Category Archives: Commentary

Opinion or analysis concerning whatever’s on my mind.

A Carton of French Fries Walks Into a Bar

Posted on August 16, 2024 by JMN

This is the latest specimen in The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest that has run for centuries. I’ve never come close to inventing a caption for an entry in this feature, but it fascinates me for what it often shows … Continue reading →

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‘Just About Everyone Needed Therapy’

Posted on August 11, 2024 by JMN

“Gathering, touching, connecting — these are Tosquelles’s methods.” This article highlights an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan that will end on August 18, 2024:  Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut. The Catalan … Continue reading →

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Break Out the Tiny Fiddle, But Have Some Heart, Too

Posted on August 9, 2024 by JMN

She had the effrontery to burden the critics with her good looks. I speak of Yvonne Furneaux.  In a review of a 1955 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine,” the august British theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote Ms. Furneaux off as … Continue reading →

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Foggy escalator.

Posted on August 4, 2024 by JMN

This is my photo of the day (POTD), and my favorite title ever of a photograph! Foggy escalator.

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‘Plastic Is This Zombie Medium’

Posted on July 30, 2024 by JMN

Verse can have visual ramifications as well as verbal ones. Text commandeers white space on the page in one-off patterns reflecting a close collaboration between author and typographer. The ensemble is larger than the words which are its literal medium. … Continue reading →

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Ammo and a Candy Bar

Posted on July 23, 2024 by JMN

Ask yourself how often you’ve found yourself in this familiar pickle: It’s late Saturday night and you’ve run out of ammunition. The stores are closed until Monday. It’s beg, borrow or steal some rounds, or else fiddle away the rest … Continue reading →

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patience

Posted on July 17, 2024 by JMN

FURTHER AWAY– Don’t care ! I’ve got plenty of time ! patience The pen and wit of Gilles Labruyère are a daily marvel. This one in particular connects me with a favorite topic: signs that point somewhere. The quintessential sign … Continue reading →

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Raise Your Hand If You’re Up for a ‘Variety of Irreconcilable Points of View’

Posted on July 10, 2024 by JMN

Rooky move: I responded to the first page of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay “On Ambivalence: To Be, but to Be How?” (Poetry, June 2024) before I had finished reading it. I caught the wave generated for me by her allusions to … Continue reading →

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‘You Can Make Something and You See It. But Then You Have to Spend Your Life to Get the World to See It’ (June Leaf)

Posted on July 2, 2024 by JMN

Painter and sculptor June Leaf died on July 1, 2024, aged 94. “She is that rare thing in painting today: a poet with a taste and a talent for complex images.” (Hilton Kramer, 1968) In Paris, Ms. Leaf told Hyperallergic, … Continue reading →

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The ‘Jolly Bunch of Pen-Pushers’

Posted on June 29, 2024 by JMN

For me the skills of cartoon and caricature are from on high, which is why I relished this article about Philip Guston. It told me much I didn’t know. He was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Montreal who … Continue reading →

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