Hindsights

Say Hello to Top-Down Corporate Aristocratic Capitalism

...and say goodbye to the Bottoms-Up "Invisible Hand" and Democracy!

Mozart, "Così fan tutte"

"Thus Do They All"

DIstracting Gyges

I don't think that Candaules ever saw it coming...

A Las Barricadas!

Black storms shake the sky
Black clouds blind us
Although death and pain await us
Against the enemy we must go
The most precious good
is freedom
And we have to defend it
With courage and faith
Raise the revolutionary flag
Moving us forward with unstoppable triumph
Working people march onwards to the battle
We have to smash the reaction
To the Barricades
To the Barricades
For the triumph
of the Confederation

Merry Christmas!

Just beat your own drums, people! That's all you need to do!

Francis Picabia (1879 - 1953)

New American Dreams

It is the American Dream
What we all strive for and imagine
Indouble-wide trailers to double-wide mansions
In sprouting lakes of fake fish.
Nothing captures its essence
Unbound by time or dust or rot
The things we cherish still are lovingly patted
And brought through the centuries.

It is more than a dream now
It's a reality that the millions have made
Our heart and soul builds the heaven on earth.
A refuge for the sick,
And a shelter for the needy,
It is everything we desire.

In the cherry trucks and laughing children
To indolent teenagers with smoke circling
We see our dream and the actuality
It may not be perfect, but it is our heaven
And so disillusioned we conjure forth our hope.

In the picket fences we see our childhood
In the sky we see our adulthood
And in the middle we see our life.
Suspended, but not contained,
It is the dream that wakes within us all

- Amy H., Wichita, KS

Inspirations for the Rokeby Venus?

Mirando en el Espejo de Ayer

from Wikipedia

On March 10, 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery and attacked Velázquez's canvas with a meat cleaver. Her action was ostensibly provoked by the arrest of fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day, although there had been earlier warnings of a planned suffragette attack on the collection. Richardson left seven slashes on the painting, particularly causing damage to the area between the figure's shoulders. However, all were successfully repaired by the National Gallery's chief restorer Helmut Ruhemann.

Damage sustained in the attack by Mary Richardson in 1914. The canvas was later restored and the incisions repaired. The breaks visible in this photograph, above her shoulder and horizontally across the upper left of the image, were to the glass only.

Richardson was sentenced to six months' imprisonment, the maximum allowed for destruction of an artwork. In a statement to the Women's Social and Political Union shortly afterwards, Richardson explained, "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history." She added in a 1952 interview that she didn't like "the way men visitors gaped at it all day long".

The feminist writer Lynda Nead observed, "The incident has come to symbolize a particular perception of feminist attitudes towards the female nude; in a sense, it has come to represent a specific stereotypical image of feminism more generally." Contemporary reports of the incident reveal that the picture was not widely seen as mere artwork. Journalists tended to assess the attack in terms of a murder (Richardson was nicknamed "Slasher Mary"), and used words that conjured wounds inflicted on an actual female body, rather than on a pictorial representation of a female body. The Times, in an article that contained factual inaccuracies as to the painting's provenance, described a "cruel wound in the neck", as well as incisions to the shoulders and back.

Time is the Greatest Distance Between Two Places

Were you to cross the world, my dear,
To work or love or fight,
I could be calm and wistful here,
And close my eyes at night.

It were a sweet and gallant pain
To be a sea apart;
But, oh, to have you down the lane
Is bitter to my heart.

-Dorothy Parker

The End to Mourning

Desperately Seeking Surplus Jouissances!

The Pervert imagines him-/herself to be the Other in order to ensure his/her jouissance. The perverse subject makes him-/herself the instrument of the Other's jouissance through putting the object a in the place of the barred Other, negating the Other as subject. His/her jouissance comes from placing him-/herself as an object in order to procure the jouissance of a phallus, even though he/she doesn't know to whom this phallus belongs. Although the pervert presents him-/herself as completely engaged in seeking jouissance, one of his/her aims is to make the law present. Lacan uses the term père-version, to demonstrate the way in which the pervert appeals to the father to fulfil the paternal function.

Living in the Bubble

“I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.”

~ Marshall McLuhan

"There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend... One day the black will swallow the red."

Saw the John Logan play Red at the Everyman Theatre in Baltimore over the weekend. One word best describes the experience, "Awesome!"

“The child must banish the father. Respect him, but kill him.” - Mark Rothko character on the subject of Cubism/Surrealism