Suppose it were Friday clxv: What is its frame?

Almost any movement, captured,

is from some perspective, a race

against time. I think the race is

a reluctance to part with the image

in itself, not any struggle with time.

Pedantry, generally considered

to reflect an undue concentration

on details of interest to no one else,

might from that perspective only represent

an anchorage in values beyond irrelevant time.

Is the permanent collection

of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

especially challenging to the untrained

eye, or are its concentric ramps a launch,

of a struggle for rapport with what one sees?

ii  Nino Migliori
    View from a train
      untitled color gelatin print

Fingers first, memory last

              

A friend wrote in the other day,

reminding one that politics play

only a part. At the end of it, I

agree, though they do take their

time, up front. These are photo-

graphs by the 20th Century Bolog-

nese master Nino Migliori, which

compose themselves as a sequence

in the direst crime of politics,

against which naïveté holds fast.

"The hands speak," was the title

of one of his exhibitions in New

York. Let it be known, they live.

Nino Migliori

Il Complanto di

  Niccolò dell' Arca,

  La Matière des Rêves,

  Cuprum, 

  Gente dell'Emilia

A singspiel for our times

Now that our fabulist President

has dispatched his Secretary of

State to concoct a libretto for

an abduction from an Ottoman ser-

aglio gone awry, all confidently

anticipate an enormous enhance-

ment of his original premise, a

band of rogue murderers infil-

trating one autocrat's embassy

in another's secured city, only

to chop the captive for lunch.

Much prettier music, much mer-

rier ribaldry; with a score al-

ready in the public domain, by

no less than Mozart. Ah, so much

to dazzle: who could rue the in-

cidental disappearance of the

corpus delicti? Take that, O.J.