persian invasion, ca. 480 B.C.

Much appreciated by Xerxes, but, to his discredit and misfortune, little listened to, she counseled against engaging the Greek fleet at Salamis, a disaster for the Persians from which she quite skillfully escaped.

[When] Artemisia… found that the Persians were defeated, and she herself was near to falling into the hands of the Greeks, she ordered the Persian colours to be taken down, and the master of the ship to bear down upon, and attack a Persian vessel, that was passing by her. The Greeks, seeing this, supposed her to be one of their allies; they drew off and left her alone, directing their forces against other parts of the Persian fleet. Artemisia in the meantime sheered off, and escaped safely to Caria. [q.v.Herodotus: 8.87]

Artemisia, the daughter of Lygdamis, sank a ship of the Calyndian allies, which was commanded by Damasithymus [king of Kalyndos]. In acknowledgement of her gallantry, the king sent her a complete suit of Greek armour; and he presented the captain of the ship with a distaff and spindle. [from Polyaenus, Stratagems of War, Book 8, Chapter 53, adapted from the 1793 translation by R. Shepherd.]

Which said, out of the fog, not to mention friction, of war differing accounts emerge, in this case concerning the allied ship she sunk, to wit the fate of Damasithymus and his [Kalindryan] ship:

Both Herodotus and Polyaenus report that he was killed at the engagement, when Artemisia rammed his ship with loss of the entire crew and its commander. Though they were nominally allies, Artemisia wanted to escape pursuit by an Athenian ship under the command of Ameinias.

Seeing Artemisia sink Damasithymus’s ship, he assumed it was Greek, and, according to Herodotus said: “My men have become women, and my women men.” In Polyaenus’s telling Xerxes says, “O Zeus, surely you have formed women out of man’s materials, and men out of woman’s!”

In Herodotus’s account, Artemisia and Damasithymus had begun a feud while they the Persians were crossing the Hellespont. But he hedges his narrative: “Now, even though it be true that she had had some strife with him before, yet I am not able to say whether she did this by intention, or whether the Calyndian ship happened by chance to fall in her way.”

Whatever the “truth” of any of these accounts, Artemisia is credited with some useful stratagems, among which was that she “always carried on board with her Greek, as well as barbarian, colours. When she chased a Greek ship, she hoisted the barbarian colours; but when she was chased by a Greek ship, she hoisted the Greek colours; so that the enemy might mistake her for a Greek, and give up the pursuit…” sez Polyaenus, op. cit.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds out of your friends’ mouths?

No, the real words are more delicious than they…

The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,

The masters know the earth’s words and use them more than the audible ones… [Whitman, op. cit.]

Sing a song of karma…

Half a pig, half a pig onward

Into the vale of fat

Rode the six hundred

(pound family of 3)

And then, of course, the Tsar, in addition to Rasputin, had Fabergé to egg him on…

Artemisia also being a genus of aromatic plants of which the vulgaris species is known to us as mugwort.

Several cultures find it has a variety of magical, insect-repelling and medicinal uses. The Chinese species, verlotiorum, seems especially good, when used in moxibustion, at coaxing fetuses in breech to flip over into a head downward position without further intervention.

Keeping up disappearances

Paris is a city shaped more or less like and enlarged liver…

Work

Woman

Ship

…The earth neither lags nor hastens,

It has all the attributes, growths, effects, latent in itself from the jump,

It is not half beautiful only, defects and excrescences show just as much

as perfection show.

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,

The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either,

They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,

They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly…

The earth does not argue,

It is not pathetic, has no arrangements,

Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,

Makes no discrimination, has not conceivable failures,

Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,

Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out…

To her children the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail,

The true words do not fail, for motion does not fail and reflection does not fail…

[Whitman, op. cit.]

I really don’t like words like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I really don’t know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean.

And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage.

The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on the choices one has got to make, for ever and ever, every day. [from James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited and with and introduction by Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Source: Freedomways, 1963. Reprinted in Seeds of Liberation, edited by Paul Goodman. New York: George Braziller, 1964. Some paragraph breaks added by E.D.]

Seen at hand or seen at a distance,

Duly the twenty-four appear in public every day,

Duly approach and pass with their companions or a companion,

Looking from no countenances of their own, but from the countenances of those who are with them… [Whitman, op. cit.]

The writer has her/his words cut out for him/her…

Piecework, mon amour

CLXXXV

Water into wine. Jesus’s first miracle, according to John, performed at the Wedding Feast in Cana, when the spirits ran low.

Dionysus too had done something of the kind for the Andrians (inhabitants of Andros who had builded him a temple), by creating a river of wine for them to get schnoggered on. One or more of the several Philostratuses (a Sophist-icated clan ca. 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D.) apparently saw a painting of this wonder in Naples and described it in Eikones (Images) a didactic work in two volumes intended for the art education of the young.

Titian reimagined the scene in his The Bacchanal of the Andrians, a work much admired, and copied, by Rubens.

Rooted in, yet springing from the earth

I am

I am knot

“We lack,” says Yale historian Timothy Snyder (who has equated the fall of the Weimar Republic with our current political situation), “the concepts that we used to have that allowed us to connect ideas and political processes.” [Interview in Süddeutsche Zeitung 2/7/17.]

It’s an interesting observation. Bracing, and with the ring of truth. But did we “used to” have these concepts in a reliable, enduring sort of way, or were they intermittent? Or could they be seen as an evolutionary moment in social thought whose moment, at least for now, has passed. At different stages in our personal lives as well, we “have” awarenesses, that are not available to us other times. Awarenesses that are available to us for reality construction during infancy differs in discernable ways from when we are six. Though I really can’t remember.

(But seriously) what if the equation between what we call ideas and what we call political processes is, or was, specific to particular cultural circumstances, such as those which existed in the heyday of the republican idea(l) itself? A kind of Age-of-the-Reasonable-State-era aha! that immediately began to concretize on the one hand and evaporate on the other.

Of course we might ask ourselves about those things we assumed to be entitlements and now appear no longer to possess, and to make dire comparisons between then and now. But we could also ask, and even think about, how a host of observable circumstances are disposed toward transformation – toward new potential configurations, in all their as-yet unknown-ness.

As for the Hitlerizing of Trump, do not all authoritarian regimes operate, essentially, in the same strategic mode? Do they not arise, with their “solution” of Unity Against Them, out of a critically depleted state of the common?

“We have, at most, a year to defend American democracy, perhaps less… We need people who can help translate ideological utterances into political warnings…” Snyder continues.

Perhaps such people could have helped, back when savvy interpretation of such utterances might have proved dispositive, at least in some folks’ minds. But do we need, as in don’t have them, or are they (we) extant and are “warnings” simply ineffective in shifting the larger tide?

It’s an apocryphal story, but an appealing one, that Kaiser Wilhelm called Von Molke with second thoughts about the invasion of Belgium, only to be told that the trains had already crossed the border.

Each morning I wake up and say “Thank you, G*d for not making me a Yale historian!”

Potatoes, the New World’s revenge…

Oddly too, Snyder’s arguments make one nostalgic for the ‘30s (when people understood ideology for what it was and made bad choices anyway), even if one wasn’t born yet… The idea that, somehow, Lindberg’s America First would be preferable to Trump’s if we could only reconstitute the real thing from its DNA…

If I had a hammock…

We pay people to make distinctions so we can choose which of the distinctions they make we like…

Huh?!

Siri, what is virtue?

Strategy, mon amourgo:

Observe the terrain. In expanding and contracting, coming and going, distinguish the terrain: the distance and defiles, whether it is broad or narrow, whether it contains dead or alive things. The body form contains movement and non-movement. Combine the inner and outer into one Dao. [Sun Lutang. Joseph Crandall, trans. Bagua Quan Xue. Pinole, CA: Smiling Tiger Martial Arts, 2002. p. 18. Quoted in Tom Bisio, Beyond the Battleground, Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2016. p. 8.]

To lead a silent mind, you must first fill it with words.

The exceptional is overrated

The next stop on this Manhattan-bound Number 2 train will be Burro Hall.

Who knew?

New York.

It’s the city that molded you into the person you are now, infusing you with grit, compassion, and endless ambition. [From an ad pitching St. George’s Medical School (Grenada) seen on the above subway train]

But yes, aha, from a personal standpoint, diagnostically-speaking, that infusion of grit explains a lot.

Infusions of grit have been known to cause internal abrasions, sometimes severe, occasionally life-threatening. Common sequela include, but are not limited to: hyperempathy and (over the Queens) borderline megalomania. “Ambition,” even the endless variety, doesn’t cover it by half.

Clams without borders

They are trampling out the vintage

Where the grapes of Rothschild are stored…

It’s all the same to the cannoli

Fuggedaboudit

Tales of Bourgeois Enlightenment

A very fast read indeed

The Roguing States Period

Once upon a time there was a little Buddhist cop…

Oh, you take the Deep State

And I’ll take the Rogue State

And I’ll get to nihil afore ye…

Blame it on the Hakenkreuze

With its magic spell…

Left hook, right cross, what’s the difference?

Marcus Pretzell, a member of the far-right party Alternative for Germany… [“German Newspaper Says Its Sorry for ‘Mob’ Article, NYT, 2/17/17]

Ah, zo vat’s in a name?

Hooked, twisted, it’s all the same to the Pretzel(l)

Even when the Hakenkreuz isn’t worn on the actual sleeve, you can sense the internal Pretzell…

At any Gibbon moment, things seen and unseen are rising, and falling, and always swinging

No wall can stop the mongrels…

It’s a horde rain, ‘gonna fall

“Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?” Richard A. Friedman opeditorializes in the Times.

No, Richard, it’s too late.

But, on the other hand, a broken clock is right twice a day…

Experts fear the growth of antler-semitism in America!

Jews with horns!

I’m Bonnie Phobia

And I’m Clyde Repression

(Unison) We rob consciousnesses!

The great wall of resentment

What does it keep out?

What does it hold in?

It is important at this point to state that there is no one definite principle available a priori and enabling a classification suitable for every purpose to be made….

The necessity of introducing some classification and the caprice attaching to it is most striking…in history (where) the necessity continually arises of making distinctions which are seen on closer consideration to be fluid and inadequate.

So wrote Max Planck in his Philosophy of Physics (1936).

We’re going to hell in a hand-Brexit

What arrondissement is El Prado in?

What strange hybrids abound in the Garden of False Commonality!

Draw such energy as you can from the animals and plants around you.

The people are likely to be toxic.

Cultivate the warmth and illumination of inner fire with your nearest and dearest.

Mindmeltdownfulness

David Teniers, court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm Hapsburg, the Governor of Flanders, and keeper of his very fine collection of painting and sculpture, made several of these gallery portraits. The Archduke (in tall hat) is depicted showing to visitors the wealth of his pictures, most of them Venetian, almost half of them by Titian. Other Venetians represented are Giorgione, Antonello de Messina, Palma Vecchio, Tintoretto, Bassano and Veronese; also there are Mabuse, Holbein, Bernardo Strozzi, Guido Reni and Rubens. The sculpture supporting the table representing Ganymede, is a bronze by Duquesnoy the Younger. Teniers himself is represented as the figure on the far left.

It has been suggested that Velázquez borrowed the device of the half-open door at the back of this picture for his Las Meninas; at least Last Meninias can be understood as a similar picture [?!], designed to illustrate the enlightened patronage of the patron and the corresponding pride of the court artist. [Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez et al, (trans. Unacknowledged, The Prado, London: Scala Publications, Ltd. 1993, p. 219]

(Half-open door) at the back of this picture.

            At the back of this picture!

            Ah, that’s what Plato was saying! Some of it anyway…

Pliny and Quintilian report that Lysippus said of himself that earlier artists had “made men as they are,” whereas he made them as they appear to be.

Thus the great Western conquest of appearance!

Or is it?

Lysippus had, in any case, modified the canon of symmetria in the direction of a more complete illusionism. Truth of proportion bent before the dictates of the eye. As Vasari would later write, regarding sculptural realism: “If the numbers are right, but the eye is offended, the eye will not cease to be offended.”

But back when “pure” proportion ruled, two sculptors working on separate halves of a joint work were so precise in their measurements, that when the pieces came together they joined perfectly.

At the back of the picture…

‘round the tapestry’s corner…

The other side of the fresco…

CLXXXIV

After the death of Velázquez, [Juan] Carreño [de Miranda] showed himself to be the artist most worthy of continuing the depiction of monsters, jesters, and dwarves that inhabited the Spanish court. Inventories show that the Alcázar possessed a large number of portraits of this kind by Carreño, among which are the two of The Monster…

The name of the girl depicted in this painting is Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, and she was born in Bárcenas. In 1680, she was brought to court to be admired as a monstrous manifestation of nature. She was six years old at the time, and already weighed almost 70 kilos, or 154 pounds.

She probably only attended celebrations and gatherings in the palace in order to be seen by the royals and their guests, for according to José Moreno Villa (who found no financial accommodation for her in the palace records), she appears not to have been a part of the service-class at court. In that same year of her arrival, Juan Cabezas published his True Relation in Which Notice is Given of a Great Prodigy of Nature That Has Arrived at This Court, in the Person of a Giant Girl-Child Called Eugenia, Born in Barcena [sic], in the Archbishopric of Burgos.

The publication was illustrated with a woodcut and republished in Seville and Valencia. Through Cabezas we know that Charles II commissioned the second Apelles of our own Spain, the famed Juan Carreño, his painter and aide-de-chambre, to paint a portrait in two manners, one nude and the other in fine dress.

The description of Eugenia written by Cabezas could not have been more sympathetic, showing how far Carreño must have gone to infuse some degree of dignity into her enormous figure: She is white and her face is not terribly unpleasant, although very large. Her head, face, neck, and other features are of the size of two men’s heads, or thereabout. Her stature is that of an ordinary woman, but her massiveness that of two women. Her belly is so vast that it equals that of the largest Woman in the World when she is within days of giving birth.

Her Thighs are so very thick and fleshy that they ride one upon the other, and they conceal from sight her private parts. Her legs are little less than the Thigh of a man, and they and her Thighs have such rolls of flesh that they ride one upon the other with shocking monstrosity, and although the feet are in proportion to the Edifice of flesh they sustain, the result is that they are almost like those of a man. She moves and walks with some effort, due to the inordinate greatness of her body…

In 1941, Gregorio Marañón pointed out that this young girl represented the first known case of hypercorticism, and also that from the girl’s decisive grasp on the fruit in the portrait of her clothed, she must be left-handed.

To show Eugenia naked, Carreño employed an approach extremely rare in Spanish painting: the mythological portrait. He placed the girl against a neutral background and had her lean on a pedestal laden with bunches of grapes; he crowned her with grape vines… and in her left hand had her hold another bunch of grapes, whose leaves covered her sex. Costumed, then, as Bacchus or Silenus, Eugenia lost much of the freakishness of her appearance and could almost have been confused with a depiction of Bacchus as a child.

It is possible that the two paintings of Eugenia were still unfinished upon the painter’s death, though he kept them in his workshop until the end, in 1685.

The nude, along with the other painting of the pair, The Monster Dressed in Finery, was in the royal collections until 1827.

After being taken to the Alcázar… it went to the Zarzuela Palace, where it appears in the inventory taken in 1701. In 1827, the Monster Dressed came to the Prado, while… the nude was given as a gift by Ferdinand VII to artist Juan Gálvez…

In 1939 [it was] donated to the Prado, making it possible for the two portraits to be reunited (Álvarez Lopera, J.: El Greco to Goya. Masterpieces from the Prado Museum, Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2012, pp. 126-127). [https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection. Paragraph breaks inserted by E.D. for ease of legibility.]

Y entonces, las decisiónes de Miranda

            Pista: no es una telenovela…

Sólo le pido a Dios

Que la guerra no me sea indiferente

Es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte

Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente

[Leon Gieco]

All right, Mr. Bakhtin, I’m ready for my close-up…

Some time around 430 B.C., sponsors unknown threw a sculpture competition in Ephesus, the subject: Wounded Amazon.

The full number of participants, likewise, is not available to us, but Pliny the Elder records the presence of bronze statues by Polykleitos, Phidias, Kresilas, Kydon and Phradmon in the Artemision (by then the temple of Diana) when he visited there ca. 65 AD. Pliny also notes that the judging was done by the artists themselves, with Polyclitis winning first prize. More than one scholar, however, regards this as a confabulation.

The bronzes, of course, are gone – who knows where? What we do have are numerous Roman marble copies, based, presumably, on the originals and now organized by art historians into five distinct types. What the types hold in common is the standing figure of a young woman with short, wavy hair, her right arm raised as if to parry a blow, yet without a sense of forceful intentionality in the gesture. The Amazon’s peplos has fallen from her shoulder to reveal or both breasts. She does not, certainly, look happy. Neither agonized. Her gaze seems internally directed, she is not looking out there.

It is said, by Pausinias, Strabo, Herodotus and others, that the sacred site at Ephesus was founded by Ephos, queen of the Amazons toward the worship of the “many-breasted” Anatolian goddess Kybele who merged with the Ephesian Artemis and later mutated into Diana.

Though the index of the World’s Wonders vacillated through the centuries, finally concretizing in the Renaissance, the Artimision consistently ranked among the magnificent Seven. Of the temple’s architecture, Antipater of Sidon, an early compiler of Wonders lists, wrote, ca. 100 BC: I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens and the colossus of the Sun and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand.”

Five sculptors walk into a temple…

Later, in Pergamon, the Amazon is supine and either dying or dead…

The what of the how

“There’s a deficiency of the state in France and Italy, so I take action.” Said Cédric Harrou an olive grower in the Côte d’Azur, convicted and fined for sheltering migrants from Sudan and Eritria. “We’ll carry on, because it’s necessary.”

Taco Bell Shanghai

Through a looking glass darkly, Alice

The territory of UkRhein. Putin wants it.

In social life, there is no bottom floor. There is only where the elevator stops.

Sleep on, Endymiono                                                                                          r

Fu, bat, sounds (sort of) like fu, good fortune.

Hence the association. As with ba, eight, and ba, wealth.

Similarly but oppositely, the number four is a near homophone for death. Certain buildings in Hong Kong, in accordance with both Chinese and European superstitions, omit a host of numbers unlucky enough to either be (or include) a four as well as thirteen, making it possible to ride the elevator up to the fiftieth floor of a thirty-five story building.

In KL, the twin Petronas towers, each have eighty-eight actual stories, the inherent good fortune of the total, presumably, cancelling out any negative numerical effects from the inclusion of fours and thirteens.

And everyone knows that pianos bring good luck upon their owners! Except, that is, for the Imperial Bösendorfer, which has a ninety-seven keys, and therefore represents a mixed blessing since nine is fine (associated as it is with the Emperor and being a near-homophone for long-lasting, to have enough and to save) but seven has some negative associations with loss, bullying, deception…

Luck if you’ve ever been a lady to begin with

Luck be a lady tonight…

Interculturally things get complicated tho. For example: Fu ba (bats eight, or bats prosperous) is a near homophone for the American military slancronym FUBAR. Fortunately SNAFU doesn’t resemble anything in Mandarin… but BOHICA sounds like it could be Japanese…

The bride walked down the aisle to the “Jurassic Park” theme. In another nod to her favorite film, the wedding cake was topped with two velociraptors… three of the groom’s cousins wore their family kilts… [From “Vows,” NYT, 2/12/17]

I was a discalced Carmelite for the…

If two offspring of a singe pregnancy complain at the same time, are they twinging?

Let the emperors defend themselves!

Heroic nudity, as in Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, or David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae.       Pathetic nudity, as applied to courageous, defeated barbarians, e.g. the genres of Wounded Amazon or Dying Gaul).

Forensic nudity, as in…

Alt nudity…

Pathetic fallacious nudity, as in: The lascivious waves crawled higher – and higher still – up Andromeda’s shapely legs…

There are eight million voice-overs in the nude city. This has been one of ‘em…

Heroic dude-ity, like awesome!

So, uh, what would, like, a heroic fallacy, be?

CLXXXIII

The age of in no sense

Tweeter’s remorse

Lie down with oligarchs and wake up in the street

…Much of the nation is euphoric over the completion of Djibouti’s first modern railway, which follows the path of a creaky French-built line, completed in 1917, that met its demise several years ago after generations of neglect.

Although workers from China did much of the technical and engineering work, thousands of Djiboutian and Ethiopian laborers were hired to lay tracks and dig tunnels…

The system will be operated by Chinese conductors for five years and then turned over to local citizens, many of them trained in China.

After a boisterous opening day ceremony in the broiling sun, only the best-connected attendees were allowed to board the train, which filled with applause and song as it glided out of the station.

Daha Ahmed Osman, 34, a tech specialist who works for the Djiboutian government, displayed a wide grin as he watched the arid, harshly beautiful landscape spill across the train’s picture windows.

He predicted that the new train would transform Djibouti and Ethiopia, and eventually all of Africa. “For this we have the Chinese to thank, because they shared with us their money and their technology,” he said. “More than anything we thank them for showing confidence in us.” [Andrew Jacobs, “Joyous Africans Take to Rails, With China’s Help,” NYT, 2/8/17, A1:4]

Having constructed one of the world’s most extensive and modern rail networks at home, China is taking its prodigious resources and expertise global. Chinese-built subway cars will soon appear in Chicago and Boston, Beijing is building a $5 billion high-speed rail line in Indonesia, and the Chinese government recently christened [!?] new rail freight service between London and Beijing.

Another ambitious system in the works, the 2,400-mile Pan-Asia Railway Network would link China to Laos, Thailand and Singapore… Many of the projects are part of Beijing’s new Silk Road initiative… [ibid.]

If you can’t change the guard, blow up the palace

The partial eternally confounds he, or she, who idealizes the total

A few days after the WTC towers fell in upon themselves, I sat with a friend at our local coffee shop in Chelsea. Already the energies of our vastly powerful nation were driving toward war. Nonetheless, we speculated on his most recent daydream: a futuristic grooved railway – a supply and trade route from New York City, up across Canada, over the Bering Straits, through Asia, into the heart of Europe and south into Africa. Our talk grew animated as we elaborated the idea of a massive, international public works project, linking a host of autonomous, yet interdependent localities. What would it feel like, we wondered, to live in a city at once more deeply connected to itself and to other places on the earth? But since he is an ex-economist turned craftsman and I am a writer and a teacher, we let our conversation go at that. Parting to head our separate ways, we agreed that in the near term, New York City should relearn how to build good ships. After all, the harbor is still there. And the city’s lifeblood always was the sea. [from E.D., “The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki, Mohammad Atta and Our World Trade Center,” an essay which appeared in OpenDemocray (online) and in print in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin eds. (Routledge, 2002) and American Letters & Commentary 14, 2002]

I’ve seen you ‘round for a long long time

I remembered you when you drank my wine

            Why can’t we be friends?

Why can’t we be friends?

Why can’t we be friends?

Why can’t we be friends?

            I’ve seen you walking down in Chinatown

I called you but you could not look around

            Why can’t we be friends?…

            The color of your skin don’t matter to me

As long as we can live in harmony

            Why can’t we be friends…

            I’d kind of like to be the President

So I can show you how your money’s spent

            Why can’t we be friends…

            Sometimes I don’t speak – right

Yet I know what I’m talkin’ ‘bout

            Why can’t we…

            I know you’re working for the CIA

They wouldn’t have you in the Ma-fi-A

            Why can’t…

[from the song of the same title as the refrain, collectively written by numerous members of the funk band War, 1975]

Dosso Dossi’s Witchcraft, ca. 1535, was described by the Medici cardinal who bought it, well after its creation, as: “the painting with the portraits of the buffoons of the dukes of Ferrara.”

From the beginning of the second half of the fifteenth century, the influence of Netherlandish realism, stemming from the Van Eycks, made itself felt with insistence in Spanish painting… [and] a parallel development [was] possibly hastened by the presence of Italian artists.

For instance, in Valencia, the anonymous Master of the Knights of Montesa, who was almost certainly the Italian Paolo de San Leocadio, marks a further step in the conquest of the plastic sense of space. [Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez et al, (trans. Unacknowledged, The Prado, London: Scala Publications, Ltd. 1993, p. 3]

In what sense does the late 15th century “conquest of the plastic sense of space,” take into account la Reconquista, mucho menor “the Moor’s last sigh?” Much less the arrival of the Genoese Navigator’s trinity of ships in Indja, mucho menor Cathay?

The fine fine line, perhaps and not even a discernable border, between stricture and structure

Well I’ll be an Andalusian dawg!

My plastic sense of space runneth over…

Who was the first to conquer space?

It’s incontrovertible

That the first to conquer living space

Is a Castro Convertible

            Who conquers space with fine design?

Who saves you money all the time?

Who’s tops in the convertible line?

Castro Convertible.

As distinct from “conversos,” plastic or otherwise, menos menor Marranos o Moriscos…

Y entonces, Castro, como la Castro Kultcha, so called in Galician cultura castrexa; in Portuguese cultura castreja; in Asturian cultura castriega, y, por fin en español, cultura castreña. Castro Culture (en ingles) is the archaeological term for the material Celtic culture of the north-western regions of the Iberian Peninsula, i.e. today’s northern Portugal together with Galicia, western Asturias and northwestern Léon.

Born at the close of the Bronze Age (c. 9th century BC) Castro Culture, survived eight hundred years until, along with its plastic sense of space, it was conquered by Rome and its culture. Apart from numerous artifacts of everyday life, the most visible evidences of Castro Culture are the remains of its walled oppida and hill forts, which came to be known as castros, from Latin castrum for “castle”…

Wha’s inna name?

Is there no bottom, Bottom?

“I had some mistrust toward everything the state defends or that is related to the public sphere,” Mr. Todorov told Le Monde [in a December 2016 interview]. But he said “a kind of small wall collapsed in my mind at the same time as the Berlin Wall, which allowed me to access this public sphere. I felt I was no longer conditioned by those childhood and teenage years living in a totalitarian world.” [from the obituary for Tzvetan Todorov, born in Bulgaria, died in Paris, aged 77, NYT, 2/9/17]

How green was my card

Tromper, to deceive, trick, mislead

Present                       Future

Je trompe                     tromperais

Tu trompes                 tromperas

Il trompe                     trompera

Nous trompons           tromperons

Vous tromperez          tromperiez

Ils trompent                trompaient

Past participle           trompé

In Free World, you hook rugs

In Soviet Russia, rugs hook you

Doubt your strategy, not yourself

King Philip’s favorite dwarf and all that

I was una monstrua desnuda for the Court of Spain

Buy Polar

Say goodnight, Gracie

CLXXXII

I wuz a gendre-bending tale of lust and heartbrake for the FBI

I was a bent gendarme for Interpol…

Flash, bam, alakazam

Out of the pink marble sky…

…recuperating abroad…

Between Wallpaper and Wall Street, we managed to convince ourselves this was a nation when from the beginning it didn’t want to be. And couldn’t be even if it wanted to.

It’s very nice – very sweet, very tender – but it’s too tender. No sentimentality. From here on, no sentimentality.

From May 25 to September 17, 1787 a mass delusion was conceived and gestated in Philadelphia. Once born into the world, it grew into that most temporarily unstoppable of forces: an idea of great appeal with no basis in reality. Once set in motion, and finding little in its path to slacken its momentum – in fact quite the opposite – this prodigy of social nature and the mythic imagination took nearly two hundred and thirty years, to find its junkyard.

Extry, extry! Read all about it: No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.

BERKELEY, Calif. – Fires burned in the cradle of free speech. [“A Free Speech Battle at the Birthplace of a Movement,” NYT, 2/3/17, A9:1]

And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush, and behold, the bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed. [Exodus 3:2]

For the nonce

Hapax, Dis, Tris and Tetrakis Legomenon walk into a text…

You can’t get to Mt. Horeb from Mt. Sinai, or vice versa, since, experts say, if you’re at one, you’re already at the other…

And oh, if Moses would only stop beating around Dictamnus, a genus of flowering plant in the family Rutaceae… also known as burning bush, dittany, gas plant and fraxinella; a herbaceous perennial, native to warm open woodland habitats in Southern Europe, North Africa and much of Asia.

“Intermittently, under yet unclear conditions, the plant excretes such a vast amount of volatiles that lighting a match near the flowers and seed pods causes the plant to be enveloped by flame. This flame quickly extinguishes without injury to the plant.” [Fleisher, Alex; Fleisher Zhenia, “Study of Dictamnus gymnostylis, Volatiles and Plausible Explanation of ‘Burning Bush’ Phenomenon,” Journal of Essential Oil Research 16 (Jan.-Feb. 2004)]

Cat’s Eye, a CIA black site in Thailand

And ain’t Gina Haspel a woman?

CIA, CYA, wash the difference (?)

And lo, the videos of the 10,000 waterboardings burned, but would not b consum’d

Memling’s Last Judgment, a large triptych, oil on wood, having been completed, ca. 1470 (commissioned by a Medici bank, er, vice president, doing business Bruges) was duly crated and took ship for Firenze. But… it was captured and embootied by a Hanseatic pirate and, after many sea adventures, came to rest on the altar of the Marienkirche of Danzig. Some time in the 20th century it Gdansked over to the National Museum.

“It’s a damaged brand.” Sez Daniel F. Runde, (former Director of the Office of the Global Development Alliances at the United States Agency for International Development). [“Uncertainty at Clinton Foundation in Trump Era,” NYT, 2/3/17, A20:1]

It takes a damaged brand to sing a damaged song…

Disneyland was made for u and me

Ur in tiny hands with Roguestate

A nonce word, aka an occasionalism, be a lexical device created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication. Some nonce words accrue meaning and establish themselves by repeated usage, while others are merely for the nonce, a word no one seems agreed on the origin(s) of, but which may be a smushpheme of “for the once.”

Which said, Memling’s Annonciation [sp.?] (oil on oak, ca. 1480, transferred to canvas ca. 1920) may be seen at the Met… like all else, por ahora…

For denonce, having been embootied by piraticals, I am recuperating abroad in Danzig

Pink shalom

QuackUp® – startup competition for Twitter®

“Who knows what the president of the United States really wants?” asks François Hollande.

Even as the EU statisticians put the official number of people who died in 2016 trying to cross the Mediterranean toward Europe at 4,579.

And unofficially?…

Don’t (sang Tom Petty oncet) have to live like a refugee…

And LBG (led by greed) people – what rights should they have?

Selfie and Other

And yea, as the not-yet-thought-of Vican spiral winds round to another grand moment of mimetic figuration, Leonardo calls across the narrowed chasm to Plato, who likely never dreamed of Christ, nor any other composite yet unitary god, and who had reviled the imagmakers of his day for their falsehood, their seductive game of delusions: “The painter,” says Leonardo, “is master of all things which can occur to human thought… and in fact all that is in the universe, in essence, presence or imagination he has first in his mind and then in his hands…”

“The divinity belonging to the science of painting [italics mine] transforms the painter’s mind into an image of the mind of God, since he has power and freedom to bring to life diverse essences of animals, plants, villages, countrysides, ruins of mountains, fearful and frightening places…”

And yet, the artist’s gaze, which witnesses all things, must soften, in order for particularities to manifest their integral coherence, through sfumato, as when “evening is falling” or “it is bad weather,” thus lending pictorial form to the inherent “grace and sweetness” of the natural world. [Freely adapted from various sources including Leonardo da Vinci, The Art of Painting, translator unacknowledged, New York: Philosophical Library, 1957]

Sometimes you pop the question.

Sometimes the question pops you.

Some critics say Mr. Campbell has been out of his depth – a tapestry curator thrust into the large shoes of the legendary Philippe de Montebello, with no experience running a major institution… [“Ambitions for Met Museums Lead to Stumbles,” NYT, 2/5/17, A1:1]

The Young Woman of del Sarto gazes out at you. With her right hand she holds a book open. With her left index finger, she gestures to a line of Petrarch: Go warm sighs to the cold heart.

Her head inclines at once toward and away from you, eyes alive with challenge – to what?

Between her hands and face curious pendant, seemingly a tiny bouquet of dried flowers rests against the dark of her bodice.

Vasari finds Andrea’s technique “without error,” but faults him for “timidity of spirit.” But does Vasari, like so many others, confuse the bold with the monumental?

Rue Pavée, Rue Vieille du Temple, Rue des Francs Bourgoise…

Sous les pavées, le marais

Sous les poupées, les gens?

Wot ho, Templars all!

Wot ho! no es lo mismo que Wotta ho’!

¡Arriba, abajo, al centro y adentro!

Boxes leak

wall : llaw

So many, so many: caught between fear and arrogance

Trapped in the past aggressive tense

For every homeless person in SF, there’s another o in Goo…gle

Invasive maneuvers

Expand those contractions!

Mannerism, so the development out of the “classical” Renaissance is called. Though the origin of the term is not at all certain, there are suggestions. Vasari, who had given all due filial props to the formal restraint and compositional rigor of his immediate predecessors, extolled in his own contemporaries their “true manner of making stories full of nude figures and poetry.”

Humptyism

Sometimes a pietà, sometimes a deposition, sometimes an entombment.

But always dead weighted man descending, so that spirit may arise.

A knee grows in Harlem

Repeat three billion times: The glorious past…

The venerable vulnerable

If G*d gives u capital, make disasters

Street of the Frankly Bourgeois Bad Boys

Rue des ourses des blancs manteaux

Two-tone flesh-colored Broncos matter

Caravaggio, very excellent in his colors, must be compared to Demetrius [of Alopece, 4th century Greek sculptor], because he has left behind the Idea of beauty, ready to follow after likeness, said his contemporary, Giovanni Battista Agucchi, of whom more to come soon…

Favella, Favella, che ti venga il cacasangue! [Speak, speak, or may you get the bloody shits!] shouted Donatello, who had earlier followed likeness (though of legendary subjects) at his marble Zuccone (who seemed so lifelike… )

And Habakkuk, from what one may read in his Book, was a stone iconoclast.

I was a Laughing Cavalier for the Haarlem Militia

The observable and immensely reliable reciprocity between confusion and contusion

Wake up, Magi, I think I got somethin 2 say 2 u…

Abraxos = magical embraces

CLXXXI

I’m more afraid of what we won’t do than what he will do

Real estate developers: a plague of high-costs

I was a date rape drug for the FBI

International Revivals, mon amour

Et ensuite, La Comtesse Valtesse de la Binge (1859-1910) née Louise Delabinge, who rose, yeastily, through the ranks from grisette, to lorette, to femme galante, to grande horizontale.

Having secured, early in her career, a gig (pronounced gigue) at the Bouffes-Parisiens, she took the stage name Valtesse, a contraction of votre altesse (your highness) and expanded her surname to de la Binge, aligning it with that of an existing aristocratic family, then slid Comtesse in at the beginning to jumpstart the algorithm. Valtesse wrote at least one novel, thinly-veiled memoir, under the pseudonym Ego, and used Rayon d’or as an additional nom de plume de guerre d’amour.

Zola, presumably based Nana on her – judge for yourself. And she looks most striking, naturally redheaded and fair of cheek, in a pastel portrait by Manet, ca. 1880, au Met Musée, bien sûr.

Under the ruins of a walled city

Crumbling towers and beams of yellow light

No flags of truce, no cries of pity

The siege guns have been pounding through the night…

As I returned across the fields I’d known

I recognized the walls that I’d once made

I had to stop in my tracks for fear

Of walking on the mines I’d laid

            And if I built this fortress around your heart

Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire

Then let me build a bridge

For I cannot fill the chasm

And let me set the battlements on fire…

[Sting, “Fortress Around Your Heart”]

A man like me and never the usual terms

The thunk of the trunk of the el-a-funk

In “The Gipsy Girl,” painted ca. 1630, Hals takes Caravaggio, and oil paint, to another place

What is north will be west will be south will be east…

Attention! – Président psychiatrique

The eternal resurgence of the grotesque

Not to mention the arabesque

What ever happened to the name Fanny?

In some genres of art, the male is so important, he need not be depicted

All horses are Pegasus, proved Muybridge, at a gallop

They don’t teach Lindsay’s poems in schools today on account of Vachel prejudice

(r u washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

Guten Morgen, Herr Slagheap.

Nein, nein, nein! Herr Doktor Baron von Slagheap to you!

When clinical goes critical…

I’ve been warning me about me for years…

But did I listen?

What connects Greece and China?

Perhaps what travels in the oh-so-common air. Various datings suggest a big, really big, eruption of the Thera (now Santorini) volcano between 1642 and 1540 BCE precipitating a great deal of particulate matter into the atmosphere and stratosphere, tidal waves, blankets of ash. This event has been correlated with the beginning of the end of Minoan civilization, and, by extension, the busting down of door to Patriarchy.

Written at a distance of some longitudes away, The Bamboo Annals describe what sounds like a volcanic winter characterized by “yellow fog, a dim sun, then three suns, [one sun and a pair of sundogs?] frost in July, famine, and the withering of all five cereals.” Politically, down with the Xia and up with the Shang.

In Egypt, cataclysmic rainstorms are recorded on the so-called Tempest Stele of Ahmose I. Unsure of the primacy of chickens and eggs, certain contemporary interpreters allege the storms were “caused” by Egypt’s war with the Hyksos.

Back in the vicinity of Greece, all the noise and shaking may account for Hesiod’s account of the Titanomachy [in Theogony] and Plato’s description of Atlantis drowning.

The big and little worlds

of They and Me

Now weave conjointly

with the I and We

What is the nature of internal embrace?

This is what democracy looks like

This is what autonomy feels like

Whose fault?

Asphalt!

Gen. William Booth Enters into Heaven

Boom! Boom!

Uffizi don’t fail me now!

It is said of the so-called Medici Venus – who may or may not have been carved by Praxiteles, and found herself carried off, Helen-like, to Paris for a spell – that Englishmen of the 18th century, visiting her in her chamber, would kiss her hand. It is not said which hand.

A Riveting Tale, by Rosie

It was a green-card wedding and the old folks said, “oh well.”

For it was plain to see that Lee cared nothing for the mademoiselle

But when three months came ‘round they saw her belly had begun to swell

“C’est la vie,” say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell…

            Thanks, Chuck

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in the ‘60s anymore…

So much remains to be unsaid

A genre-bending tale of lust and heartbreak, exploring the myths of female sexuality… a story that swerves from parody to fairy tale, to gleeful gore, with camp decadence… [breakouts from A.O. Scott’s 2/1/17 NYT review of The Lure; not rated; Polish with English Subtitles; 1 hr, 35 mins running time; directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska]

“…The film follows two mermaid sisters onto land, where they look for love, feast on human flesh and find work singing and stripping in a nightclub [which], with its seedy glamour and its muted sparkle, represents a partial concession to realism…”

The Battle of San Romano represents a historical event, a battle of 1432 against the Sienese and troops of the Visconti of Milan which was won by Florence. Paolo Uccello depicted the event in three episodes (one now in the Uffizi, one in the Louvre, and the other in the National Gallery of London), working probably from 1456-57 when the Medici ordered festivities for the condottiero Niccolò de Tolentino, who had been in command of the Florentine army.

The three paintings are mentioned in a fifteenth-century inventory of the Medici Palace in via Larga, hanging high up in the bedroom of Piero de’ Medici (later that of his son Lorenzo the Magnificent). In 1598, it no longer being remembered what they represented, they were referred to simply as “Ancient Tournaments.” Then they appeared in the Wardrobe of the Grand Duchy, where they still were in 1784; but in the following century, probably because their worth was no longer recognized, they were sold and two of them left Italy.

They constitute, however, probably the most mature masterpiece of Paolo Uccello. The battle scene is constructed in abstract but highly evocative terms, with a brilliant use of perspective. Lines lead into the depth of the picture from the broken lances lying in the foreground, the horses and the fallen riders are boldly foreshortened, and forms are reduced to pure volume (the knights in full armor, the palisades of lances, the helmets, bows, etc.).

In the background are hills, also treated geometrically, but alive with figures of fleeing soldiers and animals. [Luciano Berti, trans. Rowena Fajardo. The Uffizi. Firenze: Becocci Editore, 1989, pp. 36-37.]

HONG KONG – A Chinese-born billionaire who has forged financial ties with some of the country’s most powerful families was taken by the Chinese police from his apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong late last week and spirited across the border, a person close to the businessman said on Tuesday. [Forged. Spirited. Which country?]

The billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, who has been missing since Friday, is in police custody in China, where he apparently is safe, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of arrest. Mr. Xiao is a Canadian citizen with an Antiguan diplomatic passport, though he was born in China.

His removal from Hong Kong appears to contravene the “one country, two systems” rule that allows the former British colony to run its own affairs and bars the Chinese police from operating here…

Mr. Xiao, a prodigy who passed the examination to enter the elite Peking University at age 14, controls a sprawling empire with shares in banks, insurance companies, coal, cement and property through his Tomorrow Group. The Hurun Report, which tracks Chinese billionaires, estimated his fortune last year as 40 billion renminbi, or $5.8 billion. But that vastly understates his wealth said the person close to Mr. Xiao.

Mr. Xiao’s fortunes rose after his graduation from the university in 1990, where he had been head of the official student organization and stayed loyal to the government during the pro-democracy demonstrations in1989…

His fate in recent days has been the focus of media attention and the confusion in Hong Kong and the overseas Chinese-language press… On Tuesday, Mr. Xiao posted two notices on his company’s WeChat account saying he had not been taken from Hong Kong to the mainland and instead was “recuperating abroad…” [Michael Forsythe, “Billionaire Vanishes In Hong Kong,” NYT, 2/1/17, A8:6]

A cabinet of furiosities

Some days you do the math, some days the math does you

In “Amour,” Ms. Riva played Anne, a retired music teacher who is failing mentally and physically. Her husband, Georges, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, devotedly cares for her…

In an interview with the entertainment news website The Wrap.com, she said that [the film’s director Michael Haneke] had only one direction for her.

“We were doing a scene,” she recalled, “and he said ‘It’s very nice – very sweet, very tender – but it’s too tender. No sentimentality. From here on, no sentimentality.’ This was the key that opened the horizon of the film. Once I heard that, it became much more clear.” [Richard Sandomir, “Emmanuelle Riva, Star of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ and ‘Amour,’ Dies at 89.” NYT, 2/1/17, A25:1]

CLXXX

He says “Murder!” he says

Every time we kiss

He says “Murder!” he says

At a time like this

He says “Murder!” he says

Is that the language of love?

Wrote Frank Loesser oncet, and Betty Hutton sungit, Dinah Shore too

“It’s a German School daub… people love to see the grimaces of the damned,” said Stendhal of Memling’s Last Judgment.

Putsch comes to tschov

No saber does not always mean to lack a sword

Selfie of Leonidas before Thermopylae – who needs David?

Dead souls walking

Tweetocracy, mon amour

Klemgard, E.N., Lubricating Greases: Their Manufacture and Use. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1937.

Langworthy, C.F. and A.D. Holms, “Digestibility of Some Vegetable Fats,” USDA Bulletin 505. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, February, 1917.

Cressey, P.F., “Chinese Traits in European Civilization: A Study in Diffusion,” American Sociological Review, vol. 10 (1945).

A critical lack of tomorrow

This painting [The Apotheosis of Henri IV and the proclamation of the regency Marie de Médicis on 14 May 1610] originally occupied the focal point at the end of the Gallery of the cycle of historical episodes and allegories painted by Rubens for Marie de Médicis at the Palais du Luxembourg. It is also central to the theme of the series depicting Marie de Médicis assuming the Regency by popular demand on the death of Henry IV. The large and dynamic composition, linking the group of the Queen to that of the King with a double volute, is a powerful example of the curvilinear rhythms of Baroque art. [Michel Laclotte and Jean-Pierre Cuzin. Diana de Froment and Frances Roxburgh, trans. The Louvre: French and Other European Paintings. Paris: Editions Scala/London: Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd., 1982, p. 188]

And so, some remnant of the West [compared to what?] rafts home again after its Idiodyssey.

And who weeping more briny bucketsful than Agamemnon?

Land ho!

            Who you callin ho’?

Worcester, C.R.G., The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze. 2 vols. Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of the Customs, Shanghai, 1947-8.

The famous Greek vase [krater] with the scene of the vendor of tuna fish…

            [4th century, B.C., Mandralisca Museum at Cefalù]

Pell-Walpole, W.T., “Gasses in Bronze,” Mémoires du Congrès International de Fonderies. Brussels, Belgium, 1951.

Hatfield, W.H., Cast Iron in the Light of Recent Research. 3rd ed. London: Charles Griffin & Co., Ltd. 1948.

Melior, J. W., “The Scumming of Mazarine Blue,” Trans. British Ceramic Society, vol. 35, 1936.

The hue, named in honor of His Grand Eminence Jules Raymond Cardinal Mazarin, Bishop of Menz and successor to Cardinal Richelieu as Chief Minister to Louis XIV, to whom he bequeathed the “Mazarine diamonds,” many of which later came within the purview of the Louvre.

There exists too, a species of papillon, Polyommatus semiargus, vernacularly called the Mazarine Blue, the male’s wings being a deep azure, almost purple.

The Mazarine’s range is a wide one: throughout continental Europe, unto Scandinavia, even reaching into the Arctic Circle, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Thought extinct in Britain since the early 20th century, occasional “vagrants” have been sighted from time to time, feeding as they do on red clover…

The Great Wall

jes’ turn that W upside-down

Endocrynia, mon amour

Siegfried drinks the ocean and burps:

Too much salt!

Pulsifer, W.H., Notes for a History of Lead. New York: D. Van Nostrand Co. Inc. 1888.

Actors well practiced in Standinsky Technique

Schunk, E., “The Yellow Coloring Matter of Sophora Japonica,” Journal of the Chemical Society of London. vol. 67, 1895.

Ames, J.W. and Gaither, “Barnyard Manure: Production, Composition, Conservation, Reinforcement, and Value,” Ohio Agriculture Experiment Station Bulletin 246, 1919.

De Jode, P. Various Academy Figures Newly Compiled from Life with Enormous Labor and at Great Cost, Most Convenient for Young People Who Enjoy the Art of Drawing. Antwerp, 1629

Pieces of ape! Pieces of ape! caws the macaw with the speech ‘pediment

Is there a “seemly” haste?

Nightingale, S.J., Tin Soldiers, British Non-ferrous Metals Research Association, London, 1932.

Langworthy, C.F. and A.D. Holms, “Studies on the Digestibility of Some Animal Fats,” USDA Bulletin 507. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, March, 1917.

Mellor, J.W., “Crazing and Feeling of Glazes,” Trans. British Ceramic Society, vol. 35, 1936.

Dead macaw squawking

After Philopoemen died, (183 B.C.), Pausinias wrote: “Greece ceased to bear good men.” [Description of Greece, 8.52]

The Lamination of Christ

            Oy!

Ow!

Nazarine blue (Mary wore)

A clear and pleasant danger

Among the principal Greek inventions:

First, How: As in how Iphigenia felt (q.v., c.f. Isaac).

As in how Achilles slew Hector.

Or how Odysseus and Ajax argued over the armor of Achilles.

Or how Achilles, now a shade, yearned for news of his son…

Then later, The Beautiful: As in how beautiful.

And we have found these inventions indispensable, possibly inescapable.

Or at any rate we would need Ariadne’s help – unless we have become too bullish…

Cornejo, R.F., “Care of Barnyard Manure,” B.S. thesis. Department of Agronomy, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, June, 1913.

Searle, A.B., Modern Brickmaking. New York: D. Van Nostrand Co. 1911.

Cowher, Lou, W.H. Hunley, and LaDow Johnston, How to Build a Muzzle Loading Rifle, Target Pistol and Powder Horn. Portsmouth, Ohio: The National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, Inc. 1958.

Large, E.D., The Advance of Fungi. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940.

Goodrich, L.C. “Notes on a Few Early Chinese Bombards,” Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 24, 1947.

Shankman, R.V. “O.E.D. on a Grecian Urn,” Micrography Today, vol. 69, 2017.

Zimmer, G.F. “The Use of Meteoric Iron by Primitive Man,” Journal Iron and Steel Institute, vol, 94, no. 2, London, 1916.

Uhlig H.H. Corrosion Handbook. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1948.

Carpenter, H.C.H., “An Egyptian Axe Head of Great Antiquity,” Nature, vol. 130, London, 1932.

Christensen, C.M., The Molds and Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951.

Wagmore, Dame Edith. Elders of Zion: Protocols or Mere Suggestions. London: Darcy & Co. 1923.

Pestalozzi, A. “Notes on the Engineering of Certain Alpine Funiculì,” Journal of Organic Engineering, vol. 666, 1905.

Williams, B. A Coney Bibliography of the Mind. San Francisco: City Lights, 2099.

Omnicom. Joy is Everywhere. Cincinnati, Ohio: Proctor and Gamble, 2016.

Pernice, B. “I was a Pink Marble Atrium for the FBI,” A Likely Story Magazine, vol. 8, number 3, New York, New York, it’s a helluva town…

CLXXIX

And so many souls, exiled to the frozen wastes of Cyberia, with only their iPhones to keep them warm…

What tyrant makes them suffer so?

Unfathomable urges

Last time is not a reliable indicator of this time

General Semantics looks to be large and in charge. But Corporal Punishment keeps the troops in line.

Rage Against the Machine.

Hmmm. What if rage is the machine?

Tromper = a French transitive verb meaning to deceive, abuse someone’s confidence, to be unfaithful to, to cheat on, to disappoint, to elude…

c.f. se tromper, to be wrong or mistaken

Also, trompe as in trumpet, or in anatomy, a tube-shaped structure

Made by mussels [or oysters], pearls are conceived inside the mollusks through the shining of moonlight; the most valuable ones being the oldest. It is incorrect to hold, as some people do, that pearls are also contained in snake intestines, dragon jaws, and shark skins…

The pearls produced in China come from the two [pearl] beds of Lei-chou and Lien-chou [prefectures in southern Kwangtung, long known for their pearl production].

When a mussel [or an oyster] conceives a pearl, it does so by creating substance out of immaterial matter. While the common small aquatic species are often eaten by other fishes and therefore are short-lived, the mussel [and oyster] are protected by their hard shells. Even if they were swallowed whole [the eater] would not be able to digest them. Hence the mussel [and oyster] can live to be centuries old and create the priceless treasure [of pearls].

When a pearl has been conceived, the mussel [or oyster], even if it lives in water a thousand fathoms deep, will open its shell when the full moon shines, letting the moonbeams fall on the pearl, of which the form is made out of the essence of the moon.

The Harvest Moon especially delights aged mussels – on a clear night they will float with opened shells all night long, following the course of the moon and turning in every direction to absorb the moonlight… [op. cit. Sung, pp. 286]

“Our culture is on the verge of extinction because young people under 30 head into the city for work,” said a woman… [who] gave only her surname, Lam.

“Look at our hands; you can see that we do hard manual labor,” Ms. Lam said, extending her calloused fingers. “Our life depends on the weather and the water.”

The residents of this floating village are members of the Tanka group, an ancient people scattered across southern China who have survived on coastal waterways and on the margins of society. But Guangdong is a cauldron of manufacturing and urban growth. Cities have engulfed once-quiet towns, and the Tanka way of life is disappearing.

A cement plant on the shore opposite the village in Datang discharged fumes into the air. Apartment blocks have risen along the riverfront The briny, tidal water of the Bei River, the residents’ livelihood, had been dredged and is polluted, overfished and crowded with ships.

“Many Tanka people who have settled onshore haven’t told their children about their Tanka background,” said Wu Shuitian, a professor at Guangzhou University who studies the Tanka people…

Yet [they] rarely voiced regret for the passing of their old ways… “We have no choice but to hang onto our old way of life, because it’s the only skill we know,” Mr. Chan [a Tanka fisherman] said. “I don’t want our tradition to be preserved if the younger generation doesn’t want to keep it.”

“People onshore used to very much look down on the lives of the people living on boats,” said Xie Diying, a retired cultural affairs official in Guangzhou… who has spent decades preserving Tanka saltwater songs and promoting their revival.

“This has left a big shadow in their hearts,” she said. “Many young people don’t know that their own parents were water-faring people.”

After the Communist Party came to power… the government began to move them onshore and put their children in schools.

But the Tanka on their boats remain a people apart, an underclass in the region’s economic boom. A few thousand of them still live on the water across southern China, although precise counts do not exist.

Many of them in Guangdong shuttle between small apartments and their houseboats, which they move up and down the coastal rivers to be near the best fishing.

“Before we could sing the saltwater songs, but very few people know them now – I don’t,” said Tam Wing-keung, 60, a fisherman. But he said fishing was in his bones. “Even of you threatened to kill me, I couldn’t do anything else,” he said. “This is my only skill.” [Chris Buckley and Adam Wu, “In South China, an Ancient People Watch Their Floating Life Dissolve, New York Times, 1/24/17, A4:1]

The pearl mussels [and pearl oysters] are gathered by the Tan people who are most devout in offering sacrificial animals to the “Sea God” in the third month of every year. These people eat raw sea food and are able to distinguish the color of the sea water after diving into it. Spots occupied by the flood dragon [as indicated by the color] are left strictly alone…

Pearling boats are constructed somewhat wider and rounder than other vessels. Large numbers of straw mats are taken along on an expedition. When a boat comes across an eddy, mats are tossed into the water, thereby gaining a safe passage. The diver is tied at the waist with a long rope, [which is attached to a winch and attended by people] on the boat, and dives into the water carrying a basket.

The open end of a curved pipe is attached to his nose and mouth enabling him to draw breath, and his ears and neck are covered with a neckwear of cured leather. The farthest depths that pearl divers reach are about for or five hundred ch’ih…

            When a diver feels short of breath, he will pull on the waist rope and will be quickly hoisted out of the water. Some, whose luck happens to be adverse, are drowned. A diver who has just emerged from the water must be wrapped immediately in a hot boiled woolen blanket, otherwise he will die of cold shivers… [op. cit. Sung, pp. 286-298]

The Harvest Moon especially delights aged mussels – on a clear night they will float with opened shells all night long, following the course of the moon and turning in every direction to absorb the moonlight…

            Full Corn Moon or Full Harvest Moon: This full moon’s name is attributed to Native Americans because it marked when corn was supposed to be harvested… [It is] the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October. At the peak of harvest, farmers can work late into the night by the light of this Moon… Corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice the chief Indian staples are now ready for gathering. [Full Moon Names and Their Meanings, Farmers Almanac online]

The prostitutes and courtezans of Canton belonged to a special ethnic group, the so-called tanka (tan-chia, also tan-hu), descendants of South-Chinese aborigines who had been driven to the coast and there engaged in fishing, especially pearl-fishing. They were subject to various disabilities, i.a. interdiction of marriage with Chinese, and of settling down on shore. They speak a peculiar dialect, and their women do not bind their feet. It was they who populated the thousands of floating brothels moored on the Pearl River at Canton. [From a contemporary, probably 17th century European source quoted by Robert Hans van Gulik. Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society From ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Archive, 1974, p. 308]

Landscape With the Rape of Proserpina – no, I mean Seascape With the Rape of Europa – no… Ruinscape With the Rape of the Sabines, no –

Certain Chinese myths hold that Barbarians were descended from various animals. The Tanka people, supposedly, had water snakes as ancestors. Because of this, it was claimed that the Tanka that could remain under water for as long as three days, without breathing air. [Wolfram Eberhard, China’s Minorities: Yesterday and Today. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1982. p. 89]

Famous was the brothel-quarter of Nanking, known as Ch’in-huai, named after the waterway it was situated on. The girls lived most of the time in the hua-fang “painted boats”, luxuriously appointed floating brothels. Sumptuous banquets were held on board enlivened by song and dance, and the guests could stay there the night. The Ming writer Yü Huai (1616-1696) has left a collection of reminiscences of the beautiful and accomplished girls of that quarter… [which he calls] the “Capital of Immortals of the World of Lust”… [op. cit. van Gulik, p. 308]

Ah, the deltas…

If you come down to the river

Bet you gonna find some people who live

You don’t have to worry if you got no money

People on the river are happy to give…

Rollin’, rollin’…

The good, the bad, and the discombobulated

A river springs from A-ju Mountain and divides in two at Ts’ung-ling, one called the White-Jade River [Figure 18.5] and the other, the Green-Jade River [Figure 18.6.]…

Since jade is formed by the shining essence of moonlight, those who gather it along the river banks often keep watch there under the autumn moon. When an especially brilliant patch of light is spied, there the crude jades are sure to be found…

The White-Jade River flows southeastward, the Green-Jade River northwestward. There is a place called Wang-yeh in I-li-ba-li where numerous crude jade rocks are found in the river. According to local custom, unclothed women are sent to gather these. The theory is that, [since both women and jade are… yin,] they will attract each other. As a result the jades will not disappear and can be easily picked up by the women [Figure 18.6]. This is probably and indication of the barbarians’ ignorance…

The [hand picked] crude jades are brought, with the aid of either boat or camel caravans, to Kan-chou and Su-chou by the local Turbaned Moslems, having passed through Chuang-lang and Chia-yü Passes. (The tradition of these local Moslems requires that a new layer of turban be added to a man’s head with each additional year, so in old age a man’s headdress is extremely clumsy. These people are therefore called Turbaned Moslems. Even their king is careful not to show his hair. When asked the reason for this practice, they answer that the sight of hair brings famine in that year. This is utterly ridiculous.)…

Once the jade is cut, fine workmanship follows; the best tool for the latter being knives made of pin-t’ieh [probably meteoric nickel-iron]. (Pin-t’ieh is found in the meteorites around the Hani Garrison [in Sinkiang province]. It is obtained by breaking open the meteorites.) The odd pieces of jade resulting from cutting, carving and polishing can be used to make inlay ware. Extremely fragmented pieces are ground, screened and mixed with ash to fill cracks in lutes. This is why the sound of the lute has a jadelike quality. When the design is to delicate for the use of a knife or chisel, the pattern is first traced on the jade with the liquid from the warts of a toad, and then carved. The way in which different things in Nature are able to control each other is indeed mysterious. [op. cit. Sung, 301-304; n.b. the use of Chinese place names does not necessarily indicate that the places referred to are within the borders of China.]

The origin of pearls and jade is different from that of gold and silver. While gold and silver take form deep under the earth’s surface after having received the essence of the sun, pearls, gems and jade absorb the moon essence and do not need the earth’s covering. The gems in their pits exposed to the blue skies above; pearls, denizens of deep waters; and jade, existing beside precipitous streams; all need only the covering of atmosphere and water.

For [the protection of] the pearls, there is a “shell fortress” under water, presided over by the shell goddess and guarded by immortal dragons, which no man dares to violate. When destiny points to certain pearls that have to do service in the human world, they are pushed out by the shell goddess and so are taken by pearl divers. It is likewise impossible to get the jade that has just begun to form, for it is obtainable only after the jade god has pushed it out into the river, which is a thing just as strange and mysterious as the fortress for pearls…

The makers of lazurite lamps and beads are the people of Shantung province, north of the Huai River. This is because nitre is produced there.

Nitre is a non-substantial material and is capable of transforming itself into nothing when heated with fire. In contrast, black lead is a heavy-bodied material [and consequently is difficult to destroy with fire]. When these two materials are heated together, nitre will try to induce lead to become nothing, while lead, on the other hand, will strive to keep nitre in the present world.

The result of their melting in the same pot is the creation of a translucent and lustrous appearance. This is the manifestation of the wonders of the universe through common earthly occurrences. With this, I close my volume on the Divine Creation. [op. cit. Sung, 308]

CLXXVIII

There comes a time

When people incline

From a false order

Toward the real unknown

Gunpowder is manufactured by using saltpeter and sulphur as the principal, and the ash [charcoal] of grass and wood as the auxiliary, components. It is believed that saltpeter and sulphur are respectively negative and positive in character. A combination of the positive (yang) and the negative (yin) form gunpowder. {The fire and shock waves resulting from] the explosion of gunpowder out of a compact space will blast nearby persons and things into total destruction.

Saltpeter is an upward projecting agent. The gunpowder used for straight shooting, therefore, is composed of 90 percent saltpeter and 10 percent sulphur. In comparison, sulphur is a lateral blasting agent. The gunpowder employed for making mines and bombs consists of 70 percent saltpeter and 30 percent sulphur. Ash, being the auxiliary component of gunpowder, is produced by burning the wood of willow, pine, or birch root bamboo leaves, hollyhocks, bamboo roots, or egg-plant stalks. Of these plants, bamboo leaf is the most fiery.

To wage pyrochemical warfare, various types of incendiaries are used to produce “poisonous fire,” “divine fire,” “magical fire,” “scorching fire,” and “spraying fire.”…

Some people claim that the smoke of wolf dung, being black in daylight and red at night, rises straight into the air, and that the ash of a river whale can be inflamed by wind. These two materials, however, must be tested before detailed description of their pyrochemical properties can be made. [Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu (Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century). Translated and annotated by E-Tu Zan Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun. Mineola, NY: 1966. pp. 268-269]

Fru the grass, duckly

Earthwide orbgasm

ATH = all too human

SAD = strange aggressive drivers

Twerkulese!

Planned obese adolescents

Terms and conditions apply

The occidental cannon (his-yang p’ao), being spherical in shape like a copper drum, is cast of wrought copper. When it is fired, men and horses within half a li are shocked to death… Immediately after the fuse is lighted, the operator must run back and jump into a deep hole, because his life can be saved only when the cannon is fired on a high spot.

The “killer-of-myriads: or wan-jen-ti is a toxic incendiary bomb for fighting enemies from the top of a garrison wall. It is conveniently used [in the present dynasty] to defend the remotely located small cities… The sulphur and saltpeter in a killer-of-myriads are ignited to project incendiary flame and toxic smoke in all directions, thus killing many men and horses instantly. [op. cit. Sung, pp. 271, 275]

“Portuguese calivers” were on board Portuguese ships that visited Canton in A.D. 1517. Thorough some confusion of terms, the guns received the name of fo-lang-chi, meaning Franks or Frankish, which was probably the name given to the Portuguese themselves by their Arab or Malay interpreters. [op. cit. Sung, footnote, p. 278]

Plant parenthood

Legosthenes, the oblong philosopher who hurts like hell when u step on him barefoot…

Tiny hands. So sad.

A man like me and never the usual terms

Is there anything in the world, queries Master Sung, to excel learning and writing? The red-hot fire is the source of the deepest black [i.e. lampblack for making ink] and the whiteness of mercury can be metamorphosed into the reddest vermilion: such are the unfathomable wonders of Creation!

Then, in the proper functioning of the government, the [emperor’s] vermilion rescripts are applied to documents of state, [written] in ink, hence law and order are proclaimed across the land; while in myriads of ink-printed volumes, vermilion is used [to punctuate and comment], and the truth of the universe is clarified. These are the treasures that belong to a study where there is no room for such things as pearls and gems.

As to the painters, who re-create Nature in their work, they use every kind of color – some are used in their natural state, others are mixtures of different elements. In all, these represent the changes that occur through invoking the water and fire essences in Nature. How can this be possible with out the aid of forces divine? [op. cit. Sung, p.279]

After the gigantic march and rally of January 21, 2017, a kind of quiet approximating peace descends on the city, or it perhaps emanates up from the ground. Lowball estimates are that a quarter million filled the streets between Dag Hammerskjöld Plaza and Fifty-fifth and Fifth – the closest police would let the demonstrators get to Trump Tower. But having witnessed the enormity and density of the crowd, I think it’s possible the actual number could have been twice as high.

Zero arrests. And pushing six thirty on a mild-tempered Saturday night on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea: few cars, no horns or sirens, nary a single lunatic beating the air with cries, just a kind of low-to-midrange woosh, and the occasional bing-bong of the C or E train “doors closing” chime wafting up through the subway coffers followed by the soon-fading achunk-achunk of the trains heading north or south.

Baby breathing, so many women having spoken with their feet.

Hence the quiet sounds of the after party, before…

What is the character of Greek narration as we know it from Homer? Briefly, it is concerned not only with the “what” but also with the “how” of mythical events. Obviously this is not a very strict distinction. There can be no recital of events that does not include description of one kind or another, and nobody would claim that the Gilgamesh Epic or the Old Testament is devoid of vivid accounts.

But maybe there is still a difference in the way Homer presents the incidents in front of Troy, the very thoughts of the heroes, or the reaction of Hector’s small son, who takes fright from the plumes of his father’s helmet [q.v., c.f. Little Hans].

The poet here is an eyewitness. If he [sic] were asked how he could no so exactly how it actually happened, he would still invoke the authority of the Muse who told him all and enabled his inner eye to see across the chasm of time.

We do not know whether painters and sculptors invoked similar sanction when they first ventured into the real of genuine mythological narrative. But one thing was bound to follow: in a narrative illustration, any distinction between the “what” and the “how” is impossible to maintain.

The painting of the creation will not tell you, like the Holy Writ, only that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Whether he wants to or not, the pictorial artist has to include unintended information about the way God proceeded and, indeed, what God and the world “looked like” on the day of creation.

The Christian Church has had to battle with this unwelcome concomitant of illustration since the very beginnings of Biblical cycles. It may well have been the same difficulty that restrained earlier [and other] cultures from embarking on pictorial narrative of sacred themes. But where the poet was given the license to vary and embroider the myth and to dwell upon the “how” in the recital of epic events, the way was open for the visual artist to do likewise. [E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York: Bollingen Foundation/Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. pp. 129-130. Some paragraphs inserted by E.D. for ease of legibility onscreen.]

If there’s still fog but no friction, is it still war?

Ask Dr. Clausewitz…

Mr. Trump also took issue with reports about the number of people who attended his inauguration, complaining that the news media used photographs of “an empty field” to make it seem as if his inauguration did not draw many people…

Mr. [Sean] Spicer [Donald Trump’s spokesman] said that Mr. Trump had drawn “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,” a statement that photographs clearly show to be false. Mr. Spicer said photographs of the inaugural ceremonies were deliberately framed to “minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall…”

Photographs of Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and of Mr. Trump’s plainly showed that the crowd on Friday was significantly smaller, but Mr. Spicer attributed that disparity to new white ground coverings …

Mr. Spicer also said that security measures had been extended farther down the National Mall this year, preventing “hundreds of thousands of people” from viewing the ceremony… [“Slamming Media, Trump Advances Two Falsehoods,” NYT, 1/22/17]

Vermilion is obtained through the conversion of mercury [cinnabar ore]… there are no other sources for mercury and vermilion. Tales that mercury is obtainable from certain grass, or from the sea, are pure nonsense and believed only by the gullible. Vermilion cannot be reconverted into mercury. This is because at this point the wonders of Divine Nature are exhausted. [op. cit. Sung, p. 285]

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century the public began to demand that the royal collections should be on general view. The idea of installing a suitable museum in the old palace of the Louvre materialized under Louis XVI…

The project was completed by the French Revolution. The ‘Muséum Central des Arts’ was opened at the Louvre in 1793. The resources of the royal collection, now the national collection, were soon augmented by numerous painting seized from churches or collectors who had emigrated and then, in the wake of French military victories, by masterpieces seized in Flanders and Holland, Italy and Germany. It was thus that a fabulous museum, called the Musée Napoléon from 1803 was founded…

Today’s international moral code would condemn such and enterprise, yet it would be wrong to attribute it simply to the ritual plundering of victorious armies. The Musée Napoléon was undoubtedly formed… as a High Temple of Art for the edification of the citizens of Imperial Europe. It was designed to illustrate the moral and intellectual progress which stemmed from the Revolution: in the words of [Vivant] Denon [the museum’s director], the ‘comparison of the efforts of the human spirit throughout the centuries’…

In 1815, after Waterloo, representatives sent by the beleaguered countries took back more than five thousand works of art. Only about a hundred paintings escaped restitution and were left in the Louvre by the allies of France… [Michel Laclotte and Jean-Pierre Cuzin. Diana de Froment and Frances Roxburgh, trans. The Louvre: French and Other European Paintings. Paris: Editions Scala/London: Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd., 1982, pp. 132-133]

Little Han(d)s: the psychoanalysis of the phobias of an eternally five-year-old boy

Yuge castration anxiety, mon cheval

Marching to a different, though distinctly tinny, Drumpf

Like Black Forest ham: cured but not treated

BEAUTY BARS THE WAY

And now, Little Han(d)s: who is buried in Grant’s tomb?

Correct, Ulysses S. Grant. Now the final question…

for sixty-four thousand dollars…

What color was George Washington’s whitemare…

Beaten, beaten, sans merci – like Balaam’s ass and the proverbial dead horse

CLXXVII

It is the artist’s job to mediate the internal and external.

If the economy is the heart, culture is the lungs.

Gotham birds are paying with their lives for bringing down the jetliner that Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed on the Hudson River eight years ago this weekend. Thus commences a New York Post article, “Airport bird slay up since ‘Miracle,’” 1/15/17.

“Nearly 70,000 birds [mainly geese] have been slaughtered, mostly by shooting and trapping, near the city’s three airports…

“But it’s not clear whether those killings have made the skies safer. Federal data show that in the years after bird-killing programs at La Guardia and Newark airports ramped up in response to the near-tragedy, the number of recorded bird strikes involving those airports went up…”

Cut to Ms. Monroe in a second-floor window wearing a slip and blow-drying her hair. Mr. Ewell walks down the street and into the building. The film cuts inexplicably to 30 seconds of what must be a Shriners parade in Manhattan, then jumps to another intertitle, which reads “Our Baby.”

And suddenly, there is Ms. Monroe again, this time on the subway grate in that famously fluttering white dress, holding a matching white clutch in her right hand and a red-and-white-striped scarf in her left.

Mr. [Jules] Schulback was incredibly close, filming right behind Mr. Wilder’s shoulder, stopping to wind his hand-held camera every 25 seconds. Now and then, a silhouette of the director’s arm intrudes into Mr. Schulback’s crystal-clear shot. At one point Mr. Wilder, in a fedora, passes across the frame. Ms. Monroe gets into position and yawns, while the cinematographer sets up the camera. Through a gap in the film crew, Mr. Schulback captures just her face, looking off to the left, serious and unsmiling.

Then Mr. Ewell is there, chatting with Ms. Monroe, who pushes him into position. The dress flutters again, Ms. Monroe holds it down, bending slightly, smiling and talking to Mr. Ewell, but it flutters up some more and she laughs, her head thrown back. It blows up again, but she doesn’t push it down this time and it flies up over her head, clearly revealing two pairs of underwear that, because of the bright lights do not protect Ms. Monroe’s modesty quite as much as she might have liked.

Then, as suddenly as she appeared, Marilyn is gone, and the film reverts to home-movie mode: Edith Schulback walking on the grass at a family outing in the country. It’s like being shaken from some crazy dream back into reality. [“The Lost Footage of Marilyn Monroe,” Helene Stapinski, New York Times, Metropolitan Section, p. 1. 1/15/17]

“Hearing Objections, a former ‘Dreamgirl’ Says She Will Not Sing for Trump” reads the Times headline. “Ms. Holiday elaborated on her decision in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, expressing concern about remarks Mr. Trump made Saturday on Twitter. He referred to Representative John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement, as “all talk, talk, talk – no action or results.”

Ms. Holiday said she had a “personal bond,” with Mr. Lewis and had sung not only at his 75th birthday celebration but at his wife’s funeral.

“He’s [Mr. Lewis] already taken the action, the ultimate action, his blood on the bridge.”

[After 1949] “We all thought that China had a very good opportunity to develop… History misled us.” Said Zhou Youguang, inventor of the Pinyan system, to the Guardian, in 2008.

Blood on the bridge

Like being shaken from some crazy dream

Revealing two pairs of underwear

Not clear whether those killings have made the skies safer

Former “Dreamgirl”

Talk talk talk

History misled us

And she laughs, her head thrown back

Flan and wife

Icing the body elektrik

Keats at Highgate

A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk

(“Loose,” noted Coleridge, “slack, and not well-dressed”)

Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk

Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed

The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back

Homeward in his own state of less dispersed

More passive consciousness – passive, not slack.

Whether of the Secondary type or First.

            He made his way toward Hampstead so alert

He hardly passed the small grey ponds below

Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt

Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow

That banks made swift. Everything put to use.

Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.

– Thom Gunn, Conjunctions I, Winter, 1981-‘82

The Invasive Successional Growth Café:

now serving Japanese knotweed salad

Theater of the abject

The heart hates heat

Metallurgy 101: With iron you can obtain gold

μεταλλουργός, metallourgós: worker in metal

Packing heat

He texts me

He texts me not

The topography of culture: desert, sea, jungle, yin and yang sides of the mountain, amber waves, tierra dura, jungle jim, always a river

Kraters with landscape

“Extent of Genital Wounds Among Troops Is Mapped.” [NYT, 1/15/17, A15:1]

There goes the f**kin’ brand!

Soften the gaze

Anything could happen

Iphigenia going out

Polyxena coming back

Anything at all

Tr[i]ump[h] of the Will

The elephant in the room is not necessarily visible

Or alive

It’s philosophy’s job to put art back in a box

The lawsuit states that during the campaign, Mr. Trump described “Ms. [Summer] Zervos’s experience along with those of others, as ‘made up events THAT NEVER HAPPPENED;’ ‘100% fabricated and made-up charges;’ ‘totally false;’ totally phoney [sic] stories; 100% made up by women (many already proven false); ‘made up stories and lies;’ ‘[t]otally made up nonsense.’” [“Former ‘Apprentice’ Contestant Files Defamation Suit Against Trump,” NYT, 1/17/17]

“Nicky Scarfo, ‘a Mob Boss for the 1980s,’ Dies at 87.” So headlines the Times obit, 1/18/17.

[His] sons were raised in Atlantic City, where the legalization of gambling in 1976 turned out to be a windfall for what became know as the Bruno-Scarfo crime family.

The family was led by Angelo Bruno from the 1950s until he was murdered in 1980.

Mr. Bruno, known as the Gentle Don or the Docile Don, was succeeded briefly by Philip Testa, who was called Chicken Man, apparently because of his links to the poultry business. Mr. Testa was soon killed by a nail bomb.

Succeeding Mr. Testa, Mr. Scarfo muscled in on the casino boom through his company, Scarf Inc., pouring concrete for the foundations of several gambling palaces, including one that opened as Harrah’s Trump Plaza…

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

            This attributed to Al Capone [not to be confus’d with Al Capon, so called because of his alleged ties to the poultry business]

Or Al Strapon, so called because of his alleged ties to the lesbian porno industry

Aim lower

Crucifiction [sic] of the Virgin [sic]

I was a plague at Ashdod for the FBI

Last Ferry to Cythera

Strategic twitters among the joint cheeps of staff…

Email from the Times.

Subject head: The truth is what we do better.

Venus and the Three Graces Surprised by a Mortal

And vice versa

And how

CLXXVI

From a single gust of wind, Clare Hollingworth reaped the journalistic scoop of the century.

Ms. Hollingworth, the undisputed doyenne of war correspondents, who died on Tuesday in Hong Kong at 105, was less than a week into her first job, as a reporter for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, on that windy day in 1939. [When, as now, more fig leaves fill the air with every passing gust.]

Driving alone on the road from Gleiwitz, then in Germany to Katowice, in Poland… she watched as the wind lifted a piece of the tarpaulin that had been erected on the German side to screen the valley below from view.

Through the opening, Ms. Hollingworth saw, she later wrote, “large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns” concealed in the valley.

She knew then that Germany was poised for a major military incursion. Hastening back across the border to the Polish side, she telephoned her editor… [Margalit Fox, “Clare Hollingworth, Reporter Who Broke News of World War II, Dies at 105,” New York Times, 1/11/17, A18:1]

Wow, some tarp failure, or rather, war-drobe malfunction…

It is recorded in Ling-piao lu [a later abbreviation of a T’ang Dynasty work, Account of Unusual Matters in Ling-nan, by Liu Hsün] that the people [in Kwangtung] washed goose and duck droppings for gold flakes and bits, some getting one ounce a day and others none. This is probably not true. [Sung op. cit. p. 236]

So many stones to pass

            Said the river

Scenes in the Life of an American Dog

Post-charity precarity

El gran atlas del fin del mundo

First it was the icy snow. Now comes the freezing rain.

An arctic blast that has reached as far south as the Mediterranean is generating perilous conditions for thousands of refugees in overcrowded migrant camps in Greece…

On Wednesday, a Greek navy ship docked at Lesbos island to take on as many as 500 refugees. They have been struggling to survive the subzero temperatures in the severely overcrowded main camp in Moria, using pup tents that were supposed to be temporary when they were set up last year in warmer weather.

Videos and photographs taken by migrants inside the camp… showed flimsy shelters sagging under a blanket of snow and people waiting in long lines in the falling snow for food and to use bathrooms [?!].

“The snow is only the tip of iceberg,” Mr. Schoenbauer [of the UN high commission for refugees] said. [Liz Alderman, “Cold Snap in Greece Imperils Refugees in Crowded Camps,” NYT, 1/12/17, A10:1]

Headline: “Transcending Politics to Empower Women.”

Caption (to a picture of a chewed-up trash-can lid): “Nick Marotta, who coordinates Central Park’s night operations, says the park’s newer trash cans can keep rats out, but not necessarily raccoons.”

Erebus, who coordinates night operations with his sister Nyx, both offspring of Chaos. It is said that Nyx’s beauty is so unbearable, so breathtaking, that Zeus himself is more afraid than aroused by her appearance.

Nyx, Nyx

I want to stick around a while

And get my Kyx…

Of all the tricks of magicians, that of making cinnabar silver fools the ignorant most easily. The method consists of putting equal parts of lead, red mercuric sulphide, and silver into a jar, which is then sealed and stored in a warm place for twenty-one days.

During this time the essence of silver is absorbed by the mercuric sulphide, and smelted “silver” is obtained. This silver, however, is stuff with out spirit, a mass of dead substance.

If refined with lead it will decrease in weight with each smelting and after several firings will altogether disappear, thus [causing the maker] to lose the money spent for the mercuric sulphide and charcoal. It is set down here lest the foolish, in their hope to get rich, are still ignorant of these practices. [Sung op. cit. p. 242]

China turns out to be a Russian hoax!

She’s sitting at Table 5 across from a bearded man who speaks more softly and says about a fifth as much. A TV interviewer, now real estate agent, she recounts her years on the carpet, [“the running joke was that Donald never came onto me,”] with all the brio of a war veteran, inflected with reprehension for the celebrities who didn’t properly acknowledge her.

“You’ve done the impossible, you’ve transcended addiction. What advice would you give to someone like Lindsay Lohan, someone who is really anguishing?” she asked Robert Downey, Jr. once at a press event.

He looked through her, she says, then pointed to another reporter. “Next.”

There’s a good eighteen inches between your tables and she isn’t large, but her movements are – her right hand keeps springing into your peripheral vision, its trajectory stopping a few inches from your face.

Real estate.

Wooden ships on the water

Very free and easy

Sarcophagus: flesh eating (limestone)

There’s a distinction to be made between a meteorologist and a meaty urologist

WARSAW – The long convoy from an American armored brigade slid unobtrusively across the German frontier into Poland just before 10 a.m. on Thursday, A dozen residents from the southwestern border town of Olszyna turned up to watch.

“Americans coming here is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to us,” said one resident, Mieczyslaw Mroz, 62.

“Gówno zamiast mózgu,” commented his neighbor Ruszyard Kplyng, 82.

“Where are the tarps?” asked Olga Slzysneva, aged 7.

“Sent to Lesbos,” replied her father, Tadeusz Kapuściński, 47. “Along with every pup tent in Olszyna.”

“I wanted a gust of wind to lift the corner so I could see large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns,” said Olga, clearly disappointed and near tears. “I wanted to reap the scoop of the century.”

“Nyx, nyx,” her dad responded soothingly…

[U.S. Troops Arrive in Poland, on a Mission Gone Murky,” Rick Lyman and Joanna Berendt, NYT, 1/13/17, A14:3. Fake reporting contributed by Blake Williams.]

See the bouvier dams of old Siam

Feed the planet on a can of Spam

Oxy-pop and snort another gram

U belong 2…

            Look for justice in a lizard’s eyes

Buy an app to rearrange the flies

Stalk the victims of our own disguise

U belong 2…

            Visit Corinth in a pouring rain

Slaughter cattle and then plead insane

Watch the baby swirling down the drain

U belong…

The Chinese man bowing his two-stringed fiddle on the subway platform at 14th Street plays an air that sounds like a mélange of Auld Lang Syne and Amazing Grace.

            And it totally works.

In 1929, I sold shorts…

Precarity, despairity, nofairity…

And your beard can sing

Shack Dwellers International

No lie

http://skoll.org/organization/slum-dwellers-international

Numbers, told and untold

Three photos featuring the lobby of Trump Tower – with its by now-ubiquitous pink marble that translates so well to black and white – accompanying three separate articles in the A section of the January 14, 2017 New York Times.

The first shows himself, shot from behind, (nice DA) entering an elevator. The second, Marine LePen (reportedly there on a “private trip”) descending an escalator. Completing the troika, Marilyn A. Hewson, CEO of Lockheed-Martin, amidst a gaggle of newsmen, having “nearly closed a deal” with the president-elect on the future of the F-35 fighter jet.

Fasciste descendant un escalier

And within spitting distance of MoMA too

Ikonography, mon amour

Che Seurat, Seurat…

If you want to take over France, I say, first send the “Marines…”

Le Pen and the sword. What matters who’s mightier, since they work together?

In collaboration, as it were.

That which can be hacked will be hacked

And anything can be hacked

The Calvinist rejection of religious art was said to have led to painting interested exclusively in depicting the appearance of things and in technical questions [such as how to achieve a sense of depth and space in a landscape without using linear perspective].

Still life [in Seventeenth-century Holland] is a lesson in seeing and painting. But this does not contradict its symbolic interpretations. [The French art historian] André Chastel compared the table on which the objects of the still life are arranged with a sacrificial altar: the more capable the painter is of capturing the freshness of the petals, the softness of the materials, and the diversity of the reflections in liquids and metals, the more dramatically and effectively he achieves his goal of denouncing the vanity of appearances. [Llorens et al, op. cit., p. 88]

Still life with pineapple and potato masher

Yogi, what is value?

Well, Boo Boo, that is a very inter-resting question…

Pink is the new white

CLXXV

Of the components of gunpowder, sulphur is pure positive [yang] and saltpeter is pure negative [yin]. When these two elements come together, the result is noise and change – this being a wondrous thing brought about by the celestial forces.

Sulphur is not produced in the northern barbarians’ country, possibly because the people there do not know how to roast and collect it. Further amazing cannon have been manufactured in the Western Ocean and by the Red [Headed] Barbarians… [Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu (Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century). Translated and annotated by E-Tu Zan Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun. Mineola, NY: 1966. p. 201]

And the Rockettes, whatever to do? Dance or not dance? Well, really, is it dance? Well, perform at any rate: those flexing, extending, fetish legs subjected to a precise Lipizzaner-like discipline – the staple Nutcracker-hussar costumes, beneath which superbly grown and crafted female members, yes, but swiveling, pivoting upward like the guns on a dreadnought’s turrets, erecting to fire…

You are what I eat

Coca coli

And Radio City Music Hall within spitting distance of Trump Tower, separated only by a Rockefeller’s center and just down the road from Tiffany’s…

Master Sung observes that although Nature has divided time into day and night, man [sic] is able to prolong the day artificially in order to carry out his tasks. The reason is not due to his being fond of toil or disliking leisure. If, for example, the weaver must burn wood for light and the student rely on the glow of snow to read by, how little work could be accomplished in this world!

Stored in the seeds of grasses and trees there is oil which, however, does not flow by itself, but needs the aid of forces of water and fire and the pressure of wooden and stone [utensils] before it comes pouring out in liquid form. [Obtaining the hidden oil] is an ingenuity of man that is impossible to measure.

For the transportation of goods, and travel to distant places, men must depend on boats and carts. One drop of oil [in the axel] enables a cart to roll and one tan of oil used in caulking a ship makes it ready for the voyage. Thus, neither cart nor boat can move without oil. Furthermore, cooking vegetables without oil is like letting a crying infant go without milk. The uses of oil are indeed varied and numerous. [Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu (Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century). Translated and annotated by E-Tu Zan Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun. Mineola, NY: 1966. p. 215]

On the night of Nov. 16, a group [grope?] of executives gathered in a private dining room of the restaurant La Chine at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The table was laden with Chinese delicacies and $2,100 bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild. At one end sat Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of the Waldorf’s owner, Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese financial behemoth with estimated assets of $285 billion and an ownership structure shrouded in mystery. Close by sat Jared Kushner, a major New York real estate investor whose father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

It was a mutually auspicious moment.

Mr. Wu and Mr. Kushner – who is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and is one of his closest advisers – were nearing agreement on a joint venture in Manhattan: the redevelopment of 666 Fifth Avenue, the fading crown jewel of the Kushner family real-estate empire… [“A Second Empire By Trump’s Side,” NYT, 1/8/17, A1:2]

6 6 6

…Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down


Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down


I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down

            You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown


You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown,


That I got the crossroad blues this mornin’

Lord, babe, I’m sinkin’ down

            And I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked east and west


I went to the crossroad, baby,

I looked East and West


Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, ooh well, babe, in my distress…

Robert Johnson, ca. 1936

What, queries Master Sung, is the carrier by which knowledge of Nature’s wonders and the mysteries of the Universe is transferred from ancients to moderns, and from Chinese to foreigners, so that those born in later times can learn it at a glance? If all communication between ruler and subject, teacher and pupil, were by word of mouth, could much be achieved? Yet with the use of a slip of paper or a slim volume of writing, teaching can be accomplished and [government] orders carried out, as easily as the breeze blowing or ice melting in the sun. It is indeed fortunate that in this world exists Old Sir Paper, from which both the sages and the ignorant have benefitted.

Paper consists of fibres and tree barks. White color emerges as the “green” is killed, and thus was taken the first step toward [the existence of] myriads of books and hundreds of specialists and schools [of thought]. This is the refined use of paper. As to its ruder uses, such as shielding against the wind or protective wrapping of things, they were initiated in antiquity… [Sung op. cit., p. 223]

At the beginning of this century, much was still considered “Christian” which has since been recognized as “pagan.” Examples are several fragmentary sarcophagi with bucolic scenes devoted to the ideal pastoral life, especially those with depictions of a shepherd carrying a sheep across his shoulders which were long considered to be allegories of Christ, “the Good Shepherd.”

There was a similar mistaken interpretation of the representation of a reading or teaching philosopher. In their disputes with pagan philosophical schools of the Roman Imperial Period, early Christian writers were fond of terming Christianity the only “reliable and profitable philosophy” (Justin the Martyr, d. ca. 165). For this reason, earlier scholarship regarded the depictions of philosophers… on sarcophagi as references to the Christian faith of the owner. The wonderful fragment with representation of four male figures was long interpreted as a gathering of Neoplatonic philosophers, but more recent research has shown that the piece in fact shows part of two common scenes in the decoration of Roman sarcophagi: a wedding and a consul’s initiation into office… they both refer to the virtues of concordia (harmony) and virtus (virtue) which the deceased practiced in life in the hope of moderating his fate in death… [Arne Effenberger, “Late Antique and Byzantine Art,” Masterpieces of the Pergamon and Bode Museum, Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1995, pp. 108-109]

Similarly, an incorrect interpretation of the figure of a reading man in the decoration of a sarcophagus from Fiesole probably led to the acquisition of this excellent work for the Early Christian collection. In fact, the representation was intended to allude to the owner’s spiritual education and erudition in Classical poetry and philosophy, and to his conduct of his life on that basis.

The deceased appears a second time as a hunter on horseback which signifies not his love of the hunt, but his virtus. The rustic scenes of harvesting evoke the Elysian Fields where the deceased has now taken up his abode; at the same time, they are allegories of the seasons expressing the hope that the existence of the deceased in the beyond might endure eternally… [Ibid. pp. 109-112]

[A sarcophagus from Rome, last quarter of the 3rd century] marks quite precisely the chronological and thematic transition from pagan to Christian imagery. To depict the figure of Jonah, the sculptor borrowed the motif of the sleeping Edymion… Only the gourd vine on the trellis identifies the young man who slumbers in heroic nudity as the Old Testament prophet Jonah. In Roman art the orans (a figure with hands and arms raised in prayer) originally personified the idea of pietas (piety). It is often encountered on early Christian monuments, where it depicts the deceased in a metaphor of blessed transcendency.

The idyllic pastoral landscape, too, is an allegory, symbolizing peaceful existence; even the motif of the man carrying a sheep was sufficient to express the idea of peace. The figure of the slumbering Jonah brings these elements… together to form a compelling Christian paradigm. [Ibid. p. 112]

Ah the ikonography of it all: On the short side of a pseudo-sarcophagus [two slabs, one shorter than the other joined at a right angle and set up in a corner of a mausoleum to give the impression of a four-sided sarcophagus] from Constantinople and dating from the early 5th century “three figures are shown in niches formed by a rich architectural framework with columns whose spiral fluted shafts stand on tall bases… The figure in the center, which is larger and more important than the flanking pair, depicts Christ.

“He wears the costume of Classical orators, poets and teachers: tunic and cloak (pallium) with sandals on his feet. His long, curly hear, bound by a fillet, gives him the appearance of a youthful king. His head is framed by a… halo with a cross. Two apostles in the flanking niches, depicted in the iconography of Imperial notaries holding scroll and writing board (diptychon), turn toward Christ, the regal philosopher.” [Ibid. p. 116]

But then comes the million-figure question: given the worship of so many false gods in the past, could any images, even depictions of persons impeccably holy, serve as a legitimate vehicles for expressing the divine principle embodied in Christ? Did, in short, in a variant strain of Plato’s iconophobia, the image invariably mislead the would-be faithful and potentially corrupt those who had already embraced the one true God? Thus the iconophile/iconoclast pendulum swung both ways for over a hundred years. In 726, Byzantine emperor Leo III forbid icons, and vast quantities of religious imagery was mutilated and outright destroyed. Empress Theodora definitively sided with the iconophiles in 843. In between, in 787, the Second Council of Nicaea gave Caravaggio the nod way avant la figure:

We decree with full precision and care that, like the figure of the honored and life-giving cross, the revered and holy images, whether painted or made of mosaic or of other suitable material, are to be exposed in the holy churches of God, on sacred instruments and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and by public ways; these are the images of our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ, and of our Lady without blemish, the holy God-bearer and the revered angels and of any of the saintly holy men. The more frequently they are seen in representational art, the more are those who see them drawn to remember and long for those [holy figures] who serve as models, and to pay those images the tribute of salvation and respectful veneration.

…marks quite precisely the chronological and thematic transition from pagan to Christian imagery…

La spéciation, mon amour

History pees itself

Cede Texas to Mexico, FL to Cuba

History and its Bummer-tents

The changes in Titian’s painting in the middle years of the [16th] century gave rise to one of the greatest stylistic revolutions in the history of art. If we had to date its beginning we could cite the journey he made to Rome in 1545. The meeting with Michelangelo, whose great fresco of the Last Judgment had recently been unveiled, seems to have given Titian an even greater confidence in himself. It is significant that he painted the Danaë… during this visit.

Justifying the liberty he took in painting mythological figures, Titian declared that he created them in the manner of a poet rather than a story-teller. This explanation could be extended to his new way of applying color. Vasari, who visited him in his studio in Venice in 1566, provides the following explanation: “The manner he employs in his latest paintings is very different to that of his youth. They are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, with the result that little can be seen in them when viewed from nearby, but viewed from a distance, they appear perfect. The method he uses is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, because it makes the paintings appear alive and painted with great skill, but conceals the effort.” [Tomàs Llorens, María del Mar Borobia, Concha Vela, Guide of the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, 1996, p. 48]

There is a species of illusionism in art, of a different order than that of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, vying to fool the animal senses.

It is that subtle, but real distinction between the high relief and the free standing statue: i.e. the full separation of the individual(s) from lateral support. Now, one is truly on one’s own. Accompanied only by one’s shadow, and, as ever, by unrelenting gravity.

No relief. And only one direction home.

CLXXIV

All spokes lead toward and away from the void

What collective predicates make it possible for us to say something like “Walt Disney’s ‘Bambi,’” or “Rockefeller Center,” or “Pericles’ Athens,” or “The Louvre’s ‘Winged Victory,’” without immediately realizing we’re talking nonsense?

What, in short, propertifies our thinking?

The emperor wishes to recover the tripod – an ancient and enduring symbol of the legitimacy of the state – but the tripod, apparently, has other ideas. The detail depicts the moment when, as the vessel is being raised, a dragon’s head emerges from its mouth and bites through the ropes. As tripod begins to sink back into the depths, the large figures at the top, one of whom is quite probably the emperor, watch helplessly.

“It’s difficult to recognize in this foggy environment the actions that are taking place.” Said Darins Jauniskis, the director of Lithuania’s State Security Department and former commander of Lithuanian special operations forces, speaking of a Russian disinformation campaign. [“U.S. Lending Support for Baltic States Fearing Russia,” NYT, 1/2/17, A3:1]

Wait – who’s fearing what?

It’s difficult in this auto-fog to differentiate objects, subjects, asses, elbows, shit, Shinola®…

Let them eat diamonds

Though there was no first among equals, it was obvious that museum officials felt a special satisfaction about being able to put a face to the name of Mr. [Wilfredo S.] Mercado.

On weekends, he worked as a security guard at the trade center. But in his day job he was a purchasing agent for Windows on the World. His duties included checking that every lobster delivered to the loading dock under the north tower was alive… [“Five Faces, All Immigrants, Are Added to the 9/11 Memorial,” NYT, 1/2//17, A11:5]

The fly becomes the web

Probability: another name for G*d

Lord ‘n’ trailer

Selfie mit bunker

A machine made up almost entirely of ghosts

Manifest density: as u can’t always get watchu want subtly imposes itself as the natural anthem

The dead

The not-so dead

The so-not dead

Risky replaces whiskey

No single malts, blends only

We want no checks

Or balances

Huge white gull

Some days u read the noose,

Some days the noose reads u

[He] set himself to make from another piece of marble a Cupid that was sleeping, the size of life. This, when finished, was shown… to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco [Medici] as a beautiful thing, and he, having pronounced the same judgment, said to Michelangelo:

“If you were to bury it under ground and then send it to Rome treated in such a manner as to make it look old, I am certain that it would pass for an antique, and you would obtain much more for it than by selling it here.” It is said that Michelangelo handled it in such a manner as to make it appear an antique; nor is there any reason to marvel at that, seeing as he had genius enough to do it and even more. [From Georgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, quoted by Andrew Graham-Dixon in Caravaggio, New York: WW Norton, 2010, pp. 383-384]

“Were you on drugs?” Mr. Cuomo asked. “No,” Ms. [Judith] Clark replied. “I was on politics.” [Jim Dwyer, About New York, “She Faced Cuomo and Got Clemency. He Got ‘a Sense of Her Soul.’” New York Times, 1/4/17, A1:3]

A Governor on the Brinks of a…

The Massachusetts Babe Colony

All gaffe, all blooper, all the time…

Constant reinforcement of savage incoherence, unremitting…

Verdant waves of cane

Social life as a rogue algorithm

Is a colonyscope an instrument for diagnosing the state of one’s empire?

Sense of soul

Portrait of Attalos I (?), King of Pergamon; Beginning of the 2nd century B.C.; Marble; ht. 39.5 cm. Discovered in the Byzantine wall on the acropolis of Pergamon.

This portrait, which has been identified as a depiction of King Attalos I (241-197 B.C.), derives from an over-lifesized statue that stood on the acropolis of Pergamon. It is one of the most impressive late Greek portraits that suggest the individual physiognomy of the person depicted while designating him a ruler by means of iconographic devices indicating mood – the wide-open eyes that seem to gaze into the distance, the energetically troubled forehead, and the tensed chin region. The locks of hair across the forehead are rendered in a markedly plastic manner, a feature which probably alludes to the ruler’s posthumous divinization. [Max Kunze, “Classical art in the Pergamon Museum: Past and present,” Masterpieces of the Pergamon and Bode Museum, Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1995, p. 95]

Everybody wants the Dardanelles

It’s hard out here for a primp.

On a warm Wednesday evening in November, Jean Shafiroff, a striking redhead, entered a ballroom inside the Plaza hotel. She wore a custom gown by the Harlem designer Victor de Souza: pink-and-blue striped silk taffeta, with a large bow on the bust and a train so long it could have qualified for its own subway line. Think Jessica Rabbit as a candy-striper [stripper?].

The occasion was a gala for the French Heritage Society [The Proust Ball, no fooling], which seeks to preserve French culture and was attended by a who’s who of counts and countesses. The setting was grand, the music was gay and the Taitinger Champagne flowed like blood from a guillotine…

Ms. Shafiroff exemplifies a new breed of hands-on philanthropist, one who isn’t necessarily born with the right family name, or introduced through debutante balls, or nurtured through the ranks of junior benefit committees. Instead, she is what her husband calls a working socialite, who regards the philanthropy circuit as a profession and is the master of promoting her own image alongside the charities she supports…

At the French Heritage Society gala… there were speeches, a salmon pastrami starter followed by chicken breast and excitement when a party crasher was thrown out by security for trying to steal an armload of the event’s gift bags – a spectacle captured by Lady Liliana [Cavendish] on her smart-phone.

Mr. McMullan, the photographer, stopped to take Mrs. Shafiroff’s picture… Mrs. Shafiroff angled her swan neck and smiled… [“Charming for a Cause,” by Ben Widdicombe, NYT, 1/5/17, p. 1, “Style” section]

Among the musical instruments, the cheng (commonly called gong) is hammered directly from the heated metal without casting; the cho (commomly called copper-drum) and the ting-ning (small bell), however, are made by first casting [the metal] into round pieces and then hammering them.

For hammering the gong or copper-drum the metal is placed on the ground, and the combined labor of many men is required for hammering a large instrument. [As the instrument takes shape] its size is gradually enlarged with the progress of hammering, resulting in the resonant sound of the instrument.

The raised part in the middle of the copper-drum is made first, and then the article is cold hammered to produce the [proper] sound. The slightest difference in the strokes will determine whether the sound will be male or female; the former is achieved with many repeated strokes of the hammer. [Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu (Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century). Translated and annotated by E-Tu Zan Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun. Mineola, NY: 1966. p. 197]

Ring dem bellz!

Kvetch your way to rock-hard abs!

Imperative your way to the great conditional…                

If I wuz a rich man…

Kvetching and kvetching in the tightening gyre,

Tontocles, the idiot Greek philosopher-hero-general

Tontocracy: rule of the stupid

I was a hands-on socialite for the…

I was a working philanthropist for the…

…How can the artful arguments of the necromancers compare [in their marvels] even to one ten-thousandth of the creations of nature? [Sung op. cit., p. 201]

After his escape from prison in Malta, Caravaggio reached Sicily and sought shelter in Syracuse with his old fellow apprentice Mario Minetti. He was assisted in his research for a commissioned painting, The Burial of St Lucy, by a local antiquarian, mathematician and archaeologist, Vincenzo Mirabella. Among other sites, Mirabella showed Caravaggio “a huge grotto said to have been used as a prison by the ancient tyrant Dionysus. According to local folklore, Dionysus had ordered a deep and narrow slit to be cut into the roof of this ‘speaking cave’, so named because of its extraordinary acoustic qualities, which amplified noise in such a way as to make the least sounds perfectly audible. At the cave’s single entrance, the tyrant built a great gate, so that he could confine his prisoners within. On the hilltop above the cave, perched directly over the slit cut in its apex, he placed the house of his jailor. While his captives languished hundreds of feet below, Dionysus could eavesdrop on their every word. He could hear admissions of guilt, learn their plans, discover the names of their friends and allies.

“After explaining all this to Caravaggio, Mirabella was struck by the acuteness of the painter’s response. ‘I remember,’ he wrote, ‘when I took Michelangelo da Caravaggio, that singular painter of our times, to see that prison. And he, considering its strength, and showing his unique genius as an imitator of natural things, said: “Don’t you see how the tyrant, in order to create a vessel that would make all things audible, looked no further for a model than that which nature had made herself to produce the self-same effect. So he made this prison in the likeness of an ear.” Which observation, not having been noticed before, but then being known and studied afterward, has doubly amazed the most curious minds.’

To this day, the great cave… continues to be known as ‘The ear of Dionysus.’” [Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, New York: WW Norton, 2010, pp. 400-401]

CLXXIII

Intercrural sex: not just a vase they were going through

“Would you ban the French from building in Paris?” asks the Israeli ambassador in response to the United Nations resolution condemning West Bank settlements. You mention this to Wolfgang and he says: “And if they wanted to tear down the Eiffel Tower?”

An agent of the Duke of Urbino, frustrated in his attempts to negotiate a commission for a painting from the maddeningly resistant Caravaggio, writes to his boss c. 1605: E uno cervello stravantissimo: he is a very extravagant brain.

ONLINE: NEWS AT THE UPSHOT

Is a robot coming for your job? Readers react to the threat of automation.

nytimes.com/upshot

The breakout box is decorated with a little computer screen arrow

Click and drag

In October, a New Zealand college professor submitted a paper to the OMIC-sponsored “International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics,” which was held last month at the Hilton Atlanta Airport.

It was written using the auto-complete feature on his iPhone, which produced an abstract that begins as follows: “Atomic Physics and I shall not have the same problem with separate section for a very long way. Nuclear weapons will not have to come out the same day after a long time of the year he added the two sides will have the two leaders to bring up to their long ways of the same as they will have been a good place for a good time at home the united front and she is a great place for a good time.”

The paper was accepted within three hours…

On Dec. 1 and 2, the “2nd International Congress on Neuroimmunology and Therapeutics,” the “13th International Conference on Vaccines, Therapeutics and Travel Medicine: Influenza and Infectious Diseases,” and the “International Conference on Clinical and Medical Genetics” were all held, simultaneously, at the Hilton Atlanta Airport.

Stacking multiple fake conferences at the same hotel is a common practice, says Jeffrey Beall, a tenured University of Colorado Denver librarian. He maintains a website for identifying “predatory open access scholarly publishers” that masquerade as scholarly journals, but are actually in the business of pumping out worthless articles and exploiting scholars with hidden fees. “You just rent a hotel, make up a name and stand around while everyone is reading their papers,” Mr. Beall says. “It’s easy money.”

Mr. Beall’s list, which has grown to 923 publishers from 18 in 2011, also includes a British company called the “Infonomics Society.” Like OMICS, it publishes a raft of journals, 17 in all, with legitimately dry-sounding titles like “International Journal of Sustainable Energy Development.” Mr. Beall calls Infonomics an “impostor scholarly society” that is “designed to generate as much revenue as possible.” All 17 journals are run by a single person named Charles Shoniregun out of a modest two-story attached brick home in the outer suburbs of London… [“Fake Academe, Looking a Lot Like the Real Thing,” Kevin Carey, New York Times, 12/29/16, A3:3]

AMSTERDAM – Twenty-six couples in the Netherlands are waiting to find out if the sperm that was used to fertilize their eggs at a reproductive technology clinic might have come from the wrong men… [NYT, 12/29/16, A3:1]

A bit deeper up the Styxish river of the Times, under the heading WHAT IN THE WORLD (sans ?) one encounters the liver-spleen, if not the heart of darkness:

What do you do with the buildings associated with Hitler’s life and death? In Austria, they are hitting the delete key, but in Germany, it’s more like copy and paste.

After years of indecision and delay, the Austrian government is moving to seize and either demolish or drastically remodel the house where Hitler was born…

In Berlin, where the authorities have generally taken a somber approach to the terrible history, the story is different. Most landmarks of Nazi rule in the city were demolished long ago, but a commercial firm has now re-created one of them as a tourist attraction: the bunker where Hitler committed suicide in 1945.

The new bunker was built about a mile from the original site by Historial, which also runs the Berlin Story Museum next door… [“A Berlin Attraction’s Uneasy Phenomenon: Hitler Sells,” Alison Smale]

The wrong men, fertilized by history

Lascaux, mon amour

Hitler Sells

Jesus Saves

Moses Invests

The ultimate, viral, billion-dollar IFP will be for the app that can translate real news into fake news in a nanosecond, and vice versa

Just hit alt-right-delete

“Sorry, but you can’t be in scouts: N.J. mom of transgender 8-yr.-old rips boys group.”

THE FAMILY of an 8-year-old with an appetite for camping, hiking and barbecues says he was kicked out of a New Jersey cub Scout pack because he was born a girl… [NY Daily News, 12/29/16, p. 17]

Tension of the body; relaxation of the face.

Severe style. Archaic smile.

Lady Gagdiva riding backward into Prague (or is it Danzig?) on a dwarf, albino ithyphallic mule

Adjectival order, mon amule

You’ll be OK once you see that it’s all a divine clockwork…

Ithyphallophobia, mon amour

Is it live or is it Memorex¿

You brexit, you bought it…

Berlin Goddess meets Lady of Auxerre in a battle of Archaic frontality and mildness of smile

Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province in central China. A city of six million, more less, aka iPhone City

Where the clocks don’t move but the trains run on time: a coney treblikna of the mind

Hunker down

Doubled down

Bunker down

Does the second hand move? Only in the Treblinka of an eye?

I was a Venus of Ludendorff for the

Air, Bed, Bath, Bunker and Uberalles

Traum Wasser

Play Themistocles 4 me

The West: don’t bank on it

For years I travelled over many lands,

Past oceans, mountains, valleys, desert sands,

And when the Deluge rose I flew around

The world itself and never glimpsed dry ground

[The Canticle of the Birds, distichs 704-705]

I wuz an eight-head-high doryphoros for the FBI

To aver that Man is the measure of all things makes a Protagoras of you and a protagonist of me

The tragedy of our thinking: an old, old comedy

Exit, pursuing a bear

Michelangelo da Caravaggio excelled in painting feet, ma Guido Cagnacci, fuggedaboudit

He dallies amid bamboo in the morning, stays in

the company of bamboo in the evening, drinks and

eats amid bamboo, and rests in the shadow of bamboo.

He has thus observed bamboo in numerous

different forms.

– Su Che (1039-1112) writing about his friend Wen Tong (1018-1079), a master bamboo painter. This inscribed on the painting “Bamboo in Wind and Rain” by Shitao (Zhu Ruoji), (1642-1707).

To catch up with yourself does not necessitate taking longer strides.

Just stay where you are, and you’ll soon return.

Master Sung observes that it is by working on metals and wood that artifacts are made. How could the skills of even Kung-shu Pan and Ch’ui be manifested if the world were devoid of tools? Without forceps, hammers, and the like, the “five weapons” and “six musical instruments” would be incapable of fulfilling their respective functions.

Out of the blazing fire of the same furnace will emerge a host of objects of different sizes; one may weigh 30,000 catties and be capable of anchoring a battleship in a raging sea, while another may be as light as a feather and fashion embroideries on a ceremonial robe.

Yet if we assign all the credit of superb smelting and casting to supernatural forces, it seems that proof of this can be found in the story of Mo-hsieh and Kan-chiang swords, and in the rise heavenward of two other famous swords which turned into two dragons [after being discovered]. [Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu (Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century). Translated and annotated by E-Tu Zan Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun. Mineola, NY: 1966. p.189. Footnotes 1 & 2, p. 198. Kung-shu Pan of the state of LU was a famous artisan of the Spring and Autumn period (770-403 B.C.). Ch’ui was a skilled artisan of legend who lived in the days of emperor Yao (ca. twenty-second century B.C.). Some say he belonged to the time of the Yellow Emperor, ca. 2700 B.C. Mo-hsieh and Kan-chiang were named after the famous metallurgist Kan-chiang who made the swords, and his wife Mo-hsieh. The dragon swords were said to have been discovered by Lei Huan of the Tsin dynasty (A.D. 265-419), who dug them up out of their underground hiding place.]

Upping the sacrificial ante on throwing people under the bus, comes the strange, sad and desperate strategy of throwing the bus under King Kong.

¡No disparen, somos periodistas!

Turkish media reports initially said that there had been as many as three [Kalashnakov-shooting attackers] and that they had stormed the club wearing Santa Claus suits. Later reports were contradictory before the Turkish government clarified and imposed a news blackout. [“Attacker Strikes Istanbul Club, Killing Dozens,” NYT, 1/1/17, A1:1]

When Walt Disney’s “Bambi” opened in 1942, critics praised its spare, haunting visual style, vastly different from anything Disney had done before.

But what they did not know was that the film’s striking appearance had been created by a Chinese immigrant artist, who took as his inspiration the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty…

Mr. [Tyrus] Wong died on Friday at 106.

Trained as a painter, Mr. Wong was a leading figure in the Modernist movement that flourished in California between the first and second World Wars. In 1932 and again in 1934, his work was included in group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago that also featured Picasso, Matisse, and Paul Klee.

As a staff artist for Hollywood studios from the 1930s to the 1960s he drew storyboards and made vibrant paintings… that helped the director envision each scene before it was shot…

Wong Gen Yeo… was born on Oct. 25, 1910, in a farming village in Guangdong Province…

His first art teacher was his father, who trained him nightly in calligraphy by having him dip a brush in water and trace ghostly characters on newspaper: They could not afford ink or drawing paper…

Mr. Wong spent two years painting the illustrations that would inform every aspect of “Bambi.” Throughout the finished film – lent a brooding quality by its stark landscapes; misty, desaturated palette; and figures often seen in silhouette – his influence is unmistakable…

In retirement [he became] a renowned kitemaker, designing, building and hand coloring astonishing, airworthy creations – butterflies, swallows, whole flocks of owls, centipedes more than 100 feet long…

When his [three] daughters were small, Mr. Wong encouraged them to make art… yet he would not let them have coloring books.

The reason was simple: He did not want his children constrained, he said, by lines laid down by others. [Margalit Fox, “’Bambi’ Artist Finally Found Acclaim After Enduring Bias,” NYT, 1/1/17, A1:2]

…clarified and imposed a blackout…

Free, wide and 21

Who let the godz out?

Karmik relief