Friday, October 19, 2018

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


Thursday, October 18, 2018

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















Nino Migliori

Il Complanto di
  Niccolò dell' Arca,
  La Matière des Rêves,
  Cuprum, 
  Gente dell'Emilia






Tuesday, October 16, 2018

A singspiel for our times






Now that our fabulist President
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.