Streetwalking on a Ruined Map

There's an undeniable mystique about the silent film era--and a notoriety, too.  D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation includes a lynching. Nate Parker's 2016 film appropriated the title and another species of controversy, when Parker was accused but ultimately acquitted of involvement in a rape at Penn State. The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931) are two of Chaplin's'most famous silents. If you believe in the power of unspoken thought you're on your way to understanding the power of quietude. Imagine Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), without explanations or perhaps the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925). The nurse's face is caught in a moment of horror which would later inform the mouth in Beckett's Not I (1972). Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence (2025) is a documentary about the work of one of Italy's most prolific silent filmmakers, whose Neapolitan works paved the way for neorealism. Unfortunately, only fragments of her films are extant. The fact she recused herself from society, did or did not increase her fame, depending on which way you wish to look at it.  In Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, film historian Guiliana Bruno restores Notari's legacy, but if you like ghosts, the less you know the better.

read "Talk to Her" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Bible

"Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law" by Rembrandt

There is something biblical about almost everything. It rains and it’s Noah. You’re swallowed up like Jonah. Turning the other cheek is the other side of the coin from an eye for an eye. Athens and Rome the Hebraic and the Hellenic. Spontaneity of consciousness versus obedience is the way Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Even The pre-Christian Odyssey is biblical as Joyce illustrates  in his description of Leopold Bloom's wanderings. The notion of the angry God is the fabric of existence in almost all cultures. The compassionate Buddha is also Janus faced in its impassively. Cosmic indifference, in the existential sense, is, when you look at it. the stuff of faith. It’s what made the Israelites worship idols—as they waited impatiently for direction.

The Marshall Plan

the firebombing of Dresden

Reality is currently akin to Strindberg's A Dream Play. In the preface to the play the author writes: "The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, dissolve, and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer's; for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws. He does not judge or acquit, he merely relates; and because a dream is usually painful rather than pleasant a tone of melancholy and compassion for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative." In "The Midnight Sun," the famous episode of The Twilight Zone where a heatwave which seems to be the result of the earth tumbling out of orbit towards the sun is only a dream of the reverse. It's another way to describe the country the day after the midterms. Well, perhaps that's dour. It's a time to celebrate! However, the results are so outlandishly unexpected as to throw doubt on any reality. Revenge or reconstruction are the two impulses. Congressman Robert Garcia who will be the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee thinks it should be both and he's in a good position to know. One point he does make is that rampant corruption is tied to the stress American families feel. There's no doubt that a rodeo is more exciting than a dog and pony show, but on the other the level of destruction and pilfering under Trump is so high that one wonders if the United States won't need a Marshall Plan to recover from its own self-imploding impulses. USID is destroyed, the staff of the CDC and the DHHS have been decimated with many posts filled by anti-vaxers and other medical shamans. The FBI under $Kash Patel is stripped of qualified agents and the Department of Defense or Department of War as Hegseth likes to call it is literally a war zone. The United States has been living through the Middle Ages replete with a plague and Inquisition. Pete Hegseth should be cast as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor sentencing Christ to burn in hell in the same of Christian renewal. The Reformation and Enlightenment have occurred almost overnight. Is the next stage of history, Vertigo?

The 38th Parallel

Roosevelt Stalin and Churchill all met a Yalta in the aftermath of The Second World War. With Hitler vanquished, the conferees set out to divide German in 4 occupation zones, run by England, France, Russia and the United States. The rest is history or silence which ever way you will have it. By l948, the allies were negotiating the Berlin blockade. Yalta is the setting for a famous Chekhov short story, "The Lady With the Dog," about two lovers trapped in unhappy marriages. Yalta is part of the region annexed by Russia, but still considered part of the Ukraine. Now the day after the midterms, new alliances, which will inevitably engender discord, division and exclusion have already metabolized. In the Chekhov story, the lovers are never fully able to escape their predicament. They inhabit a literal "no man's" land. The DMZ between North and South Korea was established at the 38th Parallel in 1948.

Fjord

What makes a work of art bad? Distortions masking as ambiguities, manipulative devices in the lieu of complexity, are some answers. Why does bad art produce fury? But what can be most deceptive is the question of ideology. One might agree with the impulse or the underlying advocacy (if it's agit prop), but take dudgeon with the implementation. Similarly one might praise Riefenstahl for the classicism of Triumph of the Will, while detesting its point. Still it makes the cut. Fjord, which won the Palm D' Or at Cannes, is a particularly infuriating example of a disingenuous project that has, for some reason, gotten in under the wire. Basically it's l984 applied to a quasi socialist state which, in reality, happens to be an exemplary democracy. Borgen is a series about another Scandinavian democracy, Denmark. Compare that with the portraiture of officialdom in Fjord. The evil doers in the child protection unit are so thinly and stereotypically painted as to be unbelievable in any context. Ditto the judicial system of a country whose manners and mores, US. citizens might rather flee to than from, as have the Rumanian/Norwegian family at the center of the drama (which is, inadvertently, a love letter to MAGA btw). Apart from being untrue, the film doesn't rise to the level of manipulation since the viewer is liable to reject the garbled conceit at the center of the plot. This is not An Enemy of the People, the famous drama by the great Norwegian playwright which is a paradigm for the artist himself, isolated by his knowledge of a truth. The title of Ibsen's last work When We Dead Awaken, might be invoked here, simply as a call for that form of beauty which is truth.

Haley Stevens

Haley Stevens is stupid. Plainly she doesn't like El-Sayed, who she feels didn't strongly enough repudiate an anti-Israel ad. But why support Mike Rogers, considering her "convictions?" Why not simply shut her trap? She could continue to campaign for the ticket without supporting El-Sayed, who was almost as stupid as Stevens, but not quite, in disinviting her from a campaign event. Backing Mike Rogers is "political revenge porn." Stevens did a long interview with Anderson Cooper in which she had trouble iterating what had made her change her mind overnight. BTW it's a wonder Stevens has gotten as far as she has. Ineloquent is the only way to describe her. In fact, her rhetoric resembles the kind of bulldozing that's characterized Trumpism ever since the advent of Kellyanne Conway. It's a bit like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Is she one of the pods who has adopted the face of a human. There is a neurological condition called Capgras Syndrome where the sufferer believes that a familiar face is an imposter. However, in this case, is Stevens the imposter?

The Price of Everything

La Cicciolina

 Pollock and Lucian Freud, painters whose styles have literally nothing to do with each other, share a similar persona and the figures they cut in the art world have little in common with the highly ideologically and monetarily infused nature of the current art world, but there are comparisons to be drawn between Brits like Auerbach, Bacon and Freud, and De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko and others of the Cedar Tavern set. Krasner and second generation female abstractionists such as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan evince a similar romantic rage with respect to the artistic personality. In the case of Pollock, self-destruction is a part of the mythology. What a far cry from Jeff Koons, whose career is devoted to the commodification and monetization of art, a career btw that could have been the substance of a Brecht play. Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything (2018) brilliantly describes the sea change in the world of art that evenly separates the midcentury work of the American abstractionists and the London School from what was to follow. Koons' brilliance btw should not be discountenanced. His "art" is an essay on the process of its own inception. Its process or product is its theme. The porn actress and later politician La Cicciolina, who was both Koons's subject and wife was, at one point, his Maecenus. The only similarity to Krasner and Pollock would be to say one was a woman and the other a man.