The camera is a weapon

"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

Gardner's photographs of Lewis Payne are portraits, documents not photojournalism as such. Payne may not have had a choice but he had the opportunity to confront the camera. The same applies to the portraits from Cambodian genocide. Photojournalism is voyeurism. There are going to be a lot more photographs of the last moments of life: the view of the weapon. It's something new.   

The argument against AI is like the argument against photography, colllage, or Pop Art.

The close relationship between the United States and Europe transcends geographic proximity and transactional politics. It represents a unique bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.

Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America's founding documents. The Declaration's revolutionary assertion that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognized that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy. 

samuel.samson · Pathways (Piano Covers)

“No one does ‘existential dread’ as well as Philip Glass”

If there's one filmmaker I hate, to the point of wanting to beat him to a pulp, it's Errol Morris 

TR: What other documentary filmmakers do you admire?

EM: Certainly Fred Wiseman. We both live in Cambridge too, and he’s a friend of mine. I find this kind of universe he’s created, the Fred Wiseman universe, the Fred Wiseman cosmology, to be endlessly fascinating. I often am perplexed at how he is perceived as a kind of sociologist, as if he is going from one institution to another and chronicling it much as a sociologist might study organisations by examining each of them in turn. But I think his enterprise is very, very different from that, and that Fred has created a whole sort of deeply expressionistic, surreal films. Very much Samuel Becket-like in their essence. If you like, various theatres of the absurd. And he also strikes me as one of the most truly perverse filmmakers, maybe the most perverse filmmaker of all time.

TR: In what sense?

EM: Because he has created one nightmare after another. Man at his most dysfunctional. And insane.

TR: But surely he would say that he simply sits back and watches?

EM: Well, yes, he does. But the end result of his watching is something that is so much about Fred and about how Fred sees the world, which is a wonderful thing, not a bad thing. It seems like the enterprise and the essence of art. Fred has actually managed to create a kind of personal universe on film that I find compelling. I call him the king of misanthropic cinema.

TR: And his response is?

EM: I think he takes it, as well he should, as a compliment.

I followed the Morris/Kuhn fracas, probably through Leiter. I thought I must have written something here, but I didn't. I've mentioned him and my dislike twice. 

I hated The Thin Blue Line. I saw it when it came out, and I knew what it was. I already knew what Philip Glass had become. I probably saw it Chicago, when I was living with Graeber again, and sitting in with Babette Mangolte. I'd published my piece the year before, and I was already working on the megillah.

If the point is to get an innocent man out of prison, then everything else is irrelevant. If the point is the creation of "art", then the life of the man in front of the camera is secondary. Morris reduces art to illustration, but then indulges aestheticized artiness He believes in "truth", so art is emptiness. Then why even bother? It's the definition of scholastic decadence, Mannerism without irony.  He calls Wiseman "the king of misanthropic cinema" because Wiseman says his films are "fictional".  Morris, the condescending hypocrite and pedant, accuses Wiseman of nihilism. 

As has been said many times over the past year, every accusation is a confession.

---

I found of video of Wiseman on a French TV, chatting in French. I've never seen him so comfortable in an interview. He's always been a sort of honest conservative classicist.

Godard on Leacock.

"There's no point in having sharp images if you've got fuzzy ideas. Leacock's lack of subjectivity leads him ultimately to a lack of objectivity. He doesn't even know he's a metteur-en-scene, that pure reportage doesn't exist."

writing rewriting

Conclave and La Nona Ora

 

It's a standard trope of the modern novel that the central figure is more an observer than an actor: someone moved by forces beyond his control. In a novel, or written language, the first protagonist is the writer. In film because of the immediacy of connection to the image of the person on the screen, the performer leads. Fiennes is impressive because he shows all the confusion, but he's more impressive than the character he plays. A stronger director, cinematographer, editor, would pull the interest back to the observing eye. As it is Cardinal Tedesco is the greatest figure on the screen. Another option would have been to give him much more time, to give the devil his due.

In Barry Lyndon the central figure was a lousy actor, a blank playing a blank. I want to see it again.

Ali Bati, the ad that became a meme. 

The original drawing was about progress as it gradually became more skillful from left to right.

art vs illustration, intent vs reception, reading images, and time, left to right, in the West. I always liked the meme. I saw it today used to describe the Biden administration and decided to look for the source. That's when I learned that the one move was to flip the drawing. A simple transformation, and brilliant.

Jokes are popular art. Duchamp was a joker. There are a few cases where Bati could sue, but he seems to take in it stride.

For what it’s worth, nobody I know has ever jerked off on the thigh of one of their interns while on the clock in their office, so that’s one way Clinton is not like us. https://t.co/rSCVLGAV4U

— Isi Breen (@isaiah_bb) November 24, 2024

He couldn't think of the obvious, and had to imagine something implausible.

It took me back. The politics of earnest, seemingly sexless, men. Also of course, some women.

It's the self-blind politics that makes support for transwomen obligatory because they call themselves women; but Philosemitism is suspect, and Rachel Dolezel earns mockery.

Arthur Danto on urinals. 

 Oxbridge "philosophers".

I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? 

Like Moyn's pathetic politics. And he's doing it again. Brazil just indicted Bolsonaro, but somehow the US is supposed to be above such things. The model is the faculty lounge.

2020

repeats.  The distinction between collaborative reason in the academy, and adversarial reason in the world at large.

2017

The fetish for happiness, for demand for resolution of all conflicts, external and internal, the denial of the possibility of tragedy, the liberal institutionalization of narcissism, while denying the possibility that it could exist. Cafe revolutionaries, liberal Zionists, transsexuals, the popular triumph of wishful thinking. The absolute triumph of course is fascism.

The overlap between critics of liberal transgenderism and defenders of Zionism, and critics of Zionism and defenders of male fantasy. Zionist fantasies have become reality through the state of Israel, and Palestinian reality has become tied to fantasy. 

I really feel almost alone

Lewinsky tells her story

“And so we moved to the bathroom and were more intimate. There was some attention paid on me and then I was reciprocating, where up until that point he had always stopped before completion on his part,” Lewinsky said, delicately trying to explain their encounter.

“I sort of stood up and said I wanted to move past that stage and so he finally said OK.

That’s when the dress was soiled, but Lewinsky didn’t notice at the time. “So that finished and then I hugged him after. And he hugged me,” she said. “And off I went.”

The 30 year old man on the right is officially a woman, named Giulia Valentino.  

Looking at  Jeff Wall

The arms, the hands, including the fingers, the formal arrangements, staged out of observation. Degas, including the green.

The Beautiful Game

The Kyrgyzstan Football Federation released this clip for their upcoming World Cup Qualifier against Team Melli pic.twitter.com/pnU6Za86BZ

— Alireza Talakoubnejad (@websterkaroon) November 14, 2024

Twitter may not last.

reworking something from last year. oil on canvas, 11"x14".

Gary Indiana RIP

"One Brief, Scuzzy Moment"

 

 

Indiana, reviewing Blake Gopnik's book on Warhol in 2020, writes his own epitaph, and mocks his young fans. 

This book could appear only at a time when the bohemian mobility, sexual freedom, and cultural ferment of New York in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties are not simply being forgotten, as people who were there die off, but becoming unimaginable. A time when New York has become so cluelessly middle class that someone can actually write, of the back room at Max’s Kansas City, that Warhol “behaved more like the cool-cat senior in high school who the freshmen do everything to impress and who looks on with amused condescension.” This is the point of view of someone who never, ever could have gotten into Max’s.

Lorentzen now has a tag. I was thinking it was odd Indiana doesn't have one, but Colin doesn't have one either. It's never necessarily been a compliment. I should have one for the new Brooklyn Intellectuals

---

a month later, remembering Menand.

"I am not the leader of a militia, I'm from Hamas. And that's it. I am the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and independence. You are a war correspondent. Do you like war?"

 

Not at all.

 

"And so why should I? Whoever knows what war is, doesn't like war."

 

But you have been fighting for all your life.

 

"And I am not saying I won't fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don't want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free."

 

Borders have been basically sealed-off for 11 years. Gaza doesn't even have water anymore, only sea water. How is living here?

 

"What do you think? 55 percent of the population is under 15. We are not speaking of terrorists, we are speaking of kids. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. I want them free."

 

80 percent of the population depends on aid. And 50 percent is food insecure—50 percent is hungry. According to the UN, Gaza will soon be unfit to live in. Yet still in recent years Hamas has found resources to dig its tunnels.

 

"And luckily. Otherwise we would all be dead. The way you see it, it's the way the Zionist propaganda tells it. The siege didn't come after the tunnels; it wasn't a reaction to tunnels. It's the other way round. There was a siege and a humanitarian crisis, and to survive we had no other option than digging tunnels. There were times when even milk was banned."

Someone could write a book. The relation of Florence to Venice, to modernity.  Titian admitted he couldn't compete with Florentine facility; he had to do something else. But Picasso's best painting is an anti-formalist clusterfuck that works. Panofsky said he didn't use color plates in his book on Titian because they would only be an insult. The plates “were made from the best available originals and are all in black and white, not in spite but because of the fact that Titian was the greatest ‘colorist’ who ever lived.” And he doubted the attribution  of The Flaying of Marsyas.  Picasso said "when I don't have red, I use blue."

All repeats, but I'd never put the images side by side.

The ideal of Modernism was that it was a sort of return to the Renaissance, but the Renaissance was a loosening of rules, while Modernism was a closing down. Gursky’s nihilism begins in Seurat. To see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the high-point of 20th century painting is to imagine a century beginning with the Carracci and Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas and fading into mannerism. The idealism of Modernism is always the idealism of a church, or the equally strict, fearful, ironic mockery of the same church.

old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Richard Serra from 2013, 2011, 2007, and 2003

2011

 

Richard Serra, Untitled, 1972, Charcoal on paper, 29 3/4 x 41 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of John Coplans, 1975
There's something very interesting about this drawing. When it was made, and why.

"Philosophy opposes fiction, and theories of modern art opposed the 'fiction' of pictorialism. The implications of that preference are unexamined."
Look at the shape. How it appears flat and then seems to recede. The beginnings of a return to pictorial art: affirmed/denied/affirmed
Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

from 1996

Coetzee likes to trespass on his own fictional territory. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) he was quickly on the scene to pause the action and deliver a little lesson in the nature of fictiveness: ‘The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.’ And so on.

The origin of all this "meta-fictional" crap isn't fiction—Shakespeare is "meta-fiction" by default. 

"The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."

And then

The 'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really is a question of art. 

Tristram Shandy as literature in the Age of Reason.

Various ways to repeat myself. I wish more people got the joke