LXXVI
When the light is too bright, or one is overfocalized, it is no longer possible to see the compenetration of the visible and the invisible.
What is the pattern, the configuration, the disposition, within?
Baby, you the fishhead in my bouillabaisse!
The operation successfully corrected his conformities.
We are micro-landscapes.
That which generates also limits.
Electricity is no respecter of borders.
The bishop’s egg is Euclidian. The curate’s egg is picaresque.
And Klimt Eastwood.
Gustav: True relaxation, which would do me a world of good, does not exist for me.
Harry: Man’s got to know his limitations.
Three “legally” blind mice, Lysenko, Bukharin and Zsa Zsa Gabor condense in a…
Curate’s egg: describes something that is at least partly bad, but has some arguably redeeming features. In its original context, the term refers to something that is obviously and essentially bad, but is described euphemistically as only partly bad – its supposed good features presumably redeeming it.
Said original context is a cartoon, True Humility, drawn by George du Maurier and published in Punch in 1895. The cartoon shows a curate seated at breakfast in his bishop’s house. The bishop, smelling something not quite right remarks: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones.” To which the curate replies, “Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!”
When Punch reprinted the cartoon in its final issue, nearly a hundred years later, it retained slugged in a new caption: Curate: “This f***ing egg’s off!”
Euphemism and its disconnects:
New South Wales. Neither new, nor Welsh. And south is relative.
The Van Diemen is in the details. And the taxonomy.
Lambertia formosa, commonly known as mountain devil, grows as a spreading shrub to seven feet tall, with one or more stems arising from a woody base known as a lignotuber, from which it regrows after a bush fire. The flowers hold profuse amounts of nectar and are pollinated by honeyeaters. “Discovered” in what is now Botany Bay, by botanists entailed to Cook’s party.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Leni Riefenstahl and Madeleine Albright walk into history…
When is a Constable not a Constable?
When it’s an unstable.
For example, a painting walks into Christies, and immediately their experts declare it as the work of a “follower” of Constable and sell it for five grand and change. This is 2013. Next year, the buyer brings it to Sotheby’s who recognize that beneath the almost literally tacky overpainting lurks an authentic Johnny C. oil sketch for Salisbury Cathedral. Clean it up. The newly emerged Constable, having overtaken his “follower,” is auctioned by Sotheby’s for $5 mil and change.
But just one cotton-picking minute. The attribution, Christie’s responds, is by no means certain. Still, the curator from the British Museum confirms that indeed it’s the real McConstable – replete as it is with garish colors and disordered strokes – and she ought to know.
Lawsuits, retributions, and reputations rise, tumble and roll as we speak.
Either way, finished or sketch, individually or severally done, it’s a horrendous painting. Which puts one in mind of what Gombrich, in Art and Illusion, terms a “pathetic story,” wherein one of Constable’s paintings was accidentally brought into a jury room of the Royal Academy where the arbiters of taste – J.C. included – were seated in judgment. Seeing the painting, one of his colleagues gasped, then shouted “take that nasty green thing away!”
When Constabulary duty’s to be done (to be done)
An appraiser’s lot is not a happy one.
But come the resolution:
An international longshore union: Dockers Without Borders
Sad, but rue:
Rooming houses without boarders.
Shad, yet roe:
Decline o’ the fish(er)ies.
De facto Western split: the poetic and the “real.”
This is the twain, an internal schism, projected outward as “East” and “West.”
This is the Titanic (White Star) and the iceberg (What’s its name, White Diamond? And who built it? Surely not bankers, maritime corporations or workers in Belfast) that are bound to converge.
Love is strong and you’re so sweet
And one day baby we got to meet…
Say the Rolling Stones
Binyammin Tetanyahu. When you’re cramped, you want to flex, extend, abduct, even lash out.
In opening and shutting, a gate is only as good as its hinges.
Amidst and amused.
Cultura facit saltus.
A broker age
Monday morning sociology
Big bang. Great game.
What do they call the first lamb into the shed?
A shear-leader.
Swoondoggle
In the midst of winter: fire consumes a SUV and several cars of the Metro North train that struck it in Valhalla, NY.
I was a Katzenjammer Kid for the FBI
By the shores of ayahuaska…
Got tired of waiting for Wefty down by the warf.
So I’m weaving.
What is the relation among Pooh, Smokey, Paddington, “Gentle” Ben, and Gladly, the cross-eyed bear?
What color is your Mondo-green, lady?
Four colic’d birds, three flensed hens…
Time has come today
Young hearts can go their way
A beef jerky, cut off in the prime of his life
Lost in the eidolonosphere
Can’t put it off another day
Eidolons, fuckin’ eidolons.
Same eidolon, different day
I don’t care what others say
Time has come today.
WARNING
BRIDGE FREEZES
BEFORE EIDOLONS
Now the time has come
There are things to realize
My dear Lady Ann
I’m flat on my can
I must shake my leaves
For Thomas, Siam
Display is rummy, love
You tie Mike up, my love
I’ve pledged my trough
To Lady ‘green
Eidolons to the right of me, eidolons to the left of me…
Follied and blundered…
…“Form” ruled Greek thought. It was even the starting point – to which we always return – of the history of philosophy. “Form,” as an archetype, founded and structured the Platonic world of Ideas, any form within the sensible realm being merely an image of the real-intelligible form (on the sensible plane, the eidos is and eidolon). Aristotle also held that it was “form,” henceforth associated with matter, that constituted reality. [Jullien, …Nude, p. 63.
In The Mustard Seed Garden’s Renwu section, it is noted that what we think of as figure and scenery should “turn toward each other”: “It is as though the man were looking at the mountain and the mountain also leaning to look at him.”
“A man playing the lute should seem to be listening to the moon, while the moon, in all its serenity, should also seem to be listening to the lute.”
According to Jullien, mountain and man face each other in a reciprocal “gaze.” The painter’s aim, through making visible their hidden channels, meridians, veins, flows of energy, is to reach their “co-originarity,” i.e. their common breath.
This is a relational structure, that does not focalize on “anatomy” and understands the structures of mountain and human body according to another logic, whereas anatomy – again Jullien – is “well suited to the Greeks’ penchant for analysis.” In the West, knowledge of anatomy became the basis for the painter’s art.
This anatomical interest of the Greeks and the inheritors of their thought, appears as early as, and perhaps earlier than, The Iliad, where battles and combats include vivid and detailed anatomical specificities: the precise locations and trajectories of inflicted wounds – a real, blow-by-blow forensic cascade from which, one cannot help but think, the manner of our news reporting, and particularly “sportscasting” derive.
Ineluctably our encounter with these materials carries profound implications for discerning the formative logics by which we come to understand the body, the landscape (on which opposing phalanxes or heroes clash) and the nature the forces shaping and sustaining the world.
To return to painting, and in particularly to the painted figure, “the Chinese artist tends to render precisely these flows of invisible breaths connecting it with the outer world and animating it from the inside, because this is what sustains life. The undulation of the clothing – the sweeps and folds of the sleeve and of the gathering at the waist – is used to convey this, for the array of curves created by the garments is the only perceptible external sign of the inner network of the cardinal channels; as the flow of energy sweeps through them their vibrations can transmit these rhythmic pulsations.” [Jullien, …Nude, p. 61.]
CitiSpike: corporate subsidized needle exchange program. Bikelanes, Spikedveins, all part of the disgorgeous prosaic…
Monetize your momma
OMG, I’m streaming thru my X-box!
An SUV runs through it
It’s all Greek
Ah, but I may as well try to catch the answers blowin’ in the wind
Blue Funnel. White Star.
Hit the wayback button
Pearls b4 pearls. Swine b4 swine. And never the twain…
Scott Free. Stone Free.
The former from scotfreo, Olde Anguysh for “exempt from royal tax.”
Having nothing to do with Dred.
Nothing, like property or chattel, being a relative term. And much freedom, even manumission, being a post-mortem circumstance.
Circumflexion. And circum-extension. The leverage via calories and irrigation of bone and sinew. Said John Henry to the Captain… No hammer this side of this mountain, that ring like mine… no sweat that run. And tons, sixteen of them just for starts. If I had a hammer. If Fannie Lou Hamer. Lady Mondahowgreenwasmyvalley.
Nifty ways to lead your lumbar.
Perdido en el siglo…
Like a river, running off at the mouth
Mercury is in Petrograd
Live and let liver. Here’s looking at you, kidneys.
Harmonies and disharmonies: perceptible as patterns.
If I could conjure you…
Two livers do not a kidney make
All stories involve coming and going.
That which ramifies returns to its root. And that which springs from its root, ramifies.
The sound of two hands laughing.