May it last

Who does not respond to Spring-
time's gentle breeze of Presi-
dential banishment, in carefree
marking of the moment as if Paul
Revere'd returned to claim a vic-
tory lap? With all the world de-
livered at last, to a universal
resolve to expel the beast from
town, what need have we to make
redundant entries in that data-
base, when merely to recall who
we are, can assure what will be?

Origins of Wednesday xlviii: Look away?

    What is that moment,

    as affectionate irri-

    tion with you little

    twerp dissolves into

    stupefied disbelief,

    that he will govern?

    Where is that place,

    the vanishing point?

  A gathering farce in the 
  Senate is, to the practice 
  of medicine and the dis-
  tribution of care, what 
  opium wars and the slave
  trade were, to their own, 
  absurd excuses: simple 
  rape, with unctuous hymns 
  of dogma. What is calculated 
  exploitation of the body, 
  for a violent concentration 
  of wealth in the fewest pos-
  sible hands? It's whoring. 

  This final vengeance on the
  outcome of our Civil War is
  an incinerating rampage of 
  racism and sexism, resurgent.
  It engulfs our very identity,
  with fanatical thoroughness.

  Look away?  

Henry Moore
Tube Shelter
Oil on canvas
Tate Gallery
1941

John Thomson
1778 - 1840
The Blasted Oak
  the remains of
  Torwood Forest,
  near Stirling
Oil on canvas
1815

Bruce Weber
River Phoenix
undated

Le Sept

Let's go ahead and be corny:

the whole schtick was master-

fully staged, of course — the 

courtyard of the Louvre, the 

Beethoven chorus from the 9th,

the youngest leader of the na-

tion since Bonaparte, not by a 

coup d’état. The clarifying wit 

of I.M. Pei’s “foyer” struck us 

as the capstone of the occasion; 

the transparent, universally re-

cognized monument to the Interna-

tional Style, suggesting an entry 

point all over again. None of it 

makes sense to Americans who voted 

for our little Donny Thump-Thump,

masturbating his way through his

great man fantasy of history; who 

mime his Thump, and lobotomize 

themselves for it at Fox, when

he telephones in another chant; 

they wall themselves off from ev-

erything having to do with border-

less humanity, to say nothing of 

a humanism reviled by their heret-

ic pastors. But if one wanted a 

quiet star to shame the starch out 

of Teresa May, and brush American 

impostorship aside, there he was, 

a creature of Europe with friends.

Make the day count? Who knows.

All one sees, is one renewing

wave, not cresting. Our newest,

bravest continent; the homeward 

shore of humanity.

The Daily Express

May 8, 2017©

Ivan Terestchenko

Tricouleur

RICO, you darling little statute, you

    Come, sweetheart,
    live exquisitely,
    they usually say.

Drew Harwell
  and Matea Gold
While in White House,
  Trumps remained selling
  points for 'very special'
  Philippines project
The Washington Post
May 2, 2017©

Jay Directo
Billboard in Manila
Agence France-Presse
2012©

Being a picture

Lenin's objection to Beethoven

is so well known that it hard-

ly seems that it could add any

weight to the problem of look-

ing at Kertész these days. But

some day has to come soon, for

escapism to play no part in it.

André Kertész

Untitled Polaroid

  Photograph

1980

Robbie Beeser

Standard nautical font

8-meter vessels converge
precariously at a racing
buoy in the 1936 Olympic
games, and give us a vi-
sion in photographic ex-
cellence no one forgets,
of a contest marred by a
monstrous provenance. At
the same time, the univ-
ersal font for identify-
ing sailors is document-
ed beyond all propaganda.

Leni Riefenstahl
Kiel
1936

Amateur

It's axiomatic, in viewing
images created by Kertész,
to struggle against appre-
ciation tainted by axioms.
It can feel undignified to
allow oneself to look, al-
most as if one had to see.
















André Kertész
Untitled Polaroid
  Photograph
1980

Two outstanding studies of Shelley

Where does a writer catch
my eye?

His bedroom window looked west, towards the setting sun. There was a wide lawn, with a shallow bank to roll down, and then a cluster of enormous trees, elms with rooks in, cedars, American redwoods brought back to England by his grandfather, and further and darker, rhododendrons and fir trees. Through the trees was the lake. Then there was the orchard and the south meadow, and beyond an even bigger lake which was called Warnham Pond. It was two lakes really, joined by a stone bridge. His father kept the boat there, and the fishing lines. His father stood among the reeds and shot the wild duck, with their bottle-green feathers, and the snipe.

   On his best days the curtain
   of clouds was gone. The blue
   sky stretched above him un-
   marked and unobscured and in-
   spiration moved there, almost
   visible.






Where 
I'm taken.

Richard Holmes
Shelley
  The Pursuit
1974
New York Review Books, 1994©

Ann Wroe
Being Shelley
  The Poet's Search for Himself
Random House/Pantheon, 2007©