Saturday, October 8, 2016

Saturday commute cxxxiv: Sorting the millennials ii

















   Not the merriest of months,
   this one, for little Donny
   Thump-Thump. His genius in
   deceiving some males seems
   to be abandoning him, just
   as they recall they have a
   mother, a sister, a friend.

   There is a breed standard,
   after all.

























Thursday, October 6, 2016

Sorting the millennials





 In America, we read that our
 children of the '80s are un-
 moved by the dreary logic of
 preventing forest fires, as
 a means of democratic self-
 expression with their ballot.

 This makes perfect sense, in
 a system closed to combustion.
 There's a lady in North Car-
 olina, would you believe, who
 travels the world, photograph-
 ing dumpsters which have suf-
 fered the same calculation.

 Here's one from Seville, a
 place that knows a tyranny
 as the casino of the street.























Paul Fontanier
  for Pull & Bear, 2016

Caroline Cockrell
Dumpster, Seville
undated

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Wagerings, Madrid
1930s








Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Stump speech





    A photographer I don't know, of 
    longtime family roots in Virgin-
    ia, snapped this picture of or-
    chards in Giles County in 1980,
    with Kodak Kodachrome 64 diapos-
    itive film. Photographs created
    in this medium were known as
    slides, possibly because they'd
    have been inserted into slots
    in projectors, for viewing by
    strong light. They were popular.

    It has been a while since we've
    seen an image made with a lens,
    that conserved any texture, any
    organic nuance of gradation. If
    you've been to Giles County, it
    it doesn't see itself this way,
    anymore. It just looks this way. 
















T. Michael Williams






Tuesday, October 4, 2016

What I thought I'd ask Mike Pence





    Given the way things are
    going with the tax code,
    does he foresee the time
    when fending for oneself
    will mean the culinarily
    challenged may expense a
    a tin of Caspian beluga,
    every time we lay an egg?


    























Cameron Dallas
  for Calvin Klein






Monday, October 3, 2016

We go home now vii





   I like scale, I like
   feeling it, restored
























Pirkle Jones
1914 - 2009
Breaking wave, Golden Gate
San Francisco Museum
  of Modern Art




Scrubbing where it's fun to stand






     I think I can understand the
     hallucination we know as Lib-
     ertarianism. It has a lot in
     common with Mitt Romney's im-
     mortal discovery of the call
     for free stuff, even in that
     endearing impression, chores
     take care of themselves. But
     then, too, it holds escapist
     faith, in the little people,
     to maintain society's floor.

     Libertarianism does expose a
     flaw in Liberalism, whenever
     they appear on a common plat-
     form; and that is that it is
     flat-out boring. You can see
     where this is going: it must
     be time to get back to town.



























Sunday, October 2, 2016

Let's draw the curtain






  Our week, our weekend, have
  felt beleaguered by a horde
  we don't know very well. It
  is reflex, to think this is
  our fault. Suppose it were?

  We still deserve to be our-
  selves. Ostentatious it may
  sound, we are those who in-
  sist upon it, especially in
  the case of any who imagine
  they are not singular, too.
  This ingenuity is not ours.






















Iasonas Laios

Cy Twombly








How I blew 900 million





    And bilked the American taxpayer
    50 million for the next 18 years.
    It was my due, for ingenious bus-
    iness failures. I am your voice.

























     Damon Winter
     September 14, 2016
     The New York Times©

    Anton Stankowski
    Snow removal, Zurich
    silver gelatin print
    1931








There [positively] will be doughnuts






Little more than 5 years ago, we raised the question of deferring the promise of doughnuts as risking a crisis of confi-dence in one of our culture's central tenets. At a certain point, a doughnut delayed begins to feel like a doughnut denied, and back then, the hour of 11:00 seemed to err decisively in that drastic direction. Now, it does not seem to go too far to say, we owe it to the Trump campaign to have identified the many for whom the tardy doughnut has begun to represent that very deprivation, per se, which we were not alone in dreading as an impression indistinguishable from the world as it palpably is. We should have seen it, written in their faces, long ago: eleven is simply too long to wait.







It's not enough to commend the rest of us, for somehow having mastered the art as well as the intent, of loitering for the doughnut shop to open. But it does seem to be the case, that great undiscovered pockets of society have never been filled with the range of interests which can transform frustration into a diverting if not wholly comforting contest. For them, water's only rain.




















iii  Damon Winter
      The New York Times©