The Parable of the Mote and Beam

A birthday card for a friend (he's on the left). File under visual imagination, or at least memory.

10 hour days. 6 days a week. No time for this shit.

"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."

From 2017. I've changed the ending a bit. Lemmy now gets the last word.

I keep thinking of this as a primer: easy to understand, almost obvious, like a lecture in images. I could run down the references and conflicts it it describes point by point. But I think no one gets the joke. And that's why Lemmy gets the last word.

Ubiquitous images of modernity: the grid and the individual imagination; universalism and one point perspective; ideologies of objectivity and subjectivity; fantasies of reason and resulting psychosis; rationalism and irrationalism, but also rationalism vs empiricism, pedants vs ironists, philosophers vs comedians and lawyers.

My lords, ladies and gentleman, we are here also to honour Mr. Fred Timson, leader of the Timson clan, that vast family of South London villains, petty thieves and receivers of stolen property. But, no violence in your record Fred right?

That’s right Mr. Rumpole. 

Mr. Timson conducts his life according to strict monetarist principles. 

So I do Mr Rumpole.

He does not believe in the closed shop. He believes that shops should be open at all hours of the night, preferably with a jemmy.   

Too right Mr Rumpole! 

But, without Fred Timson and his like, how many of us would be out of work? How many brother judges? How many of Her Majesty’s counsel learned in  law? How many Coppers? How many humble Old Bailey Hacks? Indeed, we may all be bundled out under the embankment in cardboard boxes…So my lords, ladies and gentleman, charge your glasses, Henry, fill'em up! I give you a toast to Fred Timson and the criminals of England!

The Museum of Capitalism. The quote is Daniel Bell.
I have to keep trying.

I'm going to keep adding names to this list as I find them. I'm a little amazed.

"I don't always agree with @BretStephensNYT, but when I do, I really really do." Daniel Drezner, WaPo, The Fletcher School, et al.

"Brilliant and compelling." Anthony Blinken. Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama.

"Good column by good columnist; very worth a read. (Don't @ me; I already know that you feel sad about this.)" Jennifer Steinhauer. NYT Congressional reporter.

"A smart column." Steven Greenhouse, former NYT Labor Reporter. Author of “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.”

It's takes a conservative ironist, a comedian, to make liberals acknowledge tacitly what they've never had the courage to admit. And they don't seem to realize they've done it.

Stephens explains Trump, and Brexit if you look at the details.

Bret Stephens for mass deportation, and not in Israel this time.

...On point after point, America’s nonimmigrants are failing our country. Crime? A study by the Cato Institute notes that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants, and at more than three times the rate of legal ones.

Educational achievement? Just 17 percent of the finalists in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search — often called the “Junior Nobel Prize” — were the children of United States-born parents. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, just 9.5 percent of graduate students in electrical engineering were nonimmigrants.

Religious piety — especially of the Christian variety? More illegal immigrants identify as Christian (83 percent) than do Americans (70.6 percent), a fact right-wing immigration restrictionists might ponder as they bemoan declines in church attendance.

Business creation? Nonimmigrants start businesses at half the rate of immigrants, and accounted for fewer than half the companies started in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005. Overall, the share of nonimmigrant entrepreneurs fell by more than 10 percentage points between 1995 and 2008, according to a Harvard Business Review study.

Nor does the case against nonimmigrants end there. The rate of out-of-wedlock births for United States-born mothers exceeds the rate for foreign-born moms, 42 percent to 33 percent. The rate of delinquency and criminality among nonimmigrant teens considerably exceeds that of their immigrant peers. A recent report by the Sentencing Project also finds evidence that the fewer immigrants there are in a neighborhood, the likelier it is to be unsafe.

And then there’s the all-important issue of demographics. The race for the future is ultimately a race for people — healthy, working-age, fertile people — and our nonimmigrants fail us here, too. “The increase in the overall number of U.S. births, from 3.74 million in 1970 to 4.0 million in 2014, is due entirely to births to foreign-born mothers,” reports the Pew Research Center. Without these immigrant moms, the United States would be faced with the same demographic death spiral that now confronts Japan.

Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be — when “we” had just come off the boat. 

2003

The politics of educated liberalism is the politics of reassurance, of protecting your own interests while wanting to be liked. If you're a leftist, even the bourgeois variety, you need to make the hard choices. This country feeds off the energy of new arrivals, who trample its exhausted native underclass. But I love these new people, who live a double life of greed and community, a double life Americans of any class seem unable to understand. Of the immigrants I know who've been both here and Europe, most would live there if they could. They don't love the American dream, but they need American money.  I'm rewriting this on June 17, 2005, softening the tone, but I'll leave the original punch line just for laughs. After American workers gain the imagination and the pride that immigrant tradesman bring with them, I'll move back to this country; because once they close the borders, I'm leaving. 

New tag for Immigration

I fixed a few things.

Have the patience to make it through the first 2 and a half minutes. If the next section bores you, jump to 5:30. If that bores you, give up. Click full screen to read the subtitles, and if you watch the whole thing be warned that later the subtitles conflict with the audio.

I don't know why I'd assume people get the jokes, but the piece is meaningless without them.

Keeping this at the top for now.


A few small changes and a coda, but it's probably still not done. Something I'm tempted to add; I haven't made up my mind.
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Since I replace the file, this url is always the most recent version.

a reel

It begins at 2:42. It solves a lot of problems. Just a few shots, but it works.

Submitted 1/1/16
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For the Museum of Capitalism: A Dissent

When I heard about the competition I sent in a proposal immediately with an email, a youtube link and a request for the check. Frankly I was surprised to get a response. The writer wrote to call my bluff: anti-proposals were welcome, but I needed to register first.

The video link was a few minutes from D.A. Pennebaker's short film documenting Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York, a self-destructing machine installed in the garden at MoMA in 1960 and switched on in a show of discreet catastrophe for an audience of money-men, their wives, and cognoscenti. The low-res video images are horrifying, maybe more so than the film, hinting at the destruction of the 20th century, air-raids and ovens, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The event itself was a comic and nihilistic theater of anti-Fordism for an audience of Fords and Rockefellers.

If I were a designer or an architect or an artist interested in conceptual games I suppose I could draw up a proposal for a self-destructing building. But this isn't a proposal for a building, or an argument against a building made via the proposal of an impossible one. Anti-architecture, like anti-art, and anything predicated on opposition, is by definition an angry child, its anger predicated on the existence of a parent. Parents have responsibilities that children don't, and children on their own are no longer children; they have no choice but to be adults before their time.

Artists want the luxury to remain children; we’re always looking for indulgent parents to adopt us so that we can be angry with them. It's a new phenomenon over the last two hundred years. Entertainers are what artists used to be and architects still are: tradesmen and professionals who work to pay the bills. But architects are required to be optimists while entertainers have broader options.

Entertainment is the art of bourgeois capitalism. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction began with Gutenberg and the printing press, and includes both Shakespeare and the modern novel. Fine art, the art and craft of high-value commodities is a holdover from the ancien régime, and its partisans now play a role no less absurd than defenders of the eternal verities and the gold standard.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. 

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. 

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

Capitalism, in an irony Marx would have enjoyed, returns us to the ancient past, the Bronze Age: the age of stories. The Golden Age is the age of kings, or at the very least aristocrats; capitalism at its grandest is gilded. Architects now are stage designers. The museum of capitalism is the shopping mall, our greatest art made from the conversations of observers of the scene, sitting and talking under the palm trees at Starbucks.

The designer of your webpage understood this, maybe unthinkingly. A 3D font is an illusion of physical and architectural space, but your designer chose a font that's doubly fictional, a contradictory illusion, the only appropriate form for a museum built to house them. It was a brilliant choice. My only quibble with the design was that reading the words “call for ideas”, my first thought was, “Where’s the number?”

After registering, I began to work on a film, a montage of youtube videos recorded in groups as screen captures (the web is the greatest library since Alexandria). I approached Werner Herzog about a voiceover, but I’ve been told now that you’re only reviewing static documents.

In the absence of that I offer the words above. Once you open, the film will be available for exhibition, as will my appropriation of your designer’s image, which I’m having enlarged to 11’x17’, in an edition of 3.

The final, at least something closer to it, is here


Another section. Something I've wanted to do for 20? years. This made it easy. Looking for a translation I remember, I didn't find it. But I found Philip Roth.

For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.

The perfect Shiksa Goddess is a Nazi. A song by a Nazi, sung by a Nazi. The end of an illusion, of a dream and a nightmare. The end of the Reich. And the last of old Europe.

To be clear: the song is high decadence, a form devolved, a few notches about kitsch. It's not Mozart, or Beethoven; it's nostalgia, high mannerism. [update: See Thomas Mann and David Bowie, above.] Kafka laughed reading his stories out loud to friends. The first time I saw the scene above I couldn't help laughing. I still can't. Self-awareness mixes the tragic with the comic.


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A start.

Something about process. All of the footage obviously is off the web. The sound from the screen capture is external, from the computer mic. I downloaded the videos and used the sound files synced up to the captured image, putting individual video files in the editing timeline where necessary to sync image and sound, and then removing them, but leaving the sound. When you put a small format video into a large format timeline the image becomes is centered automatically. I left the second repeated Godard image in because looking at it while I realized it connected specifically to the Kubrick, the animation, and box/grid imagery, and monocular and binocular vision. It's not a new gesture; it's a trope. It I didn't think of it until I saw it. Not knowing what to expect, I saw something and used it. Art and invention is mostly observation. I don't "create".

The question for me at the moment is whether my manipulation of Godard, to make say him what I want him to, is too tricky. It's never a question about whether my work may or may not represent morality, immorality, humanism, anti-humanism, nihilism, etc. That I'm trying to craft something for an audience is the sum total of my requirements. Questions of whether or not that audience is large or small, what I'm aiming for and whether I succeed or not will be answered and re-answered over time.

What is certain is that the model of philosophic art doesn't spread beyond its core audience. The poetry of academics as academics simply does not last. It assumes too much and is not seen in the future to have described what has become the past. The Wire and Breaking Bad were not made by college professors. Whether anything I do is good or not, is too arcane or just bad, is irrelevant. Whiggish art describes intent, and original intent works for art no more than law.

New tag for Kubrick. And one for Baudelaire. I'm surprised I hadn't made one earlier.

updated a bit.

note-taking, record-keeping, reposting my comments elsewhere.

Answering bullshit at Language Log

“Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.”

"A spatial object must lie in infinite space. (A point in space is a place for an argument.)"

"To hear the melody move from C to E flat is to hear the E flat as called into being by the C – a virtual force operates between the notes"

"Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science."

"She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves"

European Jews and their descendants, including those with blonde hair and blue eyes, have a "right" to "return" to Palestine, and to force the native inhabitants, including Jewish converts to Islam [and Christianity], off of their land. Having done so they nonetheless maintain the right to refer to themselves and their ideals as "modern" and "liberal".

Harry Frankfurt is a master bullshitter. Philosophers and economists have a lot in common. Believing your own bullshit is something a good bullshitter should try to avoid.

The first is Chopra. The second is Wittgenstein, etc.

I didn't read the comments before I made my own. I didn't know about the Penguin Poetry Hoax.
The one thing my comment adds is what I wrote in my own words, adding real politics to what's otherwise a discussion of language games.  Language is problematic as a means of communication, but it's all we have.

At the bottom of the post is a link to "relevant past posts". Clicking a couple of times brought me to What would a 'return to philology' be a return to?"  I've been using that phrase for a few years, but I haven't looked for it. I should've. After all, I'm describing historical change, not causing it. It's obvious philology should be drifting back towards the surface.

Philology is the study of language use, meanings, in context. It's the practice -not the theory- of empiricism and makes a mockery of the rationalist model of "doing philosophy". There is no science of meaning that does not destroy meaning; language without meaning is mathematics; mathematics is anti-political, as evidenced in the absurdity of the paper linked above.

Gödel and Addington again.
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The ghost of Panofsky: New Philology

Two great "failures" signal the break between painting and architecture –Leonardo's Last Supper and Michelangelo's Last Judgment. That both works are about "last" events suggests that in the minds of their creators there might have been some other last thoughts. Wall decoration obviously was not the kind of ambitious goal Leonardo had in mind for painting –witness his inability to make emulsified paint stick on walls. If Leonardo expressed ambivalence about decoration, Michelangelo went even further, unleashing pure anger and frustration. There is no doubt about Michelangelo's intentions in the Last Judgment: he totally destroyed the visual coherence of the Sistine Chapel by blasting out the end wall. It is very hard to know what this mural means to say about painting. Michelangelo's florid aggressiveness seems to attack everything that has gone before, including his own work on the ceiling immediately above. The Last Judgment is illusionism run rampant. There is no compositional restraint, no pictorial enframement, no sense of physical weight; the figures float high and wide. Pictorial cohesion, architectonic space, sculptural gravity –all these aspects of Michelangelo's genius become just so many pieces of driftwood. Painting before the Last Judgment was painting one could look at, or at least into; after the Last Judgment painting became something one could walk through. Michelangelo dissolves the end wall of the Sistine Chapel so that we can exit the church through heaven and hell, moving out of the Renaissance toward Caravaggio's world, a world of sensuality and spatial incongruity beyond even Michelangclo's imagination. 

I looked through a copy of Stella's book soon after it came out. I think I stole one. But I put it down pretty quickly when it became clear he was still speaking as a formalist; he sensed the dynamism of Caravaggio's sense of space but couldn't describe the cultural change that produced it. Intellectually he was and is a modernist. But his work is not.

Here Berenson is writing about Perugino and Raphael, but we have a hard time keeping Caravaggio from our thoughts: "Art comes into existence only when we get a sense of space not as a void, as something merely negative, such as we cus-tomarily have, but on the contrary, as something very posi-tive and definite able to confirm our consciousness of being, to heighten our feeling of vitality" (Italian Painters of the Renaissance, vol. z, Florentine and Central Italian Schools, London, Phaidon, 1968, p. 88). After setting the scene for the importance of the positive effects of space on art and experience, Bcrenson notes that "space-composition is the art which humanizes the void, making of it an enclosed Eden, a domed mansion wherein our higher selves at last find an abode." He continues: "Space-composition ... woos us away from our tight, painfully limited selves, dissolves us into the space presented, until at last we seem to become its permeating, indwelling spirit ... And now behold whither we have come. The religious emotion ... is produced by a feeling of identification with the universe; this feeling, in its rum, can be created by space-composition; it follows then that this art can directly communicate religious emotion ... And indeed I scarcely see by what other means the religious emotion can be directly communicated by paining—mark you, I do not say represented" (pp. 88-89, no-91).

Stella's point is that Berenson doesn't like Caravaggio but nonetheless describes, unawares, the sense of pictorial space that only begins with him. I'd add that Stella's book describes the importance of cinematic space without noting the importance of film. Even more surprising, there's no mention of Bernini.  I want to say to Stella what Le Corbusier said to Oscar Niemeyer: "Oscar, what you are doing is baroque. But it's very well done."

That's not an insult. My argument is always that it's up to others to describe what we do. They do a better job of it. It's important to let them. Still...

Painting before Caravaggio could move backward, it could step sideways, it could climb walls, but it could not march forward; it could not create its own destiny. Without a deliberate sense of projective space, painting could not become real. The road to pictorial reality must pass through the dissolution of perimeter and surface. This is the road paved by Caravaggio to lead great art toward what we now call great painting.

That's where observation ends and fantasy begins. Art is never "real", and it does not "create" it's own destiny. What Stella is describing is Caravaggio's realization that with artists' new technical facility painting could now become a profoundly compelling lie. Theater is fiction. But then all art is fiction, including the art of the Church.  Mannerism recognized that but the art is torn between poles of indulgence and guilt. Caravaggio's work is not torn. It's at home with the new world of ambiguity.

Schjeldahl

I don’t know what to make of Stella’s later works. His most famous apothegm—“What you see is what you see”—is no help, if seeing is supposed to imply comprehending. Looking is futile except as an inspection of the wizardly ways in which Stella made the works, with welds, flanges, castings, and, increasingly, computer-generated patterns. Always, there are self-consciously poetic titles, a habit of Stella’s since he gave the Black Paintings names like “Die Fahne Hoch!” (“The Flag on High!,” from a Nazi anthem) and “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II.” In the eighties and nineties, he made works referencing the hundred and thirty-five chapters of “Moby-Dick.” The titles function as apostrophes of meaning. Meaning exists. It’s just not “what you see,” except through tortuous efforts of association.

Stella made a permanent difference in art history. He is extraordinarily intelligent and extravagantly skilled. But his example is cautionary. Even groundbreaking ideas have life spans, and Stella’s belief in inherent values of abstract art has long since ceased to be shared by younger artists. His ambition rolls on, unalloyed with self-questioning or humor. The most effective installations of Stella’s later works that I have seen are in corporate settings, where they can seem to function as symbols of team spirit. Rather than savoring his work now, you endorse it, or not.

Ben Davis (Artnet)

At Princeton, Stella took his BA in History, writing a thesis on the political context of medieval manuscripts. Still, his principal interest was studio art, and he later remembered diverting his thesis into a long aesthetic aside, theorizing “how decoration becomes art and when it ceases to be just decoration." The argument hinged on a comparison of Jackson Pollock and Celtic knotwork: “One happened to be painting and one was manuscript illumination, but they both reached the category of art and left the lower category of simple repetitive design or pedestrian decoration far behind."

Thus, Stella was always notably more interested in problems of form than social content. His thesis, it would seem, theorized Pollock's Abstract Expressionism as the superhero version of decoration; the beatnik angst that had been part of Pollock's reception in, say, Harold Rosenberg's 1952 description of it as “Action Painting," was of no interest.

As Stella was graduating from Princeton, the cozy New York art scene was beginning its long maturation into the professionalized “art world" we know today. One harbinger of this was the 28-year-old Jasper Johns's show at Castelli Gallery in 1958, which caused a sensation and sold out, a then almost-unheard-of feat. This coup couldn't help make an impression on the young Stella, who was nothing if not ambitious.

Jerry Saltz

For 15 years this artist was as unstoppable as an icebreaker in his painterly progress, churning out series after series, building on and advancing not only his art but painting....

That decade-and-a-half period began in 1958 — when this exhibition begins, too — with four muddy-colored, sodden strippy paintings that look like walls divided into fuzzy strata. You see him riffing on art history, using text and brush-y gesture. But you also see the Minimalism that is incipient. Then, from 1959 to his Diderot Series of 1974, Stella hits the equivalent of 15 years of almost all home runs. That’s a run longer than Cubism; and in between there, between 1971 and 1973, is my favorite of all of his paintings, the Polish Village Series, in which Stella breaks the flat surface of painting, begins working on constructed, shifting planar three-dimensional surfaces. Between 1970 and 1987 he'd had not one but two Museum of Modern Art retrospectives. Everyone had to deal with Stella; the theory crowd revered him, ditto curators, critics, decorators, architects, and museums.

But around 1977 Stella had gone off the optical-topological reservation, making art that made his critical support evaporate almost overnight....

I’m a Stella fan who can't deny his importance but who also wouldn't want to live with most of these things. From his gigantic, early fluorescent-colored Protractor Series ­— one at the Whitney is 50 feet long (!) — to the late tarantula-like psychedelic-colored hyperconstructions, Stella's art doesn't have human scale; it's not really for people so much as the superorganism of art history. Or skyscraper lobbies, public spaces, the Vatican. And let's face it: Due to his wild-style sense of color, pocked lava-flow surfaces, and cacophonous compositions that look like three-dimensional maps of Pangaea, Stella's art can be really garish.

Roberta Smith

Going through this show may be a matter of deciding how far you can stick with Mr. Stella. You could say it allows us each to answer the question, “Where was Frank Stella when you went off his work?” But also: “Where was he when you came back?”

We have all waxed and waned. Here the “Irregular Polygons” come on strong, with the “Protractor” works not far behind. Also in the running: “The Fountain,” a mural-like 1992 detour to flatness that collages together five print mediums. But the aluminum reliefs rule, culminating with a beautiful representative from the “Heinrich von Kleist” series (1996-2008), inspired by that German writer’s stories. “ ‘At Sainte Luce!’ [Hoango] [Q#1]” of 1998 has a captivating papery softness but is actually made of elaborately painted cast-aluminum elements clearly devised on the computer, and less clearly derived from photographs of smoke rings that are also in the show.

It’s hard not to be impressed with the hulking aluminum and steel sculpture “Raft of the Medusa(Part 1)” (its splashes of once-molten aluminum conjuring the waves of Géricault’s 1818 painting of that name, not to mention Richard Serra, Anselm Kiefer and recent Matthew Barney), or the two big star sculptures from 2014 on view nearby. But for all their pizazz, Mr. Stella’s sculptures seem generic, as if they could have been made by someone else with access to his resources....

Mr. Stella is postwar and abstract painting’s great jester and adversary, which is not to demean his achievement. Moving through this compelling, feisty show can bring to mind Wallace Stevens’s high-minded yet grounded advice. In the long poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens stipulates the requirements of great art in the headings he gives its three sections: “It must change/ It must be abstract/ It must give pleasure.”

I should  write something on Stella.

Most of the reviews are off the mark, as judgment and even as description.  Roberta Smith's review is the best, and the only one that doesn't smack of moralism.

Stella is the most important American "fine" artist alive. That's my bet, though I'm going to be around long enough to find out if I win.  But he's made a lot of work and he's made a lot of crap, and critics and other members of the self-described sophisticated audience for art (as opposed to film etc.) still follow preferences based on their ideological positions.  Smith's tastes, within her preference for abstraction, are more catholic than most.

Something I worked on a few years ago, then stopped. Part of something longer, as usual. I've started to work on it again. I wish the camera had been better. Rough cut, and no grading.