Saturday commute cxlvii: Sense and recompense

There are all kinds of love

in the world, but never the

same love twice.

The building down the avenue

is a hotel, and used to keep

rooms at a discount for under-

graduates in those days. I saw

this remark from one such fel-

low, in a story entitled, The

Sensible Choice; and it seemed

to fit to perfection a time, so

many years later, when we were

still suspended in the fantasy

of seemingly advancing beauty.

Now we find, this was not so.

But what was true, was a pas-

sion for that aspiration, em-

bodied in the second edifice: 

the one exemplification of it,

rising over every imitation -

that love we would have once.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
1924

Ezra Stoller, photography
Waldorf-Astoria and the
  Seagram Building, 375
  Park Avenue, New York
1960

And everything had been going so well

It was Friday last, when I found my-
self in a bustling port city, south
of Washington - the very harbor, now
that I think of it, where the Monitor
met the Merrimack, and also many Af-
ricans their new terrain. Yet all of
that seemed well washed away, in the
copious splashing of hooch upon the
wharves, where eddies of Mercedes al-
so swirled, of romance by injection.

To a corner doorway, then, I ventured
for reflection in a glass. As with so
many chances taken in this region -
the American South, that is - the im-
manence of God is not slow to be re-
revealed. Not in just any of the de-
tails, as Mies had once implied, but
exquisitely in the mistakes. 

So pleased by the impressions of my
cocktail, I found myself asking the
barkeep to divulge its secrets. And
this he did with such meticulous care
in every dimension, even in penman-
ship, that one could find the hand
of our Lord drawing one's own, down
his roster of ingredients and tech-
niques, to that very blaze of rev-
elation for which the region is so
celebrated. 

                       Bombay Sapphire, 2.0 oz.

                       Dolin vermouth, 0.75 oz.

                       Saint-Germain, 0.25 oz.

                       orange bitters, 2 dashes

                       stir for 30 seconds

                       strain into chilled glass

                       garish w/lemon peel

                       

Origins of Wednesday lviii: Social media we don't need

The managers of Russia's internet
access have been generous in open-
ing their sea cocks to rmbl since
we announced Anne Applebaum's new
book, and Ukrainian readership hit
new highs. Now, the Russians' bold
attention to this page cannot have
been triggered by another ornament
in the English language, but rather,
by a likely arousal of interest in
the direction of Russian internet
aggression. For our part, we wish 
there were a way to enable access
for Russian residents, without the
nasty little robots in their govern-
ment's employ. It is an interesting-
ly unfree market: sometimes, Russian
interest outweighs that of America
and France, combined - this page's
default audience; at other times,
it is absolutely zeroed out for days
on end -- weeks, months. Has anyone
else noticed, there is no such thing
as a Russian reading market: only a
valve operated by the State, to ad-
vance one of its furtive interests?

Has anyone else noticed, this is ex-
actly the game plan and wish list of 
the new American government, in its
saturation of society with delusion,
division, dysfunction, and decay? It
is as hard to imagine, America voted
for this, as it is to say Russia did.
The monsters don't need to censor the
speaker, if they isolate the listener.

What is left of any such distinction?

Robbie Wadge

Tonight we would go

"A blithe heart makes a blooming visage."

This evening at the Whitney

the exuberant exhibition of

sculptural works by Alexan-

der Calder, Hypermobility, 

will be brought to a close

with a reception in honor

of the publication of his

authorized biography, it-

self a blooming visage of 

the blithe art of seeing.

Jed Perl

Citing the student yearbook

at Stevens Institute of Tech-

nology, ca 1917, captioning

a snapshot of Sandy Calder

Calder

  The Conquest of Time

    Volume I: The Early

    Years, 1898 - 1940

Alfred A. Knopf, 2017©

"Who left the faucet running?"

    Who left the faucet running? By the time

    it was over, thousands of hectares had been inundated.

    To feed that room. He waits for me and

    makes sure I am explaining the life of the mind.

    Everybody makes the same children with them.

    Weather tipped the guy off,

    dropped the snowball.

John Ashbery

Quick Question

  New Poems

  The Fop's Tale

  [fragment]

Harper Collins/Ecco, 2012©

Joakim Heltne

untitled

undated

Masha Gessen on techniques of our governance

Peace, a life at peace, has always been
and continues to be an ideal for human-
ity. But peace as a state of world pol-
itics has never been stable... In the
last quarter century, the threshold for
applying force has clearly been lowered.
Immunity against war acquired as a re-
suit of two world wars, literally on a
psychological, subconscious level, has
been weakened.

No one has done so much to validate the
reflections cited above as the man who
uttered them, at a conference in Sochi
on the Black Sea in 2015, Vladimir Pu-
tin. Now, he has an emulator in Wash-
ington, an admiring co-practitioner in
the arts of disinformation which the ac-
tivist-historian of contemporary Russia,
Masha Gessen, shows to have destroyed
any prospect for a stable civil society,
much less a democracy, in that country.

Now Putin's American admirer has demanded
the harassment and de facto seizure of an
American broadcast network, for its exer-
cise of its press freedom, while every day
inundating the culture with disinformation
regurgitated by his kept cable news hacks,
preachers, and virtual internet hordes.

One reads Masha Gessen's fine book with a
sense of urgency of any Russian - yet, in
English, in the United States. The subject
is one of the implementation of a common
policy by common means. The diverting and
quaint concept, collusion, having been ren-
dered extinct by the structures of social
media, falls by the wayside of her inquiry.
Extinction, meanwhile, remains prolifically
at the center of the American President's
own discourse, as a condition of greatness.
His are no mere flirtations with war, they
are a cultural conditioning, well under way.

Masha Gessen

The Future is History

  How Totalitarianism

  Reclaimed Russia

Riverhead/Penguin, 2017©

Is Paris burning?

 The German Chancellor's anxious cry,
 on his armies' evacuation of Paris
 in 1944, could not have been more
 desperate or more shrill than the
 American President's demand of his
 Oklahoman custodian of federal fu-
 els policy, to know if he had yet
 quashed the nation's leadership in
 global climate protection, the cen-
 terpiece of his vindictive erasure
 of the achievements of his Black
 predecessor. More than his loathe-
 some dignity, more than his meas-
 ured reasonableness, more than his
 infuriating acceptance of reality,
 every trace of his predecessor's
 identification with civilization
 must be more than avenged; it must
 be contradicted. Is Paris next?

Alexander Calder

Four Planets

1963

Pierre Lescot

Palais du Louvre

1527

I.M. Pei

Grand Entrance

1983

Anne Applebaum has a new book out today

          I'm all ears.

Anne Applebaum
Red Famine
  Stalin's War on 
  Ukraine
Doubleday, 2017©