Hidden Under a Bushel

    "Hidden Under a Bushel" by Hallie Cohen (watercolor 5'x12')

"The Mona Lisa" was the subject of Freud’s essay on Da Vinci. You might be more inclined to Sargent’s "Madame X" with her majestic presence punctuated by the signature black gown. There has always been speculation about the model for Courbet’s “The Creation of the World." It was long held she was Whistler's mistress, but it is fairly certain she was Constance Queniaux, a member of the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera. Her wanton pose is a far cry from the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile. Is Lavinia Fontana’s “Young Noblewoman” a possible love interest for a male or female viewer? Was her moustache a message or cosmetically common for the time? In Hallie Cohen's "Hidden Under a Bushel" she looms as the dominating presence in the stark intersection at the top of Rome’s Gianicolo (a symbol of change and perhaps sexual or cultural transition). At the same time she disappears into the coffered ceiling atop the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. This latter momentarily steals the spectator's attention in a dramatic perspectival sweep. Still Fontana’s subject maintains her poise as the center of the painter’s reality. What do you love someone for? Looks? Character? In this case character is subtly entwined with nobility to create qualities of mystery, equanimity and grace. 

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

 

"cart pushing" by a horse in l907 Paris

Are you someone who chronically puts the cart before the horse? If so your dasein is in trouble. You don’t need to study inertial force to realize that the frightened horse is going to push the cart into a building or worse possibly a group of bystanders who have stopped to watch. If you’re in the driver's seat you’re going over head first. So at least wear a helmet. Husserl and Heidegger both averred that objects have no agency. It’s one of the primary precepts of phenomenology. Have you said to a wagon, "33rd and Third, please?" Have you ever known a trailer that had a mind of its own and simply took off without the car it's usually attached to (speaking of co-dependent)? This is not to imply that horses possess human consciousness. For more on this subject read Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Cart before horse people are the same folks who win the battle and lose the war. They don't know their ass from their elbow. They cut off their noses to spite their face. They always sound like they have a plan.They're on the same page, at the end of the day.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Wanted!

Seeking applicant for job of reading responses to customer satisfaction surveys. Spoiler alert how effective is a survey of services provided in the age of A.I? You   must be proficient in providing answers without using A.I.  For instance what does A.I know about the quality of the meal service on Delta business to Rome? This, naturally, brings up a basic question about A.I. Can an artificial intelligence have an opinion? The election was rigged. A real intelligence wil say nonsense while artificial intelligences all voted yes. Artificial intelligences are MAGA Republicans who voted for Trump while real intelligences were for Kamala Harris. Getting back to the job of evaluating surveys. Answer in 500 words or less. What makes you feel you’re better qualified to evaluate surveys than the artificial intelligence sitting next to you?

read "Making the Graphic Novel Graphic" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen to "Bernadette" by The Four Tops

Odysseus on the GW

Zero Mostel as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown

Odysseus’ wiles enabled him to put a wooden stake in the eye of Polyphemus and also to avoid the lure of the Sirens. Dostoevsky wrote a story entitled "The Double" where a character encounters his doppleganger during a snow storm in St. Petersburg. Imagine Odysseus transported from Greek mythology to America and confronting his double as he crosses the GW Bridge at rush hour. You can hear 1010 Wins Traffic and Weather announcing a 45 minute delay in the outbound with famous Greek hero scheduled to arrive at Ellis Island to claim his birthright citizenship by dusk.

read "Making the Graphic Novel Graphic" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung is German for “the burden of the past.” It’s a majestic looking word comprising a visual onomatopoeia. Centuries old resentments bottled into a Saint- Emilion of poison. The Bosnian Serb conflict rose up with the fall of Tito. Before was the massacre of Armenians by Turks. Hutus murdering Tutsis in Rwanda are one of many genocides There are no shortage of tyrants from Savonarola to Robespierre and Idi Amin to manage the gallows. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor puts Christ on trial. Of course there have been Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Tunisia. There was the Marshall Plan which subsidized the rebuilding of Germany. It was a far cry from the punitive Versailles Treaty which can be credited for the rise of huge inflation in Weimar Germany, then fascism. Sound familiar? Now Trump has taken away protections for John Bolton and Anthony Fauci. Will retribution make America great again? It’s an ontogenic as well as phylogenetic question whether to adjudicate or hold out an olive branch. It all comes down to the 23rd psalm.Thou prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

The Mass of Poets Lead Lives of Quiet Exasperation

There are those who literally knock their heads against brick walls and have scars to prove it. The proverbial brick wall is invisible to all but those who run into it—say climbers like Ibsen's architect Solness, who is building castles in the sky. Is it possible to separate aspiration and culmination? Can one be ambitious as an artist and free oneself from the muggy torture of being misunderstood that some, certainly not all, creatives experience? Alain Robbe-Grillet once said new forms seem like the absence of form. What would have happened to Jackson Pollock were there no Clement Greenberg? Pollock was well on the way to alcoholic oblivion anyway. Perhaps the intervention of a critical mind bought some respite that civilization ultimately profited from. No matter—the mass of poets lead lives of quiet exasperation!

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Pompeii

erotic fresco from Pompeii

Fantasy and romanticism go hand in hand. The romantic yearns for or postulates a transcendent reality.  Both Epicurus and Lucretius believed in carpe diem. It was the opposite of "the search" which Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling pursues inThe Moviegoer and certainly a 180 from Christian notions of redemption, resurrection and the Afterlife--though Percy was a Catholic. But fantasy can function in a purely biological way as an attribute of mind and therefore body. It’s what makes eroticism possible. Bodies in and of themselves are defined by their corporeal essence. Reality defies platonic forms. Attraction is a brief madness that creates a nimbus of eros, the potion that turns a quotidian male or female into a desired object and evolutionarily the messenger that exports the DNA of one generation on to the next.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle