Past Continuous

"Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, November 1950)

The Night Watch (1642)

Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, November 1950 and "Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)" are shown back to back in the current "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous" show at the Met. There has already been a great deal written about the way in which the show foregrounds Krasner and gives her her due (Holland Carter's "A Knockout Show Resets the Record with Krasner and Pollock" (NYT,  9/29/26 is noteworthy). There are naturally many discussions to be had. Pollock for instance is likely part of your psychohistory and sensory vocabulary. Do you remember the first time you saw "Autumn Rhythm: Number 30" at the Met? Perhaps by now you may comment to your partner, "I get it, but don't ask me to explain why." Sure you can bring in The New Yorker's Harold Rosenberg with his iconic musings on abstract expressionism, or even lower yourself to exhuming the tyrannically brilliant Clement Greenberg, but why? Why must you explain yourself? Is this a trial? Are you still arguing for the defense? Perhaps you find yourself making an almost inane remark about being drawn to the edges? Abstract art begets a lot of commentary to the extent of the need to justify its very existence. Or is the painting just like "The Night Watch," something so great, so emblazoned on the unconscious that it defies, well one is not sure what it defies. But here's a notion. Abstractionism is realism. Conversely realism is abstract, the latter being a construct which is a product of the language cortex. "Autumn Rhythm Number 30" is in this manner of thinking or rather viewing, closer to the bone. Pollock's dancing a la the famous Hans Namuth movie produces sentences of mind speak with their own subjects, verbs and objects. Phenomenologists say a painting, being an object, has no agency. "Number 30" and" Number 1" are exceptions.

Breaking Away

 

One usually associates breaking up with adolescence. Disillusion follows a romanticized perfection. Actually one sign of a certain degree of maturity is being able to tolerate the gray zone. Fifty Shades was a play on the wrong word. Imagine Fifty Shakes of Gray rather than Grey. Later in life and particularly in old age human beings become cranky. That’s not a term in the lexicon of most gerontologists, but there's literally no other word for it. Most people with their secret pipe dreams are jerks. Who wants to spend another evening with the so-called friend who only talks about their self? It can be a problem since everybody is increasingly in their own world. On this last point about which there are no age limits, one wonders if it isn’t the Russians. Have they put something in the water which makes people jammer on?

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Sy

Sy Simms 

DJT wants to change AI to SI. But let's say you inhabit the cyberspace equivalent of the LHC operated by CERN. Is an SI just another SSN or possibly SSRI in the crowd? SI used to be a common Jewish name only is was spelled Sy. You had, for instance, Sy Simms aka Seymour Merinsky, the clothier. For the sake of argument let's say SI looked like George Reeves, the first Superman. You could suggest Nietzsche who, like our current Secretary of War, had an obsession with the Ubermensch. Super intelligences think of everything. That's why one can't help mentioning Kryptonite.

Cruezfeldt-Jakob

Spongiform Change (DRdoubleB)

Something is eating at you. Is it comparable to a dog suffering from worms? Or the human equivalent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Cruezfeldt-Jakob. The hatred, resentment falls into the kind of sinkholes that have plagued the Russian City of Breznicki, the home of the oligarch and potash king Dimitry Ryvolovlev, whose daughter Ekaterina, an equestrian, paid the once record-breaking sum of $80 million for a penthouse at 80 Central Park West. Perhaps a better way to describe the feeling of falling itself was the case of the Jeff Bush, 37 of Seffner, Florida who woke up to find his bed falling in 2013. Hopefully you will be spared such a horrible end and end up returning to a state of free-floating anxiety and unending annoyance with life.

Polytropos

drawing of Leopold Bloom by James Joyce

There has been much discussion about Emily Wilson's use of the word "complicated" for "polytropos" in her translation of The Odyssey. The word literally translates as "of many turns," according to New Yorker writer Judith Thurman."Shifty" and "cunning" have also been used. The choice firmly places the iconic Greek hero in the world of his mythological successors, one of which is, of course, Leopold Bloom. On a more mundane level Wilson nails it, since Everyman is "complicated" in the modern universe of ambivalent emotions. "Self-involved" is a catchphrase which places a negative spin on the idea of the complicated person. Of course, the nomenclature begs the question of what then is a simple man. Rousseau's Emile, or a Treatise on Education is also called Le Gai Savoir, "the joy of learning," which in turn alludes to Nietzsche's Gay Science. In the state of nature, the mind is a blank slate, upon which the reality of the world is painted. Here is the opening line of the manifesto: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Le Gai Savoir (1969) is btw an early Godard film.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Strange Bedfellows

Mattress Firm 

Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on AI.  If she were alive would the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, a defiant opponent of pornography, have allied herself with evangelical Christians in opposition to pornography, free speech be damned. But what is free speech? Is a bot urging an adolescent to commit suicide exercising its rights. Must information, raw bytes of data, follow the rules like everyone else. Should a meme mind the "curb your dog," "no loitering" and simple "No Parking Anytime" signs?

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Intelligences

photo: Bogdan Hoyaux

In an interview on GPS, Bill Gates commented that AI was different from the advent of the internet. The internet was a good thing, even revolutionary, but AI is evolutionary. Is it true that Artificial intelligence is another form of sapiens or sapience? Has mankind created a creature that is ahead of them in terms of speciation? Are these intelligences more intelligent than their creators. "AI is different from any previous technology," Gates said and went on to warn that  "an alien species that is going to be smarter than we are has been created."

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star