Arm music iii

On his abduction by police
for incarceration, torture,
and a Stalinist show trial,
despite his loyalty to the
Party, in Costa-Gavras' 
The Confession, the charac-
ter played by Yves Montand
settled his last glimpse of
the free life upon a youth,

Running in a park. On his
descent into heart attack 
in Venice, Thomas Mann's
Aschenbach settled his fi-
nal glimpse of life upon
another at the beach, sway-
ing from umbrellas thrust
into the sand. Britten, in
that opera, structured his
ballet upon this vision.

Even I, just yesterday, in
the asphalt of a parking lot
in darkest dour Dixie, saw
a boy break from his parents
in a headlong, giddy run to
the family truck, to fling 
himself within. Think tanks, 
left and right, have bicker-
ed for that boy throughout
our lives, to no avail. He
has elation, unaccountable.

If I had known music, would
I not embody it? If it bade 
me dance, how should I not?

This characteristic strikes
to the core. We will discuss 
American politics this year,
because we have to, for mem-
ory and desire make it ours.
The characteristic lies deep-
than the trend, deeper than
tendency or temptation; and
is essentially impregnable.

Boys! No running! is a man-
tra for defeating elation.
Even against worse policy,
it is fallacy, and would
exchange certain degeneracy
for hypothetical catastrophe.
It seems we may be offered
this choice, by alignments
stifling any other.

i     Sabine Weiss
      Paris
      1956

iii   André Kertész
      New York
      1940s

Saturday commute cxxvii: Once more into the brief

Who knew, the bright American latrine

would come not merely to typify the

nation's discourse in the great quad-

rennial spat for bragging rights to

power, wealth, and the pressing busi-

ness of genital selection, but to afford

its venue? Well, you may say, dread of 

this had lurked in the stalls of reason-

able people, ever since Conservatism 

cornered righteousness and Liberalism

bagged discrimination. All it would

take to smash the persistence of these

two prosperous plantations, would be

a financial catastrophe exposing every-

one but the malefactors, to what com-

placent gravy trains they had been.

But that political candidates might

flee to the latrine, that first, last,

and saddest refuge of narcissism, with-

out anticipating the vanity mirror's re-

versal of their logotype, was a strange 

oversight in this advanced day and age

of resort to the self-referencing server. 

True, tacticians for Mrs Clinton had 

the foresight to adopt the reversible

logotype, the letter "H," ambidextrous 

as the day is long; but they then went on, 

to cripple it with a directional arrow of

inscrutable destination -- which no one 

could indict, and anyone could deny,

as progressive or regressive. At the same 

time, how soon we forget how forlornly

Jeb's exclamation frond asserted a "right 

to rise," against his Party's own defining

defense of the status quo of latrines. At 

least the logo for the sociopath from Texas 

led with the first syllable of being trussed, 

and ended with the last of the past tense.

Now, that was coherency worthy of a 

Princeton panty raider, par excellence.

Eventually, incrementally, mercy broke 

upon this sourest of settings, with the 

freshening of satire's sure restorative -

an SNL sketch on what to do, in one pair,

of clean underwear, dried on a radiator.

In a time of logotype reversals, would

politics acquire a decent respect to the

opinions of mankind?

Peter Stackpole

Drying on a radiator

Saipan

1944

We go home now ii

    Don Mills and Jerry
    Kahn with ice boxes

    Santa Monica hills,
    completely accurate


















Edmund Teske
1911-1996
Gelatin print
1955-56

Gitterman Gallery
New York

Origins of Wednesday xxiv: Chute

    I think it will be a long time

    before such a portrait doesn't

    recall Jake Gyllenhaal in wait

    for his bronc in Brokeback. We

    glimpse the sympathetic figure

    and then, lacking the spurs of

    cinema to drive us on, observe

    the chopped index finger, that

    sleeveless forearm ready for a

    wrapping of the reins. Long-as-

    similated prices of an unusual

    kind of glory seem extreme for

    so little of it, and we commis-

    erate reflexively.

    Why, our bachelor uncles would

    ask. Why not learn without pit-

    y, except for one's ignorance?

   

The old shirts ii

Kelly's art was the art of the flâneur,
but of the flâneur who was immersed in
his own empyrean imagination and dis-
tilled each fragment of the world into
an exquisitely enigmatic form ... The
suppressed, almost covert relationship
between the artwork and its quotidian
subject gives these images their quiet-
ly equivocal power. The experience of
nature is masked as it is given an ab-
stract force, so that these reliefs
turn out to be about something bravely,
thoroughly abstract as the idea of fil-
ling space without filling it.

Our masthead introduction did not say
it better than Jed Perl, above, or Gene
Swenson, discussing Lichtenstein: 

The picture is a stringent but amusing exposure of visual as well as social habits.

Ellsworth Kelly

  Blue Diagonal

  Diagonal

Matthew Marks Gallery

New York

2009

Ellsworth Kelly in studio

Flâneur revised 

rmbl

Jed Perl

New Art City

  Welders and others

Knopf, 2005©

op. cit.

Jed Perl

editor

Art in America

  1945 - 1970

  Writings from the age ..

Gene R. Swenson

The New American Sign Painters

  Art News

  1962

Library of America, 2014©

op. cit.

Saturday commute cxxvi: Out of the fire

Friends possess great latitude

with me, to inquire in the nos-

iest way, provided they accept

the risk of a querying absorp-

tion of their question. So, it

wasn't so unusual, when a bril-

liant, flaring gem of my exper-

ience lately asked if I'd ever

imagined sharing the remainder

of my life with someone whom I

knew.

I was reminded of the boy on a

road in the Pyrénées, not an e-

vent waiting to happen, but an

event reflecting, before one's

eyes. And the copper, hammered

pan approached on the hypothet-

ical, of willingness to commit

to eliciting an omelet.

Rodrigo Penaforte

Dieter Krehbiel, photo

ca 2015

The old shirts

 I put one on, the

 other day, a pin-

 point cotton wov-

 en in Glasgow and

 fashioned by tail-

 ors in New Jersey,

 about this long a-

 go. Of warm-weath-

 er weight, it im-

 parted a sense of

 luxury to the arm

 from decades admir-

 ably withstood, of

 laundries and more

 genial wearing in.

 It's what I'd been

 rusticated to the

 same place for. I

 did not pursue the

 comparison.

 This is for myself.

We go home now

   Now this. To save their
   soul they say they need
   Ted Cruz.