Chaim Soutine: Flesh

"Carcass of Beef" by Chaim Soutine (Albright-Knox)

“Chaim Soutine: Flesh,” as blunt and emphatic as it might seem, is an elegant title for the current Jewish Museum Exhibit. Soutine remarked, “They say Courbet could give in his nudes all the character of Paris. I want to show all that is Paris in the carcass of an ox.” And that is what the Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, who studied art in Vilnius, proceeded to do in paintings with names like “The Donkey” ((1934), “Plucked Goose” (1933), “The Bull” (1940) and “Sheep Behind Fence” (1940). “Still Life with Rayfish” (1929) was based on a painting by Jean-Simeon Chardin (1725-6) and he paid homage to Rembrandt’s “Flayed Ox”(1655) in his own "Carcass of Beef" (1925)--as would, by the way, Francis Bacon in his "Figure with Meat" (1954). The curators remark, “Chaim Soutine still lifes embrace the modernist notion of gesture. Material and color are as much a subject of the art as the objects depicted.” His expressionistic work hovers on the edge of abstraction just in the way it does with nineteenth century painters like Van Gogh, but the intensity of the brushwork recalls the fauvist esthetic. Remember the fauves were referred to as wild beasts? Stendhal famously wrote The Charterhouse of Parma.  But Soutine, who legendarily found his subjects in abbatoirs, might have written a novel entitled The Slaughterhouse of Paris.

Home Run Bases Loaded

photo of Babe Ruth (Irwin, La Broad, & Pudlin)

What to do when you hit the complete opposite of a home run? Let’s say you have all these ducks lined up and you start to get into one of those psychotic states where you actually believe a miracle is going to occur and all the things you most want to happen—material things of course—all magically transpire on the same day. The girl or guy you liked has broken up with his significant other and you turn out to be the reason why. Of course if you’re a writer your short story has been accepted by The New Yorker (if not a poem and humor piece for the Shouts & Murmurs section too). You receive a substantial refund check from the IRS and you learn that you have been accepted for one of those prestigious residencies, let’s say the Rome Prize given by the American Academy. You're offered full room and board, in The Eternal City. It doesn’t get better than that, but it does. You got tickets for The Stones concert. You always said you were going to see the vaunted group before you or they expire and you’re not going to have to wait that long after all. In fact, the person you're mad about gives you a lukewarm hello (actually they're waving at someone else before they catch you in their peripheral vision). The New Yorker rejection arrives perfectly on time as always. You get a threatening letter from the IRS, which shows a large amount of interest accumulating on the money which it turns out you owe and there are no Stones tickets anywhere in sight, primarily because you  haven’t put yourself in the lottery which is usually created to deal with the demand. The best you can get is Joan Baez. Yes Joan Baez will be at The Beacon. It's the boobie prize. You can be one of her groupies with their walkers, if you act quickly. What to do? Nothing. There's nothing to do when you get this kind of news.

Pornosophy: Is Equanimity a Turn On?

Are equality and equanimity a turn-on? An anecdotal appraisal of human relationships would indicate no. If you look up and down the food chain of so-called love and sexuality, there's scant evidence to support this hypothesis. In fact, just the reverse seems to be true. There are the powerful and aggressive and the more submissive souls who seek protection under their wing. One word for this is attraction, another is sado-masochism. Of course there are numerous themes and variations. The wonderful thing about the mathematical principal of permutation is how many of them can be wrought for a seemingly small number of variables. In the equation in question, the passive-aggressive personality throws a wrench into what would be admittedly simpler proceedings. Under the guise of malleability, the passive individual is able to worm his or her way to the top in turn unveiling the fact that the benefactor is the one in need of salvation. Pure submission is a spiritual experience to the extent that the ego is totally subsumed by the larger force—which is, in further extending the complexity, a liberating thing. God is the ultimate dominant and those believers who give themselves over to Him! or Sir! or Mistress XXX! will end up spreading their wings and flying away with literal shit-eating grins on their faces.

Couch Potatoes Anonymous

You may be a vegetarian or even like vegetables, but you don’t want to turn into one. With robots or bots as they’re called becoming ascendant there's a tendency to try to compete with expeditious mechanical objects that exude no discernible affect. Even robots possessing a high degree of A.I. have a vegetative affect, to the extent that they experience highs or lows. Computer generated voice recognition systems and robo callers all get the job done, but there's a lack of the kind of emotion that makes for a memorable experience.  The recent e coli scare with regard to romaine lettuce should put people on guard ("E. Coli Outbreak Tied to Romaine Lettuce Expands to Sixteen States," NYT, 4/19/18) Vegetables are not all that their cracked up to be. Sure a vegetable is a living thing but it doesn’t cluck like a chicken, moo like a cow or oink like a pig and when all is done and masticated, you end up imbibing a lower level experience. Edamame does not produce the silence of lambs. Ersatz meats that are made from tofu do not elicit that famous Wendy's “where’s the beef? that produces the Robert Ringer Looking Out for #1 kind of feeling. A couch potato doesn’t appear out of nowhere. He or she is the product of eating too many carbohydrates.

The Return of Marco Polo's World

In a review of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century ("Foreign Policy From the Dark Side," NYT, 3/28/18) Bret Stephens quotes the author thusly, “The very idea that some sermon or blog or tweet has gone viral is a sad reflection on the state of individualism in the 21^st century. The electronic swarm is a negation of loneliness that prepares the way for the new ideologies of totalitarianism.” Kaplan’s locution is a brilliant statement on the narcotic effect of technology. The internet of everything has become so all consuming that solitude is misperceived as depression. The Opium of the Intellectuals is the title of a book by Raymond Aron rephrasing Marx’s famous quote, but it's not  ideology as the hive mentality that's increasingly becoming operant in political culture. Populism has come a long way from the era of La Follette and Huey Long. Now it’s a tribal mentality whose ethos is ultimately technology. Tyrants spare their followings from the burden of  freedom by offering a cloak of belief. But  cybernetics has ultimately created a human ant colony that’s ruled not by thinkers but algorithms masking as historical dialectics.