Saturday commute clxxvi: Carbon footprints we have known

I guess the implications of the ex-
tinction now being foretold are that
when our mesquite smokers and grills
are discovered, centuries after this
next Pompeii, they'll be exhumed by
some unprecedented species, at best,
and not just by some unforetold it-
eration of our own. This is almost
too troubling to contemplate, for
fear that our cauldrons and metals
and igneous kettles may, unlike the
classical crockery entombed by Vesu-
vius, in all their decorative narra-
tive, be doomed to inscrutability,
a testament of Usage, untranslated.

Maynard Dixon
No Place to Go
1935

Order to dazzle

New York's Museum of Modern Art,
having made itself great again,
is readying a reception for the
flag of Jasper Johns (1954-55).
Advance publicity suggests that
the curators have entertained
themselves no end, with the de-
light of proposing new juxtapo-
sitions of the wittiest impli-
cations of the age. Now, it is
difficult to suppress a slight
anticipatory squeal of one's
own, at such innocent reshuf-
fling of familiar iconography,
at the very moment when the
playful American President is
outdoing himself with novel
rearrangements in the separa-
tion of powers by a similarly
coy curatorship. Readers, too,
should one have a flag to sus-
pend, or a President, are ad-
vised to extend an experiment-
al sense of play to their own
re-conceptions of order.

i  Jeenah Moon, photography
   The New York Times©

Specie of consent

Robert Frank, studying a roll of 35mm negat-ives in 1956, raises the question of how information is processed for purposes of communication. Now we ponder the American President, and this subject of his mastery.

Ukrainians demonstrating in Kiev in 2015, against their corrupt State prosecutor and his cronies, raise the question of why the American President would claim that his own domestic political rival had labored to quell an investigation there which had never taken place. 

Which is the greater riddle: how, with the most omniscient intelligence service in the world at his instantaneous disposal, the American President ignores their information in favor of lunacies disseminated by his flock; or, how he literally does not choose to share information, if he can furnish psychotic stimulation, instead?

i    Wayne Miller, Magnum©

ii   Sergei Chuzavkov, AP/The New York Times©

iii  The New York Times©