Bidding to be arrested

Last call: Twelve hundred.

Two thousand!

Two thousand?

Twenty-one hundred!

I'm sorry, sir, but we can't ..

Make it Twenty-five hundred!

My money's as good as anybody's!

You remember, I remember: it is 1959

and Alfred Hitchcock is making a mov-

ie of which we wouldn't change a line;

and now, a man at an auction of paint-

ings is anxiously trying to be arrested.

At the same moment, the new art city, in

the phrase adopted for the reigning his-

tory of Manhattan's art world at the time,

is witnessing the opening of the defining

building, of a movement which survived the

War to signal the revival of the sublime.

Spanning the rear of its entry floor, a

restaurant is being readied as a gathering

place of optimism in a renewing world.

We read in the papers last week that a des-

perate man can still court disgust if he 

has enough money. Evidently the owner of a

controlling interest in the building cannot 

repress a penchant for demanding recognition

that his money is as good as anyone's. Can't

this Maecenas buy himself an embassy somewhere?

When, do you suppose, they will ever learn, it was never about the money. 

In the revolting, frenzied meltdown of all dignity, since Thatcher and Reagan, iconoclasm of all stripes is simply a boutonnière of cheek, and we have seen this exuberant vulgarity strike at the absolute heart of optimism, itself, already in Manhattan just this year. I give you a malign cropduster, who passes his glove over the dust on Michelangelo's tomb sculptures and offers to pop for their replacement with crystal domes by Mauboussin. They cost more; oughtn't they be more worthy? As his arrest warrant, yes.

It could never have been about the money at this building or this restaurant. It could only, always have been about the rarity of what is possible to do in public to give hope. I have admired the popular play on Mark Rothko, for good, sufficient reasons; I never did concur in his objections to this setting. I would not have believed anyone could be so dense as not to see, or so intolerant as not to permit, the innocent existence of a beloved place. 

For generations, people have gathered beneath the work of art this fellow openly reviles, tak-ing shelter from such brutish-ness. A legitimate worry, well developed in New Art City, that new art was threatened with being reduced to mere decor, was suspended in that place by a reassuring brilliance of procession, layer, line, and scale, which is as close to timeless as anything built in that century, all focusing a single, simple inference with éclat. It actually is all right to be alive. People can create beauty, and they can share in it.

Now let us make a party of in-heritance, right here.

Alfred Hitchcock

  director
Ernest Lehman
  screenplay
North by Northwest
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959©

Jed Perl
New Art City
  Manhattan at Mid-Century
Knopf, 2005©

David Segal
At Four Seasons, Picasso Tapestry
  Hangs on the Edge of Eviction
The New York Times
February 3, 2014©

Martin Filler
Taking Down Picasso
The New York Review of Books
February 7, 2014

Paul Goldberger
Why Picasso's 'Le Tricorne'
  Must Remain ..
Vanity Fair
February 7, 2014

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Philip Johnson
  architects
Phyllis Bronfman
  patron
The Seagram Building
375 Park Avenue

The Four Seasons
99 East 52nd Street

Pablo Picasso
Le Tricorne
Les Ballets Russes
1919

Walden Street

Sometimes, when I think of how

little that any reading has af-

fected my life, I don't so much

search my memory for exceptions

as run into them in the street.

When I can't tell a bannister

from a bike rack, from a riot

barricade, I know I can count

on the street to provide the

defining distance to sort this

out. This principle of perspec-

tive can almost be carbon dated

as acquired in the reading that

we all once had to do, of Henry

David Thoreau. To the Greeks'

unanswerable perception of the

validity of distance to portray

form, he brought the argument

of its necessity to furnish con-

text, and portray meaning. What

made it fundamentally unforget-

table, was that he argued this

in terms of human relations, to

give framing to our dialogues.

Was there a more pressing ques-

tion when we first read Walden,

than how to extract that magic?

This principle, so obvious on the

stage, and so pressing in every-

day life, never loses resonance

of its original source. In later

education - in the US, that is -

it was impressive to find, how

pervasively Thoreau's discovery

remained acutely attributable, in

the minds of new friends from all

over the country. Without having

to mention it, it would be appar-

ent as we gauged our distances in

dialogue, we were conscious of a

scruple which arises in our being,

with a footnote that we all accept. 

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

  Life in the Woods

1854

Eric Weiss

  

The argon presidency

The political scientist,

in so far as he wishes to

remain a scientist, is lim-

ited to the study of tech-

niques. A good deal of what

is called political science,

I must confess, seems to me

a device, invented by aca-

demic persons, for avoiding

that dangerous subject pol-

itics, without achieving

science.

It is not premature to identify the

present Administration, historical-

ly, as the Argon presidency. It is 

not untinged by fetching traces of

Zinc, but these are laid on, pallid,

episodic, and ambivalent, as such

things always are with that reticent

element. The aloof element is not 

ungenuine, either; it simply cannot 

join in any stable compound. It has 

always been vexatious pseudoscience 

to imagine tactics for firing its 

inertness. Argon doesn't lack polar-

ity, it lacks affinity. 

As a repair for atrocity in office, 

which its genius is only to smother, 

it is content to afford a somnolent 

blanket of innocuous gas. The under-

lying turmoil, visibly rending the 

society it surveys, is beyond its 

reach, if it had one. But in truth

no force that brought it into pow-

er and none which resists it, be-

stirs its indifference. This is per-

fect for inhibiting degradation in

an opened wine, but equally so for

promoting it in an open society.

This appreciation, as one can guess,

is for the same reader who keeps the

place intractably disreputable. That

suspected dilettante, known as the

well rounded scholar, so exemplarily

embodied by every honourable school-

boy who ever lived, is never going 

to be an adherent of think-tank tru-

isms. To think with him is to learn 

with the best; we don't read Laski's 

The American Presidency these days, 

under that title; rather, we read

of it in his letters with Justice 

Holmes, in which they speak of get-

ting outdoors at Beverly. It's how 

these things are done. But scribes 

still saw away on lesser models, in 

a faux science which is less a dis-

cipline than a hermetic trade conceit. 

Restaurateurs, all. We know them. 

Today's liberation from the self in-

terested feed lot of political comment 

comes from the description of what it

was like to be living as a Jew in Pie-

monte in the 1930s and 1940s, or as 

many of those years as were allowed, 

before deportation or extermination

on the spot. It's not the story one

expects; it's authentic, in the first

person, brilliant, original, persua-

sive and, certainly, not provincial

in the slightest. I refer, don't I,

to Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.

It's not just revenge upon dry chem-

istry. It's a prophylactic against

fashionable formulas. For those to

whom such things may be a caution,

it's also imaginative and beautiful,

Socratic and satirical. It could be 

a ballet; I hope it will be. We may

wish, art were not diagnostic, but

we'd only have to invent it again.

We'd almost absolve it of useful-
ness, to rusticate the alchemists.
They write about what happens, and
talking-head about what happens, 
but they project margarine; and this
is because they can. They ignore, as
Professor Cobban was warning, above,
nature because they must, so that e-
ven their study of behaviour is dead.
Chemistry cannot afford such science. 

On arrival in office, Argon immediately
repudiated the go-go cohort that put it
there, precisely as Wilson had done; and
installed a lady from the Loop to make
sure its constituents were never heard.
That shining exile of muscular hope began
an atrophy conforming exquisitely with Ar-
gon's atomic structure.

This was not the usual extermination of
potential rivals, and it was not the usu-
al depopulation of the village. This was
Argon's helplessly candid resignation. I
recall being dazzled, and yet, to be fair,
I hadn't measured Argon's purity. I had
been brought by politics to think polit-
ically; and I had not read Primo Levi yet. 
I had thought, Argon is being curably ob-
tuse. But this is not true, because it 
cannot be true. It is not in Argon's rep-
ertoire to be stupid, only to be oblivi-
ous. The mirage of technique, meanwhile, 
enchanted our clerks, and caused us all
to struggle to reform an innocent element.

There is no doubt that they were inert

in their inner spirits, inclined to dis-

interested speculation, witty discourses,

elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous dis-

cussion. It can hardly be by chance that all

the deeds attributed to them, though quite

various, have in common a touch of the static,

an attitude of dignified abstention, of volun-

tary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of

the great river of life.

Argon comes with a self- inflicted price; but with this element Levi does not foretell the rejection we all know as Holocaust. He has in mind Argon's cost to its culture. He remem-bers, as a child, visiting his very aged paternal grandmother, against her own reluctance to be bothered, who would usher him into the disused "good" living room, and dig out of some recess the box of chocolates, always the same box, and offer me one. The chocolate was worm-eaten, and with great embarrassment I would quickly hide it away in my pocket.



























Alfred Cobban
University College, London
In Search of Humanity
  The Role of the Enlightenment
  in Modern History
  Lectures to Winthrop House,
  Harvard College
George Braziller, 1960©

Harold J. Laski
London School of Economics
University of London
The American Presidency,
  An Interpretation
Harper & Brothers, 1940©

Harold J. Laski and
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Holmes-Laski Letters, I and II
Mark DeWolfe Howe and
  Alger Hiss, editors
President and Fellows of Harvard College
1953
Atheneum, 1963©


Primo Levi
The Periodic Table
1975
Raymond Rosenthal
  translation
Schocken, 1984
Alfred A. Knopf, 1986©


George Adamson
1913-2005
Displaced Red Wine from Glass
  on Outside Table Becomes the
  Setting Sun

Thursday one continent at a time

One's haste to precipitate the 
weekend works a tricky deception 
on a perfectly decent, sometimes 
even harmless day called, Thurs. 
I keep trying to reclaim the day 
for a wholeness like any other's, 
but anticipation sometimes chafes 
against my plans. I know very well,
at such times, it's a sign that I 
need to be back in Barbados for a 
while, if only for its view of Al-
exandria. Time needs to calm down
for a moment, take a breath. 

 

Possibly that pulmonary application
is what always makes me feel a press
of the stethoscope where only a meth-
odical tidying up is taking place.

One has this sense that the breath-
ing act is so obviously the matter
of highest interest, that we have
no time to waste to assay its con-
tinuance. Getting on with the week-
end, who can fret a grain of sand
or some other such alien intrusion,
given the highest likelihood of a
riotous mess, if all goes smoothly?
Now is the time for tending to the
intake valves and tuning the exhaust.
Let Monday's maid look after the debris.