Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Jumbo

Without being lugubrious or sententious, it could be argued that this is a messy business, full of potholes and trolls who hide under bridges. You don’t need the human propensity for extrasensory self-implosion to realize the tightrope one walks. Within an increasingly short period of time, you have to negotiate morality and mortality. Why not like the character of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Mr. Watanabe--hit the town when you know you’re going to die? Remember Jimmy Stewart’s Walpurgisnacht in It’s a Wonderful Life? Even members of the Hemlock Society might be too scared to take the leap into the unknown (which btw is the absolute nothingness of no longer being a  sentient being). Do doctors or lawyers drop their caseloads of suffering clients when they realize time is running out? Do the dying more actively covet their neighbor’s wife and husbands? Do you finally knock his block off? Do you tell the couple talking at the top of their voices in the airline lounge to shut the fuck up? Do you inform them that all their chatter is about drowning out feeling? Wouldn’t it be fun to say “fuck you” to the friendly neighbor who's about to enter the elevator? And what about all those thoughts, all the weird non-printable thoughts about all the things people could do if they didn’t matter and if they didn’t give a shit—such as hosing down your guests the way Lyndon Johnson did his colleagues with his beloved “Jumbo?”

read Hallie Cohen's interview on collaboration

and see the invite for her show, Mi Ricordo: Roman Watercolors, on exhibit until April 27

Monday, March 18, 2024

Forte dei Marmi



Forte dei Marmi

"A cat has nine lives" is almost as trite as the eponymous play--Eliot notwithstanding (btw one is flummoxed in understanding the appeal of such a piece of trash). Still "Cat Person" became one of those short stories that epitomizes a sensibility, earning a $1million advance for its author, Kristen Roupenian.            Not literally #MeToo but humans have at least 5 if not more. Remember Jaques "Seven Ages of Man" speech which ends "sans teeth sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything?" Piaget, Erickson all delineated stages of development that are tantamount to lives. "Live a today don't think a tomorrow" said a teenaged Swiss boy named Philippo to his alcoholic American alter ego aka Mr Lowenbrau in of those ineffably timeless stages of life that took place one afternoon in the half empty square of the seaside town of Forte deli Marmi--sixty years ago.

see the invite for Hallie Cohen's show, Mi Ricordo: Roman Watercolors, on exhibit until April 27

and listen to "Secretary" by Betty Wright



Friday, March 15, 2024

Safety Last!

Time. H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine and Steven Hawking A Brief History of Time--famous for its inscrutability. Lately there has been a controversy, Standard v Daylight. Zeno paradox, with the tortoise triumphing over Achilles raises questions about the perception of both distance ad time. "Slow and steady wins the race" is the old adage. Mad Men the series set in the early 60s advertising world, earns its title because everyone is in a rush. "Stop the world, I want to get off" is another one. Do you have time? Everybody has all the time in the world--albeit on a finite basis. Remember Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hand in Safety Last! (1923)?     

Listen to Joan Baum's review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy on NPR

and read Mark Segal's review of Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo: Roman Watercolors" show in The East Hampton Star

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Seven

The knight  (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is one of the most iconic scenes in the history of cinema. The "Odessa Steps" sequence from Potemkin, replete with the nurse's silent scream, is another. You know when an icon has become a cultural meme when it begins to be parodied, as Woody Allen did in his famous New Yorker piece "Death Knocks." Is there a modern day Odysseus who returns home once again, only to be recognized by his dog Argos? Everyman today navigates the medieval world of an inquisition (QAnon) within a plague (the pandemic). Remember the movie Seven, with its garish retribution? Are Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and yes Donald Trump, today's Terminators?

Listen to Joan Baum's review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy on NPR

and read Mark Segal's review of Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo: Roman Watercolors" show in The East Hampton Star


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Rebel Without a Cause



There's the  old saw that every American boy wants to be president and after that a policeman or fireman. If they're lucky they won't win the swing states, but in reality most boys and girls want to be James Dean right down to becoming super novas before they cross the event horizon to the black hole of obscurity and oblivion. "Girls just want to have fun" sang Cindy Lauper and boys like to plow the field (s). Who wouldn't want to be Keith Richards (whose autobiography was brilliantly titled Lifeor Mick Jagger. Yes even at the age of 75 with 29 years of psychoanalysis, 31 years of karate and 37 years of Recovery you're still thrilled by the guy who has wild sex with in the backseat of his car--at the eternal drive-in of the mind.

Listen to Joan Baum's review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy on NPR

and listen to Beechnut 4-5789 by The Marvelettes



Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Information Highway




Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds (1772)

Bandwidth and wheelhouse are increasingly popular words. Both register capacity. The preponderance of such iterations is a reflection of the nature of the information aka data universe in which we live. You're register a kind of barometric pressure. Credit card companies social media even avatars in alternate play universes like Second Life have to be attended to. Have you ever gotten telephone messages from somone who is dead and whose dial back number is out of service? Sorry it is not a sign of anything. In fact, nothing is a sign and there are no wise old prophets telling you which way to turn at the crossroads. In other words today's human
 is wired into networks it takes a lifetime to escape. It's a far cry from Boswell's Life of Johnson

Listen to "The Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson

and see the invite for Hallie Cohen's show, Mi Ricordo: Roman Watercolors

Monday, March 11, 2024

On the Nature of Things

The deduction at the end of one of those globall treatise on human behavior like Lucretius' De rerum natura is that the micro and macro worlds mirror each other. There is one exception: the quantum world of subatomic particles and even in this realm, you conveniently discover the notion of quantum entanglement. Interestingly president Biden and his "predecessor" (the word Biden used 13 times to describeTrump his State of the Union) perfectly illustrate the above principle since their selves are both individualized personae and symbols of a greater whole. Trump is not a real politician. He practices sandbox politics which he learned as a little boy. There haven't been too many studies of his pre-oedipal behavior but one can assume he was a bully who immediately accused some other kid of doing it first, On a macro level Biden has been accused of using his State of the Union to barnstorm. Talk about sandboxes, his "predecessor" tried to steal the president's pail and shovel. However, being a nice guy, he only spoke up when it was almost too late.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department  Booklife

and listen to "Mr. Pitiful" by Otis Redding