I was a sophomore in high school. That winter a neighborhood acquaintance, James House, who was perhaps a year older than I, turned up driving a new 1965 2+2 mustang. The car was a fastback, dark blue with a broad double white racing strip from bumper to bumper. The motor was a 289 cubic…
I received email messages from two friends this morning. They registered a complaint to a statement which I made yesterday. I criticized Capitalism as practiced by Big Pharma as being predatory, pitiless. I am an insulin dependent diabetic. Not only is the cost of insulin very expensive, the pricing of many prescription medications has…
I received a sardonic email from a friend this morning. The writer observed that “the sun is hot, ice cubes are actually made of water, and blueberries tend to be blue.” Such observations of the nature of reality, until recently uncontroversial, agreed upon without further ado as “common” by everybody except maybe those under…
To stop thinking about the Second World War and Auschwitz is to forget the reality of the horror of war and the violence of extermination. –John Armitage 2002 Introduction to Art and Fear by Paul Virilio To bow in silence seems appropriate in response to the eleven who were killed in the Tree of…
Rampage Kills Eleven PITTSBURGH — Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others, the authorities said. In a rampage described as among the deadliest against…
I never expected to see Smokey Robinson perform live. The Motown artists were in their heyday when I was a kid. All are up in years. Performing is demanding work. It is physically arduous, and one has to give one hundred percent emotionally if one is to meet one’s obligation to the audience. Last…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Excerpt from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) I have no words. There is nothing more to say.
Ethical boundary, aesthetic boundary of sport as of art. Without limits there is no value; without value, there is no esteem, no respect and especially no pity: death to the referee! —the fatal habituation to the banalization of excess. –excerpt Silence on Trial p 33 by Paul Virilio What is missing? It is Friday…
A machine for seeing, a machine for hearing, and a machine for thinking…. very shortly to come with the boom in all things digital and the programmed abandonment of the analogue. How will the silence of the infinite spaces of art subsist? We are all seated in Plato’s cave, which has become the Sybil’s…
This afternoon I feel blue. There is a lot of funky-shit going down. I am aware of too much given the ever present cell phone news feed, offering adrenaline prompting content, just a swipe away. Most of the time I resist the temptation. A sure recipe for misery is to allow one’s mind-space to…
